El 1 de septiembre de 2019, en una entrevista publicada en El País Semanal, Alejandro Amenábar (Santiago de Chile, 49 años) anunciaba su decisión de rodar una miniserie basada en la novela gráfica de Paco Roca y Guillermo Corral El tesoro del Cisne Negro. El cómic se inspiraba en el embrollo político-legal-aventurero que había enfrentado durante cinco años (2007-2012) al Gobierno español con el cazatesoros estadounidense Odyssey Marine Exploration por el expolio de la fragata Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, hundida frente a las costas del Algarve en 1804. El tesoro de 17 toneladas de monedas de oro y plata, valorado en 500 millones de dólares (380 millones de euros), fue recuperado finalmente en 2012 por el Ministerio de Cultura tras sucesivos asaltos judiciales y hoy una parte de él es exhibida en el Museo Nacional de Arqueología Subacuática (Arqua) de Cartagena.

Two years after that announcement, Alejandro Amenábar, by the hand of the Spanish producer Fernando Bovaira, the American Platform AMC (The Wire, The Walking Dead, Mad Men ...) and Movistar+, already has the fortune ready, its first series and with allprobability not the last if you take into account your high degree of satisfaction with the result.It will be released in world scoop next Friday in the official section outside the San Sebastián Film Festival - in a single session with its six episodes - and on September 30 it will reach the small screen, before its launch in the US andLatin America.Domingo Corral, original fiction director at Movistar, considers the presence in the Donostiarra contest: “It is very important for us that the premiere occurs in San Sebastián.For that, a magnificent director like José Luis Rebordinos is needed, without prejudice and with a lot, but cannot put them all because obviously the spirit of the festival would be denatured.But I think that choosing one or two a year to include in an official section of a film festival is good ”.

Life gives many laps, also in the audiovisual industry.In that interview, the thesis director, who admitted not to be especially fond of the phenomenon of the series, lamented some attitude of the platforms that broadcast them regarding the treatment of authorship: “When a platform announces a series or a film and says'An original series of ...' and puts you the name of the brand and deletes the name of the creators, that means that the company is above the creator.There can be no ‘original Netflix’ or ‘Movistar’ or ‘HBO’ series because Netflix, Movistar and HBO are not people who have created that ”.Obviously, Alejandro Amenábar's name is outstanding and well prominent in the credit titles of the series and both Fernando Bovaira and Domingo Corral, his executive producers, openly recognize that without him “nothing of all this would have come forward”.

A quantitative leap

But how was the immersion of the filmmaker in the prone ocean - sorry for the word game - of the series?"Well, the truth is that the jump, really, has been quantitative, not qualitative," explains the director sitting in a photographic study of the Madrid Pueblo Nuevo neighborhood.“Until now, the longest filming in which I had been that of Ágora, which lasted 15 weeks.In thesis, for example, it was five weeks.And in this I knew that we would go beyond 20 weeks, that is, that it entered into unknown land.But in what has to do with the dynamics of preparation, work with the actors or the staging, it has been - re -understanding for me - exactly the same as in a movie.The feeling has been, if you want, very cinematographic ... many people who work on TV, what I'm going to say does not feel very good, but I felt like I was shooting a very long movie, because yes, you know that eachEpisode has to function as an independent entity, but at the moment in which all that is piled up and becomes a huge puzzle to which you have to give order in the assembly, it is like shooting a movie ”.

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If fortune has two stars like Stanley Tucci (the devil wears Prada, Spotlight ...) and Clarke Peters (The Wire) in the American part of the cast, the Spanish cast is a whole bet.Álvaro Mel, a 25 -year -old half -known actor and an influencer of success in social networks, and Ana Polvorosa, a scarce cinematographic career actress although extensive career in the world of series, form the protagonist couple.They are accompanied, among others, Karra Elejalde in the role of the Hypervitamin Minister of Culture Enrique Moliner (transcript of the Royal Minister of that time, the writer César Antonio Molina, who had to deal with intensity the bull of Odyssey before ending up being dismissed in 2009by President Rodríguez Zapatero, through a telephone and when Molina was in Egypt about to inaugurate an exhibition, being replaced by Ángeles González-Sinde).

Fortune raises as a context, beyond the story from the free adaptation of the Odyssey case with its lawyers, its politicians and their pirates, the alternation and opposition of two worlds and two cultures: of the Castizos bars of Madrid with a chickenpainted in the glass to the American road motels, of a certain mixture of well -intentioned and picaresca quixotism to the aggressiveness of some entrepreneurs, of Karra Elejalde to Stanley Tucci.It was not easy."I wanted to play precisely these two worlds, to use some of the topics that define us and some of those who define them, and the challenge or question we asked ourselves was whether that would end up working," says Alejandro Amenábar,Who admits that, in some scenes with Karra Elejalde, for example, it was raised if he would not be directly entering the Sainete genre.

As he did when he had to defend his last film, as long as the war lasts, he has no complex in assuming his personal immersion in the protagonist character - then he was unamuno and in this case he is the probation and well -intentioned official Alex Ventura - and a defensepassionate about what he calls "how good there is in all of us"."In these chungos times for so many things," he explains, "specifically in this country it seems that the worst of us often comes out.And well, I must be a goodist ... but I claim the good.I always try to put myself in the skin of my characters, which in the end is what I think the spectator does ”.

‘La Fortuna’ and the ‘Good Fortune’

Amenábar likes to refer to fortune as "good fortune" ..., and the truth is that he and his team had it, and much.The covid, first, and the weather, later, respected the deadlines and conditions of a filming that seemed diabolical.“We have been very lucky, in all those months we did not have to delay filming or a single day.But of course, we were very isolated, I had no social life in months, of course, if we caught Covid, the filming stopped 10 days ”.As for the naval battles scenes, which in the series work as a historical flashbacks, the producers came to consider the possibility of not filming them.“They were a kind of wild card;We knew that if we reached the end of the filming and we had ventilated the entire budget on the Covid and delays, we should look for ways to count the naval battle without counting it, and it would have been a small shit, but that was my commitment.And we got to the end and there were money to be able to do all that part, ”recalls the director.As if that were not enough, in those days, San Sebastián and Pasaia were one of the few corners of the Peninsula in which he did not flood, in fact made sun every day of the filming.

Producer Fernando Bovaira results in the avatars of what he considers as the most delicate of the entire project: “The pandemic exploded, with all the uncertainty that that threw not only on the filming of the naval scenes, but of the filming as a whole.In June 2020 it was very difficult to make the decision to move forward with the series.But in the end we started shooting on July 28, 2020 and we left for the following year the filming part with the frigates.And the sensible place to have done it was Cádiz, but we decided that it was not because it was not good for the frigates to go down the entire Atlantic surrounding Galicia.One of them, the French [Étoile du Roy], came from Saint-Malo, in Brittany, and the other, the Russian [Shtartar], from the Baltic.And because the port of Pasiaia has a bocana so narrow that it is not so subject to time, but it was a foolish rolling there, because in April in Pasiaia you can fall one that ... ".

Pandemia has been decisively and dramatically in the field of filming.On the one hand, the shadow of the contagion and the fear of the activity.On the other, the financial problem, as Bovaira explains: “In a filming, Covid is a daily shock… and it is very expensive.You have to ask for a commitment to all team members not to have social interaction, or as much as possible;Limit within the admissible contacts within the filming, so you have to establish concentric circles and that only certain people can attend that day, and of course, spend a lot of money on what is prevention, protocols, delays andobligation to have an additional team dedicated exclusively to prevention ”.