Monzón: It came from a book [by Francisco Pérez Gandul]. One of the movie's producers sent me the novel, and I read it in one night. It's a page-turner, and it had a lot of great ideas in it. I thought it was a great idea for a movie: this guy comes to the prison the day before he starts to work, suddenly he's in the middle of a riot and he has to pretend he's a criminal not to be killed by the criminals. It's a high concept, an idea that's going to catch the audience from the beginning. And I thought, OK, I really want to do this because it has the flavour of a Greek tragedy: this character is in a shining moment and in 30 hours he is going to suffer the worst things that a human being can suffer, and he's going to change forever.

Was it tricky to capture this in the script?
It was a challenge for me. You only come with characters plus your skills behind the camera, and you have to grab the audience and not let them free until the end. Because you don't have a lot of locations: this is a pure piece of narrative cinema. So it attracted me a lot. But the first thing we did, my screenwriter and I, was to make it singular; we wanted to make it different, not an homage to American prison movies like the novel is. So we got the basic idea from the novel and then we went to the prisons and we talked to real inmates and guards and we absorbed the reality that we were seeing. And we put all of these things in the script, and finally into the movie. I thought that the best way to tell the story was to give the appearance of reality.

In order to get this realistic appearance, I knew I had to
go to a real jail.

Did that add some tension while you were shooting?
Yes, for example in the riot scenes there were people who started to act like it was real. They started to bang with their bare hands on the windows, and break them, and it was impossible to yell "cut" in these takes, because people were so noisy. So to cut these action scenes we had to use one of those football air-horns; it was the only way to stop this brutal discharge of energy. And for the real inmates it was kind of like a dream, because they could destroy a prison without being punished for it! So their improvisation was a gift for the movie. It was a very exciting experience.

Was it difficult to work in a real prison?
The most important part was when I went with the actors to the real jail to rehearse there. They were kind of aghast, because there were so many hints about the prison's past. You could see the scratches on the walls, the smells, the noises of the metal doors banging, and in the solitary cells you could see the marks of people who were locked in there saying "please let me go". And to see this was so shocking, to feel it and live it with real inmates, to visit their cells and see how they act and talk. This situation made us sometimes feel like we were real inmates involved in a riot! In the beginning, because this was an old prison, it was dirty and unhealthy, we didn't have running water, and all the film crew was a bit thrown by that. But within a week the team was in the cells taking naps as if we lived there.

Casting the role
was nuts ... someone who could confront Luis Tosar face-on, with those eyes
like hammers!

Are you working on something nicer and gentler now?
Yes, I need it! We have written a dark comedy in English that's set here in England. At the same time we have another in Spanish, which I'll probably shoot first, called El Niño, which means The Kid, about a young guy who is dealing hash in the Straits of Gibraltar, which is this very hot area now, the gate to Europe. My writing partner and I spent a long time researching this situation, talking to policemen and delinquents, going to the area. I'm very excited about that movie.

Cell 211 has such a great idea at its core that surely American producers have been interested in remaking it.
When I was in Toronto, American producers were all over me, asking me if I wanted to do an English-language version, but I said, "No, I've done it already." Finally Paul Haggis bought the rights, and he's writing it and probably going to direct it as well. It's the perfect kind of script for two powerful actors, but I don't know what he's going to do. But I'll probably see it - I'll buy my ticket at the cinema like everyone else.

OPTIMUM, LONDON • 29.JUN.11

< < BACK TO FEATURES INDEX