When it comes to finding those rare, thoughtful, well-written parts for women, writer-director Rodrigo García is, well, the man. The filmmaker made 2000's Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes, and 2001's Ten Tiny Love Stories. Both ensemble pieces were written from a female perspective and packed with experienced, high-profile actors such as Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, and Kathy Baker. But Garcia insists his writing is not so much about women, specifically.
"I don't think of any of the three movies as being about
women or about problems of women. I have more fun writing women and imagining myself as the other, but I have no idea why that is," García says. "Two months before we started shooting [Nine Lives], all of these women were available. Obviously they only had to work for a few days, but that just gives you an idea of how underused a lot of these women are. Lucky for me, the only reason I get the movies made is because I can get these very good name actors in there. Before I cast a movie, no one wants to put up money for them. No one wants to make them. It's thanks to [the actors] that I can make the movies."
In comparison with his past projects, García is happier with how Nine Lives' male characters turned out. "[They] are more developed this time around. [Before,] they weren't as differentiated as the women," he admits. Inspired by one-take masterpieces such as Russian Ark and Code Unknown, Garcia added the extra challenge of doing all nine stories in one continuous take. It is perhaps not so tough when you have pros--including Close, Hunter, Baker, Sissy Spacek, Aidan Quinn, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Joe Mantegna, Robin Wright Penn, William Fichtner, Amy Brenneman, and Dakota Fanning--doing the acting.
"[Casting director Amy Lippens and I] were in preproduction, and we had the headshots of our cast up on the wall," Garcia recalls. "It gives you a great deal of confidence. It relaxes me because I know they're going to pull it off. Most of these actors come from theatre, anyway. They've been onstage for two hours. They know how to carry something. So, of all the paranoia of the one-take shots, the acting was the least of it."
Garcia is no fan of the audition process, so when it comes to casting, he would rather see pretaped footage. "I really only audition for the smaller parts, and it's half over when the actor comes through the door," he says. "The casting process is not about acting. Plus, it's crucial because you never recuperate from a mistake in casting."
Nine Lives was executive-produced by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director behind ensemble tour de forces Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch) and 21 Grams. The combination of Inarritu and Garcia helped make Nine Lives the third and strongest film in Garcia's triptych. The themes of the nine 12-minute stories are people being trapped in cages of their own making, including a mother (Elpidia Carrillo) in prison, a woman (Hamilton) torn between killing her father or herself, and a pregnant woman (Wright Penn) running into a past lover at the supermarket.
Garcia says he never fully knows a character until the actor plays it. "I often write characters a little hard-boiled," he says. "I wrap them a little too tight, and when actors come in, they humanize them and blow this oxygen into them, and [the characters] become these lovely human beings. Sometimes I'll watch the choices actors make, and I'll say, 'Oh, isn't that lovely. Now I know what she means when she says that.' I have my gut feeling about what she's like, but it's not until I see them in the flesh-and-blood of Sissy Spacek, Kathy Baker, Robin Wright, that I say, 'Okay, now I get it.'" At a recent event at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, Baker complimented Garcia's directing style, saying, "No direction is needed. Rodrigo is very soft-spoken because his directing comes off of the page. It's from the heart."
When it comes to hidden exposition and motivations in his characters' past, the former cameraman prefers to let the well-qualified actor fill in the blanks. "I think that the greatest tool that an actor has is his or her imagination," he explains. "If you're the writer and director, it's so easy to say something that an actor is going to take at face value. So I try to say as little as I can to actors, because I don't want to be in their head when they're acting. If the actors don't need me to answer questions, I'd rather not answer them. For example, I had never met Robin Wright or Jason Isaacs before. We had two days for each segment: one day to rehearse and one day to shoot. They each had decided what had happened to that couple in the past. They said, 'Do you want to talk about it?' and I said, 'No, you guys talk about it. You figure out what had happened. If you disagree, I'll come in. If you agree, then I won't come in.' So, they talked and agreed, but I can't tell you what happened to that couple. I need the scene, the moment, to work. All the answers about the past? I don't have them."
A Writing Tradition
Garcia's father, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and won a Nobel Prize in 1982. "My father wrote screenplays with Carlos Fuentes and others. So, it was a common sight growing up seeing two people in the living room trying to break out a story for a movie," he recalls. "My father used to say, 'There's nothing better than something well-written.' So when you hear things like that when you're a kid, they stick to you." The Colombian writer taught his son the importance of writing every day. "The worst option was to wait around for a good idea because then months or years could go by and you would never write," says Garcia.
He studied medieval history at Harvard, but an early interest in still photography blossomed into a 16-year career as a director of photography and cameraman for films such as Great Expectations, Reality Bites, Gia, and Four Rooms. He graduated from American Film Institute and worked his way up from production assistant to directing Carl's Jr. and the Milk Processing Board commercials for the Hispanic market. In 1997, Garcia wrote Things You Can Tell, later workshopping it at Sundance's Writers and Filmmakers labs. There he met Baker and director Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes), who showed the script to Close. Within months, all three signed on. "[Avnet] got it to Holly Hunter, and Kathy Baker had already read it from working in the Lab," says Garcia. "You know, actors attract actors, so it was sort of a snowball effect. I was very fortunate to get a cast like that, obviously, for the first time."
In 1999, Garcia began directing episodes of The Sopranos for HBO and has become the cable network's darling director. He's helmed episodes of Six Feet Under and Carnivale, as well as the 2006 pilot Big Love, about a contemporary breed of polygamist Mormons in suburban Utah. Among Garcia's film projects in the works are Nick's Way, a day-in-the-life of an aging filmmaker and the women in his life; Passengers, about a woman assigned to work with a group of survivors from an airline accident; and Moments, a mosaic piece of 90 one-minute moments. "[The projects are] all in the same struggle," he notes. "Some have money and a script but no actor. Some have money and an actor but no script."
Garcia concludes, "As stressful as shooting is, watching actors at work is what gives me the most pleasure. It's very enjoyable to me." BSW
