Get to know Miguel Delibes.
Discover
to Miguel Delibes
in the cinema and theater
Fernando Lara
La imagen y la palabra, Mesa redonda, en Miguel Delibes
Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas 1991
Madrid, Ministerio de Cultura, 1994, p. 245.

Mario Camus
en entrevista con Diego Galán.
El País Dominical 13. 05. 1984.
Josefina Molina
La imagen y la palabra, Mesa redonda, en Miguel Delibes
Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas 1991.
Madrid, Ministerio de Cultura, 1994, p. 247.

Andrés Amorós
De la novela al teatro, Mesa redonda, en Miguel Delibes
Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas 1991Madrid, Ministerio de Cultura, 1994, p. 259.
To this respect I remember in this movie a scene when a prissioners train was led to Siberia, one of the prissioners faces one of the guardians and tells him off with a sequence of short insults, three to be more specific. My duty in this case was to reduce to seven syllables those insults, and facing the difficulty to find in the Spanish language three words short and expressive enough, I opted to choose only two words but very resounding and conclusive: “lacayo y lameculos” (lackey and asslicker) the later a bit too harsh for that time which on the day of the premiere of the movie in Valladolid, made the woman sitting next to me in the theater to turn to her scort and said to him: “How funny you see, they also use the word lameculos in Russia!”.
This experience with dubbing was very useful for me since I have always been in favor of the braveness of the language, saying as much as you can with the smallest number of words. After this, another three colaborations of minor responsibility came along, such as the literary revision of movie scripts or perhaps a bit of advice in the shooting of some movies thathad any of my novels as theme. In this sense my first experience was El camino (The Path), movie which was directed by Ana Mariscal in the little village of Candeleda. I remember that I was surprised by the slowness of the creational process and also by the fact that the content was not filmed in a lineal way, from the beginning until the end, but on the contrary was filmed in segments and fractions without any logical sequencing. I also remember that the children would get tired because the filming took so long and it was very exigent, and when Ana Mariscal began the secene in which Daniel, el Mochuelo, leaves a thrush on the hands of his dead friend Germán, el tiñoso, the kid who played the role of Germán had fallen asleep inside the coffin, such a scene caused great distress in his mother who was observing the scene, but such anecdote made the scene much more credible.

Miguel Delibes con la directora, Ana Mariscal, y varios actores. Rodaje de El camino, 1962.

Antonio Ferrandis, Miguel Bosé y Amparo Soler. Fotograma de Retrato de familia, 1976.

Terele Pávez. Fotograma de Los santos inocentes, 1984.
Mi last two experiences have to do with La Guerra de papa, by Antonio Mercero adapted from my novel El príncipe destronado and Los santos iocentes, based on the novel with the same title directed by Mario Camus. The ashtonishing lesson from Antonio Mercero was that he took a three year old boy and got him to act in front of the cammeras as if it was the most natural thing for him to do. The first time that Antonio Mercero told me about his intention of adapting for the cinema El príncipe destronado, I told him that the main difficulty was finding a child to play the main character, that perhaps that could be solved by finding a wee mand with a child´s face to play the role of Quico. “I won´t surely do that”, Mercero said to me. If you manage to get through to the cild´s world, the child opens upt to you”. And indeed, Mercero entered that child´s world and made him move in a natural and spontaneous way, without the child even knowing what he was doing, in other words, he did it as a game. When Quico was acting in front of the cameras he was doing nothing but extending his normal life as a real child, all the games in the room next door. In the shooting of La Guerra de papa, Lolo García, was not acting, he was just playing a game. The amazing job of Mercero leans on the fact that he made seem as a game something that once was edited represented something much more serious.
It is equally amazing that Camus in Extremadura, was doing something similar but in his case with adults involved. Camus also tries to make them play, although the game, that game is not exactly the type of game is not part of the noemal activities of human beigns. That was the deifficulty in this movie. If it is difficult to make a child play when what he is really doing is work, it is equally difficult to make an adult pretend that he is playing when he is working instead. But camus achieves this and Paco Rabal- Azarías-and Alfredo Landa-Paco, el bajo- behave like children in the movie, the behave like “santos inocentes”, which was the only way to create the ideal atmosphere so the theme of the movie works, in other words, that the theme convinces and touches the spectators.
Miguel Delibes
Experiencias cinematográficas, artículo aparecido en La Vanguardia, de Barcelona
y recogido en Miguel Delibes: Los santos inocentes.
Barcelona, Círculo de Lectores, 1985, pp. 161-175.