Interview with Red Cockroaches director Miguel Coyula

Red Cockroaches has had a great deal of feedback around the world. Was it a surprise for you or did you expect it, after you finished the film?

To be honest, I’m not really sure that I expected such a big reception. Although, I knew from the very outset that some would love it while others would just really hate it. But I’m not really bothered by such extreme reactions; I’m thrilled when someone holds strong opinions and reacts very passionately to the film even if it means that they hated it. I would never make a film to target specific audiences, that’s just not how I arrive at a project. Which is exactly why I like to work totally independently: to have total control over the final product and the freedom to choose exactly the kind of films that I want to make.

I have the impression that many of your works deal with childhood and its problems, and Red Cockroaches takes the main characters to their past.

I think that childhood possesses the only brilliant moments of an otherwise ordinary life. In my case childhood was the melting pot of many obsessions and fears. For example, ever since I was told what an egg was, I’ve always been freaked out by them. In my mind, every time I see one, I see a small chicken that wasn’t born, whose life was cut off while still developing.
Childhood is an intense period in life when you ask yourself important questions about themes that you don’t quite understand yet but which will have a large impact on your future work. People usually think that I had a sad childhood. I think there is a strange sort of beauty in that. The truth is that I naturally tend to see darkness in everything.

The incest theme in Red Cockroaches is presented in a completely new way (at least I can't recall any other film that deals with incest like it). Was it difficult for you to direct these scenes and for Adam Plotch and Talia Rubel?

When I started writing the screenplay I was at first uncomfortable with the theme, but as the script evolved, I began to understand the characters more and more. Lilly and Adam are under pressure because society tells them that what they’re doing is wrong. That’s one of the themes in the Trilogy that starts with Red Cockroaches, where society will slowly do away with moral prejudice and give way to a state of total anarchy.

It was really tough for Talia and Adam to do the sex scenes. Although there was really nothing sexually explicit in those scenes, it was actually very stressful for them to do. This was due in part to my decision not to want to repeat the same camera angle and so I had to cover the scene from many different setups and of course there were the inevitable multiple takes for each angle. On top of that this was Talia’s first film!
But by the time we were ready to shoot that scene, we had already been talking about it for some time and, since we were shooting chronologically, they were already psychologically prepared for it, but it was still tough. In any case, every movement in those scenes had already been carefully choreographed in my mind. When you have scenes like this, you just don’t arrive on the set and all of a sudden start improvising.

How much did the script change during the shooting, or was it already “pictured in your head”?

Originally I had written some extra dialogue that didn’t make it. When I actually started shooting, I realized that some of the dialog was unnecessary and expositional so I got rid of it. If you explain too much you’ll kill the mystery, you destroy the layers and flatten the depth of the film. I’ve always been more concerned with posing interesting questions, rather than answering them. If the actors had problems with a specific line, I would encourage them to find new words to express the same thought. But in general, we pretty much stuck to the script.

How did you find the actors and actresses for Red Cockroaches? Although they are practically unknown, they seem to be comfortable in front of the camera - the acting was mostly incredibly professional in the film.

I had already worked with Adam on a short and since we worked so well together, I knew that I would use him again on the next project. We put an ad on Backstage [a trade newspaper read widely by actors] and secured a room at a performance Center courtesy of Adam’s mother. We held an open audition over a period of two days and more than 150 actors showed up, in spite of the fact that it was advertised as a low-budget film with “no pay.” New York is a great place to find good actors of all kinds. Most of the cast of Red Cockroaches was selected from that audition.

Can you point the themes or other things in your films that comes from you Cuban background?

I grew up and went to film school in Cuba where art house movies are widely shown. I will never forget discovering Solaris when I was seventeen, and had already completed my first short. I think I usually make films about films. My style is a hybrid of several influences. I’m like a sponge in the sense that I take whatever I like the most of: Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Orson Welles, or David Lynch. Take my pessimistic view of the world, my obsession with ruins, an impossibility to deal with realism, strong headed alienated characters, a love for the incomprehensible, package it all in a very low budget and you’ll have the recipe to one of my films.

You also contribute to the Microcinemascene.com website, tell us about “microcinema” and how important do you see the whole microcinema scene.

Advances in digital technology have allowed a lot of new people free admission to the formerly exclusive club of filmmaking. The problem with that is that most of the time a lot of these newcomers are not really moviemakers. So while the volume of productions has gone up, much of the work out there is technically inferior or just simply uninteresting.
Truly Independent Filmmakers should understand that it is up to us to do the challenging cutting edge work that would never be produced by the big studios. On the other hand, it is very sad to see so many “independent” filmmakers producing low-budget versions of mainstream movies, in the hopes of being picked up by Hollywood. The good thing is that since the pool of microcinema productions is so large, you are bound to find some undiscovered but truly refreshing work.

_{Editor's note: Check out Microcinemascene.com !}

Your next film is "Memories of Overdevelopment" which a sequel to the widely-known classic considered the best Cuban film in its history. What is the original film all about, what about the sequel?

The original, "Memories of Underdevelopment", is a film about alienation that is wise, funny and sad. It follows a Cuban intellectual whose family leaves for the U.S. shortly after the triumph of the Cuban revolution. So he is left behind in Cuba unable to adapt to the dynamics of a new society becoming a detached observer constantly analyzing the world around him, similar to Camus’ "The Stranger". It is a film with an amazing narrative structure that is completely open, a true movie of the 1960s from a Novel by Edmundo Desnoes.

Based on an unpublished novel by the same author, the sequel takes place 30 years later, when the character immigrates to the US, and finds that he doesn’t belong there either. Independent producer, David Leitner, an American who has traveled to Cuba often and is sensitive to the nuances of its culture is onboard as producer. Needless to say we are all very excited about the project. There aren’t too many films dealing with themes of alienation being produced these days.

Do you plan to shoot movies with digital video in the future?

When I was in film school, I shot my thesis film in 35mm; it was a very grueling experience. After using the digital format, I decided that I would never go back to film again. Digital is so much easier to manipulate and cheaper too and since I’m not one of those film texture fetishist, I mean… what the hell! I don’t care about the term "it looks like film." I just want to create compelling movies with a backbone of striking images.

Your own prediction: Where will you be and what will be you doing in 2010?

From the very beginning I’ve always known that I didn’t want to make conventional mainstream movies. I see myself as constantly evolving and challenging myself in new ways, hopefully never becoming a tired cliché in my own image. Of course, there is always a chance that what it is currently considered experimental or cutting edge could become the mainstream of tomorrow, but then again, that’s the job of the artist to always stay ahead of the pack. Burn your bridges and never look back.

Parts of the interview previously released in Finnish at Elitisti.com