Int: Fernando Eimbcke

Fernando Eimbcke acknowledges it: Duck Season
is heir to Jarmusch’ Stranger than Paradise. This talented 35 year-old, (who looks 15 years younger), doesn’t try to deny it. He even thanks Jarmusch in the movie credits, as well as Yasujiro Ozu, “two of my biggest influences”. “Everybody who watches my movie can tell what directors I am a fan of but I wanted to make it explicit and thank them on the credits” he said in a recent round table interview in New York.

But if he was a merely copy-movie-maker he would have never got 11 Ariel Awards (the Mexican Oscars) and dozens of prizes inside and outside the Mexican border. Eimbcke’s movie talks to audiences around the world in a language that is not usual in this century. The norm are fast movies wrapped in special effects that hide empty scripts full of meaningless words. Duck Season is exactly the opposite: zero visual tricks, not even colors or artificial lights, a movie in black and white with a controlled rhythm and a script without words-overdose that is able to say many deep things through quality humor and tenderness.

The whole movie happens on a Sunday in an apartment and involves only four people. Flama and Moko are two teenagers ready to spend their Sunday playing video games and eating pizza. At one point, another teenager, Rita shows up. She is a neighbor looking for an oven to bake a cake. The fourth character is Ulises, the pizza delivery man. When the power in the building goes off, they will find themselves together in a space in which they are not used to interact. But somehow they will find a way to do it, opening the door to feelings and emotions that usually hide behind pizza and videogames.
The exploration of the loneliness of childhood, the effects of divorce or the power of friendship is showed in Duck Season in such a fresh, fun and sweet way that watching it becomes a strange moving and laughing experience.
And that was exactly what Fernando Eimbcke was looking for when he started this project, “a movie that I could enjoy watching”.

Question: Duck Season was a small movie and then you got awards, all the great Mexican directors like Cuaron or González Iñarritu embraced it, now it is opening in the States… did you expected this kind of reaction?

Fernando Eimbcke: No. I never expected it. We made the film like if we were in film school, with almost no money, in five weeks, just with natural light… We wanted to be proud of it and we did it with a lot of love and effort. Then many things happen to it and it was amazing and we weren’t ready for it.

Q: Why did you choose to do a black and white film?
FE: The script asked for black and white. I was watching a lot black and white movies at the time so when I finished the first draft I reread it as if it was black and white and it worked. We made a camera test and we found that it really helped the story. It is a very simple story and the characters are so settled that the black and white helps to keep the attention on what it’s happening. Actually, at the end we realized that even helped with volume and geometric forms. Something that color wouldn’t have give to us.

Q: What are the movies you were watching at the time?
FE: Band of Outsiders and Breathless from Godard, Stranger Than Paradise, Tokyo Story…

Q: Are you interested in shooting in HD?
FE: Of course. I love the discipline that 35mm gives to you but the future is digital. Very soon everything will be digital.

Q: What’s the story behind the painting? [There is a duck’s painting that has a big part in the movie]
FE: We hired a painter and we asked him to do it and when I saw it I thought it was awful. He is my friend and he was very proud of it and I told him I liked it, even if I didn’t…

Q: But why that particular image is connected to divorce in the movie?
FE: I don’t know… My parents didn’t divorce but they fought, like many other couples and when they used to fight I felt in a battlefield and there was always something to fight about. I had also a lot of friends whose parents got divorced and I saw them going through really hard times but never talked about it, neither with me or other friends.

Q: How did you cast the kids?
FE: They had never done a movie. Moko (Diego Cataño) had a short part in a film, but it was a really different one. We didn’t hire a casting director but a theater director and she helped me a lot. One of the main parameters for choosing was the vibe between them because we knew that with actors of that age the most important thing is not the acting skills but the chemistry. And that was proved when we chose Rita (Danny Perea). We actually hired someone a little bit younger but we put her together with the kids and nothing happened. So we looked for a different Rita and suddenly, there it was. Moko was shaking by her side so we saw chemistry there.

Q: Did they enjoy the shooting?
FE: We learnt a lot from them because at the beginning, during rehearsal time, I let them play a lot but then I told them: fun is over, now you have to work. And Moko came to me and told me, so what’s the point? I said: you are hired to work. But then I started to think that as a director I had the responsibility to make them work but at the same time to make them having fun with the job, and it was a good start and it definitely worked.

Q: It seems that there is a new trend about using actors who are not professionals…
FE: I guess this is a response to something. During the Italian neo-realism directors decided to not use professional actors either. I think this is a moment in which people who do movies are looking for freshness and I guess non-actors help about it.

Q: Is Duck Season inspired in your own experiences?
FE: I had two older sisters but I guess mainly it was inspired on my boyhood; the boring part of my boyhood. Writing the script was basically trying to escape from those memories of boredom.

Q: Did you always wanted to be a filmmaker?
FE: No, never, I went to a very traditional catholic school and in my family everybody was an engineer or an accountant.

Q: So how it happened?
FE: By accident. I didn’t want to be like my parents and I started to study communications but after three months I quit. So I started to work with a photographer who one day told me that he had made a film so I went to see it and I was shocked to discover that you could actually do movies in Mexico. I asked him where he had studied and he recommended the CUAC (Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos). I applied but I was rejected so I spent a whole year watching three and four movies a day. Then I applied again and I got in.

Q: You have already another project… (Lake Tahoe)
FE: Yes, I’ve been working on a script for a while that took me to the Sundance Lab too. It was a great experience, I thought I was in the last draft but I discover that I was only at the first one…

Q: Are you afraid of doing a second movie after all this success with the first one?
FE: In Mexico there is nothing to be afraid of because there is no industry so if you make a film is because you really need to make a film. And now I have another one in my computer so…

Warner Independent Pictures releases Duck Season
on March 10th (today!) in New York and Los Angeles with a wider release to occur in the weeks to come.