Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Alien: Romulus’ Director Fede Alvarez Charms Hometown Crowd With the Story of His Career in Ventana Sur Masterclass
Hollywood heavyweight director Fede Alvarez returned to his home country of Uruguay this week to host a masterclass at the Ventana Sur market, held in Montevideo for the first time this year.
Eliciting loads of laughs and several enthusiastic rounds of applause, Alvarez reflected on his personal journey from a teenage filmmaker shooting superhero movies with his friends to helming one of Hollywood’s most iconic sci-fi franchises with this year’s “Alien: Romulus,” which grossed $351 million at the global box office. Other standout titles in the filmmaker’s impressive resume include the 2016 horror hit “Don’t Breath” and 2013’s “Evil Dead” remake and 2009 breakout short “Panic Attack!”
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Below, five takeaways from a Variety conversation with the filmmaker and his Ventana Sur masterclass.
Superhero Origin Story
Alvarez may feel right at home in Hollywood today, but his first trip to Tinseltown came more than two decades ago, in a story he says very few people know about.
“In 2003, I won a prize that brought a friend and me to Hollywood for the premiere of ‘X-Men 2.’ For me, as a young guy in my twenties to leave my parents and come to the Chinese Theater, it might seem like kind of a mundane thing for anyone who is from Hollywood or works here, but for me it was the most magical day of my life.”
Alvarez recalled that sitting in a crowd loaded with A-list actors and big-name directors on all sides gave him a sense of perspective that was key in developing his early career.
“That trip is what helped me see that these people were just regular human beings. They were using the same bathrooms, talking, eating popcorn with everyone else, and that really opened my mind,” he told Variety. “When I went back to Uruguay, a part of me was hell-bent on making sure I’d get back to that theater.”
Coming of Age
After his inspiration trip to Hollywood for the “X-Men 2” premiere, the world seemed a much larger place to Alvarez. So, he and longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues quit their, by Uruguayan industry standards, comfortable jobs in Montevideo and went to Amsterdam for a master’s course in screenwriting.
“We shared everything that year. We shared one bicycle that we used to ride everywhere that year, and we learned how to write movies together. We had an amazing professor from USC who gave us an industry perspective on how to really write movies the Hollywood way.”
As soon as the year abroad finished, Alvarez and Sayagues got to work on their breakout short “Panic Attack!” The duo spent three years working on the film, which went viral in the early years of YouTube and opened doors for them in Hollywood.
“I went back to L.A., this time with a short film that everyone was talking about. I found myself back at the Chinese Theater with the short, thinking, ‘How the hell did I manage to get back to this place again?’”
Make What You Love
Alvarez explained that his Hollywood success has benefited greatly from the kinds of films that he likes and has always liked making. He says that as kids, he and his friends would make no-budget superhero films with hand-crafted special effects, several of which he screened parts of during his masterclass.
“I was lucky that my sensibilities from the first time I ever grabbed a camera always aligned with a genre and a style that is popular with audiences. This is the kind of filmmaking I’ve always wanted to do… I’ve never had to compromise what I like doing to get work.”
Despite their amateur roots, the clips shared by Alvarez showed that the director has always had a keen eye for what works on screen and a knack for storytelling. They also surely inspired many in the audience who share similarly humble filmmaking beginnings.
Representation Matters
Alvarez says he’s been invited back to speak in Uruguay several times but never had a chance to make it. This time, “I may be doing it for selfish reasons, to see my peers and friends, but I also want to share my story with fellow Uruguayans who might want to hear about how the hell all this happened.”
According to the director, there is often a perception that successful Latin American filmmakers must come from affluent backgrounds and have had opportunities handed to them to advance their careers. While financial advantages and connections often play a major role in any filmmaker’s chances of launching a successful career, the director argues that hard work and determination are equally important, if not more so, for a filmmaker to find success in the industry. In Alvarez’s case, there were certainly no significant network connections in Hollywood, as he was the first Uruguayan to make it big in the U.S. studio system.
“Even today, there are not enough Latin Americans in positions to direct and produce movies like the ones we’ve been making,” he says. “There should be more, and so a lot of my motivation is to promote that and encourage a new generation to do it and show them it’s possible. The best way to do that is often by telling a success story from the beginning.”
Uruguay’s Impressive Growth
In the quarter-century that Alvarez has been making films, Uruguay’s screen industry has seen exponential growth.
“There was almost nothing else when I shot my first shorts, my first serious films that I could actually send to festivals. At the time, if you had a professional-looking short and you submitted it to any festival with a section dedicated to Uruguayan movies, you were basically ensured to get in,” he recalls.
“That has changed radically over time. Today, any film festival in Uruguay will get hundreds of submissions for maybe 20 spots. That’s how much I’ve seen it change from 1998 to now.”
Alvarez says he’s seen similar growth in industry terms and that there is more local work for artists and technicians than ever before. “When I was growing up there, it was a very rare occasion when a big production with money would come from abroad and shoot in Uruguay.”
The director recalled a unique source of motivation for much of the Uruguayan industry when, in the early 2000s, Michael Mann traveled to the country to film his “Miami Vice” feature adaptation.
“That was a big educational experience for everyone,” Alvarez recalled. “It was also really inspiring and showed you that it’s a real job, filmmaking, and lots of people were influenced by that production. I think just about every Uruguayan involved in cinema has a story or two about ‘Miami Vice’ coming to town and the impact that it made.”
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