Chris Weitz on Twilight Nods, Oscar Hopes, and the Politics of A Better Life

I live in L.A. myself, but I came to a new realization of how vast and isolated Los Angeles is while watching A Better Life. What is it about that quality that makes this such a specific L.A. story?

I think it has something to do with the way L.A. was constructed, and with the breakdown of public transit early on in L.A.'s modern history. So we live literally in these bubbles, our cars, and we get from point A to point B. It's a very nodal city. We sort of pass by everything else at 40 miles per hour, and in doing so we miss so much of the color that defines other people's lives, and the life that we could experience if only we slowed down to take a look at it. L.A. is really a series of these microclimates, parallel universes that operate independently of one another. The people of Boyle Heights are equally unconscious of what's going on in West L.A. To them, Boyle Heights is their Los Angeles -- that's L.A. There's a montage in the movie which is constructed to show the distance, both in space and in time and in cultural terms, from Malibu to East L.A., going through all of these varied neighborhoods. And it's rather melancholy, too, because you see everything people miss out on. The experience of making this film was fantastic and eye-opening and mind-expanding because a whole new city was opened up to me.

Which part of the city do you live in?

I live in Malibu.

Aha!

Let me just come out of the closet on that one. I like to call it "Topanga Adjacent," because it sounds hipper. [Laughs] But really, I live where Carlos [the film's protagonist] goes to work. And so East L.A. is geographically distant from me, but actually all I have to do is hop on the 10, to the 110, to the 101, and I'm at Homeboy Industries, where my friends Father G and Hector Verdugo work, and I am in East L.A. -- in Mexican L.A. More people, I think, should take the time to go there and experience it. I think L.A. is sort of a bellwether of the way that the country is heading. With gated communities and larger and larger excerpts, we are losing touch with one another.

Along those lines, it's been said by your producers that A Better Life is not a political film, and yet the very act of making your protagonist an illegal immigrant sets up the audience to sympathize with his plight.

Well, the movie camera is inherently sympathetic; unless you dress someone up as Darth Vader and play scary music, you're actually going to take an interest in the person who's in front of you. So in that regard, we can't make a movie about an undocumented immigrant without it being in some way viewed as political. But to me the real importance about this is the love between father and son, which can't find its way in the beginning of the movie and finds its way toward the end. We're not trying to be cute by saying the movie isn't political, it's really that we didn't have a political aim in mind. This is just a great story to us that happens to rest next to a hot button issue. But if we'd really been keen on making this movie very political, we would have shot it differently, I think, inasmuch as we would have demonized the authorities more, but to me they're just as worthy of sympathy as the undocumented immigrants in the film. And I think we'd have a different approach to publicizing the film; I'm sure we could get Rush Limbaugh to say how much he hates this film...

And maybe he will!

Maybe he will, but we're not going out of our way. You can get a lot of press by shocking and angering people, but we're really more concerned with these performances by Demian and Jose and how that affects people.

It really is beautiful to watch the bond between their characters grow and develop over the course of the film, and as they traverse the terrain of Los Angeles their story evokes the immediate influence of Bicycle Thieves. To what extent was that film instrumental here?

I mean, that's one of the greatest and most beloved movies ever made, so I've been very leery to use it in the same sentence as my film, because that's kind of blasphemy to me. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the classical cinema. And of course the whole movie, in a way, is a nod to Bicycle Thieves. There are some differences here; the son is older, so the friction between father and son is much greater and is a theme that runs throughout the movie. And the father's inability to express himself to his son is an important element.

What's so powerful about reflecting the plotting of Bicycle Thieves is that throughout the course of their journey together through the city, Luis is really able to see, for the first time, what his father's life is like.

The veil is lifted from in front of his eyes. He knows what he knows, and in many ways he knows more than his father does about gangs, about the modern world. His father keeps his head down and works. And in some ways, Jose's character Carlos knows that he is not going to make it in the Anglo world, and that kills him. Or at least, he thinks he knows that. But what Luis has got wrong is that he has no respect for his father's work and his father's sacrifice, and within the heart of every cynic -- and I think many teenagers are, by nature, cynics -- there is still this bud of hope, and his father somehow manages to keep that alive.

How did you find those two? Demián's performance in particular feels like a potential awards contender.

Yay! Well, I would like to get Demián nominated, I think it's an extraordinary performance. He is a big star in Mexico, and I saw him in Che and then watched some of his Mexican films and thought, "This guy is amazing -- he has to be the Gardener." For me, the secondary advantage was that his face wasn't instantly recognizable to everybody in America. When you cast somebody like Benicio del Toro or Javier Bardem, you also cast every other movie that they're in, every other character that they've ever played, to an audience that's familiar with them, and that can be a hindrance. So he was always my guy. José, we had a Mexican casting director as well as Joseph Middleton, who is the casting director my brother and I always work with, and she had seen José in an audition for something else and brought him in. And he was just extraordinarily naturally talented and smart and responsive. And he knows what he's talking about. He grew up in East L.A. and he took three buses to get to our auditions; it was a five-hour round trip for him to get to auditions.

And he was 16 years old at the time?

Yes. It means something to him. There are a multiplicity of stories that could spring from the people I've met while making this film.

I noticed during the opening credits crawl of A Better Life that you had a number of key crew that had done New Moon as well -- your composer Alexandre Desplat, your music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas, even your DP, Javier Aguirresarobe. What brought them back to work on this with you?

Along the way, if you are lucky enough to have a long-ish career you get to meet people with whom you feel really simpatico. All of them individually became enamored of the script, they weren't just going to do it for me. Javier is one of the world's great cinematographers and brought this fantastic outsider's perspective to Los Angeles. Alexandre is a huge composer and was able to give some of his free time to this movie. Alexandra Patsavas locked down all of these great bands, including eventually Ozomatli, who are like the prototypical great L.A. band.

Between the score and the soundtrack, the musical identity of the film is really vibrant, but there's a wide range of flavors. What kind of sound were you going for?

Yeah, it's quite varied -- there's a lot of Latino rap, there's reggaeton, there's narcocorrido, which is this scary music which sounds like mariachi music but is actually about people being shot and beheaded.

I've heard of it -- songs dedicated to various drug lords and such.

Yes. So when Carlos is in the club and they're playing all this funny-sounding, cute music, the lyrics are actually about people being killed.

In addition to opening A Better Life this summer, you're also producing American Reunion with your brother. We've seen pretty much the entire original cast return for this, but is Natasha Lyonne also coming back?

You know what, I am so frickin' clueless at the moment because I've been doing all the work on here, I'm not sure if she is. I sure hope so. I saw Natasha a while ago, and you know, she went through a tough time but she's better. She seemed very well when I saw her, and it was great to see her.

A Better Life is in limited release Friday, June 24. Read Movieline's review here.

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