Interview courtesy Revolver Entertaintment.
Cary is considered one of the most exciting new voices in International Film. His work as a writer, director, and cinematographer has taken him around the world – from the Arctic Circle to Haiti and West Africa.
Mr. Fukunaga wrote and directed the short film Victoria para Chino, which screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It was honoured with over twenty-four International Awards, including a Student Academy Award and an honourable mention from BAFTA’s Los Angeles chapter.
An MFA candidate from New York University’s Graduate Film Program, Mr. Fukunaga marks his feature film writing and directing debut with Sin Nombre – a film set on the lower Mexican border where fearsome gangs are the only option for reaching a more prosperous land. The stories of Sayra, a teenager living in Honduras and hungry for a brighter future, and teen gang members Smiley and Casper, for whom the ungovernable Mara Salvatrucha is their entire universe, become interlaced on a train to reach Mexico. It is a journey that will determine the future of their lives…
How did this project take shape for you, as a first-time feature director?
It came about through my short film, Victoria Para Chino, which was about a truckload of immigrants who were abandoned and suffocated in Victoria, Texas. In doing research for that, and filming in Mexico, I learned about the Central American side of immigration. When we think of immigration, we usually think Mexico-to-the-United States but there are Hondurans, Guatelmalans, and Nicaraguans who are travelling north to get into Mexico and then go Mexico-to-the-United States. I knew this was a story I wanted to tell in a feature film.
It struck me personally. I wanted to have audiences experience this from a human perspective, one which has nothing to do with politics or agendas about what immigration “means” or what it “should” be. The web, newspapers and books have information, but, for me, it is hard to get a sense of things unless I go in person to see what somewhere is like.
When the short film played at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival I was asked to submit a script for the Sundance Lab. I had spent all my time finishing the short, so I had just two weeks to draft the feature script. I drew on the research I had done for the short, but I knew I needed to find out even more about the things that I didn’t know about and write more drafts. I wanted authenticity.
What with the larger scale, were you considering presenting the script for a director to consider?
No, it was always going to be a project I would direct, and I always planned on filming in Mexico, because that’s where the story takes place.
There was no way I could have written Sin Nombre without seeing what I was writing about. So, in the summer of 2005, I went down to Chiapas and Tapachula, Mexico with a couple of friends who had worked on the short, to do firsthand research. We spoke to police. We went to jails to meet with gang members who were part of the immigrant smuggling trade. We went to the borders, and saw rafters on the Suchiate River between Guatemala and Mexico. We visited immigrants at train stations, yards and also at shelters, including one that is designated for immigrants who have been injured on trains - 16-year-olds who lost their legs, for example. These are people who were headed north to try for a better life for themselves and their families, and now they had gotten hurt and never made it north.
After seeing them, my friends decided they didn’t want to ride the train, so I ended up doing that by myself. One night, at 2am in the Tapachula yards, I jumped on a freight train with two Hondurans that I’d met the night before. I had invited them to stay with me at a hotel rather than wait all night at the station, which was dangerous. We all jumped on and travelled across Chiapas; a lot of what happened on that 27-hour trip – within the first couple of hours – formed the basis for what happens on top of the train in Sin Nombre. The bandit attack that happened not far from us, and the camaraderie with the immigrants, enriched my perspective.
Was there a lot of chaos on the trip?
Well, if you see drama or crazy stuff, it happens instantly and then it’s gone as soon as it came. What surprised me is how mundane a lot of the journey is – like ordinary life. Here’s the way I learned to look at it from the immigrants’ perspective; whether bad things or good things happen, it’s just another day and everything and everyone is in God’s hands. If they’re on top of the train and completely dehydrated, they’ll say, “It will rain and we will collect water.” If bandits attack the trains, they’ll say, “We’ll run and then come back to the train when the bandits go away.” Whatever happens, they will roll with it. They don’t dramatise what’s happening in their lives.
That was your purview. So what did you learn from them that motivated your storytelling?
The immigrants that I met knew that the journey and the life they were going towards were going to be hard. I didn’t meet any who thought that the streets were going to be paved with gold in the USA. That’s not the perspective people have any more. The journey is now one of survival, necessity, and basic economics; at home, they make 45 lempiras a day, and milk costs 15. You have people who can’t make enough money to meet the cost of living or feed their families in their country, where the economy is falling apart. We would be stopped for several hours, and they would be looking in irrigation ditches for water, along the way. At that point, there is nothing else to do but talk, and I would get asked, “What are you doing here?” I would answer, “I’m writing a story.” I’d write in my journal, and some people would say “Good for you,” and others would say “Please tell our story.” By the end of the trips, I had learned so much and lived some of it myself. So I felt even more responsibility to tell the story.
What does the title mean?
The title Sin Nombre translates as “Without A Name,” or, “Nameless” in English.
What drives the main characters?
This movie is about people in our day, in our time, at this very moment. They are living their lives, and they have made the decision to try to look for something better. Smiley is looking to be part of a community. Having been raised by his grandmother, he had no male images of role models. Casper, as a member of the Mara, is his example. There may be standard stories of why kids join gangs, yet every case is an individual one. Casper and Sayra are both looking to reconstruct families they have never had; that theme is set against the worlds of immigration and gangs. When they meet, a trust builds up between them bit by bit. They become linked to each other, yet at the end of the story are in very different places.
Was it just that one trip, Cary, that got you all you needed to write the script and prep the movie?
Oh no. I made more trips back to Mexico. The last train I rode was in the summer of 2006, across Veracruz. A year and a couple of months later, we were filming scenes where I had travelled.
So you filmed in the fall of 2007?
Right, and right where I had been before. We were creating a fiction in spots where the real thing is still happening. The actors would be on camera, and a few feet away there would be real immigrants who had just travelled for days.
Where did you shoot the movie?
On Mexico City locations that were so diverse; we were able to find so many in a 200-mile radius. For example, Orizaba is gorgeous with its colours and light. The Tegucigalpa, Honduras scenes were filmed in Naucalpan. You see how they built those concrete houses on the edge of a valley…
How did you work out the visual approach for the film?
Well, since we were mostly using real locations, Pache (the production designer) and I talked a lot about colours and textures. We went for a saturated, yet not overt, palette; there are these natural decaying backgrounds mixed with hot spots of colour.
In terms of the cinematography, Adriano and I talked from the beginning about doing less inflected camerawork, no messing with the negative. We wanted the camerawork to be natural and let what happens be the drama.
How did the key actors come together, and how did you work closely with them?
That was also in terms of it being authentic; we had it written into the contract to make the movie that we would be casting Central Americans. For the principal roles, I wanted people who caught the spirit of their parts. So, through (casting director) Carla Hool, we cast people with a lot of experience, like Paulina Gaitan, and people with practically none, like Edgar Flores; she could give me four variations on a scene, while he was in a lot of ways just being him. So it was a good mix for me, and it meant that I couldn’t over-plan a scene – which I don’t like to do in the first place, since I like spontaneity. Yet I can also control the dramatic flow of a scene towards authenticity.
Tenoch (who plays Mara leader Lil’ Mago) is a natural leader and 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. During the writing, I found that character starting to take over scenes; despite all the bad things he does, you still want to like him. That was true of certain gang members I met, too – and with Luis Fernando Peña in playing Sol. We cast people off the streets, because I had always hoped to cast as real as possible. RE
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