Roland Joffe

Born on November 17, 1945, Roland Joffé from London comes from a family of Jewish roots and studied among other places at the Wallingford Jewish School (Oxfordshire). He was always a man interested in religion and the injustices of the world, and in his rebellious youth he sympathized with the left, specifically with the Trotskyist-oriented Revolutionary Workers Party of Great Britain, although he never affiliated. “I was interested in politics at the time, especially what the political parties were doing, but I didn’t get actively involved,” says the filmmaker.

Because of these sympathies, Joffé ended up on the blacklist of MI5, which caused him problems when the BBC wanted to hire him to direct the television adaptation of the play “The Spongers”. Producer Tony Garnett decided to go for it anyway, and Joffé became a highly regarded television professional.

Television established Joffé, who was already considered a professional solvent when he made his film debut with the memorable Los gritos del silencio , from 1984, based on the report “The Death and Life of Dith Pran: A Story of Cambodia”, published by Sydney Schanberg, in the New York Times.

The film recreates the dramatic experiences of three reporters in Cambodia during the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge. The film not only helped to publicize the cruelty of the tyrannical regime, but was also a great success with critics and audiences, and won three Oscars, for supporting actor ( Haing S. Ngor ), cinematography ( Chris Menges ) and editing ( Jim Clark ). The soundtrack marked Mike Oldfield ‘s first originally created work for film .

The producer of his debut feature, David Puttnam, reteams with Joffé for his next work, The Mission . Robert Bolt ‘s screenplay ( A Man for Eternity ) contains the themes that most interested the filmmaker: redemption, violence and religion. He contrasts the adventures of two characters, Father Gabriel, a fervent Jesuit who founded a mission on the Iguazú Falls, and Rodrigo, a mercenary who will join him after killing his own brother because he has relations with his wife, and who has decided to renounce violence forever.

“It is a moving story about political reality versus the best of human nature. We are of animal nature and therefore we destroy what we love for selfish interests and ends, and at the same time, we are tortured by the feeling that there are other options, but we do not have the strength to carry them out. In the political questions of 400 years ago we find the same questions that we wrestle with today,” Joffé commented.

The unrivaled location photography of South America, the highly inspired soundtrack by Ennio Morricone , and above all, the intense performances of two greats, Jeremy Irons (Gabriel) and Robert De Niro (Rodrigo), all contributed to making the film truly memorable. .

With those two titles, a tremendous career was expected for Joffé. However, the interesting if slow Shadow Makers , about the creation of the atomic bomb, crashed at the box office, despite having Paul Newman as the lead. Nor did The City of Joy , a dignified, albeit very abbreviated, adaptation of the famous best-seller by Dominique Lapierre , with Patrick Swayze as a doctor who travels to India to help the underprivileged, get the expected recognition.

Downhill, Joffé was even forced to shoot most of a very commercial film, which is out of place in his filmography. This is the adaptation of a famous video game, Super Mario Bros. , a real pain in the ass, although it didn’t even appear in the credits.

Discreet regarding his private life, it is known from Joffé that his first child was born from his marriage to actress Jane Lapotaire , Rowan Joffe , screenwriter of The American and 28 Weeks Later . After the divorce he had another daughter, with fellow actress Cherie Lunghi .

In cinema, throughout the 90s he did not raise his head. After The Scarlet Letter , a very discreet adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘s novel , she tried her luck with the noir genre with the bawdy Goodbye Lover , at times interesting but unsuccessful.

After the failure of Vatel , with Gérard Depardieu playing a cook on the run-up to the French Revolution, Roland Joffé hit rock bottom with Captivity , a thriller with a script that had more holes in it than Gruyère cheese. It even caused hilarity in the cinema when the policemen who are looking for the protagonist, kidnapped, go to the home of the presumed culprit, and while they take a look, they sit down to watch a game on TV. During the commercial, they calmly change the channel, and discover the closed circuit through which the kidnapper is watching the girl! It gave the impression that the filmmaker was totally unmotivated.

How did Roland Joffé end up shooting a film about the Spanish saint Josemaría Escrivá? Apparently, one of the promoters of the film went to Holland to convince him to shoot the film. He carried with him books and a DVD with images of Escrivá. Initially, Roland Joffé was not interested in this project. “Coming home he thought ‘I don’t feel like making this movie. I have another project set in India’ (…) I was thinking of rejecting it”, comments the filmmaker in an interview with Jesús Colina, for the Zenit news agency.

Even so, he put the DVD on while he was writing a letter refusing the offer on the computer. As he wrote (“Thank you very much. I appreciate that you have undertaken all this journey, but I really think you should look elsewhere”) the DVD continued to play and Joffé noticed a fragment in which Saint Josemaría was speaking at a meeting in Chile. with a young Jewish woman, who assured that her most fervent desire was to convert to Catholicism, but since she was a minor her parents would not allow it. Ella escrivá replies that she be kind to her parents, that she loves them very much, and that she does not show any gesture of insurrection. “She was looking at my computer and she was like, ‘Wait a minute.’ I turned off the DVD. I stopped writing the letter. I put on my film director’s cap and wrote a scene”, explains Joffé.

This is how he began working on You will find dragons , a film about a young journalist who discovers the friendship that united his father with the Spanish priest in the past. Written by Joffé himself (there was a previous script by Barbara Nicolosi that was finally scrapped completely), the filmmaker recovers themes from La misión , as it focuses on the personal journey of two characters, one spiritual (Escrivá) and the other (Manolo ) whose life is marked by violence. Both are interpreted respectively by Charlie Cox and Wes Bentley and the film takes place mainly during the Civil War.