I was not surprised that I was deeply charmed by young Joel Alfonso Vargas’ Mad Bills To Pay, which screened at this year’s New Directors/New Films Festival at MoMA. It’s a movie after my heart, a Biggie-quoting, micro-budget, largely improvised indie about Rico (Juan Collado), a Dominican teenager who “makes a living” selling nutcrackers on the beach in the Bronx. It descends from two rich traditions of New York City filmmaking: it’s a classic coming of age dramedy in the vein of Peter Sollett’s Raising Victor Vargas and, obviously, Robert De Niro’s (and Chazz Palmintari’s) A Bronx Tale; and it’s also a raw, neo-real, documentary-style film set in the outer borough crevices of the city that rhymes with Ramin Bahrani’s early explorations of Queens. We watch Rico’s story unfold in long takes, learning of his impending fatherhood with an even younger unwed soon-to-be-teenage-mother (Destiny Checo, a star-making turn in her first major role) via a locked camera that observes much of the action at a distance, giving the viewer the intimate verisimilitude of watching Nest cam footage of a domestic drama playing out around a small community in the Bronx.
The making of the film is something of a miracle. Vargas was a Fulbright Scholar who graduated from the National Film and Television School in the UK a year ago. He made a short film about a kid hustling homemade cocktails in quarter water bottles, then used every ounce of his own now London-based but Bronx-bred hustle to stretch that into a feature, which required shooting 100 scenes in 16 days. These sorts of conditions can often produce incoherent student films that serve as resume-builders for young, aspiring filmmakers. Instead, Vargas and his cast collaborated to create a touching, slice-of-life addition to the New York City indie canon, the result already a hit on the festival scene and touring the world, from Sundance to Berlinale, and continuing its run through the summer as the negotiations around proper distribution continue.
The film’s success is largely in the details. It’s a movie that knows its world and its characters intimately: the music they listen to on Bluetooth speakers, the handles of booze they make their nutcrackers with, the clothes they wear and how they wear them, and when they suddenly break from English to Spanish in a fit of piqued aggravation. It nails the dynamics of a small, Bronx- family in this Bronx-based Dominican enclave, the members of which are hard on one another because they know the world will be hard on them. But within the bickering, the roast battles, and the back-of-the-head slaps that tell someone to wake up and get their shit together, there is a powerful, ever present core of support and the toughest love. As a fellow outer borough guy, I had to get in touch with Joel to discuss his filmmaking philosophy, how he made his wonderful new film, and the Bronx.
Joel Alfonso Vargas: Hey man. Are you based in New York?
Abe Beame: I am. I’m in Flatbush.
JAV: Nice. I’m in the Bronx, at my mom’s house.
AB: What part of the Bronx are you from?
JAV: I’m from Marble Hill, Kingsbridge. I don’t know if you know that area.
AB: I do. Is that where the movie is set?
JAV: It was set in Crotona Park. You know, Freeman Avenue, on the 2 train? Central Bronx, I would say.
AB: Yeah, I wasn’t entirely sure because parts of it took place off the 6 somewhere.
JAV: Well, I mean, obviously the stuff that we shot near City Island, Orchard Beach, that was the Pelham Bay 6. But then the apartment and everything, the neighborhood stuff was off the 2 train. Do you know Orchard Beach?
AB: Not really. From south central Brooklyn, we go to Tilden or Jacob Riis or Coney Island for the kids, something like that.
JAV: There are nicer beaches in the Rockaways and Brooklyn, because Orchard Beach is a man-made beach, and there are no waves because it’s a bay. So it’s real dead, you know?
AB: You’ve said that the locked camera device you employed for the film was somewhat pragmatic. Were there any other stylistic influences or ideas that informed the decision to go with that approach?
JAV: Yeah. There was a lot of conversation around the narrative purpose of utilizing this language. A lot of it was navigated intuitively, but I was really drawn to the idea, especially in how we composed a lot of those images, with putting people in an untraditional third, in a lower third or far right or far left, but just kind of having them in this vastness, this negative space.
I’m going to talk in terms of metaphors, although I don’t really think about metaphors so much, but the metaphor of having this sort of vastness of space and landscape and, you know in that shot, the poster image when Rico is looking off to the right and you see the seagulls, trying to explore the irony of the opportunity that image creates. The stillness of, and the constraints of this box the characters find themselves in, both metaphorically and literally.
I’m also a big fan of observational cinema, and Pedro Costa is someone whose work I really admire. I looked a lot at the Austrian filmmaker Urich Seidl as well. It wasn’t a conscious reference, but I think in trying to figure out how to approach the story, after the fact I was like, oh shit, this actually looks a lot like Seidl’s films, because of the use of static camera and a lot of improvisation.
We could have done static camera up close, but I think that, again, the decision not to was mostly intuitive. With hindsight, I think I was reluctant to bring the camera really close because I was afraid of the performances — because, you know, Latin. I don’t know what your background is, but I’m Latin American and it’s a very loud culture.
AB: I’m Jewish. We certainly have that as well.
JAV: [Laughs] Yeah, like Southern Europe, it’s just kind of, you know, crazy. And I guess, a lot of semitic cultures and et cetera are loud. So I was afraid that if I brought the camera close, some of those scenes could read like melodrama. And I think in pulling it back, that diminished the scale of some of those performances in a way and grounded them a little bit more.
AB: Were there ever times that you wished you had coverage? Maybe when you were in edit afterwards?
JAV: You know, I didn’t really. Maybe one scene towards the end could’ve used punctuation. But other than that, not really. I think if we had more resources, what I was missing was camera movement, laterally or moving into the frame. But I think my idea of coverage is a little distorted because it would be like four minutes or three minutes that mixed it into the final cut of the film, but these were actually like 10-, 15-minute scenes that we filmed. They were very long and improvisational. And that was intentional because I wanted to have the flexibility in post to play with the feeling of the film depending on where I placed the in and out points. Like by starting a scene really early in and ending it really late, you can completely change the impact of the scene. So we sculpted around those really lengthy takes.
AB: It sounds like the shooting script was more improvisational? Like you had beats that you needed to hit in scenes, but not line-for-line dialogue. Is that right?
JAV: Well, in order to secure some financing, we had to produce some script pages. So I did produce about 35, 40 pages. And I knew I had crystallized the mechanics of the story. But I think it was great for the actors, when eventually we got to rehearsal to have the script as a document. It set the language and tone and cadence and things like that.
But when it came down to rehearsing individual scenes, at least with the scripted part of the film, we approached it with a lot of license, because I wanted them to take ownership over the lines. So the writing was true to life and how people speak in the Bronx, but I still wanted them to break it and make it their own. So there were scripted scenes and scenes that were fully improvised, but I wouldn’t be able to say at this point what was scripted and what wasn’t because it’s all blended in my head now.
AB: I’d guess it’s probably easier when you’re working with younger, less experienced actors to just kind of let the camera roll and let them find the character in the scene, right?
JAV: Well, yeah. But, you know, I have to say, a lot of the conversations we’ve been having about the film, people think the cast are non-actors, but the only true non-actor was Destiny. Juan has had a lot of experience in theater, and he comes from improvisational theater, so he has a knack for it. Yohanna [Florentino] is a trained actor, she’s done stage plays and things, and Nathaly [Navarro] is also a trained actor.
So in the end, it wasn’t like we were really finding the characters from scratch; they knew what they were doing. It was like we’d have a debrief. This is the arc, this is the shape of the scene, and they would take it and run with it. They had to, because we just had such little time and resources. There wasn’t as much exploration. It was putting a lot of trust in them and their expertise. They would interpret my brief and do something brilliant with it, and then from take to take, give notes and things. But I want to say like 90% of the time, they just completely brought it, you know?
AB: What was the budget for the film?
JAV: I mean, it’s kind of off the record because we’re not allowed to talk about it. But there was a point in time when I initially pitched the story to [fellow National Film and Television School graduate and first-time producer Paolo Maria Pedullà], and I was like, this is the $3 million version, and I’m going to try to scale it down so we’re going to do it with the resources we actually have, which was very much not $3 million.
Which is cool, because we’re playing alongside all these other films and new directors whose budgets are so much bigger than ours. And I’m just like, “Wow,” you know? It’s definitely not a perfect film, but for what we made with that little amount of money, I think it is okay.
But eventually, once we got into Sundance, it legitimized us in a way in the production. We got some completion funding from Killer and Spark. Most of that has gone to music licenses, because there was so much secondary source music in the film which, it’s like over $100K on just licenses alone. In hindsight, I’ll never be doing that again. I wish I just had that money for production.
AB: I saw that you found Destiny Checo on TikTok, who is a revelation. Were you just served her by the algorithm? What was the process behind finding her?
JAV: It was pretty interesting because we were seeing a lot of Destinys. We’d street cast from Washington Square Park to Orchard Beach, literally all over. And we’d invite people to come to this little rehearsal space on 34th Street, and people would come or send tapes. And I just couldn’t really find the right tone. I think “regular” people have this idea of what acting should be like. So they maybe mimic what they see on TV, which is watered down and whitewashed. And I’d keep saying “Ah, please don’t do that,” through the audition process. Because of the style of the film, we needed them to be themselves, which is hard. TV isn’t representative of this world or these characters.
With Destiny, I saw some actors from traditional kinds of channels and it was the same issue. They were great, but there’s no idiosyncrasy, and I’m looking for that. And it was similar to Juan because I was just desperate. We got Destiny several hours before we had to begin shooting. With Juan, it was like maybe 48 hours.
AB: Holy shit.
JAV: Yeah. Because we were going for somebody else. He was a straight non-actor, someone we met at Washington Square Park. He’s from Williamsburg, and he would have been great, but his life was a little bit too much. He was a teen dad. And as we were getting ready to shoot, he just started flaking and saying it was because of his kid and his responsibilities, but we told him we’ll pay for your babysitting, et cetera. And then we dug a little deeper. It turned out his girlfriend actually didn’t want him to do it because she was afraid that it was too distracting or he’d get too famous [Laughs].
AB: [Laughs]
JAV: And I’m like, oh, man, please it’s like such a small, small film. It’s not like that at all. I mean, not knowing that it would be what it is now, you know? I was really downplaying it.
AB: How’s that relationship going [laughs]?
JAV: I mean, I don’t know [laughs]. I’m sure you would be shattered, because it could have been such a great opportunity for him.
But anyways, we had seen Juan maybe five days or a week prior, and we were like, he is great. And we had him as our understudy. So when our first choice dropped out, two days before, we reached out and said, “Hey, Juan, you ready?” And he said “Yeah, absolutely.”
AB: That’s amazing.
JAV: But to go back to Destiny, I found her and Juan through Backstage initially. And honestly, there aren’t that many young actors of color. It’s maybe five or six pages. And there was nothing on Destiny’s profile but this TikTok link. And as I played it, I was like, this is really good. She has a pretty big personality. She’s so emotive in her expressions and she was doing these lip syncs, and then we got in touch. I think we actually got in touch through TikTok. And she’d never been in any sort of film production or theater or anything. And, you know, it’s a weird thing being hit up by a stranger on TikTok like, “Hey, you want to be in a movie?” So she showed up to the audition with her brother, who’s a cop.
AB: Just in case it’s a scam or something. Makes sense.
JAV: And she was so timid initially. She wouldn’t let the sound people mic her up. It would always have to be one of the women in wardrobe. But over time, people often remark on her timidness when she enters the film, and that arc she goes on, that was actually her. Over time, she got more comfortable with us and she felt more free to express herself. And then, by the end, she was really cool. She didn’t care about anything. She was folded into the team.
AB: Did you shoot sequentially?
JAV: No, we didn’t shoot sequentially, but we shot it in two blocks. Within each block, it was kind of shot, I guess, semi-sequentially. Which was good, because we had some things go left during production.
AB: What went left?
JAV: Our initial original location had to be fumigated. There was a roach infestation. So we called in an exterminator, and he said this is a health hazard, you guys can’t shoot here. So we say, how long would it take to fumigate? He’s like two weeks, and we say, we don’t have that, this film needs to be shot in a matter of days. And then he’s like, by the way, I live a few blocks down the road. You guys can come to my house and shoot. So we ended up shooting at the exterminator’s house.
AB: Is that where the Islanders banner comes from? [Author’s Note: Rico has an Islanders flag in his bedroom in the film, which I found confusing fandom for a Dominican teenager in the Bronx.]
JAV: Yeah. I mean, our production designer touched up the room and she dressed it, but a lot of it, that was just the exterminator’s room, Rico’s room. So he had a lot of that stuff up there already, I think including the Islanders flag. The Dominican flag was ours. But the trophies were his, the stickers on the dresser, the computer chair — it was his space.
AB: So Rico is based on your brother’s friend?
JAV: He’s based on a lot of people that we grew up around. But there was one person in particular who left such an impression on me. He was like Rico, a rolling stone. Never had his life together. A teen dad. He was really heavy on conspiracy theories, and I always found him interesting. And then on my dad’s side, my older brother by 10 years, he was a teen dad. And we grew up very close until he went to prison. And he was always this fucking very belligerent guy, and he would shout, and I was always a quiet, shy kid. And I’d tell him nah, you’re fucking crazy, dude. You can’t talk to your mom like that. [Laughs] If I talk to my mom like that, she’ll still slap me.
AB: You do a really great job capturing what I’d gently describe as a very specific brand of “Bronx mess” in the film.
JAV: Thank you. But you know, I don’t want people to think that is all that Dominican families are. It’s my experience having grown up in a working class Dominican American household, that’s just how it was. But Dominican Americans are more diverse than that. There are middle-class Dominican Americans, wealthy Dominican Americans.
AB: What’s the next step for the film?
JAV: We’re talking to distributors, and there are offers on the table, but things are being worked out and negotiated by our sales company. We really hope that the film can be released later this year. And we’re still doing festivals. San Francisco is next. Then Korea and the Czech Republic.
AB: Feels like a movie that deserves and will get a pop with an extended Anjelika summer run.
JAV: I mean, that’s the case I’m making. Like, please, let’s run it in August.
AB: So what’s been the highlight of having this little movie that blows up, touring it from festival to festival?
JAV: Just sharing it with the audiences because we didn’t really get to do much of that prior to Sundance. Everything came together, the completion funds came at the very last moment.
But showing it at Sundance, that was great. And taking it to Berlin and sharing it with an audience who doesn’t really get the cultural references, but responds to it. Whether that’s the family themes, or the fatherhood themes, and the impact being a more political one. A lot of their questions were around the American Dream and how the film addresses that idea.
It’s been cool realizing we made something that resonates. There’s a lot of laughter, and people responding to the humor. That was really refreshing, because when you’re working on something over such a long period of time, and you’re watching it 10, 20, 30, 100 times, the impact of it just gets lost on you. So just realizing, oh, yeah, it is a funny film and there’s just so much in it that hits, it’s a very heartwarming feeling.
AB: I don’t know if Juan Soto reads InRO, but do you have any messages for him, if he happens to come across this interview?
JAV: Juan Soto? [Laughs] I’m not super… I’ve actually had a lot of issues with my family because I’ve always been a Mets fan.
AB: You’re kidding me.
JAV: They’re all diehard Yankee fans.
AB: How did that happen?
JAV: I don’t know. I’ve always been a born contrarian. I’m going to root for the underdog, because you guys always win. My grandfather was a Mets fan, so it just kind of happened.
AB: Well, begrudgingly, I guess, congrats on Soto.
JAV: I guess, maybe, you don’t have to put that in the interview because I’m going to get killed [Laughs].
AB: [Laughs] No way! It’s on the record, we’re using it.
JAV: Ok. Well, I also stopped watching baseball years ago. Not the easiest thing to follow in London. They’re trying to get me into cricket. I’m like, oh, I’m not doing that shit.
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