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“I Thought Maybe Directors Have This Magical Thing Where They Can Judge a Performance”: DP Rodrigo Prieto on his Directorial Debut, Pedro Páramo
Pedro Paramo Based on the novel by Juan Rulfo, a key work in Mexican literature, Rodrigo Prieto’s Pedro Páramo follows several characters across decades as they search for answers to their lives. The story unfolds in arid villages and lush haciendas, against a backdrop of feudal aristocracy and a powerful Catholic church.
First seen at a crossroads in a desolate landscape, Juan Preciado (Tenoch Huerta) sets out to keep a promise to reconnect with his estranged father Pedro Páramo (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). In his journey Juan encounters others who have dealt with his father: criminals, priests, the deaf and blind, and above all, women. Lovers, wives, cooks, servants, the women in Pedro Páramo are trapped by rules and conventions that apparently leave them powerless. Yet morally and emotionally, they prove stronger than the men in their lives. Their actions determine the narrative.
This is the first feature directed by Prieto, the acclaimed cinematographer of Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, and The Irishman. Working from a screenplay by the director and writer Mateo Gil, Prieto shot Pedro Páramo on a tight schedule on locations in his native Mexico. We met at the Morelia International Film Festival, where Prieto presented his film, participated in Q&A’s, and led a master class. Pedro Páramo is currently streaming on Netflix.
Filmmaker: This is part of a series on DP’s who become directors. I’m talking with Rachel Morrison, who said she did a workshop with you about that.
Rodrigo Prieto: Yes, we found we had many things in common. One thing she said was that she’s used to being anonymous. We do our thing behind the camera, and when the film comes out the focus usually isn’t on you. As a director, we have to present the work, talk about it much more than as a cinematographer. That vulnerability is something different. Suddenly you’re much more in the spotlight. As a director you’re putting a lot of yourself in the film.
Filmmaker: So they’re not judging your technical skill, they’re judging you personally?
Prieto: As a cinematographer, they’re judging your artistry, which is more abstract. With all the characters in Pedro Páramo, even though they’re not written by me, a lot of what’s happening with them has to do with myself, with my personal experiences. With the story, what you emphasize in the movie, what themes you present—all that’s very personal in a way I may not have anticipated at first.
Filmmaker: This is a notoriously difficult novel with shifting points of view, several narrators, and many timeframes. Why choose such a challenging work for your first feature?
Prieto: It is pretty challenging, but I’ve always been a fan of the book, first of all for its surreal tone. The opportunity to direct this came to me unexpectedly. Netflix had purchased the rights to make a new version. They were looking for a director, and offered it to me. I thought, why not? Since I was just finishing Killers of the Flower Moon and Barbie, it worked out with my schedule. It also worked out with my life. I felt the need to come back to Mexico, to explore my roots. I could have stayed in my comfort zone, continued shooting, but this felt like a good chance for personal growth.
We ended up shooting in San Luis Potosí, which is where my grandfather was from. I’d been there once as a child. It was just like Juan Preciado in the story. He goes to this town where he had been as a child, exploring his roots and ancestors. Shooting in San Luis Potosí was similar in a weird way.
Filmmaker: Speaking to other DP’s, they said you focus your energy on the shoot. Maybe some prep, maybe some post, but mostly your energy goes to the shoot itself. As a director, your work expands so much more.
Prieto: Exactly, the timeframe expands enormously. Every director has a different process, but I’ve always enjoyed coming on board as soon as possible and participating in whatever decisions the director wants. Some directors want the DP collaborating on shot listing or storyboarding, others prefer to do it themselves.
My work on this movie from the get-go was wonderful. The production design team led by Eugenio Caballero and Carlos Y. Jacques already had designs for the Comala and Media Luna locations. I could get a sense of their imagination and bring my input to that. Anna Terrazas, the costume designer, had also begun working.
Locations were so important here, because you see the same places in different time periods. They change enormously, not just switching furniture and things like that. As the characters go through emotional devastation, the town does as well. When we first see Comala, it’s a ghost town. In ruins. We also see it in its heyday, full of life and vegetation. Finding a place where we could achieve that was a big challenge. Scheduling the time for the art department to change Comala while we were shooting elsewhere was a logistical nightmare. Still, that process was wonderful for me.
Filmmaker: How did you work with screenwriter Mateo Gil?
Prieto: Mateo wrote an adaptation many years ago which he was going to direct. In fact, I was considered for cinematographer. When this new opportunity came, I asked Mateo if he was okay with another director taking his baby. He preferred someone shooting it rather than the script gathering dust in a drawer. We spent many weekends going through it together.
Filmmaker: With a novel like this, how did you decide what to include or discard?
Prieto: Exactly. That’s the tricky part. I’ll give you an example. One of the experiences Juan Preciado has during his journey is with these two incestuous apparitions. It was one of my favorite parts in the novel, but in order to include it we had to take out other fragments. It’s the juggling you have to go through.
There is a moment in the novel where Father Renteria [Roberto Sosa] goes to a priest in Contla to ask for forgiveness, but the other priest won’t absolve him. We decided to omit that scene, that it was enough to show that Renteria had not forgiven himself for his own behavior. That way we were able to include the moment in the screenplay when Juan Preciado meets the incestuous siblings. It’s a long scene in the novel that we had to make shorter, but I thought it was important to have it.
Filmmaker: You restage scenes from different angles throughout the movie. At times it seems you are deliberately trying to deceive viewers.
Prieto: You know, in real life you catch things out of the corner of your eye and you wonder, “Did I imagine that? Or was it real?” Your perception is what matters in the end. Obviously there are levels of reality and surrealism in the story. I wanted this feeling that the characters were experiencing not necessarily ghosts or visions, but a feeling of strangeness. We were constantly exploring these fleeting things. And making connections between characters. So I placed Juan Preciado in locations where we would later see Pedro Páramo. And the same place, for example, when Juan Preciado first arrives to Comala, it’s the same location where young Pedro Páramo sees Susana San Juan [Ilse Salas] leave the town.
Filmmaker: The women in the story, like Susana San Juan, were in my mind emotionally and morally stronger than the men.
Prieto: That’s very interesting. I love that. These women performers embody their roles with such power. Susana San Juan in particular, you know? Yes, she’s insane. She’s so sick it kills her. But she’s practically the only character who does her own thing. She decides, “I’m not going to go with all these rules you people have, all this stupidity. I’m in my own world, I don’t care.”
I think the story is a lot about power and how it is wielded. It could be a priest, it could be Pedro Páramo.
Filmmaker: What was the casting process like?
Prieto: It’s been many years since I’ve been filming in Mexico, so we went through tons of photos and videos. I was grateful that actors I knew before, like Roberto Sosa and Dolores Heredia, were available. It was a great process, a long one but fun for me. I used the callbacks as a way to rehearse how I would direct actors. Seeing how they would respond, seeing if what I said worked or not. It was a workshop for me.
Filmmaker: One thing about being a DP, you can’t really comment on a performance.
Prieto: As a DP, I try to avoid saying anything to the actors except “hello” or “good morning.” In the past I might have given an actor a technical note like, “Could you hit this mark?” Or, “Could you stand up slowly?” Then the director will go, “Why are you doing that so slowly?” A disaster. Now, every time I have a note of some sort, I will go to the director first and say why something is or isn’t working. It’s funny, because as a cinematographer I do get pretty involved emotionally in what I’m shooting. I’ll see a great performance and wonder if everybody else noticed it as well. Sometimes the opposite.
Directors have to determine from seeing a take whether or not it’s working emotionally. It would happen to me as a DP, but I was afraid that maybe I didn’t have that talent as a director. I thought maybe directors have this magical thing where they can judge a performance. But now I feel if you really know the subject matter and the characters, you can decide. You can tell. I was happy to discover that I had a good sense of if a performance is working.
Filmmaker: Did you have the vocabulary to modulate performances? Get performers to fine-tune their emotions?
Prieto: It’s very tricky. Actors are in a vulnerable space. They’re insecure. We’re all insecure. If I tell actors something in a certain way, it might throw them off. It might get in their heads, you know? You have to find ways of asking them to adjust while maintaining their emotional state. And every actor is different.
I learned by watching directors what works and what doesn’t, and how to kind of navigate that. Say I felt that someone was maybe doing it too big. I could never say that, because then they would be, “Oh my God, I’m overacting.” Finding the right word is tricky.
Filmmaker: Can you talk about keeping track of the larger project while you’re shooting? At one point you go through three different time frames in three consecutive shots.
Prieto: Our schedule was very tight. I knew I wouldn’t have time to ponder when we were filming. So I shot listed the whole film. It was almost like a parallel script, maybe you could call it a technical script. It was a shot-by-shot description of every scene, which was useful for everybody, even the editing staff, to understand what we needed to cover, how to implement the transitions between periods. How to visualize the different timeframes within a scene.
Filmmaker: You couldn’t shoot chronologically.
Prieto: Exactly. My assistant director Martín Torres was very grateful for the shot list. He knew the coverage and the technical challenges beforehand.
However, working with the actors, rehearsing with them, we sometimes found things we could incorporate into the script. There’s a moment when Pedro Páramo pays Renteria, the priest, to absolve his dead son. Essentially paying to get him into heaven. In rehearsal, the gold coins dropped to the floor, and Sosa knelt to pick them up. I thought, “There it is, we have to do that.” The priest kneeling in front of Pedro Páramo, it was the perfect visualization of their relationship.
It’s something I saw with [Martin] Scorsese. He also does extensive shot-listing, but he’s always open to something happening on the set. I tried to incorporate the actors’ energy into what we were shooting.
Filmmaker: How specific are the visuals in the shot list? Juan Preciado falls as he’s running around a corner, and the camera picks up dust flying up into his face. Was that planned?
Prieto: Yes, definitely thought out. I knew I wanted to push in towards him, and he had to fall at the same time the camera reached the mark. It was very technical. Tenoch Huerta is very good at hitting marks. He wanted to make it big. He had some padding, but he said, “If I’m falling, it has to look strong.” So we did plan it out and he did it perfectly.
Filmmaker: I didn’t notice many elaborate camera setups. It seemed like you wanted to concentrate more on capturing emotions.
Prieto: Yes, exactly. For me, it was about emotionally connecting one moment to another moment, one character to another. That’s in the novel, too, this sense of non-linear time where everything might be happening simultaneously. I tried to express that through the camera. When Juan Preciado is leaving the inn with Damiana [Mayra Batalla], he looks back at the hallway. The camera pans to the kitchen, where it’s many years before: the same place, but an entirely different era.
I kept doing that in the film, like the transition from a grave in a cemetery through the grass into a different time. I wanted to capture this sense of overlapping time. Like when Renteria is looking at the shooting stars, this beauty sent by God, but he can’t appreciate it. He’s suffering because he wouldn’t grant absolution to a woman who then died. We connect it in one shot, even though it’s not in the same place. I tried to blend timeframes and locations.
Filmmaker: Everyone in the story starts out with a wish, a hope, but nobody gets want he or she wants.
Prieto: That’s exactly right. That’s why there’s a shop in the plaza called La Esperanza, the Hope. Juan Preciado says in the beginning, “I had this ilusión, this illusion, that I would find my father.” All the characters have a hope and then are disillusioned. Mostly this disappointment, this disillusion, is the result of rancor, of grudges. An unforgiving nature is the tragedy each character faces.
Filmmaker: Nico Aguilar is also credited with cinematography. How did you work together?
Prieto: Nico was there the entire time. We both shared cinematography duties. I could switch roles from DP to director, and Nico was there for support. Sometimes there might be a shot we needed, and Nico could get it. We also had a second unit that my daughter Maria Prieto directed. She was responsible for the whole scene of Miguel Páramo jumping the wall on his horse, as well as several other big moments.
Filmmaker: Did you reach out to other directors for advice?
Prieto: Yes, my friend Rodrigo García, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Greta Gerwig, Martin Scorsese, and others. Alejandro gave me some advice about shooting again in Mexico, what it was like for him when he did Bardo. Just to be ready for certain things, because we’re used to working in different countries.
Filmmaker: What did Gerwig have to say?
Prieto: When we were shooting Barbie, a cousin of mine gave her a copy of the novel. A lot of her questions to me were about Doloritas [Ishbel Bautista], the mother of Juan Preciado. Of course motherhood is a theme in her movies, so I found it wonderful to consider the novel from that perspective.
I showed Scorsese an early edit. Even though he may not know that much about the history of Mexico, he really got the story and the characters. I asked him if he noticed that some of the shots were inspired by what we’ve done together, but he didn’t. I would say in particular that top view of Miguel Páramo in the grave is a classic Scorsese shot.
One piece of advice I got from Scorsese when I first told him I was going to adapt this famous novel was, “Stick to the source material as much as possible, because otherwise they’re going to kill you.”
I feel like we remained true to the novel and stuck very closely to Rulfo’s words. But it’s a movie, not a novel. Two separate things. One doesn’t replace the other, you know? The imagination of the reader will never be displaced by a filmmaker’s interpretation. It’s just that I had the opportunity to materialize the way I imagined the story.
