Director Cary Joji Fukunaga (right) avoided the action-packed clichés when filming South America in favour of a more restrained, atmospheric style SIN NOMBRE
enriched my perspective’, Fukunaga recalls. What about the immigrants’ apparent fatalism? ‘Whatever happens is in the hands of God. It’s faith more than fatalism’. As well as offering a rivetingly authentic immigrant story, the film is also compelling in its exploration of the inner-workings of a real gang, Mara Salvarucha. Originally from Los Angeles, Mara is composed of Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans. Rooted in the culture of death metal and hardcore punk, and with an outstanding array of facial and bodily tattoos, the gang’s inside machinations are skilfully linked into the plot.
‘It was pretty academic’, Fukunaga explains when asked about access, ‘I would go to the prisons, sit down with the social workers and we would select some of the gang members who would be most willing to talk. Some were active, some were not. The contacts I have are gone, I have no idea where they are.’ Excellent casting clearly delivered on the gang roles. ‘Tenoch (Huerta Mejia, who plays Mara leader Lil’ Mago) is a natural leader and very charismatic, so in the gang scenes I would say to him, “You control your guys and you decide how things are going to happen”. That strengthened the dynamic on-screen.’ As for their facial tattoos, Fukunaga says that he does not know their exact origins but guesses that they come from early 1980s American prison culture, ‘where the real hardening of the gangs took place. They took it to another level when they got out and tattoos were part of that. Fuck it
racks
‘ALL THE PEOPLE WE HAD MET HAD BEEN RAPED OR ASSAULTED ON THE TRAINS’ all to get to another level.’
When Sin Nombre premiered at Sundance in January, it won awards both for directing and cinematography. Under Fukunaga’s direction, Brazilian director of photography Adriano Goldman has successfully avoided the usual clichés of adrenaline-fuelled narrative filmmaking, opting for a more welcome, restrained, slower-paced natural shooting aesthetic. Rejecting the infamous Red digital camera – ‘on too instantaneous’ – for a more textured 35mm, the film’s exquisite long shots of Mexican landscapes lend themselves to the film’s horror and beauty. the Red
it feels
‘A lot of my friends’ films are action adverse, but I have yet to make one like that. There is a desire in me to do a film that is all one take!’, he says ponderingly. This return to a more traditional style of filmmaking is undoubtedly a conscious decision on the director’s part to break away from ‘the over-stylised films of the late 1990’s, early 2000’s’. With a second script already underway for Focus Features and another one with Universal, Fukunaga has certainly hit the ground running. ‘When I was writing the Sin Nombre script six years ago,’ he laughs, ‘I did not think that it was going to be from a studio (Focus Features), but it couldn’t be better!’. Finally, what about the film’s name? Was there a discussion about changing it to an English translation? ‘I was against it. I felt it’s pretty easy to pronounce for non-Spanish speaking audiences and it sounds enigmatic enough. For those who do understand Spanish it is very relative to the title. Anyway, after a while they stopped asking me about it.’
It is this incredibly confident, youthful resolve that seems to have landed Fukunaga right where he’s meant to be, delivering a gripping socio-political Spanish language thriller for his first feature film. He discloses that his next project is once more foreign terrain. He is working on a musical, but without a chorus and dancing. ‘Imagine a Disney live action without the happy ending’. It is here that he again comes back to this theme of doing something that ‘tortures me’. Painful for him, perhaps, but all the better for us.
Sin Nombre is on selected release from Fri 14 Aug. See review, page 23.
13–20 Aug 2009 THE LIST 13