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Adriana Barraza Roundtable
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 I just want to hear about her experience in the desert.Adriana Barraza: The desert is an image and a beautiful landscape for all of us if you haven't lived it.
The moment that we arrived, that first night, to film the first scene there, we got out of the cars. And the first thing that shocks you is how dark it is-even with the moon we really don't see anything. You start getting very frightened.
We have to start thinking about how the desert is. It's full of little tunnels underneath the sand. The ground is hard. It looks like normal ground, but it's not that way at all. It's full of tunnels underground, where there are snake nests and rabbit holes and many other different holes created by animals. So when I was walking around in these high heels-with flat shoes it wasn't that bad, but with the high heels, the high heels would penetrate the ground and break into the tunnels.
So from the first scene Alejandro told Rodrigo Prieto, who was the sound person, that the only light that there's going to be is the flashlight. And it was going to be just me with the two children and him and the flashlight. And we were joking around because they were saying that I would be the gaffer, because we only had the camera, sound and light.
So they told me, “We're going to run from here to there. And this is the trajectory that you're going to be taking.” At that moment, when they say Action, we started running, and I began to like just sink into the sand up to my knee, incredibly, and the children too. So every time one of the children fell into a hole, I had to yank them out of the holes because we were both very surprised. And Rodrigo Prieto, who's the camera guy, was trying to shoot the film-he was falling all over us because he was also sinking, and he was trying to hold the image.
That first time that we confronted the reality of the desert, that is a constant surprise -and a bad surprise, an unpleasant one. It's very frightening, very, very frightening. Because you don't know whether you are standing or stepping into solid ground. And in that area, after five or six days, more or less we realised where the holes were. It's something that you finally learn because of survival skills. You adapt. But however, we really had some very bad falls.
Rodrigo, the cameraman, had actually a back pain because he was holding the camera throughout this and running through the holes, and at one point Rodrigo and I were joking around, saying: “I have my little girl,” he said, you know, which is his camera, and I had my little girl. And it was really, really tiring, exhausting.
When we started shooting the scenes… I just want to continue talking about the night, actually. We obviously all know that in the desert there are very many animals like snakes, coyotes. And we've seen it all in cartoons. But to hear the coyotes in a place that is completely dark, with a moon that casts a little bit of light and you have to sort of fill in the blanks of what you see. And then you hear the rrrrr! Of the coyotes, it's really frightening.
And you sometimes would hear chk-chk-chk-chk!--and that was the rattlesnakes. But however, the production was obviously always cautious to send people to the areas where they were going to be shooting at-people who were called, I guess, `snake-handlers', who know how to find them. They look underneath the bushes, and if there is a rattlesnake, they know how to grab it and how to kill it, or take it somewhere else.
And I would always say, “But, you know, snakes can't swear on their own word!” So I didn't know whether or not they would come back. So I was frightened. But just like Amelia, me, Adriana, I had to be very, very self-aware, self-assured in front of the kids and tell them, “It's all good! We're just going to do the scene. We're just going to run. Nothing is going to happen.” I had to reassure them. And at one point or another the children would get very scared because they would see a little twig and they'd think that it was a snake or a serpent or a scorpion, and I would go back with my flashlight and I'd show them, “No, no. You see, it's not a snake at all; it's just a little twig.”
And I imagine that that is exactly what Amelia would have had to do as well. I would hug them so that they felt more secure and were supported. And of course, if they scraped their knee or leg I would, you know, rub their leg for them. And they were very professional, because they would fall, they would get scrapes, and they would never cut a scene; they would just keep going. They were very professional. And then when we'd cut the scene, they would say, “Ouch! You know, it hurts!” But they would wait until the end of the scene.
And I can say that there wasn't one person in the crew, Alejandro and everyone else, that didn't fall into a hole and, you know, sprained an ankle or twisted an ankle or things like that.
And sometimes you knew that there had been a snake, because I would shine my flashlight and I could see the snake's print where it had slithered by. And I remember one time, even though we had all the possible security and safety precautions, but at one point we were having dinner at the catering area, and one of the guards who were surveilling that there were no animals coming towards us, they had grabbed a scorpion in a very big soda glass. They had caught a scorpion. And it was a very large glass and a large scorpion. It was so large, the scorpion, that its claws were coming right out of the glass-I mean, in a big, big glass. They were giants. They were about 15 centimetres big. Pretty frightening.
But fortunately we always had the safety or the precautions of an entire team that was always very aware and ensuring that nothing was going to happen, nothing tragic was going to happen.
Another thing that I can say is that the desert drives you a little nuts. It makes you lose your sense of orientation, of direction. And at one point Alejandro told us: “Just walk in a straight line.” And I grabbed my two children, Rodrigo grabbed his camera, and the audio guy, and we started running. And we were running, running, running. We thought that it was a straight line, but we never got to the point B. And then Alejandro cut, and Alejandro said, “What are you doing? You're walking around in a circle!” And we had been walking around a bush the whole time. And I said to him, “That's so strange. I thought that we were walking in a straight line!”
It really is terrible to have that happen. That was at night, but in the daytime what happens is that the 50 degree Celsius temperature that we had to film in was really too much. I told an anecdote in the press conference, but in one day five people ended up in the hospital. I had a stand-in who was used for the car scenes, and at one point or another we said, “You know, maybe we can combine the running scenes.” But we couldn't do it, because she was not an actress; she was just a double.
And so when I started getting very ill, at about one o'clock in the afternoon-and that's when the sun is at the highest point and 50 degrees; it's just too much. And I started to shake and sweat. But it was terrible, because it was 50 degrees and I had a cold sweat. And I couldn't breathe. I had to loosen my clothes to be able to breathe. At that point four had already been in the hospital in one day. It was terrible. People would just fall ill. And so then they took me to the camper, to the Wannebago.
And Alejandro and the producer came and said very sweetly, “If you want, we can cancel the shoot.” And I said, “No, no, no,” because I'm alone, and I knew that if I didn't film that day, then that would be a lost day because no one else would be filming. And I have produced myself other projects, so I said, “No. I know what that means.” So I told them, “No, no. Just give me two hours.” They gave me oxygen. I bathed. They gave me some fluids. And I slept for an hour.
And then they had my double running around from afar, because she wasn't acting. But at the third or fourth time, she fainted. So they had to take her to the hospital, and they said, “The devil can't fill in any more!”
When I bathed I could not take off my makeup because it was just too long to apply it, to put it all on. So I just bathed, you know, covering my face, and then I came back to the shoot to continue filming. It's really terrible!
Something very strange happens with the dehydration, because you don't want to drink water any more at one point. Because they would always constantly tell you: “Here, drink more water,” but you just didn't feel like it. It's like you lose your thirst. It's very strange.
Can I ask very quickly how you became involved in the project?
Adriana Barraza: Alejandro called me to do some auditions, because years ago Maria-Laria, his wife, had the `blessed enlightenment' to tell her husband when Alejandro was asking, “Who could play this role?” she had the presence of mind to say, “Well, you know, because of the acting characteristics it could be Adriana Barraza.” And he said, “Oh yes, that's true!” So I was in Argentina, working, and I received a call. They didn't have my phone number; I didn't have theirs. And I got a call from Tita Lombardo, one of the Mexican producers. And at that moment she said, “Where are you? Alejandro's here looking for you too!” And I said, “Oh, that's so cool! Give him a hug!” And she's like, “No, no, she's looking for you!”
And when I finally connected with him, he said to me that he wanted to audition for me, and I said obviously yes. And he sent me the papers, six scenes of the script. I would record them in Argentina, I'd send him the CDs until we finally had the one he wanted.
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