Pablo Larraín

Pablo Larraín is a Chilean film director, producer, and screenwriter known for acclaimed works including No, Jackie, and The Club. His cinema often explores political themes, having earned recognition such as an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. He co-founded the production company Fábula, which has been instrumental in the development of the modern Chilean film industry.

Pablo Larraín: The Insider Who Indicted His Own Class

In 2008 a Chilean director sent a film to Cannes about a man living under Pinochet's dictatorship who is obsessed with John Travolta's character from *Saturday Night Fever* — and who is also a serial killer. It was a startling way to make a political film: no torture chamber, no martyr, just a nation's moral rot expressed through a middle-aged man practising disco steps. The director was Pablo Larraín, and his own family sat on the other side of the country's political divide.

The Wrong Family for the Job

Pablo Larraín Matte was born on 19 August 1976 in Santiago — three years into the dictatorship — into one of Chile's prominent families. His father, Hernán Larraín, was a law professor who became a senator for the right-wing Independent Democratic Union. His mother, Magdalena Matte, served as minister of housing and urbanism under the conservative president Sebastián Piñera. Larraín himself backed Michelle Bachelet's centre-left presidential campaign in 2013, and has been unambiguous about where responsibility lies for the cultural devastation of the dictatorship years: the political right, he has said, "is directly responsible for what happened to culture during those years."

That sentence, spoken by a man with those parents, is the key to his whole career. Larraín is not an outsider throwing stones at an establishment. He is a member of it, describing the damage from inside, which is why his political films have their particular quality of intimacy and disgust rather than righteousness.

Fábula

He studied audiovisual communication at UNIACC University in Santiago, and in 2003, with his brother Juan de Dios, co-founded Fábula — the production company that has financed his own work and backed other filmmakers. This is not a footnote. The brothers co-produced Sebastián Lelio's *A Fantastic Woman* (2017), which became the first Chilean film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Larraín built the infrastructure that made a Chilean film industry viable at the same time as he built his own filmography.

His debut, *Fuga* (2005), won prizes at the Cartagena and Málaga festivals. Then came the run that made his name.

An Unintentional Trilogy

*Tony Manero* (2008) premiered at Cannes. *Post Mortem* (2010), about a coroner's assistant working through the 1973 coup, competed for the Golden Lion at Venice. *No* (2012) starred Gael García Bernal as an advertising executive hired to run the campaign against Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite — a film about defeating a dictator with jingles and soft-drink aesthetics. Together the three became known as the Pinochet trilogy, though Larraín did not set out to make a trilogy; the through-line emerged.

*No* became the first Chilean film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won the Art Cinema Award for best director at Cannes. Around the same period he made *Prófugos* (2011), the first series HBO Latin America produced in Chile, nominated for Best Drama Series at the International Emmys.

Priests, Poets, Presidents' Widows

*The Club* (2015), about four disgraced Catholic priests warehoused in a bleak seaside town, won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin. *Neruda* (2016) reunited him with García Bernal for an unorthodox account of the poet in exile. The same year brought his English-language debut, *Jackie*, with Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which won the Platform Prize at Toronto and brought Portman Oscar, Golden Globe and SAG nominations.

Then *Ema* (2019), premiered at Venice; *Spencer* (2021), with Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales, again drawing Oscar, Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations for its star; *El Conde* (2023), which returned to Pinochet by other means; and *Maria* (2024), his eleventh feature, with Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, premiered at Venice and nominated for Golden Globe and Critics Choice awards. He also directed the Apple TV+ miniseries *Lisey's Story* (2021).

The Anti-Biopic

Three films about three famous women could have been a formula. Larraín's stated premise makes formula impossible: "My personal starting point is to understand that you would never be able to capture anyone." What he pursues instead is "an illusion that works on a more emotional level and an intellectual level." He cast Stewart, he says, because beyond skill and elegance "she has the mystery" — and he prizes that above technique, noting that even after working closely with her, her enigma "remains intact," which he calls "the mark of a true movie star and artist." His summary of what he is actually chasing on set is almost mystical: "the incredible, spiritual mystery that comes out after you film someone."

Why Pablo Is Called a Genius

The specific capacity is oblique attack. Larraín consistently declines the direct route to his subject and finds a slanted one that reveals more. A dictatorship examined through a disco impersonator. A plebiscite that ended seventeen years of military rule told from inside an advertising agency. Jacqueline Kennedy rendered not as a historical figure but as a woman managing an image in the days after a murder. This is a compositional intelligence — the ability to identify the one strange entry point that makes a well-worn subject legible again — and it has held across a dozen films in two languages and three countries.

The counter-case has substance. His late-career pattern — a famous woman, a compressed time frame, an unreliable interiority, an unnerving score — has hardened into a recognisable house style, and what once felt like discovery can now feel like a system being reapplied. Critics of *Spencer* and *Maria* have found the approach mannered, its mystery a way of avoiding the harder work of explanation. His own account of his method leans on words like "illusion" and "spiritual mystery," which is candid but also conveniently unfalsifiable. And his standing rests partly on advantages he did not earn: family connections, a production company he owns, and the access those bring. What he did with them is the answer to that objection. He turned the family's political inheritance into evidence against it, and used Fábula to lift other Chilean directors — including the one who finally won Chile its Oscar.

Legacy

Larraín's ballots tell you where he came from — *2001*, *8½* and *Vertigo* on his 2012 Sight & Sound list; Kubrick, Cassavetes and Bergman on his 2021 Criterion selections. What he added was a way of filming national trauma that refuses both documentary sobriety and melodrama. Chilean cinema before him was a marginal presence at the major festivals. He got it its first Best Foreign Language Film nomination, produced its first win, and then went to Hollywood and taught it something about how to film a famous face.