Isabel Sandoval: “A lot of minority artists should stop pandering and overexplaining to people”
Criterion ChannelRecorded during the 78th Venice Film Festival
NICOLO GRASSO: I wanted to talk to you about this whole year for you, it’s been insane! Starting from ARRAY picking up Lingua Franca, going to Berlin, being commissioned by Miu Miu to make Shangri-La, attending Cannes . . . How are you living this whole experience?
ISABEL SANDOVAL: The world is going through a nightmare in real time, but I am very, very grateful that my work is getting shown more widely, getting more appreciated around the world. We live in a surreal experience. Of course, a lot of the acclaim has been for Lingua Franca, but I am also really, really thrilled that Miu Miu reached out to me about making the short film for them, Shangri-La. I feel like I had a creative breakthrough with it. I talked yesterday [at the Miu Miu Women’s Tales meeting] about how, in my previous work, it was always kind of anchored in some examination of socio-political reality for my characters. Although I did not go to film school, a lot of my film education has been watching works of world cinema, especially European directors like Haneke, Bergman. I always had this austere and serious sensibility when it comes to “a good film has to be political, it has to be serious, it has to be straight-faced”. When I was making Lingua Franca, of course it touches on some very important political issues, like immigration and the trans experience in the US, but that was also the first film where I started to become more open to sensualness and lyricism and poetry in my work. When Miu Miu approached me for Women’s Tales last November, in the middle of the pandemic, that made me think, because I would be working with much more limited resources, access to locations. That also marked the first time for me being completely intuitive to my creative process. That’s how I came up with the premise for Shangri-La: that exploration of sensuality and lyricism that I started in Lingua Franca, I really took it to a whole new level and extreme with Shangri-La, and my realisation is that having a character like the one I have in Shangri-La, which is a woman of color, and an immigrant, for her to just be herself and give voice to her dreams and fantasies and to be sensual is, actually, the most radically political thing. So, I feel like, for me, what was mostly important this past year is not necessarily the external success that I have achieved, but the growth and evolution I have had as a filmmaker, and how to move forward.
Rewatching your movies in order and getting to Shangri-La, I love how much more experimental you get with the camerawork and editing, using slow-motion, superimposed images. It is wonderful to witness that evolution.
At first, I was daunted because I had never really done a proper short film before, and I feel like, growing up, we are used to watching full-length features. But film schools train you to start first with a short film, it is something more manageable before you move on to a full-length feature. So I really approached the medium of short filmmaking as a novice, as a beginner. I said, “Should I learn the conventions, the rules, and the structure of short films?” No, I am just going to approach it as spontaneously and as freely as I have been approaching my own feature film work. The only guide that I really had, and something that I learned from Lingua Franca, is that, and this is to paraphrase Maya Angelou: at the end of the day, people are not going to remember the intricate details of your plot, or the quirks of your characters, but one thing they will never forget is how your film made them feel. Because art, and specifically cinema, is an emotional experience, and the more complex and singular and rich that emotional experience is, and the more striking and unique your visual and dramatic sensibility is in achieving that emotional experience, the more you stand out as an auteur with an original voice and aesthetic. So that is how I approached Shangri-La, especially. In a way, it’s a treatise on desire and how a woman tapping into the deepest recesses of her psyche and giving voice and manifesting her desire in this visual medium is truly quite revolutionary in terms of who I am in the American film industry and the topics that I choose to make. Someone like me is expected to continually focus on narratives of how we are victimised and oppressed, and I think that’s a narrative that a lot of cisgender, mainstream audience wants to see us in, because that’s how we are constantly being portrayed. For me, I wanted to subvert that, by showing her at her most . . . The boldest thing I could do is just have her be, and exist, and desire as a truly striking assertion of her selfhood, and identity, and agency.
Even the choice of having it set inside a church confessional is really bold. You mentioned multiple times that you were raised Catholic, which is always a constant in your work.
I feel like that’s kind of been my hang-up in my work. I feel like it’s always sex and religion, and I have dealt with that in very different, idiosyncratic ways throughout all of my work. Señorita is about a trans sex worker, but there’s also scenes where she attends a ceremony of confirmation of the boy she’s been looking after. Apparition is of course about nuns in a monastery. Lingua Franca is about this trans woman allowing herself to experience sexual pleasure, but there are also two scenes between her and another trans woman in a church. Tropical Gothic is essentially the clash between native people and Catholicism.
How is the pre-production of Tropical Gothic going? You won the VFF talent highlight award at the 2021 Berlinale.
It is actually being shopped around among different American producers. I am currently being repped as writer-director by CAA, they are helping get the project out and see who is interested. Currently, the project is a semi-finalist at a major fund for script development, but I am also starting to send the project to potential cast members and collaborators.
You have been working on your own projects, including a TV show, but would you be interested to do some acting on the side?
I starred in a short film that was shot November last year in Savannah, produced by the Savannah College of Art and Design. It is kind of a reimagining of different scenes in iconic Hollywood films, like Blue Velvet, All That Heaven Allows by Douglas Sirk, Tree of Life by Malick, and I also played the Malcolm McDowell character from A Clockwork Orange. Reimagining these iconic scenes with a trans woman of color as a protagonist this time. People have asked me whether I would like to star in more projects, but I feel most comfortable acting in my own films, because I know that the characters that I write are going to be complex and layered, not just, for instance, all about her being an immigrant, all about her being trans. This is quite an easy box to be placed in, in Hollywood. I would only really act in another director’s work if I feel like the character is fleshed out or multidimensional or if it’s a director that I love. If Luca Guadagnino asked me, then, sure! I’ll play a trashcan for you!
I can only imagine how difficult and frustrating it can be, to have those conversations to try and have more fleshed out characters in someone else’s film.
In a way, more than directing, I feel like acting is more like a sacred space for me as a person. I feel it’s an aspect about my artistry that I feel most vulnerable and honest, so I would like to just reserve it for projects that feel really special to me on a personal level, and it’s not something that I would want to do for money. I feel like I would be desecrating it, in a way. Of course, I am not saying that I would only do very independent or art-house movies and act in them. It could be a more mainstream or commercial project, as long as it feels true to me, you know?
This reminds me of Lulu Wang who was asked to direct a Marvel movie, and she refused because of a lack of control and how diluted the story would be, feeling less personal by the time production started. Don’t know if that is something you would consider.
We’ll see (laughs). In person, I feel like I am a lot goofier and crazier. I see myself playing a variation in the Barbra Streisand character in What’s Up, Doc? That’s something I would feel excited about doing as an actress. We’ll see.
You have become an actual beacon of positivity on Twitter. That place can be very dark!
There is a lot of negativity and I am trying to make my own Twitter account fun, at least for me, and hopefully for other people as well. I am there because I love movies, and I think that’s something that unites a lot of cinephiles, so I want the tone of my tweets to be kind of celebratory, rejoicing that we get to either experience and create something together.
That is actually how I ended up watching Lingua Franca, after seeing so many of your tweets pop up on my Twitter timeline. Even your Criterion Closet video, these things managed to get a lot of people to know you and seek your works. It is nice to see something good coming out of social media and YouTube, pushing people to delve into these films, and it is lovely.
I knew that Lingua Franca was going to do decently in Europe, but I wasn’t sure it would resonate as much in America, again, because of the portrayal of the trans experience, and that particular subjectivity is really quite subtle and nuanced. A lot of minority artists should stop pandering and overexplaining to people. It’s the same in life as it is in art: the more you try to please people, the more they do not appreciate what you are telling them. You know what? This is my art, and if you get it, great. If you don’t, I feel bad for you (laughs). That’s why they know that if you were setting certain standards and expectations for yourself as an artist and as a filmmaker, they will put in that effort. You let them know that they deserve that effort and that deep level of engagement coming from the audience. That’s also what I learned from all the auteurs that really influenced me, because, in certain ways, they broke rules about filmmaking. The most memorable filmmakers to me are not the ones who followed conventions, but those who broke the mold in certain ways. That’s who I remember: the rulebreakers.
After reading up all of your interviews, I ended up doing a small Rainer Werner Fassbinder binge, given your love for his work.
I’m really excited because Metrograph in New York, one of the few art-house cinemas, is doing a triple feature of Lingua Franca, Shangri-La, followed by Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
I would say that’s probably my favorite from Fassbinder, but there are so many to choose from. If you had to pick one out from his filmography, what would you choose?
One of the first films of his that I’ve seen and that I really love to this day is The Marriage of Maria Braun, and I know that was very much influenced by Sirk, but that’s a kind of melodrama with a very strong political underpinning to it. I am yet to get into his TV series, but I want to watch World on a Wire and Berlin Alexanderplatz when I am back in the US. Before I came here, I did a binge of Georges Melies’ short films because they were on the Criterion Channel and they were leaving by then, so I watched like 12 to 15 of them. It is really the birth of cinema, and for him to be very ambitious with the stories and ideas that he was trying to depict in his short films about men flying to the moon . . . I wish filmmakers to this day would continue to be as daring and ambitious and experimental.
Especially in the era of digital, where so many of those technical challenges are easier to surmount.
If I wanted to be remembered as a filmmaker, I don’t necessarily want to be remembered as the blockbuster filmmaker, but someone who innovated the medium in their own unique way.
You are honestly on the right track now.
It’s tricky because, with Lingua Franca also doing well in the US, the industry has come knocking, so it’s really a tricky process of starting to do bigger projects but not losing track of why I’m doing what I’m doing in the first place.
Venice had a really good lineup this year, it’s unfortunate that you are not able to enjoy it to the fullest like you did in Cannes.
Yeah, but I hope to be back a lot. It’s also been a tremendous experience with Miu Miu, they have been nothing but amazing to myself and Kaouther Ben Hania.