Pablo Isla likes filmmakers and Rodrigo Cortés likes businessmen. Although the businessman is Isla and the filmmaker is Cortés. But that is why they are face to face on a stage, in front of two hundred people who are not expecting a boxing match, although all the blows go to the head: but from the public. The gathering is entitled Culture and talent and is one of the central acts of this Friday’s day at the Hay Festival in Segovia, which will celebrate its main days until tomorrow, with around eighty acts in which writers, artists, historians, a Nobel laureate, a herd of sheep, poets and –it was said– filmmakers and businessmen.
Pablo Isla was titled in his day (when he chaired the giant Inditex) as the best CEO in the world and if he visited Segovia this Friday it was to talk about leadership and because among his new challenges is Fonte Films, the film production company he has just created . Will it have Cortés as director? The filmmaker had the courtesy not to ask in public, but Isla demonstrated his perfect knowledge of the filmography of the Galician director, who had great success in 2010 with Buried . So who knows.
In the give and take, Isla defended that “never” the initial objective of a business project should be to earn money. “You must undertake things that you can feel proud of and, without thinking about money and without being a romantic, you must believe in what you do and have some wickers and choose well who you join forces with. But the project must above all excite you, and from there the business success will come”. She took the example to the field of Cortés: “You cannot be irrational or unrealistic, if you make a 10-hour film or a 3,000-page novel, you know what you are risking.”
“I quite believe in the purity of intentions,” Isla added, in a scuffle that was hilarious, “albeit without naivety. I have a lot of faith in human beings. Do you look at me in disbelief?
–No, no, I guess you are used to interpreting the expressions of the board of directors…
“Well, yes, I’m used to faces of… agreement…”
-And this is good?
“What you need are uncomfortable faces,” Isla concluded.
The businessman, in any case, defended the union, and then went on to counterattack: perhaps Isla was already working. He asked Cortés why proportions of talent, discipline, work, strategy and effort are necessary for success in artistic creation. For the director, it is a combination of all of them, and more than anything that the effort is maintained over time. “Resistance is necessary and, without discussing the board you play on, do it with a hint of foolishness.” Of courage, creativity, madness.
Folly was Konstantin Novoselov and Kate Daudy. The first was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 and both are artists. Yesterday they filled the center of Segovia with sheep (400). They made them star in a performance with which they wanted to illustrate Einstein’s theory of reunification.
They had written YES or NO on the wool (in eco-friendly and biodegradable paint with the first rain) and showed the public that you can live in peace, bleating equally, whether you are for or against (yes/no) whatever. . Novoselov starred in another of the afternoon tables. He won the most prestigious prize in physics for his discoveries about graphene and yesterday he said one of the phrases of the day: “I know less and less things”.
