Interview by Eric Lavallee on Jul 01, 2010
Source: IONCINEMA.com Feature
"Winner of the prestigious Tiger Award at Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival and an audience favorite everywhere it has been since it began it's world film festival run starting at TIFF last year, for this month's IONCINEPHILE we present Pedro González-Rubio and his feature film debut, Alamar. Film Movement are releasing this tale about the bonding of a father and son set in the splendor of nature starting this Wednesday at the Film Forum in New York.
Eric Lavallee: During your childhood…what films were important to you?
Pedro González- Rubio: I remember growing up with a film made by my grandfather about a boy who learns to play the violin, he did "Yanco" in 1960 and against all odds he was able to finish this film. This is probably one of the milestones from independent mexican cinema of the 60s. My mother had a video copy of Lamorisse "Le Balloon Rouge" which she played to me very often. I loooved Peter Pan too.
Lavallee: During your formative years what films and filmmakers inspired you? And at what point did you know you wanted to become a filmmaker?
González- Rubio: The film that influenced me the most to choose this career was Cinema Paradiso, I saw it with my mother in an old art deco cinema called Bella Época. I must have been around 12 years old. I could feel very close with the characters emotions towards the magic of movies, so when we walked out of the thatre I remember telling my mother I was going to make films. Then at film school I discovered Godard and Truffaut, their energetic film style inspired me to break with the canons that I was learning at that same time. I mean, at school I learned the basics of filmmaking, I specialized in photography and this gave me the opportunity to know all the departments of cinematography, from electrician and rigging to focus puller all the way to director of photography. The films by Herzog where groundbreaking, one that I loved was Fitzcarraldo. They portrayed the difficulties of the creative process as well as the miracles that happen beyond our control of the elements. This I clearly learnt it from Herzog’s films and made me discover another aspect of filmmaking. The social drama portrayed in my first work TORO NEGRO, co-directed with Carlos Armella, came from British films we saw during our school years in London. The works of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke where surely an influence. We took the dramatic structures found in their films to create the focus of our story in TORO NEGRO.
Lavallee: Is the bond/rapport between father and son something that you wanted to explore beforehand? And do you think that curiosity exists because it is something you yearn for or something you identify with strongly?
González- Rubio: The family relationships have been center themes in both ALAMAR and TORO NEGRO. In ALAMAR I felt the need to tell the story from an opposite perspective of parent/sibling relationship, I was thinking of this project as the duality with the first one. I was yearning to explore a story about a very simple and primitive activity in the nurturing of a child, because I felt my previous film explored the incapacity of teaching since the characters are stuck in a solitary self destructive loop. In ALAMAR I wanted to have a timeless relationship and love between family, this could be achieved by focusing on the initiation of a boy with his father’s roots.
Lavallee: A “which came first” question: did you go in knowing you would film with the coral reef backdrop or did your meeting with Jorge and Natan set the pathway of the story?
González- Rubio: I was interested in exploring the impermanence of things. So by choosing to film in such a fragile environment and then doing it from a child’s point of view would give that idea of impermanence a strong notion. The image of this coral reef came first by witnessing how the coast in the Mexican Caribbean is being invaded by urban/touristic developments, destroying everything in its path, from the lifestyle of the fishermen to the ecosystem of the zone. Playa del Carmen used to be similar to the location of the film, now we have no mangrove there, instead there are beach clubs, bars and hotels to bring the commodities of the city for the comfort of the tourists."
Para leer la entrevista completa da click aquí: http://www.ioncinema.com/news/id/5256
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