INTERVIEW: Alonso Ruizpalacios creates love letter to Mexico City in ‘Güeros’

Güeros, the new film from director Alonso Ruizpalacios, follows four young characters as they navigate the prolonged student strikes that rocked Mexico City in 1999. The movie, currently playing New York City’s Film Forum, won Best First Feature at the Berlin Film Festival and was recently nominated for 12 Ariel Awards, Mexico’s Oscar equivalent.

In Güeros, Tenoch Huerta plays Sombra, a student who has difficulty dealing with the reality of unemployment and often suffers from panic attacks. He’s watching his younger brother, Tómas (Sebastián Aguirre), who was thrown out of his mother’s house after an unfortunate incident involving a water balloon. Joining them on their road trip around Mexico City is Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris), a young man who is much calmer and more relaxed than his good friend, Sombra. Rounding out the quartet is Ana (Isle Salas), Sombra’s girlfriend and the director’s real-life wife. She’s one of the leaders of the student movement, although her political ways are sometimes met with opposition and outright sexism from her fellow protestors.

Ruizpalacios said the genesis for the project came from his own remembrances of the student protests. “I started writing this when I finished university and had to go back home to live with my parents and was unemployed for quite a while,” the director said recently during a phone interview. “And that sort of limbo led me back to the days of the student strike in ’99, sort of reminded me of that same feeling. So I started writing about that, about that strike that happened in 1999 in Mexico, which lasted almost a year and sort of had a deep effect on all my generation. And the other starting point was, I guess, the desire to write a sort of a love letter to Mexico City. I had always wanted to make a road movie inside Mexico City, so I kind of put those two together. That’s what the film came to be.”

The black-and-white movie follows the group of friends from an apartment where they steal electricity from a neighbor to a near-violent encounter with a gang to a community forum that quickly grows heated to a multi-day journey to find a legendary Mexican singer who is believed to have made Bob Dylan cry. The feel of this neo-New Wave film can be traced back to Ruizpalacios’ own life.

“I guess every character has some part of yourself in it,” he said. “Definitely I think Sombra, the main character, is a bit of an alter ego of mine. … The other guy, Santos, his friend, he’s based pretty much on one of my close friends at that time who had a completely different attitude toward this limbo of unemployment and no school and no this. He really enjoyed it, and he had more of a Zen master attitude toward idleness. And so to me it kind of was interesting to have these two poles, these two different attitudes to the same problem, one facing it with angst and panic attacks and sort of tortures himself with his indecision in a sort of a Hamlet way, whereas the other guy, he lives day to day. He enjoys it if he’s static, and he enjoys it if he’s moving. I think all the characters have a little bit of myself and a little bit of close friends of mine, and also the actors I think they brought a lot of their personalities into the characters.”

The film, which runs a little more than 90 minutes, was shot entirely on location in Mexico City. The director said that the metropolis is so vast and diverse that it’s almost a country unto itself. “So there’s enough contrast for a whole film, for many films, inside Mexico City,” he said. “I think in the end what is left in the film to me does speak fairly of at least the way I see Mexico City. … When we screened it in Berlin, many Mexicans who had been living abroad for a while were like really nostalgic. … We made a big effort of not picking the same spots that you usually see in films, but we see, I think, a more real Mexico City.”

Film Forum and others bill the movie as an homage to the New Wave cinema of the 1960s, when student protests and youthful meanderings populated the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors. Ruizpalacios said the homage aspect was not intentional, but perhaps inevitable.

“I think you can’t escape your references, I guess,” he said. “I think you can see that in any director’s work, but we never intended to make something like an homage. I think rather what I see that maybe the film takes from the New Wave, rather than copying shots or scenes or whatever, is more the spirit of playfulness. I think that is something that I’ve always responded to in the work of [François] Truffaut and Godard, and I think that’s sort of the way we approach the film as well. We approached it from an angle of [a] game; the filmmaking process had to be joyful. And I think it was for us, and I think that shows on the screen.”

The film is a combination of scripted dialogue and some improvisation, or as Ruizpalacios called it, “documentary reality.” He wanted to portray real faces of Mexico City, and so his team used many non-actors for the extra parts and supporting roles.

“They’re all like people from the neighborhoods that we actually shot in,” he said. “So this sense of improvising and capturing moments of documentary reality was very important to me. … So, yeah, the end result is a mix of very strictly scripted scenes and some loose, improv documentary scenes that we did. The sort of trick with getting these two to co-exist and to weave into each other without noticing, I think, we managed that in the editing.”

Güeros is Ruizpalacio’s feature-film debut. Before the project, he had completed a few shorts and some TV work; the director also runs a theater company in Mexico. Even though the project is a debut of sorts, he said the film process felt familiar.

“Actually some of the actors in the film are in the theater company,” he said. “So it didn’t really feel like we were doing something that we hadn’t done before. It really felt like a continuation of work that we’ve done before. … I hired only my friends in all the key positions, including the actors, and that was important for me because I feel that that somehow always comes across in films, what’s behind the camera. And we were doing a film about friendship, so it was important that we got along, and had a good time and had an atmosphere where we could improvise. So it didn’t really feel like we were doing something really new.”

The director said he completed the film close to the birth of his son, who has the same name as the younger brother in Güeros.

“So in a way I feel that it’s like my other child,” he said of the indie film. “It’s probably full of mistakes and everything, but I put everything I had into it. Yeah, I’m happy with the way it turned out, and with the way it’s been read in different places. That’s been really interesting to me, to see like the different reactions and different stuff that people have written about it, or said, or come up to me and say about it. They’re not always good things. Sometimes people disagree with many of the things in the film, but I think it’s been stimulating and much more than I could have foreseen.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Güeros is currently playing New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information.