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Meet Joan Paüls

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Joan Paüls.

Joan, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am a Catalan film director from Catalonia, a privileged place in the world. I started writing in a very early age and since then, I have been always attracted to the feeling of telling stories and provoking emotions. And the summit of storytelling is cinema. So when I was seventeen, I thought words were not enough and I directed my first short film. During the next formation years where I built my voice and my vision, I directed and wrote more than eight short films that have traveled around the world being nominated in more than 100 festivals and receiving more than 30 awards, with five different films awarded. On the meantime, I also traveled abroad and excelled the prestigious MA Directing Fiction at Goldsmiths University in London, starting my international career.

I worked for some big companies such as Somesuch, one of the top global companies, Magic Light Pictures, with several Academy Awards, RCR Films or Harold Entertainment, one of the world’s top advertising companies. And in 2014, I created my own production company – today disappeared – opening my scope to the world of music videos.

With all of that, I was more than confident to make a step forward and make a big jump moving to work and live to Los Angeles in 2018, the core of filmmaking in the whole world. I had been in the U.S. with a sports grant in my teenage days and I had clear in my mind that the chance of doing relevant films and getting mass worldwide audiences was only possible in the States.

I knew I wanted to come to Los Angeles since I started. That was a clear goal, and to be able to be here is already a prize for me. But I know what it counts is what I do while I’m here. I directed two short films, three music videos and I have been involved in the production of different feature films and big commercials side to side with stars like Mickey Rourke. I also worked and participated in the American Film Market in Santa Monica and I have already been in more than ten film festivals with my latest works, ‘The Disease’ and ‘Anonymous’. To name a few, Los Angeles Fashion Film Festival, NewFilmmakers Los Angeles, Lift Off Los Angeles Film Festival, The LA Independent Showcase or a festival that will bring my film to a theatre play. And they will keep moving around because the distribution just started. Now, I’m working with a project that involves some secrets of Marilyn Monroe, and another that involves a series of war photographs adaptation. Time has come for me to make my first feature film.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
My first film in Los Angeles is called ‘The Disease’ and presents two siblings discussing their careers in Hollywood and the fleeting nature of ambition with the great generational dilemma: is having a dream a virtue or a disease? The film deals with all the difficulties that the young generations face nowadays due to overpopulation and recession times. All I wrote for the short is somewhat autobiographical. So, no, it has not been a smooth road. And maybe it will never be.

Nowadays, we have our head full of dreams and very ambitious goals because that’s what the older generations and the standards of living put in our heads, and they are incredibly difficult to achieve. In the case of filmmaking, it is clearly a long-term career. It’s like running a marathon where on the sides, you have people throwing to your feed massive balls to make you fall. And you have to keep running and avoiding these balls for a lot of years, which most people is not capable of or willing to. I am because, like Earth, I have no plan B.

For me, the main struggles have been mainly two. Firstly, the language and the culture differences. I have been working and living abroad for the last six years since I moved to live to London. And when writing or directing a movie, the language is key, as it’s the main tool you use to create the art piece and to share your emotions. Emotions are very attached to the words, more than we think. As director Iñarritu says, directing a movie is insane. But directing a movie in a foreign language is totally crazy.

Secondly, I’ve lived in Barcelona, London, Madrid and Los Angeles in six years. I’ve changed not just my job but the whole industry where I worked in too often, and every time I change country, I have to start from the bottom. All your contacts, production companies, dynamics, locations, projects… all is lost in the blink of an eye. This has made my promoting or growing process less pronounced than it should have been inside on one same industry.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I do movies. Momentously, in the short film format. I do write and direct them. I am most known for my best and most awarded short films, which are ‘Wounds’ and ‘One way flight’. I have always worked from a literary aspect placing the script on the center of the production. Writing the script, the story, the characters, the dialogues and the narrative is my main talent. I come up with original ideas or original ways of telling the same stories naturally and I use these skills to have my own voice and to differentiate from others.

A director is basically someone that has something to say because if cinema doesn’t speak up, you are losing a precious opportunity. Probably you don’t know the Catalan situation in my country, but I’ve been raised in a situation of repression and I have a huge sensitivity for injustice. So which stories am I interested in? Not any story is worth-telling in the numbers that cinema moves. The cost and the technical and artistic labour are so high that I always try to use cinema as a tool for denounce and criticism of real-life events. Raising awareness through the audience and interpellating change with its catalyst power. If you watch my films, you will see my social focus. I usually work with real stories and realities from our world that need thorough examination. Sometimes, setting a blurry line between fiction and reality.

The story can also live in the world of fiction and imagination to send its message. For example, in one of the movies I have written, I’m interested in stressing the importance of Art as the key element for the survival of our species. We are usually told that intelligence is what makes us different from other beings. But robots, probably a reality in the next 50 years, will have better intelligence. It’s not it. Emotions are not either, as animals feel in a very similar way. It’s the capacity of creating something new what defines our species. With this project, I’d like to send a warning to all humans that if we continue in the use of technologies and the deterioration of social relations as we are now, we could face a really end-of-species situation.

And as one of the Hollywood producers told me, the industry is constantly looking for voices like mine that come from abroad, people who don’t have an American background and can bring different points of view and different interests to the stories that we tell. I have the global care and sensitivity for human stories, but I can also watch those from a European or Latino perspective.

I am here in Los Angeles because it is the best place to achieve the balance that I follow between the artistic and authorial side, as is the work of an author; and the commercial side, as is the work of a businessman. Always having in your mind that if you are doing a film is to tell something valuable to the world. As an artist, I feel personally connected to this goal in a world full of needed revolutions.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
After years and years of a career based on the make of short films, besides my work on several big production companies, the know-how of the industry from inside and my entry in Hollywood working in different movies, it’s time for me to make a step forward with my first feature film.

I have three different movies written and one TV Series and I am working on the production of one of these projects about an Arabic woman in her 20’s coming to Los Angeles with her adopting family after she suffered from the wars of Syria when she was a kid. Of course, the backstory is based on true events. I want to talk about the cultural clash and the micro racism, sexism and homophobia that is still very present in today’s world in our Western societies.

I have acknowledged a very curious situation in Los Angeles where all the people living in the city and try to break in the Hollywood industry have become an independent industry itself. As my future plans, I want to be one of the raising voices of this independent industry surrounding Hollywood to show that the filmmaking world have changed and that you don’t need a blockbuster production to do big movies with a global audience. Independent cinema has more chances than ever to be seen, but at the same time the competence to be the ones who do it is brutal.

I see myself growing in the Los Angeles independent cinema directing my first movies or my first television series, which are now in developing stages and conversations. The ultimate aim is to get the chance of being tested in the real Hollywood. It is very important to get a position of power and respect because all the messages you could send or all the changes you could provoke usually come when you have the breaking mind of an outsider but the know-how of an insider.

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