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| Alfonso Cuaron (center) directs Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal in Y Tu Mama Tambien. |
Alfonso Cuarón is reinventing his approach
to moviemaking; reinventing its place in his life. A child of the
movies, he has been working in one capacity or another in the industry
since the age of 14, when he first began to sneak onto film sets
in his hometown of Mexico City. A stint at Mexico’s National Film
Academy was followed by any number of production jobs, boom man,
cameraman, etc., and ultimately, a decade of steady work as an AD.
He worked on a lot of pictures, most of them low-budget American
flicks shot in Mexico: "A lot of crappy movies. Mostly horror
films, " he says.
After directing a few episodes of a local serial produced
by a friend, who identified him as ‘up-and-coming, ‘ Alfonso broke
out with his first feature, a comedy called Love in the Time
of Hysteria (1991). Though the film was never released in the
U.S., he was soon making steady inroads in Hollywood, eventually
landing a deal to direct The Little Princess (1995) for producer
Mark Johnson. It was a job the director fought to secure, and his
effort paid off. The film was a critical success and did respectable
box office business, too. But his next picture, a modern retelling
of Charles Dickens’ classic, Great Expectations, was a weaker
film and left the director questioning the course of his career.
Hungry for a fresh start, Curaón returned to
an idea he and long-time collaborator Emmaunel Zabezki, the only
DP Alfonso has ever worked with, tossed around years before: a film
set in Mexico, about a couple of young guys on the cusp of manhood
who take up one summer with a beautiful young woman several years
their senior. A sexy road movie, a coming of age film, a dispassionate
and often blunt take on modern day Mexican social and political
realities, Y Tu Mama Tambien, slang for "and your mama,
too’, is everything the director needed to bring him back to the
cinema he loves. In this interview with MM, Alfonso talked about
the film’s off-the-cuff visual and narrative style, where it took
him as a director and how those pesky Mexican censors tried to take
a cut out of the film’s target audience.
Phillip Williams (MM): How was making Y Tu Mama Tambien different from your other films?
Alfonso Cuarón (AC): It was a complete
departure from anything I’d done before. I tried a very objective
approach, which is quite different from my other films, that were
very subjective. I tried to be restrained and removed and let the
actors go with the flow of the scenes. Trusting the material more;
trusting the actors more. That was the biggest lesson.
MM: With the various observations the film
captures about the current state of Mexico, the military presence
and so forth, would you say that it’s an anti-PRI film (the dominant
political party in Mexico)?
AC: We tried not to make a judgement; we just
tried to make an observation. For us, this movie is about identity.
Two young men seeking their identity as adults; a woman seeking
her identity as a liberated woman, more in a spiritual sense than
an ideological sense. Together with that is an observation of a
country that in our opinion is a teenage country looking for its
identity as a grown-up country. So we were not trying to make a
criticism of the PRI, it was just inherent in the situation. Whatever
you see in Mexico will reflect on who has been ruling the country
for the last 71 years. This transition toward a new identity is
part of what Mexico is going through now.
MM: In terms of some of the more overt political
content in the picture, the police stopping people on the
side of the road and the student demonstrations, how much
was in the script and how much did you add during production?
AC: Everything was pretty much in the script,
but in the process of prepping the movie we were adapting everything.
When my brother Carlos and I were writing the script, we decided
that context was going to be as important as character. When we
wrote the script we quoted certain events that then we had to adapt
because reality was also dictating to us. What I mean is, there
are little scenes in the script that we saw new possibilities for
during scouting. In some cases we would photograph an event we witnessed
first-hand and then reproduce it when we were shooting. In other
instances we picked up material, documentary-like, while were shooting.
For example, the roadblocks set up by police, you
are not supposed to shoot those things. We stole those shots. The
second or third time that we crossed a roadblock the police became
very suspicious (laughs). When the lead characters need to retrieve
their car keys from one of their sisters, whose office is at the
National University, the National University was actually on strike.
The police invaded the university and arrested hundreds of students
and put them in prison. So there was a massive demonstration of
150, 000 people demanding the release of these students. Instead
of looking for another location our Director of Photography said,
‘Why don’t we use the demonstration?’
MM: I’m assuming you used just one camera
and available light?
AC: One hand-held camera, available light and
a lot of stress because it was a very fiery demonstration.
MM: Did you get what you wanted?
AC: Yes! I got more than what I wanted. And
it was good because it was the first thing that we shot and it was
like, ‘okay, we have to do it. Let’s do it.’ And we were still doing
costume tests and so on. We knew that whatever the characters were
wearing in that scene they would be wearing for a large chunk of
the film and the hair as well. So that morning we had to make a
lot of quick decisions and just go for it.
MM: How do you prepare for a film?
AC: Preparing begins from the moment you start
working on a story. It’s amazing how your head works on the story
even when you are not. Now that I’m coming back to write, I find
it very enjoyable. Since doing Y Tu Mama I think I’ll tend
to be a little more loose in how I approach the work. I used to
be so detailed about every single element and aspect of the process;
now I’d like to rely a bit more on chance, to see what chance brings.
Connect with life and see what life decides for you.
MM: Your next film will be a larger studio
film again. How do you think you will prepare?
AC: It will depend on which film I’m doing,
and even which scenes I’m approaching. With certain films it would
be crazy not to storyboard, not to do a shot list. You have to organize
a lot of people; a lot of people need to be in sync with what you
are doing. I take a lot of pleasure in doing storyboards because
I love the drawing process and I love how it becomes a common tool
of conversation with the different departments, even though you
don’t always follow the storyboards. In a way it becomes a rehearsal
for you. The problem was that I used to rely too much on that. Now
I’m getting a lot more pleasure out of the human element of the
process rather than the technical element.
MM: What is your feeling about how Y
Tu Mama Tambien was rated here and in Mexico? It can only be
seen by people over 18 in Mexico?
AC: Well, here it’s a different discussion.
In Mexico we sued the government. The thing is, when they
rated the film as adults only we had the right to ask for a definition
of, first of all, who rated it, and then how they came to their
conclusion. What we discovered is that the same bureaucrat has been
in power for the last 25 years and anything that is made in film
or television goes through the same institution called the RTC,
Radio, Television and Cinematography.
Everything goes through them for classification. The
government says that there is no censorship, but when you have classification
by the government they are able to use it for political censorship.
We found that there is no clear definition of how films are classified;
it’s arbitrary. So it violates a lot of constitutional rights for
Mexicans. We argued, for example, that it violates the rights of
parents to educate their children. Our plea was: ‘Let the kids go
if they are accompanied by their parents.’ And they said no. Because
the bureaucrat knows what’s best for your kids. It’s part of this
patronizing system we’ve lived under for the last 71 years. So we
sued the government and they punished us by sending inspectors to
the theaters and making people prove their age even if they were
in their forties.
MM: Did you try to cut the film at all?
AC: I tried to do some cuts to get an R rating
in the USA and IFC saw the film and said, ‘Don’t do it. You are
butchering the film.’ And I have to say the MPAA was really cool.
They saw that the film was not an exploitation film and said, ‘Hey,
guys, we are who we are, the film is what it is.’ We started to
present cuts and even they said, ‘Don’t butcher the film.’
MM: Do you think that with the success of
films like Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama, we are going
to see more output from Mexico?
AC: I wish I could tell you that there is a
whole movement, but that would be a lie. There are interesting individual
voices, but unfortunately, part of this thing of coping with identity
has affected filmmakers in Mexico and Latin America. I think that
filmmaking in Mexico in general suffers from an acute disease I
would call ‘provincialism’ and a fear of belonging to a global community
of cinema. I’m so tired of seeing these Latino panorama festivals.
Actually I find it very patronizing. I cannot blame the festivals,
they are trying to help Latin American cinema. But for me, that’s
boring. I’d like to see Latin American cinema belong to the world,
to world cinema.
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