He is a fan of Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks or Ernst Lubitsch. And every summer he premieres a comedy with a few invariable elements: a family plot, a good group of kids, Leo Harlem, a few jokes that aren’t bad at all, and a hit with the public. For all this we can already talk about the Segura touch, and it is that Santiago Segura –who also acts (that is another of the invariable elements)– is a gold mine for the box office.
This July he has not missed his annual appointment. The director and actor premieres today Summer Holidays, in which he plays Óscar, the classic pagafantas who believes that his life is ideal until his wife (Patricia Conde) leaves him for a handsome therapist and he is fired from his job . Desperate, he seeks the support of his friend Félix de él, a crook also separated and unemployed who, through his brother-in-law, gets a summer job for both of them. Óscar and Félix go to a hotel in the Canary Islands turned into children’s entertainers. His mission is more impossible than Tom Cruise’s: entertain twenty children, including his own, who have been brought into the hotel as foreigners.
How was the shoot?
Imagine, twenty children, Patricia Conde, Cristina Gallego, Leo Harlem… I was happy. It was like playing with the best toys in the world. This movie is made with the best human material available. In the end, a director is a manager who has to put a story into images, but without actors he is nobody.
His daughter Sirena is already a regular in his movies, but where did he get another 19 child actors?
My daughter has come out a little from my relationships with my wife, and I think the other children are each from their parents’ relationship. I have been in charge of collecting them, taming them a little, having a lot of patience, giving them a lot of love, getting them to become friends with each other and the rest has gone smoothly, because when you say ‘cut’ and you see that the children continue playing, you think, ‘ How wonderful, this goes alone’.
And it also has Leo Harlem who is like another child…
I suffer because I’m very responsible and Harlem because it’s not pro-kids, but when he goes on stage it’s funny, since he has very internalized the role of face, hard face, vivalavirgin or whatever. Leo is a crack and he is like another child because we have him adopted. He is part of the family like Antonio Resines, Flo, David Guapo… they are people I like, they are funny and I think: ‘I’m going to take advantage of them’.
And do you pay them?
They are friends, but they are not stupid. I pay them. They have to live on something. It is true that when I made Torrente the producer told me: “I can’t pay all these people you’re bringing, they’re your friends, you’ll see what you do.” They were Javier Bardem, Fernando Trueba… and in the end we found the solution: we gave them a ham.
Just like in those classic comedies you love, in Summer Vacation there is a love story…
I was excited to put a little romanticism in the film. I had a problem though, because how is anyone going to fall in love with me? And I thought maybe because we have hobbies in common. So I introduced the interest in classic comedy that my character and Cristina Gallego share. I admit that in my life I have flirted in the same way as this character. I saw that women liked bad guys, those who treated them badly, I turned it around and discovered that by treating a woman mega well you can have a chance.
His films are the highest grossing year after year. Has it saved Spanish cinema?
I wouldn’t say that much, but five years ago the exhibitors thanked me for my film raising 12 million euros. That’s seven for theaters. Last year, the owner of a cinema gave me a bottle of wine, because he was going to close and he avoided it thanks to my film. It’s very nice, but I don’t feel like a savior of anything.
Before these family films, the Torrente saga was already very successful. For when a new installment?
An idea has been going through my head for two years. Torrente would be president. It would start with members of a far-right party who see Torrente in a bar giving a roll – like some taxi drivers who give you a rally in the taxi – and they think: ‘This man seems very convincing’. They approach him and suggest that he go with them. And then the guy gets excited and gains power, power, power…
Artificial intelligence has already arrived at the cinema. Do you plan to use it?
Imagine that there is a robbery trial and the security cameras have recorded it but the judge cannot accept it as evidence because he does not know which images are real and which are not. I’m not afraid of artificial intelligence, but it’s going to suck.
