INTERVIEW: Gerardo Naranjo

With his bold visual style and intimate, if volatile, narratives, Gerardo Naranjo has been one of the most exciting independent directors to emerge from Mexico in the decade after filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón put the nation's cinema back on the international radar. While Naranjo, 40, always seemed keenly appreciative of the Godardian dictum, "All you need for a film is a gun and a girl," the phrase has never been more appropriate than for his new movie, Miss Bala. The narcotics thriller jacks up the stakes with pyrotechnics and gun battles in the real-life story of a would-be beauty queen (the sensational Stephanie Sigman) who becomes the pawn of a drug gang. The director shared his thoughts about this dramatic leap in a chat during the 2011 New York Film Festival, where Miss Bala had its American premiere.

After making two relatively small films—Drama/Mex and I'm Gonna Explode—you really shifted gears here.

I felt I needed a change. I guess you can see, this thing is completely different.

You traded your toys in for a machine gun.

That's a good metaphor. I stopped playing little games, and I assumed the position that I could speak in a serious tone, a tone in which I had never spoken before.

Did that come out of needing to challenge yourself as a filmmaker, or with a story you needed to tell?

It began with some anger, to see the cultural products that we have: the media, the soap operas talking about the crime wave, the movies talking about violence. People were not talking about it with some other sensibility. The movies were comical and farcical, and they were huge hits. It's a lot of material depicting this but none wanting to make a note on the miserableness of it. It's always embellished. These guys have gold chains and parties all the time with women and the drugs and loud music. From what I knew that wasn't true.

What I see in the streets was something much more gray, much more pathetic, sad and full of ignorance. There is a good space to make something, maybe a movie that will reflect on that. We were coming [up] with different story lines. We discovered that it's a good idea that these guys are not having such a party. It's a job where you can walk up the ladder fast maybe but you can die very soon, full of paranoia, full of betrayal. They are killing each other like crazy. It's always a take on the funny side. I felt there was a possibility to make a movie that would speak with another tone.

Almost all this material spoke to the process of becoming a criminal. "I am very poor. My son has leukemia. I don't have money for medicine so I become a drug person. I start killing people because that's how I'm going to cure my son." No one was making a description of the feeling a victim has when crime comes towards your life and starts infecting you and everything around you. I knew I wanted to make a movie without drugs in it, without torture, without a graphic description of violence, although I wanted violence to be all over the movie but in a feeling. I didn't have a story.

But then the headlines came to your rescue.

One day, the news of the beauty queen appeared. She's in a truck with heavy armory, dollars, a lot of drugs, and I grew fascinated with the news. I think its perfect for what I have to say. What this story can give us is a perspective where we don't have to get into the psyche of the criminals. We are just with the girl. We see how they speak, how they walk, how they look but we never go into the mind of the criminals.

When we had the perspective, we just had to set up a number of rules, limits of things we wouldn't do. The life of the movie comes out of contradiction. We were working with some thriller rules, some suspense rules and some action film rules. So we say OK, let's start destroying those rules. What if we destroy the rule of the thriller by not knowing what the bad guy does? We will commit to the ignorance of the girl. What if we don't see, as in a Schwarzenegger film, the guys shooting? But we turn around the camera so we don't see the ejaculatory process of the bullets going out, and we see the pathetic-ism of something being destroyed. We don't want the True Romance final showdown with feathers of birds flying in the air.

Here, everything has gravity. Everything has to be inglorious. It was a bit of an experiment to make these action sequences where you watch what you usually don't watch in a movie. We try not to put ourselves in the good hands of the cut. We're going to use long-form shots. We're not going to show everything. Most of the tension of the movie will come from people trying to see more and they can't.

That's true. There's a kind of strange inertia at work, since Stephanie is often tied up, or crouched in a corner or stuffed in a dark room. It feels inexorable and agonizing.

There are two tensions that help the movie. The first one is the frustration at the girl's passivity. The audience wants her to do something but for me it's a perfect metaphor for a country that's not doing anything. Also it's a good discussion: what do you do as a normal citizen? Why doesn't she get the gun and kill the guy? Well, Bruce Willis would do that, but I don't think a normal person will run away that easy. These guys know too much. They have your number. They know where you live. We knew people would be anxious. We use it to bring you to the end of the film, trying to figure out what the hell is going on inside her.

Also, dramatically, I think we were very strong in not having her emotions come across. She's a good sufferer, another saint or Joan of Arc who takes all the pain in a very stoic way. She has a certain position against pain. She keeps a dignity. Another tension is the camera work. You don't see most of the things you want to see. The soundtrack is giving you a lot of information you wouldn't find out.

You mentioned how you found Stephanie, but she had auditioned for a commercial first.

When I met her, she hadn't done anything. She did a bad TV show, which I was very angry about. When I met her, we began the process of making the script. I told her a lot of lies. I told her a lot of bad things would happen to her. She seemed courageous. I said, not everything I told you was true but it's going to be hard. We shot the whole movie on video, shot by shot, with the actress and a lot of extras to help us. There were no guns, just brooms, chairs, in a big room. That was important for her to know the internal rhythm of the film. I wanted her to know her choreography. I do improvisations, but I don't want them to be kidding around or the movie will be eight hours. Then I cast the bad guy and put them together, and she really didn't like this guy. She was disgusted by him. She's from a better social status in Mexico than him. I said this is great. He provoked in her these things in reality.

What was it like to experience the pleasure, in the blockbuster parlance, of blowing things up real good?

I'm a big lover of action films. The French Connection is a movie I will always love. I knew the theory of the concept behind it but I never had done it. I felt incredible doing the scenes. I never expected it to be such a rude, bleak experience. It's so loud your brain stops thinking. I never took that in account. There was a lot of safety for the crew. There were a lot of injured people because of the explosions because it gets into your skin, and we didn't know that. It was incredible. We just had one shot to do. That was most of the budget of the film in the action sequence. We didn't have much budget so each action scene was done just once.

What happened to the real Miss Baja?

She's working, trying to be a model and forget what happened. We met with her and she told us a bunch of lies, or she told us a very fantastic story that we were not very interested in. For a moment we thought about inviting her to become the actress, but I don't think it would have worked out. She was left out in the middle of the night and brought out in the back door of the office of the police headquarters. She was released in the most un-normal way, that's what we are saying in ending movie like that. There is a minimal trace of the possibility of the law being something that works in Mexico. Even if they want to destroy her life, they can't even jail her. They have used her in the way they want.

People do seem very disturbed by her passivity. Is she a normal person who would act this way or is she standing in as a kind of symbolic persona?

What if she's been crying like Frodo in Lord of the Rings all the time? What is she us suffering like that, does that make it OK? I truly believe that people when they are in front of a very violent event,they freeze. They don't take action. I had a good friend who was kidnapped in a taxi. They took her credit cards, and went to the ATMs to take money out, a big tour all around the city. Every time they go to the ATM, they would leave her alone in the car. She didn't do anything and saw these guys are not killing me. But if I go and try to get out and they get me, it's the end.

Are you worried you may become a focus of criminal attention?

We want to think we didn't. That's why we made everything fictitious. Obviously, the guy has a genital problem, so that was my main worry. That some criminal would say, "We are not impotent, we are macho machines." Besides that, so far, the movie doesn't talk about crime is bad or governments are bad. In my mind, I feel this is the crowning of some cultural illegality that I was raised with: they tell you if you do a trick, you get ahead of everybody. We as a social group don't see the benefit of following the rules. That's the basis of the problems of this society. We need very soon a spiritual revolution. We failed to fix this country. It's up to a new generation. What we have to do first is get to know ourselves.

[Listen to our 2009 podcast with Gerardo Naranjo here.]

Posted by ahillis at January 22, 2012 7:00 AM