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MAX CALAVERA
I was born in Barcelona, on April 8, 1999 in the Teknon clinic, based on forceps. I suspect they damaged my left lobe leaving me numb for calculus and abstraction. The good part is that I have a creative and passionate right lobe. Being born violently with the “Give peace a chance” chords must have marked me. I didn’t speak until two years later, but I could communicate with the language of the animated penguin Pingu. When I was five I could read in english, spanish and catalan and I made up some melodies on my grandmas old piano.
I was ambidextrous. That made my teachers go mad and went crazy They couldn't stand to see me paint with both hands. How usually happens in this world, they “normalized” me by forcing me to use one hand to write and I forgot penguin language.
During my childhood, my film training inevitably went through Disney. However, I would never have had this animal need to tell stories if it weren’t for my grandmothers. They infected me. As a child I loved hearing his anecdotes: the republic, the spanish civil war, their journeys abroad and many other fascinating stories. Although many years have passed I sometimes ask them to recount them to me, even if I know them by heart. In fact, my grandmother Montserrat, due to her gift for storytelling, we call her Momo, as the protagonist of Michael Ende's novel of the same name.
Thanks to these very special grandmothers, I was able to see films from “Laurel & Hardy”, Charles Chaplin, The Marx Brothers among others. Aside from immunizing me against black and white, it made me love comedy. Even my other grandmother mistakenly gave me "Robin Hood" starring Errol Flynn, when I expected Disney's remake. I liked it so much that I asked for another Errol Flynn movie! The next one was "Santa Fe Trail" also directed by Michael Curtiz.
Grandmother's house became my cinema paradiso. My cousins and I locked ourselves in the "crazy room" to spend the afternoon glued to our VHS player watching ET, Mars Attacks among others. So, little by little, I was tying my vision of the cosmos to movies and books.
I have studied in schools of varied ideologies. It has helped me to be open minded and not prejudiced. I went through an elitist international college, also an alternative hippie center, and a couple of Catholic schools. The "cocktail" is not bad. Was at an Opus Dei school where I fell madly in love with history and politics, thanks to an airy Robin Williams teacher at the "Club of Dead Poets." Here I delved into cinema and intuited that in this world would be my future. In this same school we saw "The Graduate" clandestinely and I discovered Hans Zimmer thanks to a music teacher of mine who also taught me how to clean DVD's spitting over them.
Luckily I was able to channel my artistic madness by entering ESCAC (School of Cinema and Audiovisuals of Catalonia) with an excellence scholarship. With 70 shootings behind me - some as a director, others as producer among many other positions - I could consider myself the David O Selznick of low-budget or rather zero-budget productions.
Throughout in these four years in college I have also written and directed a variety of short films: from a bread with tomato western (westerns set in eighteenth-century Catalonia) titled By a Handful of Sheeps to an Intimate Drama with a fantastic touch "Eddie and the Glass Onion", which was one of the selected short films of the festival organized by ESCAC, the inexperienced. Thanks to these last two short films I was able to enter the direction specialty, after some difficult access tests.
As is usual in cinema but especially in student productions, I have dealt with all sorts of situations: technical equipment injured by lights coming off, obstructing the municipalities for not paying a fine for shooting a film without a permit, eat pasta salad four days in a row, driving Monegros desert in the battered Honda Jazz of my best friend for not paying a rented car. Improvising scenes isn't a big deal anymore. the locals don't want to know anything about us, the actor has to leave the set because he forgot to feed his dogs and a long and so on that they have improved my skill to be able to solve problems quickly. A kind of 22 year old Mr. Wolf.
In recent years I have been lucky enough to meet the director Manuel Huerga and have been helped by producer Sebas Mery's Life & Pictures) and editor Lluís de la Madrid.
After a long confinement I decided to shoot "Knock on wood for Christmas" a comedy disguised as a slasher that revolves around the Catalan Christmas icon Caga tió. This October the effort was rewarded by being able to premiere at the 54th edition of the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival.
Now my next stage remains to be written. Even if it is with burning iron, I want the filmmaker's stamp to be engraved on my flesh. I am an artistic beast that endures this pain.
Max Calvera Vernet
Statement
Screenwriter, short films director, musician and arts lover.
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