Chris Weitz Creates A Better Life for Himself, Demian Bichir

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Sunday, 12 February 2012 14:30

Written by Brad Balfour

A 2011 American drama directed by Chris Weitz, A Better Life, was originally known as The Gardener, from the screenplay written by Eric Eason and based on Roger L. Simon's story. In January 2012, its star, Demián Bichir, was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Ironically, this film has a French counterpart also dealing with an illegal immigrant, the 2011 French film directed by Cédric Kahn, Une vie meilleure.

Born November 30, 1969, Christopher John "Chris" Weitz is an American producer, writer, director and actor best known for his work with  brother Paul, on such comedies as American Pie and About a Boy, as well as directing the film adaptation of the novel The Golden Compass and New Moon (from Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series).

His most recent film, A Better Life, details single father and illegal immigrant Carlos Galindo's attempt to build his gardening business while struggling to keep his son from succumbing to the gangsta lifestyle. Trouble ensues when his truck is stolend and he and his sontry to recover it without help of the police or by using violence.

Though there was hope as far back as the film's original release for indie film accolades, no one expected an Academy Award nom for Bichir.

Q: You did two gigantic Hollywood financed, CGI-intensive movies, The Golden Compass and Twilight: New Moon. What led you to make this intimate, character-driven film, as with About a Boy?

CW: The usual answer is: we make the big ones so we can make the small ones, but it wasn't like that for me. I sort of ping pong from one thing to another. So after About a Boy, I thought "I'm really tired. I’m not going to make any more movies for awhile."

Then I fell in love with Philip Pullman's novels and made The Golden Compass, which was about masses of money and special effects -- talking animals -- the whole nine yards. The studio re-cut it, changed it around, and I disavowed the final version of it. I'm not joking.

Then with New Moon, I felt, "Okay, here's an opportunity to make a fantastical movie which is very faithful to the book." My whole thing was like, "This is going to be an exercise in being faithful to the book and giving the fans of the book what they want."

I knew the studio wanted that too. What would it be like if we were on the same page -- special effects, the whole thing, all the stuff I've learned, why I've spent years talking to special effects experts and all that kind of stuff?.

Then, right before doing New Moon, I read this script by Eric Eason, which was then called The Gardener, and fell in love with it. I thought, I have a baby and just got a new house, I better pay the mortgage before I make The Gardener.

I'm being shockingly honest; I don't even know why I'm saying all these things. You're like my therapist. It wasn't really the decision "Okay, now I'm going to scale down and make something really heartfelt."

I’m pretty much heartfelt about everything that I do, eventually. It takes me longer with some movies to fall in love than with others, but with The Gardener, it was love from the screenplay, basically.

Q: You grew up in New York but you've been in LA for about 20 years. Was making this film part of discovering another side of Los Angeles?

CW: It was, because it's very difficult to discover different parts of Los Angeles.

It's much easier to walk five blocks and discover a different part of New York. We live vertically here, and we're living on top of one another; you can't help but run across all different kinds of people from all different kinds of countries, places, hierarchies.

Whereas in LA, it's very, very stratified, but horizontally, which is why there are these long driving montages -- to give you the feeling of what it is to be in this vast urban sprawl. The world of Los Angeles here is probably as foreign to most people who live in Los Angeles -- or most people you imagine when you think of people living in Los Angeles.

It's a horizontal city, spread really wide, with a lot of different neighborhoods where people don't get to know one another. A lot of people just drive past interesting things, interesting bits of culture, and they're especially afraid of the neighborhoods depicted here.

All I knew about East LA was that there were some gangs there and it was Hispanic and you're supposed to be scared of it. But I didn't spend a single moment of my time there scared, and I don't mean just because I had a huge crew around me. Now I consider it part of my home as well.

I think that this is really a window into the lives of some people who are usually thought about in terms of numbers and statistics and are used as political footballs.

The key decision here in terms of which worlds to present was, this isn't about some white guy who helps Carlos figures things out. Usually there's the crusading white teacher or some white cop who lowers his gun and decides to help the guy out. "I shouldn't be doing this. I'm breaking all the rules." But this is a bit different.

Q: Like The Soloist.

CW: Yeah, The Soloist. Not to knock it, but that's, theoretically, one way in for an audience.

Q: [Though your name is Weitz, you actually have Latino roots.]

CW: My grandmother is Latino -- she's Mexican, she moved to America when she was 17. My wife is half Cuban, half Mexican-American.

I grew up with a lot of Spanish being spoken around me, but I didn't speak Spanish. So I knew that I had a long way to travel in terms of being able to make this movie with any kind of authority. So I started learning Spanish. I wanted to hire a bilingual crew, so the DP, the AD, script supervisor are all Spanish speakers -- most of the crew, in fact.

Q: How did you cast the two principal actors?

CW: There [were] problems of nationality, first of all, because I really wanted it to be played by a Mexican.

And that's tremendous, because one might consider somebody like Benicio Del Toro or Javier Bardem, but [there's] also the baggage seeing their other movies brings.

Demián Bichir is a big star in Mexico, and his two brothers are movie actors as well. He's from a theater background. He's kind of a George Clooney of Mexico. So I was able to look at all the films that he had done in Mexico, as well as to see his performance as Fidel Castro in Che.

He actually put on about 25 pounds to play this role. He's not a character actor; he's a leading man. For me, it's great, because he brings this tremendous technical ability and capacity, but at the same time you don't really know his face.

José Julián just came to an open casting, a kid who'd grown up in East LA, single parent family, and decided not to take that course. He's a very smart kid. It took him like three hours to get to his auditions -- he took three different buses -- [and] three hours to get back. He was really very committed. One of the best natural actors I've seen, so that was great.

Q: Some of the gang members in the film are played by real ex-gang members.

I went to Father Gregory Boyle. I'd read about him in a book [G-Dog and the Homeboys: Father Greg Boyle and the Gangs of East Los Angeles by Celeste Fremon]. He is a Jesuit priest who started a gang intervention program called Homeboy Industries. He's one of the most remarkable people I've ever met.

Gang members who want to leave that life go to him and he tries to get them a job, whether it be at one of their cafes or bakeries, [or] silk screening where they make T-shirts and stuff. But they also get counseling, they get NA, AA, all sorts of help. And I think that they come to it from a place of not demonizing gang members per se.

When I showed Father Boyle the script, he hadn't met me, he didn't know me from Adam. He really liked it because of the scene of the gang members listening to the little girls sing karaoke.

[It] showed gang members don't go around gang membering it up the whole time, like shooting at each other and selling drugs and stuff. These are people who have families and who have lives, and they've made decisions because of the circumstances they found themselves in.

So when we were auditioning for the gang members, we did it the usual way at first, which is you audition actors who are coming in to play gang members. There were guys who'd been in Training Day and this and that, and they were really ganging it up because they thought "Oh this is what this guy wants. He wants somebody like those scary guys in Training Day." It was a lot of high energy, kind of menace, and I sort of got where they were coming from.

Something felt wrong, and the writer suggested that we do an open casting call at Homeboy Industries. And I said "Why didn't I think of that in the first place?" So we did, and in fact, all of the gang members, except for the very last guy, are ex-gang members who came to us through Homeboy Industries.

I sort of felt that from Richard Cabral. Just the way he carried himself, the way that he talked, was really impressive.

The last guy wasn't cast from a real gang [because] he's probably being shipped back to Honduras or El Salvador. Those guys are [Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)], that's the most dangerous gang in the world. I wanted no part of them, I just didn't. So we had one guy who's doing a pretty impressive job of filling in that role.

Those tattoos, that's all the real deal. My friend Hector Verdugo, who's the second in command at Homeboy Industries, would be like "Listen, I don't want to tell you your business, but you see that guy's got the 666 tattoo, and if you look at that tag there, he's in the wrong neighborhood. He wouldn't be here."

And I was like, thank you very much, we won't include those. Whether or not people would notice it, you've got to care enough about that kind of stuff because people can feel it. We had such good gang intel.

Q: The scene where the demonstrators were having the rally was very honest.

CW: The demonstration was in the script, but I thought, there's no way we'll ever get that because we don't have the money to stage that kind of thing.

And halfway through shooting, the Arizona law came into effect. They organized a big protest in Downtown [LA], and suddenly we had all of our extras. So it was like, thank you, Jan Brewer.

Q: Your film ends on not too hopeful a note -- 800,000 people have been deported in the last two years.

CW: It's kind of subtly stated that there's no guarantee that Carlos is going to make it across. [Some] 3,200 people a year die crossing that desert. My feeling about it is, oh my god, I hope he makes it, which is what I want people to feel.

I find people's reactions to the very last shot really interesting because it is in some ways a measure of whether they think the situation's hopeful or not.

It's a hard time, and one hopes that if this film can break through a bit and be a teachable film, it can help change things.

Q: Regardless of what anyone thinks is right or wrong about the immigration situation, your film seems to show the reality of it, not the right or wrong. Did you see it as just the vehicle to show what it is?

CW: It's incredibly complicated. As much as I might like to say that this isn't a political film, it's impossible to turn the camera on a character who's involved in some sort of political issue.

First of all, you can't turn a camera on somebody without expressing sympathy in some form, because you're expressing interest. These people are largely invisible to us, or they're only really known in terms of figures and statistics.

It was to say, look at this person. He's a good person; this is why he does what he does. And it's even saying, look at Santiago, look at the guy who stole his car; understand why he did what he did.

We definitely didn't want to demonize the ICE officers, either, or the cops. Everybody's just doing their jobs.

I encounter Hispanic Americans who came legally or became legalized and are like "I had to work hard to get legalized. Why should we just let everybody in?"

In some way, I understand both sides of the issue. So although I probably fall on the leftier side of the issue -- and I don't think that any Tea Party activist is likely to buy a ticket and have their hearts changed -- I think this gives some information.

And by the way, there are a lot of Carloses. I know he's a very saintly man, but I've met a lot of people like him.

So it just says, look through this window for an hour and a half, and people will become more informed, and then they can go see some kind of right-wing propaganda. Maybe they can see McCain talking about how Mexicans set the Arizona fires or something like that.

Q: People are speaking English. It doesn't seem realistic.

CW: People speak various levels of English, and it usually starts with speaking the English that you need to take orders, to listen to your boss, or whoever's employing your boss.

Actually, the expression in Mexican Spanish is trucha, which is "strange". Spanish is a very complicated language, because if you call someone a salvatrucha, it's actually a mean word for a Salvadorian, but trucha actually means "clever".

Demián came to this country illegally when he was in his 20s. He was already an actor -- actually, didn't speak any English, and he just picked it up. He had a good ear for it. He watched the TV and picked it up.

So that's probably how Carlos did it, bit by bit. He's a clever guy. He was a smart guy and he watched some TV and thought, "This is going to be a way of making my life better someday, maybe, if I get a chance. I've got to educate myself."

The movie is not medicinal or a lecture, but it has been incredibly well researched. So if you start to think "Is that fact or figure that's just been quoted true?", trust me on it. We've done our homework.

Q: Have you had any response from politicians?

CW: Yes, actually. The Mayor of LA [Antonio Villaraigosa] came to see it and cried, which I think is good.

I'm going to the National Council of La Raza annual meeting to talk about it, and we'll do a screening there. And I know that the President [of the United States] is going to give a speech there.

Obviously, what I'd love to do is to get this in front of Congress -- or even the UN, because immigration is a global issue. But it's harder to do than you'd think. The mechanisms for getting people to do that are difficult.

We're going through the really laborious process of getting it to the White House right now. I know a guy in the Ethnic Outreach office of the White House. He's going to take a look at it. There's a possibility that it could be shown in the White House. Who knows?

I happen to know a guy who's in the Secret Service. So right now, I'm literally having my buddy hand deliver it to the guy who's in the Ethnic Outreach office. If I had sent it from LA, it would take four months to get through security, the guy said. We've been having these great email exchanges about "I can't make it this weekend because I've got to go to Philadelphia with the President, but I'll hand it over."

He liked it, too, by the way. It's a hit with the Secret Service.

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