If you enjoyed lesbian web series Chica Busca Chica, you’re going to love creator Sonia Sebastián’s follow-up film Girl Gets Girl. Featuring several fan favorites with different names but very similar personalities, this Spanish flick’s a laugh riot.
We had the pleasure of speaking with Sonia, who now resides in Los Angeles. She told us about how fans made this movie possible, how the Spanish entertainment industry is still lagging behind on lesbian content and what’s next for her franchise.
AfterEllen.com: When did you start to think Chica Busca Chica could, in fact, be more than a web series? When and how did the idea of a movie come to be?
Sonia Sebastián: The idea of the movie came because I was trying to shoot the second season. I wrote it, but in Spain, it was totally impossible because the content, the lesbian stuff—the channels were not prepared for that. So I was thinking, “What can I do?” Because a series is expensive and you need more time to shoot and all this stuff. And one day, I was talking with some friends, and they said, “Why don’t you do a movie?” And I said, “Doing a movie is very complicated.” They said, “Oh you can shoot maybe in three weeks, in two weeks. You don’t need so much money. You have a lot of actors that you know.” So I said, “Why not?” I started to think what could happen with these characters nine years later, and we started to write.
AE: Hearing you say you couldn’t make this happen in Spain might surprise some, given the success of your web series and a show like Tierra de Lobos. Do you feel there were too many barriers in place to give your series a new life on Spanish television?
SS: Yeah, it was a lot of problems. And Tierra de Lobos, it’s not a lesbian series. You have this little space in all the story. But Spain, we have gay marriage as of 10 years ago, so I’m very proud of that. But I think that we need to change the Spanish industry because they don’t want main lesbian characters. They say, “Okay, we can give a little space to a lesbian or a gay.” But they don’t want to produce and execute a purely lesbian series. When I was trying to do my second season, I was in contact with a big producer there. And they loved the project. Any channel—they had a bunch of meetings. And it was not possible. Spain is more prepared to give secondary characters lesbian stories, but not the main characters.
AE: Let’s talk about the importance of fans. I know there was a lot of crowdfunding. How vital were they to getting this movie made?
SS: I think the fans were the most important part to this movie’s birth. The fans were there not just in the crowdfunding. Even before, I had so many, many, many, many letters, emails of people that watched the series and they said, “Sonia, we need that you keep telling stories like that because it helped me to come out,” or “It helped me to talk to my mother and communicate with my mother,” or “Now I don’t feel so bad because I saw your series and I know that I’m a normal person too.” So the fans, for me, they were in all the process. That was one of the reasons I decided to go with the movie and financing by crowdfunding. They were helping all the time, sharing. So it was amazing. And AfterEllen helped a lot, too, because AfterEllen gave us the opportunity to share and to tell American people that we want to do this. And OneMoreLesbian too. So yeah, for me, fans are the most important part in this project. I appreciate it so much, and I am very proud and very happy about that.
AE: While you kept some of the same actresses, you changed up character names and added a lot of new faces to the cast. Why is that?
SS: I was feeling that I want to do the same thing, but I want to do something different too. I want evolution of the characters. When we start to write, something happens. We need other characters for this story. The other script writer is not the same from the series. It’s other writers who wrote the movie with me.
AE: Are you saying that in changing the names, even though you kept a lot of the same characteristics, did changing the names just give you more freedom with regards to what you could do with those characters?
SS: Yeah. For me, that’s exactly what it was. It’s more freedom. Because if not, I have to control everything and people can say, “Oh, that is not the same.” We felt that we needed that freedom. It’s the same humor. It’s similar stories because it’s the stories that I have in my life too. But yeah, we need some freedom in writing, in directing, in acting. It was a lot of years. And I want to talk about family. The most important thing for me was to talk about family. Family could be whoever is with you and who loves you and supports you. That was really important to me to tell. The series was more about fun, the cheating. I wanted to grow up.
AE: Why all the new faces though?
SS: I wanted to talk about family, and I needed a big group. I don’t know why, but I said, “I need more actors because I want to talk about lesbians, I want to talk about transgenders, I want to talk about gays, I want to talk about straights. I want to talk about all these people together and show the world that we work together.” We work. We love each other together, and we can be a great group, a great family. The most important is who we are inside. And I’m a little crazy—I love risk. I wanted to work with a lot of actors there.
AE: Because of the love that already existed for the actresses, their characters and your storylines, there were so many directions you could have taken the film in. Why did you ultimately choose to go with a “coming home” and a “family” story?
SS: It’s because now I’m feeling like that. I wrote this movie almost three years ago. I love to go out, and I love to go to bars to meet girls, but I’m eight years older, and I’m starting to think about raising a family. “What happens if I cannot have a kid?” I think that is my priority. And we have some groups in Spain that say that “Gays cannot get married” or “We are not families.” I wanted to show that we are. It was my feeling in that moment.
AE: The “coming home” storyline, was that something that was also important to you? Or was it just a nice way to place some of the characters in America?
SS: I wanted the Inés character, the most similar to me, to face her life and who she is and what she wants in her life. I wanted to do this character that is running all the time. She cannot face the conflict. For me, it was really nice to show that she ran away, and she makes the same life that she had in Spain. She reproduced the same style of life, the same cheating with the girls. She’s not grown up. She needs to grow. And I love the U.S. Now I’m living here. So for me the opportunity to choose the U.S. instead of London or France, I think it was more because I love this country.
AE: As a writer and director, you’ve favored large casts of women. And when it comes to your storytelling, you’ve put several queer women front and center. Why is that so important to you?
SS: It’s very important that we can show to the people other styles of life. I’m a lesbian, and I’m a woman, and I speak, and I have a life with women and with lesbians, and I love, I love that. I love the possibility to show these characters that we cannot see so frequently in TV or in series, in movies. I want to give the opportunity and the voice to women to speak and to lesbians to speak.
AE: Is there anything else planned for this franchise? A sequel to the movie? A TV series? More web episodes perhaps?
SS: Not now, but hopefully—I have the web series, the second series, written. Maybe now with the movie we have a possibility. In Spain, it’s very difficult. It’s difficult to get funding and financing for this kind of content. But who knows? Maybe. What we thought all the time was if we make a lot of money with the movie, we can produce the second season and the second part of the movie. I had this crazy idea of putting all of them on a trip in a Mexican hotel. We’ll see. We’ll see how people accept it, how we can sell the movie, and try to make more lesbian content and women’s content.
Girl Gets Girl plays at Frameline in San Francisco on June 18 and at Outfest in Los Angeles on July 9. Visit the movie’s Facebook page to keep up with future screening dates.
