Omar Rodriguez Lopez is an unusual debut director, even by Rotterdam's eclectic standards, as Ben Walters finds out
It's not just that he's already world famous as a musician – he's the guitarist with band The Mars Volta – but the film he's premiering in the Bright Future strand, The Sentimental Engine Slayer, is only one of five features he has already shot. Clearly, the prodigiously prolific production rate for which he is renowned as a musician applies to his interest in filmmaking as well.
“This is the first film I showed to anybody,” Rodriguez Lopez says, “the first to go outside the womb or the nest. I've always got a film project on the go. I've made a lot of shorts, just for the process of it. The process is everything, the experience is everything. It's a form of therapy.”
Shoestring
Dating from 2007, The Sentimental Engine Slayer was produced on a shoestring with collaborators “sleeping on the floor for a month” and follows Barlam, a young Texan struggling to make sense of family, sex, drugs, work and the world in general. Expressive and increasingly psychedelic, it's a heady, empathetic piece, moving but not sentimental in any conventional sense. Rodriguez Lopez is compelling as Barlam but, he says, playing the role was an entirely contingent decision. “It was not something I wanted to do. I hate being the centre of attention – like with the band, my friend is at the front, let everyone focus on him while I concentrate on the music! But my main actor walked away a week before shooting. He was offered a paying job. So it was a question of whether to let the project die or step into something I already knew so well.”
Language
Engine Slayer's characters frequently slip between English and Spanish in a way that is a daily reality for millions of Americans, but is rarely seen on screen. This, the filmmaker says, is “something I don't like about American cinema, especially underground or independent cinema. They look down their nose at Hollywood but they give us the same version of America. It doesn't reflect reality, and when it does, it's sad stereotypes that border on racism. They just show white life in America, and even white life is not untouched by all the peoples that made the country.”
Music
As well as writing, directing, designing and starring in the film, Rodriguez Lopez, who has scored other people's features in the past, also wrote the music for Engine Slayer. “That's the easiest part for me,” he says, unsurprisingly. “I don't have to communicate ideas or translate things. With other people's movies it can take hours to get three notes – the director says 'I want the three notes of travel.' What the fuck is that?!”
Rodriguez Lopez is keen to question conventional categories. He rejects the term 'artist' as bourgeois, preferring to find evidence of being expressive in a range of activities. “We each find our way. The guy who kicks the ball at the goal or shoots the gun at the 'enemy' is also trying to figure out who he is.” He has a similarly permeable take on what forms his work. “Watching films shaped my music. People ask who my biggest influence playing guitar is and I say Margrit Carstensen in Fassbinder films – that's how I want to play! If I make music and my influence is music, then I'm just copying. If I like a character and want to capture that feeling, then I have to dig and dig and dig – but when I find water, it's the sweetest.”
Joined-up
Rodriguez Lopez, who lived in Amsterdam for a while – “It was great but it's too cold for my blood. I need a blue sky” – has been enjoying his first visit to IFFR. “It's great that this festival supports expression rather than glamour,” he says. After Rotterdam, he's returning to his current home, near Guadalajara, Mexico, to finish off his latest feature, which he will be submitting to festivals. “I'm finishing a cut on another film too, and there are five or six records that have to be mixed, a dog that needs to be fed, a mother who needs to be called...” His, then, is a joined-up life. “My music is not different from my film is not different from my cooking is not different from this conversation. It's all part of the project.”
More about The Sentimental Engine Slayer here.