Other ways of creating: In conversation with María Gisèle Royo and Julia de Castro on ‘On the Go’ (2023)

A woman running out of time, a Grindr-using gay man, and a mermaid hit the road in search of an unwitting sperm donor in On the Go, a free-associative avant-garde road movie like little else. Co-directors María Gisèle Royo and Julia de Castro met at an artist’s residency and embarked on a five-year journey to bring their shared vision to the screen.

Their resultant film may seem initially illogical to some, but it finds the roots of its self-understanding in feelings and experiences innately shared between the two women. A homage to niche cult classic Corridas de Alegría, On the Go spins that film’s form off in different, female-focused directions, to enthralling, ideologically challenging effect.

We discuss all this in a side room at the Ciné Lumière, where the film has just enjoyed its screening at the London Spanish Film Festival. María and Julia are armed with beers, and I’m armed with a microphone and some very recently prepared questions.

María: I’m María Gisèle Royo. I’m co-director, co-writer, co-producer and now co-distributor in Spain of On The Go.

Julia: And I’m Julia de Castro. I’m the other half of what you see on set. I’m a musician in the film, I have one song. I’m also the main character.

How did you come to work together on this project?

María: We met each other at La Academia de España, an artists’ residency in Rome. I had the film grant, and Julia had the performing arts one.

One day, she brought her Vespa with her and asked me to accompany her to the tax office for the Codice Fiscale. It’s lovely to go on a Vespa in Rome, so I accepted this mission.

While we were there waiting, she proposed that we make an homage to Corridas de Alegría, an underground film from 1982, directed by Gonzalo García-Pelayo. This is an extremely niche film that very few people have watched, so I was surprised that she had. I’m from the same city where Gonzalo developed most of his career, but she’s not from there. 

Julia: As an artist, you propose things in conversation with other artists all the time, but when you find someone who listens and is as crazy as you are, it’s like okay, let’s do it. 

It was like a spark at the beginning, but it was a serious spark, because we are here together five years later. That was a moment, and it completely changed our careers. I left music, I left a lot of things to develop this film.

Tell me more about the film that this is a homage to. Could you outline what that film is, what drew you to it, and what you took from it into this film?

María: The film is a very free homage to Corridas de Alegría. Corridas de Alegría, Gonzalo described as a film about friendship and love disasters, love disappointments.

Julia: Spanish media described it as the most sexist film from him. When you watch the film in that context, it’s obvious as to why, but it has a lot of things that we love. The freedom in how the film was shot is something that we really appreciate, because it shows that you can make films in an easy way. For us it felt kind of impossible to make fiction, but when we watched this movie we felt we could do it.

María: Yeah, everything seemed possible. And for being the most sexist film, it’s the first film in Spain that shows a trans woman naked. I think it’s very revolutionary.

Was maternity so key to that film?

María: Nothing.

Julia: Nothing at all!

María: We took the essence of the film, in terms of the freedom that it had. There are some quotes. There’s a point where the random dandy guy that appears in the pickup car says a line that’s from Corridas de Alegría and Milagros gives her reply to that. And the most iconic scene of Corridas de Alegría, where they get back the stolen car and policemen show up out of the blue. 

But we did something completely different. In Corridas de Alegría, there’s nothing about maternity, there’s no mermaid. 

Julia: This is our universe, like Corridas de Alegría is his universe. When he watched it, he was very kind. Like ‘okay maybe I don’t really understand everything, but I support you’. That was a beautiful gesture.

María: It was the first time that we’d collaborated. We started writing something that was a little bit amorphous. At some point somebody held up the mirror and told us ‘Listen, this is too crazy, maybe you need to bring it down into something more coherent. Any artistic process needs to be answering questions that you don’t really have the answer for, something that is relevant for you in the moment that you’re creating’. So we were like, okay, so what is something that we could look at in a coherent way from two different perspectives? 

Neither of us had a partner, and we were running out of time to become mothers. We had two different perspectives as to how to approach that situation, and we realised that this was the key to develop something that was more organic, that could really evolve.

The development process working with that topic spanned five years. Did your feelings shift around as you developed it, such that you felt positive about the project some days and other days kind of like ‘oh fucking hell’?

Julia: Right. That’s one of the important things about collaboration, because as women we’re on a cycle. I would tell María when I didn’t feel like I could write anymore and needed to be apart for a while. I needed space, I needed to fall in love again. It was beautiful, because María would say ‘okay, just be there, I’ll keep going’. 

At the beginning, the film was for us about maternity, but we later realised that we were writing about friendship. How friendship can support any crazy moments. Intergenerational friendship was very uncommon in the cinema we watched, so we said ‘oh my god, this guy we see is twenty-two years old and this woman is almost forty years old, and they have deep conversations. He can understand her and the other way around’. It’s something that we didn’t see in other films. It was important to us, and we realised at the end of the process that it’s about friendship. You have friends that even though they think you’ve made the worst decisions, they’ll work with you, ‘let’s do it’.

I want to ask more about your melting pot of characters in relation to the maternity topic at the heart of the film. You explore maternity in tandem with queerness, compatibility with incompatibility. And you’ve got this multinational trio of characters. I’m curious how you blended all these things together and why.

María: We didn’t plan it. The casting was completely open, especially for La Reina. We considered an American woman, a German woman, a Chinese woman, but it wasn’t because of nationality. We realised how important it was, the way we look at the characters. Chacha Huang said that it was the first time in her life that she received a casting that doesn’t specify an ‘oriental’ or Asian character. To say ‘La Reina de Triana’, the Triana is a neighbourhood in Seville. ‘The Queen of Triana’ is the most Spanish possible description. When she received the casting, she thought ‘it’s wrong, it can’t be possible’, but it was. She was so grateful. That’s the future of cinema. It doesn’t matter my face, what is important is if I am a good actress.

And with the characters, yes, I’ve considered having a kid with a friend of mine that I love, who was at that moment completely hooked into Grindr. Having the idea that the best possible person to raise a child with is somebody that you are sexually in a completely different world from, and that maybe that’s unimportant and perhaps makes for a stronger couple or parenthood situation. It’s something I haven’t seen before, and it’s interesting to consider. Why do we have to be tied by sexual relationship to bring up a child in the world? Maybe that’s not the most important thing. That idea developed into this relationship and this possibility of seeing other ways of creating a family together.

I want to talk more on the mermaid, because she’s an element that interrupts and disrupts the film that’s trying to happen. Why a mermaid specifically?

María: A mermaid is a mythological creature that is universal. We wanted this character to be somebody that is a stranger. A stranger can connect with so many different cultures and people. It also opened us up to working with metaphorical elements. The classic story of the mermaid is about a woman that gives her voice to have legs. Her wish is to become a mother, cooking, going shopping. Right now, we’re in a transition period of the feminist revolution that we’re living, and it’s maybe still dragging us or keeping us in our desire to become a mother without even questioning it. I think it was a beautiful decision.

Julia: Because we are two women, and this thing is about dialogue. We are so different. After this conversation, we’ll probably have different reflections about what we just did, which is amazing.

María listened to me and said let’s do this. It changes your path and the way you live when there are people who are prepared to listen. For me, the mermaid represents the people who project something into you, like snap, let’s change, come on, let’s do it. Mermaids are everywhere.

What were your other cinematic reference points beyond the film that you were paying homage to?

María: A huge reference was Death Proof by Tarantino. 

Julia: Monte Hellman, Two-Lane Blacktop, a crazy movie with three people in a car. One of them, the girl, is the mermaid in a way. Lion’s Love, Agnès Varda – that was also important. It’s true that maybe there is a little bit of Pasolini in there.

We also feed ourselves with a lot of different fine arts references. I study history of art, so for me many things came up, and Maria is a documentary woman. The mix of us brings a lot of references. We don’t even know from where sometimes, but they come up when we’re working. Most of the characters are based on real people, that perhaps has to do with the documentary side of things, as does the way we produced the film.

You had a script prior to funding. How did you convey this visually-driven film in screenplay form?

María: We were trying to find a way to express the female unconscious, so there were these moments that would break the narrative that had to do with understanding and following your intuition.

Julia: We trust a lot of people that we chose to work with. Patricia Caballero we were talking with a lot two years ago. It was obvious that we trust each other a lot and how we would develop the scene. We didn’t need like a specific at that moment, we didn’t need specific words. The actors were linked to the script. The idea of ‘show, don’t tell’ stayed very present for us when we were writing, searching for images that could express the ideas that we were trying to work with.

Were there any particular images that you had as a starting point? There are a couple in the film that I find especially striking.

María: I’m curious to know which ones.

Julia: Yeah!

When she’s in the space with the holes.

María: That’s actually the one scene that we wrote during the shoot. We were looking to express other possibilities for maternity, so that was there [already]. That moment synthesised the essence of what we were trying to do in something simpler. It was beautiful that we had access to that space. 

I want to ask about the use of freeze frame and the sudden cuts in the opening sequence. Despite the dream logic that you thread throughout, you could sit most audiences down in front of the film and they’d find it very watchable. But then there’s those jarring freeze frames. I’d love to hear the thinking behind them. 

María: Gonzalo García-Pelayo was referred to as the only Spanish representative of the French New Wave. These are the editing techniques that the French were coming up with and that was something that Paola Álvarez and Sergio Jimenez, our editors, brought. We trusted them from the beginning, and they were in the in the process from the script stage. We knew that they could make magic with the footage and, because we were going with an almost one take methodology, they would have to utilise editing techniques that would work with the restrictions that the footage was offering. I think the freeze frame was a beautiful option.

From what you’ve said, the authorship of the film is shared between you and your collaborators, which I think is beautiful.

A road trip is really good as a device, or an excuse maybe, for dialogue to meander and go off on tangents, as it does when the trio are in the car together. Is that all as scripted or is any of it devised by the cast?

Julia: It’s mostly scripted, but there’s always the possibility of a little bit of improvisation. The essence of the scene needed to be respected, obviously. The cast were very comfortable, because we rehearsed for two months. They were very aware about what needs to happen in each scene. The moment that we reach that point in the script, they are free, we’re fine, we trust you. 

How long was the shoot? 

María: Five days per week and we had two weeks and a half.

Do you plan to collaborate on further film work together?

María: Yes, we are already writing. Today was a very fruitful day in the Tate Modern.

What do you want your audience walking out of the auditorium to be reflecting on having seen the film?

María: If they came with someone, I want them to talk to each other, and to disagree probably. And hopefully have the idea that they should try to be creative. 

For me, the film is about understanding that maternal instinct has to do with feeling the possibility of creation, and how that can be applied to other ways of creating, not just procreation.

Julia: So I don’t agree with that at all. I don’t need them to take away a need to create anything. It’s fine if they want to be creative or not, if they want to be an artist or not. I don’t think we need any more artists in the world. We are taking a risk, and we are fine with that.

For me it’s that there are people creating things and taking risks to tell stories. Like ‘hey, these women are taking a risk just to tell me this story, and I appreciate that’. That’s all. When I watch a movie, or when I even when I buy something, I think ‘this businessman is taking a risk for what I have in this microphone’, for example. You’re taking the risk, I appreciate that, I admire that. If [our audience] can realise and be aware of all the things we are doing to tell a story. For me that’s enough.

On the Go screened at London Spanish Film Festival on September 21st and is seeking international distribution. With thanks to María and Julia for their generosity with their time and insights and to Joana Granero for facilitating.

You can find the film on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/onthegofilm/

Blake’s Archive: On the Go (2023)