Juan de los muertos


A story about a attack of zombies americans in Cuba. Now the bad zombies are gringos.

Now Alejandro Brugues tell us about his movie "Juan of the dead":

Juan was always a good idea. I'm always taking notes, developing new stories, until one stands out and I can't get it out of my head. That was Juan. Besides, I love zombie films and it allowed me to do all the social commentary, so it was a perfect combination.

There are many anecdotes. The first day we took our zombies out to the street they had to attack an old man, and one of the zombies actually bit him and took some skin off his arm. So we had real zombies! We hired that one for another three scenes. Also we had neighbors calling the police a couple of times, because they saw heads on the street and body parts and all that. And we had policemen in the shooting! But they came anyway and made sure everything was fake. There are plenty more, trust me, I could write a book just with the anecdotes. Actually, I should!


Although the film matches a lot what I had in mind, you always have to adapt. Initially I didn’t want to go handheld most of the film, but the shooting schedule was so crazy we couldn’t be using dollies and cranes as much as I wanted. Also, we couldn’t wait for the right lights and that kind of thing most of the time. Basically, if we didn’t shoot something the day it was planned, we didn’t have time to shoot it another day, and we had to move really fast. But I guess that happens in most of films. At least it has always happened to me!

The budget is 2.3 million euros. And sorry, but no funny anecdote about finding the money. In my mind I always think the producers had to give lots of blowjobs, but the truth is everyone involved just loved the idea and wanted to join us in this crazy thing.

We shot the film in 44 days and we used the Red One. Why? Because the director of photography, Carles Gusi, said so, and I trust him a lot! I don’t miss 35mm, to tell you the truth. I know digital is still not the same, but we’ll get to that. And the digital projection is beautiful, no scratches, no mistakes changing reels. What can I say? I just love it!

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