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"The Future is Digital Cinema": An Interview with Arturo Ripstein

and Paz Alicia Garciadiego
David Sterritt

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2004

To cite this Article Sterritt, David(2004)'"The Future is Digital Cinema": An Interview with Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia
Garciadiego',Quarterly Review of Film and Video,21:1,39 51
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10509200490262442
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 QRF 21(1) #12104

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 21:3951, 2004

Copyright Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 1050-9208 print/1543-5326 online
DOI: 10.1080/10509200490262442

The Future is Digital Cinema: An Interview with

Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego

DAVID STERRITT

Arturo Ripstein is Mexicos most acclaimed and influential modern filmmaker. Ac-
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quainted with the Mexican film industry through his fathers activities as a producer,
he assisted Luis Buuel on the classic El ngel exterminador/The Exterminating Angel
(1962) and made his own directorial debut with the western Tiempo de morir/Time to Die
(1965), using a screenplay by Gabriel Garca Mrquez, his longtime friend. Since then
he has cultivated a distinctive cluster of narrative and stylistic traits including a penchant
for melodramatic stories, uninhibited performances, expressive lighting, and unusually
long takes that allow emotionally charged scenes to play out in real time. Among his
most critically praised films are El Castillo de la pureza/Castle of Purity (1973), El
Santo oficio/The Holy Office (1975), El Lugar sin lmtes/Place Without Limits (1978),
La Mujer del puerto/Woman of the Port (1991), Principio y fin/The Beginning and the
End (1993), a remake of The Honeymoon Killers called Profundo carmes/Deep Crimson
(1996), El Evangelio de las Maravillas/Divine (1998), and El Coronel no tiene quien le
escriba/No One Writes to the Colonel (1999). Beginning with the brilliant El Impirio de
la Fortuna/The Realm of Fortune (1986) his most important collaborator has been screen-
writer Paz Alicia Garciadiego, who also composed the score for their film La Reina de
la noche/Queen of the Night (1994). In 2000 they decided to make their next film, As
es la vida/Such Is Life, in digital video, with results that pleased them very much. They
used this format again for their next film, La Perdicin de los Hombres/The Ruination
of Men (2000), and plan to continue with video in future projects. I talked with them
during the San Francisco International Film Festival shortly before Such Is Life had its
premiere at the Cannes film festival.
David Sterritt: Id like to start by talking about digital video. Why have you moved
to this format after so many years of working on film?
Arturo Ripstein: Its a touchy issue, because Id rather keep the word video out
of things. Of course we should call it digital video, because thats what it is. But when
its transformed into 35mm celluloid I try not to think of it as video. Video has always
been, especially in our countries, [often used as] the worst exploitation medium . . . with
horrible material, gross comedians, naked women, whatever. For that reason I try to avoid
[thinking] of it as video.
And heres another thing. When you say the source of your new work is digital
video, people watch the film to see what it looks like. When I started to consider digital

The author wishes to thank to Mikita Brottman for her gracious assistance in preparing this article.
David Sterritt is film critic of The Christian Science Monitor and Professor of Theater and Film at the C.W.
Post Campus of Long Island University. He is a member of the Film Studies Faculty at Columbia University
and co-chair of the University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation, and has served twice as
chair of The New York Film Critics Circle. His books include volumes on Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard,
and the Beat Generation.

39
 40 David Sterritt

film, the question I got from everybody was, Hows it gonna look? I always say its
not television, its not film, its another thingits digital film, with a different look, a
different quality, different options and aspects. It has to be inventive, to have its own
rules. . . . Its aesthetics have to be invented. And we need ethics about how to approach
the medium, what you should try to do with it. For me this was important because I dont
want to keep on making films that look alike and are judged according to their lookalike
quality. I want to break out of that completely and start doing things that tread different
paths, paths that are unknown. Politically speaking, too, there has to be a break with
what audiences are used to seeing. A good thing about video is that you worry about the
audience less and less; you start doing work because you think the work is important and
good, not because you know it will be successful. Video films are so cheap that if they
find a small niche . . . the monies allotted to the film will be quickly reimbursed. So you
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dont have to think about audiences that much anymore. You can think about the works
own value and worth, and [this] is sort of a rupture with what has been going on until
now. I seriously believe this will be the first artistic revolution of the twenty-first century.
It will change the way things are done, it will change the way things are approached,
and it will change the way [films are] seen.
DS: Youre raising a long list of really important issues.
AR: I think the medium raises them. The new possibilities, the things it opens,
pertain to new options. I dont want to be a filmmaker anymore. Im another thing now.
DS: Thats a big statement.
AR: I mean I want to be a cinaste, but not a cinaste like it has been done before
now. I want to do different things. Ive just made a film [As es la Vida/Such Is Life]
thats an adaptation to modern-day Mexico of Medea by Senecanot the Medea by
Euripides, but the Roman one, which is 800 years later. Of course, the myth itself goes
back 3,000 years. Its a complicated myth. . . . We made this film because we wanted to
make a tragedy, because that genre has no more meaning in our century. The century
has sort of abolished the idea of tragedy, because of its own tragedybecause of the
reality of the century that we have lived through, one of the most ferocious in the history
of mankind. The idea of tragedyincluding the idea of catharsis, and the Aristotelian
canon of unities, and the chorushas been abolished by reality. It has no fundament to
exist on anymore. So our idea was to take the notion [of tragedy] and [adapt] it to see
what happens.
DS: Why did you turn to Senecas version of Medea rather than the more famous
one by Euripides?
AR: Basically, because its better! Its sparser. The characters are more defined.
There are fewer characters, too, and we wanted a very small [narrative] realm. Also,
the use of language in Seneca is much more elaborate than the use of language in
Euripides. . . . Seneca was a cultured man and a very rich man, the richest man in the
world, a couple of times Bill Gates. We thought going from that direction would lead us
to what we neededto reenact the notions of [his play] within the realm of modern-day
Mexico.
Paz Alicia Garciadiego: Its focused on revenge. The revenge of the female character.
AR: Yes, its more about revenge than the sheer notion of destiny. But Medeas
destiny is revenge. We followed the path that Aristotle markedunity of action, of
space, of time, a chorus, all adapted to modern-day Mexicoto see how it would hold
up. And it holds up very well in this little story, this ferocious story. It certainly has the
same spectrum of emotion that it used to have. Of course, tragedy was seen differently
in the time when it was new. . . . Euripides used to compete in the Olympiads, which was
sport and literature, and he would win or lose. Seneca never wrote for performancehe
 The Future is Digital Cinema 41

wrote for readingbut either way, audiences [demanded] a more immediate, religious,
experience from these sorts of representations. We wanted to convey that same notion of
a deeper experience than events that would happen in the police section of a newspaper.
We wanted to go deeper into the realm of possible deployment of emotion, which would
[bring out] a more religious notion of reality than just plain facts, retold. Thats where
[this project] led us. Its a very complicated structure even though it all happens in
twenty-four hours. Its got a path that sort of jumps toward the culmination of the theme
and [evokes] the aspect of tragedy as it was played then.
DS: Returning to digital video, you spoke a little while ago about how its a new
thing, it opens up new possibilities. Can you go into that a bit?
AR: When we start to write a script, ideas come and go, and some of them sort of
stickideas you can talk about a couple days later, and then a week later. They start
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to grow and spiral. Everything changed when I said to Paz Alicia, Lets try our hand
at digital video. She agreed it was a good idea, and I said, Its going to be different.
Everything is smaller, and [the medium] has great latitude and versatility. She started to
write differently, because we wanted a [script] very enclosed in itselfvery harsh raw
material with a ferocious beauty we had never achieved before. She came to me and said,
This is the first time I sat down to write a script for us when I knew its not going to
be our last movie. This is the ninth film weve done together, and every time before we
had the fear that this was going to be the last one.
DS: Because of the difficulty of sustaining a career in serious-minded cinema?
AR: Because of the difficulty of getting financed. So this was sort of a departure.
Paz Alicia said, Its different. Im writing differently. Im putting in things Ive never
used before, that Ive never dared to put in before.
PAG: Exactly. As a writer, Ive always tried to be very precise. I dont play very
much. I dont have a ludic animus within me. But now I had the feeling that this wont
be my last film, because its so cheap. Even if its not a good one, we can make another
one. So lets play!
AR: Yeah, the notion of good or bad immediately disappears. . . . You arent trying
to do a good movie, you are trying to do the best one possible. Which is different.
DS: You dont have to prove yourself.
PAG: Exactly. So you can take riskslike sometimes making a jump, having el-
lipses, enormous ellipses with no explication. Just because its neat, and I like it, and I
can [do without] the sequence in between this moment and the next one. That gives me
a sense of freedom. When the script was finished and I went to the set, and I saw Arturo
working with the actors, I felt the same sense of freedom in the actors.
AR: With the actors, it was completely different than when you work with a regular
crew. A thousand-foot reel of Kodak film, when its shot and developed and printed, must
cost around 1200 dollars. Thats about eight to nine minutes of film. Here we shot with a
thirteen-dollar cassette that lasts half an hour. If you dont like it, you erase it and shoot
again on top of it. So working with the actors had a different perspective. It was not,
Be precise. It was, Be true to your art and go ahead and do. We dont have to stay
within guidelines. I did things like shooting a scene over and over again, and I told Paz,
Itll be all right by around the sixth or seventh take. But Ill keep on doing it and doing
it, because I have the time and raw material. So I shot for thirty-five takes to see what
the actors would do, and the repetitions started to rid them of their masks and started to
make them bare. Which is quite fascinating. And the camera was a very small thing
not a high-definition camera, but a DV camera with the Sony system, almost consumer
material. Thirty-five years earlier, when I directed my first movie, I asked, When can I
have a camera with wings? And now I had one.
 42 David Sterritt

DS: But the image is not going to be the same as you would get if you were shooting
with 35mm film.
AR: No, no, no, its a completely different thing [from] the beauty of photographic
material. You have to know what youre aiming toward.
DS: If the great virtue of photographic film is its beauty, what is the great virtue of
digital videonot in terms of the filmmaking process, but in terms of what we will be
seeing on the screen?
AR: Truth. Fundamental truth. It has a raw, ferocious beauty that you never can
achieve in the other medium. It is a willful break with photographic material: Lets do
something different, lets aim for different options and visuals. Lately film has turned
not into a directors medium but a photographers medium. Now it is the director again.
You dont tell stories with images, you tell stories with time. And time has a beauty that
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is concrete through the digital medium.

DS: Earlier you said youre not a filmmaker anymore, at least in the usual sense. Is
this something you might have been moving toward before the option of digital video
came to you?
AR: Yes. I always wanted this smaller thingan absolutely personal relationship
between me and my camera. The camera is the basic fundamental of . . . lets call them
movies. You can [make movies] without actors, or without a script, but without a camera
its tremendously difficult! So the camera is the basic element. And when you get a
camera that has a personal immediacy, the results are immediate. Everything is immediate.
Everything is small. And everything is yours. You have the relationship that a painter
has with his brush and his oils and the cloth that hes smearing. Its exactly the same
relationship. This will democratize filmmaking. Everybody will be able to do it.
DS: Is it a good thing to democratize filmmaking?
AR: Its a wonderful thing.
DS: I ask because I see artists as special people who arent like everybody.
AR: They will remain that. . . . God didnt hand out talent in equal parts to everybody.
He was stingy about it. The approach that you have to the medium has to be very strict,
very rigorous. And very serious, and very well thought out, because anything could
happen. But now everybody will be able to do it, and the true artists will emerge. Film
artists wont be a group of people who speak in a jargon that only they understandthe
illuminati of film, a bunch of people who have gone to school or learned the craft by
watching or reading about it, and have a ciphered language of their own. Now you will
spend very little money on the brush and the oils and the cloth or the cardboard or the
wall. Everybody can do it, like everybody can write a sonnetyou only need a piece of
paper and a pencil. But the artists are the ones that remain. Its not going to be technicians
now. Its going to be true artists. True artists have been very infrequent, and have been
even more so since the cinema of the hegemonic powerthat is, the United States
became seen as the only path one can tread. There are fewer and fewer artists working in
films in English. Everybody says the Oscar, the Oscar, the Oscar is the most important
award for film in the United States, and it has grown, with the help of imperialism and
canons, to be the most important thing ever. And a movie like American Beauty wins all
these accolades. But while a thing like American Beauty is an okay movie as opposed to
other American movies, its very difficult to compare it to [Andrei] Sokurov, or [Emir]
Kusturica, or [Abbas] Kiarostami. Now everybody can [make movies] and there will be
a break away from this. Artists and true art will come from this change. Of course, a lot
of trash will inundate us. Enormous amounts of trash, like in painting or literature. But
art will surface. And the Schubert, the Mozart, the Picasso of film will arise from this.
 The Future is Digital Cinema 43

DS: Kiarostami has also said the future of film is going to be strongly affected
by digital video. But when I look at the last film you made before moving to digital
video, No One Writes to the Colonel, adapted from the Gabriel Garca Mrquez story,
I see a very classical kind of filmmaking. In terms of lighting and composition, its very
painterly. It exemplifies the best of the cinema as weve known it, in the sense of that
sensuous beauty we talked about before.
AR: So now lets kick it in the ass and do something different! Lets break away
from that! I mean, I know how to do it, I know the craft. Ive been working on it nonstop
and in high amounts of concentration for the last thirty-five years. So now lets forget
about that and start doing whatevers in your heart, not in your wallet!
DS: Returning to an earlier topic, we were talking about the difficultyalmost the
impossibilityof tragedy in todays world, because of the tragic century weve been
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through. Yet your films almost always have a tragic dimension.

AR: No doubt. But our starting point has been melodrama. Melodrama has a plastic-
ity: You can jump from genre to genre, toward comedy or toward tragedy. Weve always
liked the rules of melodrama. But at the end we like to pull it out of the glove, and turn
it around, and give it the possibility of the other side of the mood, finding the tragedy
within the human heart. I like the dark aspect of the human heart. It is multifaceted.
But weve always worked within a certain structure: the precise structure of melodrama.
Or the almost precise structure of melodrama. Being very plastic within itself, it doesnt
have precise definitions. Its variable. It can go from black-and-white Mexican films to
Visconti to [subjects from] Dostoevsky and Dickens. It covers the whole realm.
PAG: Our films always refer to the idea of the tragic. Nearly all turn toward tragedy
by the last scene, and in most of the films the last scene was the one we cared about
most.
AR: Yes. Weve tended toward tragedy as a vision of how [a story] can be integrated
into our brutal world.
DS: Id like to talk a bit about your early films.
AR: The first one I did was Time to Die in 1965. It was written by Garca Mrquez,
before he was Garca Mrquez.
DS: Ive seen it. And what was next?
AR: After that came a couple of other films, then Castle of Purity.
DS: This bears out your longtime attraction to melodrama.
AR: Melodrama is the basic aspect of filmmaking in Mexico, and living there, I was
nurtured by it, I grew up with it. It was a logical necessity. Every director in Mexico
has always done melodramas, from the worst to [Luis] Buuel. It has been the voice
of Mexico. And there is an explanation for that. We had a government, for seventy
years, of one-party leadership. They took language and transformed it to their needs.
They made language disappearwords didnt mean what they really meant, but what
politicians wanted them to mean. So the agora was not the place where [authentic]
language existed; it existed within the family, within the interior of homes. So the realm
of interior melodrama was basic to storytelling, because it was enclosed, and within this
enclosure language could be used. . . . Bourgeois morals were [devoted to] family and
religion and the state; these were [considered] the good things. But with melodramas we
could break out of the idea that these are the only possibilities of good [and speculate]
that they are rather the possibilities of evil. . . . We thought these bourgeois values were
responsible for us being what we are, and since that is not good, we had to do things
that were disquieting and unnerving, which questioned the idea that we were living in
the best possible world.
 44 David Sterritt

DS: How does one make an impact through melodrama in a country that swims
through melodrama all the timewhere it has become the language of film, the language
of popular culture, one of the primary languages?
AR: The primary language, no doubt about that.
DS: It must be challenging to push it farther and stretch it in different ways.
AR: Not only to push it farther but to turn it around completely, to [find] the opposite
to the morals that stand behind it. Paz and I have always been very loving of literature; our
friends have always tended to be very literary, and Ive always thought the relationship
between literature and film is much closer than everybody supposes. So we [conceptu-
alize our projects] through literary genres, more often than not. Such Is Life is a high
point.
DS: Youve mentioned morality a couple of times, and you spoke earlier of ethics
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and aesthetics. Is there a way of characterizing the ethical or moral stance that can be
traced through your work? Is there an issue or cluster of issues that are of primary
importance to you?
AR: Yeah, but I try to avoid my opinions in my work. I dont say what I like and
what I dislike. I have opinions about many things, of course, and I express them, but
never through my work. Through my work my ethical point is to always keep the sense
of ambiguity that is embedded in my heartto try, within the reaches of possibility,
never to betray it. . . . I come from a country of survivors. Weve survived many things.
I talk about survivals, about people at the end of the rope, at the beginning of their last
scream. They are the ones I like most. . . . This being the case, Ive tried never to betray
the idea that what I like most is the ambiguity [of] what should be the good, the bad for
people.
PAG: Not to judge the characters, but to accompany them.
AR: To watch them. Thats what I do with my camera. I watch.
DS: Its clear from that statement how digital video could become an extraordinarily
effective tool.
AR: It is the most immediate extension of the eye. And of the hand.
DS: If one of digital videos prime virtues is to allow a greater truth in what one
captures from the worldremoving the masks from actors, for instanceone of the
things were talking about is the distinction between fiction and documentary. If youre
shooting an actor doing a scene and you shoot it so many times that the performance
is utterly changed, revealing more of the actor and less of the role, are we crossing or
blurring the line between fiction and documentary?
AR: Yes, very definitely.
DS: Do you think video and film might exist side by side for you as time goes on?
Do you perhaps see yourselflike Jean-Luc Godard, for examplemoving back and
forth between the two media?
AR: Cinema will disappear as we know it. But the big changes in [cinema] have
always been technological. . . . Digital video is another technological change. The camera
I used in my first film was an enormous machine that had to be carried around by four
people. Now things are smaller and that will democratize things, as I said before. Its
frightening, but its a fact.
DS: Id like to hear more about the relationship between realism and melodrama in
your work.
AR: When you try to be realisticwhich is, of course, an invention of other schools
of narrativeit is simple to be emotional, but thats only sentiment. Ive always loved
the artificial, because that is the only ethical way to an idea. The rest is sentimentality.
I try to avoid that as much as possible.
 The Future is Digital Cinema 45

PAG: I think Arturos work is very baroque, and in [Such Is Life] its even more
baroque. Since the camera is [like] a character in the film, the [other] characters are
aware of it. So its not a realistic relationship with the camera.
AR: The idea of the story being recorded is present within the whole story. . . . What
youre doing [with digital video] is documentaries of the thing thats happening in front
of you.
PAG: But it isnt [cinma-vrit] documentary. There you just go and shoot people.
That is not the case here.
AR: Right. Documentaries use two techniques, controlled or uncontrolled. This film
merges them. That is the future of cinema. I was born into film. My fathers a producer.
I always liked the touch, the feel, the look of the thing. But even if my heart is made
out of celluloid, the future is digital cinema.
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DS: For someone whose heart is made out of celluloid, you sound very enthusiastic
about getting away from it.
AR: Im absolutely fascinated by this, yes!
DS: Before we leave the topic of documentary, your affection for the long take has
always given a feeling of watching reality unfold in time, as opposed to a highly edited
cinema thats always saying, Cut, cut, cut.
AR: But not exactly reality. Ive always been baffled by reality, and Ive never
thought I could capture it. So what I try to achieve is truththe truth that is indefinable.
What it is, what you would think it is, what are the boundaries, what might be edgy or
thorny. I know what I believe is true. Thats what I try to make shots from, and thats
what I try to narrate from.
PAG: And also from time.
AR: Yes, always from time. Time gives a depth that is truer than the triangulation of
cuts. If truth happens [during a shot], it happens. If it doesnt [and you pretend it does],
youre the biggest liar, youre a fraud. So its got to be well thought out. But theres only
one way to convey truth, and thats to believe it yourself. Film has become, within the
realm of digital cinema, a question of faith. And that is a complicated issue.
DS: Clearly! Earlier you mentioned an almost religious aspect of the truth youre
dealing with.
AR: And of tragedy. The people that [classical] tragedies were told to had a sort
of religious experience, which is a question of faith. I believe in that, and I am moved
by that. I want to experience a catharsis [when making a film] that will change me, not
only the characters. That is our aim at this moment. Pretty unpretentious, as you can see!
(laughs)
DS: Its interesting to feel your sense of engagementhow you live so fully in the
work youre doing and see it as having so many connections with the profoundest parts of
our lives: our ethics, our aesthetics, our morality, the condition we face as being human.
Yet your films are often so sad, and so absurd, and sometimes both at the same time.
I mean absurd with a capital A. . . .
AR: And with a small A, also.
DS: Yes, from time to time! Given the very unhappy things that happen in so many
of your movies, is making these tales a happy life for you?
AR: The best. Absolutely the best.
DS: But youre looking at misery all the time!
AR: Yeah, but were having a lot of fun! (laughs) Its the best possible life, just
watching.
DS: Years ago Martin Scorsese told me that filming the part of Taxi Driver where
the bloodbath happens and the guy gets his hand shot up was depressing. He came to
 46 David Sterritt

work in the morning and didnt look forward to this. In a movie like No One Writes to
the Colonel, you spend all those weeks with two poverty-stricken people and a chicken,
on their way to a truly tragic finale. Do you come to work in the morning with a song
in your heart?
AR: Oh, absolutely. Its truly a joyous set. We all laugh constantly, and theres a lot
of joking. What we talk about is heavy, so we make things around it very light. Some
actors miss the point sometimes, and become [too] involved [in the storys mood], so we
put a penance on them and they have to pay for the food, things like that. (laughs) They
will enjoy the work and smile, or they have to pay for everybodys food!
PAG: And we always put absurdity inside tragedy, which is the main point in our
filmmaking. The use of absurdity lights up the tragedy, illuminates the tragedy.
AR: The absurdity is inevitable. We live in a very absurd countrya very strange,
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very strong and powerful country. Its not an ordered country, like [the United States]
could be. Everybody thinks the same things, but differently, and thats very strong and
very strange.
DS: Lets back up a bit and talk about your early life. I know you grew up around
the film industry because your father was a producer in Mexico.
AR: He still is. Hes an old coyote, still going strong. I was born into film. The
first time my father took me to a studio I was three years old. From then on, I wanted
a Moviola as a birthday present. I kept going to the studio, and got a little camera, and
shot little 16mm movies with my classmates when I was thirteen or fourteen. We didnt
have the glory of video then, so we never knew what was going to happen; we had to
develop the film and find out what wed got. I grew up thinking of nothing else. I always
knew my destiny would be as a filmmaker. Until now!
DS: Yes, youve finally escaped destiny! But you went to film school, and all that. . . .
AR: No, there was no film school in Mexico then. But I read about movies and I
was an avid, voracious filmgoer. I learned the craft that way, and by watching and asking.
I could go onto sets to see everybody shoot, and I would ask, Whyre you doing this?
Whyd you pull the camera back instead of forward? and things like that. Even the
bad directors were stimulating. I learned a lot from them because when I was sixteen or
seventeen and a typical, one hundred percent red-blooded Mexican adolescentwhich
means being precocious and horrendousI knew I could do better it than they. But then
I went to do the same thing with [Luis] Buuel, when he was making The Exterminating
Angel, and I said, This is different! From him I learned my approach to filmmaking
which was, be truthful.
DS: And you kept making little movies of your own?
AR: I made little movies of my own, and when I was twenty-one I directed my first
feature. I was very young [for a] director at that time.
DS: I assume your fathers connections helped you.
AR: Well, my father did [help with] that movie. He didnt want tohe sent me to
law school and then to university, because he wanted to make a decent man out of me.
But he never could. At one point I threatened him, Ill kill you or Ill kill myself if we
dont make a movie. So he said, All right. Pick one of the writers that work for me.
And I said, No, I have this guy I just met a year ago, and hes good. That was Garca
Mrquez. He was a guy who worked in publicity, doing ads for jeans and things like that,
and I had read a couple of his books, which I admired enormously. I said to him, Why
dont you come over? He always wanted to be in filmthats his real, true ambition,
not literature but film. He never could make it in film, which is fortunate, since its given
us a wonderful writer. Anyway, my father and I did a couple of films together, and then
we decided never to work together again. I said, I like you a lot as a father, but I hate
 The Future is Digital Cinema 47

you as a producer, so lets keep on having a relationship as a father and a son, not as a
producer and a director. Then I made my career, and then one day he said, Well, lets
do another film together. He was a very old man, and I was an old man myself, and I
said, Okay, lets try it again. And we did one more film together, a few years ago.
DS: Which one was that?
AR: The Beginning and the End.
DS: One of my favorite of your films.
AR: We did that together. The rest of my work has beenas with every [film] career
in Mexico of my generationfundamentally state-financed. But that has [gone through
changes] over the years. Back when I did Castle of Purity, it was completely state-funded.
Now you only get a certain part of your budget, and you need coproduction in order
to achieve your purposes. Its very difficult. Mexico used to have a [film] industrynot
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really an industry like in the United States, but a business, ratherwhich made one
hundred, one hundred twenty films a year. Now its eight films a year, seven films a year,
nine films a year. Its been shrinking tremendously, and getting financed is complicated,
so my career has been like every other Mexican career: difficult, strenuous, hard. But
Ive been wonderfully lucky. I found Paz Alicia, and that made my movies.
DS: Speaking of the state-financed aspect of Mexican film, has this produced par-
ticular pressures on what you can do?
AR: No.
DS: Not in terms of censorship?
AR: Oh, censorship exists in Mexico, of course. There are some things that you
cannot talk about. There are certain national symbols, for instance, that you cannot talk
about. Its completely different than the Anglo cultures, where you make fun of your
leaders. Its normal [in Anglo cultures] that you put television on and comedians are
talking about the President or the Presidents wife, and its fair and its valid. In Mexico,
its forbidden by law: You cannot make fun of the national symbols, one of which is the
President. The flag, the national anthem, you cannot make fun of. I mean, you cannot
have stripteasers dressed up as the Mexican flag, youd go to jail immediately.
PAG: Youve had a lot of problems with censorship, but it hasnt defined your career.
AR: Thats true. . . . Censorship, in a certain way, makes you sly and intelligent.
It makes you sort of move around certain things [in order to] to say the same words
you [originally] intended. So it is a very interesting subject, and very peculiar. Its
not just to be [disparaged] because its an imposition. There are censorships in every
country in the world, and here [in the US] you have probably the worst censorship of
all, which is economic. What a producer doesnt think will [do good] business, or is
worthy of putting money into, wont be done. Thats the worst censorship of all, because
it makes you disappear. Another problem very related to the economic here is the idea of
entertainmenta crass idea that has become a four-letter word to me. So every country
has its own rules, and we have to sort of jump through them in order to achieve truth.
But its not that I always wanted to talk about forbidden things in Mexico and couldnt.
Ive never particularly wanted to talk about the army and things like that. And being
state-funded has never really been a problem; theyve never told me, Do this or Do
that. We dont get paid very much for films, with Mexico being a small country, so
for many of the films that Paz and myself did together, we never got paid at all. We
did them because we just wanted to. We live from scholarships that the government
gives to a few of the artists and intellectuals. Theres about six hundred positions in the
system [for funding of] artists and painters, architects, filmmakers, [people in] theater,
dancers, etc. Which is good. Its a paternalistic society, and that is good. But even though
we live off thata very small stipend that we get monthlyweve never been coerced
 48 David Sterritt

into doing something, never been laid a certain path to go on. Never. That doesnt
happen.
DS: What kinds of audiences do your films find in Mexico? Are they popular?
AR: No, no, not at all. We have very, very small audiences. Mexico is a country
where the biggest writers have editions of around two to five thousand books. Carlos
Fuentes and Octavio Paz, the big, big names, have very limited editions. I aim to
that audience, which is very, very small. And Ive been lucky that my films have been
able to go out of Mexico, so theyre seen in [other] countries, where they also go for
a very elitist sort of audience, a very small sort of audience, which is the audience
that every foreign filmmaker in the world hasforeign being defined as non-English.
Even though American films are foreign everywhere in the world except the States,
American films are the movies. And we [others] are foreign filmmakers even in our own
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countries.
DS: Yes, I know. The Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Diegues once told me that every
country has two national cinemas: its own and Hollywood.
AR: No, its the other way around.
DS: Hollywood first.
AR: Hollywood, and then come a few foreign filmmakers.
DS: I want to ask about the collaboration between you two. Its been very longnine
films now?
PAG: Nine films.
AR: Fifteen years.
DS: Which is a lot of films. How did this collaboration start? Arturo had already
made quite a few movies.
AR: I had already done a bunch of films. I met Paz when I was thirty-five or thirty-
six, and she was twenty-nine or something like that. They said, This is Arturo Ripstein,
and she said, No, youre not Ripstein, because Ive read about him for so many years.
Ripstein is an old man!
PAG: Its true. He was already in the newspapers when I was fourteen, but you never
saw his photograph. Reading about him, I imagined he was a director of thirty-something,
forty-something, and in reality he was twenty-one. So I knew his films, I loved his films,
and just by chance and by luck I found him. . . .
AR: Yeah, we were friends and we started to talk. She used to write for television,
for childrens television, but she started to tell me stories and she was very punctilious,
very precise in her storytelling, whatever story it was. Shed say, This morning I went to
the grocery store and I bought a few eggs and two of them fell on the ground and broke.
She was so precise and so defined and so funny. So I said to her, Why dont you write
a film for me? She thought I was joking. But I got a film put together, and I called her
and said, Would you like to do this adaptation for me? She said, Let me think about
it, and I said, Ill give you fifteen seconds. (laughs) When it elapsed she said, Let me
call you back. She called me back fifteen seconds later and said, Yeah, Ill do it. So
we started working together and I started telling her exactly what I wanted, how I liked
things, what the format was like in my work, and she immediately did it. For the first
script we wrote together she would give me batches of ten, fifteen pages. It was a very
enormous script, the first one she wrote, because I told her, Put in everything. I would
read ten, fifteen pages at a time, and I told her my ideas. But after that I said, Listen,
you sit down, write the whole thing, and give it to me after the first draft is written. Of
course, before she even puts her hands on the keyboard theres been discussion going
on and on and on, to clarify what the script is going to look like, and to clarify a very
difficult question, which seems very simple but is not: What are we talking about? What
 The Future is Digital Cinema 49

is this film about? This is complicated to know, so we discuss it for a number of days,
or weeks, or months until she gets into the actual writing.
PAG: Thats because we fall for the story firstsomething in the newspaper, on the
TV, something that someone told us, or told someone who told us. . . . So first we like
the story, but then we say, Why do we like this story? What is the story behind the
story? What is the theme? And that is not so obvious. It takes us time.
AR: It takes us a long, long time. After we discuss this, she writes the whole thing,
and gives it to me, and I give her a bunch of notes, and we discuss. Even though [our
work is] so intertwined, hers is done before mine begins. Im very present at the writing
and shes very present at the shooting, but still, theres sort of a delimited areaa time
when shes finished and I begin, or I havent begun and shes in the middle of her
work. We dont fight or disagree fundamentally. We like basically the same things in
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our films. We disagree, bitterly, in politics and religion. Shes brought up by nuns, Im
Jewish, so . . . (laughs) She likes some films that I hate and vice versa, but in our work
we fundamentally have the same point of view. Throughout my career, Ive been very
fortunate to have wonderful writers. Ive tried to avoid professional screenwriters. I prefer
to have novelists and poets and essay writers to work with. Professional screenwriters
are too obvious. You feel youve seen that movie many times before.
PAG: Most of the professional screenwriters are people who dont intend to do an
artistic job. They follow the rules, and they dont try to experiment, they dont try to
push. . . .
AR: Yeah, they dont have a vision [free] of technicalities.
DS: They do the craft, rather than the art.
AR: Exactly. Ive preferred the other guys, that didnt know a word about screen-
writing, but had visions.
DS: And you two continue working together after a script is finished?
AR: The shooting is the same. Whenever I get into muddy waters and I dont know
what the hell Im talking about, I confer with Paz. Shes constantly on the set, and she
talks a lot to the actors. I also have a little team of four guys on every film whose job is
to get Paz the hell out of here whens she on top of it too much!
DS: Working together so constantly, do you ever just get tired of it?
PAG: Well, sometimes.
AR: Its not easy to work like this. But its possible.
PAG: The most difficult part is when were in trouble, because a film is sinking, or
financial [support] isnt there. . . . Neither of us can just be calm, because were both in
the same boat. Thats the most difficult part.
AR: Yeah, the horrible part is that we share the anguish. I cant go home and tell
my wife, Im weary, Im frightened, and hear her say, Come on, take it easy. I tell
her Im frightened and she goes nuts! (laughs) Thats the hard part.
DS: You both appear to be holding up nicely under the strain.
AR: We try our best.
DS: You have achieved great artistic respect while also representing a particular
cinema, the Mexican cinema. Im not suggesting you should do something else, but Im
wondering if youve ever had the temptation or the opportunity, or even the fantasy, of
leaving Mexican film and going to Hollywood, of working in some other milieu.
AR: Yeah, at a given point I said I would like to go to Hollywood, because I want
to get paid enough to make a living from my work. But then I thought, If I go to
Hollywood, Im going to make things that are not my stuff. Its going to be their stuff.
Its going to be about a boy and a dog, or a boy and a horse, or a boy and a boat. Its
not going to be mine. So Ive had economic temptation, of course: Ive always wanted
 50 David Sterritt

to live off my work, not from government grants. Id like to buy nice things, everybody
wants that. But that has never been an issue in itself. Im not going to sacrifice the things
I can do in Mexico in order to have a checkbook. Not by a long shot.
DS: Youre very connected to Mexico City, as well.
AR: I was born in Mexico City and Ive lived there all my life. Its the city I hate
the most and I love the most. Its my voice and my eyes and my heart.
DS: Still, some of your films deal with people who dont have very urban temper-
aments.
AR: Not that many. My films are very urban.
PAG: Still, youre right. The explanation is that most of Mexico City is a young
city, and most of the people there come from the country. So even this urban society is
a peasant society. Peasant society is in the blood of Mexico City.
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AR: Its extremely varied. This is one of the biggest cities in the world, with twenty
million people. The ones we like to [tell stories] about are the ones who dont integrate,
or integrate wrongly, or have expectations that will never be fulfilled because they
are integrating into a very closely knit society thateven though its enormous and
expandingdoesnt allow certain permeabilities.
DS: So the urban perspectives of your work take different forms.
AR: I never say exactly where [characters] are at. I never talk about when in the
century things take place. I never talk about money, or how much things cost, because
money in Mexico is very strange, very erratic. Theres never anything very precise.
I like to talk about things the way [Rudyard] Kipling did, telling stories in a very
precise manner, letting the possibilities develop as if he didnt know what they would be.
Interpretation is a horrible word, and multiple readings is also horrible. I prefer to
think of facets, a wide range of possibilities. I dont like to know exactly whats going
on [with characters and situations] because that would be only one way of seeing things.
I like to make very long shots with a mythical point of view. The rest is ambiguous.
PAG: What he asks me when Im writing my scripts is things like, Is it before the
rain? After the rain? Near Christmas? Near Easter? Its not the [exact] month, and of
course its never the year.
AR: Its [a] mythological [approach].
PAG: Its mythos amidst a society that is . . . so old and so new. We have been living
in the city forever, yet none of us has been there more than fifty years.
AR: We are both first generation Mexico City.
DS: Theres one more thing I want to ask you about: other filmmakers, other work
that has inspired you.
AR: Thats easy to answer. Its exactly the same list any director of my generation
would give you. Buuel, and [Fritz] Lang, and John Ford, and [Akira] Kurosawa, and the
French New Wave, and the Italians, and a couple of directors from the Eastern bloc. . . .
DS: Which Italians? The Neorealists?
AR: Fellini and Visconti, of course.
DS: And which Eastern directors?
AR: [Andrzej] Wajda, the Czechs, the Russians. . . . Its exactly the same list that
has influenced all of us. And also [Orson] Welles, and [Raoul] Walsh, and [Howard]
Hawks. . . . There are certain ones that were like directors directors. My generation is
a large one, and certain directors were mixed up with the [very] idea of film. Buuel
was filming, and Welles was filming, and Visconti was filming. These guys influenced
all of us.
DS: They influenced critics, too. I have a similar list, although Im sure there are
variations.
 The Future is Digital Cinema 51

AR: But very few, probably. I mean, I would like Ford better than Hawks, and maybe
youd like Hawks better than Ford. But its the same bunch of guys that determined the
way we looked at things, looked at film, looked at the ethics of filmmaking, the aesthetics
of filmmaking. We learned from them, and we stole what we thought was necessary.
Amateurs make homage, professionals directly steal! (laughs)
DS: A final question, to get back to our starting point: digital video. Can you imagine
a time in the near future when the adventure of the new medium could lead you to work
thats radically different from what youve done before? Given the new possibilities
the new ways of thinking and expressing and working with performersis digital video
going to be an extension of what youve already been doing, or might we see something
that we wouldnt recognize as a Ripstein film until we saw the credits at the end?
AR: I certainly hope so.
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DS: You would like to embark in entirely new directions?

AR: Oh, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. Things that Ive never even heard of, that Ive
never even dared to think I would do, I would like to try. With this medium, knowing
that my next work is not going to be my last one, I can go on and be bold. Really bold.