Exterior. Four o’clock in the morning. Shooting of a film. A very snowy, icy road. A car has to stop at a particular point on the street. Nobody makes it. Everyone is frozen and very tired. A young man from the art department raises his hand, he’s sure he can do it. He tries and nails it on the first try. And that instant changes everything. This is how Antonio Lemos began a career as a film specialist that has led him to shoot more than 30 films with directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Milos Forman, Paul Greengrass or Ridley Scott. Also TV series and more than 150 commercials. A story of risk, precision, impossible scenarios and endless early mornings. A life of film.
His story begins in Galicia, where he started racing rallies as an amateur for the pure love of driving. Later, with a backpack and a motorcycle, he moved to Madrid just when private television was born, “I was going to spend the weekend and I stayed 18 years.” Serving drinks, he met an unusual (and stuttering) character who gave him a hard time every night and one morning he offered him a job in a film “by Buñuel”. He thought he was crazy: “But Buñuel is dead,” he recalls. It turned out that he was the son of the mythical director, and that conversation would open the doors to the world of filmmaking for him as an assistant decorator and driving the prop truck.
“I was fascinated by the art department, assembling those marvellous sets that would be thrown away in two days.” A fascination that would lead him 4 or 5 years later to set up his own workshop to build sets for advertising, trade fairs, TV series. The company had a department called “Impossible Staging”, where they made, for example, the world presentation of the Peugeot 307, in which they simultaneously flew a car over La Diagonal in Barcelona; with a hot air balloon lowering it from the sky in Valencia; with cranes, parachutes and army F18s floating it over the waters of the Guadalquivir in Seville; with a semi-submarine raft and divers and raising it to the cornice of the Palacio de la Ópera in La Coruña on two wheels, as if it were going to fall. A crazy project that required an enormous amount of planning and coordination, “and always a bit of luck,” he adds. In the life of this Galician who has been living in Ibiza for years, the impossible ended up becoming routine.
Antonio Lemos has participated in films such as “Acción Mutante”, “Airbag”, “Orquesta Club Virginia”, “Carne Trémula”, “Hable con ella”, “Los abrazos rotos”. He has shot with Pedro Almodóvar in five films (two of them Oscar winners), and from each one he treasures an anecdote that seems to come out of the most surreal backstage. “Almodóvar would get very nervous with any scene that had a minimum of action,” he says amused, ”I was a bit of a go-to guy for everything, I was his source of reassurance.” Lemos has also worked on international mega-productions such as Milos Forman’s “Goya’s Ghosts,” where he disguised himself as a Franciscan to throw himself to the ground, baby in arms, as horses galloped past him. “I’ve broken my pelvis, humerus, collarbone, ribs,” he says matter-of-factly. She has never been afraid. Only concentration. His precision and courage, more than technique, he admits, were the keys that opened the doors of legendary directors, like Ridley Scott.
During the filming of “Kingdom of Heaven,” he became the British director’s personal driver and bodyguard. “I spent two months being his shadow, day and night. He would sleep for three and a half hours, then lock himself in his trailer, which was like a miniature movie theatre, to watch what he had shot the day before.” He recalls how Ridley would walk around the set, with more than 600 technicians and sometimes as many as 10,000 extras, correcting actors as he repositioned a vase, and how he would draw each sequence as if he was already watching it on screen. “Nobody shoots battles like him,” says Lemos, still impressed by this filmmaker, of whom he has the best of memories: “I haven’t seen anyone like him.”
But as in any good movie, after long years of jumping between moving vans, braking burning cars or even filming a choreography of 18 cars in a closed airport for “The Bourne Ultimatum”, Antonio’s life had to take a turn. And one night in January, at 2am, he arrived in Ibiza by chance. He came aboard a ferry with a Saab convertible from the 80s that he could not sell, and that he exchanged in the port of Sant Antoni for an old wooden sailboat. Little did he know that this deal would end up changing his life. After fixing it up, for more than two years, he lived on that boat, anchoring between Espalmador, the bay of Sant Antoni and the Salinas, with the red wine-coloured sails fluttering in solitude. “I’ve spent nights going around with the engine running, while the Guardia Civil wanted to throw the boats out,” he recalls with a chuckle. While living on the boat he traveled abroad when projects came up, but as he himself acknowledges “as a specialist, at 50 you are completely obsolete, in advertising not so much, but in cinema. You end up getting tired, the body hurts”.
While in Ibiza he met a definitive character and decided to stay, Oscar Ferrer, owner of the graphic design company Konkordanz, “one of the best people I’ve met in my life, it was a fantastic connection”. Óscar proposed him to make videos together, “I loved the plan and I was leaving the projects in Madrid, it worked very well”. Sadly in 2019 Óscar suffered a sudden heart attack and shortly after his brother also passed away, but Lemos was already settled in his little house in Cala Vadella and decided to stay. “I will never forget the first winter, after the boat, when I lit the fireplace while it was raining outside.”
Since then he has continued filming, but at a different pace, participating in Ben Turner’s “White Island”, in some international series and, more recently, as art director in local short films such as “Soc Maricó” and “Boca a boca”. Now he collaborates with artists like Adrian Cardona, makes wooden benches with logs brought by the sea, shoots videos, paints. “When you’ve done almost everything, you look for other things. Ibiza gave them to me”.
There is no trace of pose in Antonio Lemos. Just life, a life marked by the constant search for new challenges and the ability to reinvent himself, incredible experiences and a great sense of humour. Film specialist, set builder, action choreographer, precision driver, guest at Orlando Bloom’s birthday party, navigator, artist, sports circuit instructor… he has lived cinema from the inside, every second to the fullest and has a million stories to tell. He says that the young specialists of today see him as a dinosaur. But he smiles. Because he knows that his story does not fit in a single film.
