Barbara Wurm: It’s really wonderful to have your film in our line-up. It’s going to be one of the most hilarious and humorous films. When we were watching the film together during the selection, it was sheer pleasure – a firework of wit, intellect and heart. We truly loved the film and are very happy that you’ll be with us. It would be interesting to know how long you usually digest a new film project beforehand, and how you conceived this one.
Nicolás Pereda: I have a strange process, because lately I’ve been making several films one after the other. I premiered a film two years ago, another one last year, but I actually started writing this film about three years ago. This project came out of nowhere for me, because I’d been working on films that were much more directly political – about the Mexican situation, violence, and the representation of violence – subjects that felt more conjunctural, more pressing, more urgent. But then, I’d spent some time with my mother, which I hadn’t for a while, and she’s a classical music composer. She was talking to me about her life as a composer. Her generation was the first to form a group in Mexico. There had been female composers in Mexico before, but not as a group. They were total oddities, and her generation was perhaps the first in which that seemed possible. The way she spoke about it was always rather funny. Then I’d seen several press briefings with different composers together. When I’d go with my mother to the launch of a CD, a compilation by several composers, I’d watch them speak. There was something lacking in their interactions, but also something amusing: the camaraderie, the fact that they cared about women supporting one another. Yet there were also all the other things that come with being human – jealousies, frictions, the inevitable tensions of any group. So I thought that a combination of all of that might turn into something interesting. Then, when I premiered a film in Mexico called FAUNA (2020), it was the first time a distributor made me do endless interviews. For the kinds of films I make, when they get distributed, I already accept that there’s no prospect of a commercial release. So it doesn’t make much sense to do the usual promotional interviews. But I did it because he asked me to. I went from radio station to radio station, from blogger to blogger, at first with the whole cast, because they were the same group as in EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE. And it was hilarious, because people who hadn’t seen the film were asking very superficial questions just to get the job done. And I understand – reporters are paid almost nothing and have to cover as much as possible for very little. They didn’t want to be there. We didn’t want to be there. But we were talking about something we really cared about, and that made it funny. At some point we just started laughing with one another. So in a sense, the experience of those interviews – with people who couldn’t care less about what we were discussing, who didn’t know the work or what we’d done before – combined with time spent with my mother and her world and her stories, made me feel there was something there. A third thing that mattered was that while I was writing – it’s in the credits – I watched a film by the British visual artist Tacita Dean called 150 YEARS OF PAINTING. It’s basically an interview with two women painters. One is a hundred years old and one is fifty. There was something so beautiful about that interview that I copied about two and a half minutes of it into my own film. I had to modify it, because the circumstances are different. In Dean’s film, one of the artists says she began painting because of her sense of smell. That’s something I stole, because I found it funny. But in Dean’s documentary, she said it earnestly. Nobody laughed in the cinema or in the film itself. It’s almost solemn, the way she speaks about it. I used the same text, the same dialogue, and suddenly it became funny. Then I remembered that my grandmother used to say that when she wore gloves she couldn’t hear. So I added that, thinking about people whose senses are interconnected in these drastic ways. I suppose all these little things helped the film come together.
What I attempt with these actors is psychological transformation without physical transformation.
Yun-hua Chen: It’s fascinating to see how you gather material from different sources like a collage, and that’s the feeling of authenticity in the film, which runs parallel to the performative aspect. For example, the cast are your friends, but they’re also playing roles, and the roles themselves are also versions of them. How do you think about that relationship between authenticity and performance?
NP: It’s a difficult question, because it grows organically from working with them. I’ve worked with them for a long time and I’m very comfortable around them. I recognise them as people, as my friends, even when they’re performing these other characters. The boundary between who they are, how I observe them, and the figures I construct is very blurred. Psychologically they’re nothing like the characters, and when I see them on set, I see my friends. When I say ‘action’, the transformation is so subtle – the difference between who they are and the characters they perform – that it’s hard to detect. That gives me a sense of grounding. I teach film at a university, and when I teach fiction I often see how, when students say ‘action’, the actors’ souls seem to leave their bodies. You’ve all seen this in student work, right? That idea that something happens and suddenly they stop being human beings and become hollow figures. Of course, there are many forms of representation in which actors transform themselves while retaining humanity – great actors do that – but you also see this switch in many fiction films. What I attempt with these actors is psychological transformation without physical transformation.
BW: And do they think about what they’re doing or what methodology they use?
NP: My relationship to them is as artists. From the beginning, I send them the script, they read it, and I see what they come up with without my saying a word. I hardly have to tell them anything. I don’t really have to direct them. They understand how I want them to behave. I don’t ask too much about how they do what they do, because I don’t want that to become an issue when it’s already something I enjoy. I like the fact that they have a degree of agency when it comes to improvisation. The words I write don’t always have to be exact. For some of them they do, because they feel more comfortable that way. For others, they make up a lot of the words and want to improvise a little. There are no clear boundaries in the process, and in that sense it becomes a collaboration to the point that there are aspects of how they work that I don’t even know. I’ve always felt that if you perform as someone for whom this and that happened in the past, you risk diminishing the complexity of human experience. We behave more in relation to our unconsciousness than our consciousness – everything we carry from our lives, plus perhaps biological factors, pushes us in one direction or another.
BW: I was wondering how wide the gap is between the script and what actually happens in the dialogue, right up to the end of the film.
NP: In the final section, when Estévez, the father, the male composer, comes in, it stays fairly close to the screenplay, both in sequence and in what is said. Some of them deliver everything word for word. Rosa, for instance, says exactly what was written, while the rest improvise slightly. But they don’t add new sentences, they simply substitute phrasing they feel more comfortable with. The ending, however, was different in the screenplay. Something else happened originally – Lázaro didn’t stay for dinner. When we were shooting, Lázaro told me it would be better if he stayed. At first I thought he just wanted to save a day of shooting, because we were meant to film the ending the next day. But he quickly convinced me that it made more sense for him to stay for dinner, to finish there. We had never left the apartment up to that point, so it felt wrong to go elsewhere. At the same time, I didn’t have any written dialogue for them, so they improvised the entire exchange. When I hear it now, I think it’s funny in a way I would never have written. It was especially nice because they are father and son in real life, and Estévez isn’t a professional actor, so it was a wonderful opportunity for him to improvise a scene with his son.
YC: Your title, EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE, is very philosophical and multi-layered, and that is related to your use of sound. The characters carry sonic space with them, even when they leave the frame. Can you talk about your ideas of sound?
NP: My experimentation with sound came quite late in my filmmaking. I made several films in which sound simply accompanied the images. I cared about framing and acting, while someone else recorded the sound and I barely paid attention. When I realised that, I was surprised at how dismissive I’d been of such a major element. A few years ago I made a film that pushed these ideas much further, perhaps too far. It became slightly quirky in the sheer number of small experiments I attempted. I mixed the sound myself, which forced me to spend time learning through trial and error.
In that way, the location suddenly tied together all the film’s ideas about sound and noise.
For this film, I chose the location because it was a friend’s apartment I’d only ever visited at night. She often invited me over for drinks, and after ten in the evening the place is usually quiet. I’d co-written the script with a friend who also knows the apartment’s owner well, thinking about that space. And when I asked to use it, she said yes, but warned me that it was actually quite noisy. Another difficulty was that the actors had scattered: Teresita Sánchez became successful and had no time, Luisa moved to the countryside, and they no longer all lived in Mexico City, so gathering everyone was complicated. They’re also like family, and family is the easiest group to cancel on. So suddenly coordinating them became difficult, even though we’d been working together for years. The only window was 24 to 31 December, when no one works in Mexico and nothing is being shot, so we filmed right over Christmas, from the 23rd to the 31st. Very close to the apartment, there’s a huge shopping mall, and Christmas in Mexico means the heaviest traffic of the entire year in a neighbourhood that is already congested. When I arrived, I thought, how are we going to manage this? I looked at other locations because of the noise. The film even had a different title at that point. But then I spent time in the apartment listening to all that sound and started thinking about how the film dealt with contemporary classical music. Noise itself is a genre of music, after all, and suddenly I realised that this made sense. The script already had dogs barking and neighbours complaining, and it became even funnier with so much more noise around them – why obsess over that one sound. In that way, the location suddenly tied together all the film’s ideas about sound and noise. It was entirely serendipitous: The concept emerged simply because I was working there. The scene in which they carry the sound with them is something I’d tried in another film, and I love the way sound can expand space – something we usually associate with camera movement or editing. But sound alone can construct space: You hear voices while looking elsewhere, and suddenly the world grows larger. You imagine the unseen room in your mind. There is also the possibility of being in two spaces at once. Before I began experimenting with this, if someone had said, ‘In this film you see two spaces simultaneously,’ I would have imagined a split screen showing two different places. But doing two spaces at once through sound is far more subtle than that. I thought it was wonderful to be able to watch how these women behave, especially the mother and daughter, when the others are no longer present, because we hadn’t seen them without the crew. At the same time, we gain a glimpse of the two secondary characters and something of who they are, without ever leaving the main figures. It felt like an exciting possibility to achieve all of that purely through sound. I also find it fascinating to think of the film as meta in many ways – not only because of the filming within the film, but because sound and noise are so prominent. It becomes a chamber piece, in a sense, and you could even describe it as a meta-genre experiment: chamber music translated into cinema, with different elements fading in and out, partially hidden by others.
BW: That’s really beautiful, I think – one of the many aspects that make the work intellectually challenging. You so often explore the boundary between documentary and fiction. Does the distinction matter to you, and at what point do you know a film works? How do you avoid becoming too abstract or conceptual while keeping the sense of a single, flowing piece?
NP: It’s become much more important to me over time, what you’re describing. With this film I can talk about those ideas: the chamber-music structure, the way interactions swell and recede, how one instrument becomes louder and then softer. All of that, and everything we’ve been discussing, feels important. At the same time, I think this is the most accessible film I’ve ever made. It’s incredibly simple. I believe anyone can watch it without engaging with those deeper layers. For me they matter – perhaps that’s why I make films – but the surface has become important too.
Much of my work draws on that culture, but here it’s more about how artists speak to one another, how interviews function. I wouldn’t call that universal exactly, but many cultures share those dynamics.
YC: It’s incredibly difficult to make a comedy that travels well and can be appreciated across cultures, and I wondered whether you already knew those comic moments would work internationally when you were writing the script.
NP: I didn’t think about it until I made GREATEST HITS in 2012, one of my favourites, which simply doesn’t work outside the Spanish-speaking world. There’s a character who speaks extremely fast in a manner that is very specific to Mexico City, instantly recognisable there. Perhaps that’s cultural, but more importantly it relies on wordplay that is extremely difficult to translate. The same is true of Cantinflas, arguably the most important comedian in Mexican film history. To me he’s a genius, but he doesn’t work in other languages, and he isn’t widely known outside Mexico, not even across Latin America or in Spain. It isn’t just linguistic, it’s cultural. He improvised constantly and played with language. With this film, however, the comedy doesn’t arise from virtuosic language but from absurd situations, so it isn’t language-dependent. In that sense it moves easily across cultures. It’s also not necessarily Mexican in subject. Much of my work draws on that culture, but here it’s more about how artists speak to one another, how interviews function. I wouldn’t call that universal exactly, but many cultures share those dynamics. At the same time, contemporary classical music belongs to a Western tradition, and in that sense the characters are inscribed within something broadly European – though that tradition now exists everywhere, with so-called Western artists living all over the world.
BW: Nearly half the films in our programme are by women directors, and yet yours feels like the most overtly feminine, or at least the most pointedly emancipatory. It deals directly with universal gender gaps, and the plot itself is structured around them. I find that striking. Was that also connected to conversations with your mother?
NP: Yes, my mother has always been able to laugh at the famous men of her generation. She isn’t ambitious by nature, though she achieved a certain degree of success when I was young, and she’s comfortable with her position because she never cared about status. Yet she was always conscious of being pushed aside, along with other women, and she spoke about those men not with resentment but with humour – finding them slightly pathetic for how much they worried about their standing in such a tiny world. The world of contemporary classical music is extremely insular. There are only a handful of people. Everyone knows everyone else. The gains were minimal: a few more performances, a few more interviews. That’s why Estévez becomes something of a stereotype, slightly pathetic, because that was how my mother described those figures. I recently screened the film for five women composers, friends of my mother, at her house, and they were the perfect audience. They laughed at moments no one else does, especially when Estévez appears and they instantly recognise that man from their own lives.
YC: One of my favourite lines is when the daughter says she was going to change her pyjamas but now won’t, just to show her mother that the world will be fine regardless. Did you write that?
NP: Yes – it comes from the idea of emancipation viewed across generations, from people with different values and ideas about what that freedom means. When my mother spoke about her career she was dismissive not because she didn’t care, but because she didn’t feel the need to fight every battle. Luisa, by contrast, is younger and more restless, and believes each struggle is worth pursuing. That difference helped shape the mother/daughter relationship, which became central to the film.
