By Josh Gardner
Mexican filmmaker Juan Pablo González (Caballerango, The Solitude of Memory) makes his feature length fiction debut with Dos Estaciones, a portrait of a struggling family-owned tequila factory in an increasingly globalized industry. Premiering in the World Dramatic Competition, Dos Estaciones stands out for its honest characters, breathtaking landscapes, and reverence to the tequila making process. González is the latest in a line of Mexican filmmakers who have found international success at the premiere independent film festival in the US.
After working successfully in documentaries, González wanted to make his first fiction something personal, so he returned to his hometown of Atotonilco in Jalisco and based the film on his own family’s century long history in the agave industry. We spoke to González via Zoom about writing and re-writing the film, his hatred for Spring, and hiding Manuel Garcia-Rulfo's Hollywood resume from his nonprofessional cast.
With your background in documentary, you employed an untraditional writing process for the film. How did the script come about?
We actually started working on this film in 2017 and decided to write the film while shooting at the same time. We first brought Teresa Sánchez (The Chambermaid) to Atotonilco, getting her to know the place, the people. In that first trip, she formed a relationship with Rafaela (who would go on to play her executive assistant and possible love interest in the film) and we actually filmed with both of them and Maria alone. We started writing the first version of the script after that trip and then every year we would come back and shoot and write segments of the film. We actually did some documentary shoots that ended up being in the film. So it was a long process of finding the film through the writing and shooting along with finding the character of Maria with Teresa.
Teresa was the pro on set, as you mostly worked with nonprofessional actors. How did you facilitate the relationships between them?
You have to meet Teresa to understand the whole answer to this question, but she is just the loveliest person. The most affable, generous, and giving person. But she also has experience working with non-actors in a lot of the theater she does. That was really important. She was able to build relationships with the rest of the cast throughout the years. Then a month before we started shooting, we all arrived on location and started working with the non-actors and Teresa on rebuilding the script. We had written this script over the years and then distilled it into an outline, the structure of the film. Then with both the non-actors and Teresa, we rewrote all of the dialogue and a lot of the situations in the film. So when we were actually shooting the scenes and they were acting, it was as if they were living it at the moment, if that makes sense, because they had built it for themselves. That whole process was super important for us.
The performances all felt really lived in and honest. So you achieved what you set out to do. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you do have kind of a Hollywood superstar in the film, although maybe he doesn't get a Hollywood close up. How did Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Murder on the Orient Express, Widows) get involved in the film?
Manuel and I are friends and he’s from this same region. We wanted the actor who played the agricultural engineer to be someone from Jalisco, because the accent was very important, the demeanor was very important. He actually sometimes works, in his time off as an actor, at a lime farm. So he has a lot of experience in the countryside, he's there a lot, even though he lives in LA. We became really good friends because I've been living in Los Angeles for a few years teaching at Cal Arts. He watched Caballerango and really liked the film and wanted to collaborate with me. I thought it made a lot of sense to bring him into the film precisely because that closeness that he has to the region. I mean people will watch the film, but there's one scene that it is very clear that he's surrounded by non actors and they thought he was an actual engineer. I just told them, "would you mind if this engineer joins you for a bit?" And it was sort of perfect.
I love that. You talked a little bit about the process of rewriting the film in rehearsals but could you talk about the editing process? Since you were filming since 2017 you must of had a lot of footage. How did this also shape the film?
We used a lot of the early footage to build the language of the cinematography. So we had that footage ready and even used a few scenes from it. But then we had the main shoot, which was about five weeks. I had a period with the footage by myself and with another producer, Ilana Coleman. She’s also the writer and she edited some parts of the film as well. So we started working with the whole footage as if we were editing a documentary. There's different ideas of how to edit documentary vs. fiction. Everybody sort of has their own way but something that was very important for us was once we shot the film, it was like the script didn't exist. We would treat the footage as footage. We would treat the images as just this one thing that had to be kind of sculpted. Lívia Serpa joined the edit and she is both a fiction and a documentary editor. So she really understood the process that we were working with. Because of the way we shot the film, it made us really focus on the structure of the film more than the scenes, because the film was shot in long takes and there wasn't a lot of coverage for each scene. So really the process of working in the edit was finding the best film that we could make with the footage that we shot and not thinking so much in script terms. It's kind of like the script already happened then the film kind of got rewritten in the shoots and then let's rewrite the film now in the edit.
There’s a scene where we follow the tequila along the production process and it felt very spiritual. I was wondering where spirituality came into play in the film for you?
I mean it's interesting because this is a very religious region and we sort of purposely didn't address that. We didn't want to get distracted with that aspect of the cultural and social fabric of the region because it also brings certain stereotypes that we didn't want to engage with. But I feel like the music for me really brought a transcendental element to the film. For the character of Maria, this tradition means something to her on a personal level, but it's also something much larger and incredibly historic that brings tradition and rituals into the process itself. So I would think about it in those terms and I really wanted to get that across without necessarily making it about kind of a specific spiritual practice.
Just a sacred process.
Yeah. Exactly like a sacred process for all of these families that have been doing this for centuries in this region.
How important were the physical landscapes to you and the impetus for telling this story?
Juan Pablo: The film began with that idea, the idea of how does time pass in this region and how time is imprinted in the landscape. The idea of the two seasons is obviously a metaphor and it's symbolic, but it's also pretty present in the region. Because for the people who live in Atotonilco and in many regions in Mexico, we basically have the season where people prepare the land for cultivating, especially corn, and then it rains and corn grows, et cetera, and everything becomes green. Then it's the harvesting season where everything is yellow again. So that's kind of like the way we experience the passage of time.
I would always wonder why Spring was so important in poetry. Because I thought like, oh my god, in my hometown, Spring is awful. It's just incredibly hot and dry and it's just like, why are is there all this beautiful imagery in like music and poetry about Spring, if the way I experience Spring is kind of terrible. So anyway, it was also sort of alluding to the title and kind of the whole concept of the film, how time passes and... Well, I shouldn't talk about that. Sorry. I was going to do a spoiler.
The film centers on very strong women. How did you decide to highlight gender in this story?
I think the stereotypical image of the tequila is that it is completely populated by men and only men. That’s not true. That is a stereotype, the image that some people in the industry have perpetrated for years. There are a lot of women involved in this world, in this tradition. Historically, I mean, anyone who you talk to and who knows the history of tequila knows how important women have been in this history. So I just didn't want to make film about the Jalisco highlands tequila and men.
To wrap things up, what does it mean for you to have your film premier virtually here at Sundance?
It's incredible. It's my first fiction film and sort of my first feature, because Caballerango was a mid length film and it's really humbling. We know that the selection this year was smaller than in other years and we are just really, really excited and just incredibly happy about it. The film is going to get a lot of attention and has already been getting a lot of attention just because we are in Sundance. This kind of platform really gives the film a lot of opportunity to be seen in many more places.
Josh Gardner is the founder of Cinema Lamont, a non-profit that fosters cross-cultural understanding through the power of world cinema. He also runs Cine Mexico Now, a festival of contemporary Mexican cinema in Detroit.
