The Argentine filmmaker Patricio Álvarez Casado, director of “El Comandante Fort”, considered that “Ricardo’s regional appeal is that he was a bad millionaire, irreverent and contradictory».
The long-awaited four-part documentary series will premiere this Wednesday on the streaming platform Star+ and proposes to dive into the unknown aspects of the mediatic heir who made his life and his early death a reality show,
“Fort was not concerned with multiplying his fortune: he spent all his money on himself and that side of a bad millionaire seems attractive to any audience,” Casado (producer of “El último Elvis” and “Animal”) said in an interview with Télam regarding the series that oscillates between the documentary and fiction shot between Buenos Aires and Miami.
For Eddie Fitte, the journalist in charge of the investigation, stressed that the story represents a kind of “dream of the global kid” since following the death of his father, Ricardo took care of squandering his inheritance in full view of all.
“His way of living represented a kind of revenge,” he added; to do what she wanted following feeling suppressed by the gaze of others for years and say ‘I am all powerful’.
But the investment of those millions at the service of a meteoric rise to fame is just the tip of the iceberg of the media and ostentatious character who 10 years following his death he survives in the form of memes, iconic phrases (“I don’t drive the rating, I drive a Rolls Royce”, “Enough guys”, “Meameee”) and merchandising.
What is truly new regarding this series is that illuminates an unknown part of its history thanks to an exhaustive investigation which led to the appearance of an unpublished diary in which Ricardo recounts, among other things, his failure in music and his first loves.
In this regard, Casado highlighted the effort of the entire team forr «trying to understand what Ricardo felt, because he hid as much as he told; there appeared family conflicts, the fight for sexual identity, the need for affection and recognition, which are problems that all people have, and for this reason the public felt reflected in some aspect ».
With testimonies from his sons, his brother Eduardo, and Gustavo Martínez, his most emblematic couple, in addition to the participation of various names from the local star system, among other people, this series written by Álvarez Casado, Juan José Becerra, Tamara Tenenbaum and Nicolás Miguélez, aims to lift the frivolous veil to discover the person behind the character.
Interview with the filmmakers
Q: What seduced you to tell the life of Ricardo Fort?
Eddie Fitte: What interested us the most was being able to tell something new of a life so televised that it was 24 hours a day, from Monday to Sunday, on the screen. And that Pandora’s box that we were opening generated a version of him that we didn’t even know regarding, a kind of new Ricardo.
Patricio Álvarez Casado: We strive to try to understand what was he feeling and family conflicts appeared, the struggle for sexual identity, the need for affection and recognition, which are problems that all people have. I think we were able to bring that part to light and our dream was that he might talk regarding himself and when the manuscript appeared we mightn’t believe it. We had the scripts written and we had to reformulate everything but it was a pleasure that he put his life into words because that way there was no one judging him or interpreting him, it was him talking regarding him.
Q: Somehow, he had written his own script, How did you get to that material?
EF: In life, Ricardo was a hurricane that when he died he left behind a bunch of letters, documents, credit card statements, wardrobes, Word files, and printed emails. in two spaces that were preserved as the tomb of Tutankhamen. Our obsession was those things that had never been reopened and we were able to enter when we brought this idea to the family with two premises that were fundamental to us: journalistic ethics and production quality.
PAC: Opening those spaces enabled this non-genre that the series has because it is unclassifiable as Ricardo and I always liked that because We dreamed of doing something that he liked and the non-gender classification of the series identifies him. When the costumes began to appear, the cane of Juan Carlos Pallarols who was the only person who was not president who had it, the costumes, the sets, we began to understand that there was non-narration and the triggers to create this kind of tribute of the family.
Q: Before you talked regarding the emergence of a “new Ricardo” from the investigation, How is the Ricardo they met?
EF: I understood your return to the closet as victim of the homophobia of those times, because he was required to come out of the closet being the father of two surrogate children when on TV there was a person asking a homosexual if the adopted children of a gay man were not at risk of being raped. On the other hand, at the time he seemed to me an ordinary character “look how he shows all his money”, but investigating his time in Miami, his friendships with Gianni Versace, the beers with Madonna, the champagne in the clubs with the cream of clubber culture of the 90s, I realized that I was in front of a figure of cultural relevance. That was my discovery.
PAC: The answer to what we discovered is in the series. You start with the frivolity, the media part, the excesses, its most arrogant side and, As you progress and you are removing the layers, you are seeing the weakness. It’s like a hero’s path in which when you finish the series you love him more than when you started it. The different Ricardo is there.
Q: What do you think will be the attractiveness of this series outside of Argentina where Fort is an unknown character?
PAC: For me, Ricardo’s appeal at the regional level is that he was a bad millionaire who didn’t make a fortune, that he spent it on him, which is the desire of any person and generally that millionaires cannot do it. Then That side of the bad millionaire, irreverent and contradictory seems attractive to any audience.
EF: He is an absolutely Argentine character at Maradonian levels of a public figure, which makes it impossible for me to think how he can be seen from the outside because, for example, in Mexico there are many millionaires like that, who are drug traffickers and drive Rolls Royce down the street. but Ricardo he was far from being a narco: he had a chocolate factory and all his money belonged to him legally. It is half the dream of the global kid, this revenge of having felt repressed by the gaze of others and saying “I am all powerful”; It’s like being bitten by Spiderman’s spider but in the form of a bank transfer.
Telam Agency
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