Man’s inhumanity to man is one of the recurring themes of drama throughout the ages, and sometimes storytellers take the concept very literally. In the new thriller Desierto, writer/director Jonás Cuarón – the son of Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity) – invites audiences to follow a group of migrants crossing the Mexican/American border, and watch in horror as a white American hunts them for sport.
It’s a disturbingly topical premise, as Americans are debating the issue of immigration throughout a turbulent election year, and Jonás Cuarón knows it. I spoke to the filmmaker over the phone last week to discuss the challenging ideas that Desierto invites audiences to explore, and why he thinks the film’s genre storyline makes those lofty notions more palatable.
Find out all about Desierto in our exclusive interview, and see Desierto in theaters on October 14, 2016.
STX Entertainment
Crave: Where did Desierto start? Did it start with the idea of wanting to do a small intimate thriller, or did it start with wanting to tackle immigration as a topic in a thrilling milieu…?
Jonás Cuarón: Well it all started ten years ago. I was traveling through Arizona and you know, back then all the anti-immigration laws were starting to be promoted in Arizona, so there was a really strong rhetoric of hatred. Hatred towards the migrants or the foreigners who were just in general “the other,” that were different than ourselves. That rhetoric kept being promoted so I became very interested with that subject matter, and for many years I tried to find the best way to tackle it.
And that’s when I thought of ‘70s genre films. I’ve always been a fan of the fact that in the ‘70s all those filmmakers made very political and diverse films, and they made them all under the disguise of genre film. So that’s when I thought it would be interesting to try to tackle this subject matter in this way, as a horror film, to show the horrors of this experience but not try to show them in that rhetorical way, by debating with the audience, but actually try to make them experience that horror.
When you’re crafting a villain who decides, basically, to hunt immigrants – maybe for sport, maybe for personal catharsis – where do you begin? Is it hard to wrap your head around the kind of villain who would do such a thing?
Well, the guy that Jeffrey [Dean Morgan’s character] is based on, he’s specifically based on the idea of the Minutemen, this group of people that patrol the border between Mexico and the U.S. But more than specifically the Minutemen, to me Jeffrey represents this vulnerable sector of society, you know? I mean we don’t know much about the character but by the little clues Jeffrey gave us I think it’s pretty clear that it’s a character that is going through a vulnerable situation, and to me represents how these vulnerable sectors of society, they keep being bombarded with so much hatred. You know, I believe that sooner or later someone is going to just end up pulling the trigger. To me, in a way, Desierto is a cautionary tale of where we’re going to end up as a society if we keep up promoting so much hatred.
STX Entertainment
He’s a character, Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character, who has completely dehumanized or detached from the idea of immigrants as human beings. But he’s very attached to his dog. Is that in and of itself a statement, per se, or is that just trying to give him something humanizing [for the audience] to latch onto?
When I wrote this script and I showed it to my dad and my uncle for advice, the first thing they told me was you have to get rid of the dog. It’s your first film, you have no budget. Don’t work with animals and babies. They’re telling me that, [and] during the years I struggled to find the right animal and the dog I did consider cutting out that character, but not is the dog one of the most terrifying elements of the film but also I knew that it was the only way I was going to show that human side of Jeffrey. To me it was very important that the villain wasn’t just like a two-dimensional, black-and-white villain. I really wanted him to be human, and you know, in a film where he’s completely alone in the desert I needed his companion, the dog, [which was] the only way to show that he was human inside.
Gael García Bernal is an exceptional actor, and he’s asked to carry a lot of this movie without a lot of dialogue and in very sweltering physical conditions. As a director, how do you work with him to keep that level of intensity going strong, when I can only imagine he must be exhausted?
Well look, I wanted to work with Gael and it happened before we were actually filming. We had, with Gael particularly, these really long sessions where we kept working on the character, trying to really find the story of that character. Gael was the one who came up with this idea that he wasn’t a migrant coming to the U.S. for the first time, but what if instead we played with this idea that he was returning home, you know?
So a lot of the work happened there on the script, and once we were on the set I was really lucky as a director. The actors were literally doing what the characters were supposed to be doing. In that sense it was Gael, after takes he was literally exhausted from running so much, then it was literally like, “Okay, run from Point A to Point B and we’re going to show the dog chase after you.” So in that sense what I’m trying to get at is that by filming in the actual location and really putting the characters through all the situations and obstacles, they themselves were really portraying what I needed.
Given those difficult conditions – the environment, the weather, the exertion – what sort of advice do you wish you could go back and give yourself about filming Desierto?
[Laughs.] I guess my main advice would be to next time do a film in a place with air conditioning. Just because everything about the desert was really hard to shoot at. The light conditions were the most ideal but at the same time I’m like, I really wanted a precious cinematography, so we kept having to wait for the few hours when the light was right. In general just shooting in the middle of nowhere with this extreme sun was very draining.
STX Entertainment
This film would have been topical no matter when it was produced, but I think lately, the topic of immigration is such a hot button issue and such an important aspect of the presidential campaign. Does it surprise you that it would only become more inflammatory as your film was finally being released in America, or were you hoping for something different?
Well, I took so long. I took eight years to finish the film. Gael kept making fun of me and saying that by the time it was going to come out it wasn’t going to be relevant anymore. And now I always make fun of Gael and I tell him that he’s way too optimistic, in the sense that I’m not that surprised that this film not only stayed relevant but it became more relevant. And I’m not surprised because not only more and more the phenomena of migration is going to become more present in everyone’s life, for environmental reasons and for socio-economical reasons, reasons that us as a society are responsible for, but also because the way things are going I just see that more and more all these politicians keeping legitimizing this idea of hatred. So sadly I wasn’t that surprised that the elections this year were going to be filled with so much hatred.
What do you hope audiences are going to get out of Desierto, besides a fun thriller? It occurred to me as I was watching it that different people might come to this movie for different reasons and take different things away from it. I think all positive, but depending on your background – cultural, geographic – you might expect one thing and get another.
Yeah, I mean that’s beauty about cinema – particularly a film that maybe it’s intention was to push it to such an abstract, almost, level – that you never really know what people are going to come out with. I know what my own feeling is about it, which is I had many things in the back of my head while I was making this film. On the one hand was to kind of try to underline and put a warning over where I believe we can end up as a society if we keep promoting so much hatred.
But I also wanted to change the narrative in migration. I believe that, I know the discourse is that migrants keep being described as this monster with no face on the other side of the border, and to me it was important to change that narrative and show the heroic actions. To me the migrant is a true hero. Everything they’re doing, they’re doing it for very noble causes, which is just to try to find a better life for themselves and their family, and we keep criminalizing them and forcing them to have to take this route that [is] filled with dangers.
Top Photo: STX Entertainment
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved, Rapid Reviews and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
