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Director's Statement
I wrote THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS thanks to my neighbour. Or, to be more precise, because of my neighbour. For many weeks, her excessive and always inappropriately timed moaning provoked heated debates and many arguments in my home. It was then when, without realising it, I found the inspiration to write the comedy I had so long been looking for. Her moans were going to unleash a gale of words and reproaches in an ordinary marriage that had never been said before.
Without a doubt, one of the greatest, most ambitious adventures that any of us can experience is life as a couple. A major challenge full of adversities, where struggles become routine, the trenches are endless, and comfort given for wounds suffered is often scarce or unhealthy.
I wrote THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS inspired by the films and scripts of the American cinema of the 30s and 40s and by authors such as Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, Ernst Lubitsch and other exponents of the purest Screwball Comedy style that I always liked so much for the dynamism of their comedies and the sharpness and rhythm of their clever and always surprising dialogues.
It was essential to shape the film to have a quartet of top-class actors. Actors who could walk the fine line between comedy and drama. I have been lucky enough to work again with Javier Cámara and Alberto San Juan and benefit from our shared trust and experience from previous films. Belén Cuesta had been on my list of actresses I wanted to work with for a long time, for her comical versatility and on-screen personality. And finally, Griselda Siciliani; an Argentinian actress that I had already enjoyed as a spectator, and chance and fortune brought us together unexpectedly.
Without them, THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS would have been another film.