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I’ve wanted to make a film in Switzerland for a long time. In France we know nothing about Switzerland – like Belgium, it’s the object of rather stupid jokes. Some of its people speak French, but they aren’t French. For me, Switzerland is a metaphor of the world to come. Switzerland is the birthplace of Dadaism, but also the World Bank, and terrorist activities of every sort. It’s a place of refuge for revolutionaries and tyrants, money and dictators. Everything gets recycled in Switzerland, and no one sees it. Nuances become all-important _That Day, as a black comedy murder mystery, is a homage to Friedrich Dürrenmatt. He’s a writer I like a lot, a perfect mixture of oneirism and moralism, a Jansenist Kafka, and very political too. He wrote a fine detective novel twenty years before his death, that he never finished; he published it incomplete. In the film’s credits it says: ‘Based on a novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, with a solution by Raúl Ruiz’. My inspiration came from Dürrenmatt, Max Frisch, and Swiss films _It’s true that in talking about Switzerland, I’m really talking about Chile. The relation between the two countries rests essentially on the fact that everyone is complicit, aware, mixing and laughing with the victims. In both cases there’s the banality of evil, false laughter and sickly pleasantries. Raúl Ruiz