At the festival in Toronto in September of 2017 the critical despotricó mercilessly against The war of currents, a historical drama about the struggle between George Westinghouse and Thomas Alva Edison to stay with the contract for the lighting of the World Exhibition of Chicago in 1893, and by the way, to become the dominant company that would take the electricity to the rest of the USA. With a distribution of weight, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison and Michael Shannon as Westinghouse, and side as Tom Holland, Katherine Waterston, and Nicholas Hoult as Tesla and Alfonso Gómez-Rejón, the director of I, he and Rachel, what could have gone wrong? The same director noted the past Christmas by phone from his Texas home, two years after the start of a nightmare, to the guilty: “Harvey Weinstein”.
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Gomez-Rejón began as the personal assistant of big movies such as Nora Ephron, Robert de Niro, Martin Scorsese, or Alejandro González Iñárritu before you jump to be an assistant director and, finally, director of the second unit of films such as Babel, Argo, or The shadow of power. In 2010 he was already directing commercials and episodes of Glee. “I learned so much from all of you with whom I have worked,” he recalls. In that curriculum there are 12 episodes of American Horror Story. “My best school,” he says. In 2015 he won the audience award at Sundance with his second long, Me, him and Irene, which premiered all over the world. He was already named to big budgets, and the opportunity came with The war of the currents, the pulse to be the master of electricity in the united STATES between Edison and Westinghouse. There was only one but: the producer would be Harvey Weinstein, known as Harvey Manostijeras. “Of course, we all know how it was. But when you fall for an idea to make a movie, you may desire”. At a party, up to a veteran such as Paul Schrader warned him with this phrase: “You fucked up to Bertolucci, what do you think is going to do to you?”. That’s why in your contract, if ever, introduced the clause Scorsese: if it came to a clash between director and producer, Martin Scorsese, mentor Gómez-Rejón, could intervene as a mediator.
so that was not the director was with the speed of Weinstein, which destroyed the film and screened at the Toronto September 2017. “It was horrible”. A month later, did the information describing the behavior of a sexual predator Weinstein and broke out the #MeToo. “In two months there was not film, nor study or anything,” recalls Gómez-Rejón. The war of the currents was lost by the sewers of the industry. Saved by the european premiere. When the film was acquired by the company 101 Studios, which began to negotiate its sale to Europe, the director was able to make use of the clause Scorsese. So it was that two years later, and after two mounts more (Weinstein the back after Toronto even worse and with a voice-over from beginning to end) and a new soundtrack that is full, arrived in October to the united States, and today in Spain, the director’s cut version of The war of the currents.
Gomez-Rejón, of 47 years, at least breathes with relief: “My case is special, because I survived. The nightmare of a filmmaker is someone to target in his film, the shred in the assembly and that it is permanent. In Toronto I suffered like you cannot imagine. This situation put me to the test as an artist and as a human being. I found myself in a very dark place of my life, believing that I had lost my voice. Luckily, I was more resilient than I thought, and I was obsessed with saving the movie.” Comparison of the three versions, seem three titles are completely different. “In the first post, not I survived the chaos, the screams, the notes and the hand of the Weinstein… Was released without being finished, with criticism that got me by something that I had not felt mine, or for visual effects that were not available… I Had a year of silence and there you can reorder in mind my film, going back to my initial intentions”.
The war of currents is a story of jealousy and intrigue, on the real power and the power of the image. “I always wanted to”, defines the director, “to create a movie of the future and not the past. The viewer to think about the responsibility that involve new technologies”. And delves into the need to invest in another intelligence: emotional. “The most difficult challenges we face on a psychological level for the changes that will bring the digital revolution. What is going to give us time to adapt to the inventions? There has always been a connection between culture and technology. Our conscience will soon be in the cloud digital. Today, that technology is already manipulating the election of presidents”. And presidents will be the new project of Gómez-Rejón, Newsflash, with Chris Pine and Mark Ruffalo, which focuses on the time the journalist Walter Conkrite announced on television the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Another of the latent topics of The war of the currents is immigration, which has helped the development of EE UU. “Actually, for me, the son of mexican migrants and basques, it is essential that you don’t forget. And also I shot a new sequence, the dismissal of Tesla, that will remove everything and leave if voice, to make a record of what happened to me with Weinstein. Like Tesla, I believed to die. I could not make my dreams come true. Now I hope that the film speaks for itself and would never be defined by your relationship with Weinstein”.
