The Making of "How Do You Like It"
I like a lot the title of a modest Spanish film: “Miles de cámaras velan por tu seguridad” (Thousands of cameras look for your safety). I think we tend to consider that people in charge to look for us is selected in base to some high and special criteria or some kind of high moral quality. Due to several circumstances, I have reasons to think it is not always this way. On the other hand, I have never touched the subject of jealousy, probably the most destructive human feeling... also, for me, a very close and understandable one. These two lines join in the main character in this story, a bad person; bad not in a moral sense, but in the sense to cause pain to the other, nearer, people.
I don't like very much the common "villains" in films; they are either some kind of reversed super-heroes, or they are painted in a too much ridiculous way, destroyed as characters. I think the evil I paint is more a daily and believable one; evil from someone who takes advantage of a position of power to manipulate people, and he makes it in a hidden and quite coward way.
It's about a wickedness that doesn't come from the Evil in uppercase, but from hate, a very common, very human passion itself. In fact, Lacan said literally so, the most widespread in modern life... Probably, inevitably, in any society.
On the other hand, the compensation coming from evil is nothing but solitude and emptiness. In some way, "How Do You Like It" talks about this.
Despite being a low cost production, it is the most ambitious among mine. Anyway, our idea was always to focus attention in the actors’ performance, so we divided the plot in closed blocks, separated by more or less abrupt ellipsis, trying to let the cast develop their work on the most comfortable way.
We looked for nearby locations, easy to access, avoiding long displacements in order to finish shooting in the three days we initially had planned. Except some concrete shots, the short is almost entirely recorded in Alovera, a small town near Guadalajara (Spain). The house owner is more than a great friend of mine, a team member, in addition; the restaurant, is really a modest but spacious store, a few minutes walking from the house. As sample of project modesty, first sequence security-watching room was recreated in the garage of the house, with only two monitors and a chroma-key background to be filled later. We couldn’t get any permissions to film in a real watching room. It caused some postproduction difficulties, but it allowed the short to be finished.
Written by Fernando G. Pliego, Director of "How Do You Like It"
"How Do You Like It" - Official Trailer
