Cine Mexicano Magazine by Ana Villarreal

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Cine Mexicano

HOLLY WOOD'S KING OF PAIN 1

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Cine Mexicano The Eternal Femenine, 2016

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Cine Mexicano

October 2017

Now playing Highlights of Mexican films in theaters this month.

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Festivals

Most Anticipated Presenting the most promising films of the next few months.

Official Introduction for the 15th Morelia International Film Festival.

Review

Events Alejandro Iñárritu’s virtual reality project takes film to new frontiers – and questions.

Jonas Cuarón's "Desierto" is a horror movie for the age of Trump.

International Spotlight Gael García Bernal on Playing an Enfant Terrible in Mozart in the Jungle.

The Golden Age A look at one of Mexico's most notable films of all time – Luis Buñuel's "The Young and the Damned".

Interview Karla Souza on being Mexican – American and celebrating her immigrant culture.

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A Circuitous Route to Outer Space Alfonso Cuarón Discusses His Films.

Hollywood's King of Pain

How the director of "The Revenant" pushed his stars and crew to the edge of sanity – and created a modern epic.

Club de Cuervos: Making Netflix History Gaz Alazraki’s Netflix Hit debuts its third season.

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contributors Silvano Aureoles Lauren Kelly Alejandro RamĂrez Charles McGrath Steven Zeitchik

Xaque Gruber

Eric Kohn

Mark Binelli

Patricia Garcia Pauline Kael

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Now Playing

october 2017

THE UNTAMED

TEMPESTAD

RELEASE: JULY 21, 2017 DIR: AMAT ESCALANTE LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DRAMA / SCI-FI

RELEASE: MAY 19, A2017 DIR: TATIANA HUEZO LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DOCUMENTARY

Alejandra is a young mother and housewife who raises her children with her husband Angel in a small town. His brother Fabian is a nurse at a local hospital. Their provincial lives are altered with the arrival of the mysterious Veronica. Sex and love are fragile in certain regions where family values exist and hypocrisy, homophobia, and sexism are strong. Veronica convinces them that in the nearby forest, in a secluded cabin, there is something that is not of this world but that is the answer to all your problemas.Es something whose force can not resist and what to do with peace or suffer his wrath.

Two women, their voices echoing over the landscape and highways of Mexico from North to South, tell how official corruption and injustice allowed violence to take control of their lives. The film is a meditation on corruption and on the notion of “impunidad,” the impunity or unaccountability of those in power, whether part of the Mexican government or the country’s drug cartels. An emotional and evocative journey, steeped not only in loss and pain, but also in love, dignity and resistance.

(LA REGIÓN SALVAJE, 2016)

(2016)

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THE NIGHT GUARD

MADE IN BANGKOK

RELEASE: OCTOBER 2016 DIR: DIEGO ROS LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DRAMA

RELEASE: MARCH 9, 2015 DIR: FLAVIO FLORENCIO LANG: SPANISH GENRE: COMEDY/DOCUMENTARY/DRAMA

A single night in the life of a security guard on a mountainside construction site becomes a dark night of the soul for its hapless hero in The Night Guard, the striking helming debut from former film editor Diego Ros. Combining a nicely impassive, almost at times comic performance from Leonardo Alonso as the titular hero – a good man in a bad, bad world – with thriller elements and a constant, air of quiet menace, Night Guard is a wonderfully atmospheric, slightly off-kilter piece through which evil, gently and troublingly pulsates, as well as being a solid calling card from a first-time director whose next move will be watched with interest.

Morgana is a transgender soprano with a relentless determination to fight against social stigma and family prejudice to attain the universal milestone of asserting herself as a human being with societal recognition and dignity. To this end, he embarks on an odyssey to build an identity for which he has been persecuted throughout his life, an identity made in Bangkok. “Made in Bangkok” premiered at Guadalajara FICG 2015’s Premio Maguey Section where it won the Press Award for Best Documentary. Its U.S. premiere happened last week at FICG in L.A.

(EL VIGILANTE, 2016)

(2015)

Now Playing

SUCH IS LIFE IN THE TROPICS (2016)

UN CUENTO DE CIRCO & A LOVE SONG (2016)

RELEASE: SEPTEMBER 2, 2016 DIR: SEBASTIAN CORDERO LANG: SPANISH GENRE: THRILLER

RELEASE: 2016 DIR: DEMIAN BICHIR LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DRAMA/ROMANCE

A co-production between Mexico and Ecuador, it was selected as Ecuador’s submission to the Best Foreign Film category at the 89th Academy Awards. Going straight to the paradoxical heart of the matter, Sebastian Cordero’s assured sixth feature opens with serene imagery of pristine nature. Then a shot rings out. The movie is a saga of dirty intrigue involving a disputed piece of land. Accidental deaths and murderous machinations both figure in the gripping chain of events in Such Is Life in the Tropics, whose original Spanish title, Sin muertos no hay carnaval, is taken from a revealing line of dialogue, spoken by one of the haves regarding the expendable have-nots: “You need some death to celebrate a carnival.”

Refugio, a romantic dreamer whose years long quest to find true love takes him from the circus life in Mexico to the nightlife of New Orleans, where he unexpectedly falls for a beautiful exotic dancer with a complicated past and a dangerous ex-lover who refuses to let her go. Refugio doesn’t know that Juan, the man who saved his life, is his own father. Fate has brought them together 30 years after tearing them apart, when Juan abandoned their circus carrying a terrible secret. Refugio has grown up in this circus but in search of his lost love he embarks upon an emotional journey from his hometown in Mexico to the streets of New Orleans. This is a tale about the possibility of love, redemption and fate.

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THE EMPTY BOX

RENCOR TATUADO

RELEASE: MARCH 10, 2017 DIR: CLAUDIA SAINTE-LUCE LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DRAMA

RELEASE: MARCH 9, 2015 DIR: FLAVIO FLORENCIO LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DOCUMENTARY

Jazmin (played by the director herself, in an incredible performance), a young woman living in Mexico City, is nonplussed when she receives a call informing her that her father, Toussaint (Jimmy Jean-Louis), an illegal Haitian immigrant, is ill. She hasn’t seen him in years, and does not know why they are calling her. When she finally gets to the hospital and discovers that her father is suffering from vascular dementia, she finds herself faced with the task of caring for a man who is more a stranger than a father to her. But Toussaint, a lifelong drifter, has no one else, so Jazmin brings him to her apartment where she lives alone with her cat.

Director Julián Hernández, returns with his new work ‘Rencor tatuado’, which features actress Diana Lein in the lead role, the film includes participation from Itatí Cantoral, Giovanna Zacarías, Mónica del Carmen and Andrea Portal. The story is set in Mexico City in the 1990's, where a group of raped women seek revenge through Aída, a photographer that for reasons like harassment and kidnappings, finds herself interested in discovering a human trafficking network that among its prisoners has transexual people. Aída seduces, drugs and tattoos the transgresors so that they may never forget their crimes.

(LA CAJA VACIA, 2016)

(2015)

Now Playing

THE CHOSEN

THE ETERNAL FEMENINE

(EL ELEJIDO, 2016)

(LOS ADIOSES, 2016) RELEASE: SEPTEMBER 2, 2016 DIR: ANTONIO CHAVARRÍAS LANG: ENGLISH GENRE: DRAMA

RELEASE: MAY 15, 2016 DIR: NATALIA BERISTÁIN LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DRAMA

In August 1940 in Mexico, Stalin’s old rival Leon Trotsky was killed in his office on Stalin’s orders with a pickaxe to the head by a man who the victim thought was called “Frank Jacson,” a suspiciously misspelled surname which at the time raised no suspicions. But the killer’s name was not in fact Jacson. Jacson was a Spanish communist, Ramon Mercader, and The Chosen, Antonio Chavarrias’ most ambitious film to date following several well-received small-scale psychological social crit dramas, does a solid job of eking out the suspense and intrigue that this summary implies.

Rosario Castellano is an introverted university student who doesn’t seem to belong to her time. In the early 1950s in Mexico City, she is fighting to have voice heard in a society run by men. She is about to become one of the biggest female writers in Mexican literature, but her tumultuous love story with Ricardo Guerra will manifest her fragility and contradictions. At the peak of her career and her marriage, she will ignite a discussion that will mark a turning point in her life. “It’s the most singular biopic that I’ve seen in many years,” Woo Films’ Rafael Ley, one of the film’s producers, enthuses about the film.

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EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY (2017)

THE KIDS ARE BACK

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 17, 2017 DIR: CATALINA AGUILAR MASTRETTA LANG: SPANISH/ENGLISH GENRE: COMEDY/ROMANCE

RELEASE: OCTOBER 24, 2017 DIR: HUGO LARA LANG: SPANISH GENRE: COMEDY

On the surface, the young and beautiful Clara Barron (Karla Souza) seems to have everything- a great job as an OB-GYN; a great house in LA; and a big fun-loving Mexican family. But, the one thing Clara doesn’t have figured out is her love life. Pressured by a family wedding in Mexico, Clara asks a co-worker to pose as her boyfriend for the weekend festivities, only to be caught by surprise when her ex- boyfriend (and family favorite) suddenly shows up after disappearing from her life completely. Torn, Clara must decide between going back to the past or open her heart to new and unexpected possibilities. In an adventure full of laughter, she learns that sometimes it takes the whole crazy family to help you find crazy love.”

Manuel and Adelina are a retired couple who live their lives in trainquility without many troubles. For different reasons, the three children of the matrimony, who had become independent a while back, are forced to returned to live with their parents. The peace that reigned in the house disappears and Manuel and Adelina draw up a plan to kick out their children and take back their home.

(CUANDO LOS HIJOS REGRESAN, 2017)

Most Anticipated

most anticipated

ROMA

WHERE LIFE IS BORN

(2018)

(DONDE NACE LA VIDA, 2018) RELEASE:2018 DIR: ALFONSO CUARON LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DRAMA / SCI-FI

RELEASE: 2018 DIR: CARLOS REYGADAS LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DRAMA

When Alfonso Cuarón’s new movie “Roma” opens in 2018, it will have been four years since “Gravity” won him the Oscar for Best Director. The long wait for new material has been painful for fans of the “Children of Men” visionary, and while we still have months to go before “Roma” debuts, an exclusive first look has arrived courtesy of our behind-the-scenes sneak peek below. Full plot details for “Roma” are remaining under wraps for now, though we do know it will chronicle a year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s. The drama marks the first feature Cuarón has made in Mexico since his breakthrough “Y Tu Mama Tambien.”

Director Carlos Reygadas will star in his new film “Where Life is Born”. Reygadas will play Juan, a man living in an open marriage, The conflicts begin when his wife Esther falls in love with another man, Juan looks to fulfill the expectations that he has on himself. Since 2015, Reygadas had already informed that he was conducting the casting process and also confirmed in an interview with El Universal that in this new film he would be working with professional actors. The story of ‘caporales’ (herdmen) takes place in Tlaxcala, Mexico y is set in the traditional world of bullfighting.

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CAMINO A MARTE

BELZEBUTH

RELEASE:2018 DIR: HUMBERTO HINOJOSA OZCARIZ LANG: SPANISH GENRE: DRAMA / COMEDY

RELEASE: 2018 DIR: EMILIO PORTES LANG: SPANISH GENRE: HORROR

What would you do if you and your friend were taking a road trip down Baja and stumbled upon a guy who claimed to be from another planet? Better yet, what if he looked just like Club de Cuervos‘ Luis Gerardo Méndez? If you’re Violeta and Emilia (played by Camila Sodi and Tessa Ia), you give the cute, bearded weirdo a ride and engage him in deep discussions about life and love as you admire the beautiful vistas around you. Emilia, who suffers from a terminal illness, embarks on a journey with her best friend Violeta. On their way they meet Mark, who claims to be an alien on a mission to destroy the planet for considering humanity (and love) a virus. However, Mark begins to doubt his mission falling in love with Emilia.

While there’s always been a certain darkness to the films of Mexico’s Emilio Portes - winner of a fistful of Mexican academy awards for his Alex de la Iglesia styled action horror comedy Pastorela - that darkness has always been balanced out against a certain playfulness. But not this time. Not when you’re dealing with the story of renegade priests and the slaughter of innocent children to clear a path for the arrival of the antichrist. Portes’ next will be the very serious minded horror effort Belzebuth, a film that clearly has plans to expand Portes’ international audience playing out in a blend of English and Spanish as the fight against the devil spans both sides of the border while pulling in a bearded - and bloody - Tobin Bell alongside iconic Mexican actor Joaquin Cosio.

(2018)

Festivals

morelia film festival by Silvano Aureoles and Alejandro RamĂrez MagaĂąa

Official introduction for the 15th FICM: a place of culture and freedom.

ifteen years ago, the name “Morelia” began to appear in the history of cinema in Mexico, and it started to echo throughout important spheres devoted to the seventh art at the international level. In this city, with its humanist spirit and libertarian vocation, the Morelia International Film Festival was founded in order to make spaces accessible to Mexican directors, as well as to genres and formats excluded from commercial exhibition. Now in its fifteenth year, we celebrate the existence of the Morelia International Film Festival and acknowledge the efforts of its organizers—not only in completely fulfilling their objectives, but also in creating an entire film culture that dynamizes the Mexican industry. This gathering has unquestionably become a seedbed of talent that enriches our national filmography. During this time, great artists like Werner Herzog, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Nyman, and Juliette Binoche, among many others, have left an indelible mark on the city’s memory. In turn, they have brought back stories of Michoacán: a state with such beauty and diversity in its natural settings, with such a rich background in traditions, art, and culture, that it seems predestined for cinema. 21

We are the soul of Mexico!

Festivals

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The Morelia International Film Festival is a beloved presence for those of us who come together here: indeed, it resignies the seventh art as an act of collective communion. We firmly believe that in this gathering, sheltered by diverse cultural expressions, we practice new ways of understanding our society and our own human condition. For these reasons, the state government supports this cinematic encounter, which has never ceased to believe in Michoacán—and which has even helped us hold our heads high in moments of adversity, revaluing ourselves as a state that has much to offer and always forges ahead. All guests of the Festival are friends of Morelia. Explore our state’s geography; discover that, besides the chance to experience film, this great place called Michoacán contains infinite stories to be told, as has been done since the very origins of cinema in Mexico. All you need to do is wait for the lights to go out. There, in the silent darkness of the theater, life is reborn under the cinematographer’s light—and we will probably reinvent ourselves, too, once we have glimpsed other ways of undergoing the human experience. Let’s let cinema work its magic! Long life to the Morelia International Film Festival! — Silvano Aureoles Conejo, Governor of the State of Michoacán This October, the Morelia International Film Festival celebrates its fifteenth year. These have been fifteen years of constant growth, continual learning, coexistence, and shared ideas—and, above all, of fine cinema. Culture is an essential right and an engine for societal development. Such principles prompted us to launch this festival, which has gradually become a platform for analyzing and reflecting on our realities, a space for communication that contributes to the debate of necessary ideas toward building a better country. From the very beginning, the goal underlying our work has been to offer a showcase for Mexican cinema. To gather Mexican films and show them to the world; to bring them into con-

tact with those made in other parts of the globe; and, most of all, to put them within reach of an audience hungry for diverse cultural options, have been—and will continue to be—our chief objectives. Over the past fifteen years, we have been privileged witnesses to the growth of Mexican film production, and we have excitedly watched countless young people establish themselves as artists and directors after launching their careers at our festival. As of FICM’s very first year, we have been ceaselessly grateful to those who believed that this initiative was worthwhile. Without their support, and without the 23

Festivals

enthusiasm of Morelia’s residents, none of this would have been possible. We wish to thank all public institutions, businesses, and people who have enabled us to celebrate cinema for fifteen years. We are also grateful to the film community, both national and international, for trusting us to show their work here. Ever since Werner Herzog and Barbet Schroeder walked the streets of this city in 2003, countless outstanding directors have visited us to share their wisdom and experience with everyone, making Morelia a red-letter event on the global calendar of film festivals. Throughout these fifteen years of work, we have always had an enthusiastic group of contributors who wear themselves out for every festival. For five lustrums of togetherness, we have seen them grow professionally, laugh, cry, panic, relax, argue, embrace, love each other, hate each other, and make up; we have seen them become mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers; we have seen them pursue changes and new horizons—everything that happens in every family. To those who have gone, we miss you, and we honor your memory by trying to live up to your example. Thank you, family, for all your hard work, and for making this film-focused space such an open, pluralistic, diverse, and respectful one. This year, as always, we will present a meticulously curated selection of the very best Mexican and international films for the enjoyment of those who visit our movie theaters and open plazas. We will host a memorable celebration, as every quinceañera birthday party should be. All are welcome to join us as we revel in film. Come, friends—quinceañeras and special guests— and dance this waltz with us. — Alejandro Ramírez Magaña, President •••

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Events

iñárritu’s virtual reality by Steven Zeitchik

Alejandro González Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki created a virtual-reality project, "Carne y Arena," that puts the viewer in the desert with Latin American immigrants under assault. (Emmanuel Lubezki)

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Alejandro Iñárritu’s virtual reality project takes film to new frontiers —and questions.

s virtual-reality entertainment began to gain currency over the last few years, two key questions have emerged: Will the mainstream film community embrace it? And in what form? The first question is increasingly heading to an emphatic yes, underscored most recently at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where organizers for the first time included a VR project in its Official Selection. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s ”Carne y Arena,” by the Oscar-winning director of “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” is a multi-platform experience that includes a VR film; it is so sprawling the festival installed it in an airplane hangar 20 minutes outside downtown Cannes. The project has both Hollywood bona fides — it was partly funded by the studio heavyweight Legendary Entertainment — and the stamp of the art house community, for which Cannes is a holy site. Answers to the question about form, however, remain far more ambiguous. “Carne y Arena” tells the story of Latin American immigrants attempting to cross into the United States through the Arizona desert when they are caught by U.S. authorities. Iñárritu and his frequent cinematography collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, who goes by “Chivo,” located real people who suffered the torturous journey and had them reenact it on camera; they then shot their stories with VR’s 360-degree sweep and in-your-face urgency. Viewers experience the film in a highly curatorial way. The piece is flanked by an art installation — on-screen testimony, a re-

“Until you feel it — until you feel what it’s like to be 20 years old, not left wing or riwht wing or any wing — you can’t really talk about it.” — Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Director.

constructed holding pen — while the movie itself is a “walking” VR piece that allows the audience members to wander around the desert, a sand-strewn space the size of several volleyball courts, wearing Oculus Rift head sets. A version will come this summer to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it’s expected to run for several months, welcoming one museum patron at a time; “Carne” also will open in a few weeks at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. The six-minute piece begins with a desperate group of immigrants straggling into sight, led by their “coyote” smugglers. But the windswept quiet is soon jolted by a heavens- rattling military helicopter. In an instant, the terrain is turned into a “Children of Men”- style horror show. As guns are pointed and orders barked, the immigrants drop to their knees. So too can the viewer; the virtue of VR is the ability to walk up to and around a film’s subjects, almost like one holds an invisibility force field. “This is very different from the rhetoric and the politics,” Iñárritu said in a joint interview with Chivo on the first Sunday of the festival. “Until you feel it — until you feel what it’s like to be 20 years old, not left wing or right wing or any wing — going through something like this, you can’t really talk about it.” 27

The subject matter is not new to VR. Border stories have been explored for years by many of the medium’s preeminent filmmakers (especially the former USC pioneer Nonny de la Peña), and the air of novelty put forth by those promoting the project will be met by VR veterans with a measure of skepticism. What Iñárritu has done differently is offer a sense of scope and scale — much like a studio director who adapts the techniques of an independent filmmaker to a bigger canvas. There is an almost unprecedented vastness to the desert, which can seem peaceful until the cavalry arrives and turns it into a kind of wasteland prison. The use of a comparatively large budget (undisclosed) and whiz-bang technology also offers a level of hyper-realism that would have been unthinkable to filmmakers working with different tools or a shallower pocketbook. Beyond the question of the border story, whether documentary-style pieces are ideally suited for VR generally remains to be seen. Dropping a viewer into the action is one of the chief assets of the medium, making the documentary style a no-brainer. Whether it also is the most compelling — not to mention the most commercial — is another matter. Given their resumes, Iñár-

Events

ritu and Chivo might have seemed apt to press a fictional narrative — something live-action VR has been sorely missing — though, when asked, the pair hedged on whether they’d try that next. Still, the filmmakers would seem well disposed to VR from a technical standpoint, having used 360-degree camera techniques in “The Revenant” and “Birdman,” in which they at once broke cinema’s frame and worked within it. This time around they had no frame to break, just a cover-every-pixel process they described as being as vexing as it was liberating. “It’s a completely different medium. You can’t use the tools we’ve developed in film for over 100 years,” Chivo said. “We came in with two cameras thinking we’d block everything and then shoot it. And we realized that was very naive.” To hear the pair talk with fresh wonderment about the form — the need for new grammar and the obsolescence of old techniques, the flouting of convention and the different rules of consumption — is to listen to conversations that many in the VR community have long had and, in a sense, moved past. Still, such remarks are noteworthy. They offer a glimpse at the sometimes uneasy dynamic that occurs when the artistic establishment in one form begins discovering another, like when rock musicians first stumbled upon an already thriving world of hip- hop beats. Hollywood and VR still need to work out cultural differences too. The notion is highlighted by the unusual layers of Hollywood bureaucracy around seeing “Carne” and interviewing principals at Cannes, which clashes with the informality and filmmaker accessibility that has until now characterized the space. Even the matter of what to call these new pieces has been complicated — a point whose seeming insignificance is belied by the number of emails sent to journalists at Cannes exhorting them to call “Carne” an “art installation” instead of a film. 28

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“ We came in with two cameras thinking we’d block everything and then shoot it. And we realized that was very naive. ” – Emmanuel Lubezki, Cinematographer.

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, right, on the set of a VR project that puts you in the desert with Latin American immigrants under assault. (Chachi Ramirez)

The presence of “Carne” at the festival makes for a tricky juxtaposition. Much of the Sturm und Drang at the festival around digital technology has been centered on Netflix, which with two films in competition has provoked a backlash from French theater owners and plenty of headlines. But in a way, streaming services are not the real disrupters. They may upset theater owners, but they keep intact many of the film industry’s long-standing rules and players. Hollywood in the Netflix age is doing what it has always done, it is just delivering film differently. VR, though, upends the game much more significantly, changing the very way stories are told and — since hardly every filmmaker is as game as Iñárritu and Lubezki — who will tell them too. That is far more anathema to the ideology of Cannes, which reveres cinema and its masters like few others. This makes it all the more surprising that festival director Thierry Frémaux enthusiastically persuaded a skeptical Iñárritu to bring the piece here (at least as the filmmaker explained it), instead of the other way around. If VR takes off as a storytelling medium, the idea of people gathering in plush theaters named after French artistic greats to watch two-hour slices of edited film could seem as quaint as the masses gathering for the latest Bizet debut. In that regard, at least, Iñárritu and Chivo are ahead of the curve when they say that VR could soon become a much bigger part of film fans’ diet. “I think it could be less than 10 years when kids look at a movie on a [traditional] screen and say, ‘You used to watch things on that?’” Chivo said. In the meantime, filmmakers are ranging around to match content and medium. “We are using the highest technology to express the stories of the people treated like the lowest in society,” Inarritu said. “It is virtual reality to express a bad reality.”” What other kinds of reality — and whether it needs to be real at all — still needs to be sussed out. Maybe at future festivals. • • •

Review

DESIERTO by Eric Kohn

ive “Desierto” credit for this: There has never been a more appropriate time for a tense thriller about Mexican immigrants avoiding the murderous advances of a gun-wielding American lunatic. Released a little over a year after Donald Trump labeled the majority of undocumented Mexicans living in the U.S. as drug-dealing rapists in the same breath as announcing his presidency, the first feature from director Jonas Cuarón (the son of “Gravity” director Alfonso, with whom the younger Cuarón wrote the screenplay) doesn’t deliver much in the way of ingenuity. But it’s baked in a topical kind of dread. “Desierto” takes the form of a minimalist B-movie, spending only a modicum of time setting up the premise before set30

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Donald Trump’s campaign makes this violent thriller more engaging than it looks. tling into the prolonged cat-and-mouth dynamic that dominates the story. After a handful of Mexicans assemble on the outskirts of the U.S. border, surrounded by barren desert, their transit hits an abrupt when the militant Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, gruff, scowling and unapologetically one-note) takes aim at the group through the scope of his rifle. In a series of alarming shots, their numbers quickly dwindle, leaving a handful of survivors to sneak around the rocks in the hopes of avoiding Sam’s murderous intentions.It doesn’t take a literature doctorate to comprehend the symbolism of the character’s name: The whole movie functions as a prolonged metaphor, though it fares better at stating the terms of the situation than digging into their causes. The hero of this taut scenario is Moises (Gael Garcia Bernal), an experienced traveler who takes advantage of the terrain to survive the ordeal even as the body count rises. Bernal’s soft features and small build make him the ideal antithesis to the growling macho lunatic who fires off endless rounds at the survivor, though the routine grows tedious with time. Despite the gorgeous, red-tinted scenery captured by cinematographer Damian Garcia and a jarring sound design that pierces quieter sequences with abrupt gunfire, “Desierto” doesn’t do much with its world beyond setting poor Moises loose in an awful situation as he dodges and ducks his way to freedom. It might have worked better as an arcade game. But that same underlying simplicity often makes “Desierto” just compelling enough to hold immediate appeal. The migrant workers offer hints of fragmented lives on both sides of the border, but the limited setting reduces their struggle to an abstract plane, to the point where the movie’s ongoing battle reaches an abstract level. 31

Review

Imagine Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry” directed by Roger Corman and you might start to get a sense for the scrappy appeal that guides the movie along. It has the scope of a big-screen showdown but falls short of placing sophisticated characters within it. Sam, whose ridiculous babblings reach an absurd extreme in his final scenes, sounds like the parody of a Trump supporter who lost his way to the rally. Spouting blunt threats at every moment, he’s about as much fun to watch. “Desierto” throws subtlety to the wind, but not without purpose. Viewed in a broader context, it clarifies the extremes of nativistic impulses that initially gave the Trump campaign its horrifying boost in the polls; with few details about the timing of its events, the movie may as well take place in a near-future in which the Republican candidate has taken charge. But then again, Trump doesn’t have to win for the insanity of the Sam character to resonate. Some 6.5 million undocumented Mexicans live in the United States, a figure that should reflect the desperation of people who need the help of their more powerful country next door; instead, it has been simplified into the fuel for another Red Scare. “Desierto” lingers in the harsh depiction of fear that morphs into psychosis. One wellchoreographed car crash arrives just when it seems like the surviving characters might make it out alive, underscoring the sense of uncertainty about their situation at every turn. “Desierto” includes one twist that implies legitimate authorities can do little to rectify the criminal acts at the center of the plot. Instead, Cuarón suggests that the border control issues come down to every man for himself. The purgatorial quality of the desert landscape becomes a battleground unlikely to go away anytime soon, no matter who controls the terms of the conversation about its existence.

Grade: B•••

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International Spotlight

mozart in the jungle by Patricia Garcia

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Gael García Bernal on Playing an Enfant Terrible in Mozart in the Jungle.

fter the success of Transparent, Amazon is renewing another original series just in time for the holidays. The latest season of Mozart in the Jungle, premieres on December 23 and is set in the world of classical music. Gael García Bernal plays enfant terrible composer Rodrigo, whose appointment as head conductor of a New York City orchestra has caused a stir among staid conservatives who used to run the show. While music fans are sure to love the series, there’s also enough scheming, sex, and behind-the-curtain intrigue to interest viewers who don’t know the difference between Strauss and Schubert. Bernal spoke with Cine Mexicano about his first big foray into television (if you can still call it that), the inspiration behind Rodrigo, and the one show he can’t stop streaming online.

What attracted you to this specific character? The world of classical music is so fascinating. It’s a world that encompasses people from everywhere and erases the basic restraints of nationality; everyone is united by this common language of music. That was very exciting to me to be part of. Were you a fan of classical music before you came on the show? A fan? No, but I appreciated it and respected it and listened to it every now and then; but I didn’t follow it. Now thanks to the show, I’m closer, but I still can’t call myself a hardcore fan because there are still so many things I need to listen to. Your character in the show, Rodrigo, looks a lot like composer Gustavo Dudamel. Is that just a coincidence?

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(Laughs) I mean the character is based on every conductor, from Dudamel to (Vittorio) Monti to Claudio Abbado to (Leonard) Bernstein to (Herbert von) Karajan. Did you see a lot of concerts to prepare for your role as a composer? Not as much as I would like to because there’s not enough time! I’m in different parts of the world and these things happen in such a small space, but YouTube is a great place for seeing people from different countries. Mozart in the Jungle is your first major TV series. How was this different than filming a movie? Well the result and the expectations are really interesting because they are very immediate; I mean, we just finished shooting like four weeks ago. What do you think of this new kind of TV experience online? I have no clue where this is going—this is beyond me. Perhaps this is a generational thing, but I can’t incorporate it yet into my system. It’s changing so much. If you go back to Fassbinder’s films or even Bergman’s films, they were made for television in a way, because they were episodic. This is where [the way we watch TV now] came from—it’s not new. But the format you can access this now, all in one go, in one weekend, it’s fantastic. Have you ever binge-watched anything online? I watched The Wire. It’s incredible. It’s absolutely incredible. I couldn’t stop watching it. That was the point when I realized this has a lot of reach, bigger reach than I thought that these things could have—it’s like the Balzac of the 21st century.

Any other shows you’ve been particularly drawn to? I don’t know, a lot of people go crazy about Breaking Bad, but I don’t like the soap opera aspect of it and only following one character. I like the context to all of it, all the pieces, like The Wire. It’s more about the state of things; it’s not about the narrative of a person. I mean, The Wire is the description of the world and the beginning of the century. What can we expect from you next? I’m doing a film called Desierto. I finished shooting it with Jonás Cuarón, son of (director) Alfonso Cuarón. And then... who knows? • • • 36

Interview

karla souza by Lauren Kelly

don’t watch a lot of movies with subtitles. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that subtitles require focus and when I’m home watching a movie, I’m likely also working, Instagram stalking, cooking food, playing indoor fetch with my dog, Swiffering, texting or doing some other random activity like painting my nails (who am I kidding? I never paint my nails). You know, it’s the whole girls-who-multitask thing. When I was invited to interview How to Get Away with Murder’s Karla Souza about her new film Everybody Loves Somebody, though, I was automatically in — even if it meant I was going to have to set aside two hours to just sit and watch the television screen. I am so glad I did. Everybody Loves Somebody is an incredible film that perfectly presents the Mexican culture and language in a way that movie lovers from all walks of life will love. I’m not Mexican. I’ve never really been to Mexico. All I know is that I love their food and think the Mexican culture is beautiful. But this film explores what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a Mexican-American woman and what it means to be in love. Check out what Karla Souza had to say about her new film Everybody Loves Somebody, representing Mexican-Americans in Hollywood and really embracing her roots. Lauren Kelly: I love that Everybody Loves Somebody is a bilingual film with both Spanish and English. I don’t think that we see many mainstream movies take the bilingual route. Do you think that’s something that should happen more often — like even Marvel films could have a character or two that speak a different language and have subtitles?

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On being Mexican-American and celebrating her immigrant culture.

KS: Oh, for sure. It represents the world as it is, and I think that, you know, the more inclusive we are with that, the better the movies and the better the representation of us will be. I think it’s not an easy task because there’s not enough Latino writers that are being given opportunities to write things — and I say this because I’ve been given a lot of bilingual movies in the past because of my career in Mexico, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s going to make sense for her to do this.” A lot of studios want to hit that demographic, but they sort of do it without starting in the right way, which is having someone who knows the culture, and enjoys the language as well, to be able to write these things. I would get very frus-

trated reading scripts that were bilingual but maybe not bicultural. And this one really loves both cultures, represents them in a very accurate, genuine, authentic, fun, fresh way, and it includes so many more people because it has that language aspect to it. And I hope that we start trendsetting, you know, like having bigger movies also include that. Because I think it’ll definitely change a lot of what’s going on right now. LK: Absolutely. I really enjoyed it. I know I’ve said that three times, but I just haven’t seen a movie that’s done it that well. It so perfectly hits a variety of demographics that maybe wouldn’t necessarily both go see this 39

movie, so I thought it was really genius. When you come across a situation like that, how empowered do you feel to let the “powers that be” know that they’re not hitting the culture aspect of it in the right way? KS: Oh, very. I don’t only say I won’t do it, which is probably the biggest sort of action that I could take. People follow my movies for a reason, and that’s because I believe in them, and I don’t want to just make movies for the sake of making movies. I felt really strongly about this script because, like you said, it’s a very specific way of life. It’s a very specific tone, and romantic comedies, if done badly, can be catastrophic. I

Interview

knew that [director/screenwriter] Catalina Aguilar Mastretta had an amazing take on the female psyche and the modern woman and the modern immigrant woman living in the U.S., and I really saw the need for a story told of our daily lives without being a statistic and without just trying to hit a demographic, and I felt that with this one. What I do feel with the different scripts that they give me where I feel like this is done for one of those reasons, I share my point of view. I don’t just say, “No, thank you.” I say, “I feel that this represents Latinos in a wrong way, in a bad way.” I tell them I think it has too many stereotypes, that even the way they come in and out of Spanish doesn’t really make sense, it feels forced. I explain that as Latinos, we can also be professionals. In the movie, she’s a successful doctor that has diverse patients. And I also have to be careful of what it says about women. I get a lot of scripts that only talk about women’s appearances and what they look like. I think we’re tired of having to meet this standard and not being asked what our talents or abilities are. So I also really pay attention to whether the script embodies a full female character or if they’re 40

just wanting a two-dimensional objectified woman. So I also have that aspect to take care of as well. LK: Well, amen to that! Now, in Everybody Loves Somebody [no spoilers!], there are some moments when your family puts the “when are you getting married” pressure on your character. And this is something that I think is prevalent in society — I’m 28 years old. I’ve been with my boyfriend for eight years, my mother asks me every other day when I’m getting married. How do you feel about the pressure put on women to get married? KS: Oh, I bet! It’s funny because it’s put on by women and men. Society makes women feel like, oh, you’re getting old. The patriarchal society has made women believe, first of all, you’re only valid and valuable when you’re young. All the products that are sold to us — those anti-aging products — are telling us that there’s a due date. Wisdom and white hair might not be as valued as in different cultures. Our society really needs to take a better look at what

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we’re selling, because I think women being empowered will be as beneficial to men as it is to us. When we see society telling women that they have a certain time, that they make women compete with each other, the older generation competing with the younger generation. They’ve made us believe that there’s not enough men out there for us or that we’re only hired because of our looks and not because of our abilities. There’s a lot of lies out there that we should catch and that have taken me a lot of time to sort of see, and reading up on it and getting educated on it. I’m reading right now a book that’s about how images of beauty have hurt women along the decades. It’s a very educating but infuriating thing to see, how we don’t have equal opportunity because they’re demanding so much more. In the movie, the sister tells my character, “No, don’t you want to be with someone?” I think the family — especially in this movie — they know that the reason that Clara doesn’t want to have an emotional, intimate relationship is more because she was hurt so badly from heartbreak that she’s then being closed off and cynical. She’s seen all the ways that it doesn’t work, and all the reasons it doesn’t, so she’s become more and more cynical about finding someone she could be with for that long a time. It’s sort of like they’re encouraging her to open up again, but it does sound like they’re pressuring her, like society does. I think that, for sure, we as women should try and realize that it’s more about having someone to share. Something I was adamant about was that the movie wouldn’t end with, oh, marriage saved her. They’re married and she’s OK. I was very pushing on having the ending be that she made an inner growth of healing so that she can then have the ability and the space to love and be loved by someone else, and that love is open-ended and doesn’t mean they’re going to get married tomorrow and all her problems are solved. She is in a forever-growing process. I feel the movie did that very well and not finishing off as “a woman’s life ends when she finds the right guy,” you know.

LK: Agreed, and I think that’s so great that you encouraged that, and you speak your voice when it comes to that. I spoke to a director last week and I told him his female character didn’t have the depth or the layers that the male characters did, and he said, “Yeah, I mean, I thought she was OK, but I guess I haven’t thought about her that much. Writing women roles is hard.” KS: Wow. LK: Yeah, and I told him to write fe male characters as if he’s writing male characters, and then just make it a woman. It doesn’t have to be that different. KS: I told my friend — we were working on a movie together — and he gave me a script and asked me to give him notes. And they were all male characters, and I said, “You know what would make this character more interesting?” And he asked what — and it’s this road trip between three guys, basically, one older man, one 30-yearold and a 13-year-old mechanic. And I said, “If you make the 13-year-old a girl, and you make her an Indian-American mechanic.” And he said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Yeah, don’t change anything in the script about him, and just make it a her.” And he flipped out — now of course he’s doing it. I should have asked for credit — but he has no idea how amazing it is that a character that was written as a boy can be equally written for a girl. It’s like you said, just write a character as if it were a man, and then turn it and make it into a woman. It’s like, we’re human beings, after all. LK: It’s amazing to me that concept is so difficult in Hollywood for people. You mentioned something you specifically look for when you’re reading scripts, specifically bilingual or having to do with Mexican culture, (continued on page 83)

BY CHARLES MCGRATH Section Title

A CIRCUITOUS ROUTE TO OUTER SPACE ALFONSO CUARÃ&#x201C;N DISCUSSES HIS FILMS

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ALFONSO CUARÓN DISCUSSES HIS FILMS By Charles McGrath

n a radio interview not long ago, Alfonso Cuarón compared his movies to ex-wives: He’s grateful, wishes them well, but has no desire to go back and visit. What he didn’t say, but could have, was that none of these wives bears much resemblance to any of the others. For an important filmmaker, Mr. Cuarón’s reputation rests on a small and eclectic body of work with long lulls between projects sometimes: two movies based on children’s books (“The Little Princess” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”), a remake of a Dickens classic (“Great Expectations”), a sexual coming-ofage film set in Mexico (“Y Tu Mamá También”), a dystopian science fiction movie (“Children of Men”) and then, of course, there’s “Gravity,” his most recent and most successful film, which is already generating a lot of Oscar buzz. It takes place almost entirely in outer space. If you really study Mr. Cuarón’s movies, you can detect certain recurrent preoccupations — class awareness and the vast differences between haves and have- nots, for example — and even some technical trademarks. He loves long tracking shots as much as Hitchcock did and, like someone trying to see how long he can hold his breath, drags them out until you feel him getting a bit blue in the face. But on a first, or even second viewing, you could be forgiven for thinking that the director who

made “Y Tu Mamá,” say, and the one who made “Gravity” were simply not the same person. “A director I respect once told me: ‘You’re too much like a pendulum. You have to find your center,’ ” Mr. Cuarón said while in New York not long ago. “But I just do what I feel is the right thing at the time. I don’t think it’s a flaw.” He thought about that for a moment and smiled. “But, on the other hand, almost all the directors I admire do have a constant or common thread in their work.” The list of directors Mr. Cuarón admires is lengthy, eccentric and heavy on art- house types: Bresson, Murnau, Lubitsch, Wilder, Tanner, Kubrick, Coppola, Spielberg. He was exposed to them all, not to mention some Polish, Czech and Russian directors most of us have never heard of, while growing up in Mexico City, where his whole family, his mother especially, was 45

movie mad. (Mr. Cuarón’s brother Carlos is also a filmmaker, and so is his son Jonás, with whom he wrote “Gravity.”) The cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, known as Chivo (Spanish for “goat”), has worked on almost all of Mr. Cuarón’s movies and is one of his oldest friends. He remembers the teenage Mr. Cuarón standing outside a movie house, surrounded by beautiful girls and expounding on the use of color by Pasolini. “I didn’t know whether he was making it up or not, but it sounded good,” he said recently. “Alfonso used to go to three or four movies a day. I knew one Godard movie. He knew them all. He knew all the Buñuel movies.” Together, Mr. Lubezki and Mr. Cuarón in the early ‘80s went to their country’s best film school, the one at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where, as Mr. Cuarón said, they were “arrogant brats.” Eventually, they dropped out, because they

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A scene from Mr. Cuarón's film, “Gravity,” starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.

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considered the place too backward, and Mr. Cuarón’s real education, a long apprenticeship, took place in the Mexican film and television industry, where he held just about every job imaginable: He was a gaffer, a grip, a cameraman, a sound man. “It was obvious to everyone but him that someday he would be a great director,” Mr. Lubezki said. But Mr. Cuarón, who is now 52, was in many ways a late bloomer, and the oddness of his film résumé is partly the result of chance. “The Little Princess,” for example, landed in his lap at a moment in the mid-’90s when he had more or less despaired of ever getting a chance to direct.

Alfonso Cuarón

He read the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, which until then he had been unfamiliar with, and knew at once that this was something he could do. “It was one of those moments in life when something almost vibrates in your hand,” he recalled. “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” also came his way unexpectedly. He hadn’t read that book, either, until his friend, the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, shamed him into it. But Mr. Cuarón’s moviemaking has also been shaped by setbacks and mistakes, some of them fortunate, some of them not, and by frustration with the studio system and even with the technology of moviemaking itself. It’s clear just from his conversation that he is passionate, generous, enthusiastic. But by all accounts, he can also be stubborn, impulsive and obsessive. “He never accepts less,” Mr. Lubezki said. “He never accepts moments that are almost O.K. There are times on the set when you look at him and think, ‘Who is this madman?’ ” A big turning point in Mr. Cuarón’s career was his third feature, “Great Expectations,” or what he calls “the bad movie.” A modern-day adaptation of the Dickens novel, which came out in 1998 and starred Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke, it’s actually a pretty good–looking movie. Its main

weakness is an undercooked script by Mitch Glazer. “But the script was my responsibility,” Mr. Cuarón pointed out. “It’s a movie I did for the wrong reasons. I was too engaged in the machinery” – in reading scripts, that is, and taking meetings, trolling for stars. He and Mr. Lubezki also agree now that they both got carried away with technical issues: with lighting, wardrobe, camera angles. “It was like making an industrial film,” Mr. Lubezki said. “It felt like going to the factory every day. Mr. Cuarón’s next picture, “Y Tu Mamá También,” which he wrote with his brother Carlos, was a conscious course 48

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A scene from Alfonso Cuarón’s film “A little Princess”, released in 1995.

Alfonso Cuarón

correction: It’s looser, raunchier, more personal, and in feeling more Mexican than anything he had made before or has done since. “It has a very dramatic, very specific point of view,” Mr. Cuarón’s friend the director Alejandro González Iñárritu said about “Y Tu Mamá.” “It’s about us, about our country. That’s a childhood we all share.” “Y Tu Mamá” is filmed mostly in wide shots and without close-ups, and Mr. Cuarón likes to think of it as a movie that dispenses with technology. “I said to Chivo, ‘We need to start from scratch,’ ” he explained. “We need to make the film we would have made before we went to film school — before we learned how to shoot and became too obsessed with polishing everything.” From “Y Tu Mamá” to “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” is a stretch. “Prisoner,” after all, is not just a studio film but a franchise, the third film in a hugely profitable series, with a cast already in place and a story line that requires computer effects but not, as “Y Tu Mamá” does, full frontal nudity. His plunge back into studio filmmaking is a little easier to comprehend if you know that the film Mr. Cuarón meant to make next was a small, low-budget one: “Children of Men,” an adaptation of the P. D. James novel about a future in which humans have unaccountably lost the ability to reproduce. He wrote it while still working on “Y Tu Mamá,” but couldn’t get anyone to produce it. “Prisoner of Azkaban,” generally regarded as the best, if not the most profitable, of the Potter movies, allowed Mr. Cuarón finally to make “Children of Men,” and in a roundabout way also enabled “Gravity.” He insisted he never planned to make a space epic. He was working on another low-budget independent film, written this time with his son Jonás, when in midstream the financing fell apart in a way that both surprised and angered Mr. Cuarón, who felt that after “Prisoner,” he had earned some credibility. “It was a like: How can this happen to Alfonso?” Mr. Lubezki said. “It was a bit of 50

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a shock. Alfonso has these outburst sometimes, and this one was: Screw the independent market. I’m going to make a massive Burbank movie!” The money for “Gravity” came very quickly, especially because Angelina Jolie was originally set to star. In Mr. Cuarón’s mind, though, the movie was never supposed to be a big deal. “That was a miscalculation,” Mr. Lubezki said. “He told me: Only one actor, in space, it can’t get any simpler. We can do it in a couple of months.” It took four and a half years, mostly because in setting the movie in space Mr. Cuarón hadn’t bothered to consider how he was going to film weightlessness. “Another big miscalculation,” Mr. Lubezki said, laughing. “He had no idea. In the same circumstance, any lesser director, any normal human being would have walked away. Instead, after a lengthy process of trial and error, Mr. Lubezki and Mr. Cuarón devised an immensely complicated system that involved computer animation, millions of flashing LED bulbs, and imprisoning Sandra Bullock and George Clooney for hours at a time in an isolation chamber. “Alfonso had every reason not to be sane during this shoot because of all the variables,” Ms. Bullock wrote in an email message. “But he never wavered. Neurosis isn’t part of his DNA.” Insisting that what really makes “Gravity” work is the actors, Ms. Bullock especially, Mr. Cuarón now seems a little ambivalent about his technical breakthrough. “If you have to do it, you just do it, but it’s really better not to invent new technology,” he said, and then, almost in the next breath he added, “You know, Murnau was much more of a technological director than people think.” The success of “Gravity” has taken him a little by surprise, Mr. Cuarón went on to say, and hadn’t left much time to think about what he might do next. “I’m lazy,” he said. “I like my kids. I like life. I wouldn’t mind making two or three movies right in a row. I wouldn’t mind that at all. But I don’t know if I’m able.” • • • 51

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MAKING NETFLIX HISTORY

Club de Cuervos 52

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GAZ ALAZRAKI’S NETFLIX HIT DEBUTS ITS THIRD SEASON By Xaque Gruber Gaz Alazraki’s Club de Cuervos kicks off its third season on Netflix on September 29. The satirical comedy, starring Luis Gerardo Méndez and Mariana Treviño in the lead roles, is Netflix’s first Spanish-language original series, and it looks like the streaming service is happy with the results - and the positive reviews. Mexican filmmaker Alazraki, who wrote and directed the 2013 hit comedy film Nosotros los Nobles, co-created Club de Cuervos, producing a show that continues to poke fun at social elitism in his country, with the wealthy, spoiled heirs of a soccer club bickering over who gets to lead the sports franchise. During a session at this year’s National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) Media Summit, Alazraki attributed the show’s success to producing a great original show with the best actors and high production values. Although the show is produced in Mexico and has Mexican writers, Alazraqui shared he actively sought out U.S. screenwriters to polish his concept into an “irresistible” show that could attract a broader audience and have people wanting to see more. In the new season, Chava and Isabel Iglesias - the main protagonists - are forced to share the presidency of Cuervos de Nuevo Toledo soccer club. The feuding siblings face numerous challenges as they struggle to save the team, with the show’s trailer promising to deliver some comic relief.

The first two seasons of the show were witty, sharp and totally bingeable. You don’t even have to love soccer to enjoy it. But will it be able to keep its momentum for season three? The first exclusively Spanish language series, shot entirely in Mexico and conceived/created in the United States, Club De Cuervos, Netflix’s brand new series is not only this summer’s most binge-worthy delight, but should be applauded as a game changer in the burgeoning world of globally-designed entertainment. The series, in which billionaire Mexican siblings feud over the family-owned soccer team (The Cuervos, Spanish for “the Crows”) was designed not just for a Mexican audience, but for the entire soccer-loving world, which let’s face it, is almost the entire world. Much like the Spanish cousin to Netflix’s current 55

Emmy darling, Orange Is The New Black, Club De Cuervos oscillates brilliantly from laugh-out-loud comedy to poignant drama, while never dipping into Latin stereotypes or telenovela melodrama. Created by former USC roommates, Gaz Alazraki and Michael Lam, Club De Cuervos‘ small, diverse writing staff, were Los Angeles based, and flown to Mexico for an extensive research trip and production shoots. A unique and unprecedented approach. Alazraki, well established in Mexico for his mega-successful film, Nosotros Los Nobles, insisted on Hollywood-trained comedy room writers who were familiar with the kind of scripted, appointment television that he liked to watch. Something that doesn’t exist in quite the same way in Mexico. He cast a wide net in Hollywood. Alazraki wasn’t necessarily even looking for

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Spanish speaking writers, he was just looking for the right writers. One of those writers was Alessia Costantini, who became the only female on the staff and the show’s Co-Executive Producer. Costantini began nearly ten years ago as a television production assistant, earned her stripes in many writers rooms as a writers’ assistant, and was staffed on the final season of Scrubs. She also wrote for Everybody Hates Chris, and has sold

original comedy pilots, including Building Slut to Sony. She is currently the head writer and Co-Executive Producer of CMT’s scripted debut series, Still The King, with Billy Ray Cyrus. I had the pleasure of chatting with Costantini, whose previous career was industrial engineering in her native Detroit worlds away from the Hollywood comedy writer’s room.

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Xaque Gruber: You are one of five writers on Club De Cuervos. Did you feel you had a certain role in the writers’ room being the only female in the bunch? Alessia Costantini: This writing team — Gaz, Jay Dyer, Mike Lam and Russell Eida — was phenomenal. We were such a family. Because I was the only female in the room, part of my marching orders were to keep an eye on the way that women were depicted on the show. I was honored to have that responsibility. It was challenging because I knew we were facing a culture that had certain stereotypes in place. At the core of the show is a brother and sister - with the sister (Isabel) being the hard working one in the family. Because she is a woman, she is completely overlooked when it comes to being the president of the soccer team. Having worked in rather “maledominated” fields such as engineering and comedy, this was something I could relate to. The perception of the main characters is that “soccer is not for girls.” So the expectations are very low for Isabel. So in terms of a story that I wanted to be a part of, that was deeply meaningful for me. XG: How many strong female characters are there in this series? AC: Certainly Isabel, the sister, is the central character, and then there is the recently deceased patriarch’s mistress, Mary Luz. These two women want the same thing but go about it in vastly different ways and that was fun to explore. And then there are other female characters who are the former wives of the late patriarch and they have their own agendas and baggage. XG: As an American who doesn’t speak Spanish, how did you manage writing humor for a Spanish-speaking audience? AC: What we found was that it was not as challenging as we thought. We quickly learned that we couldn’t rely on clever wordplay, or turns of phrase, because those would be lost in translation. It forced us to dig deeper and write character-driven hu59

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mor that resonated from a story perspective, more than the classical set-up/punchline construction. The result, we hope, connects with international audiences because it hits on universal truths. XG: You clearly avoid the telenovela style of storytelling. AC: It was very important to us not to resemble or spoof the telenovela style. We did not want it be melodramatic or broad. Every step of the way we were careful to keep it grounded, and realistic. When the writers first began on the show, we took a huge research trip to Mexico because we knew we had a ton to learn. We had hours and hours of interviews with Mexican coaches, players, former team owners about championship games, going to the World Cup, challenges faced in running the team. We just soaked it all in. We use real names in Mexican politics and sports to add to the realism and relatability - not just for Mexicans, but for global fans of soccer. XG: Is it an all Mexican cast? AC: No, Mary Luz, for example, played by Stephanie Cayo, is a huge star from Peru. There was a real effort made to cast Brazilians and all different Latin people - because that’s how a soccer team is. We wanted it to be authentic for the global soccer stage. Also, most of our primary cast is bilingual, and this was important because the writing was done in English and was only translated at the final stage. The cast was great because they took the time to cross-reference the translated scripts with the English versions to make sure the right intentions were getting across. Gaz, the show’s creator, is Mexican, and he was always present in the room, keeping us on track from a cultural perspective. XG: And though it’s all set in Mexico, you wrote the whole series in Los Angeles? AC: Yes, we worked out of the third floor of a house in Santa Monica, and then when Gaz had to go back to Mexico for production, our writers room moved 60

Club de Cuervos

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to a garage - a converted garage. But hey, Apple computers started in a garage, right? (laughs) And we were so committed to this show, we could’ve been doing it in an alley and loved the whole thing. XG: How does your engineering background help you as a Hollywood writer? AC: I think it really helps me break story and solve structure problems in the writers’ room, and especially lends itself to the intricacies of TV seasons that rely on complex season arcs and inter-woven storylines. You can take a girl out of engineering, but you can’t take the engineering out of a girl. (laughs) I’m definitely the room nerd! I love my story grids and character matrixes. XG: Tell me about how writing for Netflix is different than writing for a network series. AC: One thing so unique about this experience was we wrote all thirteen episodes prior to shooting. Usually in my experience writing for television, you write, shoot it, it’s gone. It was so thrilling to get an idea when we were developing the finale, and be able to go back and add a hint to it in the pilot! I think that helped us write the kind of binge-worthy, complicated storytelling Netflix is known for. This show is available with subtitles in the over 50 countries where Netflix exists, and will expand to all the new territories as they launch. And this is what is making Netflix so unique. It is a global brand for content and not just a regional one. Writing “globally” is so exciting - it’s a real paradigm shift for TV writers. XG: So do you have a new love for Mexico as a result of your visits there for the show? AC: Oh I LOVE Mexico. I have had the best time. And every time I go I fall in love with it a little bit more. We had the show’s premiere in Mexico City and it was an absolutely incredible experience. Such a fascinating, beautiful city and culture. ••• 63

Section By Mark Title Binelli

HOLLY-

WOODâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

KING OF

PAIN 64

How the director of "The Revenant" pushed his stars and crew to the edge of sanity – and created a modern epic.

Alejandro González Iñárritu

ate one afternoon in November, only two days after wrapping up final post-production tweaks on his sixth film, The Revenant, the director Alejandro González Iñárritu walked into a screening room at the corner of Alfred Hitchcock Drive on the Universal Studios lot in Universal City, California. He was dressed entirely in black, his typical uniform – today, a couture-looking hoodie with extraneous silver zippers, worn over black jeans – and he greeted the assembled audio crew with fist bumps and apologies for his tardiness. He’d driven up from his production office in Santa Monica, where he also lives, and hit traffic, which he normally avoids by zipping around town on a Vespa. Somebody got him a Coke. Iñárritu, 52, moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City, his hometown, after the wholly unexpected global success of his first film, 2000’s Amores Perros, which in English roughly translates as “love’s a bitch” – U.S. distributors eventually decided to stick with the Spanish title – and which convinced him to leave the safe confines of the Mexican film community, where he’d spent years as a highly successful director of TV commercials, building a production company with more than 100 employees, and make the move to the big leagues, to Hollywood. When would the timing possibly be better? He landed at LAX with his wife and two children four days before September 11th, 2001. “All the neighborhoods started getting all these flags,” Iñárritu says, speaking in heavily accented English. On two Left: Filming “The Revenant” with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2014. By Kimberly French.

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occasions, walking his dog, he was stopped by police officers. The cops told Iñárritu, whose swarthy complexion had earned him the nickname “El Negro” back in Mexico City, they’d received calls about a suspicious character in the area, that he needed to show them exactly where he lived.w Today, Iñárritu is listening to audio mixes of The Revenant for theaters outfitted with Dolby Atmos surround-sound. “Every time they invent a new fucking system, we have to do a new test,” Iñárritu says with a sigh. “Pretty soon we’ll have sounds coming out of our asses.” The day before,

he’d been to a similar test for the IMAX version of the picture. “Sitting too close to the screen, it’s almost disturbing,” he says. “They’ll need to give the audience bags to vomit.” Iñárritu, we should note, utters all of these lines quite cheerily. He still curses in English with the mirth of a non-native speaker testing unfamiliar idioms, all of his “fuckings” pronounced with more care than other words and delivered with an unjaded relish. When Iñárritu smiles – perhaps because his smiles always seem tinged with irony – his face, thin, with pro68

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A scene from Iñarritu’s film “The Revenant”, released in 2015.

nounced cheekbones, a mustache and a slightly tufted goatee, assumes a sly, devilish cast. With minimal wardrobe and makeup adjustments, he could play the heavy in an after-school special about the dangers of Satanism. In a medium-size theater, two sound engineers sit in front of a mixing board that spans the length of the screen. Martín Hernández, one of Iñárritu’s oldest friends and collaborators, works at a laptop. We’re about to watch Reel 4 of The Revenant. Loosely based on the real-life adventure of a 19th-century American fur trap69

per named Hugh Glass, the film stars a prodigiously bearded Leonardo DiCaprio, who is mauled by a bear and then betrayed and left for dead by other members of his hunting party. The rest of the movie, on one level, is an immensely satisfying genre exercise, a proto-Western revenge fantasia in the tradition of Death Wish or Kill Bill, in which the audience endures the cruel sufferings of the protagonist as a pleasureenhancing prelude to feats of impossible endurance, survival and bloody restitution. Visually, the film is a spectacular throwback, the sort of epic rarely seen since

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the era of Lawrence of Arabia. It’s also a sustained spiritual meditation, as well as an implicit critique of American capitalism, as told through its earliest incursions into the relatively untouched wilderness of the New World. If Iñárritu wins Best Director for The Revenant, which people who make odds on this sort of thing have been saying is entirely plausible, it will follow his win last year for Birdman, making him only the third director in Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences history to snag consecutive Oscars. It’s funny, though: For all of his accomplishments in Hollywood, Iñárritu still describes himself as a frustrated musician. He and Hernández began working together in college as disc jockeys at a pioneering radio station in Mexico City. Iñárritu also played in a band and promoted shows, and he admits to paying special, almost obsessive attention to the sound of his films. “For Alejandro, sound can be more important than visual,” says Hernández. “He has an amazing sound memory. If I change something, he will hear it.” Iñárritu thought of Birdman, filmed to appear as if it unfolded in a single, frenetic tracking shot, as jazz: He went into a studio with the Mexican jazz drummer Antonio Sánchez and began recording the soundtrack (almost exclusively percussion) before he’d shot a frame of film, matching the beats with specific lines of dialogue in order to pre-dictate, in Iñárritu’s words, “the pulse of the film.” For The Revenant, he commissioned a spare electronic score from Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto, avant-garde composers who have collaborated with Carsten Nicolai on a series of gorgeous, minimalist piano albums, and Bryce Dessner of the Brooklyn band the National. “If Birdman has to do more with jazz and theater,” Iñárritu tells me, “I think this film is more about painting and dreams, when you don’t have to think or talk, but just feel. So the silences and the sounds of nature are very, very important to the narrative.” Reel 4 begins with DiCaprio’s character lying on a wintry forest bed, staring up at the old-growth trees towering above

Above: Filming “The Revenant” with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2014. By Kimberly French. Left: Director Alejandro González Iñárritu is nominated for Best Director for his sixth film, “The Revenant” Photograph by Martin Schoeller

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him like the ceiling of a cathedral, and ends with a thrilling chase scene in which he dives into a river to escape a band of Arikara Indians. As the scene progresses, we watch DiCaprio grunt, gasp, crawl through snow and suck the marrow from the bone of a picked-over buffalo carcass. Iñárritu sits with his arms crossed and a serious expression on his face. When the lights come up, everyone looks at him anxiously. Eventually, he emits a long “Ummmm . . .” Then he says he’s not hearing the ambient sounds coming out of the ceiling speakers, not nearly enough. “It’s like one cojone, and we need two cojones!” he cries, mock-dramatically. “I want to hear more crackling trees. Make the birds louder! If it’s at 30 percent, go to 60 percent. Then maybe I say, ‘Oh, fuck, too loud!’ And we can take it down. Show me the money, as the producer would say.” While the engineers tweak the settings on their boards, Iñárritu asks for a second Coke and picks at a plastic tub of peanuts, methodically removing one nut at a time with a thumb-finger pincer gesture. He has to wrap up soon. The next day he’s planning to fly to Austin with his son, Eliseo, a senior in high school, for a college tour arranged by Richard Linklater, the Boyhood director and renowned Austinite who also happened to be Iñárritu’s prime rival at the 2015 Oscars. (Birdman wound up beating Boyhood for both Best Director and Picture.) I ask Iñárritu if it’s typical for directors to be this involved with the sound mix of a rarefied distribution format. He frowns and gives a shrug. “Ask them,” he says, nodding at the sound guys. “I don’t think so. I’m a little cuckoo. Neurotic.” He pronounces the last word with special gusto, just like he does “fuck.” A week after the sound tests at Universal, Iñárritu flew to New York for a private screening of The Revenant near Lincoln Center. Afterward, Martin Scorsese moderated a Q&A and called the film a masterpiece. Scorsese had just completed his own historical epic, Silence, filmed in the Taiwanese countryside, and later, over drinks, he complained to Iñárritu, “I’m from New

York. I have an aversion to trees. I don’t go camping. I don’t like horses.” Iñárritu could sympathize. “I’m the same,” he tells me the following afternoon. “We are not, like, guys from the woods.” Iñárritu is dressed entirely in black again, sipping a black coffee in a hotel near Central Park. His son is staying in the room across the hall. A last-minute scheduling conflict had forced the postponement of the Austin visit, but they are planning to check out New York University. Since the ISIS terror attacks in Paris, Iñárritu has also been in regular phone contact with 72

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On set of “Birdman” with Michael Keaton (left), director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki in 2014. Everett Collection

his daughter, María, who is going to school there. “I’m concerned about her,” he says. “You know, we went out of Mexico because of the violence. And now I’m more worried in Paris than in Mexico. I said, ‘Fuck, the world is becoming very scary for young people.’ They are feeling what we felt in Mexico.” Around the time of the release of Amores Perros, Iñárritu’s mother had her jaw broken by muggers, and his father, in a separate incident, was thrown into the trunk of a car by kidnappers and held for 12 hours for a $500 ransom. Iñárritu had 73

his own car broken into and all of his family’s luggage stolen while on vacation in San Miguel de Allende; afterward, he had to fly directly to New York to accept an award, and he borrowed “an old suit of stripes” from a friend, “the worst, cheapest suit ever – it’s from 1948. I was the worst-dressed director in the history of New York fancy people.” That trip was the first time Iñárritu met Scorsese, as it turns out – Scorsese liked Amores Perros and had invited Iñárritu to stop by his office – and Iñárritu showed up in the suit, feeling “like a fucking Mafia guy from a Scorsese film.” The rising violence in his home country, coming at a time when his own public profile was increasing, factored heavily into Iñárritu’s decision to move his family to L.A. He says it also informed his approach to violence in his films. “The violence became such a painful social situation in my country, with so much suffering, that I didn’t find it funny in films,” he says. Iñárritu grew up in Narvarte, the middle-class Mexico City neighborhood where Che Guevara lived in the 1950s while plotting the Cuban Revolution. Iñárritu describes a happy childhood, including a skateboarding phase and a love of progrock bands like Genesis and King Crimson. At 17, and again at 19, he got himself aboard cargo ships sailing out of Vera Cruz and Coatzacoalcos, earning his passage by performing menial jobs, and he spent a year in Spain picking grapes and doing odd jobs – even working as a swimsuit-clad dancer in a disco. (Q: Like Magic Mike? A: “God, no! I didn’t have the qualities.”) Back in Mexico City, he played guitar in a synth-rock band called Noviembre Uno (Q: Is that the date of a revolution or something? A: “It was the date I met a girl. We were trying just to play sounds from that period, which ... the Eighties was the worst”), dropped out of college, became a local radio celebrity and eventually began directing television commercials. “Even today, if you talk to someone my age, they’ll remember us by the radio,” Hernández tells me. “I had the morning shift and he had the afternoon. He was the lazy one.”

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a synth-rock band called Noviembre Uno (Q: Is that the date of a revolution or something? A: “It was the date I met a girl. We were trying just to play sounds from that period, which ... the Eighties was the worst”), dropped out of college, became a local radio celebrity and eventually began directing television commercials. “Even today, if you talk to someone my age, they’ll remember us by the radio,” Hernández tells me. “I had the morning shift and he had the afternoon. He was the lazy one.” In 1989, Iñárritu brought Rod Stewart to Querétaro for one of the first stadium rock concerts in Mexico in years. Thanks to scalpers hawking counterfeit tickets, the venue was so dangerously oversold that one of Iñárritu’s friends told him to take the next flight to Miami. “Alejandro,” he said, “this will be serious! People will die here.” “There was a moment that I thought I would be in jail,” Iñárritu acknowledges. “But one guy died, only.” Amores Perros is indebted, in many ways, to Quentin Tarantino: three interweaving plotlines, jarring temporal leaps, an underworld milieu. But after the film’s visceral delights, the death-haunted, relentlessly somber works that followed felt ponderous, making one long for just a touch of Tarantino’s irony and sense of humor. 21 Grams (2003) featured indelible, gutting performances from Sean Penn and Naomi Watts and took an even more staccato approach to linearity and narrative, but the script leaned too heavily on preposterous Shakespearean coincidence. (Watts’ widow falls in love with the very transplant patient, Penn, who received her late husband’s heart, a premise that wouldn’t even have been acceptable in a Nineties romantic comedy starring Drew Barrymore and Matthew McConaughey.) Babel (2006) was released to international acclaim, just as Iñárritu’s friends Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón unveiled their own most-heralded works – Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men, respectively – prompting critics to espy a Mexican cinematic renaissance. But the sufferings Iñárritu piled onto his characters 76

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were beginning to feel not only sadistic but false. A subplot climaxing with a Mexican housekeeper (Adriana Barraza) stumbling through the desert in high heels and a ripped cocktail dress is so over-the-top, given everything else that’s already transpired in the film, it nearly plays as camp. His next film, Biutiful, no less gloomy – the main character, played by Javier Bardem, helps to manage a Chinese sweatshop, has an alcoholic for a wife and is dying of cancer – was critically and commercially Iñárritu’s worst-performing picture. Depressed, and approaching 50, Iñárritu says he fell into “a very, very difficult state.” To snap himself out of it, he went to a 21day silent-meditation retreat in the South of France. Every morning, he would stare at the clouds as they shifted and changed colors, and he felt like he’d never seen anything more spectacular.

Left: Gael Garcia Bernal in a scene from Iñarritu’s film “Amores Perros”, released in 2000.

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Then he made Birdman and with it made a huge tonal leap. As in all of Iñárritu’s films, the main character, the actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), takes a merciless beating – pretty much everything that can go wrong for him over the course of the film’s two hours does. The difference here is that Iñárritu seems to have realized that when you inflict a series of punishments on a character, it can be King Lear if played one way, but played another, it’s Charlie Chaplin. Birdman is very funny – at times slapstick, even. Coming from Iñárritu, this feels like a radical act. He admits as much. His love of dark movies and books comes from his mother. “Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music,” he says. “But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time

brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things. And that’s why, for me, Birdman was so liberating, to be able to laugh about tragedy.” He smiles. “Because then it can be even more sad, in a good way.” A framed photograph hangs on the wall of Iñárritu’s Santa Monica office: a man, his back to the camera, sits alone amid a spectacular wintry landscape. Mountains loom on the horizon, and there are no traces of civilization. The solitude

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Abpve: Filming “Biutiful”, Iñarritu and Javier Bardem on set of the film released in 2010. Left: Gael Garcia Bernal in a scene from Iñarritu’s film “Amores Perros”, released in 2000.

plays as epic, an existential provocation. But there’s something inherently comic about the man’s isolation: how puny he looks, the incongruity of his presence in such untouched natural surroundings, that puffy parka. It’s a selfie stick away from a New Yorker cartoon-captioning contest. Iñárritu’s assistant snapped the photo on her phone during the shooting of The Revenant and later gave it to him as a present. “Is that me?” Iñárritu asked. It was! He 79

was taking a lunch break. “I like that picture,” he says, chuckling. “It represents the feeling of directing this film.” Shooting on location in remotest Canada, in subzero temperatures, is a difficult enough undertaking. But Iñárritu and his brilliant cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, had decided they would only film in natural light, which meant they had about 90 minutes each day where things would look just right. “It was insane,” Iñárritu says. There’s a hint of pride in his voice, at having survived something so reckless, the same way a certain type of sober person can almost sound like they’re bragging when telling

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tales of past self-abuse. “I would say the film is a happy accident of a very bad decision,” he continues. “It’s the result of an irresponsible decision that I made. But we need that sometimes – to be naive, blind from reality. If not, we will not embark ourselves on things. I’ll be an office guy or whatever. I mean, I’m not an idiot – I knew how difficult it would be. But I can feel now how far I was from reality when I was deciding how this was to be made. I’m glad that I did that irresponsible decision, but it could have been really bad. You know what I mean? Like when you climb Mount Everest and nobody dies, but we were so close! It’s that feeling of relief.” “I’ve been in a lot of ambitious projects – Titanic was certainly one of them – but this seemed absolutely bizarre, and like a crazy adventure to be a part of,” DiCaprio says, adding with a laugh, “In a lot of ways, I think Alejandro was looking for a Fitzcarraldo experience.” He’s referring to the notoriously arduous 1982 feature by Werner Herzog, filmed mostly in the Amazon rainforest, a shoot so insane it became the subject of its own documentary. “He wanted to go into the heart of darkness,” DiCaprio says, “and not only film nature, but really immerse himself in a completely transformative experience.” Shooting began in October 2014 in Alberta, in wilderness so deep it required commuting two hours each way from Calgary. Soon, costs ballooned. Snow had a way of melting, or not accumulating fast enough, interrupting the shoot. More snow had to be trucked in. There was flooding. For one scene, Iñárritu demanded the triggering of an actual avalanche. The filming had been scheduled to wrap last spring, but it stretched on until the end of summer. At the Oscars, in February, Iñárritu may have triumphed with Birdman. “But at the ceremony, I was receiving texts that the location is fucking flooded,” Iñárritu recalls. “I was having a photo with my Oscar and being like, ‘Fuck!’ I was shooting 36 hours later.” Industry rumblings became so intense that the producers, in damage control, took the rare step of making Iñárritu available

for an interview in The Hollywood Reporter before filming had even been completed. The headline, nonetheless, was “How Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘The Revenant’ Shoot Became ‘a Living Hell,’” and the story was replete with tales of staffers being fired or quitting, of Iñárritu allegedly barring one of the producers from the set. Unnamed “veteran crew members” claimed that “making the film has been by far the worst experience of their careers.” While he feels vindicated by the film’s reception, Iñárritu still bristles at early characterizations of his shoot as a modernday Apocalypse Now. “Everybody that embarked on this film knew the conditions,” he insists. “Nobody was lied. Some of them complained. I understand. For all of us it was hard. But guess what: 99.9 percent of the people stayed, and we are so proud. To cover this gossip – like, ‘Oh, somebody was fired.’ Well, there is 300 people in the company! Of course some people were fired. And some people stay and love it. Is that really something should be even discussed? I don’t think so. But anyway, now the film is there, and now the people understand that every penny, every decision that was made, was worth it.” “Human nature usually applies to filmmaking,” Sean Penn says. “People get tired and lazy, and they start accepting things. But Alejandro never lets himself go there. He’s got more warrior spirit than that. Too many of my colleagues, actors and directors, like to put on a nice suit or dress and represent the picture more than make it.” Iñárritu appeared on a panel recently with the director Ridley Scott, who talked about shooting Gladiator five minutes from the airport in London. “And he looked at me,” Iñárritu recalls, “and said, in an ironic and humorous way, ‘You don’t have to go places to make the film look like they are in those places.’ And I absolutely disagree. Because it shows. People are very surprised when they see the film. ‘Oh, my God! The landscape, the light!’ And I said, ‘That’s available. I didn’t create it! I just captured it.’ And how I did it? I just put a fucking camera down and I stayed 11 months freez82

ing my ass to capture that fucking thing. I didn’t invade the fucking screen with pixels and electronics.” Among this year’s now-infamouslywhite list of Oscar contenders, Iñárritu was the only person of color to be nominated in any of the major categories. The nominations had yet to be announced when we talked, but Iñárritu did bring up questions of representation in Hollywood, mentioning that he enjoyed the complexity and nuance of Sicario and Narcos and lamenting the “clichéd stereotypes of fat, bad, drunk Mexicans that are so common in mainstream American films sometimes.” Iñárritu being Iñárritu, he pays particular attention to musical slights. “I love Sam Mendes, but I went to see Spectre with my kid, and the opening scene of the Diá de Muertos party, with this kind of tropical music, in downtown Mexico City, with all these people dancing like it’s the Rio de Janeiro carnival ... I had to laugh. Or when I was releasing Amores Perros on DVD here, the music over the menu was flamenco! I said, ‘Guys, this is from Andalucía, from the south of Spain. This is not Mexican music.’ ‘Oh, but it’s so Latin.’ I said, ‘”Latin” is a fuck you!’ Like if I say, ‘It’s so Anglo,’ and just play some German music.” Iñárritu has been most dismayed by the rise of Donald Trump, and the ways in which, despite his racism, he’s been treated as an entertainment figure on shows like Saturday Night Live. “He’s a very poor man who only possesses money,” Iñárritu says, adding that he takes solace in one certainty: “Trump doesn’t know it yet, but he will become one of the guys that he hates very soon. Soon he will be a loser.” Alejandro Iñárritu made history this year by winning Best Director for a second year in a row. See Iñárritu accept his award and more of the 2016 winners here. •••

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Brad Pitt in a scene from Iñarritu’s film “Babel”, released in 2006.

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Karla Souza (cotinued from page 43)

important to make it. I don’t know if you actly what we’re talking about. There’s not remember, there was one called Women on enough of those inclusive projects where Top or something. I feel like I’m interpreting a human being and not just a statistic or a nationality. is that they really capture Mexican LK: I don’t know if I’ve seen it. culture. What do you think is the most beautiful thing about your culture? KS: That was with Penelope Cruz, but I LK: And speaking of How to Get think, again, that was only in English. But Away with Murder, what is the difKS: Oh, my goodness. I love family. In this there’s not one I really remember that really ference between how Shonda Rhimes movie, my character is a successful OB- did it accurately. Yesterday, all my friends writes women and other people? GYN and yet she goes back to her teenage from the show How to Get Away with years when she’s with her parents. Like, Murder, I did a screening for them at Four KS: Well, I think, especially with this show, that’s me. I could be working as a profes- Seasons. And they were just so in love with we have Viola Davis and Pete Nowalk as sional, but she reverts to that family life, the movie. They freakin’ loved it. And I was the showrunner. [Rhimes and Nowalk] playing those games and those competi- surprised to see that it translates, because have definitely, from the pilot, brought tions and having that much fun with the even if they had to read subtitles at some forth a woman who is unapologetically herfamily is something that I grew up with, points, they really connected to the story. So self, unapologetically flawed, and is as vuland the Mexican culture has a lot of, you this movie is as much for the general market nerable as she is powerful. I think we only know — Sunday is the day you spend with as it is for Latino audiences. That’s a really seen men written in that way, and I think your family, and you have 40 to 50 people exciting prospect. Shonda Rhimes came to change television at your house, the uncles and the cousins, for women forever. I’m grateful to be in that and I grew up with that. I know that that’s SK: Absolutely. That’s exactly what I family. a tradition that I want to keep alive and I recognized when I watched it. I had also want to share. And I love that in this no idea that it had subtitles, and at LK: It’s a good family to be in. Last movie, you almost want to go and hang out first I was like, “Oh man, I can’t work question: What kinds of real change with this family. That, and the music in the while I watch this movie because I’ve do you feel most passionate about movie is very much hand-picked specifi- got to read the subtitles.” But I fell in making in the world? cally because it’s our history and our tradi- love with it, and I thought it was done tions. The themes are universal. And also so well because it does hit so many KS: I’ve been transformed by stories, and the food. Mexican food is one of the best different markets and resonates so I think that storytelling is definitely sacred. culinary experiences that people can have. well. I do want to ask, were you ever I take it very seriously because my life has There’s a lot of things, even the landscape asked to downplay your diversity or been changed, whether it was a movie, a that we show in the movie of Ensenada in your heritage when you were climb- play, a piece of writing, poetry, a painting. Baja is just spectacular. There’s so much ing up the Hollywood ladder? I feel that the power that storytelling has more — I wish we could have shown more, to change people, to bring them together, but I’m glad we didn’t see the typical, you KS: For sure. I even did it myself because to have that cathartic sort of experience, is know, border-sombrero-tequila thing that I thought that I didn’t want to only be do- something that definitely has helped my life we normally do. It was a different take on ing stereotyped jobs. When I was asked to be worthwhile and better. So I guess that that immigrant sort of life. change Laurel into a Latina for How to Get it would be for me to keep making art that Away with Murder, I was terrified, because touches people in a way that nothing else LK: Are there one or two Spanish or I thought, no one’s going to know how to can. bilingual films that had an impact on do this because the American take on my your life growing up? culture is never accurate. Until they hired LK: Well, I think that this movie is a Latina to write for Laurel, I was scared phenomenal, and I want to thank you KS: Sadly — and I think this is why it’s so that she was going to fall into stereotypes. for doing it, and we hope that your caimportant that we do this more — I don’t They promised me they wouldn’t do that reer keeps skyrocketing. We’re huge have that guiding light. You know, “Oh, sort of “defining nature of my character is fans and we’re on your side, so keep that Sleepless in Seattle bilingual some- that she’s Latina.” It has nothing to do with kicking ass. thing,” like, it doesn’t exist. I don’t have it in that. She just happens to be a Latina. I think my memory, and that’s why I thought it was that, you know, that fear still comes from ex- • • • 85

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The Young and the Damned Los Olvidados by Pauline Kael

Set in Mexico, Luis Buñuel’s ruthless—almost surgical—examination of how the poor prey on one another is the most horrifying of all films about juvenile crime. The one masterwork on this subject, it stands apart from the genre by its pitilessness, its controlled passion. Buñuel doesn’t treat his characters as ideas but as morally responsible human beings; there is little of the familiar Americanmovie cant that makes everyone responsible for juvenile crimes except the juveniles. There’s no pathos in this film; it’s a squalid tragedy that causes the viewer to feel a moral terror. Buñuel, whose early work fascinated Freud, creates scenes that shock one psychologically.

Among them here is the mother-meat dream—perhaps the greatest of all movie dream sequences; it is disturbing long after the lacerations of the more realistic material have healed. Buñuel had intended much more in this surreal vein but he did not have a completely free hand. For example, in the scene in which one of the boys goes to beat up and kill another boy, the camera reveals in the distance a huge eleven-story building under construction; Buñuel had wanted to put an orchestra of a hundred musicians in the building. The cast includes Estela Inda and Roberto Cobo; the cinematography is by Gabriel Figueroa. In Spanish.

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cine mexicano BY ANA VILLARREAL CREATED AS A MAJOR REQUIREMENT FOR VISUALIZING LANGUAGE II AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS

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