–What is it about historical figures that attracts you so much?

–It’s a curious coincidence. But, with the exception perhaps of Ernesto Guevara, many of these characters are for me amalgams, free and very crazy reinterpretations. What impressed me most and what I appreciated about this project is that they thought of a mestizo to play Magellan. In some way, he started, along with others, that process of mixing, meeting, and that’s where we come from. There is something very interesting there. Now that it is fashionable to talk about all this, even if it is for a horrible electoral political thing, talking about this meeting between Europe and America is very good. Although it is more interesting to express it from this side, to see how we put all this in a broth to see what we get. There’s something there that motivates me to ask the terrible and interesting questions.

–Some of these questions come in the film through the myth of Lapulapu, the Filipino “hero” who defeated Ferdinand Magellan.

–Precisely in this research process, the director, Lav Diaz, found himself with the opportunity to question the myth of this character who in the 20th century has been used to vindicate the process of decolonization of the Philippines. But he realized that no one ever saw it, and from there he dared to question it. Could it be that Lapulapu is more like a Fuenteovejuna, a name to exemplify a phenomenon that happened to resist Magellan and all those who came from the east? That question is very relevant in the Philippines, perhaps it goes over our heads because we are not so up to date with Magellan. It is curious that, depending on where you are, the character of Magellan acquires one importance or another.

–In Spain, Magellan is not mentioned without talking about Elcano.

–It is very curious, yes. Here you say Magellan and they come out with “well, but Elcano…” (with a Castilian accent and laughing). It’s so crazy how even in this everyone takes teams. The expedition was organized by Magellan, Elcano was one of those who mutinied against him, but in the end it was he and 17 others who survived and went around the world in an impressive way. The image of them entering Seville must have been crazy. We thought about that a lot during the filming process, like when they arrived in Cape Verde, which on land was a Wednesday and for them it was already Thursday… they said, ‘how did it happen?’ They thought they were wrong, but for the first time they realized what happened when you went around the world.

–When building this Magellan without epic or glory, did he have that ambition as a historian or documentary filmmaker to prepare his character?

–Yes, absolutely. There is a desire to understand the information, to fill it all in. But then there is that place that you reach when you embody the character, which embody is a very difficult and radical word because it is almost like being a medium. You reach a kind of acting “nirvana” where you understand motivations that academia or historical revisionism often overlook. For example, I know what pizza Magellan would have.

–And what would it be?

–(Laughs) It depends on what day, what time, place… but I can improvise it because when you act you come to have ownership of the character and then you understand his motivations, those that sometimes historians cannot reach. For example, when we were children we were taught that Magellan sought wealth, that Hernán Cortés or Pizarro were obsessed with gold. But it goes over our heads, or rather we have it as something there that makes it a little embarrassing to say, that they wanted to evangelize. The strong religious fanaticism they had was very important because Islam was winning and they had the personal and existential motto of evangelizing; That’s where that frenzy comes from, that hubris, that messianism even. That is only understood when you really immerse yourself in the skin of someone who lived that moment. It wasn’t just for money, in fact, I’ll tell you that for money is the easy modern explanation of the 20th century.

–And the sense of adventure, I imagine.

–Also, of course. They were many things: transcendence, legacy, faith. The life that follows… they were very attached to it. Furthermore, the majority were converts and had been escaping the inquisition. They got on the boat to be someone, to mean something; On land they were nobody but on the ship they became indispensable. There were many things that are interesting and that surpass and that in some way betray everything we want to understand around the mythology of power.

–You have mentioned concepts such as “meeting of two worlds” or “mixture.” Given that today everything is politicized and that there is a very polarized discourse on colonization, do you take special care when talking about it during promotion?

–It is inevitable. When I was a child, they taught us, and I’m sure in Spain too, the epic of the conquest of Hernán Cortés as if a handful of Spaniards had defeated a gigantic empire. Today we know that that was, in reality, a civil war: the Spanish, then the kingdom of Castile, were the interlocutor of that uprising against the Mexica. There were many Spaniards along with millions of other indigenous cultures who were against the Mexica. To the extent that Legazpi, for example, sends the Tlaxcalans to the Philippines to appease the territory. Well, they are not led by Legazpi, they are led by Charles V, who along with the Basques considered them his cousins. They reached that status thanks to what they did. What I am saying with this is that today we know much more about what happened, that is why it seems ridiculous and absurd when everything is sized in a politically absurd, stupid way, and also full of brutal stupidity, where we want to claim an act of goodness, as if there had been goodness or malice in that. At the end of the day, it was the historical event from which we come and from which we can have a much more interesting, acute perception, in which everything is recognized, the strong pain it caused is recognized but also how a civilization emerged and how the world changed completely. That’s very interesting and that’s why when they cast me for this Magallanes, when they cast a mestizo, it sophisticated the film in a different way because it gives it a crazy nuance, as this should be.

–270 people on a boat without knowing where they are going… It is the closest thing to making movies.

–It’s a perfect simile. At its best, cinema is an expedition into the unknown, but in which you know that there is a passage to the other side. When that happens, it’s the best. Cinema with certainties is completely useless; There are many films that were only about certainties and not about any exploration. And the wonderful thing in cinema is discovering: who knows with what alchemy and in what way it was possible to find something different, something poetic that had not been achieved. Freud puts it very well: the poets arrived at the truths before science, than the academy. Imagine, Magellan and his astrologer, who was Ruy Faleiro, knew exactly that this step to the other side existed. They didn’t know where, but they knew it could be done. They knew the circumference of the Earth. It’s incredible that at that moment, wherever they were in the ocean, looking at the stars they knew exactly which parallel they were on. That’s amazing.