VALENCIA FILM & DOCUMENTARIES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH VALENCIA DIRECTOR ANA RAMÓN RUBIO 24/7 Valencia: Tell us about something about your upbringing and education... Ana Ramón Rubio: I studied in an American school so I always felt very identified & attracted to American culture. We had talent-shows, we did trick-or-treating in Halloween, we celebrated ‘Thanksgiving’ and did all those other things that we usually see in the movies and may seem distant to most Spanish students. So, I think that’s one of the reasons why I always had a special interest in Americana and even more so on ‘Route 66’ because I had read about it in books, or seen it in movies or heard about it from songs... What got you interested in film and documentaries? Even though my parents have nothing to do with the business side of entertainment, they always took my brother and I to the movies and to music concerts or to the theatre. They wanted us to be interested in
arts, books, films... and I think that is where everything started. When I was a little girl I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to write novels but then I started falling in love with movies and Television series. I was always interested in where the camera was placed and in the narrative of the stories. So I started shooting very bad short films that I never finished, with a handycam, until I decided to study audiovisual communication in college. Tell us the story of ‘Almost Ghosts.’ Almost Ghosts is a documentary film about (almost) ghost towns of Route 66 and the American survivors who live there. I once drove the first stretch, from Chicago to Saint Louis, on a road trip to New Orleans. I got the impression that the Mother Road was very different from what we always saw in TV shows, especially because of the depopulation and the abandonment of some of the towns, mainly the smaller ones.
When Eisenhower started building interstates and quicker highways, there were thousands of towns that had always made their living from the traffic of Route 66 that died and a lot of people started fighting to halt its decline. Route 66 was something that had always been so iconic and it was suddenly so human for me. Since then it started to awaken my interest as a documentary subject, because of the intimate stories all along it. In fact it is a film about people, not so much a film about Route 66. Angel Delgadillo, Harley Russell and Lowell Davis are the main characters of the film and all of the story is told with their voice, with their experiences and with their day-to-day existence. How did you find living and working on Route 66? Shooting on Route 66 was an adventure. There are roads that are suddenly cut short and one day it is hot as hell and the next day it is snowing in Missouri. The drive is 4.000 kilometres through States that are so different from each other like California, Texas or Arizona.
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