Burnin’ Percebes Demystify “The Fantastic Golem Affairs”

Have you ever thought about how you were going to die? Most humans have, as death is one of the few absolutes we will experience in our lifetimes. That said, you likely haven’t considered falling to your death from a rooftop and breaking into thousands of ceramic pieces upon impact. Burnin' Percebes’ film, The Fantastic Golem Affairs, opens with a game of charades that goes horribly wrong and ends with a man falling off a roof. That leads his best friend down a rabbit hole related to his mysterious death. 

Burnin' Percebes is a writing/directing duo composed of Fernando Martínez and Juan González. The Fantastic Golem Affairs marks their fourth collaboration together, but at this point the two don’t see it as two people working together. They’ve known each other for so long that making art together is simply how it’s done.

“We studied together in school and we began making short films. This is our fourth movie and we try not to have specific roles,” explains Martínez.

“We both write at the same time. Well, we don't write on the same paper, me one word and him next,” jokes González. “Directing is more like a conversation for us.”

“We don't even finish each other's sentences,” Martínez jumps in. “We have a lot of things in common for sure, but we also have our own lives. That makes things funnier because we’re constantly sharing opinions, new things, and hobbies. Everything grows in that way.”

The Fantastic Golem Affairs was born out of an unlikely place: the 1984 film Top Secret!. The film follows Val Kilmer as an American rock’n’roll musician who is sent to East Germany to divert attention from a plot to destroy a NATO submarine. It’s not that gonzo premise that inspired Burnin’ Percebes, but one small gag they thought they could take and run with. 

“There was this scene where a guy kicked a German soldier and he fell from a tower,” details Martínez. “The guy shatters like he’s made of porcelain or china or something like that. We said, okay, it's only a gag in this film, but we could do a whole movie talking about what just happened. The story grew over several years because we wrote the film maybe seven years before it was shot.”

In those seven years, Burnin’ Percebes never lost focus on their ceramic man. As the script progressed, the world of The Fantastic Golem Affairs started to take shape. It’s a world reminiscent of Pedro Almodovar and Wes Anderson, but never in a way that feels like they’re taking someone else’s visual language for their own. As Martínez explains, if they want to be able to drop a piano on someone in their movie, they’ve got to build a world where that makes sense for the viewer.

“From the first scene, you get that we’re in this artificial, plastic world. You’re in this universe with realistic things, but then, if something strange happened, you would feel it makes sense,” explains Martínez. “We wanted to create this world where we can exaggerate things to explain them better. If we want to explain how a guy feels when he lost his friend, that his friend was the main reason he was alive, it would be difficult to explain if he was a normal guy. If he's a golem, if he's this creation built to take care of you, then we can explain it in a funnier, very intense way.”

Since Martínez brought up the falling pianos that make quite a few appearances throughout the film, it’s only right to ask about the production logistics for a movie to kill quite a few people with pianos falling from the sky.

“We wanted the effects in the movie to be practical, real, not CGI,” says González. “That was a thing the production company wasn't happy about. We had to close some streets in Madrid in order to get a crane to lift a piano. It was difficult, but for us it was a dream come true to throw pianos around. It’s something we really wanted to do for a while, and we accomplished that dream.”

“The cool thing for us about this film is it’s the first time we had a real budget,” smiles Martínez. “That meant we could work with a lot of people, and people who knew how to do things. The other things we made, it was just the two of us. One with the camera, the other with the mic, both directing at the same time, and both editing.”

“Being able to work with a lot of really cool people, that makes you grow a lot,” continues Martínez. “If we wanted this guy to get splattered with blood, it's really cool to have someone who says, oh, I can make a kind of machine gun that shoots blood. We would never be able to do that on our own.”

For as many smashed pianos as there are (five, for the record), The Fantastic Golem Affairs is an oddball way of exploring the male loneliness epidemic that hopefully will allow more people to be honest about their emotions. When Burnin’ Percebes were writing the script, Artificial Intelligence chatbots were not popular, but at present, more and more people are turning to AI to get their needs met. 

“AI is basically like a golem. It doesn't have a physical body, but it lets you have conversations with it,” González states. “Male loneliness is not a topic we see often in films or in any narrative in general. For us, it was important to do a story about friendship, and friendship that ends abruptly when his best friend falls off the terrace. How this guy has a coming-of-age in his 30s. How he has to face this growing-up phase late in his life.”

“Maybe there's someone 40 years old having no idea how to live in this world,” González goes on. “How to face his own problems.” 

“And also break these conceptions of roles, body shape, and masculinity,”  Martínez explains. “We wanted to try to make this supposedly heterosexual main character not the classic hero. Maybe even be kind of feminine and maybe we can show semi-naked bodies that are not common bodies. We don't have to say why we're showing them now. They're just like that. We’re trying to understand ourselves, the world, and what we would like the world to be.”

As the mystery of his friend’s death gets more confusing by the minute, our hero’s journey leads him to a bureaucratic company. The Fantastic Golem Affairs skewers the way corporations see their employees as interchangeable. Burnin’s Percebes are hesitant to say that big corporations are the villain of their movie because it’s been a while since they’ve lived the nine-to-five lifestyle. Instead, they use this company as a means of showing how intimately friends can know some parts of their life and how utterly in-the-dark they’re left about other aspects.

“The main character discovers where his friend used to work, and it was fun for us to think he never thought about that while his friend was alive,” Martínez smiles. “It seems strange in the film, but then you realize there are a lot of people who don't know where friends work. I'm not really sure what my brother does.”

“I also have friends who I have no idea what it’s like when they go to an office,” interjects González. “What do they do there? What are their conversations? Do they have friends there?”

From falling pianos to shattering ceramics, it feels right to ask Burnin’ Percebes what kind of out-of-the-box way they’d like to leave this world.

“I prefer to die in my sleep. Maybe a spontaneous combustion,” González offers.

“Piano might be good, but I hope it will be quick,” Martínez laughs. “I don't know how quick it will be because maybe you get smashed, but not die. Maybe if the smash is fast.”