When director Barbet Schroeder first delved into the writings of Colombian novelist Fernando Vallejo, he felt as though he had come across the shadow of his own childhood in Bogota. Vallejo’s hypnotic renderings of love and violence in the country that Schroeder calls “the land of my heart” evoked the taste and scent of a time and place that the director had long dreamed of capturing on screen. Here was a writer on intimate terms with the sublime passions and devilish chaos that marked Schroeder’s early years.

“I remember very clearly the kind of violence that was already taking place in Colombia even when I was young. When I was seven, our town was overrun by rioters and killers. I was told not to look out the window. So of course, that’s just what I did. I saw, in the street below, some people carrying a big, heavy American refrigerator. Six of them were carrying it and the seventh one who was giving the orders wore a red headband. He had a machete in his hand.”

“One of the six began to complain and the one holding the machete had a violent dispute with him. Suddenly, with a couple of swift blows of the machete, he chopped off his head. The man without a head remained standing for a moment, stuck under the refrigerator. It seemed like an eternity to me. I was marked by that scene, but it was not as bad as it sounds. From behind my window, the scene was silent, and therefore unreal.”

With Our Lady of The Assassins, his first foreign language film in 16 years, Barbet Schroeder directs Vallejo’s feverish account of impossible love and numbing violence under the watchful eye of his own childhood ghosts. Always a moviemaker with a sense of adventure, this picture underscores his standing as a truly international artist. Born in Tehran and raised in Colombia, Barbet moved to France in his late teens where he wrote film criticism. Briefly Godard’s assistant, he established a production company at the age of 22, producing films for Godard, Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Eric Rohmer and others. To name just a few of his own pictures reveals a career of astonishing breadth: General Idi Amin Dada; Maîtresse; Koko, a Talking Gorilla; Barfly; Reversal of Fortune; Single White Female; Kiss of Death; Before and After; Desperate Measures.

In an interview with MM, Barbet talks about his new film and the harrowing experience of making a motion picture knee-deep in the killing fields of Medellin, Colombia’s tragic city of guns and religion.

Phillip Williams (MM): Can you talk about the story for this film, and how you became involved?

Barbet Schroeder (BS): I became involved because I fell in love with the writer, just as I did with Bukowski. Barfly followed that. This time it was Fernando Vallejo, a Colombian writer. I read all his books and went to meet him and asked if we could work on something together. He suggested Our Lady of The Assassins, but I thought that it would be difficult to adapt for the cinema.

First of all, it was a long, imprecatory monologue. It would have needed voiceover, which I have always felt was a cop-out in literary adaptations. Second, there were a significant number of deaths—18. It was very powerful and worked very well in literature because these murders were parables or metaphors to a certain degree. But in cinema, we are dealing with the reality of things and it would have been unbearable. When I met Vallejo, he said he had already thought about the adaptation of Our Lady of The Assassins and had found several solutions. “I think I can easily write dialogue between men and boys without ever using voiceover,” he said to me. I told him we had to considerably reduce the number of deaths. I felt that it would take a major adaptation to pull it off, and he agreed. The result for me was thoroughly surprising: another version of the same story cropped up, certainly closer than the book, to what happened in real life. Somewhat like Marguerite Duras (The Lover), when she would retell the same story, but from a different angle.

It’s the story of a writer who comes back to his home town, Medellin, where he spent a wonderful, happy childhood. He returns 30 years later to find things completely changed. It’s a different reality, one that he learns to understand through Alexis, a young professional killer who he has an affair with. It’s a love story; a very tragic one.

MM: You were born in Tehran?

BS: Yes, but we moved to Colombia when I was young. My father was a geologist, so we were always looking for oil. That’s how I ended up in Colombia, the country of my childhood. So that marked me enormously.

MM: So making a picture in Colombia must be a very powerful experience for you.

BS: Yes, I had the same experience as the lead character in the film. His name is Fernando Vallejo, like the writer of the book and the screenplay.

MM: How has the country changed since your childhood?

BS: First of all, it was a country of small towns—500,000 people would be a lot. Now, the same towns have five or 10 million. Right there you have a huge change. Then, of course, there is the fact that you could travel anywhere in those days, whereas now you can barely come out of your house. There is no freeway in the whole country that you can take without big risks to your safety.

MM: And as a moviemaker, it was dangerous for you just to be there.

BS: Yes, that’s why all the people on my crew were Colombian.

MM: How did you and your crew deal with the dangers to your security?

BS: It was sometimes a matter of having bodyguards and being very careful. For the camera and film equipment, we needed security guards with machine guns (laughs).

MM: Kidnapping is a threat, isn’t it ?

BS: Yes. Bodyguards can save you from small- time kidnapping, but if they decide to come after you with 20 or 30 armed gunmen, there’s no bodyguard who can protect you. As a foreigner, I was the only one in real danger, especially with regard to kidnapping. My bodyguards were members of the police. They told me that on their list of risks, I was classed seven on a scale of 10.
The vans which contained the high definition cameras worth over $300,000 dollars and were guarded 24 hours a day by men on motorcycles with bulletproof vests and machine guns. When we filmed in neighborhoods that were more dangerous, we had five additional police officers armed to the hilt. In the center of town, their weapons weren’t as visible.

MM: With this sort of physical environment as the backdrop to your story, whatwas your concept for the production design?

BS: Well, it was a highly designed production. It was written, first and foremost. There was not a single improvised phrase, although it seems that way because there is a lot of local slang. Vallejo knew the speech patterns that these young boys used very well. The dialogue fit these actors like a glove. All the colors were controlled. Yellow is the main color in the film. We ended up painting certain things yellow. There are very few exterior shots taken in the film in which I didn’t organize for a yellow taxi to drive past. This is Alexis’ color, the vitality of this city. Sunny, angelic, but also diabolical. That is one thing that one forgets—that there is a wonderful energy in this town [Medellin], despite all the dangers. The other colors we used were blue and red, the red of blood. We had two rules to follow:

1) We could never use the three colors at the same time: they’re the colors of the Colombian flag!

2) The color orange, which was too close to yellow and red, was not permitted. We had to unscrew or cover over an incalculable number of orange garbage bags fixed to posts everywhere around town.

MM: How did you visualize the way you wanted to shoot the film?

BS: Like all my films, this one has a documentary quality. I wanted to anchor this as much as possible in the city of Medellin. The city is another character in the film. Though he’s been living in exile for 30 years, all of Vallejo’s work has been inspired by Medellin… especially Our Lady of The Assassins, which is partially autobiographical. Documentary and documentation are aspects that were also present in Barfly. What’s most important to me is to respect the writing. This aspect excites me: anchoring a text in reality, and by doing that finding a style that corresponds to the writer. In his books Vallejo is full of humor, which is at once flamboyant and precise, with passages which are very verbal. He always writes in the first person. I also needed to convey the hallucinatory aspect of the work, combining handheld cameras and dollies, for example, and always filming from the first person point of view of Fernando and Alexis. I wanted to capture how each sees the other. I also experimented a lot with the use of multiple cameras.

MM: That was new for you?

BS: Yes.

MM: And you shot on Sony high definition cameras. What does High Def give you?

BS: What it gives you is extra definition and depth of field. That was something
I was eager to exploit. I’m always looking for more depth of field in my movies.

MM: Can you still throw the background out of focus if you want to?

BS: I don’t like to. I have shots in this movie where the boy is in a rich person’s apartment downtown, and out the window you see the poor neighborhoods on the hills. In a normal film that would have been out of focus. With high definition I could show the boy looking out the window with his own impoverished neighborhood in the background. All that is in sharp detail. High definition gives a depth of field that would have delighted Orson Welles and his cinematographer, Gregg Toland.
All this we obtained naturally, like a video documentary. Contrary to some who try to make high definition look like cinema, and believe that the change of focus is an important element in the language of film, I wanted to explore the new technical characteristics by simply accepting them. The more clearly defined the image, the happier I was.

MM: Can you use a wide range of lenses?

BS: Oh, yes. The idea is to use the best lenses in the world. Film lenses. As soon as I discovered the high def image, I was fascinated. I really wanted to use it. It turned out that this project was ideal for that.

Once shooting began, we had to film the exterior scenes very quickly, in four weeks, before word got out. We were quickly spotted, and the last week of shooting the exteriors was the most dangerous. We received death threats. There were so many locations, to the point that on some days, we had to film in three different spots with weather that was constantly changing from cloudy to torrential rain to bright and sunny. We finished with three weeks of interior shots. Shooting on 35mm would have taken twice as long; we would not have been able to complete the shooting.

The HD allowed us to work with multiple cameras which, as I say, was a new area for me to experiment with. We had up to three cameras for some scenes. The question ‘where to put the camera?’ becomes very exciting when you’re dealing with three cameras. It becomes a strategy to make the least number of compromises possible and not to resemble television. At one point during the filming, two cameras were moved in to capture two over-the-shoulder shots after the main camera went by in a complicated tracking shot. When the good take came through it was good for the three cameras—and the filming of the scene was over. Great for the actors. With our need to shoot quickly and discretely, and with full realism, the special effects could be added in post-production without any problem at all because we were already working in the digital mode. It was very economical. I could double the number of extras in a shot; I could also treat the image: change colors, create a sunset or add things, like a bird’s shadow, or the birds themselves, or bullet wounds. There are nearly 200 subtle modifications to the film, for the most part undetectable. That’s something that normally only a big budget film can achieve.

We have one shot where the main character insults a statue of [Simón] Bolívar (the South American revolutionary hero); then a bird comes by and shits on the statue. Normally that would be a difficult shot to get—the statue was very high, but it was simple to do it digitally.

High definition helped me translate onto film the idea so dear to Vallejo of “reality becoming mad” because this excess of reality, this excess of depth of the field, ends up becoming unreal, as if reality had become mad from hyper-reality.
But I also paid the price for being among the first to use high definition for a fictional feature film. The high def 24-image camera designed for George Lucas didn’t exist yet. I filmed with the same camera, but [with the camera we used] it was 30 issues/43/images, which created a multiform nightmare in post-production and a slight stroboscopic effect in the rapid panoramic shots.

MM: Do you think your basic approach to directing has changed much over the years?

BS: Not really. What has changed is that I am now much more careful about the quality of the writing. There were certain films I did that I wouldn’t do today because I’d want to work more on the screenplay.

MM: What’s your general approach to working with actors?

BS: In Our Lady of The Assassins—for the first time in a long time—I was dealing with people who had never done cinema. The main actor, [Germán Jaramillo], had some theater experience, but the boys were actually boys from the street. I was not making a documentary, so they were actually required to play a part. I tried to treat them like movie stars in every respect; trying to provide them with freedom for self-expression. I always filmed them from the best possible angle, making sure that they were attractively lit, and so on.

Casting was very important. The young actors had to be young, handsome street guys. They had to be photogenic. Aided by the Medellin filmmaker Victor Gaviria, we found some talented actors who looked okay, but a magical face on the screen is a rare thing to find. It was finally the true character of Alfonso (he had introduced the real Alexis to the real Vallejo) who told us about Anderson [Ballesteros]. He was selling incense and had already been in prison. He lived in a neighborhood very high on the mountain. One of the typical characteristics of Medellin is that the higher you are on the mountain, the poorer the neighborhood is. These are the newest neighborhoods where people are coming to settle and build. They are “invading” and are living higher and higher.

Anderson’s place was practically inaccessible and partially controlled by guerillas. He lived with his 13-year-old brother. We had to convince him to come with us, go for medical check-ups, etc. I virtually lived with him day and night, and I did the same thing with Juan David Restrepo, who came from a similar neighborhood.

MM: Did you rehearse?

BS: Yes, we had an extensive rehearsal of three weeks. Actually, I had a little digital camera and the cinematographer and I went to the locations to rehearse the entire film on tape. I even did a small editing job just for fun. It was incredible to have such a luxury—the entire film on cassette before we even started production. These readings and rehearsals were important for the actors. They got used to their roles and I could detect weaknesses and strengths, find solutions and, especially, shoot the film faster. I was even able to drop several beautiful but useless scenes before I actually made the film. For a movie that didn’t have many shooting days, this was essential.

MM: How did you broach the subject of homosexuality with your actors?

BS: For me, it was important to make a love story and to treat the homosexuality as totally natural. I believe that everybody has homosexual tendencies within themselves. My job was to convince the young actors that it wasn’t dangerous to delve into those feelings. I also showed them the film Strawberries and Chocolate and some Fassbinder and Almodovar films.

MM: Has your work as a documentary moviemaker helped you as a dramatic artist?

BS: It’s the opposite—when I do documentaries, I always try to find the fictional story inside the documentary and exploit that.

MM: How do you feel about Our Lady of The Assassins now that it’s complete?

BS: We couldn’t return the next day to improve certain shots. It has some imperfections, but I like them because they are part of the unusual situation we had to work with. I like the movie because it does not look like any other. MM