Recently we went to a screening of The Sentimental Engine Slayer at The Tribeca Film Festival in lower Manhattan. This film stars rock group ”The Mars Volta” co-founder Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, who also wrote, produced, scored and directed the movie.
The Sentimental Engine Slayer is an enchantingly eccentric tale of Barlam, a twenty-something misfit surrounded by lovable deadbeats. The audience is treated to Barlam’s perspective, a fantastical reality, as he journeys from boy to man in a world of sex, drugs, betrayal, and misguided revenge.
At the end of the movie Omar fielded some questions from the (somewhat befuddled) audience. What follows is a transcript of these interactions.
Q: The film seems to have dark elements. Does this stem from personal dark times in your own life?
A: This is a perception you know. To decide that something is dark is a judgment. It’s a part of life. Violence is a part of life. The birth of a child is violent for a woman and she bleeds and the child comes out and it’s painful. The explosion… the creation of the universe was violent and so to me it’s beautiful exploring that aspect of it. The more we judge things the more we suffer. And so this in the film was just a part to carry out the film. And to carry out these desires. I get to live out my secret desires through writing, through cooking, through expressing myself through poetry, through the film. We have all felt at some point or another “I want to kill that guy, I want to beat him to beat himself to death with his own shoe”. And so in this film I can do that. In this film I can kill everyone I wanted to kill, I make fun of everyone I wanted to make fun of and I can beat myself and I can do it in a way that is constructive and positive and it’s again exposing something about myself.
Q: Anxiety seems to really play a major role in the film. Have you had to deal with that in any capacity in any point throughout your career, and how have you dealt with it?
A: I think anxiety and tension is there for all of us all of the time. I don’t feel it in terms of… maybe I do feel it in terms of career. I don’t even know. I feel it now. I feel it being here and the lights are on me and you know I can’t see your face and yet I try and speak to you. I feel that tension, my family is here and so I feel the anxiety and tension of knowing that they’re here and they see the film and they will perceive something else about me. So everything is extremely personal all the time. So coming to Tribeca or going to Rotterdam and thinking this is a completely different culture and they don’t speak Spanish, and the English they do speak- the English in this film- is very particular to that region. How will they understand my film? And so there’s that type of anxiety… but this is a GOOD thing is what I want to say. It’s not a negative thing I am feeling now. I am feeling nervous now, I can feel nervous and I can thank this film for feeling nervous. I haven’t felt nervous since 1988 when I played my first concert. I felt nervous again when I met the woman that I’m in love with. And so these moments of being nervous, they’re small gifts. So now I can be nervous trying to explain my film to you and it makes me feel alive and it makes me feel good about myself. I don’t want you to think that the anxiety is a negative thing. It’s something to be examined. Once something makes us feel, once something makes us angry, once something makes us sad it’s something to probe into because we are only seeing one part of ourselves that we don’t want to look at.
Q: Where did you come up with the concept for this film? Do you watch many other films, etcetera, and what is your inspiration?
A: When coming up with the concept of films I don’t watch films. It’s the same when I make records- I don’t listen to music. Because already as it is, the films that I love and the music that I love is already so embedded in me that it’s very easy to put it in your pocket and, you know, go “Here’s my idea!”, and it comes out of your pocket. So that’s when I’m writing the films and making the films, you know, we don’t watch films. We listen to music… we do anything else but watch a film. Because it’s already too easy to unconsciously borrow, as everyone does.
Q: In the movie you have the scenes with the black garbage bags full of body parts, and the fact that the movie is set in El Paso. Is this a reference to the female murders of Ciudad Juárez?
A: I think a little bit of everything in the reference there is coincidence. That is a very big part of the reality growing up in the city of El Paso. For those of you who don’t know, they stopped the count back 1994 of over 700 woman that were murdered and buried in the desert. And the police in Mexico were doing nothing about it, and it seemed like a big cover-up and there are all these theories about who was doing all these murders. And it’s still going on. It’s still going on. And now they have made a few films about it, but it’s still going on. And now we have all these things going on with the military in Ciudad Juárez, and the drug war that is happening. It was definitely in the subconscious, of course. At the time years ago when I was in the band we made a video over there. The video we wanted to make, they had just played our first video on MTV and blah blah blah and they wanted another one and so we went and it was all about the woman. As we are making it, the second night we are there we get death threats at the hotel and so the director who was Anton Corbijn who some of you may know, he said “I’m out of here!!” and so he left. Then we turned the video over to MTV and they said “We don’t want this! No one wants to know about this, about missing people. We want something nice. Give us something nice. Give us smiles”. So the video was never aired. So it was something of the unconscious. I don’t know if in the conscious mind I thought of it.
Q: Thanks very much for making this film…
A: Thank the rest of the cast also! You know! Because they will make this film alone you know. These are all people who worked very hard; we worked 16 hours a day. Some people weren’t paid. The rest were paid very little. We all lived in the house in the film together, that was my brother’s house. If my brother was here I would thank him because we kicked him and my other brother and their girlfriends and their dogs and their cats out of the home so I could make the film. And I… slept outside of my editor’s house for a month in a van, there in Los Angeles, editing the film. And it’s their fault; it’s my family’s fault that we are here. Because at the time I made it like the two films before it and the film after it, I made it only to make it. I made it only to go through the process of it. Never thinking that one day.. you would perceive it, or that myself and maybe a couple others of us would see it.
Q: When was this film made?
A: This film was made at the end 2007. And at the end in 2008 we made another in Juárez. And hopefully if luck permits we will keep making more.
