For better or worse, Fernando Eimbcke had spent enough time away from a movie set that when he stepped onto the one for “Olmo” in Las Cruces, he felt like a kid again.
“It was scary [initially] because I spent 10 years [away]. I lived in Germany for six years and there I wrote scripts and I spent a lot of time reading and seeing a lot of films,” says Eimbcke, who first made a splash with the Alfonso Cuaron-endorsed coming-of-age tale “Duck Season” in 2004. “So it was like a time of studies and it was a very good experience. And then I was really afraid to shoot because it was like, ‘Oh my god, 10 years’ [on] the first day to see all the trucks and the people…but I enjoyed it a lot.”
Eimbcke has never run away from his inner child and it’s served him well, with features such as “Lake Tahoe” and “Club Sandwich” and a number of shorts radiating an inimitably shaggy sense of humor and endearing innocence about them. To know his work is to love him when they all share an undeniably personal touch and while his films often unfold like hangout movies with no greater stakes for the characters than to how best to spend their Saturday afternoon, the depth of feeling that comes from his sly comic set-ups and the strong emotions of the age where every decision seems as it can be the difference between life and death can’t be easy to come by, yielding the kind of melancholy that comes across as effortless when it takes years of tinkering to find the right tone.
So the arrival of “Olmo,” which premiered earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival and continues to charm audiences around the world on the festival circuit, really does seem special and although the director puts a premium on having fun as the thrill-seeking leads of his films always do, his latest might be his most moving to date when it considers the 14-year-old at its center having to accept responsibility well beyond his years for helping to take care of his father Nestor (Gustavo Sanchez Parra), who has a serious case of multiple sclerosis. When the film roars out the gate with its title accompanied by the screech of an electric guitar in the style of its late 1970s setting, one can rest assured that Eimbcke’s irreverent sensibilities will temper any sentimentality there might be as Olmo (Aivan Uttapa) is left to handle his father’s medical needs for a day when his working mother Cecilia (Andrea Suarez Paz) and his older sister Ana (Rosa Armendariz), who usually is in charge of feeding and the bedpan, can’t be around.
The situation is an inconvenient one when Olmo resents his father to some degree for not being healthy enough to fulfill that role more fully in his life and Nestor still demands to be respected as the patriarch of the family even in his frail state. But in more practical terms, spending the day at home couldn’t come at a worse time for the kid when he’s invited to a party by his neighbor Nina (Melanie Frometa), led to promise to bring a stereo that he doesn’t necessarily have access to when he’s been harboring a longtime crush on her, though he does have his pal Miguel (Diego Olmedo) to come over to help. Settling in with the Lopez family never means settling down when even the most mundane activities for the family seems to bring a fresh batch of chaos and getting them all on the same page – or even in the same room together – appears impossible, but over the course of one wild day, Eimbcke and co-writer Vanesa Garnica let the deep love they have for one another emerge when their hardened attitudes towards one another are rooted in the fear that they could soon be losing a loved one and Olmo can recognize that as scary as it is to see the adults in his life as fragile as he is as a teen, it also gives him something in common with them as he grows up.
It was an incredible privilege to catch up with Eimbcke recently at the Toronto Film Festival and with “Olmo” now making its U.S. premiere at the AFI Festival in Los Angeles this weekend, we’re excited to share this conversation with the filmmaker about his triumphant return to the big screen, the excitement of working in ways he never had before on his latest film and why young adults continue to be the most interesting characters for him to build stories around.
How did this come about?
I had this idea about a boy and a vinyl record for a long, long time and I met with Vanesa Garnica, who’s been a friend since we were 13 years old. We spent a lot of time together during our teenage years and she’s a writer, so I asked her, “Let’s write a script.” Vanesa’s a very generous person, and it was like, “Okay, let’s forget about the ego. If there’s an idea, it’s an idea,” and I’m convinced that there are no good or bad ideas. You need to work them in order for them to work and it was very easy. Sometimes she wrote a scene, sometimes I wrote another scene, so it was very relaxed. and very funny. Our main barometer to know if the script was working was if we laughed with the scene and it happened that all the time we laughed.
And Vanesa’s husband is a production designer, so she put a lot of things from the period in the script and [we both] are really aware of the importance, of the objects in cinema. They represent something and this stereo represents a lot of things – freedom and fun, but it was very, very interesting to have this contrast between this stereo that represents joy and then the sickness of the father and [his son] has a decision to stay at home taking care of his father or to go to a party and all the time we knew that we were dealing with a very interesting and profound conflict [from something relatively simple]. That was our light during the process. And because Vanesa’s husband is a production designer, in the pre-production process, I saw a stereo record player [that I wanted in the film] and Vanesa was like, “No, no, that’s not from 1979. It should be like this.” So it was very, very funny. Then we wrote the script, and we sent it to Jeremy Kleiner from Plan B. They loved the script, and they told me we wanted to produce it, so it began there.
Being such a big fan of yours, I was so excited with the guitar riff that opens this movie that feel like an announcement that you’re back. And of course given that this is set in the late 1970s, “Saturday Night Fever” looms large over the proceedings, though you feel the tension between the rock and disco in the era. Was music something you were thinking a lot about early on?
It was a story about Mexican-Americans. and I’m Mexican, so I proposed a lot of Mexican songs and Jeremy [Kleiner] and Caddy [Vanasirikul, an executive producer] proposed American songs, so this melding of the music was very interesting. I love music, but I don’t use so much in my previous films and in this film, it felt necessary.
And I have two older sisters and I remember my oldest sister loved “Saturday Night Fever.” She loved John Travolta, and she loved to go into dancing, and I [thought], “I would really like to do that,” but I never went to a disco. [Still] I was fascinated by that period and I didn’t see the film at that time, but I remember I saw some scenes, and I remember that scene with John Travolta at the beginning of the film and he [became] my idol. [I thought] “Wow, I love John Travolta.”
You’ve got a charismatic lead yourself in Aivan. How’d you find him?
We had an amazing casting director Susan Shopmaker, who was proposed by Plan B, and she worked with Alexander Payne and some of our great filmmakers, so I was like, “Oh my God, yes.” She looked all through United States, and when I wrote the script, I had a very vague, confused idea of the characters, but suddenly this little guy appeared on a video and I thought, “He’s the one,” and that same day, Jeremy Kleiner from Plan B called me and told me, “This is Olmo,” so we didn’t have any doubt that he would be the main character. A very hard job for Susan, but very easy for me to say, “This is the one.”
And then [Diego Olmedo, who played] Miguel was very sweet and intelligent – both were, and it was very easy to direct them. I love to work with professional actors, but I really like the spontaneity of the teenagers and it’s actually easier for me to direct teenagers than adults or professional actors. You just need to be very clear in the sense of the scene. What’s the objective of the scene? What do you want in this scene? And they create a very interesting world in their acting because they’re not actually acting. They’re just playing. So it was very, very fun and when I work with teenagers, I learn a lot.
Is that actually a reason you keep gravitating towards stories about this age or is it the age itself that’s of ongoing interest?
I think adolescents are the perfect character because by definition, there’s something lacking in them. They want to be adults, but at the same time they want to be little kids and with this character and the story, [Olmo] wants to go outside to party, to have an adventure with Nina Sandoval, but at the same time he needs to take care of his family, and [when he’s] in the house he says, “I’m like a little kid, but I want to go with Nina so I’m an adult.” So this conflict was really interesting. Then as adults, we always lack something, but in adolescence, it’s very transparent, so teenagers are like perfect characters.
Was there a trick to getting this family dynamic right where it’s obviously close, but slightly estranged at the same time?
It was not difficult because the scenes were very well-designed and the conflict was very clear. For example, the moment when the father [soils] the mattress [and it leads to a wild scene where the family has to clean up], it was like very clear. You need to take the sheets off of the bed. [Olmo] needed to take care of his father [when he didn’t want to], so the conflict was there. My job was to settle the tone down a little bit because sometimes it was really chaotic and very noisy. But the actors, Gustavo Sanchez-Parra, the father, and Andrea [Suarez Paz], the mother, were generous with the teenagers and then Rosa [Armendariz], the sister, was amazing, so It was very organic.
We had a very difficult time with the schedule because since you’re working with a teenager, you just have a few hours, so that was really difficult. The first days I was getting crazy because I [thought] “I can’t finish the scene, it’s impossible.”And it was very interesting because I didn’t actually see the scenes that we did [on playback] because we didn’t have the time. So it was like “One shot, two takes” and “Okay, let’s go to the next one.” I was really, really afraid during the shooting because I [thought], “Oh my God, maybe the scene was not there,” but [I’d say], “Let’s keep rolling.” And then in the editing room, everything made sense.
Was there anything that took this in a direction you didn’t quite expect that you could embrace?
Everything. It was the first time that I shot in the United States and it was a crew that I never worked with [before] and I directed in English, [which is] not my [native] language, so all the time it was a surprise. I had a sticker in my workplace that says, “Do the best you can with what you have. You should adapt.” And I’m very, very grateful with this film because I learned a lot. I shot my previous films on celluloid and we shot [“Olmo”] on digital, so that was a new experience. I was against digital and then I read something from Kiarostami, who said about the digital in his very poetic way, “God created digital,” and I understood that. To work with teenagers in digital, it helps you a lot, so that was very surprising. On film, you need to plan a lot. And it’s the same with digital, but during the scenes, I could go into the scene and say, “Okay, stop. Just keep quiet. Just see her. Just see him. Keep rolling.” And then in the editing room, that helped a lot.
Carolina Costa has long been one of our favorite cinematographers from films like “The Graduates,” “Fancy Dance” and “Hala” with this sense of reality touched by magic. What was it like to work with her?
She’s an amazing DP. On my previous film, I worked with Alexis Zabe and with Maria Seco and Erindira Nunez, the co-producer in Mexico, proposed Carolina. And then I saw the work that she did and it was like, “Wow.” Sometimes during the shoot, I was a little concerned because I saw a lot of colors and my first film was in black-and-white and [I initially thought I wanted] something more neutral. But I said [to myself], “Just let her do her job” and then in the color correction, I saw the film and [I thought], “Wow, It’s amazing” because the colors are very harmonic but very intense.
That’s the problem with the digital —it’s supposed to be very near to the final product, but that’s not true. It will change a lot and you need a very good color corrector. Carolina had a very good one. In the pre-production, she insisted on meeting with the color corrector and when I saw the film for the first time [after] Carolina worked on it, it was beautiful and she found how to be truthful to that period without the clichés. And she helped me a lot with the camera. We had a very precise plan in the shooting and we changed a lot, but we had a plan. And then she works in United States, so she knows how to deal with the crew and it’s very different the way we work in Mexico and the way they work in the United States.
What was it like to have an American producer in Plan B?
All the time, it was very interesting to work with Plan B. In my previous films, I was the producer. So I made all the decisions, but on this film, they pushed my boundaries constantly and in the moment, I thought ”Oh no!” But now with some time and distance, [I realized] “Oh, that was really good” and as a director you are in a constant learning process. That’s what moves me when I make a film — to learn. On this film, what I learned is to listen to your collaborators, so it was a very beautiful experience.
Something I was moved by was how you’re able to show the perspectives of the entire family in this, and I wondered if this felt like a a film you could only make now, being a little bit older when your earlier films were largely from the perspectives of the kids largely, and now you’ve got the perspectives of the adults in there as much of a prominent presence.
It was very, very organic because in my previous films, the adults [would sound like] like Charlie Brown films, [that garbled] “Rawr, rawr,” and in this film, it was the first time that I got into the conflict of the adult characters. For example, I wanted to explore the character of the father, how difficult it was for him to be in that position and I enjoyed working with adults. Maybe I’m, like my film, going into maturity and trying to listen to the others.
What’s it been like just sharing the film with audiences so far?
The only thing that you want is to share a film with an audience. At this moment with all the platforms and you can see a film at your home, to see a film in a big screen with a lot of people, it’s like when our ancestors used to tell stories around the fire. Now being in a cinema is like that. but the fire is not from the middle, it’s from a big screen. And when you have a comedy, the response is very immediate. With this film, what’s really interesting is that you laugh, but at the same time you cry, so to show the film and to see people react, you can feel it in the theater that people are feeling something different. I do films because I want to share it with people in a cinema. That’s the most beautiful experience.
“Olmo” will screen at AFI Fest in Los Angeles on October 25th at the TCL Chinese 5 at 4:10 pm.