Super Soldier, Super Spy: Eugenio Mira on García!

Where has Eugenio Mira been? The Spanish filmmaker has been seemingly absent behind the camera since his 2013 musical thriller, Grand Piano.

Even his composing alter ego, Chucky Namanera, has been a seeming recluse since creating the soundtrack for Pazo Placa's 2017 horror, Verónica.

So where has he been hiding? Well, he explained, he's been busy on a few projects. Firstly, fatherhood. Secondly, he's been working with his old friend, J.A. Bayona, as second unit director on movies like The Impossible, A Monster Calls, and a little project called Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which became both an insight into big studio movies and a masterclass in production. "There's no way you don't get back home having learned something from that," he said, and that experience fed into his biggest adventure in storytelling to date: García!.

Disappearing for a while is something that Mira and the titular character have in common. In the Spanish-language series, now streaming on HBO Max, Francisco Ortiz plays García, a '60s crime buster frozen in time and now defrosted in contemporary Madrid. So far, so Captain America: but Garcia didn't leave a comic book world of lantern-jawed Nazi smashers. He was the hero of Francoist Spain, a tool of dictatorship who must contend with a shadowy legacy and the occasional judgmental glare of his guide to modernity, Antonia (Veki Velilla).

Recently nominated for Best Foreign Language Series at the Critics' Choice Awards ("I swear I didn't see that coming" Mira said, "I'm still pinching my self"), it's adapted from the graphic novel by Santiago García & Luis Bustos, a two-year process that Mira called "suicidal at first sight." Spanish pop culture often caricatures American and British culture, "so we had Superlopez for Superman, and we've got this James Bond called Anacleto, which is kind of a parody. The great thing about García! is that it's unapologetic. It was, 'Imagine for a second that during the dictatorship of Franco there was this secret agency with this supersoldier, not that different from Captain America.' So you have all these elements from James Bond and Indiana Jones, but to do something really unique and unexpected."

What defines García!, he explained, "is that there's satire, but there's no parody, and that's a deliberate distinction to make."

Austin Chronicle: With parody, you're always winking at the audience, whereas satire accepts that you're smart enough to catch up.

Eugenio Mira: And that's something I put a lot of effort on, because reading [García!] on paper it was there, but you never know. You have an actor, and they have their interpretation of the text, so I was, 'No, no, no, hold it there. This is going to be played straight. We're not going to focus on the cheesy line. We're going to focus on the reaction to the cheesy line, and move on."

With satire, you can be truthful. You can talk about the good things of the past, the bad things of today, and the wrong things of the past that still happen today.

And all the arcs that intersect between the characters, I focused to make sure there were no tone-deaf situations. Because, believe me, that's the hardest thing. Everything else, it was easy to go like, 'Oh, the past is going to be black and white,' so the audience is going to believe that's like an Indiana Jones-type thing. But in episode 3 and 4, when you see these problems in black and white, how the mood changes and you feel more invested, and it doesn't feel so cartoonish.

AC: There's still a lot of romanticizing of historical dictators. You see it in former Yugoslavia with Tito, in Portugal with Salazar, and it still happens with Franco in Spain.

EM: It's called the nostalgia of the absolute. It's hen you move on into a secular world, and communities of a secular nature don't have the gatherings of the religious ones. It's an anthropological fact that if you don't have these new icons to replace the ones you're losing then you're in trouble, because people are going to feel forsaken and lost. So people are going to feel a sense of nostalgia, even for an era that they never lived in, and that's what's happened in Spain. Some young fascist-thinking people are incredibly young, and you go, 'Guys, you have no idea how bad that was.'

I was born in '77 - two years after the death of Franco - and it took me until I was 17 or 18 to understand how things were before. The generation of my parents, they had made an effort, no matter what ideology they had, to support democracy and move forward. So when you're 16, 17, you feel like these two sides come up, and I think that applies to every first world country today.

Not to get into sociology and anthropology ...

AC: Oh, you can get into sociology and anthropology as much as you like.

EM: (Laughs) There's an elite that benefits from having this split in society, so they point at each other as the source of their problems.

One of the things I really loved about Steven Spielberg's new take on West Side Story, [that] I recognized that were, if not improvements, then changes and interesting is that he really made an effort to show that people follow a narrative that they inherit but never really have time to question. So the first time you see the Sharks and the Jets, they are both alien to this place.

I think that Spielberg made a very good point, and I thought a lot about that: not about being a fascist or pro-democracy, but people who have different definitions of what being Spanish is. Don't you realize, this is part of the spell, and that you have to break that spell in order to overcome?

It's almost more at a civilization level than a civilian level, that we as humans shouldn't be under this kind of super-simplifications of things. I think that [the show] represents that. Garcia is not a super-passive character. He starts to process stuff, and understand what's right and wrong, and what was right and wrong in the present, and what elements of the past are useful for a progressive mindset, and what parts of the past do you have to change, otherwise you're never going to make it.

AC: And Garcia is a man of his era, but it's funny looking back because people think that '60s spy flicks were all like James Bond, or now Austin Powers. They were often grittier, like The Billion Dollar Brain and The Ipcress File. There are good guys and bad guys, but moral flexibility on both sides.

EM: The Ipcress File is one of my references. [Michael Caine's character] Harry Palmer, you see this guy who works in an office and has a very compartmentalized perspective of what they're doing. At the end, he's frowning, going, 'What are we doing?' and that's to me one of the things that's missing from James Bond. I don't expect those things to be in the original James Bond movies, but to me in the Daniel Craig movies, and especially Skyfall, there was a moment I couldn't believe the mindset of those films. They were saying, 'We need people like Bond, we know he's controversial but there are bigger things.' I was going, 'Oh my god.'

That's the great thing about Garcia. Being from the past, where these things are openly justified because it's a dictatorship, this guy is going to be questioning everything way more than James Bond is. And what I loved about Harry Palmer is the the producers called exactly the same people who made James Bond to make something completely different.

AC: It's like how the producers of The Prisoner cast Patrick McGoohan, whose last show was the much more straight-forward spy series Danger Man. It dismantles this idea that you can take someone like Bond and simply send them back into society.

EM: And that was the criticism of First Blood. What happens with these soldiers who come back from Vietnam who'd been using equipment that was worth millions of dollars and they were doing this for the government, and they come back and they can't pay their rent, nobody looks at them like they're heroes. They were liabilities, and there are elements of that in García!. When he tries to reconnect with what was the old guard, he's very enthusiastic about it - but that's the start of his disenchantment.

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García! is streaming on HBO Max now.