Paco Roca’s comic ‘La casa’, winner of the 2020 Eisner Award (‘the Oscars for comics’) for best foreign work, has been translated into 13 languages to date and has sold, in Spain alone, more than 46,000 copies. With a bittersweet tone sprinkled with humor, ‘The House’ tells us about family, inheritance and the inexorable passage of timeall under the gaze of a house as a witness.
After the Goya winner for animation ‘Wrinkles’ (Ignacio Ferreras, 2011) and ‘Memories of a man in pajamas’ (Carlos FerFer, 2018), ‘The House’ has taken the baton as the new film adaptation of Paco Roca’s graphic novels, by Álex Montoya (‘Asamblea’). However, for the cartoonist it is not just another story. “All the comics I make change me in some way,” explains the cartoonist. “But drawing ‘The House’ made me reconnect with my family roots and with a house that I came to hate. With the film, the satisfaction is not only seeing actors I admire become the characters in my comic, but also It’s doubly exciting because Those characters are my family: my father, my brothers…“
For Montoya, the challenge was twofold: to translate the melancholy and nostalgia of Roca’s novel to the screen while respecting his personal experience. That is why, although there are obviously changes between one work and another, many of the sequences are traced shots that recreate the comic ink on celluloid. FOTOGRAMAS has reviewed with the two authors, the director Álex Montoya and the cartoonist and screenwriter Paco Roca, the first minutes of the film (which you can see exclusively at the top of this article) comparing them with the first pages of the graphic novel.
“The principle worked very well in the comic, and is practically the same in the movie“Montoya comments, turning the pages of the comic as he remembers the sequence. “He [el padre, interpretado por Luis Callejo] He leaves, puts on his coat, gets dizzy, locks up, and we leave the house alone. From there we cut to the ruined orchard, which also appears the same in the film. Here we go when they open the door [José y Silvia, interpretados por David Verdaguer y Olivia Molina], we are not in black like in the novel, but they open the door, enter through the kitchen… this is just as it is; the door, the keys, the blinds…”
Roca interrupts: “The order is the same, right? You haven’t changed many things.” “No, not in this,” Montoya answers, exclaiming, half surprised, “Damn, I’m already 25 pages in, if I’ve been super faithful to the novel!“, to the complicit laughter of Roca.
“Things begin to change, especially when the brothers arrive.“Montoya continues.”What we did was have the brother, Vicente, arrive. [Óscar de la Fuente] at the same time that they are there, and we already start with the discussions, the tensions, the ‘I read your book’ and such, and we see that the relationship between them is much more tense. We also have a meal in the middle of the film that is not in the graphic novel where they openly discuss what to do with the house, the roof, the garage… The idea was for everything to be more fluid and for there to be more tension between them.“
ASTIBERRI ‘La Casa’, the essential comic by Paco Roca
ASTIBERRI ‘La Casa’, the essential comic by Paco Roca
‘The House’ opens in theaters during this long weekend, May 1, 2024after triumphing at the Malaga Festival, winning the Audience Award, the best script and the best music.
Fran Chico is an expert in cinema and series, specialized in cultural dissemination and film criticism. He is a recognized critic on Rotten Tomatoes and Filmaffinity. Although his favorite genre is horror, the same thing tells you about the new blockbuster from Marvel’s MCU and about an auteur film to claim from the festival circuit. There is no series from Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video or Disney+ that escapes its radar, delving into the catalog of each platform to recommend and analyze its best content.
Fran has been writing in Fotogramas for more than a year, but his beginnings date back almost two decades ago in film forums and blogs such as Planeta Claqueta or Moviementarios. He was founder and part of the board of directors of the digital publication of film criticism and analysis Revista Mutaciones and a member of the Association of Cinematographic Informants of Spain (AICE), the organization that awards the Feroz Awards, as well as a voter for the Blogos de Oro al indie movies. After completing the Master of Film Criticism at the Madrid Film School (ECAM) taught by Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, he has collaborated and/or covered film festivals such as San Sebastián, Sitges and Filmadrid as a specialized press for more than 10 years, along the way interviewing relevant directors, actors and actresses from the national industry such as Penélope Cruz, Carlos Saura, Ana de Armas, José Luis Cuerda or José Sacristán and internationally such as James Wan, Edgar Wright or Dario Argento.
His knowledge and experience have led him to be a film video blogger for Fnac Spain and director and host of the podcast Holocausto Zinéfago, with more than 150 programs broadcast and available in which cinema and humor are mixed from a unique and original.
