You’re releasing a movie with Clint Eastwood. Not everyone can say that …
The truth is that it is one of those moments in which anyone is grateful to life, especially being in the moment in which we had to live. We filmed in November of last year, with the pandemic in full swing. I think it is a gift that life gave me to be patient and not despair. When the pandemic started, I dropped a project that was my dream. It had to do with the relationship between Tenochtitlán and the Spanish, produced by Steven Spielberg, a huge thing, roles that one dreams of. I was very sad but then they called me to audition for Cry Male, I sent in my audition and they spoke to me to say that I was confirmed to record in November, with Clint Eastwood in his 90s. It is incredible to see these people who are made of a wood that does not break so easily, and that although they take on the world they are living in, they know that if they do things the right way, they can work.
What was it like working with Clint Eastwood?
You have a vibrant mind. His sets are like a family. There are people who have been working with him for more than 15 years; he is a great leader. He passes by and everyone says: “hey, boss!”, But he is a nice, talkative boss who laughs. It does have the face of that generation as of our grandparents, who you know that if you make a mistake, it will throw the speech of life at you. He is a person whom many of us admire as an artist because he has not given very important pieces such as million dollar Baby and Mystic River, and being there and seeing him on set… there were moments when he would talk and I would get excited: “He’s saying that classic Clint line … and he’s saying it to me!”. But it had to be very professional.
But it is not the first time that you have to work with that caliber of people. You’ve already been with Tilda Swinton, Bill Paxton, Andy García …
With Tilda, I was just graduating from acting school. I had already finished my academic process, but I was on the proof test, and I was already on set with Tilda Swinton. I still had a very naive of not knowing what was happening. I mean, I knew I was with a star, but I couldn’t believe it. But now that it happened to me with Clint Eastwood, that I already have a whole conception of how Hollywood works and the possibilities that it can mean, it is dimensioned in another way. Also the fact that it happened in a pandemic added something special that made me feel more grateful and think about how to transform that privilege so that it generates for another.
Cry Male It is a film that talks about machismo –not necessarily from men to women but from men to men– and you come from a famously macho country. What reflection did this movie unleash in you?
Understand what the word male is. It just says it in the trailer: that word would have to be deprecated. For the men who grew up in the patriarchy, it should no longer exist. We have to learn to deconstruct it. And that: to see Clint Eastwood at 91 years of age deconstructing the concept of male when for many he has been the best example of male, is incredible. It is a bit like the metaphor of the characters, seeing Clint with the character of Eduardo Minett, who is Rafo, a 14-year-old young man, who begin to understand that what they have taught us that we have to be as men is not what Right. It’s a very nice trip, and the kind of things we have to be counting on.
A very atypical narrative for a western, but necessary in our time …
Yes, and as you say, perhaps it has nothing to do with the most visible part of the feminist movement, but it is women who have taught us men the path of loving will. We men have to shut up, listen, and from there change. I think it is important to use art to talk about these things. In a pandemic we would have gone crazy if we had not had the visual arts, if we had not been able to see all the series we saw. And it is good to entertain ourselves, but the primary purpose of cinema is to reflect.
You were talking a while ago about transforming your privilege to help others.
Yes, I have had the privilege of working on such unusual things, and I want to take advantage of it to transform. I’m on the move Black Power, in which we try to create changes hand in hand with the people who want to. We think of the utopia of a world in which we are the same, not that we are the same, but that we all have the same opportunities.
At a glance the mission of Black Power It’s very obvious, but tell me what’s behind it …
What we want is a more accurate representation of what is in the country. Turn on the TV and watch the original series on a platform: I think there are two or three 20-something projects in which the protagonists are brown. When you analyze these metrics, something is wrong because on the streets we see different things. Many times we see dark people in stereotypical characters and that is something that we want to change in the movement, reflect on from makers of audiovisual media. But there is a reality: this need to want everything with a certain international profile takes away the possibility of telling many stories, and that is where the important thing comes: changing the narrative and the optical point of things. That there are filmmakers from other latitudes, from other ideals and universes, who speak from their individuality and from their artistic community. That is a path we need to travel. We are a diverse and multilingual country with several beauties in skin, and we focus on the international Latino.
A very evil vision …
Yes, but right there is another topic. We are trying to inquire in new terms. The correct word to speak of malinchismo is endophobia. We have charged a woman who was ahead of her time, Marina, La Malinche, the weight of betrayal. It is a super macho idea, the woman is the treacherous one. A surviving woman, who learned to speak Nahuatl and Spanish with pure hearing and intelligence, and we as a society have borne her the weight of betrayal. That is machismo. It is better to say endophobia, which is exactly the same: someone who denies his own roots. If we analyze Marina’s history, she did not deny her roots. She was a brilliant woman and a survivor. And with this little story, for example, there is a change of narrative and there we meet. We do not have to have the same skin tone or gender or ideology, but we agree. And that’s what we’re looking for: a real match.
And that’s the most genuine way of doing things, because then we fall into forced inclusion …
It is something that is discussed a lot in the middle, but sometimes things need to come out by provocation so that later they settle. It is like with infertile land: we have to work it, give it water, so that the land feels comfortable and germinates again. These inclusion processes are necessary. The idea of putting filmmakers from other latitudes is not to impose an idea, but so that there are more ideas, that we learn by listening to the other. But if at one point there are a series of individuals who do not want to change, and you put a different person on them, whether they like it or not, suddenly they begin to listen and see that there are other ways of seeing the world. Little by little we will have to have a greater will so that things happen naturally.
It is very similar to what has happened with the LGBT community …
Yes, they have been invisible for a long time, and they have been subjected to different discriminations. We also owe them a debt. Why not give them space? In a few years we are going to look for the actor, the director, the actress, the photographer, whatever, most suitable for the project regardless of their sexual and political orientation, skin color, religion, but first we have to achieve a ground equal. And you also have to make white people realize that they have a privilege. I have a privilege, despite having a racialized profile, because of the career I have had, and I have two soups: I keep quiet and just enjoy that, or I use my voice so that more people have the opportunity that I had.