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Interview
2 October 2016 2.00 h

antonio chavarrías

Film director

The Catalan who murdered Trotsky

El elegido (The Chosen) is a new spy thriller based on the true story of Catalan Communist Ramon Mercader who was recruited by the Soviets to kill Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940

At­tracted by crime movies and sor­did at­mos­pheres, which he por­trayed so well in films such as Manila, Su­sanna and Volverás, An­to­nio Chavarrías has writ­ten and di­rected the story of an episode that has be­come part of 20th-cen­tury his­tory: the as­sas­si­na­tion of Trot­sky by the Cata­lan Com­mu­nist Ramon Mer­cader in Au­gust, 1940. Mex­i­can actor Al­fonso Her­rera plays Mer­cader in an am­bi­tious in­ter­na­tional pro­duc­tion, shot in Eng­lish. There was no need to add much to the script: the real story is al­ready a gen­uine spy thriller in it­self.

Mer­cader and Trot­sky is not just any story, it's the story of the 20th cen­tury.
It does re­flect that pe­riod well. First, be­cause they were con­vinced about chang­ing the world. It was a time of ide­olo­gies: Fas­cism, Nazism, Com­mu­nism, all con­fronted dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, which was just be­gin­ning. They were all con­vinced they were right. This gave them a lot of force and ex­plains the bru­tal­ity, they were also very de­ter­mined, com­pared to now, when we are a bit ag­nos­tic.
How would you de­fine Mer­cader in a few words?
It's hard; he was a man who fought to change the world, to make it a bet­ter place. For me, Ramon Mer­cader was a vic­tim.
He sac­ri­ficed him­self for his ideals, at a high price.
Yes, he had a part­ner in Barcelona and he left her and every­thing else to be­come an­other per­son, even going against his own moral­ity. But after all I've read about his life, my con­clu­sion is that he was a moral man, with prin­ci­ples and hu­man­ity. He wasn't a fa­natic. He was in­tel­li­gent, sen­si­tive, which makes the story more ter­ri­ble.
It has all the in­gre­di­ents of a spy story.
In­deed. After putting to­gether the re­search, you end up with a thriller: he was re­cruited by the Rus­sians, trained, suc­cess­fully in­fil­trated, achieved his ob­jec­tives while being con­fronted with per­sonal prob­lems and dilem­mas. This is all his­tory; we didn't have to in­vent it. I only had to cre­ate the dra­matic at­mos­phere, the di­a­logues and the hu­man­ity of the char­ac­ters.
As well as Mer­cader and Trot­sky, there is a host of in­ter­est­ing char­ac­ters.
The prob­lem writ­ing the script was de­cid­ing who to choose. Trot­sky was a per­son­al­ity of the time, locked up in his house in Mex­ico, wait­ing for death; he knew they'd kill him. He was al­ways jok­ing about it. His sec­re­taries were also in­ter­est­ing, loyal and in­volved, but they let them­selves be fooled by Mer­cader.

Clash of ideologies

An international coproduction filmed in English, The Chosen (originally El elegido), was written and directed by Antonio Chavarrías. It tells the true story of the murder of Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky by Catalan Communist, Ramon Mercader. Starring Hannah Murray, Alfonso Herrera (as Mercader), Julian Sands and Henry Goodman (as Trotsky), the film was shot in Mexico and Barcelona. On its release last month, El Periódico described it as “an entertaining film with pace, which also has some tough moments.”

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