Emerging from a bakery where he has just bought a birthday cake for his daughter, a man discovers his car has been towed. At her wedding reception, a bride realizes her new husband has been cheating on her. On an empty highway, the drivers of an Audi and a jalopy jockey for position and insult each other. Each of the six episodes in “Wild Tales,” an Argentine movie nominated for the Oscar for best foreign-language film, begins with a disagreeable incident drawn from daily life — but escalates from there into an almost baroque tale of revenge.
Damián Szifron, the 39-year-old director and writer of “Wild Tales,” said he wanted to make a movie about “the pleasures of losing control.” He admits to a kind of vicarious catharsis while writing the script, and wants viewers to experience the same sensation.
“Society is full of people who repress themselves, and thereby become depressed,” Mr. Szifron said in a recent interview. “We fantasize about what we could have done, what we should have said, and we argue to ourselves with an imaginary enemy who is no longer there. But some people explode. This is a movie about those who explode, and we can all understand why they explode.”
A black comedy, “Wild Tales” is the third feature directed by Mr. Szifron, who had a successful career writing and directing for Argentine television. The two-time Oscar winner Gustavo Santaolalla composed the film’s soundtrack, which varies greatly in style from one episode to the next, and among its producers is the Oscar-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, with whom Mr. Szifron clearly shares a fondness for over-the-top situations and characterizations.
With the unanticipated international success of his film, to be released in the United States this month by Sony Pictures Classics, Mr. Szifron has been spending a lot of time away from Argentina. In an interview by telephone from Los Angeles, he spoke in Spanish about the challenges and the satisfactions of making an anthology film. Here are edited excerpts:
Q.
Is it true that “Wild Tales” emerged almost by accident?
A.
Yes, it’s a series of scripts that liberated me as a writer. I was working for years on the writing of a science fiction project at the same time I was developing a western and a love story. These tales really began appearing. In the course of one night I would finish one, and then in an afternoon another. Their power resided in their brevity, and I had no desire to extend them. So almost without realizing it, I had in my hands a new feature-length project that had emerged painlessly.
Q.
Do any of the episodes come from real life, or were they all invented?
A.
All of them have some element arising from stories from people I know or situations I went through myself. I’ve been at weddings where many of us knew something that the bride didn’t and it seemed like something could happen at any moment that would have been catastrophic. And when I was a kid, there was somebody who made life almost impossible for my father, and many times I imagined taking revenge. But obviously I never carried it out. Also, the tow truck has taken my car away many times, sometimes in a very unfair manner, because the no-parking zone wasn’t adequately marked. And I understood how the bureaucracy is structured so that your complaints go nowhere, and finally you get tired and pay up because you don’t want to waste your life in these futile arguments. Clearly, what I have done is to transport all of these situations to the terrain of the imagination, and give free rein to all of the multiple possibilities of fiction.
Q.
Was it hard to convince producers and distributors that this format was viable?
A.
My producers supported it from the beginning, and in a very emphatic way. When we contacted various international distributors and sales agents, there, yes, qualms appeared. We were told that a movie with six episodes seemed awkward and inconvenient. But when they read the script, that sentiment dissipated. The thing is that there aren’t a lot of good experiences with films of this type.
But at the time of conceiving the film, I realized that I hadn’t been thinking about other movies, but that I had a rock album or concert in mind. I was thinking of concept albums or a jazz album where you have five or six tracks that are part of the same conspiracy, interpreted by the same instruments, but each track has its own identity. Another reference I had with this movie was the circus.
Q.
Really? That surprises me. How so?
A.
When I was a kid, I loved the circus, and my father would often take me. It was all one spectacle of two hours duration, but the different acts had value for different reasons. When the acrobats are performing, what is in play is balance, and when it’s the magician’s turn, it’s mystery and suspense. Then comes the lion tamer, and that’s all about bravery and confronting wild animals. But at the same time, it all feels like part of the same spectacle. And the movie has a bit of that.
Q.
Were the scripts given to certain actors thinking that they would be in a particular episode? Or could they choose the part most attractive to them?
A.
I knew I wanted to work with Ricardo Darin and Oscar Martinez, and so I imagined them as more than one character, and I liked that. So I gave then the script and asked which character they felt most comfortable with and attracted to.
Q.
Let’s talk a bit about the Oscar, because you’re a rookie in this, no? What are your aspirations?
A.
At this moment, my entire organism is overtaken more by a sentiment of gratitude than ambition. I am very thankful and fascinated by everything that is happening with the movie, and don’t demand or expect anything more. This movie has been sold all over the world, it was shown at Cannes. Thanks to “Wild Tales,” many doors have opened, and I am receiving a lot of offers, invitations to do things in English, which also are of interest to me. I’m going to take a couple of months to figure out exactly what I’m going to do. But let’s just say that the horizon of possibilities has expanded.
Q.
So if you don’t win, you’re not going to explode like one of your characters?
A.
[Laughs] Absolutely not.
