‘Sicario’ filmmakers talk about scouting locations in Ciudad Juarez, how visit affected them
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico is one of several locations shown during critically acclaimed Hollywood film “Sicario.”
Sicario is Spanish for hitman.
“In the lawless border area stretching between the U.S. and Mexico, an idealistic FBI agent Kate (Emily Blunt) is enlisted by an elite government task force official (Josh Brolin) to aid in the escalating war against drugs. Led by an enigmatic consultant with a questionable past (Benicio Del Toro), the team sets out on a clandestine journey forcing Kate to question everything that she believes in order to survive,” reads the film’s synopsis on the official website.
Below are some of Lionsgate’s production notes about “Sicario,” Juarez, the city’s recent history of violence, and depicting the city in the film.
ON THE BORDER: SHOOTING IN NEW MEXICO, TEXAS AND MEXICO
“Juarez is what happens when they f***ing dig in!”-Matt (Josh Brolin’s character says in the film).
Juarez, Mexico lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.
But for many who live there, it is a world away.
The once booming border town became known as “the murder capital of the world,” many living in fear and often in extreme poverty.
The city was lined with the remnants of foreign-owned maquiladora factories that spoke to an era of global trade that abandoned Northern Mexico.
At one point so many people disappeared daily … and so many dead bodies appeared suddenly out of nowhere … that such events no longer made headlines.
Though Juarez’s murder rate has dropped since 2012, the city remains one of the riskiest on earth for journalists and probing outsiders, and new cartels are on the rise. So how was a major motion picture going to penetrate the treacherous realities of this world? It was not easy. Even the location scout was more like a military mission.
Remembers producer Basil Iwanyk, “When we decided to go to Juarez, we couldn’t find one American law enforcement agency to give us the official go-ahead to go across the border. We went with a Mexican ‘fixer’ who had successfully brought a CNN crew into Juarez a few years ago, and he contacted a bunch of undercover federales who drove us around. They carried submachine guns in the front of the car and told us very specific things like, I should bring glasses with me, since I wore contact lenses, just in case we got stopped and kidnapped. We drove a white SUV because only the cartel guys drive black SUVs and if you drive a black SUV you can get targeted.”
During six intense hours, the scouting group was only allowed out of the vehicle twice.
Iwanyk recalls, “We were shadowed by a white Mustang because we were there too long, but the trip made the movie for us. We understood what Juarez was. It really coagulated Denis’s vision. The thing that strikes you about Juarez is that life goes on – there are kids playing ball there, there are people going on with their daily business – but at the same time there’s this overhanging veil of darkness and crime.”
Everyone who went to Juarez was hit hard.
Recollects producer Edward McDonnell: “I remember asking the federales, `What’s the good part of town?’ They said, ‘the good part of town is where they’re not killing anyone, and the bad part is where they are killing somebody.’ There really is no safe part of Juarez. That’s not something you see on the news. You might see figures of how many people died in Juarez, but you don’t see the people’s lives behind it.”
While the production did not shoot on the streets of Juarez, the production did shoot over Juarez and the landscape we are seeing in the film is the real Juarez City.
Most of the filming took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico; El Paso, Texas; and Veracruz, Mexico.
Oscar® nominated production designer Patrice Vermette’s biggest challenge was finding a way to re-create the famed Bridge of the Americas, where a major shootout takes place amid the heightened claustrophobia of 14 congested lanes of traffic.
The Department of Homeland Security was not about to close down the actual bridge, so Vermette scouted alternate bridges in El Paso, then built his own facsimile.
Tarmac was laid down, narrow lanes were striped and aged with oil stains and tollbooths were installed to choke up the traffic.
Villeneuve became fascinated with the borderland terrain, setting out to capture the harsh, bone-dry, yet lyrical essence of the badlands – a landscape that seems to mirror what Kate is going through. He brought in a group of trusted collaborators to bring the visuals to life, including 11-time Academy Award® nominated cinematographer
Roger Deakins, Vermette, and costume designer Rene April, whose works spans from the realism of Prisoners to the wild fantasy of Rise of The Planet of the Apes.
“Sicario’s colors and textures are directly inspired by the Chihuahuan Desert,” says Villeneuve. “I wanted the characters to be silhouettes crushed by the sun. We shot the movie in monsoon season, so every day thunderstorm cloud formations created astonishing skies for us. The sky became a silent character in the film, a poetic expression of Kate’s inner and outer torments. The desert is a fascinating place because it is an extremely harsh and raw, infinite brutal space that force yourself into introspection,” Villeneuve concludes. “This is what it’s like on the border – and we experienced that.”
The film’s glowingly bright, hyper-real look was forged in close collaboration with Deakins, reuniting with Villeneuve after Prisoners. They painstakingly storyboarded the film to prepare for the precise composition of Deakins’ shots. Both agreed that the photography should capture the unremitting action in maximum detail, but without stamping a judgment on it.
Another intriguing challenge was creating the mansion of Sonoran drug lord, Fausto Alarcon.
Vermette used a Tuscan-style estate in the pastoral north Albuquerque suburb of Corrales, bringing in Mexican design elements and decking out the posh outdoor cabana for the climactic dinner scene.
Vermette also constructed on a stage one of the least-seen elements of the drug war: the cartel tunnels that burrow beneath the border to hide the illicit flow of drugs and money. Bricks of drugs stashed in the tunnel were created out of shrink-wrapped hamster shavings. Based on law enforcement and journalistic images of real tunnels, the set was then littered with plastic bags, Tupperware, sandwich wrappers, hardhats, electrical wiring, shovels, picks, and buckets – the detritus of constant human traffic.
Click on links below for more on the film.
El Paso filmmaker who’s seen ‘Sicario’ gives his spoiler-free take on film City Rep.: El Paso must ‘fight back’ against ‘Sicario’ border image Reviews of ‘Sicario’ film ‘Sicario’ film in pictures Juarez mayor calls for boycott of ‘Sicario’ film, considers suing producers Shortlist Magazine editor discusses “Sicario” movie Hollywood film ‘Sicario’ centers around FBI and hitman in Ciudad Juarez Could the film ‘Sicario’ generate bad buzz for Juarez?
More On “Sicario”
Watch Deadline Hollywood’s interviews with Blunt, Del Toro, Brolin, and the director athttp://bit.ly/1Ot0TbV Watch 1st official trailer athttp://bit.ly/1HLOXfP Watch 2nd official trailer athttp://bit.ly/1UDcJ54 Featurette on Blunt’s character, Kate Macerhttp://bit.ly/1OsZF0s Clip of raid in filmhttp://bit.ly/1NYh6c7 While the movie is set in El Paso and Juarez it was filmed in Albuquerque, according to the movie’s IMDB page. “Sicario” is a Lionsgate presentation, a Black Label Media presentation, a Thunder Road production, a Denis Villeneuve film.
