Wednesday, July 4, 2007

JESUS BELTRAN: WHY DOES THE GRASS GROW GREEN?

PrizeWriter: The first time I heard you speak was after a screening of The Grass Grows Green. You were talking about your growing up experience and your background (how you came to engineering as opposed to film, to begin with). Can you talk a little bit about growing up, either as a kid or as a young person, and then how you envisioned your future at that time?

Jesus Beltran: My parents were both born in Mexico, and they came to the US and they ended up in Fort Worth. I’m not quite sure why you end up in Fort Worth, of all places, but I think they knew somebody—had a distant friend who was there and who offered them a place to crash more or less. So my dad came to the US, I believe in '71, maybe '70. He was there for about a year and then my mom finally came over. My oldest sister was born in Mexico. When my mother came over, she was pregnant with my older brother. So he was the first one that was born in the US—he always says, "I was ‘Made in Mexico,’ and ‘Born in the USA.’"

My dad was very fortunate that he was able to get a job pretty quickly. He had a trade more or less—he’s a paint mixer. You can take him a sample of something and he can match by eye. He learned how to do this in Mexico, so he was lucky to get a job real quick. I don't think he was much of a partier or drinker or anything like that, so he tended to stay out of trouble and was able to stick around and help my mom come over.

I was born in '77. My younger sister was born in '79, so there's four of us. We pretty much grew up in a working-class, lower-to-lower-middle-class Mexican American neighborhood in Fort Worth. We were never—I never worried about food, let's put it that way. Worried about other stuff, and my parents certainly had their ups and downs. My dad worked all the time, pretty much held two jobs. He had his day job working at an auto paint store. Then he'd come home, have dinner, and he always had a garage across the street where he fixed cars, paint and auto body. So he was pretty much in and out of the house. And then when he came home at night, he'd go to bed. He'd maybe hang out and watch TV a little bit, but not really.

So we grew up hanging out with our mom mostly, though my dad always tried to pull us over to the garage—my brother and myself. My brother was always a bit more ambitious and hard-working than I was. I guess he enjoyed the work. I more or less hated it—I'd go over for a few hours and then just want to leave and go screw around with my friends or read or watch TV or something like that.

PW:
Do you think of yourself as being one of those people who's always known what they wanted to do, from the time they were a little kid? Do you see a connection between your dad being able to look at a color and understand that color so that he could mix that color of paint--?

JB: No--

PW: You don't see that as a connection to your filmmaking or your being a visual person?

JB: No. I've never seen that part of it. I think more—If you want to look back—The only way I've thought of it is, as far as seeing any precursors to being interested in this, it's more just like having wide interests and always wanting to know about many, many topics. I would hear about something on TV or read about something, and then I'd go to the library and get like 5 books on that thing. And then I would just become obsessed about it for however many months it took to learn whatever I could learn about it. And then I would just totally forget about it and go to the next thing. That's one of the things that definitely appeals to me about filmmaking, is that you can lead multiple lives on each project. It's like a journey into somebody else's day-to-day.

That, and at a certain point I think in the 9th grade or so, I convinced my mom to get a video camera. My brother was a Marine, and he was out of boot camp. He was graduating, we were going— I somehow convinced my mom to buy this little video camera. Obviously it was a ploy to get a video camera to do other stuff, you know. You can buy a videotape of the graduation that they do professionally for $25, but she was cool enough to do it. We would recreate "Cops" episodes, we did plenty of those. My brother came back once from Twenty-nine Palms, with all his military gear. We said, "We gotta make something." So we did a kind of Gomer Pyle boot camp in our backyard—we set up obstacles and we put on uniforms and we did that.

But it never really seemed like something that would be like a career—I never really thought of it that way. I was always good at math and science, and you kind of get pushed in that direction once you excel at something. I think it's just the fact that I bore easily. Like I said, you can go do different things with each project. For me, that's actually one of the toughest things, in terms of thinking what I want to do for a next project. 'Cause there's so many things that seem interesting to me. And a lot of people are like, "I can't think of this," or "I can't figure out what to do now, I just don't have—" I feel like— "Damn, what do I do?" You need such a commitment, you know?

PW: Right. Well, that's one of my questions actually. You mentioned [at the screening] that you had 5 or 6 ideas floating around in your head at the time you made The Grass Grows Green. What made you decide that that story was the most relevant or the most urgent?

JB: I don't know that there's any way to describe it, but when you see a story or when you're doing a certain project or you hit upon an idea that you think is really unique, you feel a sense of urgency. And you feel like somebody might be thinking of this as well? Or you can't stop thinking about it…

PW: You feel the force behind it.

JB: Yeah. And this one—I liked the fact that I had experienced some of the things that the characters might have experienced in the film, and that my brother was in the military. It seemed like, just from a production standpoint, like something that I could do. It wasn't crazy ambitious in terms of locations and all that stuff. When I shared the idea with several people, they were like, "Wow, never heard of this—I've never seen a story like this." I shared it with Larissa, who was one of the producers; with my brother; some of the other producers and a few of my friends. They were like, "Yeah, that's a really good idea."

PW: There's something I want to jump back to, which is you talking about being an engineer and your way of looking at the process of production and being very deadline-oriented. What was your first step in bringing that project to fruition?

JB: Really, the first thing I did was: I had the idea. I went to South by Southwest last year with another idea that I liked, and I saw a film similar to that idea. It was a different story, but the theme was somewhat similar. Execution was not the way I would have done it, but it was good enough to get into South by Southwest and good enough that I was satisfied, very happy that somebody else had done it.

So I left that festival thinking, OK, I have to make the other one. I had met Santiago at South by Southwest. He was in First Date, which played there, and I was really impressed with his performance. I just got his business card and I said, "Hey, I'm thinking about making a movie. I'll call you if I do it." As he tells it, he's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." That's what everybody tells him, right? And so I wrote it on the way to China. I worked on drafts while I was over there for 3 weeks, shooting things back to my brother, to "Just give me a little feedback here and there."

I came back from China at the end of the month, felt pretty good about the script. And then I called Santiago. I remember the conversation. We had like an hour-long conversation. He didn't know me, I didn't know him. He was really interested. He said, "Man, send me the script." I told him, "I can't pay you," but that I wanted to do it right. He said, "Yeah, if I like the script I'll go, I'll take the time to do it."

I think I must have sent it to him on Tuesday or something. And that weekend I had to go right back to China. I was home for a week. He hadn't gotten back to me by Friday. I was leaving on Saturday. I remember going to dinner with a friend of mine. She's like, "What's wrong? You seem stressed out." I was like, "I don't think he likes the script! He hasn't gotten back to me, you know? I don't know what's going on. He's had it for 4 days, and it's 15 pages long."

Next morning he woke me up, it was around 10, I was sleeping in. "Man, I want to do it!" He was super excited. It's weird, you know. When you first start sending it out, those first few times you're very self-conscious about your work. But he loved it. He said he showed it to his business partner, and he showed it to his wife. And they all told him he had to do it. That really got the ball rolling. When you get an outside person involved, you don't want to— [laughs]

PW: You kind of owe it to them—

JB: Yeah, you owe it to them. You seem like a schmuck if you don't execute.

PW: Did you have experience directing actors before working with Santiago and before working on this film?

JB: Nn-hn. I read. I just read a lot. I have this used-book store, here and one back in Texas that I pretty much hit up every few months. I have a little library going of different books, just directing books. What I really like reading are biographies or even autobiographies, just about how other people have dealt with their own situations and their projects. There was one book that was very helpful in terms of it being instructional.

PW: Which book?

JB: It's Directing Actors. Judith Weston. This was one that I carried with me for about a month, and— I had a small notepad, and any time I saw something that I thought was really helpful, I would just write it on the notepad. I did take a few exercises from this book and use them for rehearsing with Santiago and Anthony. But they were more or less experiments [for] me.

PW: How did you surprise yourself in the process of directing, and what were the most daunting parts you hadn't expected at all?

JB: I think the most daunting part--I did expect and it was still daunting--was conveying emotion the way that I needed to convey it in front of a group of people. I guess previously feeling that talking about these things was a personal thing. I hope that if I continue doing this that I can work with just small crews. I just feel funny. You can't say it's a guy thing, but that's kind of what I felt like… [also] because I'm an engineer, and you don't have discussions like this on a day-to-day basis. In talking with Santiago, trying to get him into the state of mind where I thought he needed to be for some of these scenes, I more or less would pull him aside, and we'd go talk somewhere else. And then we'd come back to it.

The other thing that I did for a couple of his scenes was we'd talk a little bit, and then I would, if we were shooting MOS [without sound], play a certain piece of music like what we were shooting. That seemed to really help. It also was really cool, because these were pieces of music that I was listening to already, or that I had listened to before I wrote. Obviously there are technical things that are very difficult [for me] because I'm not a technician… I'm not a DP; I'm a pretty bad photographer.

PW: So how did that work? One of the things I noticed, your DP is the same for both your films--.

JB: Mm-hm. Aaron Platt.

PW: Beautiful, beautiful work. But totally different styles in both The Grass Grows Green and The China Project. How did you sit down and articulate the vision that you had for the film if you find this to be a challenge personally? You would not guess that by looking at it.

JB: Well, a lot of credit goes to Aaron; a ton of credit goes to Aaron… In terms of The Grass Grows Green, I think the look and the pacing was a big thing: the visual pacing of the film is a lot slower than The China Project. That had a lot to do with what the guy's going through, and it being your worst day at work, the kind of day that you're looking at your watch every 5 minutes. And it drags.

A lot of the things are obviously based on my experience of being in the physical locations where I had set the stories and how I feel when I'm in Texas, and things being a little bit slower. People are friendlier the way the people just walk in and out of doors. And China just being this hustling, bustling world where there's always something going on in the corner of your eye. You're in the factory, there's people doing this, that, you're out in the streets.

When I first met Aaron we sat down for like 4 hours. We sat down and more or less sketched a lot of things, like ideal looks, the office being a long rectangular room. The file cabinets at the end, kind of this subconscious morgue so to speak. When I went location scouting, I tried to get as close to our idea as we had sketched out back then.

PW: Sundance was always part of the equation. So when you sat down to do this project with a deadline in mind and Sundance being the goal, did you believe that it could happen?

JB: I have a friend, a wonderful really, really cool friend of ours, whose parents own a home in Park City. So [she] invited us out to Park City for Sundance about 2002. She’s kind of made it an every-year thing now. So I've been to Sundance—I had been 4 years in a row. I'd seen other films and—I mean, you just think, Man, I could do better than that! That's kind of a brash or stupid thought, but I felt that way. I was like, can I do a Sundance film? I don't know. I felt like I could do a film worthy of Sundance. Whether it would get in? You never know, it's programmer's choice. Was Santiago [Vasquez] a conscious decision because he did Sundance a year before? No. Santiago looked like a freaking Marine. He carried himself that way when I met him. He was the right age, he was a Latino, and he's a very intelligent person. And hell, he got into Sundance— I was excited about that because it gave us some credibility…

PW: So when you went to Sundance now as a filmmaker as opposed to an audience member or spectator, were you changed? Was your experience drastically different as a person with some stake?

JB: Oh, yeah. It was totally different. [laughs] It's like being the fat, dumb kid at school wanting to hang out with everybody, and all of a sudden somebody opens the door: "Hey, you're the coolest guy in the world—come on in!" [laughs] You just don't get in. Literally, you don't get in to certain places. And those are the obvious things in terms of just having access to those people that you want to meet and people who will give you 5 minutes, just to listen to what you have to say.

PW: How did you feel post-Sundance, coming back?

JB: Well, before Sundance I decided to do The China Project. Just based on my work schedule and needing a couple of weeks to do that, to shoot it. I just decided to cram it all into the period between quitting at Apple and starting my new job. So I took 6 weeks off. Two weeks were basically at Sundance, one week here. Two weeks doing the China thing, and then back to work, more or less. I was—

PW: Occupied?

JB: Occupied, yeah. If you say "stressed" you sound like a shit because you're at Sundance or whatever, but—You should be enjoying the moment, but I was stressed out. I don't know if I really analyze my state of contentment at any given moment. I'll do it every once in a while. I'll sit there when I'm by myself, and it kind of trips you out. But I tend to move on and I guess that's what we did with this one.

It was somewhat weird in that we're like, "We did it—we got into Sundance—shit, what's next?" This was the ultimate goal, and we did it. The day it got in, the day that [Sundance] called me, I had the funnest time just calling everybody. I was still at Apple. There were three of my best closest friends at Apple who knew that I had made a movie. Only one of them was in town at the moment. I called him: "What are you doing other than working on a spreadsheet?" [laughs] "Dude, I just got into Sundance." So we went across the street to a bar, to this pub and grill. Sat there and drank and called everybody for the next 4 hours. It was awesome.

PW: So to jump back to The China Project. Why did you decide to name it The China Project?

JB: [laughs] We started calling it that because obviously it was our China project, we're going to China, we're going to do this project. The reason I decided to stick with it was because a lot of times that's how you describe something you're working on. "Oh yeah, I gotta go to China for this China project." Kinda funny in this film because these guys may be telling their people back home, "Yeah, I gotta go work on this China project." It could be work, it could be having a good time.

PW: When you were working in manufacturing and you were first exposed to the culture of the guys that are overseas and the expectation that, particularly people who are working in manufacturing, have around having access to women and the sex industry, it obviously struck you enough to make a day-in-the-life. But what was it that struck you about it and how did you feel initially?

JB: I think—again, I use the word "absurd." Because it's kind of comical really, in my opinion, that these are grown men behaving like this, you know? They would never behave this way here. It's not even an act. It's just how people behave. It was funny. I mean, the first time I walked into one of these places myself and saw what was going on, you're somewhat shocked because you see the girls and they're like so young. I'll tell you this: I was more shocked when we made the movie than when I had ever seen this in real life. There's something about seeing it on the screen, seeing it so crisp the way that it was captured. The girls just look so frigging young. That was weird for me. Like when we first started shooting, it was like, "Whoa." It was somewhat difficult for me to describe to people. That made me really think like, OK, I have to show this. Because you can only describe something so well verbally. The attempt was really to try and place the viewer into this situation and see it for maybe the first time.


PW: The thing that struck me the most was that the whole film was told from the perspective of a woman. And that was really interesting, very feminist. That's kind of a feminist film concern, with female filmmakers starting in the '70s who were [dealing] with Otherness and the character in the film that's overlooked, the character in the story that doesn't have a voice. The person who's narrating the story—even though the [protagonist] is actually the man, is the woman.

JB: I think one of the reasons is obviously, it's kind of a man's world that you're looking at. Just by choosing a female you can say one thing. It's kind of jarring as well. That's one thing that I liked about it, was like, "OK, wow, we had a female here."

PW: She's also speaking [Mandarin, not English], which is really interesting because it's an American filmmaker. And it's subtitled. It's very very cool, but it was an interesting point.

JB: There's a lot of—a lot of things that are done because they're cool as well… The female Chinese Mandarin narrator was—I thought it was like, this is a street-smart girl, like kind of somebody who's just this observer. It could be like the mama-san who's working there, who sees this. Maybe she's been exposed to the industry for 15 years, and now she's managing girls. It's not I'm not saying that's who the narrator is, but it's somebody who has an insight into that world and maybe hasn't been drawn into that, I guess, the male side of it.

PW: The factory stuff that you shot, you were saying something about you marketing it as a documentary? Was there a little guerilla action going on when you were shooting in factories? How did you get permission and—

JB: I know the people. They knew it was a narrative.

PW: OK. Then with the brothels?

JB: [laughing] They don't really quite know what we were doing.

PW: I mean, it seemed like—

JB: The girls do.

PW: But the people who are running—

JB: I went to the place maybe like 3 or 4 times before we started shooting and before most of the crew, 3 or 4 of the guys. So we had to get the girls lined up, so we went 3 nights in a row. Literally as they brought the girls in, as they do in the movie, we told them what we were doing. We said, "We're shooting a little movie for film festivals, and we need 12 girls for 3 days in a row." There was one girl who spoke some English, and she got really excited. She sat down and started talking to me. She knew enough English to communicate things that I was telling [her to the girls]. So she helped us get some of her friends who worked there. Extremely helpful to me. My business card said "Jesus Beltran." In China, on business cards you put your last name first, your family name after that. So she thought my first name was Beltran, so she called me Beltran the whole time. [laughs] "Beltran, Beltran!"

PW: When you were making your work, who did you envision your audience to be? And after you made your work, was that audience still the same audience? Or did it expand or change? With distribution, what are your hopes in getting it out there?

JB: I did not intend to put it on any Internet stuff originally. Sundance accepted it, and that's when I started thinking about the Internet stuff and what I wanted to do with it. So I put it on iTunes, and Sundance has their own streaming website. So, it streamed on Sundance's festival website through the middle of April, I believe. We're on Ironweed Films, the May DVD. Right now I still don't want to put it on YouTube or anything like that. We're still playing other festivals, and there's another possible DVD that it might go on, which is a collection of Latino short films by another distribution company. I think slowly it will be seen by a lot of outside people. Because I think it is relevant. The strategy sometimes is to send it to top-tier festivals. I've sent it to all kinds of stuff, and if anybody asks, if anybody invites from another festival I don't care—I'll let it play.

I wish there was some way to show it more to audiences in the cities and inner cities, in the Mexican American neighborhoods, in the black neighborhoods. People relate to it very very well, and that's one of the things that I've loved about it, is that I can show it at Sundance, and John Smith from the Republican stronghold of Orange County loves it as much as Jose something from my old neighborhood loves it. I really wish they aired short films before feature films in regular theatres.

PW: Instead of a trailer, a short film.

JB: It's a much smaller investment so you could do riskier things with it. You could explore topics that nobody else wants to invest in for a feature-length film. And you could at the same time give new filmmakers a venue.

PW: Do you plan to keep working with the same people?

JB:
It's hard to say, you know the story dictates the characters in film. As far as I am concerned, [Anthony Neil Moss and Santiago] will be in every single one of my movies, if they're up for it. I owe these guys so much, just because they were so willing to go on these crazy journies. Like I said, I'd love to keep working with these guys.

I’d like to work with actors that are… worldly is one word, or curious, and are interested in talking about more than just the movie that we’re working on. Santiago, particularly, is very interested in politics, and in art. I think we have a lot of the same concerns in that… well he’s got a very different story than I do obviously. He grew up in Venezuela, he moved to the U.S. when he was eighteen, but we’re both very interested in socioeconomics, and I guess just struggle… economic struggle. I love talking to that guy. And there are several people that I would love to work with just because of that, because they seem like they’re interesting people.

PW: When you think about economic struggle, and you see it as a tie that binds different people together, do you see it as a culture, or as a commonality?

JB: I don’t know-- I think in one respect, it gives you a shared frame of reference that somebody who hasn’t dealt with these things may not have. It doesn’t make anybody more interesting, there are plenty of people who have struggled who may bore the hell out of me, or may have nothing to say. It’s certainly not the only type of person that I hang out with. I think when I was younger I felt that way, I felt like I didn’t have much in common with people who grew up with…

PW: Things?

JB: Things, and parents that could provide, not everything they asked for, but… you know, the kid who goes to Stanford, who doesn’t have to worry about hashing or getting a job and has a car and whatever. Honestly, when I got there I felt like I had nothing in common with certain people. I’m totally appreciative of the experience I had there because I met people that had come from the same place I had, but didn’t feel that way. After a while you realize everybody’s got problems, and everybody is going through their same shit, in one way or another. But certainly, when you get to know somebody, I think there’s a certain appreciation for being able to pull yourself out of a situation like that, no denying that at all. I have a lot of respect for people who can do that, and sort of, you know-- keep it real. Santiago is like that. A lot of my close friends are like that, but not everybody’s like that, and… whatever [laughs].

PW: The other side of that is when you come from struggle, and you find yourself in a world of privilege, you also can’t go backwards. Just as much as you might think you might have nothing in common with your new friends at Stanford, your friends from the old neighborhood might not feel like they have anything in common with you anymore either.

JB: [laughs]

PW: I shouldn’t speak for everyone, but I think there is a shared experience of levitating between two worlds, and being of neither/nor--

JB: You have access to both sides to a certain extent. You could go back to… you could use some hip-hop terminology: people who got big, people who blew up. It’s funny. It’s a good point that you don’t necessarily belong to either group. There’s no membership, so you never really belong to any social group, per se.

PW: So, if you get your feature funded, are you going to sell out?

JB: Oh, yeah! [laughs] What are you talking about?! Course!

PW: Your mission statement?

JB: Yeah, my mission statement. I don't know. What the hell does "sell out" mean? No, I think the idea is to try and stick to stories that are personal. The weird thing about making a movie is that I believe that it should be a personal journey for the director. Unfortunately a director can't make a movie by himself. So the director doesn't deserve full credit. But it's just like anything, and it's not just a movie either—it could be a business. It always requires one person really, really, really kind of pushing it along.

PW: The visionary?

JB: Not—you can use that word if you want, but it's just somebody making sure that shit happens. It's like people say, like filmmaking by committee typically results in crap or things that are just purely market-driven or whatever—not what I typically enjoy. Most of the stuff I like ends up being from the guys, from the directors who are considered like ruthless or assholes or tyrants on the set and whatnot. That's not what I'm trying to do, but—one of the guys is quoted as saying, "Well, somebody's gotta care." And it really, really helps when you have wonderful people who bring you fantastic choices. And that's why you have to respect and work and trust people that you surround yourself with. But at the end of the day, somebody is making those decisions.

Selling out is . . . You know, sometimes you have to make money. You can never say you're never going to sell out. Hopefully I can make stuff that's personal to me, and I would love to keep writing what I do. I hope that I can continue to work on those kinds of projects and then get to features [that way]. You can take something and make it personal as well. I think Sam Raimi's done his own vision of Spider-Man. You can make things personal. And if somebody gives you an opportunity… hey you never know. ☺

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Jesus Beltran's films have been self produced under his Zumpango Films production house, named after Zumpango Del Rio, Guerrero, the small Mexican town in which his grandfather lives. Chin lives and sometimes works in Mountain View, CA. He has a pet monkey, two fish, and a couch that was once a cow.

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Jesus Beltran can be found at http://www.zumpangofilms.com

The Grass Grows Green and The China Project can be found on MySpace at:


::Click here to watch The Grass Grows Green on iTunes.::

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