My Fantastic Fest day started most pleasantly on Friday, chatting in the late afternoon with Nacho Vigilando. He made the very good Timecrimes, which premiered here on Thursday night, and is an engaging and personable man. In the interview he talked about how certain films from the early 1990s inspired him to become a filmmaker, marveled at the performance of Karra Elejalde in the central role of Timecrimes ("He is the film"), and expressed his admiration for science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Stanislaw Lem, and Alfred Bester.

I shared my personal enthusiasm for Bester, who wrote sparingly but with great vigor, and we talked a bit about Bester's novel The Stars, My Destination, which Nacho readily noted had a protagonist very similar to the one in Timecrimes -- an ordinary, sometimes gruff man who doesn't seem like a traditional hero. Nacho was also impressed with Bester's short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," an excellent, unique time travel story.

The filmmaker also explained that Timecrimes was a script that he wrote simply for himself. He has no ambitions to be "the next Steven Spielberg" or the next anybody; he just wants to be able to express himself as a filmmaker. Before he finished the script, he was nominated for his short film 7:35 in the Morning, and then he thought he might be able to parlay that nomination into funding for the film. That didn't work out as quickly or easily as he hoped, but eventually financing was secured and he had complete creative control of the project.

Right here is where I would like to link to an MP3 of the interview, but I confess with no little embarrassment that I failed to properly record our conversation (with equipment graciously loaned by the visiting Todd Brown). Yes, I failed to switch the microphone from "off" to "on," so all I have on hand is 18 minutes of a blank recording. My apologies to Nacho.

I suppose now I'll have to time travel into the past to tell myself how to operate a microphone ...