
100 Scenes in 16 Shooting Days: Joel Alfonso Vargas on Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)

A sweltering summer in the Bronx serves as the backdrop for Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), director Joel Alfonso Vargas’s first feature film. Expanding on his 34-minute short film Que te vaya bonito, Rico—which debuted at Locarno last year, receiving the Pardo di Domani best director award—the Sundance-premiering feature picks up where the short left off in the life of 19-year-old Rico (Juan Collado), a naive yet headstrong young man who makes a meager living selling nutcrackers on Orchard Beach. After he impregnates his teenage girlfriend, Destiny (Destiny Checo), he brings her home to live with his mom (Yohanna Florentino) and sister (Nathaly Navarro), herself only a year older than the mother of his child.
Vargas, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2024, cites several influences on the project’s visual and narrative sensibility: Pedro Costa, Charlie Chaplin and his brother’s best friend from the neighborhood. Working off of a “beat sheet” and allowing his cast of non-professional actors to freely improvise during scenes, the project is rife with moments so naturalistic it’s hard to believe you’re not witnessing someone’s life develop in real-time. Yet Vargas’s choice to implement a static camera requires all of the action to unfold tidily within the frame, which at times feels akin to watching actors perform on a stage. Even so, the backdrop of the Bronx—subway stations, restaurants, house parties and the people who inhabit these spaces—is essentially vérité.
Vargas and I spoke via Zoom a few days before his film’s Park City premiere on January 26. The below conversation touches upon the film’s distinct comedic sensibility, Vargas’s vital collaboration with classmates from London’s University of the Arts and the exterminator that saved production.
Filmmaker: First, I want to ask about the decision to utilize locked-off shots throughout the film. How did you conceive this practice and what was the process of choreographing each scene?
Vargas: It was two things, really. This is kind of how I, as a filmmaker, visualize the world, but there was also a practical component. We didn’t have a lot of time or resources, so if I could reduce the amount of setups to just one, that would help move things along a bit quicker. In the end, we were covering about 12 minutes of script pages a day, as opposed to the standard three or four. If I were to have covered it in more traditional shot-reverse shot language, that would have felt more melodramatic. By giving it distance, you can be in this in-between space that’s more observational, which I thought really worked well for this film.
I’m a big fan of Pedro Costa and directors cut from that similar cloth. Their whole take on performances is sort of Chaplin-esque, where you do 50-60 takes and add a little bit until you get it just right. Our shooting ratio wasn’t that high, but we rehearsed a lot beforehand, so it was very rigorous in that sense. There was a crystallized structure and we had scripted scenes, but we would go into rehearsal and basically break them. At that point, I gave the actors full creative license to make it what they wanted and bring their own idiosyncrasies into it. Then we would rewrite the scenes essentially as one unit.
Filmmaker: I assume that this locked-off approach also proved difficult while shooting on location around the city. Typically, you’d see shaky handheld visuals here. How did you configure the camera in these public spaces?
Vargas: We did have permission for some spaces, like the lobster shack, but all of the extras were real customers. Going back to Pedro Costa, I used a child-like perspective where you place the camera kind of at waist level, which is below the eyeline of a lot of people. So, when people walk by the camera, even if they look at it, it never seems like they are. That was how we were able to cheat our way through it. The locked-off approach is an aesthetic I’m drawn to as a filmmaker, but it also limits the variables as much as possible. We shot the film, which was about 100 scenes, in 16 days. Even with a lot of locations, this limited those unexpected factors as much as possible.
Filmmaker: The short film that precedes this feature, Que te vaya bonito, Rico, premiered at Locarno last year and earned you a Best Director award. You completed the feature back in 2023, and I’m curious how you built out the feature narrative from the short.
Vargas: Ultimately, the short is the first act of the feature, or you could say the first 40 minutes. When we went to New York, our main objective was to shoot a feature. It was made off the back of a thesis for school, which had to be a short film. The school didn’t have the bandwidth to support a feature, even on the post-production side, because so many students were completing films. What could have otherwise taken us six months to edit ended up taking a year and a half, because we had to cut a short first. The silver lining was that because we had the short, we could go to Locarno, where we made a lot of connections which allowed us to build a future for the feature.
Filmmaker: In the press notes, you mention that Juan naturally possesses “charisma and sense of humor.” Something I adore about the film is how genuinely funny his character is. Were these comedic touches mostly due to his collaboration, or did you always intend to inject that sensibility into the project?
Vargas: It was definitely there in the script and in the beat sheet as well. This character was someone who I grew up with, largely based on my brother’s best friend. The memory of him is so vivid in my mind. Juan is definitely a strong shade of that. Of course, he has his own humor and is just a funny guy. To be fair, now that I’ve watched the film a billion times, I’m so desensitized to the humor. When we screened the short at the BFI for the first time, people were just cracking up. I was like, “Holy shit, we made a comedy!”
Filmmaker: The line that killed me was when Rico says he wants to name his kid Riley after The Boondocks.
Vargas: My favorite line is when Destiny is expressing how they should rearrange the room to fit a crib. And he’s just like, “Babe, in seven months from now life will always be different.” Juan added that completely on his own.
Filmmaker: Expanding on that a bit, what do you think is the best improvised moment of the film and how did it come about?
Vargas: My brain automatically goes to the vaccine argument, because that was just so brilliant. The brief was that Rico doesn’t want his kid to be vaccinated and everyone else just gangs up on and interrogates him. We didn’t shoot things in story order, but I think at that point in the production, everyone was quite used to each other and had a rapport. I think I used the very first take. Shooting in the locked-off single setup also lends itself to that back and forth. If I had covered that in a more traditional way, it wouldn’t be as authentic. I remember editing the final shot—I co-edited with another editor—then watching the whole film back and realizing that there’s just so much nuance there. Even now I still find little details.
Filmmaker: Tell me more about collaborating with producer Paolo Maria Pedullà and production designer Lia Chiarin, your National Film and Television School colleagues on this project.
Vargas: Paolo approached me at school. He had done a lot of work with Paolo Sorrentino in Italy—he’s Italian, as well—so he comes from I guess the original Latin culture [laughs]. He immediately kind of knew what this film was about and that he wanted to work together. Obviously, we were all in London, and it was actually the first fiction film the school has ever shot not just in the Bronx or New York City, but in the U.S. It was really exciting but a big fight to get the school on board. Any school would be like, “This is a huge liability.” But there was prejudice from some of the faculty because their concept of the Bronx is from the ‘70s, just rife with crime. It’s really not like that anymore—it’s probably safer than a lot of Brooklyn! Anyway, they eventually got on board because they have a relationship with the Ghetto Film School, which is based out of the Bronx, so they were, in some ways, chaperones of the film.
With Lia Chiarin, it was a similar thing where she had spent a lot of time in New York City, so she wanted to be part of the film because she had a connection to the place. Obviously, she’s British, she’s not from the Bronx and didn’t initially know the nuances of how things should look in a Dominican household. I remember the first time she came to me with a lookbook for what the house could be, there were a lot of things that weren’t exactly Dominican, skulls that were actually Mexican and that sort of thing. But it honestly just took one conversation and it clicked in her brain. She was so great.
Part of the approach was letter dropping around the Bronx to get a location for the apartment. We’ve had success with that in London as students—just going to people’s houses and slipping something in their mailbox—but in the Bronx, that’s considered a little bit sketchy [laughs]. We did get access to a lot of people’s homes just to see what they looked like, and through that Lia was able to build out her ideas for what Rico’s house looked like.
The story around how we eventually found the apartment is just crazy. There was a roach infestation in our original location. The exterminator who came to fumigate that place was like, “You guys are insane, you should not be shooting here. I have a house two streets down, do you want to shoot there?” We looked at it and it was perfect. We got so lucky, because that could have easily broken us. As they were starting to paint the first location, they moved a couch back and a swarm of roaches came out. Being from the community, at first I was like, “People are being sensitive, this is just New York.” Then the exterminator came with his flashlight and pointed out feces; it was clear we shouldn’t be breathing that in.
Filmmaker: My final point on the production design is that Rico’s room is perfect. It really looks like a 19-year-old’s lifelong space.
Vargas: I’m not gonna lie, that was the exterminator’s bedroom. We just added the hats to the wall and the Dominican flag. That place was so strange because it wasn’t your typical apartment that has box-like rooms. They all had these interesting angles,so we were able to get really nice frames. It was very spacious, so the whole crew could be there. It was really fortunate.
Filmmaker: Even with Sundance and Berlin ahead of you, I’m still curious about what’s on the horizon.
Vargas: I have a long running list of ideas that I want to get working on. I can’t speak on anything super specifically, but I’m interested in returning to New York City. That’s where my heart is. My whole family is there and there’s so much I want to say about that place. I’m interested in stories that grapple with diasporic identity and assimilation.