‘Buried’s’ Rodrigo Cortés leads a young, inventive Spanish filmmaking circle

When Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Cortés picked up the golden Méliès for best film from the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation at the Sitges film festival last month for his resourceful film “Buried,” it was just the latest trophy for his growing collection. The taut (and suffocating) thriller has stormed the international film festival scene from Sundance to San Sebastian, following a flurry of Hollywood studio rejections of a top-notch script that many thought couldn’t be transferred to the big screen.

The film is perhaps the most extreme example of a can-do filmmaking ethos promoted by a dynamic young generation of up-and-coming Spanish filmmakers who produce in hard economic times. The audaciously small thriller — filmed on a Barcelona sound stage in 17 days — is a tutorial in efficient dramatic storytelling. In the story, an American contractor, who drives a truck on behalf of the military operation in Iraq, has been trapped underground and then warned that he has just 90 minutes to use his smart phone to arrange the payment of a $5-million ransom, or his captors will let him suffocate. The film takes place almost entirely in a coffin buried beneath the sands of Iraq.

Rather than limiting the film, the built-in constraints of the production are a natural extension of a tight and well-thought-out story. The low-cost and super-simple production values were “very crucial” to the film getting made, Cortés explained. That is because “Buried” is a small-film producer’s dream: no expensive sets, no transporting of equipment and no leaving the sound stage.

But that doesn’t mean that Cortés doesn’t make the most of that coffin, which is rendered with striking creativity. “I felt like Christopher Nolan making ‘Inception’: I had everything I needed to tell my story,” Cortés wrote in an e-mail. “I was making a super production — that happened inside a box.”

Lionsgate picked up the frugal, $2-million movie at the Sundance Film Festival for about $8 million. The English-language film, which includes a breakthrough dramatic performance by Ryan Reynolds, has grossed $1 million in the U.S. in limited release, and $10 million globally since its October release. The script by Chris Sparling bounced around Hollywood because most producers thought it couldn’t be made — until it reached Cortés, who felt that he had to make it.

Cortés is one of nearly a dozen young Spanish filmmakers, mostly based in Barcelona, who make pointed and honed genre films. They are not their parents’ generation of directors, and they have little in common with their nation’s elite filmmakers, such as Pedro Almodóvar or Alejandro Amenábar, whose more ambitious visions have brought four foreign film Oscars to Spain since the early 1980s. If this new generation is made up of auteurs, they are tactical, practical and technically savvy ones, who are steeped in international film culture. They mostly aim to make deft genre films that bring financial returns that can solidify their careers so they can eventually aim higher.

Take the zombie-driven “Rec” franchise. The original $2-million “Rec” film (2007) was shot with shaky hand-held cameras, an element that was incorporated into the story, much as it was in “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield.” “Rec” is a zombie tale that takes place in an apartment building and is filmed from the perspective of a television camera after a news crew finds its way inside. As with “Buried,” the setting is physically self-contained and the story calls out for affordable production values on numerous fronts (including its emphasis on suggestion over pricey special effects).

“Rec” spawned a sequel, “Rec 2” (2009), while “Rec: Genesis” is slated for a 2011 release. The first film was released in the U.S. on DVD and spawned an American remake, “Quarantine” (2008), while “Rec 2” enjoyed a limited U.S. release.

The “Rec” films also highlight a level of collaboration that is a natural offshoot of the friendly environment that these next-generation filmmakers in Spain contribute to. The first two “Rec” films were, for example, co-written by three film directors and co-directed by two of them. Paco Plaza, 37, who attended the Sitges International Film Festival of Catalonia in October, along with many of his longtime filmmaking buddies, explained as the event wound down that “Rec” emerged from a friendship that dated back to film school between himself and co-director Jaume Balagueró (who also made the 2005 English-language film “Fragile,” with Calista Flockhart).

“The collaboration on ‘Rec’ grew very naturally out of chats and coffees between friends,” says Plaza, “in which little by little we got excited about an idea that pleased us both so much that we decided to film it together.”

Some of these filmmakers have done second-unit directing for one another, while also workshopping their ideas and creations. “This environment of complicity and collaboration helps us all,” Plaza says. “In reality, many of us are very good friends.”

One of those friends is the 33-year-old Eugenio Mira, who did second-unit work on “Rec 2.” Mira has since graduated to directing the lush, $5-million period film “Agnosia,” which is opening in Spain this month. He points out that much of his generation was strongly influenced by the same sort of film culture that shaped a young Steven Spielberg and his contemporaries.

Spain was an insular society in many ways until well after the death of dictator Gen. Francisco Franco in 1975. It took several decades for the country to catch up to other parts of Europe and the United States on an array of economic, technological and social fronts. In consumer terms, this meant the generation that grew up with affordable home cameras allowing them to develop greater cinematic fluency has only come of filmmaking age in recent years.

Beyond that, they have faced challenges, including the shift toward film viewing on DVD, satellite and the Internet, not to mention the particularly intense Spanish economic crisis since 2008. Much of this generation, Mira says, trained to become “pieces in the machinery” of a traditional Spanish film world — one that tended to rely on government subsidies and agreements with conservative television channels that bring creative strings attached.

While some might have initially aspired to pursue visionary creative paths like those blazed by Almodóvar and Amenábar — and a few still might — most have become scrappier and more pragmatic. “We are artisans who seek funding as the writer, producer and director. We have a [filmmaking] vision from the 1970s that is largely driven by the writer,” Mira says. “We converted ourselves into auteurs, not because we want to be, but because we didn’t have any choice.”

Interestingly, Spanish critics in general don’t lament the absence of art-house filmmakers in this generation; most complain that Spanish filmmakers don’t make films that are popular enough. In contrast to Hollywood, they have a point. American films gobble up around 80% of Spain’s film market, leaving just 15% or so to locally made cinema. (The rest of the world divides up the remaining 5%.)

Many are succeeding beyond Spanish borders. Mira, the youngest of his generation, says he will soon leave for Thailand to work as the second-unit director of “The Impossible,” starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. The film is directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, another young Spaniard, who made “The Orphanage.”

One clear Hollywood success is Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who directed “28 Weeks Later” and is working on “Intruders,” starring Clive Owen. But the director who has the potential to leave the biggest mark on Hollywood is “Buried’s” Cortés, who made his name on the smallest of films. He has signed on to direct “Red Lights,” a scientific-psychological thriller that will film in Toronto and Barcelona, starring Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver and Robert De Niro.

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