In this interview, Lucio Castro discusses the total freedom of low-budget filmmaking for his queer Cannes ACID film Drunken Noodles.
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When I saw Lucio Castro’s exquisite End of the Century (2019), it was so good that I couldn’t believe that, not only was it a first feature, but it was made in 14 days with few resources. It looked amazing and was fantastic. Written, directed, and edited by Castro, it was like a queer Before Trilogy all wrapped into a single film that blurs the line between fantasy and reality while asking big existential questions about identity and loneliness.
Castro’s films have a way of sneaking up on you. I really liked End of the Century immediately, but it wasn’t until the second or third watch that I realized I love this movie. The same is true for his new queer film, Drunken Noodles (2025), which just had its world premiere in the ACID sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival. It’s an inventive, funny, and tender film about fleeting connections. I liked it on first viewing, I really really liked it the second time around.
Drunken Noodles is Castro’s third film and his second film to premiere this year. The bigger budget Berlinale title After This Death, featured much bigger stars and left Castro longing for more creative freedom. He wanted to return to something more experimental, like End of the Century — a formally risky film that could have easily not worked.
Drunken Noodles was made for even less money and works a similar magic
Made for even less money and in even less time (7 days) than End of the Century, Drunken Noodles weaves a similar kind of magic. That’s partly because, like End of the Century, the film’s structure follows the logic of thought and memory. Told in four parts over two summers, each part features an encounter between two gay men, starting with the least intimate one and crescendoing to the most intimate by the end. Each encounter starts with sex and ends with a chat over a meal, where the interaction becomes about something else.
Like End of the Century, which also follows the logic of memory and thought, Drunken Noodles is non-linear. Each encounter triggers the memory of another, which in turn, reframes how we understand the previous one. The film loops in on itself. The result is an utterly original film that ponders the ripple effects of small but meaningful encounters, with strangers and intimate partners.
Twentysomething grad student Adnan (Laith Khalifeh) is our guide through Drunken Noodles; the logic of his thoughts and memories dictates the film’s structure. We meet him as he arrives in New York City for the summer to intern at a gallery and house-sit for his uncle. But it’s the people Adnan encounters that steal the film. Castro offers windows into their subjectivity, including by making us aware of what we don’t know.
Inviting us into other characters’ subjectivity
There’s a story behind the mittens on food deliverer Yariel’s (Joél Isaac) bike — a guy who propositions Adnan at a park on another night, before possibly engaging in an orgy with him (although that might be imagined). There’s history behind seventysomething Sal’s (Ezriel Kornel) recent foray into featuring sexual tableaus in his needlepoint artworks. There’s shared history in Adnan’s relationship with his boyfriend, Iggie (Matthew Risch), even though we meet them as it’s ending. Even a quick cruising encounter in the park leads to a funny exchange that makes us wonder more about who this anonymous guy might be.
An interview with Lucio Castro on Drunken Noodles before the film’s world premiere
Before the world premiere of Drunken Noodles, I sat down with Lucio Castro via Zoom, in his home where he shot the film, to talk about his process. We discussed the genesis of Drunken Noodles and the joys and challenges of writing, directing, and editing films yourself. He also told me about his cinematic obsessions — nonlinear storytelling, blurring the line between fantasy and reality, characters inhabiting foreign spaces, and how sex is a route to something else. Along the way, he offers some excellent advice to aspiring filmmakers: write the movie you know you can make today.
7R: What made you want to tell this story? What is the story behind this film?
Lucio Castro: Four years ago, my friend Tony had a show at his small gallery in the Lower East Side in New York, where I live. He had discovered this artist in his late 70s. Now he’s in his 80s, Sal Salandra. So he had a show at his little gallery in his apartment, and I went to see it. I was really touched by the work in a very strange way. I couldn’t really understand why, because it’s almost like kids’ drawings. There are sexual tableaus, but they’re not erotic. There were all these contradictions that I thought were really interesting about the work.
He’s a guy in his late 70s, making artwork for the first time. He’s not an artist. He was a hairdresser all his life. I told my friend that I would love to go talk to this guy, maybe for a documentary, just to see what world he came from. I know he started doing this sort of work very late in his life. Before, he just did needlepoint with more quaint scenes, like kittens playing with yarn balls.
I went to his house in Long Island in July 2021. In the movie, I made him live upstate. There are some differences in the movie between him and the character loosely based on him who is played by an actor. I went to talk to him, and it was a really nice interview. He’s a very generous guy. But I realized that I’m not a documentarian. I’m not interested in getting answers about how he started or learning about his technique. I love fiction, and I love this mystery. I wasn’t really looking for answers about why he did things.
Looking for a fictional story to explore Sal’s work
For three years, I had wanted to do something with Sal’s work. I didn’t know what it was. I knew it wasn’t going to just be an interview with him because that didn’t appeal to me. Last summer, as I was finishing the edit for After This Death, I wanted to do a movie about him. It came to me fast. It would take place in the summer, maybe two summers. I started writing without knowing anything. It was the same as End of the Century. How do I start? A character arrives in a city, New York is the city, because it’s where I live.
By the way, I made the movie with no resources, just with what was available to me, spaces available to me, no money, very fast. We shot in seven days. That’s why it’s more impactful that people are really reacting to it. We did it really, really fast, just with friends, I mean, very talented friends, but friends who had done After This Death with me.
Working with complete freedom on Drunken Noodles
So I started writing without knowing where it was going to go. And then everything found its place. The movie ended up being exactly what I wrote. I wanted to have freedom. After This Death is a movie that I really love, but I’ve been working on it for 10 years. It had a bigger budget. But because there’s a bigger budget, there were more eyes and opinions and more people giving feedback, which I understand. So I wanted to do something that had the freedom of a gesture. And if it didn’t work, it’s fine. I didn’t have to show it.
While we were shooting it, Bart [Barton Cortright] — my DP, who also shot After This Death — and I were like, “Oh, I think this might be good.” I edited it together on this little laptop where I’m talking to you now. When I edited it, I was like, “Oh, it works! This crazy idea, this combination of fantasy, fiction, reality, and documentary…” It could have totally failed. But it had something.
7R: You write, direct, and edit. I’m sure part of that is budgetary, but part of that is also creative. What do you like about doing all of that yourself?
Lucio Castro: I love directing, of course. I love writing, too. Writing is the thing that I love the most. Because the story can go anywhere. There are no limitations in writing. I can have characters do whatever I want. Then, when you direct, you have to deal with realities. Sometimes, actors don’t want to do stuff, or whatever. But writing is total freedom.
I didn’t edit After This Death. I had an assistant editor, but then she ended up being the main editor. We hired somebody else, as well. But I know that editing is very close to voice and cinematic language, like the duration of takes. I wanted this one to be more like End of the Century, which I also edited. I wanted to go back to that original voice. Maybe a take is too long, and it’s fine.
Losing and wasting time in cinema
One of the beautiful things about cinema, compared to TikTok or TV, which are both great, is that cinema still can lose time, waste time. We can spend time on someone looking, like someone looking at a waterfall. Whereas in TV, if it doesn’t work in five minutes, people will change the channel. It’s a different way of approaching time and duration. I wanted to go into this movie with that freedom. I wanted these characters to have a picnic and share an egg by the waterfall. Maybe it’s slightly too long. Why not? You know? By editing myself, I could totally have that control.
Of course, after I finished it, I did share it with some people whom I trust. Even my editor of last year, Julia Bloch, who is amazing, gave me great feedback. There were some tweaks. But I basically put the whole thing together. It’s really about creative freedom and creative control.
7R: How did knowing that you’re going to direct and edit what you wrote affect your approach to each stage of the process on Drunken Noodles?
Lucio Castro: I teach at NYU, and I tell my students that you can write something where you have to find financing. Or you can write something that you want to shoot now. If you write something for pure fantasy, and then eventually find financing, then you can just let your imagination go.
But if you want to write something that’s real, and you want to shoot it in two months, then you have to see what you have access to now. Of course, people have access to different things, but we all have something. There’s an apartment or a space where we live and the city where we live. I shot Drunken Noodles in this apartment, in the park where I take my daughters, another park here, and my friend’s house upstate. When I wrote, I thought about the locations that I have access to, and wrote for those spaces.
Lucio Castro on casting anonymously
The film has four main actors, and I didn’t know any of them. I’m not a huge deal at all, but I just made a movie with some big, big stars, which was After This Death. And I didn’t want to use that sort of thing to appeal to actors. So I did an anonymous post in Backstage. I wanted to make the movie with people who just wanted to make something. Through that process, I found people who were really willing to work and really willing to just be part of the story. And I love the four main guys. I think they’re all really great. It was a casting process that happened through Backstage. That took me quite a few months.
I had the actors before I wrote it, too, which is interesting. I chose the actors first. I knew that there was going to be one main guy. I knew there was going to be someone who plays Sal. The actor in the film is not the artist. He’s an actor.
7R: Right. He’s a neurosurgeon!
Lucio Castro: Yeah, he’s amazing. He’s a neurosurgeon who is now in his 70s and wants to be an actor. I think he’s a really great actor who has a really warm and funny, fun, spontaneous way of speaking, his own cadence. He was so cool. In my post, I was like, “It’s for a queer movie. There will probably be some nudity because Sal’s work is about sexual tableaus. No explicit sex, but for sure, there will be some simulated sex. So you have to be fine with that.” And he wrote back, “I’m not queer, but I’m totally for it. And he was so great in that blow job sex scene.
Everyone was very cool. They just wanted to tell the story. There were no issues. They trusted my voice, that the movie was not an exploitative movie. The movie was about something else. Because there’s, of course, a lot of sex in the movie. But what I love the most about the movie is the structure. And I think that it really talks about this expansion of connections between people, the poetry in connection.
I love connecting with people and meeting people. There’s something that happens in those [fleeting] connections that I think can have these bigger, life-altering consequences that can be small. I’m really touched by that and what that means. To me, the movie amplifies these connections. They were great. And it was really essential to know who the actors would be during the writing process.
7R: Maybe you can talk a little bit more about the structure, because it’s quite interesting. It loops in on itself. I didn’t even catch all the loops on my first watch.
Lucio Castro: You’re right. It’s a good word to say that it loops on itself. It’s absolutely right. And it’s a nice way to say it.
I have to say, it’s not intentional. When I write for myself. I just want to write A to B, B to C. I don’t have a treatment or a structure that I fill in. I like to have that freedom. The movie started sort of looping in on itself, by itself. I didn’t really make it do it. I was just interested now to tell the story. And then, oh, this can connect in this way. And then, what happens if this connects?
For example, in the story about Adnan and his now ex-boyfriend, which takes place at the end of their relationship, Adnan tells him a secret. And I thought, what if this takes place before Adnan meets Sal? And what if he meets Sal after not having had sex for six months?
Movie audiences are always like detectives. We’re making connections and anticipating all the time. I’m way more of an audience member than a filmmaker because I watch a lot of movies. I could never make as many movies as I watch. As an audience member, I always love trying to guess what’s going to happen and then connecting it back to what’s happened before. How has my understanding of the beginning changed because of what’s happening now? All these connections happened because I like them. I sort of made them do it, but without really forcing them. They came in a very spontaneous way.
7R: There’s an interesting subjectivity that happens because we think we know something about this interaction, and then we learn something else that changes how we see it. And we often get insights into the other person. Like the delivery guy, Yariel, with the mittens on his bike and the headphones he never takes off, even for sex. There’s a story there.
Lucio Castro: I’m happy you noticed the mittens. I love the mittens, and I feel like no one notices them. I lived in China on and off for work for many years. Now they’re very common in New York because there are so many delivery guys after the pandemic. But before, they were not common, though they were very common in China. I always loved them. I love this idea of this sort of armour on the bicycle. At the end, he takes his poetry zine out of the mittens. I thought it was a fun way to give some poetic space to this dark hole where the hand goes in these mittens.
The movie is very personal. It’s all of these little obsessions. When I opened End of the Century, a friend of mine, she was like, “Oh, now I understand the main difference between gay sex and straight sex. In straight sex, people first have cheese and wine, and then they have sex. In gay sex, first they have sex, and then they have cheese and wine.” And I was like, “Yes, exactly”.
That seems like a funny and simple way to talk about it. But there’s some truth in it. Whatever straight sex means, the cheese and wine are about what’s going to happen next. But if you get the sex out of the way first, and then you have cheese and wine, then it becomes about something else. It’s not about sex. When she told me that, I thought that was really funny. But actually, it’s also quite poignant. There’s some poetry in that, as well.
7R: That was something I noticed on the second viewing. The scene between Adnan and his boyfriend at the waterfall is kind of a sex scene, and then they eat. They’re talking about not having sex, which is quite sad. Meanwhile, this waterfall is gushing behind them, like a stand-in for the fluids they aren’t exchanging, which is quite funny.
Lucio Castro: You’re totally right, actually. That’s a great, great point. Also, they mentioned all these words in that scene that are in Sal’s work, like he has many works that are in sex dungeons. But you’re right, that just by saying the words, it’s a sort of sexual interaction. That’s a great observation. I love that.
7R: That waterfall looks incredible, though. Can you tell me about finding that location?
Lucio Castro: I wrote it to make it, to make it with, without anything. So I had to use stuff that I knew, that I was aware of. That specific location, actually, it’s really cool. A friend of mine had told me that there’s this hike behind a Walmart in upstate New York with a beautiful waterfall. I went for the first time with my daughters, and it was really dangerous, because you have to actually climb this fence that’s around an electric thing. So you don’t know if it’s electrified or not. You have to sort of walk through this very steep thing, I mean, that’s why it’s empty. It was amazing. There are turtles bathing. No one was there. It was a really idyllic place, but it’s literally behind a Walmart. I mean, l two miles behind a Walmart, and I found it through this friend that told me about it.
My apartment is in the movie, but I don’t recognize it, which I really love. I think that the camera has a way of capturing, photographing locations in a way that it turns into something else. The park with the bench where they have the drunken noodles is gone. It was demolished. The house upstate that belonged to a friend was sold. I started less than a year ago, but it’s already a movie of the past. Even my apartment, which I’m in now, feels different. The camera changes everything, and they become sets. They’re sets that exist only in the movie.
7R: In both Drunken Noodles and End of the Century, we never see the main character in their own living space. In End of the Century, it’s an Airbnb, or he’s staying with a friend. In Drunken Noodles, he’s staying in New York City in his uncle’s apartment and in other people’s spaces elsewhere.
Lucio Castro: That’s another great point. You’re totally right, yeah, yeah. I didn’t think of that. I like to see characters when they are not at home. It almost feels like a beginning. I don’t know, you’re making me think about something that’s really interesting. Maybe I’m not that interested in people in the places that they know well. I like to put characters in places that they know less, so that I can be equally as curious about their environment as they are: the space, the apartment, or the city.
If you are in the city where you live, you don’t even look at your surroundings. You just go from here to a supermarket, to the bus station, whatever. Especially for fiction, I think it’s really interesting when you’re more open to where you are. Adults go from A to B in a straight line. I say this because I have two daughters — kids stop, pick up a little branch, play, or jump on each other. They’re always taking these little detours. I love that.
It’s how I write, as well. I take detours, as you said, loops that loop back on themselves. Observing characters in these new spaces, it’s less A to B. That’s why Adnan can just go on a stroll. Like, I would never go have a beer in the park next to me. It would never occur to me. But maybe if I were in, I don’t know, Vienna, I would do it. When you’re in a place that isn’t home, it changes the way you interact with the city and your surroundings. But that’s a really great point.
7R: Can you tell me about the sex scenes? The film is structured in a way where we go from the least intimate encounter, and then each subsequent one is more intimate. And sometimes, you don’t even know if it’s real. Like those Uber bikers who show up for an orgy where they re-enact scenes from the artwork…it’s ambiguous if that’s even real.
Lucio Castro: I feel like each section of the film has a fantasy break. They each have these god-like figures, actually. Sal’s work is very religious. He was raised Catholic, so there’s a lot of religion in his work. I was also raised Catholic, but I’m an atheist, so I didn’t really want to add religion to the movie.
But in each section, I wanted to have, like, another viewer [who is observing the characters]. Probably, you won’t even notice. But in the first section, it’s the cat. It’s always around. Of course, the cat doesn’t speak, but it’s around. He feels observed by the cat. It’s the first thing he says when he enters the apartment. His first line is, like, “I’m gonna be your new neighbour.” When he’s peeing naked, he closes the door [so the cat can’t watch]. It’s almost his spy or God, or whatever.
In the second story, it’s the fact that Sal’s mother is in the house [although we never see her]. He says his mother made the food they’re eating. In the third section, it’s y’s twin sister. He puts a photo of her next to the bed, so she’s also observing him.
This is the first interview I’ve done, so I’ll have to get a copy to use all this stuff later on! I didn’t notice that they go in a crescendo of intimacy, honestly. But you’re right. I just did colour yesterday. So the movie is still very fresh in me.
Sal and Adnan in Drunken Noodles
In the section with Sal, Adnan is very turned on because he hasn’t had sex for a very long time. Sal is an older guy, like what he did when he was a kid. So he’s very turned on by Sal. Sal is way more like, almost like a father. He was like, okay, whatever, I’ll give you a blow job, and then, let’s go eat. What he really wants is to show Adnan something that’s very special. He doesn’t want to answer questions about his art. Whenever Adnan asks about the work, he’s like, “Yeah, whatever I make this, you know.”
What he really wants to transmit is his inspiration, and that’s why he takes Adnan into the woods. The woods are a place of folk tales, like Hansel and Gretel. So I wanted Sal to take Adnan to the woods to show him that. That’s way more intimate to me than the sex scene they have, which is horny, maybe, but it’s mechanical.
The very first sex scene in the film is with two young guys in the park in a typical cruising scenario. After the sex, the spell breaks. They’re just awkward strangers. I love that awkwardness after people put on these tough-guy personas. And when that stops, I think it’s funny.
A poetic orgy
I really love that sex scene of the orgy. Sal’s work has a lot of big orgy tableaus, with men and women. I didn’t want to make a full orgy scene. I wanted to do it in a way that felt poetic, I guess, artistic. [They make these tableaus in sexual positions.] I like that they’re still, because it’s like, it’s almost like looking at tableaus.
They’re not still, actually. They’re moving slightly. It makes us very attentive. And then we decided, with the sound designer, to also give them silence. When you’re watching it on a big screen, it’s quite breathtaking, because you hear everybody else around you. And before that, Yariel had said that desire only happens when you watch something with other people around.
When a cinema is fully silent, there’s not even room tone. You hear everybody else: a cough, someone’s moving in their seat. I really want the audience to be aware that they’re hopefully not alone watching it. But you’re totally right that they definitely grow in intimacy, you know. It wasn’t really planned. It was just something that happened when I wrote it.
7R: I am wondering a bit about the humour and the surrealism, which I feel partly comes from the long takes and your choice of cuts. When all those men come over for the orgy, there’s this very long take of them lining up in a row, and you’re like, what is happening? It seems quite threatening, and then they get undressed. It’s very funny.
Lucio Castro: I’m happy you’re picking up on the humour. I laugh a lot when I watch it. I think that in the interactions with Yariel, the delivery guy, and with Sal, there’s humour in their interactions. It happens in the edit for sure.
There’s something in just standing there, the duration. It’s like an old Chantal Akerman thing that if you just show something briefly, you understand what it is. It’s information. If you show it slightly longer, you’re like, “Wait, why are we here so long?” If you show it for way longer, then you start thinking about all the other things that start happening.
There are a few moments in the movie where I thought that duration was important. I wanted people to start questioning what they’re watching and why. And the humour will arise, as well. I feel like the movie, even though it’s drama, I guess, or has lyricism, maybe. I think there’s also a lightness to it. I hope it’s a warm, light movie. People really care for each other. People really want to connect in different ways. They’re not just using each other for sex. There’s something else that always goes beyond that.
I love that the last episode is about this character deciding to just be lost in the present time. And it’s a path to the past. I think it’s a happy ending. It’s someone just being so present, just taking their shoes off and looking at the sky. I find it really warm. It’s a very personal thing. Adnan is around other people so much. He just needed to be alone.
7R: There are a lot of sequences in the film where it’s like, is this fantasy or is this reality?
Lucio Castro: That’s an essential part of the movies that I make. To me, it’s the best use of cinema. Cinema presents a reality that’s very easy to identify. It’s really fun to subvert it. When you subvert a reality, you make both realities uncertain, unless you make a dream sequence. That’s why I hate dreams in movies. I’m being very general, but in general, I feel like they’re limiting. Because they’re just telling me, this is real, and then this is a dream. It’s cinema. It’s all lies on the screen. I like when it’s all treated in the same way, so we don’t know. Is that fantasy? Is that maybe real? Did that orgy really happen?
I like it when it makes us question what is real and what is not. Then, you’re really playing with the political possibilities of cinema. You’re photographing a reality that feels very real, but it’s not. If you create a dream reality, you’re simplifying the world. This is real; this is not. In a way, it’s more sinister, to me, because you’re saying that something’s real, and it’s really not. It’s just fiction.
By making everything on the same level, and the transitions between whatever might feel like fantasy and reality make them more democratic, or more on the same level. And then, it’s up to the viewer what’s real, what’s not, or it’s all real, or it’s all fake. I like when a movie makes me doubt and question myself. What am I watching now?
7R: The sex scene near the end with the boyfriend has a lot of cues that make it seem to me like it’s probably a fantasy. For starters, Adnan has to go through all these nested doors to find his boyfriend, like Alice through the looking glass. That location is incredible.
Lucio Castro: I’m very proud, directorially, of how Bart, the DP, and I shot that. In the script, it was a very complicated sequence, because there are so many short scenes. It could have been the most boring or clunky sequence. But I think because we fixed the camera, every time he goes from one space to the next, it is very clear. The architecture of the space made those transitions really clear for the viewer. All these transitions in the location [stairwells, doorways] prevent it from getting confusing.
I’m very proud of the way that was blocked and shot. And you’re right. The location really helped. That’s actually my friend’s upstate house. And the first time I went, I opened the [hidden] door to that room [where they have sex], that weird door. So I guess I’m obsessed with that door. And now I’ve made it part of the movie. I made a music video once that ends in that room at their house, as well. So I guess I have some personal obsessions with hidden doors.
But the movie is really all about hidden doors to the city. The park where he goes cruising is McCarren Park in Brooklyn. I found out just before we shot the movie, like, two months before, that it’s a cruising spot. It’s a park that I take my daughters to basically every weekend. I found out that, after dark, it’s like the biggest cruising place in New York. This space that I know so well, where I’ve played with my daughters since they were babies, where they’ve had birthday parties — two hours later, every night, it’s a sex space. It becomes another world, another reality, with another group of characters.
7R: I want to ask about the sound design. New York feels both really loud and really quiet at the same time.
Lucio Castro: My friend Robert Lombardo is a sound designer. He is married to the composer, and she’s also the costume designer. They’re both really good friends. He really is the one who worked the most in this movie. He worked on After This Death for two years. He’s going to be very happy that you said this. Because we really worked to make the city very loud, and then the quiet rooms very quiet. I really wanted that contrast to be clear.
I also wanted it to feel like the city in the summer. New York is full of new condos, and it’s super expensive. But I wanted to bring back a sort of warmth to the city, or the symphony. That’s why, when it starts, everyone is there. There’s a Hasidic guy, a policeman. Everyone’s there in that [opening] shot, just to establish where we are from the start, as soon as he gets out of the train station. And I wanted it to be loud and lively. I also wanted to find that in this city, there are these secret doors, these quiet spaces. There are things that happen in the dark.
7R: Early in the film, Adnan pops his head out of the apartment, and it’s very loud, but we can hear the sound of the gears on a bike moving, which you wouldn’t really be able to hear.
Lucio Castro: Most of that stuff has been sound designed. It’s all Foley and added on top. If you put a mic over the window, sure, you hear some sounds. But the way you’re realizing it now, that’s a bike sound. It’s just because it was added. It’s a very unconscious thing that we do as audiences. That’s why Foley is really beautiful. You give each sound real character and intention. You don’t just put a mic out of the window, and whatever sound is there, you use. There’s a real intention and sensitivity to every sound that you choose to have in the movie.
7R: How did you decide what you wanted it to sound like?
Lucio Castro: There are a few moments where the sound is very specific in the script. For example, in the segment where his boyfriend gives him that chestnut in the shape of an owl, I wanted to bring up the owl sound of the next scene. There are a few moments where it’s very important that we hear specific things. I wanted the city to feel very loud and summery. There are extra birds that I wouldn’t hear when my window is fully open.
The one thing that I learned to do with After This Death was to use score. End of the Century has almost no score. Initially, in After This Death, I didn’t want to have any music unless there was a band playing [the film is about musicians]. But then, when I saw the images, I was like, Oh my God, this sequence needs score! And this one, too! Now, it has a lot of score. I got very interested in thinking about what parts of the movie would have more feeling, or more something, if I used score.
But I start with a clean slate. And then I go, “Maybe [score] here. And maybe here.” It’s almost like going from nothing to “Okay, maybe just here.” I just like to add slightly. Sound design is what took the longest.
7R: Why does sound design take the longest?
Lucio Castro: I don’t know. There were many parts that needed ADR, where the actors had to re-record the dialogue for comprehension, or because there was a problem with the mic.
When you do a lot of sound work afterwards, you can then modulate. You can make the room tone higher. Maybe we hear more of the bird outside. If you just use the production sound that we recorded, it’s all in one thing. You can’t really play with the elements. So we created every single thing that you hear in the movie.
For example, there’s a shot where you see the hangers going into the closet. Everything you hear, we created. The sound of the hangers touching the metal rod in the closet. Touching clothing has a specific sound. But if you do this on the mic, it sounds shhshhsh. It needs work.
I’m not a sound designer, but I know that he’s also really great and careful. He really takes his time. It’s laborious work.
And then, of course, when it’s sold, many countries require dubbing. You have to give them a movie where the voices are detached from the sound. You have to recreate all the sound and take out the voices. So if we recorded our conversation now with the mic, I would have to recreate all this [background sound], take out my voice, and add more sounds to fit in that, so they can add another actor’s voice on top.
7R: How did you work with your DP, Barton Cortright, to develop the aesthetic of the film?
Lucio Castro: First, we decided on the format, the square ratio, because Sal’s embroidery paintings are that sort of format. In terms of the light, the colour, the grain, I always tend to want things darker. And my DP likes things a bit brighter. I like it when the lights are not super frontal in the characters’ faces. I like to shoot against the sun. I think there’s more cinematic feeling if everything’s not TV style.
Bart did theatre lighting before cinema lighting, and he’s someone who really understands where to put lights. He has lights on his truck. We didn’t rent any gear. It’s all his camera, his lights. And so in terms of budget, the only thing that was more expensive was paying a gaffer for the night shoot.
Bart and I are against coverage. I don’t like it when it’s like TV, where you have so much coverage, and then the editor has all this freedom. I feel like that can kill a vision. You give the editor too much choice. It’s good to go to a shoot with a specific way of how you want things to be blocked, which means also knowing how you want them to be edited. That gives more control. From a directorial standpoint, it also provides more freedom to the actors, because they know you only have this angle and this angle. You don’t have a million options. Just do what you have to do in this amount of time.
Lucio Castro on the importance of blocking sex scenes
Blocking is crucial for sex scenes. That’s something I learned from End of the Century. That actor told me, before we were doing his sex scene, he was like, “Look, I just did a film with a female partner, and the director was awful. The director was like, ‘Okay, you guys, just pretend to be having sex. I’ll be stealing shots around you.’” He said it was so awkward for both of us, so uncomfortable. It’s better if you tell me, “Okay, from here to here, 10 seconds and go.”
That was a great lesson. And I used that for After This Death, as well. Sex scenes are awkward. Even if the people are cool, they’re just awkward. People are naked, so they’re exposed. It’s good to have very specific blocking for sex scenes.
That’s also how I approach the whole movie with Drunken Noodles. In the scene with the conversation by the fire, I knew it was just gonna be two singles, and we never see the fire. We just see some light, some flickering. I didn’t want a wide. There were a few moments where I was very specific about how I wanted to be shot.
7R: Did you have a particular editorial style in mind for how you wanted to edit?
Lucio Castro: We made a shot list. I also did a storyboard. That’s honestly my edit. I like to storyboard before I shoot. It dictates the edit.
7R: How do you work with actors? Do you rehearse?
Lucio Castro: No, I don’t rehearse. I spend a lot of time casting, talking to actors, looking at their faces, looking at their faces through the camera, seeing how they reply to questions, and observing them. I carefully looked at hundreds of people for Drunken Noodles.
But then I trust them. If you rehearse a lot, something dies. Maybe something is gained. Rehearsing is crucial for blocking. In After This Death, one of the actors had a lot of opinions about the blocking of the scenes. He is a big actor. We had lit the scene, and he was like, “No, no, I want to enter here and sit there.” So then, you require rehearsals to understand how the actors want to move.
Lucio Castro on letting the actors fill in the details of the characters in Drunken Noodles
For Drunken Noodles, they read it. I don’t know more about the characters than what’s written. It’s not that I wrote like a biography [of everything that’s ever happened to them in the past]. Some people do that. I don’t. I like going into the movie with the same amount of information as the actors, and then seeing what they come up with. If I fill in the world behind the story, there’s no space for them to complete the character.
When Laith [Khalifeh, who plays Adnan] read the script, he said, “Oh, something very similar just happened to me.” By the way, the actors are all straight, except for Matt [Risch]. But he was like, “Something very similar had just happened to me. I really connect with this part of the story. This part is harder to connect with, it’s further from me, but I know what you’re going for.” And then we talked. We talked about things that felt hard for the actors to understand the motivations for certain things.
For Joél [Isaac], who plays the delivery guy, Yariel, he was like, “How much should I understand what he’s talking about? Should I be an ignorant person who just came here to make money, or is he someone who is interested in art?” Eventually, he will be a poet and interested in art. But before? It’s more about regulating that stuff than about true motivations. You can become very psychological with the characters, but for that, I trust them.
The magic of the camera
The camera is quite different from theatre, too, because the camera is very, very close to the character’s face, gestures, and eye movements. The camera knows what the character is way more than in the theatre when you’re sitting far away from the faces. The camera is a very close, observational tool for the characters’ eyes and thoughts. It shows when they’re thinking, when they’re connected, and when they’re not connected. It’s very, very sensitive. If you control that too much, you kill something that won’t be present for the camera. To me, it still needs to be alive.
Also, if you correct an actor a million times, it’s also annoying for them. The joy goes away, and you can tell. Sometimes, that can be useful for some scenes for them to play super frustrated or annoyed. But sometimes, it’s not. It just works against.
I like working with actors. It is very collaborative. In End of the Century, Juan Barberini, who plays Ocho, is an incredibly smart person. He helped me shape the movie and had so many great insights. I love that collaboration: working with someone who also brings so much to the table and understands the movie, too.
7R: When you’re directing actors, do you see what they do and make minor corrections? Different people have different approaches. Sometimes, it’s just technical directions like speed up or slow down.
Lucio Castro: First, I hear them say the lines. Usually, I’m not very much in favour of improvising unless there’s a word they hate or they cannot say it. Then, we change it. But usually, everything they say in the movie is stuff that I wrote, and then we play around with intention and rhythm. It’s key that they memorize their lines. Once that’s super internalized, then we can play with it. We can modulate, line by line. “That sounds great. The intention feels a little bit weird here; we need to make it clearer.”
For example, with Ezriel [Kornel] who plays Sal, honestly, I gave him very few corrections. He has this very chill, but slightly off-tempo way of delivering lines that I really liked. I thought it worked for the character. I didn’t write that; he just brought that. For Matt [Risch], who plays Iggie, the boyfriend, he’s a very warm, chill guy. Sometimes, I’d ask him to be a little less chill, less comfortable. It’s more like that sort of correction.
Humour is different because humour, to me, requires no rehearsal. When an actor knows the joke, they kill a joke. So for humour, they have to be not too aware of the funny things. For drama, sometimes, you have to do it a few times. In the scene by the fire [with Adnan and Iggie], we only shot in one take for each actor. I cut back and forth between the two of them, but we shot it in one take each. It’s a long scene, as well, like five or six minutes, though not as long as some in End of the Century. So they had to have it all memorized. They all did a great job memorizing lines.
7R: The internal rhythms within each scene in Drunken Noodles and End of the Century seem very important because you have a very minimalist editing style.
Lucio Castro: Exactly, yeah. For example, there’s the scene in the park where he meets the delivery guy [Yariel]. At first, it was going to be just one shot from behind the bench. But then, I really wanted to see their faces. So we got some coverage there, because it’s a very long scene. But you’re right. That’s a really good point. I do have a clear idea of the main shot I want to see the scene through and the blocking for that. And then, maybe I want to see someone’s face more clearly when they hear something. Or I want to hear someone saying something. So then, maybe there will end up being other shots. But I do like to establish: what is the establishing shot of the scene? What’s the centre of the scene?
If we are standing here looking at these two guys on this bench, where do we want to be standing? Do we want to stand right in front? Behind them at the back of the bench? On someone’s side? On the other side, for a different part? It’s establishing, if I were standing here as an invisible person, where would I be? That’s what guides the editing style, too.
7R: When you’re editing something you’ve written and directed, I imagine it’s tough because you’re very close to the material.
Lucio Castro: What’s tough is when you edit for many, many months. End of the Century was [a short edit and] very easy. But I edited After This Death for many months. There was a moment in the year of editing, from month three to month eight, where I was like, “Oh, my God, what is this? I’ve seen this woman open this door a million times. I don’t know what she’s doing anymore.” There’s a moment where you’re so close to the material that you’re lost. And then, I found it again.
With Drunken Noodles, I pretty much kept it the way I had shot-listed it, the way I wrote it. Nothing much changed between the movie I wrote and the final movie. In a way, I was always guided by that trust.
7R: Do you want to keep making movies in the way that you made Drunken Noodles? It sounds like you like this nimble approach, but there are challenges with having no budget, too.
Lucio Castro: I want to do both. I want to do bigger movies, and I also want to make smaller movies. There’s a structure in this movie that I feel like I couldn’t have done if people had given me a lot of money. There’s something there that I think it really works, but it’s quite risky. But I think it’s important for me to also do risky stuff.
When you have bigger budgets, it’s a bigger movie, bigger audiences. There are different things that come with it, which I also enjoy. But I honestly want to do both. I enjoy both, and I would love to be able to continue to do both. The good thing about movies done this way is that I can always make them. It’s a great feeling.
Lucio Castro’s advice to aspiring filmmakers
I teach at NYU, and I tell this to my students all the time. It’s great to have money for movies. There should be money for movies. But not having money should not stop you from making movies. You cannot use that as an excuse not to make something. A painter doesn’t stop painting if they don’t sell. They still will try to keep painting.
Right now, making movies is very accessible. There are great cameras. Our phones are great cameras. Amazing movies don’t require expensive productions. Great ideas don’t require money. I want to make a living as a filmmaker, of course. I definitely want to make money from the movies that I make. I want to make movies that are big because it also gives access to other things. For example, I would have loved to have a huge production design team. I had a person who could not be here when we shot it, because she had work. She was TIFF. I couldn’t ask her to stop working to do this tiny movie.
But there’s also an advantage to doing something where you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. You’re not waiting for anyone’s financing, for a grant. There’s something very free in that.
7R: Do you have other projects in the pipeline?
Lucio Castro: There are two. Both of them are slightly bigger. One is an adaptation of Loitering with Intent, the novel by Muriel Spark, that I’ve been working on for many years. That’s with Film 4. It’s a period piece, so it definitely requires more money. I love the novel. It’s something I’ve always wanted to adapt. The other is an original screenplay about a father and daughter that takes place over a week on an island of a father and a daughter. It’s a comedy.
7R: I know you had a career detour into the world of fashion. Are you still doing that?
Lucio Castro: I studied film in Argentina. When I came to the US, I went to fashion design school, always with the idea of going back to film. Coming from Argentina, it was hard to get a visa to work in film here because films are always so temporary. So I worked in menswear for many years until End of the Century. And then, I stopped and went full-on movie world. I’m very happy here. I don’t want to go back. I’m done making men’s shirts. I can’t think of a way to make a shirt collar anymore.
Related reading/listening to Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles
Listen to the Seventh Row Podcast episode comparing Lucio Castro’s End of the Century to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011).
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