Among the boldest of the great Argentine films that emerged at the start of the 2000s was Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut La Libertad, a film about a woodcutter going about his day that was most notable for what it didn’t do. Our protagonist simply went about his daily business for 73 minutes, and any hints about authorial input came primarily from the title. Alonso’s minimalist approach that allowed his non-actors to dictate the terms of his shooting style began to develop thematic interests and recurring tropes. Los Muertos’ study of a recently released prisoner trying to navigate the rivers of a jungle to find his daughter, and Liverpool’s chronicle of a sailor on leave trying to see his mother and crossing many a chilly landscape in the process, were similar in style to La Libertad but had a slightly more prominent narrative thrust in their interest in exploring terrains. (He also made the hour-long meta sketch Fantasma as a showcase for the leads of his first two films.) When it was revealed that he had made a film called Jauja with an actual movie star in Viggo Mortensen, it undoubtedly came as a shock, but the resulting film was one of the brightest and boldest Westerns of any era. A surrealist The Searchers that painted Argentina with color combinations never quite seen before on film, it took the story of a Danish father looking for his daughter in the Argentinian landscapes and heightened it into a journey through the wilderness of the mind, with shifts in setting that recalibrated everything prior.
With his first film in nearly 10 years, Eureka, Alonso delivers a triptych that pushes his leaps even further, and combines elements of every prior film he’s made in a wildly ambitious 150-minute epic about Indigenous people across the Americas. The film starts out as a monochromatic riff on Jauja featuring Viggo Mortensen in a similar role, before the first of Alonso’s magic tricks allows us to be transported to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, as we meet police officer Alaina and her basketball coach niece Sadie. Another metamorphosis in style brings us to a Brazilian rainforest (filmed in Oaxaca, Mexico) where the Indigenous workers of the area pan for gold and dream. On the occasion of Eureka‘s release in the U.S., I spoke to Alonso about his biggest and boldest project yet.
Andrew Reichel: I wanted to start off with the fact that you’re returning after a nine-year absence with such a big and ambitious film in the form of a triptych, and I was curious about what drew you to a triptych structure.
Lisandro Alonso: When I started thinking about the film, I was thinking about the places where I wanted to put my body, the camera, and the microphones; about traveling there to take some notes and observe. When I finished Jauja 10 years ago, I just kept thinking about the two Indian guys who take Viggo Mortensen’s horse, and I thought, “I should travel back in time and shoot some more with those two guys in order to present them better,” and from that starting point I kept thinking about films that represent natives in different parts of the world. I immediately traveled to Western films from the U.S., and from that starting point, I thought, “OK, I would like to make a film that contrasts and puts in place what the film industry reflects of the different kinds of lives of natives in film, and I would like to contrast with the natives in South America.” So, immediately, I just organized a map where I could represent black-and-white films from the Western period, and contrast that with the present time, and contrast that with South American people under colonialism.
AR: You’re dealing with Indigenous people from North, Central, and South America, and they’re joined in such unreal ways. How did you conceive of the transitions between the different parts?
LA: I was doing a fellowship for a year between Boston and New York, and I started dreaming about where I would put the camera if I had a chance to shoot in the U.S., and I immediately went to Pine Ridge. And then I started to imagine those transitions you mention. For the first one, I thought it was kind of surprising to realize that everything you are watching from professional actors such as Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni is artificial — it’s just entertainment. I like this breaking point between entertainment and a more realistic approach to people and places, and the problematic that those people and places both have. And the result of those problematics is that you realize in the film, some people just really need to get away from that reality, whatever way they choose: by drugs, alcohol, suicide… not good things. From my point of view, there’s a lot of people that really work as hard as Alaina the police officer does every day, but you get really tired by doing that. There’s only 23 police and between 40,000 and 70,000 people in the reservation, and I don’t think it’s enough in order to just put some order or good energy in the population. The second transition is doing it via just that — a young girl, [Sadie], going to her grandfather and saying, “I can’t do this anymore, I don’t have the energy, so if you can promise your word to just put me some other place and give me whatever I need to travel as far as I can, I’ll say goodbye to my body and just fly away in some mystical way.” And I just needed that flying bird in order to move to another location.
AR: You’ve mentioned that at the start of the film you’re riffing on Jauja a little bit, and then you transition back to the docufiction-style material that’s closer to your work prior to Jauja, along with revisiting your theme of a father looking for his daughter. Did you have a stylistic retread of sorts baked into Eureka from the start?
LA: Yeah, if you’ve seen my previous work, you see that I have some idea about this kind of relationship between direct family, so I always try to approach a sensibility through those kinds of relationships. I always thought the start was a kind of code for the people who appreciate Jauja, and I did have a lot of fun doing that film, so I was trying to keep that mood at the start of the film with Viggo and the daughter since she wants to stay in the violence of the Western non-frontier place. There are so many issues in this film that you can connect, but going back to your first question, I just realized that I was organizing the first part of Eureka by reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is a kind of non-frontier land where everyone kills everyone and they are looking for no order in the end, and I don’t think it’s too far away from that nowadays, even if there’s 400 years in between. I don’t think anything really changed in this place that we call… whatever you want to call it.
Credit: Film Movement
AR: Was “the past, the present, and the future” as a sort of organizing principle on your mind during the film?
LA: It’s a complex film even for me, who wrote, directed, and edited it. Sometimes I think I just have to put elements in different places, especially in this film and Jauja; it’s not like my previous films which were simpler and just “a day in the life of…”
I started to co-write with a poet called Fabián Casas, and he doesn’t have this sort of school of scriptwriting, so he’s sort of more free in a way. And I just use that freedom to put different elements, tools, and information — like in a painting — in order to help the audience, or myself as the first audience, to organize connections by giving that information. And it was good to bring back something like what were the Western films in the 1940s by John Ford and many other filmmakers, because more than half of all those films can’t be made nowadays for many reasons; for the way they treat minorities and other people around them — Native Americans, Blacks, kids, Chinese people, females, whatever. And if you compare the Western films with what our platforms are nowadays as filmmakers, it’s just entertainment, but we have to be careful with this kind of entertainment, because it puts a lot of information in our hardware — our mind, our brain. I don’t know what it’s going to be like in the next 40 years, what we read in our heads when we have a remote control in our hands every day. I don’t know how it’s going to be reflected in the next 40 years, if it’s going to be really a positive or not. And I wanted to search in this film called Eureka, but I just threw it away as a connection to see how we can analyze the information that we consume everyday and how we can put it in order in our realities, or in the necessities that some people need and don’t have.
AR: You’ve mentioned in prior interviews that the U.S. shoot was extremely difficult, with below freezing temperatures. I was wondering if you could talk about how the difficulties of shooting in such extreme weather played out in terms of how the film got made the way it did.
LA: It was a pain in the ass. We were supposed to be there for 16 days, and we were there for two months. I had been there seven or eight times before we started shooting, so I know the place and I know how hard it is to move there, even if we were a small crew of 10-15 people. We had to change, hours after the first day of shooting, the DP of the film [Timo Salminen] because he collapsed. Even if he’s from Finland, it was too extreme for him. We were shooting for 14 hours outside at night with temperatures of 30-below. And then I had to change the main actress; the way you see Eureka now, it was not how I planned it in the script. The one who became the bird was [Alaina] the police officer, but she had to leave after six days of shooting because her baby was seriously ill, and then I moved to Sadie in order to not stop the shooting, since I never stopped the shooting for a day in my life. But in the end, I think it worked better, it brings new tools that you have to use to prove to yourself that you can work better. But it was not easy. There were a lot of accidents.
I’m from Argentina and the rest of the crew were from Europe, and we were not the priority in the community. They have other priorities every day of their life, and we were just there. If they have the time to cooperate with us somehow, they will open their arms and say “hello,” but they have other things to do, so we cannot really confirm locations and characters and tools that we need in order to keep going with the shooting. It was really complex, and English is not my first language. It was very “who are you and why are you here?” So I had to explain many times who we are, why we were there, and get many permissions for shooting there. We went straight to the police station the first day we wanted to start shooting, and I said, “I really want to understand what it is to be a member of Pine Ridge Reservation and be a police officer, and how hard it is to be one in that place with the tools they have.” It was going to be more like a documentary film, which it is not at all because I manipulate the sense of time and space so you can bring your own understanding and feeling for the rhythm of the film. But we talked to the police station and community about the film, and they said, “OK, why not? I think it’s fair you show to the outside how hard it is to be a police officer here.”
Credit: Film Movement
AR: For the final section of the film, were there any shooting issues in terms of working with the community in Mexico when you were working there?
LA: That’s a good one, because you can see that I work with professional actors, but I mostly choose nonprofessional actors, especially people that probably don’t have a lot of relationship with the film industry. It was supposed to shoot in Brazil, in the Amazon, but since the situation changed politically, we had to move to Mexico, to Oaxaca, and we shot with a community called Chatinos. And they are very shy. I really like the way they are, but they are too shy; you can see in the images, in the way they look — they cannot look at you in your eyes. And the language they speak doesn’t have a lot of words; they understand Spanish, but once they try and translate it, it’s really complicated for them to organize my ideas. So it was also difficult for me, and I don’t live in that community, I live in Buenos Aires with millions of people, so it was strange. I would love to have had more time in Mexico, but since making films is super expensive, we didn’t have the time. The thing I like most in American films is traveling to different places, and if it wasn’t for the film, I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet these people, so it was nice to share some breathing, some food, some walking, easy talks. I really appreciate that, to put me in another context from my everyday life. But it was really difficult, we had to cross seven rivers by foot before we started shooting every day. We had to walk for an hour to get to the locations in Oaxaca. And once we get there, things happen. But the weather was warm!
But we were shooting over three years in order to get six weeks of shooting, because we were stopped like three or four times because of Covid, and the protocols change a lot in different countries. In the Mexican part, the one who was supposed to play El Coronel was going to be Chiara Mastroianni again, but she couldn’t arrive because of a ridiculous protocol where she had to stay something like four months in a room before we start shooting for four days. So she just told me, “Lisandro, I’m not doing that, I don’t think it’s fair to me.” And the main characters in that part of the film were Brazilian, and one of them was refused at customs once he arrived in Mexico because of paperwork, so we had to delay things. It was a strange moment to organize this kind of co-production during the pandemic, because we were shooting in Portugal, Spain, Mexico, and the U.S. It was a huge production logistically for me despite being a small film production, and I was not used to it — I don’t know who from my country is used to doing this kind of film! But it was a great risk, it was a great challenge for me to do it, and I did it, and I think it’s a good film. But it demands a lot of time from me, 10 years for different reasons, and I don’t think films should demand that amount of time, not the films I want to do.
AR: Do you generally feel that your films tend to be based around some improvisation in terms of logistics, or was this an unusual situation for you?
LA: I prefer not to call it improvisation, because every time I start shooting, I travel before for weeks, months, years, and I know the people I work with well. But when you put them in front of a 10-person crew, sometimes you have to reorganize and improvise a bit. But I would rather call it “co-participation,” because I learn a lot by talking to them. Sometimes I don’t need to give them the script because they don’t want to read it, or they don’t read Spanish. So I just explain the situation, and ask them, “how do you see this action, this framing, this movement?” And they say, “well, maybe it’s not that realistic, I should move or act this way, go that way, react in this way.” And I take some notes and we reorganize during the shooting. You can call that improvisation, but it’s not like John Cassavetes-style improvisation. In the films I like to make, it’s people mostly playing themselves, not Shakespeare. They don’t have to intellectually interpret literature; it’s more like actions and movement that define their way in this work, and they know how to do it better than me.
AR: Do you have anything else you want to add about the process of making this film?
LA: Yeah, I just really want to add that I enjoyed staying at the Pine Ridge Reservation, and I really appreciate what they gave to the film, especially Alaina and Sadie, and I think this is a good chance to expand on how I feel about Pine Ridge: they need some more attention from the government, that’s all. I don’t like to put myself as an “Indigenous” filmmaker or a political filmmaker, but I really appreciate this opportunity to say this.
