Nicolás Pereda’s latest offering, Lázaro at Night, deals with three actors in a love triangle struggling with the line between their roles and the real world. Providing a thoughtful exploration of authenticity, this film doubles as a scalding satire of the film industry. Ahead of its New York Film Festival premiere, I was able to speak with the Mexico-City based director about humor, camera placement and more. I hope you enjoy the discussion!
This is a movie that could be intense, but is actually very funny. How important was that for you? Was it present in the script’s early versions too?
Yes, especially over time. A while ago I started to think of my films as comedies and making them from things I thought were funny, things that come from personal observations that I find funny, and perhaps the people involved aren’t laughing, and maybe it’s not so funny I laugh out loud but funny interactions with friends or people or situations that I observed. Because this film is about actors and artists, directors, a world I’ve encountered, I try to incorporate a lot of that into the film. Lots of the situations have not necessarily happened to me but have happened in my vicinity, things that I’ve observed.
A lot of artists borrow from real life, but does it ever get in the way of the creative process? How do you navigate that balance?
It’s unconscious, so it’s not like I have a chart of things that I come up with and things that I’ve lived through and find a balance. It’s more like I start to write and things start appearing and some things are more conscious. A friend of mine was talking about getting paid to do castings. I remember very specifically who told me that, and in what context and why she was talking about it, and so I incorporated it. There, there was no ambiguity where I got that idea from. The director casting via looking at someone drinking a glass of water is also a friend of mine, even though his personality is very different than the one in the film. I know where I got some things from, and some things I can’t exactly know. For professional writers, or people who write every day, let’s call them, it comes easier. They have that muscle. I don’t write every day, and I wouldn’t consider myself a writer in the fact that I’ve never published anything, and the screenplays aren’t very literary at all. There are no descriptions. My relationship to the blank page is not very easy, so the world around me and the anecdotes of my friends are really helpful to get going.
Some directors try to write as little as possible.
Actually, I’ve gone the opposite direction. I used to write less. I wish I wrote more. I enjoy writing, but I need to have a lot of ideas before I can sit down and start writing or else I’ll just stare at the blank page and not write anything. I need to make a lot of notes, I need to spend a lot of time thinking about the film; and then when I start writing the process is fairly fast because I’ve done a lot of work throughout several months. It is collaborative with the actors but in a very different way. There were films in the past where it was all improvised and so on, but now I write things and I ask them to basically say it how it’s written. They obviously change some words and there’s some leeway, but the scenes tend to be fairly long, single takes. I don’t have an editing tool to shorten or lengthen or give them other rhythms. The scenes have to have an internal rhythm when I shoot them, which means that’s thought through when I’m writing. So, if they were to improvise a lot, that internal rhythm would fall apart super easily. The silences, everything is measured. When I’m working with them, then I change things. We change things together, we tighten things. But it’s not changing the improvisation, it’s saying this line doesn’t work, then we collaborate there together. It has to flow from beginning to end. There is a lot of collaboration but we start from something quite solid.
I love the way you shoot dialogues. The camera is often very still. How’d you come to make that decision?
It’s something that I rethink about with time. When I started making films, about twenty years ago, I had very concrete ideas of why I was doing that. It had to do with observation from one single perspective that’s closer to the way we observe the world. The idea of maintaining the single camera position made it impossible to edit, unless I had jump cuts—which I don’t do—which meant that time would flow closer to the real-life experience. I was trying to find ways, in a sense, to connect to our experience. In a sense, it was a naïve take, the idea that our observations could mimic the observations in cinema. Time flows differently in cinema. But it generated a certain aesthetic. Somehow, I got used to doing things this way. There’s something kind of amazing when I’m making a film, to be able to see the actors do a scene for three minutes straight. Not interrupting them, not having them repeat the scene exactly. If you do a wide shot for three minutes and do closeups on each side for three minutes, there is something mechanic that starts happening that is less enjoyable in the moment. It’s not so much about the product of the film, it’s more about the process. I make a lot of films, I need to enjoy the process. There’s something about, every single time I say action, seeing the whole thing again and not dealing with a lot of shots I’m not interested in with coverage and everything else. I have a previous film from 2020 called Fauna that had a slightly bigger crew. In Lázaro at Night there was only two of us. I was doing the camera and there was a sound person there. I was pulling focus. I wasn’t going to move the camera or do too many complicated things, and I think it worked for this film. But in Fauna what I was trying to do for example was be able to have closeup medium and wide shots without moving the camera, so the actors would move. That was a way of creating a sense of coverage without having to edit. There was a little bit of panning that also allowed for that. I would be in a close up of someone, then I would pan into a wide shot of someone, then the person who was in the close up would walk into the frame, things like that. That I enjoyed a lot. For this film, it was very difficult to do that kind of choreography under the circumstances. It was 2021. But the fact that the crew was so small allowed the film to exist.
You were the writer, director, editor and cinematographer and were part of the sound team for this project. How did those roles influence each other?
I’ve been working with the same actors for a long time. So, for me, my biggest collaboration with other people is with these actors. I think these actors give everything to my films. So, even though I control a ton of it, there is a collaboration with them that transforms everything I do. If it wasn’t with them, it would be totally different. There’re biographical elements in the films of the actors. Then there’s all these other jobs (writing, editing, all that stuff) where generally you’d work with other people. But because the budgets of the films are so small, I prefer using all of the funds to pay the actors and the one sound person than paying them less and hiring an editor and sound designer and so on. That can get really expensive as well. For this film, for the first time, I learned how to use an audio editing software and to more or less mix. I’ve been doing color correcting for a little while and now I just like the process.
There’re multiple uses of voiceover and sound in this film that feel very radical. What was the process behind those choices? There’s also some great use of silence.
Sound, in this film, was for me a big revelation. I have never paid enough attention to sound. I was always thinking about sound accompanying what I was filming, so there was a lot of silence, but there was silence because no one was talking, there’s no noise in the spaces, I was not into creating sound design that was very overwhelming. I like the quiet sound design almost always. There’s something about the blank space, the empty wall, the quiet sound, that makes you feel more present because you’re not so overwhelmed. I feel like I’ve done that before unconsciously, but this film, when I was writing the screenplay I realized I’d thought so little about sound. So, I came up with this idea that I’m sure others have done before where characters will leave the frame and take the sound with them. That’s something I had never done or thought about that, but then I thought there was something beautiful about the possibility of expanding space with sound. Like that scene where Lázaro’s watching YouTube and leaves the room and suddenly you stop hearing YouTube. It’s almost as if the microphones were taken with the characters. It’s almost like you have to start imagining the mother’s room, the rest of the house. In a sense, that sound world expands the space. The camera’s not moving but the space is expanding. That idea was in the writing and I was excited about doing it. Then there’s this idea that came in editing about using a scene that you cannot see in a different moment. With film, generally, you’re watching characters in a particular time. What sound allows you to do is watch two scenes at once in different time periods. It’s almost like you’re able to watch parallel times through sound. It’s very simple gestures that make the process of watching a little more complex. In the experimental film world, people do this all the time. I think there’s an opportunity in fiction filmmaking to do things that are unexpected even though they’re kind of simple or quite obvious.
Far from obvious, the film is very complex. It was such a joy to watch and I can’t wait for people to watch it at New York Film Festival. Thank you so much for the time!
Of course!
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