Winner of this year's Slamdance Film Festival in the narrative competition, "Tijuana Makes Me Happy" is a rare example of American based indie filmmakers making a foreign language first feature. Dylan Verrechia and James Lefkowitz, the director and editor/DP of this marvelous look at an out of work Tijuana mechanic and rooster training son, have been collaborators since meeting in the NYC music scene in the late 90s.. Naturalistically inhabiting their non-actors' world, their feature, shot on MiniDV, is a brisk verite style journey into a slice of Northern Mexican life rarely glimpse in the commercial cinema. Still seaking an American distributor, the film has screened locally at the IFC Center as part of the best of Slamdance 2007 screening series and is continuing to play the festival circuit:
BH: What was the genesis of the script and the idea of going to Tijuana to make this film with non-professional actors?
JL: It started when Dylan did a road trip down across the borders before we started. I think as we traveled to various, different places Tijuana seemed liked the perfect place to be. It’s just this culmination of America, Mexico…
DV: In 1999 I did a documentary in Brazil. I saw upnorth and it was all these street kids and I saw some kids with these chickens, so I wanted to do a story about them, and then I went along the border, finding a place to do something about them, but also doing a documentary, and then, after seeing Tijuana, we went back, James and I, to do a documentary there. We met a lot of people. First, the script got changed out, because of what we’d heard about it from people, so it became alot about prostitution and all the bad things about Tijuana. And once I’d seen the place, and especially going back with James, then we had another perspective on the whole thing. So we met people, you know, at first, children and child abuse, prostitution, but we saw also cockfights, pretty much the kind of things that are seen as negative and we started to spend a lot of time with people down there and we decided to base the story on this one kid, Indio (Pablo Tendilla Ortiz) who at the time he was 12 and he was trained as an apprentice to this cockfighter, who was a shady guy. We left the shady guy to do more a story about him and his father (Pablo Tendilla Rocha), that was a documentary and we really liked this family. Then we decided to rework the script together.
BH: How much collaboration did you have on the script and what was the collaboration like with the non-professional actors?
JL: It was a matter of finding there own past stories, listening to there experiences, you know, how the father grew up and his relationship with his father and then his relationship with his sons, his brothers, about, you know, about prostitutes, telling their stories and we did this interview documentary and just getting everyone’s stories and just synthesizing it all into archetypal characters. So Indio, it’s a lot of his story, but then a mixture of his dad’s. So his dad was a big part of writing the story. When we were, we went through a lot of development stages and then…
DV: We even had a casting director at some point.
JL: Yeah we had a lot of…
DV: It was supposed to be with actors in the first place.
JL: Right. But no one could handle, acting. Because Mexico has a very melodramatic, soap opera type of acting in general, so to find people, you either have to get people who are not real actors or who are like…
DV: Great actors.
JL: So yeah, in general the stories were… we didn’t make up that much.
DV: In the end.
JL: The kid wanted to have, to create a rooster farm, he wanted to fight his rooster but was kind of afraid, um, I mean, he never had a real fight with a friend and he never had like a rooster that he fought, like…
DV: Or killed.
JL: Or killed.
DV: And the story based on the father bringing his son to the prostitute is basically what his own father, the father of the father, did to him.
JL: During the making of it, the father had to actually leave Tijuana and cross over to the other side illegally to make money because his garage shop closed down.
DV: Right.
BH: And that’s his real garage shop in the film?
JL: This is real. He used to own a garage shop.
DV: When we met him he had a garage shop.
JL: That actually is this place that his friend who, you know, owns that and he works there, he was working there on and off, but the dad’s actual shop closed down, he lost it…
DV: …The economy when down to, so we never thought he was going to have to cross, because, we thought, when we met him he was all set up.
JL: He was completely not, you know, he was doing great when we met them. It was like, and then we went to film and like, their whole life was like chaos.
DV: We had rewrote the script, we had actors and then I came a month before shooting, arrive from the airport and I went there to where they used to live. But they had changed location. So I’m there we all my luggage and then I see his car at some other house, so I go there and at this very moment, his entire family is coming out, the kid, his sisters, his mom, they’re all leaving at this very same instant because they are going to go meet him back on the other side of the border. She was a teacher, so she had a visa to cross, but the father, since he had lost his shop, didn’t have a visa, so he had crossed illegally, so I went with him a couple hours after coming from the airport and the entire cause was to go see the father and the father was in pretty bad shape, working, you know, on the construction, you know, being badly treated and he wanted to be back because of his family’s there and I asked him, do you want to be, um, do you still want to do the film and so he left everything behind and came the next day to prepare for production. And during that time, you know, we came like three weeks and month later, and at that time we had lost many of our actress and other prostitutes we had based the story on and at that point and anyway we decided to do it on the father and the son and their relationship, so...
BH: And that’s why it became their film?
JL: Yeah, pretty much, we came there and we needed to finish a project. And we developed it around…
BH: Have they seen the movie yet?
JL: Oh yeah, they really like it.
DV: You should say what Pablo has been doing with the movie.
JL: The father has been trotting around Mexico trying to get it into film festivals, sell it, he’s like a local celebrity because our music video has been all over Mexico, MTV and so on, so he goes anywhere and everyone knows him. And he’s always like, you know, we we’re at a film festival, the Baja California Film Festival, basically Tijuana, and he was like uh…
DV: Well he started by showing the movie in the back of his pickup. Well actually his van. He would open the door and have the movie playing and show it to people that way. And then he go into bars, so all the nice, the good places, like Café Latatude, a few different places in Tijuana, he’s been showing the movie there. People have been like coming, a lot of people, you know, hooting, laughing, having a good time with the movie, singing along with the songs (laughs).
JL: I mean everyone likes it.
BH: Let’s talk about the financing really quickly. I saw that you shot for $30,000?
JL: I think so. We originally thought we could do it and then we got alittle extra to film it. Most of the money was going into paying for people. We paid them as much as we possibly could.
DV: We thought it would cost actually $50,000 while we were actually on production, but actually when we we’re on location we were fortunate enough not to have to pay for locations. The cockfighting ring, we thought it would be at least $3,000, the clubs, the prostitution clubs, we thought we would have to pay at least another $3,000, also those are places they don’t allow anyone to shoot there, no one is allowed to shoot there and they allowed us for instance to shoot in the motel room. In the motel room, which is the actual place where we started, and then I asked them, so what do you want a, you know, I want to pay you guys and they really refused in all those places always refused. And in the main prostitute hotel, the place where we shot, all they asked for was a picture of the entire crew, us, and the children, the fourteen-year old children, and the prostitutes. Now in the prostitute club, twenty-four hours, seven days a week, and there’s a picture us there. Some people were really helpful.
JL: A lot of our payment didn’t come from money, we gave people food, supplies, beds, furniture, gifts was a lot of it, because they didn’t, it like, the balance of money. We didn’t have enough to pay people like Hollywood. So we would, sort of just, I mean, we just went there as a really friendship oriented, like, everyone wanted to make this film, it wasn’t like, we went in there, raped the village and took everything we could. We went in there, and everyone took their part, everyone that was in the scene had their own little ideas, of like what they could do and what they wanted to do and how it could be and we would collaborate, listen and make it happen. So the same, it’s like, to offer money, which we did give money and like, as we could…
DV: We gave money after each shot, not actually each scene, but we would pay for, actually we paid for each day they worked, instead of being as a regular thing of paying up front or right after, that would falsify the message…
JL: Yeah.
DV: We paid like two, second time they would work, I mean, for the actual price so …
JL: Yeah, we would be double what they would expect, but still, it was a very careful balance of respect and, you know, appreciation. Because it’s like…
DV: But in general those who we’re paid we’re the actors and the crew…
JL: Actors and family, we gave a percentage of the film, we paid them, it’s like, it’s partly their film, you know, it’s like, so, yeah, I mean most of the money was to get a house, we bought a car, we gave the father the car, you know, everything we did we put into the Mexican economy (laughs), and our pockets, we we’re using or own money. We raised alittle bit more than we initially thought. Originally we wanted to get a big, bigger film…
BH: You took it to the Cannes Market, right?
JL: Yeah, we took it… well no, yeah, that was for more post-production and distribution.
DV: The movie has a long life. It starts like in 2001. I tried to get some money with this money and did this segment, you know, along the border, then in Tijuana. Then we get some more money for production itself, get a new camera, you know, get for the production and then you get all those different stages…
JL: Buy more equipment…
DV: About Cannes, about going to these places, promotion…
JL: Even our sound guys, we paid them half in equipment, because like, the equipment, they can’t buy it, one guy is from Costa Rica and to buy the equipment out there is five times as much, so they we’re willing to do it for buying them a boom mike and a digital 8 track, a mixer, pro tools, to hook them up with equipment that they brought in to their country and now they started their own studios. Now both of them are doing pretty well, they’ve both set up their own studios and are making pretty similar films. And, you know, It’s cool…
DV: It was funny, because we would get uh, all… we would get the equipment.
JL: We would buy everything on Ebay…
DV: Right, then in San Diego, we had some friends living in San Diego, they would receive them, actually they’re in the movie, Mitch and Erica, we’d get the equipment then we’d shoot a whole scene and go back…
JL: Escort it back through the US heading to Mexico with boxes of equipment, so that was like, I mean a lot of our money just went to equipment and food, you know… the other biggest expense is eating.
BH: What was the total number on your crew?
JL: Well, it’s basically…
DV: What, five, six…
JL: Yeah. The father was all around who acted and if he wasn’t acting, he was building us dollies or pushing a dolly or doing whatever he could on construction.
DV: The location scout we did together. I mean anything. The main asset was really his capacity of relating and speaking to everyone. We worked in the past with production companies in Tijuana and they, a lot of them have, want to work with American who are condescending of other Mexicans. This Pablo remained even with everyone. He would speak to everyone, he would crack jokes with anybody. So whenever there would be any tension or conflict, he was always, we would remain cool, but he would always made it that things would work out.
BH: So he became your line producer of sorts?
JL: Yeah (laughs)
DV: He was line producer. (laughs)
BH: Let’s talk about the aesthetic of the movie. I don’t think you can watch it without thinking of neo-realism or perhaps the work of some contemporary filmmakers working amidst economically depressed settings with children such as David Gordon Green in George Washington or Lynn Ramsay in Ratcatcher. What are some of your influences and what we’re you guys going for?
DV: Well I think we both grew up with uh…
JL: We grew up with Tarkovsky… and Italian films. But I think, it sounds hard, but Tarkovsky was a big influence on this. We tried not to, he uses long takes and not a lot of editing and so that you feel real time and real space and we wanted to create real time and real space so it’s like, we have these shots which, each scene is basically one shot with maybe alittle cut to move it along alittle, but that was one of our major influences and Amoros Perros was…
DV: Well, yeah, but that’s… hip.
JL: It’s still hip, but it’s still…
DV: DeSica and… the neo-realism movies are all about the singularity of the people, the singularity of the character and the story comes from the character and makes it very unnatural to make any tricks into the structure of the piece, it all comes from the character and see who are they involved, and cinema base them, you feel that its actually happening it real time.
JL: Yeah, but I think Tarkovsky was one of the biggest influences. Animals, and editing concepts…
DV: And also, I wanted to go in a place weather it be Brazil and anywhere in the United States or even in France, stay in a place, get to have contact with people, and actually write a piece and maybe at some point make a movie that would be with the people and I think it was this project, the whole project, it was exactly that. Working with people and doing something which was very specific to the lives of these people.
JL: We lived there and we… If someone from Tijuana made this film it would be something similar, most likely. I mean it’s…
DV: Well I think now since we know Tijuana even better we’d do even a different subject, but it’s basically the film that I wanted to do for a long time, this type of film, the type of movie I want to watch, not so much a singular arc, same story, what you usually watch on the screen.
