Cannibal Holocaust: Interview With Filmmaker Jorge Michel Grau By Sami Khan

Last spring, I met a friend to talk about his favorite movies from Cannes 2010, but all he wanted to talk about was Mexican cannibals.

My friend was impressed not by the art house heavy-hitters like Godard and Leigh but by a Mexican horror film by a first time director. The film, he said, was about a family of cannibals trying to fend for themselves after their father dies. It was called “We Are What We Are” written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Jorge Michel Grau.

When my friend is excited about a movie I know that it has to be important, and that was soon confirmed by Twitch Film’s rave review and the film’s subsequent screening at the even more selective New York Film Festival.

And after recently getting a chance to see the film for myself I have seen what all the fuss is about. Grau’s film is a dark, unsettling, terrifying and occasionally hilarious film about the disintegration of a family that just happens to be cannibals. It’s an empathic portrait of a fucked up family, trying desperately to survive in a world that’s out to get them. But unlike many other horror films these days “We Are What We Are” also focuses on the costs of the family’s violence and its toll on the victims. Like the best horror films of the 1970s (the movies of Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven and others), “We Are What We Are” actually has something to say about the wider world.

IFC Films released “We Are What We Are” late last week, and I had the chance to chat with Grau (along with my good friend Freddy, who did the translating).

-SK

After I watched “We Are What We Are”, what occurred to me was that this movie is really about endings – both the ending or climax of the film, which takes up maybe 50% of the screen time as well as the end of the family. What interests you about endings?
As many people know, drug trafficking and drug violence are huge problems in Mexico. Many people stay with their parents or another family member because they’re afraid of being alone. I wanted to explore what happens to a family when they lose their sole provider – when they lose their only means of sustenance and support. So it was important to me to tie the structure of the film to the disintegration of the family.

I think Richard Peña, in Film Comment, was the first one to draw a comparison to another Mexican film, Arturo Ripstein’s amazing 1973 movie “Castillo de la Pureza”, was that a conscious influence?
One of my favorite movies is “Castillo de la Pureza” and I really like Sergio Magaña’s play [about the same story] but there was no direct influence on my movie although there are some similarities between Ripstein’s film and mine. Particularly since they both feature families concealing part of the themselves. In “Castillo de la Pureza” the father conceals his family and in my film the family voluntarily decides to conceal themselves.

And, even though the play is from the 60s and the movie is from the 70s, both those works and my film are interested in families who’s lives revolve around work and repetition. Many of the Mexican plays I’ve seen and that I like are one’s that show the decomposition of the family and their separation from Mexican society.

One thing that “Castillo de la Pureza” and your film definitely share is that they root the source of violence in the family – not the police, not the lower class – but the family. Why did you make the decision?
A big percentage of families in Mexico are dysfunctional. They disintegrate very quickly and that has a lot to do with the disintegration of traditional values without the support of a strong social structure. Today in Mexico there’s the real possibility that when you go out for a drink or to any social place you’ll be confronted with decapitated human heads or a pigs head attached to a human body. That type of violence has permeated into the Mexican family and keeps them isolated. I’m not saying there’s this Manichean dichotomy between the order of the family and the chaos outside it, nor am I trying to be a moralist and say that the family is salvation. But it is true that, for better or worse, the disintegrated family is our social fabric – the core of our society.

I decided very early on that the movie had to be violent for a couple of reasons. One, because that’s what I see in Mexico today. Two, because I lived and was raised in the neighborhood where the characters live so this was my family. That neighborhood is still pretty much the same today the only difference is whether people are willing to leave their homes and go out and experience that type of violence. As a result, many of them stay concealed.

What neighborhood is that?
It’s called CTM Culhuacán. CTM stands for Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico – it’s a Mexican trade union. The neighborhood was built around the same time as Ripstein’s film came out. There’s a lot of architectural diversity in the neighborhood that’s one of the reasons I decided to shoot there but I also know it like the back of my hand, so that helps!

In the film the family is middle class but they aren’t comfortably middle class – they’re part of the lower middle class. Why was it important to you that they be this way?
I did some research on social classes in Mexico when I was writing the film. The family in my film are from the lower class but they are not from the lowest class in Mexico. We call that middle class and it’s really what makes up the bulk of people in Mexico City and really drives the city, economically and socially.

Some 75 to 80% of Mexicans live the same way the family in my movie lives. Typically, a family lives on one salary. Some families sell food in the streets or outside of their houses or they open up a little business right in front of their garage and sell stolen merchandise or buy merchandise from a store wholesale and they resell it marking it up 10%.

Is it true you are working on a cannibalism trilogy?
Not a cannibalism trilogy but a horror trilogy. One film will be about cannibalism, one will be about vampires and another will be about zombies – 1970s-style George Romero zombies not the kinds of zombies that are running around in movies today.

Your film played Cannes and the New York Film Festival and was picked up for US distribution by IFC Films – it’s one of the most successful first features released this year. Are you surprised your cannibal horror / family drama has achieved this much success?
[Laughs] Yes! And it’s ironic because I’m getting distribution for my film in America, in France, in Germany but I can’t get distribution for it in Mexico!