The champions are as dejected as they are disintegrated. They managed to win the basketball championship against all odds, but because of an incident they were disqualified and punished with two years of expulsion from the competition. Now they can go back. A new coach, played by Elisa Hipólito, has the mission of bringing the whole team together again. But the girl is a little clueless (and they say quite clumsy) and enrolls him in the athletics tests.
This is how CampeoneX begins, the sequel to Campeones, which will hit Spanish screens on August 18. A film directed by Javier Fesser as emotional as it is funny that features the signing of Brianeitor, a young man who has degenerative muscular atrophy and who is quite a discovery for the team and for the cinema. In this interview with La Vanguardia, Fesser explains the secrets of filming the new installment of the Campeones saga.
Brianeitor is the great news of CampeoneX …
What is new is that we have introduced functional disability and put a person on an athletics team who cannot run or jump or throw anything and yet shows that he can become a fundamental part of the team and group As the movie explains it, no one will question it or say anything, but what is a boy with muscular dystrophy doing on a track and field team?
Brian is very smart…
He is a brilliant being and the character is a reflection of him, as is the case with the rest of the protagonists, because the script adapts to the actors. Anyone would want Brian on their team.
How did you meet him?
In the initial script, the character was a girl called Martina, but we couldn’t find the actress I was looking for, so we expanded the range. Then, the son of Athenea Mata, the co-writer, told us about a gamer, a YouTuber he follows, Brianeitor. I saw him on TikTok and five minutes later I called the casting director to track him down. We had been looking for the character for months, I talked to Brian for two minutes and I knew we had the movie.
CampeoneX dives into the video game world. What did you know about it before shooting the film?
We invented the video game for the film. It’s called Real Runner, and we intend to make it a real video game, because that’s what it’s all about, both in terms of its visual universe and its rules and gameplay.
Have you had help from someone wise in the matter?
Yes, from many experts in the field. There are already physical video game competitions, although they don’t reach the level proposed by the film, but it is possible that the idea is only a few months away from materializing. Virtual reality will soon be a second home for all of us.
Most of the actors in the film have some sort of disability. How have they adapted to these developments?
Even if you put them in front of something very surprising, they adapt quite naturally. They always try and that’s the bottom line of the film, to show that nothing is impossible. This is the spirit of people with intellectual disabilities, with disabilities in general.
The American remake of Campeones will be released this year with Woody Harrelson as the protagonist. Have you seen it yet?
It is actually the third remake, one was made in Germany and another for the Arab world. Of course I’ve seen the American. I am one of the producers. I went to the premiere in New York with the director, Bobby Farrelly, and with the actors, Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson and the whole team of champions who came from Canada, where it was filmed. I’m not a big fan of remakes, but this one made sense, because when you make movies with people with intellectual disabilities, each version is unique and original.
And their champions, how are they? Have you noticed any evolution from the first film?
Campeones made them all very happy. But since they don’t manage all that ego stuff, that happiness has nothing to do with what happens when you become super famous overnight. It has to do with the joy they feel when they feel they are able to do a new job, to be actors and to see that people have been moved and had fun. This takes up the idea that nothing is impossible, because I have demanded them like any actor and even more. In addition, five years after Campeones, we come with a film that brings many new things and that goes deeper into the issue of disability. We made the best film possible, it’s not a second part, we didn’t stretch the gum.
Francisco Ibáñez recently died. He said that you were the only one who had done a great adaptation of Mortadello and Filemó, what do you remember of the cartoonist?
I remember immersing myself in the universe of a genius who I didn’t know was a genius, of a huge artist who never worked as an artist, who only worked as a handyman and a good person. It gave me absolute freedom. He told me: “Make the film that makes you hungry, because I also draw as I feel hungry”.
