Escape To New York: Interview With Ana Asensio, Director, Writer & Star Of MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND

Ana Asensio – the writer, director, producer and star of Most Beautiful Island – is on Skype from her home in New York City and we’re talking about the price of c*ckroaches.

There’s an extraordinary moment in the Madrid-born actress-turned-filmmaker’s gripping debut feature in which her character Luciana, an undocumented migrant struggling in NYC, sits naked in a bath while a dozen or so fat roaches pour through a hole in the bathroom wall and into the water with her. She doesn’t even flinch as they swim closer and closer to her bare flesh.

“Initially, I bought the roaches online and they are not cheap. They were $1 per c*ckroach – so that’s a lot! People buy them as a special treat for their pet reptiles but, if you want to buy a box of 100 roaches, that’s $100,” she laughs, the idea of purchasing mail-order insects one Asensio clearly finds amusing and a bit strange.

She shot the scene twice – the first time for a preview reel when she was trying to raise funds to finance her film, and again later-on, with different, larger roaches, once that money was in place and the actual movie was underway.

Freaked out

“The final scene didn’t come out the way I wanted it to,” she admits. “I really wanted the roaches to climb and start crawling over me, and me to just be passive.

“But the moment one started crawling on my finger, I freaked out because the roaches I originally got were very small and didn’t really know how to swim, but the ones this guy provided me with (for the proper film shoot) were very aggressive males and, when they started to crawl on my finger, they had spikes which were going into my skin. I resisted as much as possible but just couldn’t do it.”

It’s one of Most Beautiful Island’s most powerful sequences and even gets a smart and subtle call-back later in the movie. In my review for Film Inquiry, I also wondered if it had been inspired by the way in which migrants and minorities had historically been compared to c*ckroaches, most notably in Nazi Germany and Rwanda, but more recently by certain right-wing British newspaper columnists.

“It was not exactly that thought in my mind,” Ana Asensio says, while shooting my theory down in flames. “It was more Luciana thinking that she was no better than those roaches. I was not trying to make a statement on migration, just to look closely at one particular case, and how that woman is feeling.

“In that scene, she doesn’t think she is better than them – who is she to not allow the roaches to share her space?”

Word-of-mouth success

For a first film, Most Beautiful Island is a startlingly accomplished piece of work and follows down-at-heel Luciana over the course of one, highly eventful, day in her life. Split into two distinct halves, the first is an intimate socio-realist tale shining a spotlight onto our protagonist’s hard-scrabble existence, the second sees her plunged into a situation right out of a horror film. Both parts are inspired by Asensio’s own experiences when she first moved to New York in her early twenties.

The movie won the prestigious Grand Jury Award at last year’s SXSW and garnered a lot of positive reviews (it’s currently rated 94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) – official and overdue approbation after years of fighting to get it made. But, as Ana Asensio admits, Most Beautiful Island’s debut at the annual Austin-based culture fest was rather more low-key than she’d hoped.

“The room was half empty – for a world premiere it hadn’t drawn a lot of interest,” she recalls, laughing. “The audience left, and I thought, ‘Oh my god’, and was so nervous. But people started talking to each other and the screenings after that were packed and there were lines down the street (to see the film). The reviews came out and they were really good.”

Uncomfortable life

Asensio was born in Madrid in 1978, worked on Spanish TV as an actress in a teenage drama and a host on her country’s national lottery show, before moving to New York in 2001. “I saw the Michael Winterbottom movie, Wonderland, and I don’t know why but it inspired me to say, ‘I’m quitting, I’m going to live an uncomfortable life, I’m going to move to New York and see what happens’,” she reveals.

She’d chosen NYC over Los Angeles because she was more interested in being a proper artist than a star, but soon grew frustrated with chasing “roles in films that never got made” and similar career dead ends. She toured all over with three different one-woman shows of her own creation, before the idea for Most Beautiful Island started to take serious shape in her mind. The subsequent struggle to get the film funded has been talked about almost as much as the movie itself.

“I tried every single outlet available (for funding), applied for every single grant in the United States and Spain, and didn’t get anything,” she says. “After a year and a half, I decided I was going to go on my own. I was knocking on doors, any possible person who had money and might be interested in doing it, I approached. I wasn’t going to do crowdfunding because none of my friends had any money!

“Literally, I would tell absolutely every person, ‘I’m making a movie and looking for money’. Somehow, I met some investors who never invested in films, but had a little bit of extra money to put into different markets or whatever, and they were excited and intrigued (by what I was doing). I also put all my savings into the film, and then (Larry Fessenden’s production studio) Glass Eye Pix came on board. I was just determined I was going to shoot the movie, no matter what.”

Flawed heroine

Films about immigrants or refugees often seem terrified of making their protagonists anything less than innocent paragons of virtue – the recent Hungarian movie Jupiter’s Moon even posited the idea that a Syrian refugee might be the Messiah. It’s all very liberal and well-meaning, but also a bit patronizing, as if people from other countries have no darker, less appealing sides to them.

Refreshingly, Ana Asensio isn’t keen to follow suit and I’d probably go as far as to say Most Beautiful Island is, as a result, the most interesting and complex film about the migrant experience since Ruben Östlund’s misunderstood Play (2011). Luciana is a survivor and will do pretty much anything to keep her head above water, however demeaning, dangerous, or just plain selfish.

Despite the personal tragedy she has fled her native Spain to escape, there are times when Luciana isn’t particularly empathetic. She rips off a cab driver she can’t afford to pay and is genuinely horrible to two, admittedly bratty, children she’s supposed to be babysitting, even losing the young girl in her care at one point.

“That was a conscious decision from the very beginning,” says the writer/director of her heroine’s flaws. “I remember in an earlier cut of the film someone saying, ‘I just don’t like her’. I just want to show a real human being who, when you are struggling, you don’t look after others, you just look after yourself. It’s something you rarely see in films – that the hero of the story is very imperfect.”

Punishing workload

Seeing the film and talking to Asensio, you soon become aware easy options aren’t something she has any interest in. That said, taking on so many roles – writer, actor, director and producer – to get the film off the ground was an enormous amount of hard work and an experience she is in no hurry to repeat on her next project, a thriller, again set in New York, this time about a kidnapping.

“I wouldn’t like to do that again,” she says of the punishing workload. “Producing was definitely the hardest thing and I just hated it so much. It was the only way to get it done but it was so hard. Writing and directing, I’d do again for sure. Writing, directing and acting, I think is doable with the right support.

“It really drained me, convincing people – ‘Please believe in this, believe in me, give me money’ – and having to learn all this stuff about business plans. I don’t care about business plans, but I had to pretend to care. Because I took it to a very personal place, I think that was ultimately what attracted people to me – not because they understood the story or anything else.

“I was aware at all times of the responsibility on my shoulders – I cannot fail these people. It was just too heavy on my shoulders all the time.”

Squirm inducing

Before the interview winds down, we return to the subject of creepy-crawlies and the film’s climactic moments in which Luciana and her Russian acquaintance and fellow migrant Olga (Natasha Romanova) are forced to participate in a bizarre betting game for the delight and delectation of a group of Manhattan one-percenters. I won’t spoil it by going into further details but, suffice to say, I was interested to know if the actresses had employed body doubles for what is a challenging and squirm-inducing sequence.

“What do you think?” laughs Ana down the line. “No, we didn’t use body doubles and I had to mention that at the audition. I thought it would add a lot of realism. Natasha actually had a phobia, but she wanted it so bad that she did it.”

“Wanted it so bad that she did it” is a phrase that also perfectly sums up Ana Asensio’s journey from struggling actress to award-winning, critically-acclaimed director. And, if you’re in the market for c*ckroaches, she knows a guy…

Most Beautiful Island is available on DVD in the UK and US now. Check here for international release dates

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