When Metro Driver Dalia discovers her husband has vanished without a trace, she has to negotiate broken bureaucratic systems in order to find out the truth behind where he’s gone. What’s clever about Writer/Director Alejandro Gerber Bicecci’s feature drama Dead Man’s Switch (Arillo de hombre muerto) is how he balances his film’s thrilling missing person story with a truthful, social realist authenticity. It’s a film that looks striking, with stark black and white photography capturing the dimly lit streets and subterranean locales of Mexico that also conveys the actuality of a fractured system preventing individuals from finding their lost loved ones. DN caught up with Bicecci to learn about the creative construction of his third feature, his process of collaborating with Journalist Lydiette Carrion to authentically portray the Mexican Missing Persons system, and the challenges of getting social realist films made in Mexico’s complicated film industry.
How long have you been working on Dead Man’s Switch? When did the idea for the film first come to you?
I wrote the first synopsis of Arillo de hombre muerto in 2016. A producer called me then and said he had an agreement with a platform to make 12 low budget films and asked me to send him a synopsis for a film of my own ASAP. I was still on a long hangover after the difficult process of finishing and self-distributing Viento aparte, my second feature, that had a lot of financial conflicts. I supposed that the so-called agreement that the producer was showing off, wasn’t really solid; but I thought it was about time to start thinking about writing and producing a film again. I was in the street when the phone rang, and walked into the Metro, as I always do since I do not drive, and while waiting for the convoy, and watching the driver arrive to the station at the front of the convoy, I recalled that when I was eleven years old and started to go to the school by myself riding the Metro, something that now is unthinkable in Mexico City, I used to ask myself how do Metro drivers go home after midnight, the time the Metro closes, if the Metro is already closed.
The anecdote would be irrelevant if not for the fact that 25 years later I finished living right next to a Metro Drivers Parking Lot, the same which Dalia uses in the film, so, the answer to my childish question was pretty obvious: Metro Drivers have cars. The fact that I didn’t suppose that when I was eleven years old makes me think that Mexican Cinema and TV have always had a bias in the representation of certain social classes, and that me, being a middle-class secondary student had also this biased and stereotypical look towards middle lower class, and lower-class habitants in Mexico City. When I got home that afternoon Dalia was born: A Metro Driver who finishes her work at midnight and has to ride her car a long way until she gets to a habitational unit with thousands of apartments filled with people living in fear of the violence in the streets. Dalia needed to be one of them, living in the economic and social precariousness that identifies Mexican middle-lower classes, and when she got home, her supposedly safe place, her life needed to be turned upside down for good and without previous notice.
I figured out that this story could be the way to portray an aspect not so represented about the Mexican crisis of missing persons that has been going on for about fifteen years.
By that time, I was thinking a lot about how an established couple’s life tends to become routine and boring but structural, with love, affection, desire, and even emotion tending to be placed in something: a person, or a place, or an occupation that has nothing to do with what we call ‘home’. This led me to Carlos López, the love interest of Dalia, whose relevance in her life appears to be sustained only by the fact that she’s married: a triangle needs three angles and if you lose one you finish with a figure that has no name or meaning. Then, the question that led the story forward was: How will Dalia and Carlos López’ relationship cope if Esteban, the husband, disappears suddenly? And when I reached there, I figured out that this story could be the way to portray an aspect not so represented about the Mexican crisis of missing persons that has been going on for about fifteen years: the everyday life of a woman who is looking for a missing person, with a special emphasis on her family life, her love life, and putting on the center a question that I think is now central in Mexican environment: Can a person that has been a victim of this kind of violence feel pleasure again? A week later I had sent the synopsis to the producer, and it was pretty similar, at least in structure to what the film ended up being.
Dalia has to navigate all these bureaucratic systems as she seeks to find her husband, what research did you do to authentically represent the herculean challenges a person faces when reporting a missing person in Mexico?
In 2018 I got a screenwriting grant for this project, the producer agreement was not solid at all, as you can imagine, and I called my friend Lydiette Carrion, she’s a journalist specialized in human rights issues whom I admire a lot. And she had just edited a book called La fosa de agua (The Water Pit), following for six years the disappearance and murder of ten teenage girls in Ecatepec. The book is a must if you want to understand what happens in Mexico with violence; so, I asked her to be my consultant. She shared with me many of the interviews she made, we had some meetings to talk about the story, and she read and noted the first draft of the script giving it accuracy and precision in these issues. My professional baggage was also helpful: I worked for five years at a radio news show, have directed several documentaries facing social issues, and I have written a lot of TV thriller series, so the bureaucratic process was not something I didn’t know about. Then, in later drafts, I collected some newspaper notes that helped me finish the dramatic arc of the “Quest for Esteban”.
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Could you talk about casting Adriana Paz as Dalia, what was it about her that you felt was right for the role?
Adriana Paz is the best Mexican actress of her generation. I have the privilege of having her as a friend and collaborator. I had known her for almost 15 years when we worked together on a small sketch for an exhibition in a museum about the Mexican Independence Bicentennial. Later we made a fake Sci-Fi short film together, Luces brillantes.
When she read the script, she immediately became my closest creative ally in the construction of Dalia and the making of the film.
So, from the minute one I thought about this story I thought about her as Dalia. Adriana comes from a struggling middle lower class, she went to public school and has been fighting for years to become the greatest actress she is right now in a country in which commercial leading roles tend to be destined for white people. She knows the reality the film talks about perfectly. She knows what is to be afraid to walk late night on the streets of the city; she knows what it feels like to think that life can change tragically from a moment to the other; she knows what it is to struggle to get enough money to eat and pay rent. So, when she read the script, she immediately became my closest creative ally in the construction of Dalia and the making of the film.
What led you to a black and white colour palette for the film?
All three of my feature films contemplate social realist issues. So, I have had a lot of experience seeing audiences react to the genre and it’s something I think about a lot. I have the feeling that audiences react to social realism with a prior rejection to the possibility of ‘suspending their disbelief’; instead, they face the film with discomfort and distrust. It’s as if the audience is constantly verifying that what the film portrays is correspondent to what they know about the place, the theme, or the characters in the movie. Social realism is about generating discomfort against the system and the reality in which the characters live, that can’t happen if the audience doesn’t believe that what is being portrayed there is real.
So, reading some texts about street photo photographers I found out about the work of Japanese Photographer Daido Moriyama and his thoughts on black and white as a vehicle to build an expressionist portrait of reality through its symbolic and abstractionist elements. I decided then that the black and white palette could be an excellent aesthetic container for the story. One example of this is the Metro itself. In Mexico the Metro is orange, and plenty of us know all the stations and lines. Black and white photography allowed me to relocate the geography of the Metro and build another one, giving the audience the possibility to experience Dalia’s emotions, instead of constantly questioning if the film is accurate in the portrayal of non-essential details of places.
Social realism is about generating discomfort against the system and the reality in which the characters live, that can’t happen if the audience doesn’t believe that what is being portrayed there is real.
So much of the film takes place at night, what challenges did that bring to production? And what camera equipment did you shoot on to capture everything in low light?
Hatuey Viveros, my DP, Juan Pablo Miquirray, producer, and I decided to make this film without any power plant and using only LED lighting. It was a strategy to lower our budget a little bit, making our filming unit smaller, and having a better work rhythm, especially during night shoots. Hatuey decided then to use a small GH2 Panasonic camera for the night shoots and the Metro; and for the rest of the shooting, we used an Alexa LT with Zeiss optic. Hatuey tested a lot to be sure that both cameras could offer a similar look. He also decided to go retro and used a red camera filter during the day exteriors to add contrast to the image. In the series of tests he made, he discovered that color grading in postproduction didn’t get to the same results as filtering the image in camera.
The organ-based score is so haunting and unsettling, who did you collaborate with on it?
The score was composed by my long-time collaborator Alejandro Otaola. Otaola is one of the finest and most know rock band guitar players in Mexico. He has played for Santa Sabina, a band I am very fond of, La Barranca, San Pascualito Rey and Cuca. And the last ten years he has been composing film scores. Otaola has this constant need to challenge the musical conventions, he loves experimenting and looking for new textures in his music. He never is afraid of dealing with the unexpected and he constantly pushes forward to new limits. He’s not only the composer of the pipe-organ score but also of all the incidental music that plays in the film.
When I finished the script, I called him and told him, “Hey, I have a new script, I don’t know when I’m going to be able to shoot it, but you can read it”. After his reading I told him that I wanted the score to be composed for a church organ. I wanted to suggest that the Metro is the place in which inhabitants of Mexico City can have an ‘ecumenical’ encounter. A ‘no-place’ in which we’re all the same, where differences disappear and the sacred happens. Otaola agreed to explore the organ possibility, by that time he had to undergo surgery and he spent several days at a hospital listening to pipe organ music. When he recovered some months after he called and told me: “Hey, man, I already have the music for your film”. “Are you nuts?” I answered. “I still haven’t got the funding to do it”. I went to his study and listened to the music and loved it. So, in this film we had the score previous to having any image or sound.
Dead Man’s Switch marks your third feature after Vaho in 2009 and Viento Aparte in 2014, what has led to the gap in time between your films? And what are the hurdles you face to get feature films made in Mexico?
The fastest answer to this complicated question is that I hadn’t figured out yet, at 46 years old, how to fulfil a decent living from making films. It’s obviously more complicated than that and has to do with a lot of systemic failures in the Mexican film industry. In 2009, when I made Vaho, there were very few 30 year old filmmakers making their debut films, and they still needed to make an economic sacrifice to make it happen.
My main thematic interest has to do with how we represent reality in fiction and the way that we, everybody, not only filmmakers, construct reality through representational games.
But things changed a lot since then, now, thanks to different government funding strategies and platforms, Mexico produces around 200 features a year and a lot of colleagues can shoot their films; however, independent author driven social realist films are not exactly the easiest ones to fund, and certainly are the most difficult to distribute. I have worked a lot for hire to get a living: I have directed more than 25 TV documentaries, I have written around 15 TV series of all kinds, I have developed around ten TV series that weren’t produced. So, I write and develop own my films between jobs. Obviously, I would have loved to have a stable source of income that could have made me more productive in my own films, but that was not the case when I started. Now I think it could be possible to have a better production rhythm in the face of future years. But, thinking, writing and funding a film is still for me a solitary process that takes several years to get done.
And with that in mind, how’s the future of your filmmaking looking?
I have a lot of unfinished scripts in the pipeline. Two of them are, as my three previous features, social realism stories that I would like to shoot soon. But at the moment my main thematic interest has to do with how we represent reality in fiction and the way that we, everybody, not only filmmakers, construct reality through representational games. Reality is not something that exists there before our eyes; it’s something that we build with our conscience. So, I’m working on a documentary/film essay about that that tells the story of a theater play and it’s importance on the understanding of reality.
I’m feeling very attracted to the possibilities of film essay and the incorporation of AI in it as a new narrative tool. We all are experiencing the loss of importance of cinema as it was during the 20th century, and I think we have to address that somehow. Things change, so it’s not unexpected that we also have to change with it. I’m pretty satisfied with what I have accomplished with my previous work, and I have this constant feeling that maybe it’s time for me to evolve and make things differently now. Let’s see what happens with this project we’re already shooting in an independent low budget scheme.
