What films have been the most inspiring or influential to you and why?

Some of Lars Von Tiers Films have been the most influential to me in terms of style. The ones that really made an impression in me were: Dogville, The Idiots and The Boss of it All. Dogville’s minimalist approach showed me that to make a good film all you need is a good story. You don’t need a diversity of locations; you don’t need special effects or a huge budget. All you need is good actors, a captivating story and creativity. Who would have thought that you could make a film with only a theater set as background, using marks on the floor divide the stage and some props?

In this same direction, Rodrigo García’s “Ten Tiny Love Stories”, a film composed of a series of monologues, where all we see is a woman sitting in a chair telling a story, made an impact in me. It made me realize the importance of casting, because the only way to pull off a film like that is by choosing someone who can actually captive the audience with just her voice.

Going back to Lars Von Tiers, I also found inspiring one of his next films called “The Boss of it All” because it showed me that you can tell a story without caring about continuity or photography. Through out the film we see disjointed cuts and bad framing but that doesn’t stop the spectator from watching it. Again the audience is so engaged with the story that nothing else matters. In this film, Von Tiers used a technique called Automavision, where the director of photography chooses the best position for the camera, frames the shot and then a computer takes over and randomly decides the camera movements. It decides when to tilt, pan or zoom. This shows you how much you can strip away from a film. You can choose to forget about the traditional rules of editing or composition, as long as you tell an engaging story.

Other films that have inspired me are Errol Morris documentaries: The Thin Blue Line and Mr. Death. Watching these documentaries I realized that the secret for telling a good story is to always try to recreate the classical dramatic structure. Even in the case of documentaries where that might be seen as something more difficult because you are not making up a story, but rather capturing reality and that limits your control. These two documentaries amazed because of the way the stories were constructed. You can fell the three-way act. Before watching them, I had seen many documentaries that just lingered in the exposition of a reality or conflict. When I compared the two styles, I realized the importance of the dramatic structure. Because with the second type of documentaries, I always felt the audience left unsatisfied. There was never anything wrong with the idea behind their stories; they had just forgotten to construct them in a way where at some point there would be a resolution to whatever conflict they were addressing.

Another film that I would have to mention is “The Silence of the Lambs”. I have watched that film about 100 times and it taught me that when a film is good you can watch in a small TV, with people talking around you or dubbed to another language and if the film is good none of that will matter. Sometimes we get obsessed with watching films in the perfect screen with the best sound possible, and when we don’t enjoy a film sometimes we blame it in those technicalities. This film is also what got me hooked with thrillers and crime novels, which is something I want to explore in the film I’ll shot as my thesis. 

Why do you want to make the film you are working on at UCF?

Corruption is a well-known secret inside government institutions in Ecuador. It has always amazed me how this type of illegal activities can exist so openly in the Ecuadorian society without ever being any repercussions. It’s like the Prohibition period in the EEUU, where although alcohol was banned, people kept selling it and drinking it. When something like this happens, people stop seeing corruption as an anomaly, it becomes standard procedure. But just like with the Prohibition it remains an underground activity. The dark secret in the family, something people would try to hide and never admit openly but which they practice everyday. You want to skip a driving ticket, you pay the police officer; you want your son to pass in school you pay the teacher; you want to win a trial, you pay the judge; you want to succeed as a government employee, you let the politicians steal, etc.

I have always wondered too about the process a person goes through when what he or she’s been taught to perceive as a good or acceptable action, gets confronted with a corrupted reality. How would this person react? Would the person embrace or fight this reality, which asks him or her to act against their principles?

In a society, the government sets the rules. If the government is corrupt then the whole system becomes corrupted and I think that’s what has happened in Ecuador and other countries. So I thought what if there's someone out there that becomes so sick of corruption that he or she decides to take vengeance against the people responsible for it. Someone who becomes a sort of vigilante that wants to get rid of the bad politicians or government employees who have committed acts of corruption. It could be, one of these people who are always whispering about it. What if someone would actually dare to do it? When people lose faith in the system, it’s usually a matter of time before they start taking matters into their own hands.

I want to make a film that addresses this type of perceptions in a comic way: Can the system ever truly change? Is corruption impenetrable? Is death the only way to get rid of corrupt politicians? 

What makes a film great for you?

The approach that’s given to the story is what makes a film great to me. Aside from the details, stories revolve around the same themes and premises. What may change is the approach filmmakers give to their stories. Like Jacques Aumont says in his book Aesthetics of film: “When we go see a fiction film, we always go to see the same film and a different film”.  When a filmmaker does something creative and breaks the traditional format of constructing a story like Christopher Nolan in “Memento” or David Koepp’s approach to the ending “Secret Window” (if we focus on content alone) where instead of showing the usual negative consequences of murder, he presents it as a healing action for the main character. This is what makes a film great to me, having that something else, which makes it different from the rest of films, we’ve ever watched.