ROMÁNTICO—Interview With Director Mark Becker

Michael Guillén: Mark, I heard about Romántico when it was at the Film Foundation's festival. Michael Hawley, who frequently contributes to The Evening Class, was enthused about the film, encouraged me to see it, and so I'm glad I've had the opportunity. I live in the Mission myself and I'm sure I've seen Carmelo and Arturo. It's quite possible I even hired them through La Rondalla to play mariachi music at my home for a party I gave my Mom some years back when she was visiting San Francisco. Thus, it was great to see your in-depth portrait.

It's my understanding that this particular project Romántico started out because you wanted to do a study of the "bachelor culture" of musicians in the Mission? But then it actually ended up being a poignant tribute to family and marriage. How did that come about?

Mark Becker: As part of the process of making a documentary, it's a virtue of the filmmaker if they can keep open-minded—as far as what the film will be about—through the process. I had a vague notion of what the film was about. I was sure I liked elements of these two guys, their lives, and I could see how it could be cinematic and I could see how there could be contradictions. For example, it was an obvious interest of mine that they were Mexicans singing love songs to gringos and knowing that they were thousands of miles away from their loved ones. I knew I was interested in the fact that they created surrogate families for each other. When I talk about the "bachelor culture", what I mean is often the musicians would live in the same apartments, they'd cook together, they were each others' surrogate families here in the U.S., despite the fact that they had wives and children in Mexico. All those elements were interesting to me and I knew that they may come together in an interesting way, but I didn't know how. The reality of Romántico—and I think this may be the case for a lot of borderline sort of verité films (I hesitate to call my film verité but it's somewhat verité)—is that things happen and evolve. Things happen to the characters during the course of filming a movie. I found myself more interested and more compelled by the drama that Carmelo kept giving me than I was by my initial preconceived notions of what the film would be about. At a certain point I thought it was important for me to give in to the story that Carmelo was giving me, which was a very personal story. It was a story about the juncture between work and family and how the two don't necessarily work hand in hand always. Carmelo [thought] he was doing such a better job of taking care of his family when he wasn't with them, when he was a thousand miles away from them in San Francisco, and so my process was to let the story evolve and to not impose in too strong of a way my original preconceived notion of the film and try as hard as I could to channel what I thought was compelling about what Carmelo was giving me.

Guillén: Well, I'm really glad you didn't replace him with Antonio Banderas!

Becker: [Laughs.] I pride myself on being very communicative about the process with film subjects because I don't like the idea that you just show up with a camera on your shoulder and shoot without explaining a little bit about how documentary filmmaking works. From the get-go I talked to Carmelo about how the film was being financed because I wanted him to be comfortable with the fact that this was … y'know, it's always an odd situation that you're spending money on a film when you're making films about people who don't have any money. I was honest about that. I talked to him about how the filmmaking worked, how we spend a lot of time with any given person, and you end up choosing small moments from all of your footage and I thought he really got it, that this was a documentary about him, I'd be spending a lot of time with it, and that I'd be culling it down to an hour and a half film. It was so shocking to me, two years into the project we were just sitting around having a chat, myself and my crew members eating lunch in Mexico and he asked one of my friends, "When are you going to be replacing me with the actor?" Two years and he thought he was research. [Chuckles.]

Guillén: That brings up an interesting point. You describe financing a film about someone without money, but was Carmelo reimbursed in any way for his participation in the film? Or was the fact that you chronicled his story for his family sufficient compensation for him?

Becker: My understanding with him from the beginning before I got to know him and became what I guess you'd call friends with him [was] that I had a certain budget for the film that was from grants and the film was being funded by those grants. That's how I explained to him that—despite the fact that it might look like I had a bunch of money—it's really this borrowed money that's paying for this film about him. I also explained to him that you can't—I mean I'm just upfront, maybe I shouldn't be, but I was just upfront—I said, "Y'know, you really can't pay documentary film subjects because that would turn you into an actor and I don't want you doing anything for me. I want to be able to capture as much reality as possible." He's always wanted to tell the story of his life. That's the way he understood it from the beginning. That being said, I think there's this dynamic [that's] really bizarre, which is how diametrically opposed this documentary ethos is—never pay your film subjects—from the human relationships which are, like, okay, you've now grown familiar and you have some affection for your film subject and they're suffering in myriad ways and can you help them in any way without interfering with the documentary that you're making, which is supposed to capture truth?

Guillén: Yes. It's like the major imperative in Star Trek.

Becker: You've lost me there.

Guillén: That you're not supposed to affect history even if you go back in time. You're to remain non-intrusive.

Becker: Oh right. I see. So I should say—I don't know if it's worth noting—but when I would go down to Mexico, my family at the end of a shoot would give him what I call "the gift." It was made clear it wasn't payment for services but it would be like—I interrupted your life, you fed me, here's some money, we're so grateful sort of thing—and so there was that. Within my modest means—obviously, they're not modest like Carmelo's—but, it was money that I was sure could help them for a couple of months. Then there's this whole notion—which I am so looking forward to—[of] helping his family now that the filmmaking process is over and there are none of the conflict of interests. The film will eventually make a profit. I'm still in debt to Romántico, but in the course of a few months I assume, I'm hoping, when it hits dvd, I'm going to be able to make a modest amount of money. After 7-8 years the film might make $10,000 or something and if I could split that in half and give Carmelo half of it, if it makes $20,000 and he can make $10,000 on the film, that would be enormous for his family.

Guillén: And would truly be generous on your part. I certainly didn't mean to make you defensive about how you've compensated Carmelo for his participation in the film; what I meant more to illustrate was how a documentarian cannot intrude upon the circumstances of what he's portraying; in your case, Carmelo's poverty and his struggle to survive. By way of separate example, I recently interviewed Rainer Hoffmann, the cinematographer for the documentary The Short Life of Jose Antonio Gutierrez, and in that film there's an arduous train sequence involving Guatemaltecos journeying North to the United States where in the back of my mind I kept wondering why Hoffmann didn't just offer to drive his subjects North? To help them out? But, of course, he couldn't do that. That would interfere with the truth of the situation and—in order to film that truth—Hoffmann had to actually ride the train with these immigrants.

Becker: I just worked on a film as an editor where there's so many back seat interviews with the film subjects. You're looking at this character sitting in the back seat and you're wondering (as an editor), "Why is he in the back seat?" The camera turns and you see it's the producer who's driving the car and then I'm thinking, "How am I going to use this? Why's he sitting in the back seat? What could justify this in the movie? Will you notice? Will you think, 'Who's driving him?' " So it's that thing. I would probably rather that guy—if he didn't have a car—to figure out how to be with him on that journey. Would he have to walk to a bus?

Guillén: So when you say that you don't think of Romántico as verité filmmaking, why do you say that?

Becker: I'm speaking of it in the purist sense. There's a lot of verité footage [in Romántico], total fly-on-the-wall footage, waiting for things to happen and I'm just filming as it happens, but there's also an element to the film … where there are poetic scenes where the film is bringing you to an emotional place that has to do with Carmelo's past, images inspired by Carmelo's memories, revisiting places he's been in his youth, and as cinematically as possible capturing those places, joining his voice to those images. That's all highly constructed stuff.

Guillén: Memory as narrative structure?

Becker: Yeah.

Guillén: It's my understanding that Carmelo was the last of the Mission musicians that you were interviewing for your film project and that—once you met him—you decided he was the one because he was "cinematic." What was it about Carmelo Muniz that you saw as cinematic? Both in him and his story that brought you to the point of developing the script to be a "reverse immigration story"?

Becker: First of all, there's two things that inspired me about him at the very beginning. At the very beginning it's sort of guess work but you're working on instinct. One thing that inspired me was that he, I thought, had a very—people may disagree—but, I thought he had a very charming face. I felt like I saw a life in his face. The way in which he communicated with me was expressive and I loved something about his stature. I almost immediately saw him—and this sounds horrible—but I almost immediately saw him in this iconic way, him with his gut and his diminutive stature. I saw him in a wide shot, this small, almost cute, old man. I don't know how to say it properly.

Guillén: Almost like an archetype?

Becker: Yeah, like an archetype. Yeah. He belied the notion of somebody who crossed the border. He's an older guy. He just has nothing to do with the conventional notion of a young, hungry migrant worker. He seemed like a guy who'd been through it a bit. He had those creases in his face, but, there was something I found very charming about his face and his physical look. The real thing was his manner of speaking. He was candid. He was compulsively honest. He was speaking from his heart almost immediately and that's something you don't always find. It was obvious that he had lived an examined life. There's almost a cultural arrogance—I was talking to someone about this at a Q&A in L.A. a couple of days ago—there's this cultural arrogance that people who live hand-to-mouth existences, just working to be able to make money for the family, to get by, don't necessarily live an examined life, one in which they're self-reflective. This guy, Carmelo, immediately I realized he'd lived a reflective life. He thought about his place in the world.

Guillén: That especially came through for me when you were showing scenes of him with his nieve cart. It reminded me of something Joe Campbell taught me: that it's in the performance of our everyday tasks that our radiance shines through. The fullbodiedness of his experience is radiant in those sequences and there's something quite magnificent in his trying to provide for his family however he can.

Becker: It's so hard to not sympathize with a guy who—in order to make money—hits the streets selling ice cream to poor children.

Guillén: And often actually giving it away, remembering how he as a poor child could not afford ice cream.

Becker: And often giving it away. There's a crazy irony. He's this avuncular character. The ways he makes a living are either by singing love songs at weddings or funerals or in bars to prostitutes, or he's selling ice cream to little children. There's something about a person who earns a living like that.

Guillén: There's also a philosophical tension to his life story that captured my attention. Here is someone who lived in San Francisco, making relatively good money to send home, who returned home because his mother is sick, and is then in a situation once he's returned home where he can't earn as much money as he was earning in the States. That's when he begins doing these other things—like pushing the nieve cart—to make ends meet, though he never quite accomplishes it, and nonetheless elects to stay.

Becker: The circumstance with regard to Carmelo's return home was completely unknown at the beginning of filming. Carmelo had been in California for three years at the time that I started filming. I chose one shooting week—I'm shooting on film so I was really particular about choosing the right shooting week in which I could get a lot of stuff and minimize the economic impact of the shooting because shooting on film's expensive—so I choose my one shooting week and Carmelo, as far as I know on day one, is in San Francisco for the duration. On day three I find out he decides to leave and on day five I'm in the airport and he's going home. The film—in many ways—came to me. It became what it was because Carmelo gave me the gift of a story and a plot. That's what Carmelo provided the film in terms of dramatic structure. But then there's the surprise, which was Carmelo's gift of his—I hesitate to say "soul"—but his sensibility. I asked him on that first audio interview if he had any questions for me, if I had not addressed something that I might have in my interview, and he said, "Well you know, Mark, I've been waiting a long time to tell the story of my life and I think that this is it." I never imagined that he, on his side, would have felt that he was waiting for me and waiting for this opportunity. Between that and his sudden need to depart and go home to Mexico, I feel Carmelo led me to Romántico.

Guillén: I'm Chicano myself and another aspect I much admired in Romántico is its poignant depiction of compadrismo.

Becker: I'm not sure of that word.

Guillén: That he and Arturo were compadres, that they were almost like brothers.

Becker: I see.

Guillén: The scenes where Carmelo remained loyal to Arturo despite Arturo's problems with alcoholism were touchingly effective and a shining testament of Carmelo as an individual.

Becker: Arturo is like family, no doubt. But there's also this element that it's very male. Arturo's wife tried to articulate her situation with Arturo, the degree to which she had to force him to go to rehab, and how he was a danger to himself. But Carmelo is like a guy who is a guy friend who's going to be much more forgiving to his guy friend than anybody would necessarily be to their spouse. They were compadres, yeah. You could look at it both ways: Carmelo is faithful to his male friend in a way that is typical of men and maybe a little bit blind to how one needs to combat problems like alcoholism.

Guillén: I would beg to differ. I think Carmelo was much more conscious than you're giving him credit for. By downplaying the problem Arturo was having with his alcoholism, by not judging or scolding Arturo when so many others were on his case about his drinking problem, that's how Carmelo offers his true friendship in helping Arturo recover. Carmelo's non-judgmental friendship becomes a space where Arturo can recover. I know this dynamic personally. Because—despite what you are saying—male friends frequently desert each other in moments of crisis like this, just because they're male friends doesn't mean they're loyal, but Carmelo doesn't desert Arturo. He remains loyal. He chooses to help Arturo out in his own way.

Becker: I think you're right in the sense that that's what makes them like brothers in a way. There's nothing Arturo could have done to lose Carmelo's faith in him.

Guillén: Because the compadre system is a system based upon mutual indebtedness. It is a leaning into each other. I felt your portrayal of that through Carmelo's character was fantastic and spot-on.

Becker: It's always about trying to approach the feeling I had during production. I don't even necessarily know if I can exactly psychoanalyze any particular character perfectly—and I'm sure I can't—but I do feel like I can try to approach when I'm re-imagining it during the editing process—that feeling I had when somebody told me that or explained to me that. How can I put this together so that you feel those same chills I felt during production?

Guillén: I imagine that you do that by filming what's there. You don't film hate. You don't film love. You film what's in front of you.

Becker: Right. And you don't impose your own prejudices onto the film.

Guillén: Which was one of the reasons I enjoyed your documentary. I felt I was being given the opportunity to look into Carmelo's life.

Becker: And be able to maybe, hopefully, feel like you're putting the pieces together yourself. I like the idea of putting the viewer in an active mindset where they don't feel like they're being dragged from point A to point B.

Guillén: You've written about preferring an "unbuttoned structure" to documentaries. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Becker: By the way, I say a lot of things. [Laughs.]

Guillén: And they sound good at the time, don't they? [Laughs.]

Becker: I can explain to you what I mean by that but I'm not like a person who is able, actually, to put precise words to my feelings. Sometimes I end up going towards the more poetic.

Guillén: I find the poetic completely valid when expressing oneself.

Becker: So I'm sure what I mean by that is that I like the feeling as a viewer—when I say "unbuttoned structures"—I like the feeling as a viewer that there's a little bit of a sense of the randomness of life. When you're watching it, you don't necessarily feel like from scene to scene to scene that the filmmaker is taking you up a plot ladder where it's transparent exactly what they're doing to you as the viewer, how they're manipulating you. Even though there's a certain amount of precision and work in editing to actually take you through a plot or a narrative, I don't like the feeling that the viewer feels it happening to them. That's what I mean. I like to preserve a lot of that feeling of [being] privileged to witness all this stuff, and you are feeling a narrative flow, but you're not feeling the acts and the work of the filmmaker; you're just feeling [the film] in a pure way and not in a way where you're thinking about how the filmmaker's leading you through this procession of scenes.

Guillén: In other words, it's not like you're scripting a conflict, the conflict is naturally arising in the material situations? One of the more interesting conflicts in Romántico was when Arturo said, "If Carmelo really wanted to return to the United States, he'd be back there by now." That made me question why Carmelo hadn't returned? Why didn't he really want to return?

Becker: At that point Arturo serves a strong purpose, which is that you don't necessarily want that statement at the beginning of the film, or the middle of the film, but it is nice once in a while when one of the characters helps crystallize a potential notion about your main character. I felt like Arturo there hit the nail on the head and I chose to leave it towards the end. Carmelo is, indeed, completely ambivalent about [returning to the States] and truly fosters a certain amount of healthy denial. He wants to be the person that he was when he was 54 or whatever and risked everything to help his family, and it feels like falling short if he just eliminates that from his vocabulary. If he at any point admits that he's never going back, then he's letting down his own sense of what he should be doing for his family. He needs to maintain—"an illusion" is maybe too harsh—but he needs to maintain a little bit of a hope that he can indeed go back and do what he feels is the only way that he can help his family in the manner that he wants to. The reality is: his health, less his age and more his health, and the political situation with the border becoming more and more difficult to cross, means that he could never come back as an undocumented worker. There's that scene in the bakery with the "embassy consultant" who makes it clear Carmelo is never going to come back legally either.

Guillén: Now it's my understanding that you actually shot on film? What prompted that choice?

Becker: I'm particularly inspired by documentaries that don't forget that it's a medium of visual storytelling and when I was making Romántico, I had that very much in mind. I wanted to make a film that spoke to audiences through not just what happens, but through composition, through the visual dynamic between the character and his space, his environment, and the idea that it could show in theaters was always [foremost in my mind]. When [the idea] started to turn into a feature, I couldn't help but envision someday being able to show it to a theater movie-going audience. If 10,000 people rent Romántico on Netflix, it will never make me as happy as [an audience screening]. I just had a screening in L.A. and we had a Q&A afterwards, and [I loved] feeling the reaction of an audience in a movie theater.

Guillén: It's palpable, isn't it? I absolutely agree. What with the new forms of cinematic distribution these days—direct to video, on demand, microcinema—nothing still beats sitting in a movie theater in the dark with an audience watching a movie projected on a large screen.

Becker: The collective experience.

Guillén: Has Carmelo seen the finished product?

Becker: Yeah. That may have been the highlight of the filmmaking process, even during production, being there at this festival in Morelia, which is in the north of Michoacan and an hour south of Salvetierra, [where] they had an outdoor free screening with a couple hundred people in attendance, sitting, standing on the sides, watching the movie projected huge. Carmelo showed up about a minute before the screening—it drove me crazy—I thought he was maybe nervous, pacing the streets, but it turned out he was just getting a taco or something; he was hungry. [Laughs.] He watched the film and, I'm sure, that must have been the most odd experience to watch—in a way like home movies—in this public setting. I know he watched the film with his hand over his mouth. I don't know his exact feelings. But I do know that, after the screening, I had a Q&A and I invited Carmelo up and he was greeted with the kind of reverence that I think anybody would like but especially a musician who likes being the center of attention. They stood up [cheering his name] in crazy reverence. He's a funny guy, I find, because he has this mixture of the humility that sometimes comes with tough economic circumstances but he also has this real pride.

Guillén: I see pride and shame (or humility) as two sides of the same coin.

Becker: Interesting. He started off as the humble Carmelo for a little while but soon thereafter he was quoting himself from the movie. [Laughs.] He was very poetic [in front of his audience] and he said something to the effect of, "I say in the movie that—ever since I was a boy—I wanted to be somebody. I feel like I've become somebody because I've told my story." It might sound crazy my repeating that to you. But you couldn't want anything more as a filmmaker than the subject [saying that]. You don't want to do some sort of whitewash of your subject where the film just makes them feel good about themselves; but, this is a film that shows some of his darker side as well and he seemed to feel that there was a certain amount of honesty in the film, which he could only be happy about. The fact is that he felt like he had accomplished this dream of his to tell his story. I felt, "I didn't fuck it up." The most important thing to me in production and editing was, okay, this guy was giving me the gift of his story and I wanted to be faithful to it and I wanted to rise—not to the challenge of it—but to what he's giving me in terms of his story. I wanted to be able to capture it in the filming in cinematic language.

Guillén: Well, in a way—and that's why I brought up the comment about the compadres—you and Carmelo shared something of that compadrismo and were mutually indebted to each other through this project.

Becker: I don't know. You have to be honest. You're making a portrait film. I would never be interested in making the film if Carmelo was just some sort of pure hero, a man who's doing wonderful things for the world, that's not my interest. My interest is in being faithful to the complexity of people, which isn't all [about] heroic acts. For example, his relationship with his wife, when he talks about her menopause as being a hardship because he can't enjoy a good meal without her bothering him, that's what I wanted to show because that's who Carmelo is. He's honest to a fault. He's completely faithful to the task of taking care of his children who belies any type of macho Mexican stereotype but who also has a first grade education, who's both incredibly reflective but old-fashioned in other ways, who goes to church to pray to the Virgin at times, but doesn't buy that you should have as many children as God is willing to give you, who has all these dualities. I wanted to bring that complexity to the film.

Guillén: Your instincts as a documentarian are sound, Mark. I suspect that—why documentaries have become so attractive to audiences—is precisely because there is a cultural zeitgeist that is exhausted with aggrandized heroic representations. Audiences identify more with simpler, more human heroics, conflicted and complex as you say, "normal" individuals who perform—as I was saying—their everyday tasks so that their humanity comes through, their compassion comes through.

Becker: Sometimes I feel that even documentaries try a little too hard to show you how wonderful people are.

Guillén: Granted. But Romántico is more of a window into one human being's life rather than any idealized portrait. To wrap things up, you've expressed that you've achieved what you wanted to do for Carmelo—which I agree you have done for him—but what are your hopes for Romántico now that it's finally opening up in theaters? Other than paying your bills?

Becker: [Laughs.] There's a few things that I want. In some ways I feel like—given the distribution market—Romántico is probably maximizing its potential. I would love the idea of reaching the masses with this movie because, of course, I make films and I work in film because I want to tell stories that people see. Of course I would love if the whole nation saw Romántico; but, that's unrealistic. It's like most documentaries in which the audience is going to be those that are inclined to go see a documentary. [Romántico will screen] in cities where it's probably going to reach the art house audience that is inclined to see this kind of film. What I'm happy about is that this film could have easily not been showing in the Lumiere and Shattuck cinemas. It could have easily shown on the festival circuit, showed to an even more rarified festival audience, and never seen the light of day of movie theaters. In 2008 it's going to be seen on The Sundance Channel. It's going to have a real dvd release through my distributor Kino. So on the one hand one could get greedy and want more and more but, ultimately, I do feel this was a labor of love and the fact that it's going to achieve its audience is something I'm really happy about. It's probably not going to make anyone any money. It's not going to make my distributor any money. It's not going to make me any money. [Hopefully,] Carmelo will make a little money out of it once we hit profit. I just cannot wait to call Carmelo to tell him we need to set up a bank account for him where I can wire a little money to him.

Guillén: That'd be cool. So what's next for you? Are you working on your next feature?

Becker: I'm working on researching my next feature and I'm working as an editor again trying to dig myself out of debt from this movie.

Guillén: Any hints on what the future doc is about?

Becker: It's a portrait about the ramifications of a colorful life.

Guillén: Oh, you've been reading my mail, eh?

Becker: [Laughs.] There's this fondness that people have, sometimes for family members who have had six, seven, wives and children from different families and this is a portrait of a man who's had that colorful life and it's about the ramifications of that. He's a larger-than-life character who has a certain amount of charm. It's in English and I actually look forward to working in my native tongue. [Chuckles.]

Guillén: Sounds intriguing and something to look forward to. Congratulations, again, on Romántico. It's a wonderful documentary and—if you're worried about your audience—you shouldn't be because I think it's an audience that's only going to grow as word gets out about this documentary. It's a beautiful slice-of-life from San Francisco's Mission District as well as an exploration into Carmelo's life in Mexico. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today and I wish you luck in your future project.

Becker: Thank you so much; I appreciate it.

Interview by Michael Guillén. Cross-published on The Evening Class, parts one and two.