Juan Diego Solanas Interview On Directing 'Upside Down,' Kirsten Dunst, Jim Sturgess

Juan Diego Solanas is the mastermind director behind the romantic fantasy film Upside Down, starring Kirsten Durst and Jim Sturgess, as star-crossed lovers from planets with opposite gravitational pulls. Writing and directing the film, Solanas focused his attention on the unique imagery of the movie in which twin worlds live side by side. “The danger of the idea was the overly technological look,” Solanas told Uinterview in an exclusive interview. “There were a lot of problems going on. I spent hours at night not sleeping but searching for solutions for the problem.”

Born in Argentina, Solanas is the son of the accomplished film director, Fernando E. Solanas. With a keen eye for visuals, Solanas studied photography and art history when he moved to France with his father to escape dictatorship in Argentina in the 70s. Solanas first broke into film while working as an assistant for his father’s cinematographer. He began by directing commercials on TV and then made his debut with his short film, The Man Without The Head, released in 2003. His first full-length feature film was Nordeste (Northeast) in 2005.

For Upside Down, Solanas used technology to create a film that would be a unique visual experience for the audience. "I am a hundred percent vision guy, meaning the idea of a movie appears to me first as an image, and then I watch myself. It’s crazy, the image that I imagine, I am a spectator of the image. The process is my image, I love the image, and then the image tells me the story," he told Uinterview. "This is the way my complicated brain works."