Spanish film director Carlos Saura has started shooting a musical in Guadalajara starring acclaimed local ballet dancer Isaac Hernandez, a principal with the English National Ballet.
Titled “El Rey de Todo del Mundo” (The King of the World), the movie is a “journey through the most well-known music of Mexico,” Saura told reporters during last week’s International Film Festival.
Saura ranks among Spain’s most renowned filmmakers, having enjoyed a stellar career for over half a century. He has received three nominations for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, for “Mama Cumple 100 Años “(1979), “Carmen” (1983) and “Tango” (1998). One critic described his films as “sophisticated expressions of time and space fusing reality with fantasy, past with present and memory with hallucination.” In the last two decades, Saura has concentrated on works uniting music, dance and images.
Filming began last week at the Conjunto de las Artes, the headquarters of the film festival. Additional scenes are being shot in various city locations. Shooting is scheduled to run through April 23.
The musical repertoire included in the movie will consist mostly of well-known corridos and ranchero songs, including “Fallaste Corazon” by Cuco Sanchez, which inspired the title of the film. Several new versions of classic works featuring Alfonso Aguilar and Carlos Rivera may also figure in the final cut.
To create his Mexican vision Saura has employed the talents of Vittorio Storaro, the three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer of “Apocalypse Now” and other epics.
Although Saura has given few details of the plot, Mexican actress Ana de Reguera revealed that in the film she plays the director of a show starring dancers Hernandez, Izaak Alatorre and Greta Reynaud, as well as actress Giovanna Reynaud.
Hernandez admitted that at first he felt slightly intimidated in his first acting role, since he has always expressed himself “100 percent with my body.”
Funding for “El Rey de Todo del Mundo” has come mostly via public grants in Spain and Mexico, including 4.8 million pesos from the Commission de Filmaciones del Estado de Jalisco.