Blown Covers

The artist behind this week’s New Yorker cover, Javier Mariscal, recently collaborated with Fernando Trueba on “Chico and Rita,” a feature-length animated film that received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature earlier this year. We asked Trueba, an Oscar-winning filmmaker (his film “Belle Epoque” won, for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1993), about their collaboration:

”When I first saw drawings Mariscal had made of Havana streets, I told him, ‘Chavi—that’s how I call him—Chavi, that’s it! That’s where the movie should take place!’ and he told me, ‘I love that, but we should put a lot of music in it.’ And I say, ‘Well, let’s do a musician story.’ And he says, ‘A love story.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Almost every movie is a love story, that’s great.’ And then I said to him, ‘Why, if he’s a pianist, we should have Bebo!’ Bebo Valdés is our friend, and now today he’s ninety-three, but he’s the best Cuban musician alive in the world. So once we had the idea of Havana, Mariscal drawings, and Bebo in the music, we started building the script and the song. This movie is built on friendship.”

“I say to Chavi all the time, ‘You son of a bitch! You make your first movie, and you get nominated for an Oscar!’ It was fun to be there with him. It’s the first time in history that a Spanish movie was nominated in this category.”