The Big Picture

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff talks to the cast and crew of
Daniela Forever
at TIFF 2024.
Nacho Vigalondo talks “cinema farts,” why he doesn’t like dreams, re-imagining
A Nightmare on Elm Street
, and approaching each film as if it were his last.
Henry Golding teases
A Simple Favor 2
will be bigger and better, and reminisces about meeting the “real” Vigalondo.

Lucid dreaming has enraptured humans for years now, as the ability to remain self-aware in your dreams is a concept that seems so fantastical and illusory. Director Nacho Vigalondo uses the medium of lucid dreaming to explore grief, loss, and the idea of being careful of what you wish for in his 2024 film, Daniela Forever, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Like many sci-fi films, the fancy bells and mirrors in Daniela Forever are used to tap into the most poignant and grounded truths of the human condition. Featuring a gut-wrenching romantic relationship at its crux, Vigalondo gives us his signature ethereal quality to envelop us in the visceral emotions of the world he builds.

In the film, Henry Golding plays Nick, who is grieving his deceased lover, Daniela, played by Beatrice Grannò. The character is doused in melancholy that resonates with us in a biting way, which makes his future actions and decisions sympathetic, no matter how questionable they become. Nick is enrolled in a clinical trial, which involves a pill that instigates lucid dreaming and is being used as a way to tackle grief and depression. Patients are encouraged to re-construct their lives in their dreamscapes, and Nick complies. He is ecstatic to reunite with Daniela in this ephemeral dream fantasy, but gradually, the lines between reality and the mind irrevocably blur in a mesmerizing yet dark spiral that we don’t expect.

During TIFF, Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits with Golding, Grannò, and Vigalondo, and they discuss working with Vigalondo as a serious and fun director and how his “cinema fart”-filled philosophy of filmmaking creates beautifully balanced pieces. Vigalondo also reveals why he doesn’t like dreams but adores the thematic and visual explosion they can create on the screen and how he approaches each film as if it were the last he was going to make. Golding also teases how A Simple Favor 2 will build on all the elements we loved about the original film. You can hear about the cast and crew’s favorite movie worlds and dreams in the video above or follow along via the transcript below.

What Is ‘Daniela Forever’ About?
Image via Filmax

PERRI NEMIROFF: So clearly, I know what your film is about, but because we’re at a film festival, a lot of our viewers might not know Daniela Forever just yet. So, Nacho, I’ll give you these duties. Would you mind giving a brief synopsis of your film?

NACHO VIGALONDO: It’s never a good sign when the synopsis itself is a challenge. This movie is about this depressed guy drowning in grief who finds a way to meet his deceased girlfriend through a pill. It’s a pill that allows him to have immediate, crystal-clear, lucid dreams. He’s dreaming of her in a way that is self-aware, it feels like an alternate universe. This sounds horrible because it is. If you are building in your mind the chance to meet your beloved one again, it’s easy to start behaving like a god, which this guy is within his brain. I’m always looking for validation because I have this impostor syndrome all the time, no matter how old I get, I’m always just looking at that. [Laughs]

I’m listening to your synopsis, and I’m figuring out where to draw the line in terms of spoilers. There are so many things right now that I want to say that I know I can’t.

VIGALONDO: There are so many things going on in this film that you could spoil a lot of them.

It’s the kind of movie that I bet once you watch it the first time through, it is just as rewarding to watch it the second time around. You know where everything is going, and you can find all these little details and nuances that you missed.

VIGALONDO: I hope so.

HENRY GOLDING: There are Easter eggs in there, for sure. We thought about how to make it a little bit more fun in the second one.

Nacho Vigalondo Does Not Like Dreams But Loves Going Crazy
Image via TIFF

I like that. Nacho, I want to come back to you really briefly because I was reading your director’s statement, and a pretty good chunk of it is about how you don’t like seeing dreams in movies. Then you make a movie filled with dreams.

VIGALONDO: I have this kind of love-hate relationship with dreams because I don’t remember what happens every night. I barely remember more than three dreams all my life and I never had what you humans call a wet dream. I never had any of those. Sometimes, the dream is driving me in that direction, but just before anything happens, you just wake up. I hate dreams in that way.

GOLDING: Raging dream boner. [Laughs]

VIGALONDO: He said that. At the same time, in movies, I love when things spiral out of control, and they go visually and thematically crazy, but everything gets reset because it’s a dream. Since I was a child, when I saw movies, I wanted all the crazy stuff to happen for real, even if it’s happening within the character’s mind. I just found in this movie a way to make all dreams matter. Everything that happens in his head, in a way, happens for real.

For another filmmaker out there who might be apprehensive about incorporating dreams in their own screenplay, what is one “do” and one “do not” for having an effective dream sequence in a movie?

VIGALONDO: If you want to shoot dreams in your movie, make sure you have a dream cast.

That is the best answer ever.

What Are ‘Daniela Forever’s Cast’s Dream Movie Worlds?
Image via Paramount Pictures

Here’s a fun dream question for all of you, leaning into how this whole concept works. Let’s say you could take the pill and build a dreamscape that reflects the movie of your choice. What movie would you pick, and what might you explore in that dream?

GOLDING: That is a complex question right there. Easy. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. My childhood dreams were just enveloped with the idea of going into that factory and just losing myself. I think that would be a good one for me.

BEATRICE GRANNÒ: It’s so hard because I watch sad films, and I like sad films. It’s hard to think about a world. Maybe Harry Potter.

VAGALONDO: That’s nice.

GRANNÒ: I don’t know, though. I’m not sure.

Sad films are okay, too, because sometimes that kind of catharsis is just what you need.

GRANNÒ: Yeah, exactly.

‘Daniela Forever’s Crew Turn ‘A Nightmare On Elm Street’ Into “Dream-ception”
Image by Photagonist at TIFF

VIGALONDO: I would love to be able to dream [that] I’m within A Nightmare on Elm Street. Because if Freddy Krueger tracks me and captures me and kills me, it doesn’t happen. It’s OK because I’m in a dream. I’m dreaming of dreaming within the Freddy Krueger film.

It’s a dream within a dream within a dream.

VIGALONDO: So if Freddy Krueger kills me inside A Nightmare on Elm Street, but everything is a dream, nothing happens to me. I can survive Freddy Krueger. I wanna be the victim. I want to be killed by Freddy Krueger within a dream, within a dream. So I’m OK.

GOLDING: That makes sense.

VIGALONDO: The movie is easier to follow.

GOLDING: Dream-ception.

Image via New Line Cinema

We are long overdue for another Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I feel like that’s a way to get at it while being a little meta. I kind of want that now.

GOLDING: At the end, they just wake up.

VIGALONDO: The movie is easier to comprehend. Not that complicated. I leave the complicated stuff and the jokes for in front of the cameras, but the movie is crystal-clear. I swear.

Nacho Vigalondo Balances Sadness With Laughter in ‘Daniela Forever’
“Nacho’s vision is very free, and it doesn’t really follow any rules.”
Image via TIFF

To lean into that a little bit, when this script first came your way, what were some of your biggest burning questions for Nacho just in terms of who your characters were, but also how you would actually execute this ambitious idea?

GOLDING: For me, it was the fact that you’re not quite sure throughout the movie — it’s not really spoiling anything — if Nick is a good guy or a guy who turns into somebody not-so-good for selfish reasons. The reason that you understand completely his motivations is because he’s lost the love of his life. The only way that he’s been able to reconnect and be given a second chance is taking these pills, which give him these dreams. But throughout the story, she slowly slips from his fingers again, and he does anything possible to stop that from happening. He turns to an interesting choice of decisions that he makes.

GRANNÒ: Nacho’s vision is very free, and it doesn’t really follow any rules. At the beginning, when I read the film, I was like, “What’s the tone of this film? How is it gonna go?” But then we all met together, and we read it, and it was really funny. I realized how funny it was. Remember when we were doing the first reading, I was like, “This is hilarious.” And I love that because we’re telling a very deep and sad story, but we’re doing it through this lightness and also absurd moments. I really love to play that kind of fine line between doing something that is emotional, but also kind of uncanny sometimes. I loved working with Nacho and Henry. It was generally one of my favorite sets so far.

Image by Photagonist at TIFF

I’m gonna follow up on working with Nacho. There was something in our press notes that really caught my eye. Henry, you might have said this. When you first met Nacho, you were super professional, but then the real Nacho comes out. For both of you, I want to know the first moment you saw the real nacho.

GOLDING: Let me tell you a story. I have a fantastic story. We’re at lunch, right? I have my family over. I have, at the time, a one and half or 2-year-old daughter with us. He plays this little joke.

VIGALONDO: A dad joke.

GOLDING: And he goes like this: [Screams] In the middle of the restaurant. My child just burst into tears, and he does it for like 15 to 20 seconds and does not stop until his girlfriend’s like, “Nacho, you’ve gotta stop!” And he’s like [screams].

GRANNÒ: Because she empathized with Nacho’s pain, and he didn’t care.

VIGALONDO: I was just pushing the emotional growth of the kids.

GOLDING: She’s like two years old. [Laughs]

VIGALONDO: What is the real Nacho? It’s the serious guy on day one, and the rest of the time I’m just like pushing myself to be funnier because I know that they are getting bored. You have this responsibility on set of feeling if people feel complacent with the film, or active and everything. So, I’m forcing myself to do this stupid shit because otherwise, I’m scared of them being bored.

Image by Photagonist at TIFF

GOLDING: This was off the clock, so it doesn’t even matter.

GRANNÒ: The real Nacho is very vulnerable and serious. That’s the real Nacho.

VIGALONDO: I’m vulnerable. I’m super vulnerable.

GRANNÒ: It’s very deep what you just said. I think what he just said actually reflects the movie because he doesn’t want to be boring and sad. So, eventually, it’s filled with great moments, and it’s fascinating.

VIGALONDO: You don’t take making movies for granted, especially post-pandemic. You’re not part of the aristocracy. You’re fighting to make films, so you never know which movie is going to be the last one. I know this is gloomy. When you’re writing the stuff, you have that fear behind you, and I prefer to show the most of me or all the possibilities of the story rather than keeping one tone intact because this may be your last chance to make people laugh. It is like a survival element within you.

GRANNÒ: I love it very much.

“Cinema Farts” Are a Part of Vigalondo’s Filmmaking Philosophy
Image by Photagonist at TIFF

VIGALONDO: That means if I made Manchester by the Sea, maybe eventually someone farts, and I know that that would be a mistake in that film. This is myself saying that I’m not the proper filmmaker for Manchester by the Sea, but in this other film, I couldn’t –

GRANNÒ: Fart?

VIGALONDO: Yeah. Maybe that’s a problem, but it’s times that I see the opportunity to fart, not literally, but in cinema terms, like a cinema fart.

GOLDING: Like, don’t take it too seriously, right?

VIGALONDO: Yeah.

Image by Photagonist at TIFF 

My biggest takeaway from this interview now is cinema farts and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

VIGALONDO: CinemaFarts.net.

Nacho, I did wanna ask about one more thing that you said in our press notes because I feel like it speaks to why I keep coming back to your films. You mentioned, “I always impose upon myself to direct every movie as if it were the last one,” just like you just said, “as a way to maintain honesty over the mundane fears imposed by this industry.” Can you tell me a specific mundane fear that you don’t like and how you basically said “F” it and did your own thing and made this movie purely your own?

VIGALONDO: I can go back to farts. Because a fart is like taking you away from this sense of elegance, it may set your movie in a better position. You become responsible to the movie as a piece of your truth rather than something that applies to a market or something transactional. You’re not making movies for awards or for money; you’re making a movie that comes from the inside, and that includes a lot of gas. [Laughs] That’s part of the body. It’s a body function.

If something is made to serve whatever we define as a market, I probably have no interest in it. I prefer this route instead.

Henry Golding Teases ‘A Simple Favor 2’ Will Be Bigger and Better
Image via Lionsgate

A Simple Favor 2 is high on everybody’s mind right now. When I think about that original movie, that mystery is so incredibly extreme that I want to see more, but I’m sitting here thinking, how do you push it? How do you deliver more of the same but then justify more?

GOLDING: Well, funny enough, we shot that here in Toronto. That was my first time in Toronto, and it must have been 2018. You take what everybody loved about the first one — it found its audience, and people loved it. It’s kind of like Marmite in the UK. It’s like you either love it or you hate it. But we had so many people just absolutely die for it — the costumes, the drama, the mystery — so we took all those elements and made it bigger and better. It just gets wilder and wilder and wilder as the movie goes on. You’ll be pleased if you did enjoy it.

That is what I would expect, and that is what I need.

Special thanks to this year’s partners of the Cinema Center x Collider Studio at TIFF 2024 including presenting Sponsor Range Rover Sport as well as supporting sponsors Peoples Group financial services, poppi soda, Don Julio Tequila, Legend Water and our venue host partner Marbl Toronto. And also Roxstar Entertainment, our event producing partner and Photagonist Canada for the photo and video services.