"If Trump Imposes Tariffs on Foreign Films, They Will Lose a Lot"

Fernando León de Aranoa (Madrid, 56 years old) shifts gears. For a few days, he sets aside cinema to delve into short narrative pieces that play with language, flashes of wit, humour, and poetic expression. These are minimal stories, akin to those coined by his admired Julio Ramón Ribeyro in 'Prosas apátridas', through concise tales that explore the extraordinary within the realm of the everyday. 'Leonera' (Seix Barral) gathers a hundred stories in which he attempts to bring order to chaos and make sense of experiences such as love, death, the play of mirrors, or the confusion between what is lived and what is imagined, without abandoning his social vocation, so present in his films and his first book, 'Aquí yacen dragones'. Through these texts, one can trace the author's admiration for Raymond Carver, Julio Cortázar, Eduardo Galeano, and a myriad of Latin American writers.

-Why did you choose the title 'Leonera' for your collection of stories?

-Because it alludes to my surname, and because it speaks of the disorder of life. Writing is an attempt to bring order to things, and it represents a way to investigate, explore, and understand what life is. As Julio Ramón Ribeyro said: one writes not so much to convey knowledge, but to access it. Curiosity and interest are, in the end, the main drivers of literature.

-And have you drawn any conclusions from this exercise?

-It's not so much about understanding what you've done afterwards, that excess of self-diagnosis seems very bad to me, especially for creative work. I didn't want to perform my own autopsy. The benefits or gains - if there are any - have more to do with the process than with the result. Fiction offers a lot of parapets in daily life, such as humour, poetry, drama, metaphor, paradox, which really help you manage things.

-What do you think of Trump's latest idea to impose a 100% tariff on all films screened in the US that are produced abroad?

-It's a news item that borders on surrealism. I don't know the nuances, but if the countries that consume American cinema did the same and applied a policy of reciprocity, the US would have a lot to lose. The vast majority of films shown on screens are American, Anglo-Saxon. In contrast, a Spanish film finds it very difficult to access their market.

-To make a policy, you need a team and significant financial effort. In that sense, does writing represent a liberation?

-In cinema, you don't work alone, that's also its charm. You need actors, cinematographers, sound technicians, editors... Fitting all those efforts together is the most difficult part. In contrast, before the text, you are alone, so the result is very different as well. Short narrative offers a very different freedom. And that also attracts me.

-Short stories sell poorly. Do your editors pressure you to write longer texts?

-That notion that they sell poorly is going to change from now on. Writing something more extensive is a long-desired plan, at some point, I will have to do it. In fact, I already have some things started. The problem is that cinema takes up all my time. Getting a film project off the ground requires a lot of time and effort.

-Some stories seem like sketches.

-They are very short, some even approach aphorism. With these narrative pieces, I try to find the exceptional in the everyday, in very small things, which are common to all: breakups, relationships, distances, deaths... And also in the most routine. The exceptional is there, but many times we don't see it because routine drags us along.

-What do you think is the power of fiction?

-Fiction is what serves non-believers to find an explanation for things like the death of a loved one, and it offers comfort in the face of life's dramas.

-Several stories revolve around the figure of the father.

-The imaginary and the magic of the everyday are very mixed. Sometimes my imagination betrays me: I don't know if something has happened to me or if I've imagined it. The passage of time is sometimes expressed in a melancholic way, like when the people we love, our parents, grow older. In my case, I wasn't aware of mortality until quite late.

-The endings are not usually closed; they open a door to reflection.

-I find it interesting that it is the reader who closes the story. It's not that I'm leaving the work to them, but I invite them to participate, to complete the reading from their place. As a reader and viewer, I like works that appeal to me and require a little effort. Those that don't bore me, whether it's cinema or narrative.

-You talk a lot about mathematics.

-I'm interested in them because I don't understand them, that's why they seem wonderful to me. They are one of the great expressions of progress and intelligence. I inhabit a completely different world, that of speculation. In the end, writing fiction is speculating, it's generating models of behaviour of people or things - own or others - and testing them through a story. That is very different from science. I'm attracted to ignorance. How do you explain love or spite with a scientific formula?

-Despite being a film director, you don't use a cinematic language.

-Cinematic writing is very bare, without style or embellishments. Writing this book is not the result of a frustrated film project. These stories pay special attention to language. Some recount events that could be filmed, but most are reflective.