A film that feels necessary to witness on a big screen is a rare sort of magic. With his second feature, Spanish director Gabriel Azorín sought to create that special alchemy. Though at times Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes feels stilted in action, it’s still absolutely necessary to be experienced in theaters. The movie follows a group of men who meet at some Roman baths (typical of the Spanish countryside), where hot water l flows to the surface from ancient carved stone. In the film, the same hot water my own ancestors once washed their clothes in comes to life over lilting debates about philosophy, life paths, and human nature.
As another group takes the first group’s place in the baths, the night and day conversations echo and reverberate with each other. Azorín shows a deep emotional intelligence and a respect for film scenes as picturesque paintings. In this strikingly beautiful setting, the moss settles into the space between bones much like it does the gaps in the stone, and the audience becomes the omniscient third member of each conversation. Last Night begs the question: in a film where time stands still, how much of watching a film is being a passive witness, and how much is active interaction?
I had the chance to speak to Azorín about his magnificent feature, the idea of making a “cosmic hangout film,” how to use drone shots for an intimate perspective, and the deeply-rooted philosophy of this unique medium.
Bella Vega: This film has been described as a “cosmic hangout film.” Do you feel like you put more emphasis on the ordinary magic of a hangout or the metaphysical aspect of human connection?
Gabriel Azorín: For me, cinema has to be a machine that generates fascination. It has to take you to places and situations that you couldn’t otherwise experience. In the film, António [played by Santiago Mateus], a character who feels a cosmic loneliness, guides us through a territory which takes on a mythical character and functions as a meeting place where men say things they have never said before. Their conversations start out casual but veer towards the humanistic, and the layers of the story are revealed as if it were a video game. The result is a journey through time via human feelings.
So Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes is a film about male friendship throughout the ages. I wanted to explore the vulnerability and mysterious bonds of friendship between men —themes rarely treated onscreen. Fiction gives me the opportunity to let these characters say the things that I haven’t dared to say to my own friends. And then there is this question, which for me is almost the only one that matters: how do you want to live the only life you are going to have?
BV: What was the writing and directing process like for a film that had such deep content but low amounts of action? How did you choose the locations to film?
GA: The Bande baths are the ruins of a thermal complex built by Roman soldiers near the current border between Spain and Portugal at the end of the 1st century. I like to think that it was a stroke of luck — that the soldiers discovered the thermal spring near the camp where they lived by chance and decided to build baths where they could enjoy their free time.
I first came across the baths one winter afternoon in 2017. The first thing that caught my attention when I arrived was the steam rising from the water due to the contrast in temperature with the air. The people arriving or leaving were dressed very warmly, but those inside the pools were wearing little more than swimsuits. Spurred on by the cold outside, I decided to undress and get into one of the pools.
The heat of the water and the rhythm of the steam put my body into a state of introspection that I found very pleasant. It occurred to me that if I removed the mobile phones and flashy swimsuits, the scene would not be very different from that of soldiers bathing 2000 years ago. As the baths are in the middle of a valley, and there is no electric light at night, there came a point when the darkness was absolute. In addition, the steam from the water made it impossible to distinguish the horizon. The only thing you could do there, if you wanted to see anything, was to look up and gaze at the stars. So I did. And after a while, I thought about how many people had done the same thing in that same place before me. For a moment, I felt in communion with all of them.
Some time later, during my stay at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, I discovered the films of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis and became obsessed with the capacity of a film shot to reveal all the times that inhabit a place or, in other words, to film different times in a single shot. They managed to materialize this reflection through what they called “stratigraphies.” Joris Ivens described a scene from Ana, one of their films, in this way:
“Flashbacks from 5000 years ago! And Reis and Cordeiro have the courage to go back in time and space, and tell us: they are the same, they are the same people, they are the same movements of humanity that, in the end, return to this house. It is the cycle of life: the mountains, the water, the river, man’s relationship with nature, with animals.”
Reading this reminded me of that afternoon in January 2017 when I discovered the Bande baths, and something clicked in my head. The valley where the baths are located has a mysterious aura, so much so that for me it is another protagonist in the film. To begin with, there are the different civilizations that have left their mark there: I find it fascinating that the ruins of the Roman camp and the baths spend half the year submerged under the water of the As Conchas reservoir, which was built in the 1940s and changed the landscape of the area forever. These historical landmarks also function as layers of time that overlap and give us the opportunity to shoot different eras in a single shot.
So I suggested to María Antón Cabot and Carlos Pardo Ros, my colleagues at the film collective lacasinegra, that we return to the baths to see if I still felt that mysterious influence I had felt two years earlier. But this time we took with us a camera that was very sensitive to light. We arrived in the afternoon and bathed until nightfall, then took out the camera and began filming some young people who were bathing in one of the pools. When we returned home and reviewed the footage, we felt we had discovered something that can only be captured through cinema: timeless images.
Conversations were a key element of the film from the beginning. During the writing process with Celso Giménez, I imagined people bathing and talking as we do when we take a long road trip. Two people looking at the horizon and finding a strange intimacy — that’s what happens at night in the baths. I knew I wanted to write dialogues that were beautiful, not just naturalistic or functional. This is cinema and it’s fiction: I don’t care about the typical “I don’t believe it” attitude. I wanted the characters to talk sincerely and deeply about things that matter to them, something like watching thinking work in real time. Saying something, feeling that you haven’t explained yourself very well, and going back over the idea as many times as necessary. I love watching people talk in films. It’s one of the things I like most, along with seeing how two people get to know each other.
BV: What is the importance of stillness in this film? How do you utilize the natural movement of bodies with your actors to accommodate the stillness of the action?
GA: The main part of the action takes place in ancient Roman baths, a setting where time seems to have stood still. At the beginning, the film’s mise-en-scène works with group dynamics: [a] choreography of bodies that move, entering and exiting the frame, to give the image an internal rhythm. We play with depth of field and panoramic movements that reveal a living world to us. The camera revels in these young men who run, laugh, fall, and shows us what is around them. I am reminded here of what André Bazin said about Jean Renoir’s cinema: how his camera did not limit itself to showing us what fit inside a rectangle but also — through what he called lateral depth of field — what was outside it.
But night falls, and with it, a process of subtraction whereby the brightly coloured swimsuits, mobile phones, cars, and everything else that connotes contemporaneity gradually disappear. Until finally, the electric light disappears. The horizon also disappears from the image, leaving only the bodies in the water. My aim was to create a limbo in which we have the illusion that time has stopped forever. The device could not be simpler: naked bodies sharing a warm bath and the space and time of a cinematic shot. The camera adapts to this narrative evolution and, while panoramic movements were normal at the beginning, at night it will become more static — like the characters, who are increasingly relaxed and introspective — until fixed shots and stillness predominate.
There is also a dialectic between the night where there is electric light and the night where there is no longer any, which is a turning point in the film. At night, electric light allows us to see many things but prevents us from seeing others that have always been there. The stars are the most obvious example, but there are many more. In the intimacy of such a dark night, António and Jota’s eyes have become accustomed to the darkness and can see things they couldn’t see before. And so can the audience.
BV: What was the most important philosophical point for the movie to hit home?
GA: In my opinion, every film presents a conflict between the linearity and circularity of time. It is in this rare way that cinema presents itself as both a fleeting and permanent experience, telling us that life is ephemeral while sheltering us in a habitable and eternal temporality, [and]where I believe Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes finds its main purpose. I was very interested in the idea of cycles: the social rituals at the thermal baths, the transition from day to night, the fact that the water in the reservoir rises and submerges the thermal baths for half the year… Everything is circular there. Even the Roman architecture is about circularity. And, of course, the water that emerges from the earth at 46º, is collected in the pools of the thermal baths, turns into steam due to the contrast with the ambient temperature, and rises to the sky to form clouds that return to earth in the form of rain.
I’m also interested in the idea of alternative worlds or parallel universes. I recently read Gabriel Ventura’s El mejor de los mundos posibles, a study of the phenomenon of reality-shifting. This practice, which became very popular during the confinement among communities of young TikTokers, consists of combining tools such as meditation or script-writing to escape this reality and live in another that is better for them. There are many ways to create other realities; you don’t need a lot of special effects. A good oral story can take you to remote places. Shifters do it lying in their beds.
BV: What do you hope your audience’s viewing experience is like?
GA: As a spectator, I am interested in humanist and mysterious films that explore language without being solemn, but above all, I am interested in films that make you leave the cinema wanting to be a better person and stay with you for some time. These elusive qualities of cinema are also what I seek when I make films. I also look for films that contain a miracle — something that, once you have seen it, you will never forget.
The spectator travels through both physical space and the folds of time, and seems to be immersed in another dimension. The idea of immersing oneself and floating is relevant. Immersing oneself in the night, in water, and in an intimate conversation are experiences that, through practice over time, facilitate access to new states of sensitivity and perception. Just as the eye must adjust to gradually distinguish things in the dark, floating in water or flying over a landscape allows us to take the pulse of gravity, and a prolonged conversation can stimulate us to see beyond the present moment or connect with other times.
BV: What is your favorite scene that turned out differently than originally written?
GA: The drone shot. I don’t usually like how drones are used in films; I find those establishing shots of landscapes boring. But I thought that, with a drone, we could shoot scenes that resembled video games. I am very interested in open-world video games, and I felt there was an interesting dialogue between this language and cinema. In fact, I know a few filmmakers who explore this: Teddy Williams, Bi Gan… It’s also an opportunity to look at the world from a place you don’t usually see it from, which completely changes your perspective on things.
In the end, these are cinematographic questions: how do you film the ruins of a Roman military camp? At the beginning, I thought about shooting it from the ground, but it’s not very interesting because the remains of the walls are only a few centimetres high. So I would say that, given its characteristic rectangular and symmetrical architecture, the most interesting thing would be to shoot from above and as far away as possible, as if it were a map from The Legend of Zelda.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
