Julio Medem
January 2002
Park City, Utah

Every couple of years I know to expect something life-altering and unforgettable because I know Julio Medem will have another film ready. Medem is one of the most talented filmmakers not only in Spain but within the art of cinema around the world. He is utterly without abandon in his creativity and craft, using the medium’s capabilities to continually question, probe, and push the boundaries of human nature.

Although Medem’s films to date have been exclusively in Spanish, his work speaks for anyone and everyone who has wanted to run away but at the same time be found, to be loved but is not able to love, to live even as life is overwhelming their very existence. It is all these contradictions that make us human and it is all of this that Medem addresses with incomparable beauty, grace and artistry in the worlds and histories he conjures up within his films.

Sex and Lucia finds Medem telling the story of Lucia, a young woman passionate about love and life, and Lorenzo, a writer whose words have moved Lucia to give herself to him. The relationship they enter into is one of thrilling abandon yet tender consideration as each gets to know and truly care for the other. But while they gro closer, they cannot leave behind their respective pasts, the time when they did not know each other and impulses of passion resulted in less fortunate outcomes. Sex and Lucia is about that fine line between the burning desire to just follow one's heart, and the possible consequences that keep us so restrained we end up only able to ask, “What if?”.

It has been almost exactly three years exactly since Medem and I last spoke, and a lot has happened in that relatively short period of time. What makes Medem’s work so powerful is his very personal identification with it, how he doesn't fear allowing his own life's experiences to play a part in his characters and the stories they have to tell. What’s more, he’s not afraid to talk about that process in all its good and bad parts. Amidst the pure, awe-inspiring mountains that are home to the annual Sundance Film Festival, Medem talks about what he went through to bring his latest creation to life.

I was incredibly moved by “Sex and Lucia” – it led me to believe that you seem to take a step deeper and deeper into people with every film of you make. I’m wondering if that’s taking a step deeper and deeper into your own self when you’re doing that?

It could be. It has something to do with that, and it’s also because every time I make a movie I get better at going deeper into how to create a story and make it better. So that’s everything that is related to the movie. I also try to be different in each film I make – I want my own experience with each film to be new, so I try to run away fully from the film I made before and make something completely different. But in reality it’s just an illusion – it’s something I’m trying to do that I can never really quite accomplish.

That’s a theme that runs through most of your films: Everybody wants to run away – it’s quite a universal feeling – but you can’t ever run away from yourself.

Absolutely. This is exactly what happened during the course of making the movie. The first half of the movie, I was in denial about what I wrote and was actually trying to run away myself. For the second part, I went the opposite way and got deeper into the whole story.

What were you trying to run way from, exactly?

(Laughs) Um… (Pauses) I’m under the impression that every time I make a film, it’s a long, deep journey into itself. And a part of me is always trapped in that journey and in that deeper place that I go to. Whenever I com back from that trip and am finished with the movie, I’m not the same person – I always leave a big part of myself in that movie forever. The person I am now is not the person who made Sex and Lucia or the person who made my first film – every time I change after a film and I’ll never be the same person I was before. But there’s always something of me that I ended up bringing back, a part that is not lost in this process, and this time I wanted to run away even from that. I wanted to have a complete fleeing, a total escape. But it’s always an illusion, this idea of escaping.