Nordling here.
Alejandro Brugués, in my opinion, became something of the mascot of Fantastic Fest this year. Sure, everyone loves Nacho Vigalondo, and just being in the great Nacho's presence, you can feel the love flowing back from him, but Brugués brought a truly kick-ass film to the Fest this year with JUAN OF THE DEAD, and he's been so friendly and just happy to be a part of the festivities that you can't help but love the guy. Plus, his appetite for film is unparalleled, and it's nice to know that in Cuba AICN can be seen there (even if it takes 15 minutes for a page to load. That's dedication, my friends.)
But it was through sites like AICN, Latino Review, and others that Brugués learned about new film, and his love of film shines through everything he does. I sat down with him for a bit at Fantastic Fest, but I wish I'd had a recorder throughout my visits with him at the festival, because just talking to him about movies and his film was amazing. Easily my favorite memories of the festival were sitting down with him at the Highball and just talking about movies, man. I want JUAN OF THE DEAD to be seen by as many people as possible, as it's very accessible and just fun from first frame to last.
Nordling: Okay, I’m talking to Alejandro Brugues of JUAN OF THE DEAD. It’s his directorial first Cuban zombie movie ever made and released, hopefully soon, released in the States and I just wanted to talk to you briefly about the film and the ideas behind the film and how the film got made. First off, I wanted to ask… How’d you come up with the idea?
AB: Well my producer hates when I tell this story, but we were sitting… He’s a very good friend of mine and we grew up together, we are like brothers… One day we were together and I saw someone on the street that pretty much looked like a zombie and I said to him jokingly “We could use these people in a film, let alone we wouldn’t even need makeup and we can call it JUAN OF THE DEAD.” I looked at him and I said, “Okay, that’s the next one…” So starting there I started to think about the story and everything that I could do with it and it never stopped being fun.
Nordling: It is a very fun movie. One thing that I guess we can talk about briefly and one of the aspects of the film that I loved is how it touches on Cuban lifestyle through the prism of the genre film and understanding in the United States we know very little about Cuban life at all. In a weird way… The way Cuba portrays the United States is almost the same way in reverse where it’s kind of propaganda on both sides, so just to understand that life and the way people live there is interesting.
AB: Well I’ve been wanting to do something like this for so long and so what I wanted to show in the film was I wanted to make an amalgam of Cuban society, how it works, how people work there, how people react in terms of problems and we have had lots of problems in the last 50 years, (Laughs) so I guessed that the next set of problems were going to be zombies and so what I did is I borrowed from the Cuban reality so many things that I have seen in my life or things that I had heard of and that were so crazy, because the Cuban is a very crazy reality and I put zombies in the mix. It was a bit of a balancing act. I mean what I wanted to do is make the zombie film that I have ever wanted to see and so I knew some things about the scale that I wanted to see, because when you see a zombie film you really want to see the scale of destruction and all of that, so there were things like the scale of the film that I wanted to have. There were some other scenes that I have never seen in a zombie film that I also wanted to see here.
Nordling: That’s interesting, because a lot of zombie films… I actually think that one of the greatest parts of the film is that the scale of it is actually quite big and you know you would expect more zombie films to have that kind of scale. Even in movies like the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD doesn’t feel like it has the scale that yours does.
AB: It has a lot at the beginning and at the end, but then they spend all of the time at the mall and that’s one of the ones I really like a lot.
Nordling: It’s interesting, a lot of zombie films are… You know they have WORLD WAR Z coming out next year…
AB: Yeah, I loved the book. That was one of… Obviously I read… I saw every zombie film I could see and some of them are films that I have seen my whole life many, many times, but I read a lot. I read like WORLD WAR Z and THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE. Yeah, I did do my research. Yeah and I read like four times the whole LIVING DEAD and THE WALKING DEAD. Those I think are some of my favorite zombie stories.
Nordling: Yeah, they are great.
AB: They’re awesome.
Nordling: The cool thing about your film is that while other zombie films show the scale at first and then they draw it down to be intimate with the characters that are left and the scale of the movie isn’t so much in it anymore. Your film is, it’s weird to say, but your film remains intimate, but at the same time it’s big. It’s kind of intimate and big at the same time, it’s interesting. I’m really curious how the crowd shots came to be, I mean there had to be some CGI in there, right?
AB: Oh yeah. There is a lot of CGI. We had hundreds of extras, but there is a lot of CGI in those shots.
Nordling: It’s hard to see, hard to tell.
AB: I don’t know how many extras we had in these scenes, probably around 300 which is odd, because to get 300 zombies in makeup is horrible…
Nordling: The scene where the refuges are fleeing Havana and they are in the street…
AB: That’s what is funny about the film, because one of the things… I didn’t know when I was writing that this was something special, because as much as I tried to see films that were similar, it was very difficult because it was so Cuban and at the same time I saw zombie films and I was shooting it… There was also a lot of the Cuban reality that got into our way and somehow we managed to make it. For example in that scene that you are mentioning we had to shoot one part at a time, because obviously we couldn’t throw a hundred rafts in the water in Havana, because people would see that and…
[Both Laugh]
AB: And so there were lots of frustrations. There were a lot of restrictions in my way. You have to get permits for every raft that went into the water and we couldn’t shoot right there in that place obviously, because probably someone would get the wrong idea. And we had lots of security, because well I don’t know you have to have lots of security when you do that in the water just in case someone on your crew decides to… (Laughs) So in that scene we had to shoot one raft at a time. We had to shoot it in Havana and to put the background in later. We had to shoot everybody fighting in the marathon one by one and then just compose it all into one shot.
Nordling: It was well done. What about the stampede in the streets scene?
AB: That’s the same way, because I knew… Talk about the Cuban reality, I wanted to use all of these things that almost surreal and you know we have these squares in front of the American Embassy where they used to make lots of demonstrations and well in the ten years since they’ve made it, so I wanted to… I didn’t want the people in the film to know that these were zombies, because you really don’t see many zombie films in Cuba, but they are showing them most inside on DVD, so probably that’s a good thing. So I wanted to do this big demonstration in front of the American Embassy and the idea was that that’s where it would be where that the zombies started attacking people there and that’s where the virus starts to spread, because it seems funny to have that in front of the American embassy. Obviously we couldn’t get permits to shoot right there in front of the embassy, so we had to be like one block away from it, but that’s the building that’s in the background and for that one we did have like 300 people and then they just filled the rest of the street… I remember I wanted to have a huge shot of Havana from a helicopter or something and we couldn’t fly the helicopter near the street and all of that, because of security, so we just had to find the best way to do it. I really like that one.
Nordling: It’s a great scene.
AB: Yeah and it was awesome to shoot there, because we didn’t know if we were going to get the street, because we had some streets closed that I have never seen closed for a film and somehow we got the permit, I still don’t know how. I was gladly surprised and we closed that street for three days. I remember we shot something first and then… it took us half a day actually, but it was very tiring. There are so many shots of… Then my assistant was screaming “Cut! Zombies can’t smoke!”
[Both Laugh]
AB: There were zombies running in there smoking.
Nordling: “No smoking zombies…”
AB: Yeah, that’s were you go “Hmm…” There was so much work with coordination and all of that just to have zombies smoking a cigarette.
Nordling: I wanted to ask you about the films that you have seen and how you got to see them, because you were telling me the other night that obviously it’s very difficult to see genre films like that from America or even anywhere else in Cuba and how that happened, how it works.
AB: Well when I was growing up it was much more difficult, now it’s easier, because we download it and we have a great piracy system.
[Both Laugh]
AB: But when I was growing up it was very different. I remember the second film I had in my life in Betamax was EVIL DEAD and that film changed my life.
Nordling: I would imagine. It changed a lot of people’s lives.
AB: Yeah and after that one I started to try to get films like that as much as I could and well when I did the stuff at the beginning I didn’t… I still saw every film I could. I remember in the early 90’s they opened the only video store in Havana and it was in my building, it was a three story building, and I lived on the third floor and the store was on the first one and it took my like a month and a half to see all of the films.
Nordling: Wow, you were done. “Okay, next month…”
AB: And every time I went out of the country as a kid, because my parents used to work outside, I would do the same. As soon as… Usually when I get out of Cuba the first thing I do when I’m somewhere else is I drop my bags and head to the theater to watch a film, so something that is very tough to do there, but as I said now with the piracy you can watch everything. In the 90’s it was much more difficult and somehow I managed.
Nordling: What was the first movie that you remember that really made you think, other than EVIL DEAD, but one of the first movies that you remember that made you think “I want to do this with my life.”
AB: I remember that clearly happened with PULP FICTION, because I was writing, but… I’m a writer and I’ve always been a writer and I was writing at the time, but I really didn’t think about writing or working in film and then I saw PULP FICTION and I was like “Wow, you can do all of this,” then I decided to study filmmaking and I started screenwriting. I became a director by chance. I started in screenwriting and when I went to the film school it was at the time when I started to read sites like Ain’t It Cool and all of that and at film school they do have a huge video library. They had a huge collection of titles and all of that, so sometimes I would read about films and I would try to find them there, but also the other thing that I learned going in somehow was being greatly influenced by sites like yours that you have to see films like a child. You can’t lose that enthusiasm that you had as a kid, so what I did going into this school is instead of watching all of the classics, which I also did, I had my friends and I watching Bergman and Tarkovsky and I would watch the films that I used to watch as a kid that I remembered that had some impact on me. For example I remember Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE, because of the…
Nordling: The poster?
AB: No, not the poster. I remember the film. I saw the film as a kid and there were a couple of scenes that got stuck in my head, like when the girl gets that thing in his eye and the zombies walking around on the ridge at the end. As a kid I saw the film THE VAMPIRE KILLERS and I thought it was a horror film, but I was a little kid and it really scared me and then when I watched it at film school I thought it was brilliant and I don’t know, films that I have never stopped watching like JAWS.
Nordling: JAWS was my first film memory. I was five years old and my whole family went to see it with me and I mean when I say my family I mean my cousins and everybody. We went and saw it and I had no idea I was going to be in for a fright and I made my dad tell me when the scary parts were going to come and he didn’t, and I freaked out and for weeks after I was afraid to take baths and…
AB: I couldn’t even get into the shower.
Nordling: Yeah and then I remember as a kid just watching it and it’s like “I want to know everything I can about sharks” and then after that I said, “I want to know everything I can about filmmaking.” JAWS is very much a gateway to all of that thinking.
AB: You know when we started shooting, the first day of shooting I was wearing my JAWS T shirt, which is my lucky T shirt and incidentally we were shooting the first scene of the film, which is one the ocean, so I was like in a boat wearing my JAWS T shit and was so excited and that’s why I always include… well there are a couple of JAWS homages in the film and that’s why I included a shark. I don’t have a lot of sharks…
Nordling: That was a great moment.
AB: I didn’t tell the producers I was going to include that when we were in pre-production, because I didn’t want them to freak out about the effects. When we were there I just said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this happened?”
Nordling: (Laughs) It was cool. It was really cool. I loved the shot where they were all walking on the bottom of the ocean. That was kind of really creepy actually.
AB: That’s one of the examples of combining what I hadn’t seen in a zombie film with the Cuban reality, because you have the rafters that we have had in the 80’s and I thought… well a lot of people had died in the ocean trying to make it to Miami and I thought “What about if the zombies were following them underwater? Eventually those zombies are going to get to Miami.”
Nordling: Yeah, that’s right. That would be a great idea for a sequel. That would be really cool.
AB: Actually while I was shooting the film I said, “If I do a sequel, I don’t want to do zombies. I want to do something like JUAN OF THE CATFISH and imitate a giant catfish or things like that.” I wanted to have Juan jumping from different genres.
Nordling: Yeah, that would be really cool. I was going to ask, do you think it would have been possible to make JUAN OF THE DEAD when Fidel was running the country?
AB: I don’t think there is actually a difference and he isn’t the one that… I think…
Nordling: See, the thing about Cuba in America is we have so many misconceptions about the country and the country that you are describing is not the country that we have in our heads, at least not in mine.
AB: It’s not… In some things it’s not as bad as you guys have it pictured, so I think the film for many reasons had a good timing. I don’t think it good have been done before or probably after, I’m not sure, but at the same time I don’t see why not. I mean we had made other films before with some other themes… There have been really good Cuban filmmakers that have been critics of the seat, so…
Nordling: The only Cuban film that kind of comes to mind and I’ve totally lost the title on my head, it’s the documentary about the musicians.
AB: That’s not Cuban. It’s shot in Cuba… BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB?
Nordling: Yeah, that’s it.
AB: Yeah, that’s…
Nordling: That’s right and a lot of it was shot there.
AB: It was shot in Cuba, but that’s not a Cuban film, but there have been… I mean I don’t think there would have been a difference, but also you never know. It’s not that different now. People thing that because Fidel is not the president anymore it’s different, but it’s pretty much the same.
Nordling: Tell me a little bit about the casting of the actors and how you picked them. You were telling me about Lazaro.
AB: Since I first got the idea, I had Alexis Diaz de Villegas in mind to play Juan and then I started to think about the weapons, because you know every time you have a zombie killer you have to have a cool weapon and at the same time we don’t have guns in Cuba, so I knew that this was going to be a zombie film without guns. Well there’s one scene with guns, but it’s not about… So I wanted them to use things from everyday life as a tool, so that’s where I came up with the paddle.
Nordling: Yeah, everybody has a signature weapon which is great.
AB: Yeah and then when I saw it in my head, Juan with the paddle that he kind of had this feel Don Quixote, so I thought if I had Don Quixote “I have to have a sidekick like Sancho Panza and then I thought about Jorge Molina …I wrote the script with these two guys in mind and then well for example the character of La China, who is played by Jazz Vila, I had him in my first film PERSONAL BELONGINGS and that character was different, but this guy is such a great actor and it’s so much fun to work with him and once I was talking to him in Melvida, where he lives, and I just had such a laugh with him that I said “I have to write a part for him,” so I changed the part and made it for him and then for example El Primo, the big guy, he’s a body builder who I saw on the street. I was with my producer driving and I saw him and I said, “Stop the car, that’s the guy!” And she gets out of the car running and saying, “Give me your name. Give me your phone number. We are going to put you in a film.” He didn’t have the time to think.
Nordling: Well that’s good though, he’s a really good character.
AB: I loved working him. I mean he was good to work with and it was at the same time so fun. We were like a happy family and we were rehearsing for two months and we were like two or three weeks into the rehearsal and one day he said to me “Can you give me a paper or something where it mentions the film, because my wife thinks I’m cheating on her.”
[Both Laugh]
AB: “She doesn’t believe I’m making a film.”
Nordling: He was great too.
AB: He was great and then we had Andros Perugorria who is a Cuban actor to play Vladi. I saw him… we were casting another film and I saw him and I said, “This is the guy” and then Andrea Duro is from Spain, but she arrived in Cuba when we were already shooting, but with the rest of the cast we were meeting for two months talking about the characters, changing the script, they gave me lots of ideas and I was like rewriting all of the time with them while training. They did train for two months, some of them better than others. For example, Lazaro… you see that guy training and it’s like we were all laughing, because it was a mess.
Nordling: I don’t want to spoil too much for the people who haven’t seen the film, but one of the great aspects of the film is the zombie kills and the fact is that there are so many zombie movies with so many unique kills and you managed to actually do something I’ve never seen done in any zombie films before which was awesome. The mass decapitation scene… The harpoon scene was wonderful. Where’d you come up with them?
AB: Sometimes I would go for a cool kill cue and sometimes those aren’t even kills, because for example when he rips the zombie’s jaw off, but you know what? I did that… I wanted to do it like the fight in KING KONG, Peter Jackson’s KING KONG when King Kong opens the mouth of the T rex and rips his tongue or something and it was written like that with Lazaro biting the tongue off the…
Nordling: It kind of reminded me of BLADE 2, Guillermo Del Toro’s film where that happens with the vampire.
AB: Yeah, it was like that when they made it in pre-production, but going into the film they said, “We can’t… It’s very difficult to do the tongue thing, so think of something else.” (Laughs)
Nordling: They have many visual effects companies in Cuba?
AB: No, none at all. It was done in Spain. I mean there are some people that do CGI, but there were so many things that were done for the first time. I don’t like to say we were the first group doing that, but for example the water zombies, that was a huge green screen… No one else had ever had such a big green screen in Havana and there were so many things that were done for the first time and some of them we didn’t even know how to do them, we were trying to learn our way into it and yet directing with a special effects supervisor, Juan Ventura…
Nordling: It turned out really well, though.
AB: Yeah, well it worked. So back to the killings, with something like the decapitation I went for a more political, I don’t want to say that word, but I will… It has another meaning, because it was written in the script… Well first as it was written it wasn’t a decapitation, it cut the zombies in half, so you had lots of zombies with lots of guts and all of that and the CGI guy said it was much easier to just cut the heads off, so I started thinking “If I’m going to cut off the heads, how can I make it cooler?” Then I thought of the scene in the Revolutionist Square and then it had another meaning, because it’s not the same thing as just cutting off heads everywhere else like it was in the Revolutionist Square.
Nordling: Yeah and again I think American audience might not realize there’s something…
AB: Well but you have a building with a picture of Che Guevara in the background and all of that and also at the same time when I started thinking about it and changing it with the decapitations and all of that I said “Okay, this is going to be like this… I want to do the decapitation scene. I want to cut 300 heads in one blow” and so we did.
[Both Laugh]
Nordling: I love how the film kind of follows the zombie rules, but you have your fast ones and you’ve got your slow ones and I love how they said “Why are some fast and some slow?” “Well, I don’t know.”
AB: Going into the film I did a lot of research, so I went through the zombie universe like “Why are they slow?” and all of the people’s arguments and all of that…
Nordling: Yeah, because it’s kind of a geek thing.
AB: Yeah and so I thought. I mean I know why they are slow and I like more of the slow zombies, but why not make them fast too? I mean they are slow because of rigor mortis. When you die, you don’t get like that immediately, you have some hours before they get like that, so I said “Okay, we are going to have different stages of zombiehood and we can have the fast ones with flesh and then as they get slower and all of that the makeup is going to be evolving and do them more like they have been dead for a longer time.” So I wrote up a lot about that and I talked to Cristian Jaugui and our makeup guys from Mexico and then one morning I open my email and he sent a picture of a real dead body, because we were designing the first zombie that appears in the water and I wanted to play that zombie and I wanted to make my character a zombie and I wanted it to be like Demon Ash in EVIL DEAD and at the end it wasn’t like that. Well he sent me a picture of a dead guy who had drowned and I don’t like to see that kind of thing, so I wrote “Okay, do whatever the fuck you want with this zombie, but never send me again a picture of a dead body without a warning, okay?”
[Both Laugh]
Nordling: No kidding, it’d just ruin your day. Tell me about the first time you saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Romero’s.
AB: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD actually wasn’t the first zombie film that I saw. I saw many others… I actually saw DAWN OF THE DEAD and DAY OF THE DEAD before I saw RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD… I was like ten or twelve probably and I saw many zombie films before watching NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and NIGHT OF THE LVING DEAD I love it, but it’s not my favorite. I actually prefer, and I know this is strange, but I prefer DAY OF THE DEAD.
Nordling: Yeah, well you know there’s NIGHT and there’s DAWN and there is DAY and I’m a DAWN person, I love DAWN OF THE DEAD. The whole mall thing is kind of an iconic American thing and the fact that it’s kind of subverted in a zombie film…
AP: Yeah, I totally get that, but as you said that’s more of an American thing and when I was growing up I mean we really don’t have malls like that in Cuba, so for me it wasn’t like that powerful. On the other hand DAY OF THE DEAD and Bub were really cool. Then I started to see other ones, like Peter Jackson’s DEAD ALIVE.
Nordling: Yeah, it’s great. I think they just released it on BluRay here. Harry was talking about it.
AP: And EVIL DEAD is like… I know it’s not a zombie film, but when I saw it as a kid for me it was, so I would always put it in the same bag.
Nordling: The funny thing about the EVIL DEAD films… I love the difference between the three. The first one is a straight up horror film. The second one is kind of a comedy and horror mesh and the third one is just an action adventure movie you know? I love how Raimi kind of mixed those up. It’s funny, we were talking about it the other day, the EVIL DEAD films are very much, for horror fans, they are the gateway. Those are the movie gateway films for a lot of other films and looking back at them now in comparison to some of the other films that have come out since it’s funny how people’s opinion of it change over time. Is it still considered one of your favorites?
AP: Yeah. EVIL DEAD? I love them.
Nordling: My favorite horror film of all time is ALIEN. I loved the original ALIEN. It’s so slow and quiet, but I just love it.
AP: ALIEN is amazing. JAWS is better.
[Both Laugh]
Nordling: I love JAWS. I’m a big Spielberg guy…
AP: I am too.
Nordling: He’s somebody I’ve wanted to meet forever.
AP: I met him in Havana once.
Nordling: Really? Wow.
AP: It was awesome. I was writing a screenplay for a director back then and he was coming to see a couple of Cuban directors and he was talking to this friend of mine and Spielberg said, “What are you working on now?” and my friend told him about the story that I was writing and he really liked the story and my friend said, “The writer said that if I bring him here to meet you, he will do it for free” and he said “Call him.” I was in the theater watching MINORITY REPORT and my director calls me up and says “You have to come here right now” and I just went running there and then I told him about… When I met him I was speechless.
Nordling: I would imagine.
AP: I remember I said, “I am doing films because of you.”
Nordling: Wow.
AP: I was fortunate and then he told me always to write with my heart, which has been what I’m trying to do ever since.
JUAN OF THE DEAD is an amazing zombie film, one of the best I've ever seen, and full of rich characters, great political subtext, and some of the most inventive zombie kills ever done. This film deserves a wide audience and I really hope everyone who reads AICN gets to see it very soon. For now, it will be playing festivals, and I think this film has a better shot than most for American distribution. Funny, inventive, and heartfelt, JUAN OF THE DEAD is why I love movies. Thank you to Alejandro Brugués for sitting down with me. If JUAN is truly about building bridges through different cultures, I think it could be a film that brings Cuba and the Uniter States together in its way, and offers a look into a world and a people that really aren't that different from the United States. Thanks so much to Fantastic Fest for bringing this film.
Nordling, out.
