Gabriel Mayo is a Peruvian-American writer and filmmaker who grew up in between Lima and Miami. His short films have played in various festivals. He wrote his debut feature A Weird Kind of Beautiful during the pandemic in the American city. His writing credits include working for director Ricardo de Montreuil. His script for Eon (currently in development) was in the Top 3 in the Final Draft Screenplay Competition

A Weird Kind of Beautiful is a single-location movie about a group of friends who get together and drown their sorrows, after the funeral of one of their best friends. This is where dirty secrets and taboos gradually surface.

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.Z

Paul Risker – How would you describe your relationship to cinema?

Gabriel Mayo – Stockholm Syndrome-ish? No, there’s some truth to that, but I love cinema. It’s been part of my life since I was a teen, both as a maker and audience member. To me life is like a movie and movies are like life, it’s one and the same. Life informs cinema and cinema informs life. It can act both as an escape from reality or as a way to contend with reality. I wager I’ll be watching and involved in making films one way or another until the day I die.

PR – We’re beginning to realise the deep-rooted affects of the pandemic – how it has influenced a certain approach to stories, to denying or delaying film productions. As the pandemic had a direct influence on A Weird Kind of Beautiful, could you share your thoughts on this subject?

GM – To me, cinema doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s made by people who experience life in a certain way and have a point of view about it. It would be impossible to live through a pandemic and have it not affect what you write or how you approach the making of a film. Some actually incorporated the pandemic into the stories they were telling. In the case of A Weird Kind of Beautiful, if I wanted to make a movie I had to adapt to the circumstances; that meant shooting outdoors and containing the film to one location to minimise the chance of exposure. And even if this movie, like others, doesn’t deal with the pandemic in a direct way, I know for a fact I wouldn’t have written this script nor explored these particular themes and subject matter without the quarantine and the isolation.

PR – You’ve an affection for one-location-set stories. Are there any films or filmmakers that were a particular influence on A Weird Kind of Beautiful?

GM – Yes, I love one-location stories. In high school I saw 12 Angry Men [Sidney Lumet, 1957) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf [Mike Nichols, 1967], they both made a big impression on me. These films were so good at keeping you entertained even if all you saw was people talking in a room. I love stories told purely through dialogue and had always wanted to make one. Of course there’s Richard Linklater. He’s made several movies that are just people talking and somehow they’re engaging at the same time. He made a movie called Tape [2001] – with Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman — that I stumbled upon in college and simply loved everything about it. It was also based on a play, but the screen adaptation really gives you a different experience than if you were to simply watch it on a stage.

PR – What were the expected and unexpected challenges of writing and shooting this type of story?

GM – The writing was pretty straightforward. I’ve always loved dialogue and it’s not the first script I’ve written that is like this. But the biggest challenge was how to make a film that doesn’t bore people, because you definitely run the risk of being visually boring if you just have a few actors talking in the same spot for 90 minutes and all you do are over the shoulders. Staging, blocking, casting, camera placement – all of that is super important and has to be well thought-out. On top of that we had the unexpected challenges that can happen in an indie production.

We had to push production because of scheduling, we had to bring in a new actress ten days before rehearsals, we lost rehearsal time, we had a tropical storm at the beginning of production and started our first day late and were forced to make a choice between waiting for the set to dry and lose more time or shoot with a wet set and spray it with water every evening going forward. We didn’t know when it would stop raining. It was a tough call. We also had our lights blow up another evening because of the rain and had to stop shooting. And it was a really short shooting schedule. We had 10 days but only ended up shooting for about seven and a half days because of all these complications.

PR – What struck me is how you throw in some interesting wrinkles with the approach to the cinematography towards the end of the film. Can you discuss how you used the camera to film the unfolding tension between the ensemble cast of characters, and their relationship to the spatial?

GM – Sure. I knew from the start that I wanted the visuals to mirror whatever was going on emotionally on set. We started with a wide-angle lens and very smooth movements with a gimbal. Once the characters arrive and sit down the camera is pretty much on a tripod the whole time. As the chaos ensues I knew we had to go to handheld and Kevin (the DoP) operated the camera on his shoulder for the last thirty minutes of the movie. We also wanted to show the whole space in the beginning but as the story unfolds we changed lenses to longer focal lengths, so you see less of their environment and more of their faces, which makes things feel more claustrophobic. We break that at the end with a wide shot of all the characters once we get over the climax.

PR – How much freedom did the actors have to improvise during the shoot, and did they reveal aspects of the characters’ personalities that surprised you?

GM – Nothing was improvised. Everything was rehearsed to a T. We had nine days of rehearsals and I knew we had very little time to shoot it – it ended up being even less time with the storm – so they had to know it very well and be able perform it like it was their tenth week on stage. It was very challenging, but they were great. Having said that, a few things that weren’t rehearsed came up in the moment, mostly minor things. Without revealing much, the only big one was a specific moment in Crux’s (Eric) performance when his fiancée is confronting him about his past. He had a very tough scene and we had rehearsed it a certain way, but in the moment he tapped into a part of himself we hadn’t seen before and gave us something so good that it was obvious we had to use it in the final film.

PR – A Weird Kind of Beautiful has a peculiar dynamic with sympathy and empathy, choosing to create characters that are polarising or whose rationale is difficult to understand. Could you discuss the thought process behind the character construction?

GM – I wanted to create characters that felt real. I grew up with a lot of people who weren’t very nice a lot of the times, but they could also be incredibly funny. Or capable of being nice one moment and mean the next. One of the themes of the story is about people in your life behaving in ways you don’t quite understand. That is an experience we all have and I wanted this movie and these characters to reflect that. And honestly the best feeling for me has been people reading the script — now watching the movie — and telling me, “I grew up with people like that. I know those characters.”

PR – In at least one scene, Ivan’s vitriolic rhetoric is deeply misogynistic. Are you concerned the film may encounter a backlash from audiences and the cancel culture?

GM – Not really. I can understand there might be some backlash but I’m not worried. It’s kinda silly, really. There is a trend to subordinate art to politics. Some of it is fear, some of it is plain careerism. And in the film world many people want to feel like they’re part of a just cause and their actions have some real-world purpose, but making art is inherently selfish and we should simply accept it and move on. You will always have people looking for moral infractions and they will do everything they can do to find them. I refuse to give them credence. Focusing on a characters’ misogyny to cancel a movie would be like eating a piece of the wax candle when you take a bite out of a birthday cake and then complaining the cake is not edible. I don’t think you understand the purpose of the candle.

And I agree that some people might find certain depictions uncomfortable, but I wouldn’t want to prevent them from being made, prevent them from being seen, or enact a cost on their makers. If anything, they should spark a dialogue. Movies can be heavily criticised and then gain in appreciation over the years, others are highly lauded when they come out only to be forgotten soon after. Some will be so cringe that in the future we will only see them as a historical artifact. But let artists make mistakes and let time do its job, it’s wiser than any of us could possibly be.

PR – There’s a scene where you break the one location premise with a video recording. It shows an incident that has been verbally described. Why did you feel that it was necessary to show it?

GM – It’s the difference between hearing about a murder and seeing the murder. By the same token, the decisions the characters made in the past as a result of seeing the video is better understood if you see the video yourself. Otherwise their reactions might not be believable. The second reason is that, as we know by the end of the movie, these characters had a lot of secrets and told a lot of lies, the only way to truly know what’s in the video besides hearing it verbally described by a character who may not be doing a good job at describing it, or could potentially be exaggerating it for her own reasons, is by seeing it firsthand.

PR – The unrelenting dark subject matter is filled with misogyny, anger, stories of sexual abuse, as well as shaming. What reactions do you intend to provoke from audiences?

GM – I think that’s missing the forest for the trees. It’s an intense movie, but I don’t agree that it’s unrelenting in its dark subject matter. In fact, the movie has a lot of humour and people laugh while reading the script or watching it. Describing the movie like that is like saying A Streetcar Named Desire aims to provoke because it is filled with misogyny, anger, rape and shaming. I guess you can say that, but is that what the movie is? Or is it a movie about a down-on-her-luck woman looking for sanctuary? It’s the same movie, just depends how you describe it. I’m not a provocateur. I am not trying to provoke the audiences by inorganically adding dark subject matter, but this is drama, it’s the stuff of life. These are elements of the movie, but they’re not even the themes of the movie. I am telling a story about imperfect human beings and it’s trying to be an accurate representation of life. My only hope is that by the end of the movie people are able to reflect on the actual themes and how those connect to their own personal lives.

PR – You’ve said that the audience are in for “an intense and somewhat disturbing ride”. Where do you intend to take them on this ride? Are you concerned about eventual audience casualties?

GM – If I’m being literal, I intend to take them to the end of the movie. That’s the ride. I know some people might find some of the elements disturbing, but I just have a dark sense of humour and people with a similar sensibility will enjoy it. Others might not and that’s okay. If you eject halfway through the movie, I doubt you will be asking yourself any questions the movie raises, but if you watch it all the way through you will realise the movie is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a ride in that once you start it you might not be able to get off until the end. As for audience casualties, it’s not something I think about.

PR – How do you look back on the experience of the film and the influence it will have on your future films and stage plays?

GM – Making this film was trial by fire. I learned a ton about how to make a movie and how to tell a story. I made a ton of mistakes too. Mistakes which will positively affect how I approach making a film in the future, from casting and working with actors, to camera, editing, and post. My next film will not be a one-location film, that’s for sure, but I’ll be able to bring everything I learned into it. I would like to make another one-location film down the road once I have more experience, but this was enough for now and I have many other ideas I would like to explore.

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.Z

Gabriel Mayo is pictured at the top of this interview. The other images are stills from A Weird Kind of Beautiful.