SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME...

STARBURST talks with MIGUEL LLANSÓ, director of the fantastically surreal future cult classic, JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY TO THE HIGHWAY…

- Jordan Royce

STARBURST: Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway is a conceptually incredible movie. Where did the idea come from?

Miguel Llansó: The film is a collection of ideas. Basically, I wanted to make another film with Daniel Tadesse, who played the main character in my previous film, Crumbs. I knew I wanted to do a tragic-comedy about a hero who is lost, somehow, at the beginning; someone who gets to be a king. Then he gets a kingdom, but then he loses his position and goes back to work in a pizzeria, which I find very funny - this tragic condition. And then, of course, the ideas start to come around, as does the main idea, like reflections about power, about our inability to control our own fate and destiny.

We noted that there are a lot of ideas about what’s reality and how there are certain avenues you can’t trust with the so-called fake news, and there are certain parts of the political spectrum distorting things. Is that also an important theme to you?

Totally, it’s very important to me. I think I tried to reflect on the disappearance of the body. Daniel’s character Gagano changes his body many times: in one reality he has a mask, in another reality, he’s a TV set! In each reality, the core of the person is the same, but the different realities mould him or make him a different being. I think this is what happens with the spiritual world. But the problem is that you don’t decide the body that you want to have. Also it’s difficult to live without a body. I wanted to reflect his experience of not only being in different realities, but being in different realities with different bodies.