Fèlix Colomer Vallès: "More people have seen my porn videos than any of the documentaries I've directed."

BarcelonaBob Dylan sang "I contain multitudes," and Fèlix Colomer Vallès has taken it literally. Over his 31 years on the planet, he has been a soccer referee, a chess player, a porn film director, an aggressive vegetarian, and a trap singer. This documentary filmmaker, responsible for pieces such as Vitals and Black has a name, decided to tell all these lives to his 3-year-old son Rio. The result is the docuseries The lives of Felix which, produced by HBO, arrives on TV3 this Thursday with two initial chapters and a new one each week, and which can now be seen in its entirety on 3Cat.

How many lives fit in one life?

— In my case, a lot, because I have a list of things to do for a second, third, and fourth season. Everyone has a documentary about their life. Maybe they haven't had as many different lives as I have, but if you dig deep and the person really opens up, without limiting themselves to a facade, everyone certainly has a film.

Tell me about one of the lives you have left out, then.

— The one of a TV show contestant. I went to The great dictation and in Now I fall And I'm very interested in the world of competitions, the professionals who go there, and, above all, the public who attends. They take them there on buses from the villages, they give them a sandwich, and they give it their all. I would love to do the episode just to meet the audience. The wheel of fortune, who seem to be on cocaine, applauding everything like crazy.

The Felix we see on screen wants to succeed, to stand out. And you show the frustration of not achieving it, like when you are demoted in refereeing or, as a fan of the Guinness Book of RecordsYou aspire to have the longest nipple hair in the world, and at eight centimeters, you're still a few millimeters short of the maximum recorded at the time.

— Exactly, and then I figure out how I'm going to see Daniel in Italy, just to find out who he is, and he tells me that he had recently split up with them because it was something disgusting to his girlfriend. And it's very geeky and silly, maybe, but at the same time, for me, it's like a metaphor for life: you look for one thing, you look at another, and then it turns out it wasn't that bad.

This is made evident by another unique trip, to Mexico, to see the man with the longest penis in the world, which supposedly reaches his ankle.

— Fair enough, because he's a poor, wretched man, living in the worst conditions, alone in a rat-ridden shack. And, at the same time, he didn't want surgery because he wanted to remain the man with the world's longest penis. We sense he pretends it reaches his ankle because he thinks it reaches his knee—we know it reaches that far—isn't enough.

The series is also a letter to your son, Rio, who was 3 years old at the time and is now 5. What would you like him to think when he sees it and can process it?

— One of the virtues I try to pass on, and one that my father also passed on to me, is universal curiosity. Making documentaries also has to do with this, and being a geek, or a freak, means being a little obsessed with things.

Do you consider yourself a geek, a freak?

— Yes, both. But I love it: I find it very positive, being a geek. It seems like an insult, but for me it isn't at all. If I hadn't been such a freak, I wouldn't have done this.

How do you convince a global brand like HBO to make a series about you, a person who isn't a household name?

— You convince them not by explaining it, but by having them watch the first episode, in this case the one about chess. This made them understand that it was a collage with comedy, but also emotional moments, reflections on parenthood, and a group of endearing geeky characters. With the chess episode, we saw how the boy who had been the best in Spain for the under-10s won everything... but at the same time, he didn't seem to be happy. The rule is that, to seduce the algorithm, you have to repeat your previous success, but without taking risks, we would never have made this series. And the good thing is that HBO loves taking risks, and they were already fond of me because I had made them... Vitals, about covid at the Parc Taulí Hospital.

You filmed a lot of home scenes with your son Río and your then-partner, Valeria...

— For the last episode on TV3 we made a change, to add our final breakup.

I wondered, if anything, how she felt about exposing herself too.

— It was funny because when we were editing the episode, which we'd recorded seven months earlier, I told the editor to do the music, post-production, sound, color, and everything else he needed to do, because it hurt too much. I knew what we'd done was cool and that, in a year, it would be great to see it again. And yes, now that I've watched it again, I like it. Of course, when you put yourself out there, you have to accept whatever you do with your own eyes: it's part of your life, like people who get a tattoo. I have a good relationship with everyone, and with her too, a very good one. I explained the idea of capturing the breakup, and she thought it was a good idea. The day she came to get things from my house and told me she had a boyfriend, she found some of my condoms while I was unpacking things and asked me if I was with someone... that's the scene we included.

""This doesn't feel like a documentary." It's a phrase you often hear, as a compliment, and it must be infuriating.

— I understand what they mean, because they equate documentaries with journalistic or animal reports—dense, authorial, boring, and lacking in rhythm. But my challenge in making documentaries is the opposite: taking fictional structures to tell real stories, like the one we're premiering in September, so to speak. Time-out and it's about a basketball player who disappeared decades ago.

The lives of Felix It's a series for the global market, but you filmed it in Catalan. In fact, when you explained your year as a porn director, the motivation was also linguistic.

— The motivation wasn't to show porn, but rather a Catalan campaign because porn is one of the most watched things, but there wasn't anything in Catalan. I had no idea about this world, beyond watching porn, but I put together two teams. One of us made the website, with friends from school, and we contacted the actors and everything. And the other was the film crew, because I was just starting to study film. We could do it because only the actors were paid, and eventually we got tired of it.

What exactly?

— The actors I worked with... were very difficult. They'd show up four hours late to filming, everything was very shabby, and it was hard to maintain a normal professional relationship: they got into really weird situations. And we didn't earn a single euro or anything. That said, more people have seen my porn videos than any of the documentaries I've directed, because they've had millions of views. And that's despite the fact that the videos were designed more to be funny than to get you off: they were absolutely ridiculous.

One was titled, in fact, James I the Conqueror.

— Exactly! And it showed how James I traveled back in time to find Isabella the Catholic and perform a stick dance with her.

You're the director of the documentary master's program at Chess. Is the level of documentary filmmaking in Catalonia high enough, as the saying goes?

— Yes, I've only been here for two years and I can't yet evaluate my students, but there are chess superstars, who are from all over the world because there aren't just Catalans. In fact, there are more non-Catalan students, but there are also very good directors in the country. What excites me about the master's program is that I get to pick the teachers who are my idols, bring them to class... and I stay, take notes, and learn! People like Carlos Bosch or Alba Sotorra, for example.

What other projects do you have in the pipeline?

— I have a long list of ideas... ten or fifteen. I can't get to everything. But I've been filming a very personal one for seven years now, about a child who suffers from a rare disease and must die. The documentary aims to show the process of how a child dies in a family and what happens next. Along the way, my parents have already separated, and I was able to film this whole process. In fact, the child was supposed to die long before, and even his mother and I joked, saying, "He never dies, we'll never finish the documentary," because we've become very close friends. And this, for example, is a project I hold very dear, and obviously, I'm in no rush to finish it. In the meantime, I'm working on another project every year.

Can you make a living from documentary filmmaking in Catalonia?

— I'm very lucky and can really dedicate myself to it and earn a very good living. But in general, it's difficult because there aren't that many jobs. Now, the emergence of platforms has helped many more documentaries be seen. People have discovered documentaries, and so many are being made. But I'm happy that this one is now coming to TV3, because I'm a fan. It has a tremendous ability to position a documentary as part of a shared conversation, so that you can reach many people at the same time, in a single breath.