For most filmgoers, writer-director Jonás Cuarón is best known for co-writing the screenplay for GRAVITY (along with his father, Alfonso Cuarón). As part of that project, the younger Cuarón also wrote and directed the moving short ANINGAAQ, which can be found on the GRAVITY home video release and documents the other side of the conversation that Sandra Bullock has on her radio with an Inuit fisherman in Greenland.
Jonás wrote and directed his first feature, YEAR OF THE NAIL in 2007, and was nearly 10 years before he attempted another feature, the incendiary DESIERTO, in which Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays a racist, sharp-shooting, freelance border guard who has snapped and is taking out his pain on immigrants illegally crossing into America from Mexico, including one played by Gael Garcia Bernal. When I spoke to Cuarón before the film’s limited release last fall, the film’s themes of immigration and white supremacy seemed well timed. With the film coming out on home video this week, those same themes seem downright essential in taking a look at through fresh eyes. We know the scenario in DESIERTO is fiction, but it doesn’t seem far fetched or impossible.
Currently Jonás is working on two projects: he has again co-written a screenplay with his father for the drama A BOY AND HIS SHOE (which Alfonso will direct); and he developing a new take on the Zorro legend called Z, starring Bernal. Neither film has started shooting or has a release date, but based on who is involved in making them, I can’t wait. With that, please enjoy my talk with Jonás Cuarón…
Jonás Cuarón: How are you, Steve?
Capone: Good. How are you?
JC: I’m good, thanks.
Capone: It’s great to talk to you. I just want to say first of all that I was a great admirer of the short you did, ANINGAAQ. It’s a sweet footnote to GRAVITY that is actually a really powerful story unto itself. So congratulations on that.
JC: Thank you so much.
Capone: So with DESIERTO, where did this story come from, other than everyday reality?
JC: Yeah, everyday life. I’ve spent half of my life in the U.S. now—even more—so obviously I have to say a lot comes from everyday life. The real genesis started eight years ago. I was traveling though Arizona with my brother, and we were in Tuscan, and the consulate invited us to get a tour of the facilities. And on that tour, they started telling us lots of stories about border crossing in Arizona, which is the main region where people cross into the U.S., and all those stories were very tragic. So after that trip, I started becoming very interested in the subject matter and started reading and researching about it.
Also during that time in Arizona, all those anti-immigration laws were starting, so there was starting to be this rhetoric that now is very common of hatred to the foreigner, the migrant. Using the migrant as a scapegoat, politically. So I became interested in that. I wanted to analyze that, so I spent a couple of years trying to think of the best way to tell that story, and that’s when I thought it would be interesting to do it through a genre film. I’ve always been a fan of the ’70s genre films in the U.S. that managed to make very political, subversive movies, but they did it under the guides of genre.
Capone: You’re right, it is a genre film. I felt like I was watching a boogyman story, like a cautionary tale almost. You present it as a horror film, because Jeffrey’s character is a monster. There’s really no two ways about it.
JC: Completely. I do think probably the closest genre would be horror. I think what maybe makes it different than most horror movies I’ve seen is one, almost all the horror happens in plain daylight and in an outdoor space, and most horror movies tend to happen in a cabin in a dark space, but this is out in the open space with daylight. The other difference is that, unlike most monsters in horror movies—even though I agree with you, that Jeffrey’s actions are monstrous—there’s still a human side to that character, which for me was very important in casting Jeffrey. I didn’t want to fall into the two-dimensional villain character. I wanted him to have a human side, which was difficult to achieve, because it’s a movie with almost no dialogue, so to create that character, I needed an actor like Jeffrey who, even with all his intensity, there’s a human side filled with emotions.
Capone: Until I watched this movie, I thought all the scariest places in the world were in the dark, but now I know that when there’s nowhere to hide it’s much scarier. You mentioned the lack of dialogue. There are long passages in this film without any talking. Did that have an impact on Gael’s character? Did you need to find an actor who could convey so much emotion without talking most of the time, without having someone to talk to.
JC: Completely. I really knew that someone like Gael could really create that emotional connection, because there’s something around Gael and Jeffrey that, with almost no words, they managed just by their expressions to say it all.
Capone: Gael and Jeffrey have almost no scenes together. Until the very end, we don’t get them together, but they still have to work well as a unit. Was that something else that you considered, that they did have to be opposites that complimented each other in certain ways?
JC: Yeah, what I did was, Gael and Jeffrey never met each other until the final scene where they actually meet. I kept them to themselves, and they shot on different days, because I really wanted that first scene to be their first time together. Obviously doing the chasing, that was the first time they met, but when they're going around the mountain, they started working together that day. But then really, the day they met each other was the day that they have that confrontation when Gael grabs the rifle, and I ended up being really happy with that decision to keep them apart, because then when they came to that scene, they didn’t know each other, and their reactions—like when Gael started screaming at Jeffrey, Jeffrey was truly surprised by those screams.
Capone: I know Gael has made documentaries on the subject of immigration, and he’s also a producer on this film. Did his research and his knowledge of the subject make a difference to you in having someone so knowledgable about this issue?
JC: Completely. When I started writing the script, the main reason I wanted Gael was one, because he’s such a great actor, but also because while I was doing all the research, I kept coming up on this documentary that Gael had either produced, directed, or even acted in some of them, so I knew that Gael already had a closeness with the story that was going to be very valuable, and it was. As an actor, he really understood the characters, but also as a collaborator, even though I had already done a lot of research, once I started working with Gael, I realized I hadn’t even started doing the research. Gael was able to point me to really amazing places.
Capone: Where did you shoot this?
JC: In Baja California, near La Paz.
Capone: Did the weather and terrain change the way you shot the film at all?
JC: Yeah, but I guess those changes started happening since the script stage. What happened was I wrote the first draft, which I showed to my dad, and when I wrote the first draft, I had never visited the desert. I mean, honestly that first draft was written more based on deserts I saw on the Discovery Channel. It was more based on archetypes and landscapes that were very archetypical, but then once I wrote that draft, I showed it to my dad, and my dad read it, and he became interested in the concept, so we adapted it to space and that became GRAVITY.
But during all the years that we were working on GRAVITY, that meant that I had to take a pause from DESIERTO. But in all those years in my free time, I traveled to many different deserts all over the world. Both to start looking for my locations, but also to inform myself as a writer of the actual specifics of the landscapes, because those really informed the action sequences. It’s a movie where the obstacles and the landscape are driving the story, so it was really important and interesting to find those landscapes.
Capone: You mentioned GRAVITY and survival. The idea of survival under almost impossible-to-imagine circumstances are key elements in both GRAVITY and this film. What fascinates you about placing human beings in these impossible situations?
JC: I guess it’s something I really love about survival stories, in that in survival stories, any baggage we have as a character, as a human being, disappears, and we all revert to a more animalistic, instinctual place where it’s just pure instinct driving us. It doesn’t matter where you come from. In a survival situation, we all tend to react the same way and have the same goals. It’s very instinctual, and so I really like that.
It’s something I really tried to explore in the field. In a survival situation, all characters end up being the same. It’s something I like about the character of the desert; it doesn’t differentiate between the American and the Mexican. It has no preference. That’s something that I really like about survival situations—it puts all the characters on a similar playing field. And what I was saying about both DESIERTO and GRAVITY is that this concept of stripping down baggage from characters was a challenge in both projects. We really wanted to avoid having backstories. I feel like nowadays in cinema, there’s a necessity to have your characters explained psychoanalytically when like I do believe the stories should be told in the present tense, and the actions should speak for themselves.
Capone: If we had more time, I would dive into that, because that was a fascinating thing. I sat there thinking “I don’t know anything about these people other than they’re in this situation right now.”
JC: And look, Jeffrey, because I wanted him to create a human performance, we shot many scenes where he explained his backstory, but I always knew in the back of my head that I was not going to use those scenes. They were mostly for Jeffrey to get to know his character, to really fill his shoes, and I did try to include some of those things, and two things happened. One, those scenes tended to slow things. down. This movie is a rollercoaster. Once the action starts, there’s no time to stop and explain things. You’re just on for the ride. The other reason is, no matter what justification, what backstory I gave to the character, no matter how horrible something was that happened to make him this way, nothing justifies his actions. So those were the main two reasons I didn’t have those backstories.
Capone: It’s just come out that you’re doing a version of ZORRO with Gael. Can you say at all what your approach to this story is going to be?
JC: To be honest with you, I was invited to direct it, which obviously really excites me because I think it’s, how do you say, I can go wild places with this project, but beyond that, I loved working with Gael, so the idea of being able to work with him again sounds amazing. I really admire him, and not only having worked with him on DESIERTO, but yesterday I was showing my wife “Mozart in the Jungle” [the Amazon series in which Bernal stars]. I’m just so amazed by the fact that Gael can be funny. I would never had expected that Gael could be funny, but he’s hilarious. He’s an actor I really admire. So I’m really excited to work with him, but to be honest, I haven’t even thought beyond the invitation into the project just because I’m still coming out of the shell shock of DESIERTO. It’s like coming out of the heat stroke [laughs].
Capone: DESIERTO came out in October, about a month before the election in America. Was that a coincidence?
JC: Well, to me I was very happy, STX [Entertainment] was looking very carefully at dates, and when they chose October, I was very happy for two reasons. One is that, yeah, DESIERTO is a movie that I did to open up a dialogue and a discourse about these issues, and I do think that a month before elections is a good time to do it. I think it’s interesting to see debate arise from the film. But also the other reason I’m excited about October is DESIERTO, beyond the themes and the subject matter, it’s a pure genre film. It’s almost a daylight horror movie, so October puts it close to Halloween. Halloween, elections, horror movies. It’s all the same thing [laughs].
