Rodrigo Cortés illuminates Sundance with 'Red Lights'

"Expectations fuel the devil." Rodrigo Cortés is dreaming about the funny cocktail of calm, wisdom and inner nerves he is experiencing. The Sundance Film Festival, founded by Robert Redford, is running in Park City, Utah, this week. Once a great celebration of indie cinema, these days the festival is a strange showcase where emerging filmmakers, Hollywood executives on the hunt for the new Tarantino and journalists rub shoulders. It's there where Cortés is today traveling to promote his new movie Red Lights, which is being screened in six sessions from Friday 20th to Saturday 28th. On Tuesday, the festival asked producer Adrián Guerra to add a seventh, because the others had already sold out.

"Do I feel the pressure?" Cortés asks himself. "No... It could be because I'm caught between ignorance and innocence, or because a feeling of fatalism has already won out inside me because the film is made."

Two Sundances ago, Cortés' previous film, Buried, became a festival phenomenon. Red Lights, which is being screened in the Premiere section, is on the same course. "There are things that are always out of your control, but I feel comfortable at a festival like Sundance, where the stars occupy themselves more with staying alive than showing off: the ice puts paid to the glamour. Just cinema remains. The public respects the films."

Red Lights tells the story of the clash between a team of researchers investigating paranormal hoaxes - led by Sigourney Weaver and featuring Cillian Murphy and Elizabeth Olsen - and a famous expert on the subject, a blind professor who has been missing for 30 years (Robert De Niro). "Weaver, Olsen and Murphy will be with me at Sundance," reveals Cortés. "I had Weaver in my head from the beginning. I wrote the script with her in mind. She is the female Dr House."

As ever in Cortés' work, in the background of this film there is a reflection on Plato's Cave, exploring what we think we see and what is really happening. "I have a connection with my worries, with the enjoyment of seeing that there is something under the rug."

Does that make Cortés a guide for his spectators? "Not in the Messianic sense, but yes in the handling of the information and emotions."

Sundance is where the audience tests for Red Lights begin. The filmmaker always looks to reach a mainstream public, but an intelligent mainstream. "Hopefully, in the best of cases, each film finds its own audience. Nowadays they make films thinking the world is stupid. It isn't, but in this way it will become stupid. You should never let the marketing departments decide which films get made."

In Cortés' case, it has never been like this, and Sundance knows it.