We interview director & screenwriter Celia Rico Clavellino about her feature film debut “Journey to a Mother’s Room”

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Filmarket Hub

13 min readNov 8, 2018

We spoke with Celia Rico Clavellino, director and screenwriter of “Journey to a Mother’s Room”, intimate, family drama which was released in cinemas in Spain merely a month ago, after premiering at San Sebastian International Film Festival, where it picked up the Youth Award and which recently premiered at the London BFI Film Festival, amongst other festivals.

“Journey to a Mother’s Room” brings us the story of that inflection point in any relationship between mother and child: the daughter or son leaving home, leaving the parents behind. Most films focus on the journey the kid does when leaving its parents. In this occasion, we focus on the mother, with whom we travel towards this new period of life, trying to adapt to her new relationship with her daughter. Celia talked to us about her start and work in film up until today, how was the writing process and shared with us her recommendations for all screenwriters who are trying to get their first feature film made.

FMH: Tell me, how did your relationship begin with Arcadia Motion Pictures for your first feature “Journey to a Mother’s Room”?

C.R.C: I had worked with Arcadia in the past, on other projects: as a production coordinator, developing projects and as a casting assistant. So, I had a professional, but also, personal friendship with them. When I started developing this project with Josep Amorós, the producer of my previous short (“Luisa isn’t home”, 2012), we decided it would be interesting to incorporate a more experienced production company, as this was going to be our first feature film, for me as a director, for him as a producer.

We immediately thought of them, they were the closest and most trusted people we knew, so the coproduction relationship came about naturally. The trust was mutual. After years of working for them, they wanted to support and help me take this project forward, especially with regards to the financing bit for my first film.

Afterwards, the whole process of thinking and doing the film together went very smoothly, as they placed all their trust in me, and they helped me by surrounding me with a great team. They accompanied me day by day, giving me total creative freedom, be it for developing the script as be it to take decisions concerning the final cut of the movie. This is something crucial for a director; that you can make the movie you want to make, that they are betting on your personal vision and proposal for the story.

FMH: When did they decide that they were going forward with the project?

C.R.C: They knew my short film and they know me, so they already sensed what was the theme and style of the project going to be like, what I was interested in exploring. They knew I was writing something, but I didn’t speak to them about it until I had a finished version of the script. They read it, connected really well to the story and decided to embark on the project. Apart from the script, I presented them a dossier with a directing proposal. I never showed a treatment or a long synopsis, I directly gave them the finished script when I felt sure enough to have a well structured project, so I wouldn’t burn any bridges too soon. Then, whilst looking for financing, I kept on rewriting and reworking it. I did that always, up until we started shooting.

FMH: Then, can you tell us a bit what was the negotiation process in terms of the contract as a screenwriter/director? Any practical advice you’d give to future film directors?

C.R.C: The position of the screenwriter often times can be delicate and fragile. You write a script on your own, which nobody has commissioned, and until the movie isn’t financed, you won’t get paid for the work you’ve done up until then. In fact, when you write your first script, you want so much that someone reads it and bets on it, that when it comes to the money issue, it becomes a secondary thing (though it really isn’t) and you end up living in this uncertainty about when will you be paid for the done job. You take it as a sacrifice, an investment you make on yourself, but it is a shame that this is the way things are, it generates a lot of anxiety.

That’s why, my advice is to try getting development funding, when you’re still writing. Getting money for development, though it isn’t an easy deed, gives you the tranquility and time you need to keep working on new script versions or to incorporate a second person to collaborate on the writing with you. It is important to talk about this with producers and to have a calendar in place. Sometimes, they have other projects in development and it isn’t the best moment to pitch yours to try get into these funding schemes.

In terms of negotiating contract terms: if it is the first time you are signing this type of contract, my advice is to ask for references or advice. Not always will you be able to afford an expert lawyer in these sector, so you can ask other directors or producers. Even though you might not know any director, you can reach out to any of them and invite them to get a coffee and ask whatever doubts you might have. In this sense, most directors are generous and will be able to help you; all have gone through this and understand the delicate position you’re in when signing this type of deal for the first time. Contracts have to be understood very well, make sure nothing goes unnoticed; if you don’t understand something, ask for clarification or seek a second opinion, but, above all, don’t rush into signing the deal.

Celia Rico Clavellino, director and writer of “Journey to a Mother’s Room”

FMH: Tell us about your film, which was released over a month ago, “Journey to a Mother’s Room”. Firstly, what is it about, how did the story come about?

C.R.C: It is a film about the tight relationship between a mother and a daughter who live apart for the first time. The daughter has a hard time taking the decision of leaving home, and the mother has, on her side, a hard time accepting that the nest is empty. The film explores that concrete moment of change, of lives in transition, and proposes a double journey: the real trip of the daughter who travels to a foreign country and the motionless journey the mother does within an empty house. In both journeys, both will have to learn to love each other in a different way, from the distance, to learn that they can be far apart but at the same time very close.

The story comes from my own experiences and concerns because of living far away from my parents. In a certain moment, one takes the decision of leaving the parent’s home and that changes the course of one’s own life and the relationship with them. The telephone starts to form this new relationship, one in which we don’t always have time to call back, though they are always there, attentive, in case you need them. All of this made me think about how hard it is to correspond parents love. So I wanted to put that mother and this daughter in a very similar situation, so to explore this complex territory of affections, to put under the spotlight the contradictions in the love between parents and children.

FMH: What elements varied throughout the course of writing the script and took more time?

C.R.C: I knew I wanted to show both sides of the same coin of this process of emancipation. In other words, I started of by setting out the film from the daughter’s point of view, but also from the mother’s point of view; in a separation two people always intervine. I wanted the film to have a sort of hinge in the middle, that it was a sort of diptych so that the same process we lived with the daughter, we could live it through with the mother as well. That was the essential element to the story I wanted to write and on that depended the whole construction of the script. From then onwards, the rest could vary, but that was the centre to which come back to if I had doubts or a moment of crisis at some point.

Maybe, what was most difficult was to not hesitate on my decision of leaving the story in the interior of the house, for the most part. It was something I got questioned about by everyone who read the script. I did some tests of opening up the film to other spaces, and every time I did it I realized that it wasn’t there where I wanted to go and I’d end up by eliminating those scenes and staying with the initial proposal of a mother and a daughter at home. It always moved me deeply to peek into the intimacy of these characters and, every time I took them out of the house, I felt I lost that. So, it was a process of adding up and trying things to afterwards discard them, trying again things to rule them out, coming back to what motivated me to write the story in the first place.

The rewriting work was a conscious process of polishing and baring the story: trying to reduce to a word something that initially was a phrase. Then, reducing that word to a look. Filing the script little by little, until I was left with the essence of each situation. But this is something that I did through several stages because, if you start off from the minimal amount of information, sometimes the skeleton of it can be very fragile, though it was precisely this work of filtering a way of strengthening that skeleton that was so crucial for me.

FMH: How important do you think it is that the screenwriter/director gets involve with the more business side of things in a feature film project? In other words, is it important to understand the whole “packaging” of the movie, the budget and all the part corresponding to production and sell of it.

C.R.C: I would not know to make a movie without getting involved in all its phases, from its development to looking for financing, until the release of it. Even though you might have a great team in which you trust and there are always people responsible for each part of the process, in the end it all goes through the vision of one person. That the director is always there doesn’t mean that the ideas proposed by other people can’t be added, on the contrary. It is a team work, with constant dialogue and mutual compromise. The same way that the dialogue with the team is necessary when shooting the film, it has to be also afterwards, with producers, distributors etc. I trust a lot in that way of working; the whole movie should be a dialogue, from start to finish. From dialogue come the best ideas and with dialogue we also avoid a lot of misunderstandings.

I also find crucial that the screenwriter and the director become involved in all the phases of the film otherwise, they will be working from a very isolated place and won’t get to know what’s the reality of the project. Many decisions must be taken by them taking into account, for example, economic limitations, to make the best decision, even the creative ones, one must handle all the information, the one that plays for and against you.

FMH: What practical writing or development advice would you give to screenwriters who are trying to break through in this industry?

C.R.C: On the one hand, show what you’ve written and listen carefully to the comments people give you, with enough judgement to know when to incorporate them or when to discard them. Sharing your writing will help you, first, to step outside the crazyness of being by yourself with your thoughts, characters and ghosts and, second, it will help you know if what you’re writing is reaching people in the way you’d like to; if it moves and touches when it has to, if it makes them uncomfortable when it has to be like that, etc.

On the other hand, I’d advice to not always focus on writing only the script, but to move across documents. Combine writing the script with your directing notes, the scene outline or anything else that is a part of the project. When I combine these writing processes, I manage to get out of the obligation of having to advance in my sequence writing, and I think on the project from other places that are more inspiring. When I write dialogue, for instance, I do it in a more irrational way and I connect to the characters; when I review the structure with an outline, I do it more rationally and that helps me put some order. If you combine one thing with another, you can find a balance between your more rational and irrational sides. Both are equally necessary. At the same time, if you are writing some directing notes in parallel, more abstract ideas will come out, new images and concepts emerge, which you can afterwards make more concrete on the script. If all those processes occur at once, you feel as though you are setting the building blocks of the film, not only the script.

Another thing that works is to read your script out loud, record it and then listen it to see the rhythm it has; listening is a good experiment to test your own writing. You can ask someone to read it for you and then to tell you the story, as if it were totally foreing to you. It’s a way of listening to it almost as an outsider, take distance and imagine it as if you were part of the audience and see if it works.

FMH: We get a lot of questions on behalf of our users who want to know what type of content production companies are after. We know there is no standard form, each producer is a world of its own, but valuing your experience as a screenwriter and director, what do you think production companies (independent and/ or commercial) seek in terms of material? Any detail that will make a script stand out over the rest?

C.R.C: I think it is paramount to do a thorough research job about production companies; we directors need to document ourselves very well; to know which are the “editorial lines” of each producer, to knock on the correct doors to those of which might be interested in the kind of project we have to offer, as they may have already produced similar films to ours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIa0X3TnXAc

Once done this investigative work, we need to understand that there are many elements that will make a producer invest in a project and not another one; and we need to understand that this hasn’t got only to do with liking or not the script. Maybe that year they had loads of projecst in development or they have one that is very similar to yours. It is difficult to know really why they say yes or no. When they say “yes”, more personal elements come in to play: maybe by chance you are telling a story that the person you are pitching to feels connected to immediately for some reason. It’s something you can’t control and which, when it happens, it is magical, as if you were destined to coincide with that person.

I believe it is important that the story has a unique vision. And that that vision is the one given by a concrete person and it can’t be portrayed in that way by another one. That is what makes that movie unique, whatever happens with it, becomes different and unique from another way of developing the story. That is why I believe, when we write, we shouldn’t be afraid of stripping ourselves away or of defending our most personal lookout, which in the end, is the only thing we’ve really got to sell or give away.

Sometimes there are themes that are more in fashion, then, depends on what you’ve written, you can find the space…also, it is important that the script is well written, attractive, that it’s a pleasure to read it…when a producer or TV broadcaster has a pile of scripts on their table, if the reading isn’t attractive, he or she won’t continue reading.

FMH: Any advice about how to present scripts to a production company?

C.R.C: I think we need to make a profound exercise of auto-analysis and to know our project as much as we know ourselves. This way, one knows which are its weak spots and which are its strong suits. If you know well your strong points, you can use them in your pitch, and if you know your weak spots, you can prepare yourself to strengthen or use them in your favour, sometimes its best not to hide them. From then onwards to be able to construct a coherent discourse with the film.

It is important that when you explain the project, you seduce your listener, as in a date. This is something that a priori, doesn’t have anything to do with writing or directing, but that its gaining more and more importance in this profession. It is a part of the whole process that I find very boring. I feel that nowadays, movies aren’t sold on its own, you need to sell yourself with them and to ellaborate a story that is convincing, emotive, witty…and one must know that this is how things work, assume it and try to be coherent with oneself. Sometimes, it is very easy to tell when someone is trying too hard to sell themselves and that is counterproductive, in my opinion.