Jordi Molto (Barcelona, ​​1977) He has been writing scripts and creating sections for radio and television for more than twenty years. He has worked with directors such as Jordi Gonzalez, Xavier Sarda and Pablo Motos (El Hormiguero 3.0, Antena 3), with whom he continues to collaborate with his own space where characters such as the German reporter Wolfgang Maier, the grandfather of reggaeton Daddy Melquiades or the hidden cameras starring the elderly that have gone viral all over the world. In 2015, he wrote with the veteran Juan Herrera the book Marca Espana, because Spain is different.
-How do you think of intertwining generations in your reports and videos now that there is nothing more to talk about than market niches and things like that
-Because I think there is a new and totally interesting place in that generational clash. When you ask a 15-year-old boy to prepare an Italian coffee machine and you observe how he introduces the coffee in the upper compartment and not in the funnel and that in turn the old man pours the water into the slot where the Nespresso capsule is deposited , there is truth. There is comedy and at the same time there is tragedy. This misunderstanding between the analog world on the part of the children and the digital world on the part of the grandparents is wonderful. We had a guy put the coffee maker in the oven to bring it to a boil.
-What story in El Hormiguero would you highlight
-They all leave their mark, but Zorimar Betancourt’s marked me a lot, the woman who once again listened to the heart of her son Stefano through the person who received his heart. It was exciting to experience the moment when they listened to Stefano’s heartbeat together through a stethoscope.
-Your reggaeton grandfather Daddy Melquiades has been around the world…
-It has been a gift. When you write a script without any expectations, as was the case with the Daddy Melquiades sketch, and you see that a viral phenomenon that reaches 300 million views on YouTube arises from that occurrence, that sensation is blessed glory.
-Around the world with a joke.
-Melquiades and myself spent three weeks offering Skype interviews to Argentine, Cuban and Chilean programs. And the fireworks came when we crossed the ocean to be interviewed on Miami’s leading talk show, Don Francisco Te Invita. If it was a shock for me, imagine what it must have been like for a 92-year-old man who had dedicated his whole life to collecting tickets for a bus line in Madrid and who had never left Spain.
-What is Melquiades like
-This man is pure gold. In addition to having an innate talent for humor, he is a very good person. He is generous, he has nobility. He is madly in love with his wife, Teresa, whom he calls “My Post-it” and with whom he has been married for more than 60 years.
-What secret do you have to do your castings in the homes of the pensioner
-I use the same system as when I started: I go to a center for the elderly and start chatting with them in a friendly way, as if I were a grandson. They tell me their lives and then I pay close attention to their way of narrating, to the tempo of speech and diction. And in the story I tell them to introduce some absurd or surreal element, like that they suffered an alien abduction with a friend or that they froze in the middle of a Marian apparition. If that’s credible, then we have a strong candidate for the recording.
-Which character wanted to have him and resisted
-With Serrat. The first time I tried it I was 17 years old. I met him at the exit of a theater and went for him to grant me an interview. I got a huge rant because it was my fault that people began to approach him asking for autographs. Since then more than twenty years have passed and, after five attempts, El Nen del Poble Sec continues to resist me.
-Of your challenges with illustrious people, who do you stay with
-With Jose Luis Perales, who starred in the video of the fan sick with cancer. Perales is a gentleman who dresses by the feet.
-How is the atmosphere in a program like El Hormiguero 3.0
-This is the 13th season and the team is so veteran that the atmosphere is very familiar. And since every day is different due to cars falling from rooftops, watermelons that explode due to the pressure of rubber bands or apples that hang from a magician’s head pierced by arrows, there is an atmosphere of unpredictability that makes every day different. .
-What work that we don’t see at home do you think we should value
-Every minute of El Hormiguero is meticulously elaborated. It may have taken months of preparation although for the viewer, after all, it is only a minute.
-And they are always in the crosshairs of the networks.
-It is normal for a leading audience program to be the object of criticism and stares. A year ago there was too much commotion in the networks at the hands of a handful of haters who wrote malicious and unobjective articles (you just had to read the headline). Basically, they were only looking for the highest number of likes and shares: exactly how any fake news works.
-You wrote Marca Espana with Juan Herrera, what are we like as a country
-A contradictory and very romantic country where people shout too much; Spain is the second noisiest country in the world. But where it never comes to blows. That contradiction and romanticism Juan Herrera defines it very well: “In Spain it is mandatory to wear a helmet to ride a bike, but to run in front of a bull we just need a rolled-up newspaper.”
-How could we improve that mark
-Definitively breaking with that feeling of inferiority that we have with respect to Europe.
