Interview: Lucrecia Martel on the Making of Zama slantmagazine.com/features/article/interview-lucrecia-martel-on-the-making-of-zama
by Peter Goldberg April 11, 2018 Lucrecia Martel’s films are surgically precise eviscerations. Their targets are often Argentina’s largely white middle class, their characters the most ill-minded among a nation’s most physically comfortable. They’ve included the rabid, lustily alcoholic family of La Ciénaga, a perverted doctor and the girl who may or may not be pursuing him inThe Holy Girl, and a dentist who—again—may or may not have committed a hit and run on an Amerindian child in The Headless Woman. And in some way or another, these films demand that we situate ourselves within the shifting mental terrain of the characters. Martel’s latest, Zama, is a film about failure. It opens on Don Diego de Zama (played by Daniel Giménez Cacho), a functionary of the colonial Spanish Empire who’s stationed in remote Paraguay during the late 18th century, casting his romantic hero’s gaze over a flowing river, almost as if it were his domain. Stuck in this backwater outpost, Zama will repeatedly try to get himself transferred to Lerma, the capital of Argentina’s Salta region— Martel’s home province and the setting of her previous three films—only to be thwarted by every machination of the Spanish Empire’s bureaucracy. Adapted from the 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, Zama is a sensuous, decidedly absurdist, and at times otherworldly reshuffling of the vaunted delicacies of the period piece. And earlier this week, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, I met with Martel to discuss her anti-mythological inquiry into Argentina’s dark colonial past, her shift to shooting on digital, the particulars of the film’s sound design, and ceding power to her actors. How did you first approach adapting Zama? It’s pretty difficult to remember, technically, how it was for me. But I can tell you that it was hard to separate what I was creating with what’s in the novel, because the novel hit me profoundly. There’s something in the novel that’s not in the film, but which perfectly 1/4