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2 months ago
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Swedish-Chilean filmmaker Daniel Espinosa is feeling reinvigorated after returning to Europe to make his latest feature, Madame Luna, as well as Netflix’s upcoming crime drama The Helicopter Heist.
The director of Easy Money, Life, Safe House and Morbius tells Deadline: “I spent 12 years in America … and it slowly got apparent to me that what I was doing made me slowly drift away from the reason I actually started making pictures. So I really had a necessity somehow to get back to why I do movies at all.”
After spending a year in prison as a teenager following some minor crimes, Espinosa was sent to boarding school. There he met the son of filmmaker Lasse Hallstrom, which “kind of opened up my idea to make pictures. The idea was to make movies about the reality that I knew, that most people didn’t — that’s Easy Money.”
That 2010 Joel Kinnaman starrer was a breakout for Espinosa, and Hollywood films followed, including Sony/Marvel’s 2022 Morbius, whose release was delayed because of the pandemic and which took a critical drubbing, underperforming at the box office. Did Espinosa suffer from that experience? “Yes. To make a movie through committee, I think, is very hard, and I felt in the end that maybe a different director would have been a better fit.”
Espinosa allows, “I’m known amongst the studios to be a person with a lot of opinions, and maybe they were not looking for that kind of director.”
Upon returning from the U.S., Espinosa was trying to find how to “make a story about myself,” the filmmaker told Deadline at the Taormina Film Festival, where Madame Luna screened this week.
Madame Luna is the story of an Eritrean refugee who hides her identity as the notorious and eponymous human trafficker. When she is forced to stay in Italy on her way to freedom, she experiences the same hardships endured by the people she exploited.
On Day 1 of Madame Luna, which shot in Italy, a sort of lightbulb went off for Espinosa. “I just realized, there’s no producers, there’s no money people — it’s me, my photographer, my first AD, a very sparse team — and I got a complete anxiety attack because you’re so used to the fight.”
He continued, “The fight defines you, so I think the hard thing with the American industry is that the fight is almost a necessity, but it’s hard not to start patting yourself on the back that you’re fighting and forgetting what you’re fighting about.”
Espinosa equates himself to Madame Luna‘s lead character, “She’s also a fraud, like me.”
When I point out that’s a pretty harsh view of one’s self, Espinosa says: “Yeah, but that is a very personal experience and so I wanted to make a movie about a person who was as complex as we are… She’s slowly fighting for the right to be a good human being, she wants to convince herself and people around her that she actually is a good human being who has a reason to exist, and I think that’s how I felt before I did Luna.”
(Back in January, ahead of its Rotterdam Festival premiere, Madame Luna was hit with a theft-of-project lawsuit filed in Los Angeles. Today, Espinosa says, “It was, in many ways, a public stunt” that has since “disappeared.”)
Espinosa has also directed Netflix’s Helicopter Heist, an eight-part Swedish suspense drama about a daring 2009 robbery in Stockholm that will release later this year.
Espinosa calls the limited series “a wonderful realistic show where you have complex characters you care about, not a grand action piece, but it holds you by the throat… It has those qualities that I think I had in Easy Money and also in Safe House, and I could never have gotten back to that if I hadn’t made Madame Luna.”
After this happy return to his roots, would he go back to working in Hollywood? “I wouldn’t not do another project,” he says, “but I would shy away from doing another project where they want more a director that wants to work in constitution or the system. For example, when I did Safe House it was very important for Denzel (Washington) that it was me and what I wanted to do, and I think that’s important for me too.”
