Director Cary Joji Fukunaga talks about Sin Nombre
The winner of the Directing Award and the Excellence in Cinematography Award at the 2009 Sundance Film 
Festival, SIN NOMBRE is an epic thriller written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga in his feature debut. The filmmaker’s firsthand experiences with Central American migrants seeking the promise of the USA form the basis of this engrossing and hugely topical movie. He talks to Jason Wood about making the film.
Jason Wood: Could you talk about Victoria para Chino and how that fed into Sin Nombre.
Cary Joji Fukunaga: Victoria para Chino was my second year film at film school. We had a time limit of 10 minutes – which I still went over – but other than that we could do whatever we wanted. It was the first time I really got to experiment with dialogue and music and the first time I got to shoot in colour as well. I wanted to do something based in reality, and something about an important subject, but I didn’t have a specific idea. I’d been interested in doing a child soldier movie for a long time but that’s not easy to accomplish when you’re living in New York and you have a very limited budget.
Then in May 2003 at the end of my first year, I read about the refrigerated trailer in Victoria, Texas, and about the immigrants that died inside it. Whilst doing research I decided that I wanted to do a film that was almost entirely black, a sound film. My tutor said no pretty quickly. My inspiration was Alejandro González Iñárritu contribution to 11’09”01 – September 11, which was a soundscape piece. This concept seemed fascinating to me. I was previously known for being attentive to cinematography so I wanted to prove that I could tell a story with no cinematography at all. Ultimately that changed, and now in the film we have only a two minute segment where it’s all blackness, but there is that segment, it remained in the end. I just wanted to try different things and still make it about something important, so that all the effort that went into it wouldn’t just be some story about two people talking about their relationship in a café. I did not expect it to be a film that started my career by any means.
I ended up shooting Victoria para Chino in January of the next year, and then it took me a year for me to finish because I was doing other stuff for school, and helping a friend shoot a documentary in Africa. I finally finished it in the fall and sent it off to Sundance. It was accepted and ending up winning a Jury Prize. From there it just kept on picking up prizes. Suddenly I was in a position where I had the opportunity to make a feature film project and that’s when I went of and began writing Sin Nombre. When that door of opportunity opens, you have to go through it.
JW: You’ve been very clear that Sin Nombre could not have been made without extensive research, and the visits to Chiapas and Tapachula. How did these experiences bleed into the fabric of the film?
CJF: The news articles that I was reading beforehand were so sensational that it was hard for me to decipher what the real scenario was like. I needed to go there myself. What they were writing made it sound like a war zone; to the point where you’re afraid to set foot in Tapachula, and you get to Tapachula and it’s just like any other town. You know even some of the anthropological professors in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, had been doing their own docs on immigration and the gangs and they warned me that it was best to shoot covertly because if I went out and filmed openly in public I would be robbed and shot. We go there and it’s totally fine. However, we were originally escorted by State Security who were armed with heavy machinery, and every time we showed up people would just disappear and walk away. We couldn’t get any interviews so we thanked the security officers and the next day went to the same places to film without them. It was a completely different experience. We ended up just hanging about in the train yard for two weeks, and in between going back to the river where the crossing takes place and doing interviews. We also got a feel for the environment by visiting the prison shelters for immigrants injured on the journey. It was just so fascinating in Tapachula, especially in that train yard, that I considered writing something about just the yard itself and all the transients that gathered there.
The original intention was that the friends that travelled with me and a couple of people that had helped produce Victoria para Chino were going to write the script together and then undertake the train journey together, but after two weeks of seeing what happened in the yards and getting a feel of what happens on the journey they decided against taking the journey with me. The project became a solo mission. I think they now really regret not having taken the train and been a part of the experience.
JW: Isn’t the journey approximately 27 hours long…
CJF: Yeah, until your first stop. And then you stop in Arriaga, and there’s another train that then goes to Oaxaca, because Arriaga is about 15 minutes from the Oaxacan border, and this Oaxaca section is infamous, a lot of oil goes back and forth. Then another train goes from there to Medias Aguas in Veracruz, then Medias Aguas goes up to Tierra Blanca, which stops again, then across the mountains to Puebla and from Puebla to Mexico City. From Mexico City you can go in many different directions.
JW: How did you attempt to reflect the danger and the camaraderie of the journey?
CJF: I couldn’t bring in as much as I wanted to actually. The camaraderie definitely, but there’s one element that I really wish was in the film that I didn’t get right, and that was the humour. It’s a very dark humour but it’s there. I wanted to replicate Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land. This really captures the humour that exists in the bleakness of war. There’s the great opening line where the Bosnian soldier is reading a newspaper and comments, ‘My god. Do you hear what’s happening in Rwanda?”.
On the train there were some real characters and jokers. I had a few shots of them and it was like a comedy show. I got a note from the studio saying it looked like people were having too much fun. I couldn’t find a way of using the script to show that amidst bleakness you can make humour. In my next project I will definitely try to infuse that gallows humour; I guess balancing tone is an
on-going development.
JW: Sin Nombre could be said to correspond to a number of genres. It has road movie elements but is also an epic romance and a gangster drama. There are also traces of the western.
CJF: I don’t think I’ve started to try and master any genre, or to try to really figure out what are the components of each one. Specifically this story, the reason why I felt that it was a western was because of the very basic elements of trains, bandits, gangs and immigrants. But I definitely did not want to treat it like a stylized Sergio Leone film, rather something that was more naturalistic and that for me was consciously removed from the style of City of God or Amores Perros. These are both films I love, but we’ve now had almost ten years of bleached cinematography. I was really keen to do something else. The John Cassavetes films of the 1970s were a major influence in terms of the look and feel I wanted. I especially looked at A Woman under the Influence. I really liked the natural lighting, warmer cinematography, and longer edits.
When I was writing I really wasn’t that conscious of genre but was more interested in using basic storytelling structures to explore very real themes. I guess also that in the chase element and the somewhat doomed nature of some of the characters there are parallels with film noir, but I was much more focused on allowing the audience to feel the adrenaline of riding the train and sharing in the situations and experiences of the characters. I was also, to be frank keen, to not be too experimental with the structure as this is a film that I want as many people to see as possible.
JW: I wondered if you could talk about the casting process, the performances are very naturalistic
CJF: The casting was difficult because I really wanted a lot of unknown actors and real people. Because of the number of people I needed, the street castings weren’t as successful as I wanted them to be. In the Mexico sequences it’s a bit of a mix of unknowns and more established performers. Because of this their acting styles really contrasted so one of the hardest parts was just getting them in the same film. The benchmark for that would be Wily. Because of his range, Edgar just had to do what he knew how to do for that role, and everyone else had to basically get to his level. My role basically after we cast, was just trying to bring a lot of the guys down, and try to get them as settled as possible, that was the work every take.
I work shopped a few scenes at the Sundance lab and I was, to be honest, apprehensive of how well I would be able to work with actors. Sundance threw a couple of actors in, which was my first time working with young pros. It was amazing actually; when someone acts well your job as director becomes much easier. Having worked with non-actors where the majority of time is spent getting them to delver a line just the way it is needed, I then went to talking to actors who I could give a certain amount of information about a scene and then they would take it in ten different directions.
Luis Fernando Peña [El Sol] now is a pretty well established actor, even though he was cast off the street, and if Luis was five or six years younger I could’ve cast him as Casper, but he was just too old for the role. But he’s the kind of guy, he’s done enough work now that I could just be like, “this time you know he’s lying to you” and then he does it, and he does it different, and it was so cool to watch. It was very interesting, with some actors I could talk to and give them directions, some actors I had to bring them down, some actors I had to antagonise, like I was constantly antagonising Edgar Flores to get that intensity.
JW: In terms of aesthetics, you really capture both the brutality and the beauty of your landscapes. Were you keen to express this dichotomy?
CJF: I was travelling through Cambodia right after college in 1999, and Cambodia was still wild in the farther out cities. In the small towns on the coast there were no tourists at all and when I walked down the streets people would come out of their houses and follow me. I was taking pictures of these old French villas, that were basically rotting away, and this kid came out, and in impeccable English asked, ‘Why are you taking pictures of this stuff?’. I said ‘What do you mean?’ He responded ‘Why are you taking pictures of our city falling apart?’ I didn’t have an answer for him. There was an obvious aesthetic value, like paintings of old Roman ruins, there’s something aesthetic about decay and entropy. And I don’t think I really found an answer, even while I was making this film.
I have thought about it more in connection to the beauty aspect. You can’t really frame a shot to be ugly, you frame a shot to what you think it should be scope wise, and also once you get there, what elements and lines you’re going to include in the frame. But I think probably the reason that decay is so beautiful as well is because it reminds us of our own mortality; that nothing is forever. It’s like putting a mirror up to death, and in that way it wasn’t a conscious effort to show beauty and hardness, it’s just those were the locations, that’s what they look like, and I try to put the camera exactly where I thought it suited the moment. The violence was in some ways actually toned down in the film. At least I thought it was until I saw it with the first audience reaction to the violence, but when I was doing my interviews I saw much more violence, and I didn’t want to lose my audience in the first shot of the film.
JW: The Mara gang sequences feel especially authentic. Did you manage to obtain the input of gang members and what was their involvement?
CJF: A couple of guys, both active and non-active, really helped out in the dialogue part of the scripts. We’d write very basic street style dialogue, get the reaction from the gangs, and they would laugh at it and say ‘No, we’d say it like this’. But, why would people talk to me? It was pretty hard at first and basically the prison authorities would sit them down in front of me, and often they’d just sit there and stare. They would then either refuse to answer my questions or exaggerate completely and fabricate stories. It was a hard process trying to find people that I thought were honest and would tell me the truth and bring a little more to the gang portrayal.
What especially interested me was the domestic stuff, to see how that House functioned, because in all the interviews, all they talked about were the exploits of the gang and the violence of the gang, and not really about how it functioned on an interior level. The way a gang works in southern Mexico is not the same way the Mara works or a House works in LA, where the work of the gang started. So I would ask them questions concerning basic domestic arrangements, such as who buys the toilet paper and this threw them a little. I was just curious as to how a guy covered in tattoos goes and buys Mr. Clean in the local market. Hygiene and cleanliness are obviously important; the Mara see themselves as far superior in these terms to their gang rivals.
JW: Is there a sense that everyone in the film, gang members included, are yearning to attain a sense of belonging, to feel a part of a family unit?
CJF: Definitely, and the idea of what a family could mean when you don’t have a family, and what the idea of a family means when you have a family, but it’s not the family you wanted. It’s all about recreating a family in the absurd and violent world of a rebel unit. But it still fascinates me the idea of tribalism and families and how they function, and human bonds, loyalty and betrayal and all those things that happen in a family. I think it will somehow be a subject that I will always come back to.
JW: Were you keen that the film convey to an audience the immigrant experience and also give an insight into a world of poverty and a culture of fear and violence?
CJF: Definitely, and that started with Victoria para Chino, and trying to place the audience inside the trailer so that they would walk away feeling the fear and the claustrophobia. That is what I wanted to do, have the audience really partake in the experience. I don’t think I could’ve really changed minds. Politically if you’re one side of the fence, you’re not going to be different after. Maybe you’ll come away with a little more empathy, and I think that’s a lot to ask sometimes. You could write as many news articles about something, but unless someone has an emotional experience they’ll always feel intellectually detached. Giving them this emotional experience was a primary goal.
JW: Reaction to the film from Sundance onwards has been universally positive. What do you think people are responding to?
CJF: I don’t know what individual people react to, because I’m sure it’s probably different things. If people have children, they’re watching Smiley so it probably affects them on that level. For those that are immigrants, it really doesn’t matter if you’re an immigrant from Bangladesh, or if you’re an immigrant from South America, there’s a commonality to that experience. It was paramount to me that the film is made for an audience. There are directors that make films for themselves but I always aspired to be the kind of director that made films for people to see and connect with. From the actual making of the film – and for the 150 people I work with it’s also their livelihood – through to its completion I see it as a fully collaborative process. For me film is an inclusive experience and that’s what is so great about it as a medium. At the end of a film you can have a conversation with someone else about what you just experienced and discuss whether or not you felt connected to the story or the characters. You might even want to discuss whether you felt any connection to the person telling the story.
Sin Nombre opens on 14 August
