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 Almod\u00f3var, 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.
\nHis 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, \u201cI was going to spend the weekend and I stayed 18 years.\u201d 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 \u201cby Bu\u00f1uel\u201d. He thought he was crazy: \u201cBut Bu\u00f1uel is dead,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was fascinated by the art department, assembling those marvellous sets that would be thrown away in two days.\u201d 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 \u201cImpossible Staging\u201d, 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 \u00d3pera in La Coru\u00f1a on two wheels, as if it were going to fall. A crazy project that required an enormous amount of planning and coordination, \u201cand always a bit of luck,\u201d he adds. In the life of this Galician who has been living in Ibiza for years, the impossible ended up becoming routine.<\/p>\n
Antonio Lemos has participated in films such as \u201cAcci\u00f3n Mutante\u201d, \u201cAirbag\u201d, \u201cOrquesta Club Virginia\u201d, \u201cCarne Tr\u00e9mula\u201d, \u201cHable con ella\u201d, \u201cLos abrazos rotos\u201d. He has shot with Pedro Almod\u00f3var 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. \u201cAlmod\u00f3var would get very nervous with any scene that had a minimum of action,\u201d he says amused, \u201dI was a bit of a go-to guy for everything, I was his source of reassurance.\u201d Lemos has also worked on international mega-productions such as Milos Forman’s \u201cGoya’s Ghosts,\u201d where he disguised himself as a Franciscan to throw himself to the ground, baby in arms, as horses galloped past him. \u201cI’ve broken my pelvis, humerus, collarbone, ribs,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\t\t