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Alex Rivera Talks Sleep Dealer
For director Alex Rivera—whose debut feature Sleep Dealer opened in April to quiet acclaim—the use of collage and found footage to tell a story of immigration, technology and economic survival is only fitting to the subject matter. The sci-fi story concerns a Mexican migrant of the future, who works in a high-tech Tijuana sweatshop where laborers remotely operate U.S.-based machinery while struggling to survive in a strange netherworld between first and third worlds.
Rivera has explored similar subjects in his other work—notably his PBS-screened short documentary The Sixth Section, which followed a group of undocumented immigrants living and working in rural upstate New York who pool their earnings to rebuild their hometown in Mexico. Now with Sleep Dealer (just released on DVD), Rivera offers a unique, visionary social commentary on the intersection between immigration, corporate profit and economic justice—and he talked about all this and more in his interview with MovieMaker.
Noelia Santos (MM): Your work often explores the subject of globalization through the viewpoint of immigrant laborers using all kinds of inventive means to survive. Can you address that subject?
Alex Rivera (AR): I might be one of the few people who quotes [author] William Gibson when talking about the lives of contemporary immigrants. He has that saying like: “Corporations make technology, but the street decides how it will be used.” But the idea that technology and the material of the future is made by corporations usually for a profit motive, usually to accelerate the flows of capital, to put downward pressure on wages, or for militarization—these are the kind of impulses that drive technological development. But when the technology goes into the public, everyday people find all these inventive uses for it.
Immigrants very uniquely have used technology to network—to do everything from reconnecting their families, which are divided by thousands of miles of distance, to revitalizing their hometowns in economic terms by sending tens of thousands of dollars back through money-wiring services and using speakerphones, fax machines and home videos to supervise how this money is being spent in these places they haven’t been back to in sometimes a decade or two. Their families usually connect the first world and the third world. For me, looking at technology and immigration as two sides of the experience of globalization has been very natural.
MM: In terms of your visual aesthetic, who or what are your influences?
AR: The main fountain of images and influences was a portfolio of still photographs that I’ve been taking in my documentary practice. In Tijuana, I’d do seven-second- or eight-second-long exposures in city streets and get these wild washes of color from the neon and incandescent lights—this riot of color in a Latin American metropolis… So those were the foundations of the palate that cinematographer Lisa Rinzler worked from.
It also happened to look like Blade Runner; it also happened to look a lot like Wong Kar-wai’s early films. I love Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. There’s a sequence about two-thirds of the way through where they’re watching a dancer, and there are these multiple exposures of eyes that fill the frame; it’s really a wild effect. In the sequence (in Sleep Dealer) in the factory, when Memo is working himself to exhaustion, putting the contact lens monitors in and out of his eyes, I did multiple exposures with the eyes that were very much inspired by Metropolis.
MM: Sleep Dealer was in the Sundance Institute workshops before it received financing. Can you tell the story of how it got made?
AR: The film would by no stretch of the imagination exist without Sundance. They started to track the project nine years ago when it was a very, very rough and crazy script. It was a provocation when I wrote it, it was a joke. I wrote it almost as a hobby, just to dare somebody to read it. I didn’t think it would ever get made. But going through the [Sundance Feature Film] Screenwriters Lab in 2000 and the Directors Lab in 2001 for me was an incredible experience and the only film school I’ve ever gone through. It was the perfect film school in a month. You get to rehearse six scenes, shoot them and screen them.
[The Sundance Institute] put the film in front of Alfonso Cuarón, who saw what I’d done at the Lab, and he tried to get the film financed. Sigourney Weaver saw it at the Lab and tried to get it financed at Fox. When I had no lawyer and no producer, 20th Century Fox faxed me an offer to make the movie on my home fax machine. It was surreal—bizarre. I came out of the Sundance Lab like a cannonball out of cannon. That’s when I met Anthony Bregman, who was back then at [production company] Good Machine, and he got attached to produce. We thought we’d have it done in six months, and of course it’s not in theaters until 2009.
MM: What have been the challenges, rewards and differences between working in art films, documentaries and features?
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by wspremium on 9/08/09 at 8:24 pm
Thanks for sharing a sci-fi story concerns a Mexican migrant of the future, who works in a high-tech Tijuana sweatshop where laborers remotely operate U.S.-based machinery while struggling to survive in a strange netherworld between first and third worlds.
It sounds interesting
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