“We’re growing old together, my films and I”: Jonás Trueba on The Other Way Around

Jonás Trueba’s films almost always circle around a central relationship, but it seldom feels like they are about romance. The usual big gestures and high-stakes moments of the romantic drama are nowhere to be found, while the minutiae of daily routines usually left for off-screen are pushed to the forefront.

From the youthful enthusiasm of seduction in Every Song is About Me (2010), to the more grounded collaboration of midlife bonds in The Other Way Around (Volveréis) (2024), Trueba always seeks to frame everyday affection as something profound. In his latest, this means exploring the social and emotional implications of a couple who have been together 15 years deciding to throw a “separation party”, and having to explain the concept over and over again to their loved ones. 

Over a Zoom call, the Spanish filmmaker spoke to Sight and Sound about repetition as a filmmaking tool, his love of Golden Age romantic comedies, and how happy endings shouldn’t be taken for granted. 

Your film seems to offer different readings depending on the language of its release title: The Other Way Around in English, Volveréis (You’ll come back) in Spanish, and Septembre sans Attendre (No wait until September) in French. How involved were you with these decisions? 

To me it’s really important. Whenever I start conceiving a film, the first thing I need is a title. Some filmmakers do with a working title up until the end, and to me that’s inconceivable. I can’t start working without a title. It helps me think about everything else. I love titles that go beyond describing the plot, and in some way embody the mindset from which you engage with the film. 

I had Volveréis, the original Spanish title, before everything else. It helped me think about a paradoxical comedy, and it also served as a follow-up from my previous film, Tenéis que venir a verla (You have to come and see it). I like speaking to the audience with my titles, involving them. It’s become a mantra of sorts for me. On the English title, I suggested it to the international sales agent because, to me, it had the flow and musicality that I associate with classic, Golden Age comedies. It also helps to read the film in a different angle, with the idea of reverseness. 

The film opens with a breakup. How did you decide on that as your starting point? 

We always had a very clear idea of starting the film in this almost programmatic manner, announcing what’s going to happen. It’s a challenge in a way, you no longer have ‘the unexpected’ as a card under your sleeve. [It] really amused us; being able to construct a whole film around the repetition of the same phrase [“You’ll get back together”], and how by repeating it, it begins to show more layers around its central paradox: the sadness of a break-up, and the joy of a party. To us, that’s inherently cinematographic. It felt like the tension you used to see in the classic screwballs.

I thought a lot about Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937), which is perhaps the film that’s most structurally similar to ours. The break-up is also announced in the first sequence, and then the whole film is built on the month the central couple has to wait for the divorce papers, and the kind of discussions and encounters that happen along the way. 

How did that repetitive structure come to be, where the central gag seems to add a little more emotional nuance each time? 

I’ve always had the impression that cinema works wonderfully with repetition. A lot of filmmakers try to avoid repetition because they think it ’s boring and that nothing goes forward. But to me, the results of cinematic repetition are always very interesting. Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day [1993] and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman [1975] – they’re both constructed entirely around repetition, and they do tremendously poetic things with it.

How much of your own filmmaking process manifests in the “film-within-a-film” sequences of The Other Way Around? There’s a scene where montage and structure are openly discussed, for example. 

I’d say that cinema’s craftsmanship is always in some way within our films. I don’t like the concept of the “meta-cinematographic”, because it sounds too intellectual. I don’t think it’s an intellectual exercise, it just happens organically. Honestly, hiding the cinematic process to me is more artificial than showing it. There’s no point in evading that we’re making a film and you’re seeing a film. There’s participation from both ends. In this film we wanted to have a parody element with the film commenting on itself. It’s almost a farce about how films tend to be discussed in overly intellectual manners. “Is it a linear or cyclical narrative?” To me, many films, including ours, just snake their way through these concepts, with little diversions along the way. 

This reflectivity also extends to your performers, Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz, who’ve now appeared three times as your central couple. How much do previous performances inform your way of working with them and their new characters?

It’s very natural to me. From the start I knew it had to be them again, precisely because [those two] working together previously really helped the relationship explored in this film. They carried memories with them of working alongside each other in previous fictional romances. To me that adds a lot. They also love involving themselves in the whole production. They’re not only thinking about their characters, they’re thinking about the flow of the whole film. 

The tone of each of your films seems to be in constant flux, from the more youthful romantic uncertainties of your earlier works, to a sort of more adult set of concerns with your latest two films. Does this progression come organically to you? 

We’re growing old together, my films and I. I’ve always liked the idea of making films as a response to each vital moment. By now I can look back and identify myself and what was going on in my life through the films I’ve made. It wasn’t necessarily a plan I had, but I’ve also noticed that each film responds to a mindset and emotional state that’s close-knit to a particular moment in life. 

In Every Song is About Me (2010), a character asks another about why their work always focuses on romance. Seven films later, what keeps you interested in romantic interactions? 

I feel that those topics are still in my films, but perhaps in a more subdued fashion. There’s an evolution in my sensibility. Now it’s less about understanding couples from the seduction process, and more about co-existence and working together. Not necessarily more complex concepts, but very different in how they inform tone. 

As someone that works with romance in cinema and is also influenced by romantic comedy as a genre, how do you feel about its current standing? 

I always ask myself these questions. I think the genre’s popularity goes through cycles. The Golden Age of romantic comedies happened during the Great Depression and World War II, almost like a response to these turbulent times. Even during the 1970s up until the 1990s you could still see traces of these classic comedies influencing filmmakers. Eventually, I think the genre became overly schematic. Movies became redundant in their topics. So I always ponder on how we can go back to this genre, but from today; with a fresh perspective. 

Whenever I present The Other Way Around people talk a lot about the film’s ending, if it’s a happy ending or not. If you ask me, I wouldn’t be able to qualify it; it’s ambiguous. Some people see it one way, and others do the opposite, and I understand both. I think both feelings are there, in tension between each other. However, that did beg the question of “why wasn’t I able to have a happy ending?” 

I think modern cinema, starting from the 1960s, starts building itself against happy endings, among other things. It was seen as something passé, too naive. I think there’s a big fallacy in prestige cinema, as it always thinks a harsh ending is more important, and that whoever still does happy endings is a sell-out and a bad filmmaker.

Do you feel an impulse to go against the grain regarding prestige cinema, or at least this notion of big dramatic gestures as equivalent to quality? 

Of course. I think it ’s an interesting challenge to filmmakers today. We need to question what some people call ‘stupid’ in cinema. Would someone call George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story [1940] stupid because it has a happy ending? It’s always more complex than it seems. That’s what interests me: how to make movies that transmit positive energies to the audience, while also trusting them and not treating them as stupid.

► The Other Way Around is in UK cinemas now.