Tribute to Amat Escalante / 13-15/08/2016
Amat Escalante: Darkness Visible An interview by Nick James Tribute to Amat Escalante | 1
Amat Escalante was born in 1979. He is a self-taught filmmaker from the city of Guanajuato (Mexico); he began to work in cinema at the age of 15. After making two short films, he wrote, shot and directed his first film, SANGRE, which premiered at Un Certain Regard Official Selection at Cannes 2005. His second feature film LOS BASTARDOS also premiered at Un Certain Regard Official Selection at Cannes 2008, and it was awarded with the FIPRESCI Prize from the International Critics. HELI, his third feature film premiered at the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and Escalante was awarded the Palme d’Or for the Best Director.
Tribute to Amat Escalante / 13-15/08/2016 Saturday, 13/08/2016 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00
Sangre
Director: Amat Escalante Cast: Cirilo Recio Dávila, Laura Saldaña Quintero, Kenny Johnston, Claudia Orozco
Brief Chronicle of the Filming of SANGRE
Mexico, 2006, Colour, 9 min. Director: Martín Escalante, Kenny Johnston Cast: Cirilo Recio, Amat Escalante, Cirilo Recio, Paola Herrera, Daniela Schneider, Martín Escalante, Claudia Orozco Ruvalcaba, Alex T. Fenton, Kenny Johnston, Oscar Escalante, Raul Locatelli, Mildred Escalante, Pedro Aguilera, Nohemi Gonzalez, and Toño Sunday, 14/08/2016 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00
Los bastardos
Mexico, France, USA, 2008, Colour, 90 min. Director: Amat Escalante Cast: Jesus Moises Rodriguez, Rubén Sosa, Nina Zavarin, Kenny Johnston Monday, 15/08/2016 Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00
Slave
Mexico, 2014, Colour, 13 min. Director: Amat Escalante Cast: Natalia Guzmán, Donovan Torres
Heli
Mexico, France, Germany, Netherlands, 2013, Colour, 105 min. Director: Amat Escalante Cast: Armando Espitia, Linda Gonzalez, Juan Eduardo Palacios, Andrea Vergara Publisher Editor-in-Chief Art Director Cover Photo
Sarajevo Film Festival Izeta Građević Lejla Begić Vuletić Jocelyn Bain Hogg © Sarajevo Film Festival 2016
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Amat Escalante: An interview with Amat Escalante by Nick James
Amat | Escalante circa 1998 photo by MartĂn Escalante
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Rubén Sosa (Los bastardos) photo by Martín Escalante |
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Words can lie so much more than images and somehow images are the perfect words – for me at least. Looking back over the last two decades, and thinking about the impact of Mexican films on world cinema in that time, it seems all the more amazing that this strife-torn country produced such a range of brilliant directors. The headlines have, of course, mostly been taken by the the so-called ‘Three Amigos’ – Alejandro Gonzalez-Iñarritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro – and their near-takeover of Hollywood’s most technically daring projects: films like The Revenant, Gravity and Hellboy. But in recent years, those directors have moved away from Mexican subjects. So if you want to get a sense of what life in Mexico is like since Iñarritu’s Amores Perros (2000) and Cuaron’s Y tu mama tambien (2001) first put Mexican cinema on the map, you had to look to other Mexican filmmakers, whose ambitions were, shall we say, less grandiose, and more interested in dealing with dangerous themes through lower-budget aesthetics. Of these, Amat Escalante is among the foremost. But the story I want to tell about his cinema starts with a screening in Rotterdam of his friend Carlos Reygadas’s film Japón, in January 2003. This brilliant, sprawling, Tarkovskian study of a suicidal man finding redemption of sorts in the desolate canyons of Mexico’s backlands represents my own awakening to the full potential of Mexican cinema (I shook Reygadas’s hand in admiration straight afterwards). And as you will see from the interview that follows here, something similar happened to Amat when he too saw Japón. It led to the two directors meeting and to the situation two years later where both had films in Cannes – Carlos with Battle In Heaven and the then 26-year-old Amat with his debut feature Sangre. Someone misinfomed me that Amat had been the cinematographer on Battle In Heaven – in fact, as I soon learned, he’d been an assistant director. But that falsehood was part of a general assumption among critics at Cannes that Sangre was somehow ‘school of Reygadas’, an idea reinforced by the similarity between the two
lead characters in the two films – Marcos (Marco Hernández), the General’s driver in Battle, and Diego (Cirilo Recia Davíla), the husband in Sangre – both passive, heavybreathing individuals who inside are like boiling kettles. Sangre impressed me, however, as a very different sort of film from Battle. It’s a modernist work, whose idea of television’s nightly massaging of its worker-watchers is rigorous in its stripped-down conception. Diego, a doorman, and Blanco (Laura Saldaño), his wife, who works at a Sushi bar, may have a zombie-like affect-free marriage, but they both have a chance to stir themselves when Karina (Claudia Orozco), Diego’s daughter from a previous marriage, shows up, in trouble. The film’s sombre, slow quality seemed perfectly in tune with the cinema of millennial anxiety so prevalent at the time. 2005 was also a watershed year for me in terms of Mexican cinema because I went Mexico for the first time, visiting the Morelia International Film Festival, a trip which gave me a much better understanding of the ecology of Mexican cinema. Having said that, at first Amat’s second feature Los Bastardos made less of an impact on me than Sangre, partly because I missed its showing during Cannes 2008 – one of the festival’s strongest recent years. Los Bastardos got a comparatively hard ride there from some critics for its painstaking portrayal of Jésus (Jésus Moises Rodriguez) and Fausto (Rubén Sosa), two despised and put-upon illegal Mexican day workers in LA who eventually get sick of their regular work and do housebreaking on the side. This concept was seen by some as conforming to the prejudices of LA’s dominant community. In defending himself, Amat’s main point was that he wanted to attack prejudices and blindnesses both sides of the border. When I finally saw Los Bastardos, it seemed to me that the film’s strength lay exactly in that determination to let the audience be the judge of its characters. Tribute to Amat Escalante | 7
Claudia Orozco & Cirilo Recio (Sangre) photo by MartĂn Escalante |
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Amat Escalante continued to court disagreement and controversy with his next feature, Heli (2013) which gave us an insight into the punishments meted out by the drug cartels. Heli (Armando Espitia) is a teenage car assembly worker in the city of Guanajuato, supporting his wife Sabrina (Linda González), baby son Santiago and Estela (Andrea Vergara), his 12-year-old sister. When Estella’s soldier boyfriend Alberto (Juan Eduardo Palacios) is foolish enough to try to steal drugs from his corrupt military
my idea, but then I became very shy and realized I was not comfortable on stage. So I decided that I would make others act like someone else. I also see the audience as part of my movie, in a way that it’s still not completely possible for me to articulate. Somehow the audience and myself are actors inside the world that is the film, and as such we share that experience together, as a character.
officers, he, Heli, and Estella are taken away and delivered to some cartel sicarios, who torture Beto and Heli, killing the former. These very realistic scenes, involving setting fire to genitalia, caused something of a scandal in Cannes that year. It was the first time one of Escalante’s films had been included in the Official Competition, and Variety, in particular, gave it a morally disapproving review, saying it was “an accomplished but singularly unpleasant immersion in Mexico’s vicious cycle of drug-fuelled violence.” However, the Cannes jury, presided over by Steven Spielberg – director of one of Amat’s favourite films when a child, ET: the Extraterrestrial – disagreed and awarded Amat with its Best Director prize. Later that year, in Bucharest, the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu introduced me to Amat. Cristian was running a festival that brought the best of Cannes to Bucharest, and asked me to host a couple of masterclasses with Amat. For me, Heli was Amat’s breakthrough film. I had never seen anything like it, and it felt like it gave a truer portrait of life in a city like Guanajuato (where Amat lives) than anything else I’d seen come out of Mexico. In those masterclasses I got to know the efforts Amat had put into using ordinary local people as actors in his films. I saw that this young director could overcome a natural shyness once he started talking, and that he would diligently answer every last question thrown at him in great detail for hours. The interview that follows here happened during a frenetic time for us all. The UK voted to leave the European Union, the great Abbas Kiarostami died, Turkey suffered a failed military coup and the backlash that followed, the Republican Party chose Donald Trump as its candidate for US President, there have been terrorist atrocities across Europe. While all that was going on, Amat was putting the finishing touches to his latest feature film, La región salvaje /The Untamed, which has its own element of shock. I was sending him batches of questions in between events. I’m really looking forward to seeing this continually fresh and distinctive young director again in Sarajevo, so that he can outrage some more critics, and we can continue our conversation about contemporary Mexico and the modern world.
NJ: A feeling of wanting to act only came to me later in life, when I could be confident about what I was capable of – partly because there is a lot of performance in film journalism and criticism these days, on-camera on radio and the like. But in any case, most young people in England are now comfortable in front of cameras. Is that true in Mexico? I’m interested in that shared experience you talk about. Is it that you’d like the audience to feel as if they were acting out the film somehow? Is that partly why you like using non-actors, because it’s closer to the sense of a shared confrontation with performance? AE: I am not sure if people are more comfortable in front of a camera, but they are more used to it, and they know how to transmit a ‘lie’ better. All over the world, the way people are in front of a camera has changed drastically in the last ten years. Probably it was very similar for me growing up in Mexico as it was for you in England. Now, thanks to Facebook and other social media, almost everybody is a star, either to the world or between their friends and family. Somehow that innocence that I found in front of me in 2004 shooting Sangre, my first feature film, is mostly gone now from popular society. When I speak of the audience as a character, I guess I’m referring to them as witnesses, as opposed to spectators, to having them feel not only for the characters in front of them, but also to feel responsible for what is happening to them. For instance, when filming non-actors and discovering their mistakes, for them their pure awkwardness in front of the camera is neither uncomfortable nor funny, but it can be for the audience, and this was exhilarating for me when I started making films. Somehow reflected and maintained my interest for documentary filmmaking. This sort of performance from non-actors, or people whose ambition is not to be an actor, can be more truthful than someone just acting perfectly.
Nick James: If you could go back now and talk to the younger Amat Escalante, who was about to get involved in films, what would you warn him about and what would you say to encourage him? Amat Escalante: Nice question. I am not sure really. Somehow the innocence I had back then was for the better. So I would probably say to take care of that innocence and to trust what I was doing. I would also advise myself to learn quickly how to get rid of collaborators who are not working in your favor, how to take care of the acting as much as the aesthetics of my idea and, if possible, to keep watching five movies a week. NJ: People are often divided, however unfairly, into those who think visually and those who think verbally. Which were you more like as a child? AE: I’ve always been much more visual. I’ve never been able to express myself freely with words. That’s in part why I was drawn to telling stories with images and sounds from quite early on. My father is a painter and my mother used to play the cello. From the very start of my having memories, I recall his paintings and her sounds. What I do mixes these elements in a new way, that then lets me articulate something to the rest of the world. I reached a point – probably when I was 25-years-old – when I realized that I would never do anything else in my life that was as meaningful. NJ: What is your first memory of the cinema? Can you describe what you saw and how it affected you? AE: The first film I very vaguely remember seeing is E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. It was very exciting. I must have been three or four years old. I remember not only the film but the theatre also; the Marquee sign outside and the carpeting and posters inside. It all made an impression on me. I also remember from around the same time being taken to see The Kid , by Charlie Chaplin, at a small film club. Movies at this point were a way to experience another life and another reality that was more like a dream, or more direct about the basics of the dramas of life. Movies on VHS soon became very important. My grandmother recorded The Wizard of Oz from the television and that was the first movie I watched over and over again, obsessively. Many more would come later, in my teens and early twenties. NJ: When you were growing up did cinema have a rival for your affections? If so, what was it? AE: For a few years I was convinced I wanted to be an actor. Up to age 12 this was
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NJ: Is there a particular memory you have, and that you can share with us, where you thought, oh, this is like a movie, or, I wish I’d filmed this? AE: They would be moments in a public place where I can see a person and they can’t see that I am watching them. For example a conversation in a city bus where I hear a woman of a certain age talking to another woman younger than her and they speak candidly in that way that is somehow unfilmable, something completely anti-cinematic, but which inspires me for that reason. I’ve had many of those moments. Besides that, I can’t really think of anything that I wished I could have filmed. I am actually quite bad at taking pictures or videos in life. I’d much rather capture the moment with my eyes and then have it in my head for my imagination to work over. In this same sense I consider myself a bad tourist, because I have to make a big effort to take photos of the places I visit. NJ: When you first thought of yourself as a film-maker, were there a certain kind of films where you said to yourself, never; I’ll never make anything like that? AE: It’s more like “I don’t think I could do that even if I tried”: for example, a romantic comedy with big Hollywood stars or a very specific commercial exploitation horror film. I admire films like that because it’s as if I can’t even imagine how they put them together. Also, certain television series just seem impossible for me to fathom how they make them. NJ: What did first looking through the camera do for you – did you feel stronger or more able to articulate something or better relate to whomsoever was in front of the camera? AE: ‘Hiding’ is the first word that comes to my mind with this question. I became very shy at around age 12 and that is when I had to find something where I could hide behind, and that was a film camera. But then I realized that being shy is not so convenient for making movies. To articulate things with words has been something I’ve always had to work on. Being able to do it with film is my salvation. Words can lie so much more than images and somehow images are the perfect words – for me at least. When you say relate to whoever was in front of the camera... I think of how, for a few years at the beginning of my dream to become a filmmaker, I wanted to make documentaries because I felt that they where the stronger, more meaningful form. And so I tried my hand at them and even took a course on them in the Cuban film school in San Antonio de los Banos with Belkis Vega. After that, I tried, with my brother Martín, to make a documentary in Mexico on villages abandoned because of immigration to the USA. My mother, when she saw the first rough cut, told me it was not very good, so that was enough for me to reconsider my career as a documentary filmmaker. Part of the reason why I could not get inside my subject was because of my personality, my difficulty getting near someone in real-life in a real situation. So I went back to fiction and started planning my first short film Amarrados, which took me five years to complete, because it was basically my film school.
Kenny Johnston, Amat Escalante & Abel Diaz shooting Amarrados photo by Martín Escalante
Abel Diaz (Amarrados) photo by Martín Escalante
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Andrea Vergara (Heli) photo by MartĂn Escalante
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Amat Escalante circa 1980 photo by Oscar Escalante
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NJ: What was your first mistake, the one you learned most from? AE: Scheduling and picking my work team: I’ve learned the hard way that, after the screenplay and finding the actors, these things are some of the most important. NJ: Can you describe the moment when you realized ‘film is for me. I really want to do this’. AE: It was when I was bout 15 years old and I discovered A Clockwork Orange. Also, in a practical sense, El Mariachi by Robert Rodriguez. Knowing that he shot his film with seven thousand dollars was an inspiration that made me realize, maybe I could actually do it too. But exploring the work of Stanley Kubrick was definitely what ignited my passion. Then came Werner Herzog followed by R.W. Fassbinder, Luis Buñuel, Chantal Ackerman, James Benning, Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson, among many others. I discovered these filmmakers later, when I lived in Austin, Texas for two years, where I attended the Austin Film Society that Richard Linklater and others started. They screened films on 16mm and 35mm for free every Tuesday. Looking back, those Tuesdays were very important to me. After watching the films, I would walk to the University’s library and explore their New York Times archives for articles and reviews on the films. I was learning. NJ: Let’s talk about how you came through the education system into film. Could you give us a summary of that education – the people who were pivotal to that – and the way your feelings about film developed up to the point where you were working on your short film Tied-up/ Amarrados? AE: From a very young age my parents, Linda Wool and Oscar Escalante, avoided applying any school or academic pressure that I could have felt. My father was a painter/ musician and my mother a musician too, so my childhood was full of images and music, something that I now consider a big influence on my way of perceiving life. When I was 12 years old, my parents separated. My mother went to California with me and my brother. I had quite a rough transition to my teenage years, adjusting to a new culture
print by Oscar Escalante 1979
Linda Wool photo by Oscar Escalante
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MartĂn | and Amat Escalante during shooting of Heli photo by Kenny Johnston
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and new everything else. The contrast between the two countries was strong. As I adjusted to this new life, I discovered two films, one after another. The first was A Clockwork Orange. That was so amazing a revelation for me that I was compelled to watch it every day for about six months, or a year, and I actually had to buy a new VHS tape of it because the first one disintegrated. There was something in this film that touched and excited me deeply. But making a film still seemed like a fantasy. Then I somehow came across El Mariachi by Robert Rodriguez (1993). I read about how it was made by 7,000 dollars and by only one person doing more or less everything. So this inspired me to consider that maybe it was not such a far away dream to someday make a movie. I was around 15 years old and having a horrible time in Lakewood High School, which was infested by gangs and racial violence. To feel safe I had to join a gang and take part in some unpleasant activities, but it seemed like the only way to go to school in a ‘normal’ way. But after a few months of this it was just too unpleasant and I decided to stop going to school and devote myself to films. So I got out. My mother bought me my first video camera, and I started to experiment right away, with my brother and cousins. By this time I had already discovered Werner Herzog, who I read had also dropped out of school at age 15, and he made some of the greatest films I had ever seen. So that made me feel a bit more secure with my decision. I joined a summer workshop called VIDKIDCO for children and teenagers to learn about making films. There I shot and edited a video short called Alone at Last, about a young man who hated people and wanted to be left alone, until his wish actually comes true, and he is the only person on earth. He then befriends a mouse, but one day, kills it by mistake. After shooting and editing the video I needed music, so I went to show the short to Eugene Carpenter Jr., a family friend, who was very impressed. Eugene, a forensic pathologist, decided to become my patron and supported me from then on, right up to producing Sangre and Los Bastardos. Without his help my story would have been much different. Alone at Last won me a first place price at the National Children’s Film Festival in Austin, where I had moved to live with my father. The award included a day’s visit to Robert Rodriguez’s studios there. This was a very nice and inspiring award for me, considering he was one of my earliest inspirations. I also started attending the Austin Film Society’s free screenings every Tuesday. The greatest films for me at that moment, from Chantal Ackerman to Robert Bresson, James Benning and many others, were the ones presented by Richard Linklater, a very passionate cinephile and filmmaker. He had made Slacker a few years before, and it was that film that had attracted
Simone Bucio (The Untamed)
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me to move to Austin in the first place, since it portrayed the city in the most relaxed laid back way possible, and I needed a place like that. I was 16 and extremely antisocial. I would sometimes go weeks without really speaking to anybody, just watching films and reading about films at the UT Library. I started to learn about real celluloid film and bought myself a Super 8 camera and then later a 16mm one. I had joined the Austin Cinemaker Co-op where I did a short film on one reel of super 8 with only in-camera editing. This was important for me because I learned how to tell a story in the most precise and economical way possible. All this time, I was working at a fast food restaurant, but soon I got a job at a well stocked video store, where I would watch at least one film a day. My life was film and learning all I could about technique and the subject’s history. I wrote Amarrados, a short that I wanted to shot back in my home city of Guanajuato, in Mexico. I saved money, and after about three years I had enough to buy myself an Arriflex 16S 16mm camera and a small DAT recorder for sound, along with a good but inexpensive boom microphone. So in 1998, I went with my brother Martín and the actor Kenny Johnston, a new friend I had met at a short film festival in L.A., to shoot Amarrados during two scheduled weeks. I had learned how to use the camera, and Kenny did the sound and acted, Martín and my father helped with everything else. It took me another five years to finish the short. That done, in 2002, it was selected to the Rotterdam Film Festival, and this confirmed for me that I was on the right path. NJ: Looking back now on Amarrados (a portrait of a glue-sniffing small boy and the women in his life), which is very much a work of promise and imagination – but with some rough edges – how do you feel about it now? Have you watched it at all, or is it out of your mind for good? AE: Of course, I feel that there’s a lot of innocence and transparency in it; a lot of inspiration from the films and directors that had gotten me to that point – in particular Alejandro Jodorowsky, Luis Buñuel, Werner Herzog and Chantal Ackerman. It was a big achievement for me, especially because at one point during the five years I worked on the post-production – learning how to edit, mix sound, etc. – I was afraid I would never finish it. Then, once it was selected at an important festival, it really opened many doors for me, even if it was just that I was more confident now that I had finished a proper short film. So, in the end, maybe it is somehow, personally my most important film.
Ruth Ramos (The Untamed)
NJ: Amarrados to some extent crystalizes many of your abiding concerns: the innocence and neglect of youth, the prospect of violence, the perversity of experience. I know you like to
NJ: Sangre describes a turning point in the life of Diego, who works as a doorman, his wife Blanca, with whom he has a relationship of utter routine and a lot of sex, and Karina, his
move on with each film but would you agree there’s a thread connecting your films? AE: I am sure there is. It can be dangerous or a waste of time somehow for me to analyze it because one runs the risk of making it too obvious and contrived, but I do believe that always, with anything that is worth anything, it has to come from inside, from the unexplained and unanalyzed parts of the brain.
grown-up daughter by another woman who is in difficulties. For a feature debut, it has a number of distinctive elements. The first is the idea of depicting a life of routine by making that routine always dispassionate, so that even the sex that Diego and Bianca have is part of an obligatory domestic routine. This is a question of pacing and performance. What made that important to you then? AE: The inspiration came from being sedentary – somehow even an imposed sedentariness. I would see families having dinner while watching television and on the television, products were advertised that they consumed and discarded. I wanted to show this consumption and discarding in an emotional plain, inside the characters, and how they related with each other. That is why, at the end, Diego literally throws his problem onto the trash. There is also a faraway war going on somewhere (as always) that they get glimpses of through the television. They are safe at home on their couch but the violence will reach them anyway. This is a recurrent theme of mine. So the acting and pacing has to do with them not being in full control of their lives, which are being partially dictated by the greater interests of the government and corporations they live under.
NJ: A script for a short is one thing, a feature another. In one interview I’ve seen you talk about how long the writing process takes. You’ve also said that you like to have books around but don’t read much. Are the two related in the sense that reading and writing take you out of the ideas space in your mind and that you prefer to visualise? Or is it more that the ecology of a script for you is something that has to go slowly? AE: I don’t consider myself a writer at all. In part, probably because I left school at an early age, I have been undisciplined regarding writing, grammar and structure. My first [feature] film Sangre was very simply written. I always thought of it more like a list of shots than a literary script. Then, with Los Bastardos, I decided to co-write with Martín, my brother, who had experienced many of the same culture clash details that inspired that film. He was able to help me structure each scene and write everything in a more conventional way. I am also not very patient, that’s what makes reading difficult for me. For instance, I prefer to put on a film and write while it’s playing in the background. But I do enjoy reading a good book and appreciate the immense beauty that I’ve found in literature. NJ: What circumstances make a script go better for you? AE: Whenever I can tell something visually, using only images and sounds, it’s always very inspiring for me. I like to walk or run and listen to music and there, at that moment, a lot of ideas come. That’s how my last two film ideas, Heli and The Untamed, have come to me. I also like working with a co-writer because it motivates me to get active and gets me on my feet better. But I also want to try and write alone at some point again. My co-writers have been: Martín Escalante (Los Bastardos), Gabriel Reyes (Heli) and Gibran Portela (The Untamed).
NJ: The second distinction is the camera style, one that’s opposed to movement and to following the actor around. Instead the frame stays rigid for much of the time so that people can be half in and half out of the frame. That must have been a bold decision to make. Were you happy with the outcome? AE: Part of it comes from setting up every idea to be as simple as possible, especially considering it was my first feature film. So I limited everything: the story, the dialogue and the camerawork. We were all mostly newbies on the crew. My Director of Photography was Alex Fenton, with whom I felt extremely comfortable and he collaborated in a very nice way. At some point in the script I had the main character carving up a body, but this was eliminated because it was too over-the-top. What was left in it’s place was this idea of cutting bodies with the framing. This gave an uncomfortable and violent feeling towards the actors in some key moments. NJ: The third distinction is the absence of music, which later becomes a minimal use of music. Since you like to walk around with your headphones on listening to music a lot, it’s Tribute to Amat Escalante | 19
The Untamed (2016)
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Nina Zavarin (Los bastardos) photo by Martín Escalante
a surprise that you’re so careful with it. Can you talk us through that approach? AE: I like to think that I have respected and admired music so much that I cannot use it in a careless way. Most of my family are musicians, or play an instrument; I am the exception. So I have slowly incorporated it in my films. It can be so powerful that it can affect the scene too much. With Sangre I needed to be very careful. I knew that I should not be conventional because otherwise the film would not be noticed. I was not so sure of myself to be able to use music.
bad ones, maybe just because they are writing about something I made. In the more than ten years since I started to make films and show them to a public I have hardened and learned to not take anything too seriously, the good or the bad. With Sangre, everything written about it was important for me and it really affected me, but it was such an intense sensation that I knew it could not be like that forever, or it would simply ruin me. So maybe as a self defense mechanism I learned to take it all with a sense of curiosity more than importance.
NJ: This would be a good place to mention Carlos Reygadas, whose film Japon was an inspiration for you. It’s a story you’ve told before but the line from meeting him to being in Cannes with Sangre is obviously pivotal, and you worked on his Battle in Heaven. Can you describe how you think about that sequence of events now? AE: Carlos and I are still good friends and help each other whenever we can. He is one of the greatest filmmakers living at the moment and I am very fortunate to be close to him and be able to share ideas and experiences. When there is something he believes in, he is an extremely generous person, and he believed in me when I met him with the script for Sangre under my arm. I first read about Japón in a copy of Film Comment and I was very intrigued that they mentioned Herzog and Tarkovsky when writing about this new Mexican film that had just premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. So it really caught my attention. Then I had the chance of seeing it projected in the American Cinematheque in L.A., where I was living at the time. It was a very moving and exhilarating experience; I was very inspired and motivated. Not since Buñuel’s Los Olvidados had I seen something so powerful come out of my country. It was a very important moment for Mexican cinema because nothing like it had been done before. It turned out Carlos and I had a friend in common, Pedro Aguilera from Spain, so I asked him to put me in contact with Carlos. I wrote a passionate email to him of seeing his film and about what I wanted to do. He offered to help me with Sangre right there in his first reply. Soon after that Pedro came to Mexico City to work on Battle in Heaven and that’s when I met Carlos in person, showed him Amarrados and he hired me to be one of his assistant directors. It was an amazing experience and the only other work in films I have done besides my own films. Pedro then became my assistant director for Sangre and has gone on to direct three feature films in his country. Meanwhile Carlos helped me produce Sangre, Los Bastardos and Heli along with Jaime Romandia and Mantarraya Producciones.
NJ: Speaking of Cannes, I believe the controversy your next feature Heli caused there came to you as a shock. The film is complex portrait of a family comprising of a young car-assembly worker, Heli, his wife Sabrina, their baby, Santiago and Heli’s naive sister, Estella. It is Estella’s romance with Beto, a headstrong young military cadet that gets the family into trouble with the local drugs cartel. We know this from the film’s grim beginning where bodies are hung from bridges across highways. Tell me first what your main aim was with this film? AE: I wanted to show the situation in Mexico regarding injustice crime and violence but without the usual glamour involved with narcos and police etc. I really wanted to focus on the most vulnerable members of society, the young and the poor, a young family playing by the ‘rules’ of the government. So that’s how the idea started, and many of the details in the story are things me and my co-writer Gabriel Reyes knew about. Just general knowledge of the news. We purposely didn’t want to do research because we wanted to approach the subject as far away from journalism as possible. We are flooded with so many stories and morbid details that I wanted to steal clear of that. My idea was to have something that came more from inside me as opposed to from the press. For example, the famous torture scene. This was all from our imagination. But soon after the film was shot, Gabriel sent me a video from the internet that showed a situation just like that, of very young pre-adolescent boys working as sicarios, torturing people with fire etc. If you are aware and conscious of a situation you just have to connect the dots and reality will be there.
NJ: Cannes is a kind of bear pit for filmmakers with the critics so quick to leap on films. I read that you regard good and bad reviews with the same emotion – not a good one, a kind of morbid curiosity. Is this a matter of self-preservation, of keeping your ardour for film alive? AE: I Believe it has more to do with my personality. I cringe reading good reviews or
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NJ: Personally I thought Heli was terrifically powerful, though necessarily tough to watch. What shocked some audiences in Cannes was the violence. I know you’ve answered questions on this probably hundreds of times but has anything changed in your feelings or attitude to the violence in Heli now that time has elapsed? AE: With all my films, I like to see straight on, without blinking, we could say. Not only regarding violence, but everything in general. In Sangre I wanted to look at the mundane uncompromisingly and directly, because I felt it was a fresh way of doing it. In Heli it’s for the same reason. I want to be there in the situation and almost feel it viscerally in front of me. Of course, some viewers will react, because most people do not want to be in that situation or anything like it. The film, for me, had to be a slap in the
face, not necessarily to the audience but to myself – like when you can’t tell if you’re dreaming or seeing reality in front of you. What motivated me the most is the injustice that I see all around me. In that way I feel proud to have said something about how I saw things in my country in a film that was seen by many people in Mexico. NJ: It must have been gratifying after the controversy when the Cannes jury gave you the Best Director award. AE: It was a very nice surprise, especially coming from a jury comprised mostly of directors that I respect enormously, including Steven Spielberg, the director of the first film I remember seeing in a cinema, E.T. the Extraterrestrial. NJ: I remember in Bucharest we talked a bit about the ‘making of’ film of Heli I think your brother Martín shot. It was very revealing of your patience with the actors. What lessons did you learn with the non-actors in Heli that might affect your new film La región salvaje /The Untamed? AE: For the first time in La región salvaje /The Untamed I had the actors read the script and I rehearsed with them in a regular basis. This has been quite a radical change for me since before this I would never let them get near the script, and never rehearsed except just before the scene. I am not sure of the final results – that will be for you and the audience to say – but I felt that I was able to tell the story I wanted to more closely and without as much compromise as in my earlier films. I used to only use non-actors but now I have used people that actually were interested in acting. This was a big difference. NJ: The film concerns a mysterious young woman who enters the life of a young couple going through a crisis to do with homophobia and the repression of women. AE: The original inspiration came from two newspaper articles in the Guanajuato local newspaper. One was about a young woman that had suffered an attempted rape by an acquaintance in the woods that she was able to fight off. When the police arrived, they initially put them both in the same hospital room, and then later she was accused of being a ‘slut’. Later, the guy fled the town, which made it seem obvious he was guilty, so now he is in jail. But I was surprised at all the rumors, gossip and victimblaming this young woman suffered. The second article was an image of a man’s body floating in a stream with the huge headline above the image: ‘FAGGOT IS FOUND DROWNED’. This impressed and outraged me very much. The article stated that the man was a nurse at a local hospital. So this man that spent his life helping other people ends up in the front cover of the town newspaper, being called a derogatory term, because of his sexual preference. Those two elements are very present in my new film,. I tried to look for reason, but I couldn’t, so I ended up looking for it with something that is just not from this world. NJ: La región salvaje /The Untamed has this definite science fiction genre element to it, yet it’s also a study of adult sexuality and parenthood. Did you arrive at this SF element
through thinking about the adult sex elements? AE: It came after a few drafts of the screenplay that I wrote with the help of Gibran Portela. There was something that I could not explain, something that did not make sense in any way, or at least I could not make sense of it. So this thing came in to my head that somehow made sense in regards to the characters and the reasons for their actions. NJ: Without wishing to give too much away, there’s an element of the ‘creature in the barn’ Frankenstein horror movie to the film, is that a cinematic idea that you particularly wanted to have fun with? AE: I guess I am playing with those elements for sure. I got a bit tired of so much crude reality in my films and a cabin in the woods is very much something from the fantasy element in films. So, yes, there was some of that in the conception. NJ: The film talks about about how our natural sexual instincts are suppressed by society’s mores and rules, and them being especially prejudicial towards women in general and gay men. And yet those who find sexual completeness in the film seem kind of hollowed out, drained of life. Can you talk about that? AE: Maybe it’s more of a satisfied feeling that I perceive in them, an encounter with the void of pleasure. We could speak of the paradox of hedonism in the pursuit of completeness that these characters are looking for and they just keep getting into trouble looking for it.
Nick James Editor of Sight & Sound, the British Film Institute’s long-running film magazine, since 1997. James has written on film, literature and art for the Guardian, the Observer, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Independent, Vogue, Time Out, The London Review of Books and The Literary Review. He has published a book on Michael Mann’s HEAT and presented the BBC documentary British Cinema: THE END OF THE AFFAIR. In 2010 the French government made him Chevalier de L’ordre des arts et des lettres. Currently he curates twice-yearly ‘Deep Focus’ programmes at BFI Southbank (the most recent being Mirroring Tarkovsky). In 2015 his essay Signs and Mythologies – The Significance of Roland Barthes was broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
“Concluding this extensive interview I would like to thank Nick James for his careful attention and sensibility. Mirsad and the amazing team at the Sarajevo Film Festival for their generosity and patience inviting me, Fernanda de la Peza and my brother Martín to take part in this tribute. As I write these lines Fernanda and I are finishing editing “La región salvaje” (The Untamed) and getting the film ready for its world premiere in Venice only a few days from now.” Amat Escalante
photo by Jocelyn Bain Hogg
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photo | by Jocelyn Bain Hogg
24 Tribute to Amat Escalante