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Rejected by Hollywood, and initially by its star Ryan Reynolds, as being unfilmable, Rodrigo Cortes’s ‘Buried’ is set entirely in a coffin. Robin Askew talks to the director about the challenges of creating this harrowing, occasionally hilarious gem of a movie.

How do you avoid having your European cinematic masterpiece being remade as a watered-down piece of shit by Hollywood? By combining the original with the English-language remake, of course. How so? Well, Rodrigo Cortes’s rather magnificent locked room thriller ‘Buried’ is a Spanish independent production. All of the finance and crew came from Spain. The only foreigners involved were writer Chris Sparling and star Ryan Reynolds. “The script was around for about a year in Hollywood,” explains Cortes. “Everybody thought it was excellent, but nobody thought it was shootable. I thank god, actually, because otherwise it would never have got into my hands. At the beginning, someone discussed the possibility of making it in Spanish so they could do the remake in a year and a half. I said, ‘Are you crazy? Let’s do the remake ourselves.’”

Next, it was a question of finding a star. Cortes had always admired Ryan Reynolds, so sent him the script. “He read it, he loved it, and he said no. He thought it was totally unshootable. Maybe good for a novel, but no way was it possible to make a movie set in a box. But he wanted to see my first film, ‘The Contestant’, a very dark satire about the financial system. And he called again saying, ‘OK I want to know more’. I sent him a 15 page director’s statement explaining how I intended to achieve this so-called impossible film. Two days later we were meeting in LA and 40 minutes after that we were shaking hands. Frankly, I give credit to my poor English. I think there was something he didn’t understand until it was too late.”

Let’s be clear about what Cortes means by ‘unshootable’. ‘Buried’ is set in a coffin, in which Paul Conroy, a civilian US contractor working in Iraq, finds himself buried with just a mobile phone and a cigarette lighter for company. For its entire 94 minutes, the camera never leaves that coffin. And the first three minutes take place in total darkness. The pressures on the director to cut away from the box must have been intense.

“From the beginning I received all kinds of… let’s call them ‘kind’ suggestions to cut to the surface,” he laughs. “I thought that was the best way of ruining everything. The very first moment I read the script, I saw this was a big story and there was a big film there. So at the beginning when they asked me, ‘How’s is this going to be? Is it going to be experimental? Dark? Obscure?’ I always answered: ‘No. This is going to be Indiana Jones in a box.’ That’s not despite its elements, but because of them. The way of making it big is keeping it this way. If we had shot at the surface, we probably would have had, in the best case scenario, a good TV episode or something like that. I wanted this to be a physical experience. People have to be buried alive for an hour and a half. People have to live exactly what Paul Conroy lives and experience exactly what he experiences. The only way of doing this is respecting rule number one: never leave the box.”

Was there any suggestion that audiences might find the experience too intense? “Well, it should be an intense experience,” he laughs. “My goal is that everybody should leave the cinema four pounds lighter.”

Another thing Hollywood would never have let Cortes get away with is the ending. Obviously, I’m not going to give it away here, suffice to say that it doesn’t cop out. “That was a perfect reason to do it by ourselves. If you want to start a film with three minutes of pitch black, or keep this level of intensity, or keep the intense ending, you have to do it with total creative control. Because if a committee takes these kind of decisions, you’re never going to be able to get this unexpected result. At the beginning many people discussed the possibility of having another kind of ending, but not in a serious way. This is the way Chris Sparling wrote it and I thought it was a brilliant ending. Actually, I thought it was logical; it came from the logic of the story.”

This isn’t the first time a low budget independent thriller or horror film has trounced Hollywood at its own game, nor will it be the last. One suspects the main reason is that the big studios are too timid and continually under-estimate audiences as they retreat into formula. “I think they’re afraid,” contends Cortes. “Instead of trying to succeed, they try not to fail. They try not to be guilty of something. If they follow the book, they can always say that it was not their decision; if it didn’t work, it wasn’t because of them. They’re more focused on covering their asses than on taking the right decisions.”

One particularly clever element of Sparling’s script is his use of the mobile phone. In most films of this nature, the advent of the mobile has proven a major inconvenience for scriptwriters. How often have you seen characters making a point of observing that their phones are out of range, or the batteries have run out, just to forestall our obvious objection: why don’t they just call for help? ‘Buried’ wouldn’t work without the mobile phone, and the whole point of the film is that Conroy is trying desperately to call for help, but getting nowhere. “Yeah, you’re right. Actually, the cellphone guides the story and brings new levels to it. It also works on a metaphoric level. Somehow it’s about modern man in the real world. I mean that we have this tool that should be perfect to communicate with people and actually it’s a barrier. It’s like the real enemy of Paul Conroy is not the darkness, the lack of oxygen and the terrorists, but bureaucracy. One of the reasons why people feel so committed with the character is not because they remember that last week they were buried alive – at least I hope not – it’s because they spent 20 minutes pressing one or pressing two, following the instructions of a robot. And when you eventually get to speak to a human, the only thing they want to get from you is that you’re someone else’s problem. It’s a Kafkan nightmare that everybody lives every day.”

This also permits the introduction of some very black humour, as Conroy’s repeated attempts to seek assistance are initially thwarted by voicemail, jokey answerphone messages and petty officialdom. This was the only point of disagreement between Cortes and the Sparling. “I wanted to include some dark humour and he thought that was very dangerous because he felt that everybody could get out of the film when they laugh. And I thought no, those laughs come out of very strong and real emotions – they come from Conroy’s anger, from his frustration. You cannot keep the rope tied the whole time because you lose the emotion if you use it too much. You have to find a balance. I told the writer: ‘Chris, you don’t know it yet, but you wrote a comedy.’ Because this has the structure of a comedy. There’s something very dark and also very funny in him trying to get help and facing questions like, ‘What’s your social security number?’”

Some rather pompous American critics have suggested that it is tasteless or disrespectful to use the war in Iraq as a backdrop. How does Cortes respond? “Well, I wouldn’t respond to that. Anytime you make a decision, someone’s going to like it and someone’s going to dislike it. You can’t think about it. You just have to try to make the right decisions. If you use Hitchcockian terms, I would say that Iraq is the MacGuffin. In my opinion, it’s just the background. This is not a political film, nor a political thriller. That doesn’t mean that I don’t take it seriously, but I don’t try to filter my opinion about the conflict into the film. I’m just the director. I try to be truthful, in emotional terms, to the characters’ positions.”

Speaking of the characters’ positions, Reynolds appears to be in some physical discomfort throughout. With undisguised relish, Cortes points out that it’s all real. “Everything you see in the film happened. Everything is physical. When you see the pain – even many times when you see the blood – it’s real. We sent him back to LA with his back bleeding, with his fingers literally fried because of the heat of the lighter, with his skin totally destroyed because of the friction against the rough wood. And actually that was the easy part, because the emotional part was even worse. He developed a catalogue of extreme emotions; emotions that human being don’t usually experience in an entire life, from primal fear to panic, joy, hope and surrender. He definitely suffered. One of the few joys that you can have as a director is that you can mistreat a Hollywood star legally.”

Blimey, that sounds awfully close to something Cortes’s greatest influence, Alfred Hitchcock, might have said. Indeed, the Master of Suspense once corrected one of his most famous quotes thusly: “I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.”

“Well I wouldn’t say that at all, because I’m very thankful for the amazing work that Ryan did,” laughs Cortes. “But yeah, I get the point…”

'BURIED' OPENED ON FRI 1 OCT. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.