"It's not just me letting my imagination run wild": Oscar Moreno and the making of ENTE
Mexican-born screenwriter and director Oscar Moreno just had his first feature released on Tubi. It’s a creepy movie! Read this interview and go watch it!
Oscar Moreno is a Mexican-born screenwriter and director who just had his first feature released on Tubi. It’s called ENTE. It’s a creepy movie. The goal of this conversation is to make you click on Tubi real fast, so here’s another link to ENTE, free to stream now on Tubi.
(If you’re getting this as an email, it might be a bit too long - you can hop and read it online by clicking on “read online” at the very top.)
Topics include: a working definition of “border horror”, going back and forth between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, real-looking people on a movie screen, the reality of being a fully bilingual writer in 2023, the great screenwriter strike of 2023, shooting on a micro-budget, the film Nuevo Orden and “being judged in the court of public opinion”, composer Carolyn Koch, “letting real life touch your own work”, “trying to figure out the smallest scale version of your ideas possible and from there, any additions that may seem extravagant are placed on the story because the story actually needs them”, fictional projects getting shelved because similar stories end up happening in real life with grim consequences, and the satisfaction of accomplishing your goals despite the odds.
Looking back, I think one of the very first things I told you was “okay, I've seen Sicario, Ciudad Juarez is not ENTIRELY like that, correct”. (I probably said it much worse.) Without spoiling any twist, we can say “Ente” features a Mexican character who's been working in Texas for some time as a highly educated professional, while the other main character got stuck in Juarez and she wants to move to El Paso. What's border horror and where does this particular story fit into it?
If you're talking about the logo that shows up at the beginning of the film, it's just a label that my friend Rhonnie and I came up with because this isn't the first border-set screenplay we've created. We have a werewolf/nahual script that we co-wrote with our friend Julio that got very close to production a couple of years ago. That said, one of the themes of "Ente" is nostalgia with trauma as its flipside. On top of the loss in their family, Jessica and Aurora are the right age to have been affected by the crimewave that Juárez suffered a decade ago. Maybe not directly, but I don't believe you need to have lost someone close to you to be affected. I think that level of stress and fear does get to you. It's safer now, but things still happen as evidenced by the events of August 11th of last year. I think everyone remains alert.
On the American side, things are very different; El Paso has been touted as one of the safest American cities for many years. But we share relatives, friends, classmates, co-workers. We finished the main production of the film weeks before the 2019 Wal-Mart shooting, but even though it didn't happen on our soil we were all very affected by it. One of my friends works at that Wal-Mart and it was a relief to know he had taken the day off when that happened. Nevertheless, it was a terrifying event. It was a dark day for all of us.
Still, the border is almost never how it tends to come across in films like Sicario. I don't mean to put down the likes of Villeneuve and Sheridan, both of whom I admire profoundly, but that film was a very one-note representation of the border. But it's not the only film guilty of that. These films make the implication that Juárez is only composed of poor neighborhoods and shantytowns, and that violence is constant. It isn't. Like in every other city in the world, there are different social classes sharing spaces. Sometimes people from different continents too. People go out to restaurants. They go to concerts. To work. To school. Terrifying things still happen, but they're not the only story, horror or not, to be told. There are other people to write about who aren't cops or criminals. Now, "Ente" isn't about any of that and although it's a horror film, I hope it allows people to see the possibility of other types of stories that can be told with the border as its setting.
I don't know the last time I watched a movie with actors who look like regular human beings. I blame the international dynamics that basically ship you off to acting school if you're a super pretty child (or tween), but the result is a weird, moneyed sameness of aesthetics, even in horror fare. Maybe it took ENTE to make me realize how much I missed watching Regular Human Faces on a screen. How did you go about casting here? Did you write a role for an actor you enjoyed or vice versa?
Thank you. It all started with the script. After years and years of shorts and failed attempts, I wanted to make my first feature. I realized I needed to apply the same logistics to a feature that I had applied to my short films. A lot of that was the number of characters, but also giving myself the option of casting people I knew I could depend on, even if I hadn't worked with them before. Funnily enough, I ended up not being able to consider many of those people for a variety of reasons but this is where our casting director, Paola, really shined. She helped put me in touch with different actors on both sides of the border. I let prospective actors read the script, told them which scenes I wanted them to record for me, and from there I made my picks. Of course, in the case of the Olivas, it was important to choose actors who looked like they could be in the same family. I think we achieved it very well with the casting of Verónica, Alejandra, and Daniela.
What strikes me about the overall clarity of your writing is the fact you deal with a fully bilingual reality: you were born in Mexico, but you write and produce material both in English and Spanish, your English-language scripts placed in several U.S. competitions, now you're working with an American literary manager who's a native speaker. What drives you to commit to one language rather than the other in different projects?
I've had my foot in the film industries of both the United States and Mexico enough times to be aware of the possibilities and limitations of either. Sadly, for all its problems, the American industry is more supportive of writers. Ironic of me to say in the middle of a very necessary strike, but it's a strike that has been given support and attention by everyone in different fields. Meanwhile, the current Mexican government got rid of the escrow given to Mexican cinema, and instead, quite a few people even applauded it. In the States, there are more spaces and possibilities, not just for Americans but for people from all over the world. There's a hunger for talent, which is also self-contradictory given the amount of gatekeeping that exists. But at least there is a gate. Leaving that aside, I also have certain ideas that lend themselves better to an American or even a Canadian or British setting, and others that lend themselves more to a Mexican one. Being bilingual is a skill I want to make the most out of, and it's paid off handsomely. My first produced feature [Kaz] wasn't made in the States or Mexico, but in Kenya, from a script I wrote in English.
About this, you beat me to it: is there still any pressure on Mexican filmmakers to deliver a particular kind of story? I'm thinking State funds, but also the demands from TV broadcasters or the general expectations placed on national talent.
Yes. Not so much on what gets funded or made, but the court of public opinion, which is also influenced by the current government. For example, a few years ago, the movie Nuevo Orden was attacked online because it was perceived to be an attack on the current government. It's a film that displays a militarization of the entire country after a class revolt. Now, in my opinion, that film has a lot of blindspots in many ways in the themes of race, class, and violence, but I think that if the film had come out years before the current administration it would've been applauded, and seen as a critique of Felipe Calderon's failed use of military power against the drug cartels. And just a few weeks ago, during one of his daily press conferences, the president attacked the film Que Viva Mexico by filmmaker Luis Estrada, mocking it and the people who made it as "conservative." I've not seen it myself, but calling Estrada, someone who has attacked the previous governments and made movies that promote a left-leaning ideology as a "conservative" seems bizarre to me. This is slightly different from previous administrations which maybe did not attack films and filmmakers, but would attempt to censor movies that were critical of the government through the ratings system. They'd get the "adults only" rating, for example.
Before I get lost FOREVER in a discussion about censorship and ratings system (it might still happen), let me get back to ENTE a bit: the score is a real thrill here. It made me flash back to days of WARP and ambient music as the main choice for indies. How did you land on Carolyn Koch as a composer and what did your collaboration look like?
I connected with Carolyn through Tom Barrows, our VFX and color correction supervisor. She watched a rough "locked" cut of the film, and then we had a meeting over Zoom where we discussed the tone of the score, the sonic palette, and music placement. I really wanted something similar to Angelo Badalamenti's score for "Twin Peaks" or "Lost Highway." But there are other influences there such as Underworld's score for the "Frankenstein" play, and John Murphy's work on "28 Days Later." After that meeting, we did a back-and-forth of e-mails and direct messages. We divided the work into "reels" of 12-18 minutes where we'd work on those parts until we were both satisfied and then move on to the next. She'd send me music synced to each reel. I only had a couple of notes, she did a brilliant job.
Maybe the reason I clicked with Carolyn's score immediately - other than personal taste - was the way it echoes a season in Movie Watching that feels like another lifetime now. ENTE can be labeled as a horror story, but it brought me back to the golden era of "universal problems reflected in movies from other countries" – whether it was family tension, the loss of a loved one, job trouble, school trouble, you could find the main characters dealing with it, and every time it made you go “huh, other people around the world deal with this stuff too”. (I was surprised when Jordan Peele's "Us" had "family friends we ONLY see once a year during the holidays" as a crucial element, because it brought back a ton of associations and memories, but for the life of me I couldn't recall the last time I'd seen that in a movie.)
When it comes to your screenplays, is this ever a concern for you? Wanting small parts of the story to resonate with a bunch of strangers, borders be damned ?
Definitely, and I think it comes from me enjoying those elements in a film too. But it also comes to what I think best serves the themes and the overall material. But every time I write, I try to remember that I'm writing about people, first and foremost. I want to think about how a real person would react to the situations they go through in my stories. Maybe it comes from the theater classes I took in college, but I get very involved in what my characters are thinking and feeling in each scene. I overthink it, maybe. But it's all part of trying to give actors something to sink their teeth into. But for me, it's important that a story has a relatable, emotional component because you're dealing with stories about people. It's about the inner conflict of a film working with the external conflict. Sometimes both are one and the same. And I think it's also letting real life touch my own work. Not to say that I've been through anything like what happens in "Ente", but as someone with four siblings, I know things can get a little bit rocky sometimes.
I gotta ask you a specific CRAFT question here. We kind of grew up after the boom of screenwriting manuals and guides aimed at a general audience of aspiring writers, and we know several successful books in this vein were, essentially, assembled after the fact: "take a bunch of hit movies, spot the similarities in structure and beats, devise a storytelling formula that WORKS!". I'm aware it became a touchstone for script readers and evaluators along the way, down to the demand for a few story beats to always be there unless absolutely necessary (the "refusal of the call", for instance). Are we gonna be stuck with Save the Cat forever, or is genuine moviemaking evolving from this state of affairs?
One of my takeaways from John Yorke's "Into the Woods" was how similar all these models of screenwriting or storytelling are. I'm not sure if they will ever be eradicated, I think something in the way we are wired responds to them and chooses to tell stories that way. That said, I think my generation of filmmakers and the ones that are coming after ours; we've grown up with a lot more access not just to world cinema than previous generations. But also to things like anime, manga, and even to older films. And then there are other mediums that we've grown up with like internet videos. I think that as our generations make more films, other storytelling models could gain prominence.
Without giving up the game when it comes to your next projects: ENTE is a story that could be shot with limited money (small number of locations and actors) - what would be the extreme opposite in your case? What's the most ambitious you let yourself be, knowing how hard it can be to secure funding?
I think that of my scripts, the most ambitious one that I'd love to direct sometime soon is a relatively small-scale romance that takes place in three different countries and where the international bridges feature frequently throughout. I've written a sci-fi script that features interstellar travel, a post-apocalyptic landscape, lots of different characters, and action sequences. I think one thing that helped my writing, not just in terms of getting produced and optioned, but also in terms of improving my writing, is trying to figure out the smallest scale version of my ideas possible and from there, any additions that may seem extravagant are placed on the story because the story actually needs them. It's not just me letting my imagination run wild.
You might be the only person I told, but for a few months in 2019 I researched and drafted a novel about a shady "operative" character who was figuring out the exact amount of money, time and provocation needed to get a random crowd to assault a prominent city building. Then I shelved the project for many reasons, and then I watched a version of it happen live on January 6. Did you ever have a fictional story that was obliterated by the same events happen in real life ?
Not 100% the same thing, but years ago, pre-2016 I came up with a character who was a YouTuber of sorts who became a supervillain. Since then, we've had so many key figures in events like January 6 being YouTubers or being people happy to vlog their terrorism or to lead people toward terrorism. There even was a YouTuber here who was involved in a sex trafficking scheme.
I started this newsletter when i realized my overall frame was (still is) "expectations, reality and the inevitable crash". Looking at the production of ENTE and the variety of projects that brought you to this point of your career, is there one moment that stands out to you as a case of "expectations crashing into reality" ? And is there any lesson you learnt in the aftermath ?
I take it this means accomplishing a goal that we expected against all the odds in reality?
Oh, interesting spin: you're the first person to take a positive stance on this question. Let's hear it!
I guess I can be more positive than I thought! But maybe I'm a little meme-brained and I still remember how "(500) Days of Summer" frames "expectations" as extraordinarily positive, which is what the memes tend to do as well. But making this movie is a case of having an expectation or a goal and making it a reality; I've been wanting to make a feature film since I was a teenager. I kept making shorts and never stopped, but even a lot of the shorts I wanted to make would fall apart and I didn't really think about why. Same with my features. Then I looked back on which projects I was actually able to make and did research.
A lot of the scripts that studio purchase are those set in one location with a smaller amount of characters. They are just easier to make. It's a logic the microbudget, indie, and Hollywood worlds share. That mixed with the conclusions I arrived at from analyzing what had helped in the making of some of my short films lead me to strategize how to make a feature myself. And it all had to start from the script. I couldn't just do the thing I had done before at times when I had to adapt the script to what I had. I had to originate it in the script. And if I had to adapt anything, I had to be very careful and made sure it made sense and that the emotional impact of the film wasn't ruined.
Scheduling seems like a very obvious thing to deal with in a movie, because every movie does it, but strategizing also involves making that detail work. We rehearsed the entire movie in the time our actors and I had available to see how long or how much time we had to spend on scenes and their necessary shots. And we did have to adapt after all. Sometimes you have no choice but to wait for things to blow over. There was additional photography to address some things that were raised in early test screenings and things that weren't clicking with me about the film either. I wrote the pages for the additional photography in December of 2019 so we could shoot in March of 2020.
I wanted continuity and we had shot the film in the summer, so I also wanted my actors to be comfortable. I didn't want them wearing summer clothes in cold weather. I'm pretty sure you can guess what happened next. COVID stalled shooting additional photography for more than a year. I took that time to re-cut the film or what I had of it and refine it as much as possible. We were able to film those pages until September of 2021, and even then, that required adaptation and strategy I had to change scenes to make it easier to shoot with just one actor present and I had to mask up and keep my distance from my actors. That also limited the scenes I could shoot so I wasn't able to film everything I intended, but we also did not use everything I shot.
And now, action:
You can watch ENTE on Tubi, here:
you can watch a trailer for the movie, here;
you can keep up with Oscar Moreno on Instagram ;
and you can take a deep dive in his work through Linktree. (It’s a treasure trove of goodies in here.)
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