A world with no strangers: Sebastián Lelio remembered by screenwriter Gonzalo Maza

Since his death, photographs of Sebastián Lelio have been surfacing all over social media, each one carried by a quiet wave of tenderness: from Hollywood stars such as Julianne Moore and Florence Pugh to a small bookshop in Chile he once visited, to the dozens of artists and crew who worked on his films. Five minutes or a lifetime, it made no difference: everyone came away from Sebastián with the same impression of a charming, sensitive, intelligent and good-looking guy. He was, frankly, unbearably perfect. To make matters worse, he was a complete artist, gifted and self-aware, careful never to drown in his own reflection, as so many fools do.

We met in 2005, when he invited my wife, Carmen Luz, and me to his flat to see a rough cut of his first film, La sagrada familia, shot in just four days in a house by the sea and then edited, with monastic patience, over almost two years. We watched it on a computer screen, hardly believing what was unfolding in front of us. When it ended, we applauded.

I was a film critic then, and an aspiring television writer. We became friends at the premiere, at the Valdivia Film Festival in the south of Chile, where a new generation was being born: the Novísimo Cine Chileno, the newest Chilean cinema. Of all those new directors, Sebastián was the most ardent. He mentioned that his next film would be about three teenagers spending Christmas Eve together. Christmas films, I remarked in passing, are my favourite films.

Back in Santiago, we started playing racquetball three times a week. It was the only sport I had ever played, and the only one I thought I could master. Sebastián had never held a racquet in his life, yet he beat me every single time. I sulked; I swore at him. He just laughed.

Between games, he confessed that he was struggling to write the Christmas film. What was the point of writing a screenplay, he asked, if cinema is made without rules, in front of a camera? To him, scripts and written dialogue belonged to the theatre, not to cinema.

I saw my chance and offered him a deal. Maybe I could help. Maybe we could meet and talk about the film he wanted to make, every day, for a month, and see whether we could work together. If nothing happened, fine, we would still be friends. But maybe something would happen. He said yes.

We started in December 2005, and for the next ten years we were inseparable. We talked and talked and talked and talked, day after day, for weeks, months, years. That is how we made four films together, from Navidad to A Fantastic Woman. We talked about ourselves, about our friends, our mothers, our flaws, about the movies we loved and the ones we could not stand. Lars von Trier was our favourite quarrel: Sebastián admired him; I hated him.

We were opposites in many ways. I was rational; he was mystical. I was the brute; he was the elegant one. We were the same age, but with his wisdom and his teen spirit he was at once my older brother and my younger brother.

He was not an easy director to write for. He never really made peace with written dialogue. Sometimes he would delete the dialogue from our scripts, so the actors could find their own words for what the scene needed. And if they couldn’t find them, he gave them the lines. “Screenplays are the map, but filming is the territory,” he told me early on.

Much of my job as a writer was to work inside the rules he set. For Gloria, the story of a divorced woman in her late fifties who goes out dancing in search of love, he set two from the very beginning. The first: we can never feel sorry for Gloria. The second: Gloria can never say what she feels. No scene where she tells a friend she is lonely. No scene with a therapist. All of that was forbidden. Writing like that was never easy.

Every scene had a rule and an intention. One of them we called ‘The Grass Is Always Greener on the Other Side’. Gloria is at her best friend’s house. The friend’s daughter, who we know is about to get married, sings ‘Waters of March’ with her father, in two voices, just as Elis Regina and Tom Jobim did on the original recording. They are pure happiness: a family that loves each other, singing. Gloria watches. Her life is the very opposite. She doesn’t say what she feels: we see it.

I like to think that we learned to make films together, but it isn’t true. I thought I knew about films because I had seen so many and written about them. But Sebastián made me understand that watching films and making films are very different jobs. And he taught me, like a patient teacher, that a film is always a mystery to be discovered, live, in front of a camera: a documentary about actors pretending to be other people. A game in which the director simply sets the rules.

We loved each other and insulted each other. No, that’s not true. We loved each other and I insulted him. Sebastián, as anyone who knew him for five minutes or a lifetime will tell you, was incapable of insulting anyone. In all those hours together, I never once heard him do it. He could tell you, very directly, that something didn’t work and that we should try another way. To him, insults simply lacked elegance, and elegance was the one thing he never lacked.

After ten years, our conversations began to repeat themselves. That happens. Life took us down different roads: I moved to England, he went back to Chile. We kept sending each other our scripts; our last exchange was barely a month ago. I always thought we would write another film together, that sooner or later the right project would come along.

For a while I told myself there must be other people like him in the world. There aren’t. I never met anyone like him again.

Now that he is gone, and we, his friends, look at one another, bewildered, trying to find our way through this desolation, I keep going back to those endless conversations, our attempts to answer the questions that have no answer, about cinema and about being human, lofty questions that can only be taken seriously if you answer them laughing.

Making films, I learned from him, means raising an antenna from your head, tuning it to the feelings of the people around you, and turning whatever it picks up into scenes and images. Building a universal empathy in which no one is ever a stranger. That is what his films did, and what they will keep doing.