Close to Home: A Conversation with Juan Pablo González

After learning about Fernando’s death, I found out it wasn’t an isolated incident. A number of kids in the village had committed suicide, so Caballerango emerged from this discovery. I think that film has a lot to say about how dramatically rural Mexico has changed since the nineties. The counter-agricultural reform devastated the countryside and created this great economic divide between people in the country and people who have access to jobs in the city.

José had been wanting to get a U.S. visa for a while, and it was really hard. The racism that exists in American consulates in Mexico is really something. They wouldn’t give him one—and then they did when his reason was to attend a screening of Caballerango in Austin. That’s when people started realizing, oh, wow, this is serious. This is a real thing.

When Caballerango premiered, a lot of people who perhaps had more traditional documentaries in mind asked me, why is the camera so far away from your subjects? They believed that the distance between the camera and someone’s face equals emotional distance. I think a lot about the construction of films—how to make evident that what I’m doing is a constructed thing, and how to be transparent with the audience about this construction. There’s this obsession in documentary filmmaking with truth, which is not only wrong but dangerous. This idea that because we have access to people’s emotions and pain we can apprehend their truth—I find that disingenuous. That’s why I try to make evident that my films are made objects, and that’s why I openly participate in my films. You can hear me prompting and questioning. With Las Nubes, in particular, I tried to make obvious that I’m a performer.

He’s the godfather of my sister and is part of my family’s group of friends, though when they moved, he remained in the village. The final product came about almost accidentally. First, in a completely casual setting, Jésus told me the story. Then some time passed, and I opened up a conversation about potentially doing something with this story, like making a film with his daughters and his wife. Then we just decided to do a long interview. Many months later, I was with some people visiting Jésus, and he offered to take us around to see his ranch—a ranch in Mexico is just a plot of land. As we were driving, I asked him if he felt comfortable telling his story again, and he agreed. So we quickly set up the camera, and in the ten minutes we had to arrange everything, we realized we shouldn’t see his face, just his eyes, so that his anonymity could be preserved, in part for safety reasons.

The big reference for the film was There Will Be Blood and other films that have these larger-than-life bosses who force you to think about questions of masculinity and power. I wanted to adapt this mold for the world of tequila production, because of my family’s relationship to it. They’ve been making tequila since the nineteenth century, and there’s a really fraught, complicated history to the production of tequila in Mexico and the various families involved in it. It’s a tough world; the men, the women—everyone’s got to act tough. There’s something very Hollywood about that, despite the fact that these are real people.

[Laughs.] It’s true. The experiences of people living in my hometown, such as José’s story—they’re all pretty dark. But whenever I connect with other young people from the area, I realize there’s a lot of life too. There’s this stereotype about Mexico, especially rural parts of Mexico, that everyone’s super conservative and that people don’t tolerate all sexualities and forms of gender expression. It’s just not true. I mean, it’s complicated, but it’s not black and white. Tatín’s story embodies this. In real life, she’s also from a tiny, tiny village, and she actually does have a real hair-salon business. She goes on vacations to the beach with her mom and her sister all the time. They go shopping in the States. She had a great relationship with her dad. I’m not saying she is the perfect embodiment of happiness, but her character in Dos Estaciones shows that these small towns are much larger than their stories of loss.