Paradigm Productions

FILMMAKER INTERVIEW with Laurie Coyle

OROZCO: Man of Fire

A one-hour portrait of Mexican master muralist José Clemente Orozco

How would you describe your film to someone who hasn’t seen it?

OROZCO: Man of Fire is not a conventional PBS bio-pic, but the vibrant story of an artist whose dramatic life, iconoclastic personality and dynamic painting changed the way we see art and politics. Orozco’s travels back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border are emblematic of the experiences of millions of Mexican migrants and immigrants who come seeking a better life in America. His personal convictions and tenacity in the face of daunting obstacles make him a compelling figure with universal appeal. Shot on location in Mexico and the United States, the documentary weaves a rich tapestry of images and sound, evoking Orozco’s artistic style, while opening a window onto the artist’s inner life, passions and convictions.

What inspired you to make the documentary?

In the 1970s as young art students, and later as documentary filmmakers, we visited the great murals of Mexico — a pilgrimage undertaken by countless artists, writers and intellectuals of our generation and before. In the post 1960s cultural climate, we were drawn to Mexican muralism as an art form that was communal and political — we wondered what had given rise to this flowering of public art, and what inspiration it might have for those of us trying to create work that was innovative in form as well as subject matter.

During that first visit and throughout the subsequent ones, it was the murals of José Clemente Orozco that drew us back again and again. There was something different and daring about his compositions, dark in their meanings, risky in their style. His work evoked the sublime El Greco; inhabited the moral universe of Goya and Daumier; resonated with its contemporary across the Atlantic, German Expressionism. Orozco bridged a chasm between the socially conscious revolutionary art of the 1930s, the abstract expressionism of the Cold War, and the conceptual formalism of the post 60s artists. We decided we wanted to find out who is Orozco the artist, and who was Orozco the man?

Did you shoot in film or video? What prompted the decision?

OROZCO: Man of Fire was shot on HD (high definition) widescreen (16×9) video. We were fortunate that KERA TV, the Dallas public television station, approached us. They had been building their reputation as a provider of Latino-themed programs to public television. KERA provided the HD equipment free of charge in exchange for a Co-Producing credit. It still cost a fortune to ship the gear across the country, but we never could have made Orozco with the visual production values this subject requires unless we had had their great support.

What was the toolset and the crew scale of your production for this project?

In contrast to the mural art we are most familiar with that is essentially flat, José Clemente Orozco approached fresco painting as three-dimensional space on a monumental scale. To capture this three dimensional architectural quality of Orozco’s frescos, DP Vicente Franco utilized a Sony 700 HD camera, shooting in 16 bx 9 aspect ratio, mounted at various points on a Panther dolly on tracks, a Jimmy Jib crane that raised to 27 feet, and a StediCam. The lighting setup including 18,000W, 6000W, and 1200W HMIs —in a city like Guadalajara we were maxing out the lighting packages available. I think you will see from the opening scene of the film that it was worth tackling the production on this scale.

On the larger mural locations, we had a total crew of 20.

Were there any unusual circumstances or difficulties surrounding the making of the film, the shooting, fundraising, et al?

The unusual circumstances and difficulties surrounding a bi-national (U.S. – Mexico) film production about an artist who has been dead half a century, whose murals reside in Mexico’s most important public buildings, could really fill a book. But to spare you that, making this documentary required the cooperation and active support of countless institutions and individuals, beginning with the Mexican government. To give an example, I was location scouting at the Supreme Court in Mexico with my director of photography, Vicente Franco. We were lying on the floor trying to “frame up” a low angle shot of an Orozco mural there, when an elegant gentleman approached and asked in English what we were doing. We jumped to our feet and gave him our spiel. He spent some time with us, giving his interpretation of the murals. I asked him for his business card, thinking he might be of help in getting permission to film there. He replied he didn’t have a card, but wrote his name on a slip of paper. We found out he was one of the justices of the Supreme Court! In fact, when we later requested permission, the justices had to approve the request, which they did, providing we didn’t film when they were in session. So we had to shoot the mural in the middle of the night, and it was quite a scene—all those security men in stern black suits with our crew in their pony tails and shorts, and the old janitors mopping up around us.

You made a rich and active use of different footage and images to combine with your new material. What did you have to do for acquisition and in post for all of this?

From the very beginning, we knew that we didn’t want to make a traditional bio-pic of Orozco with talking heads and archival. The challenge with any film about a visual artist is to create a cinematic form that evokes the artist’s style and the viewer’s sensual experience of the work of art, while offering a window onto the artist’s inner life, passions and convictions. So we evolved an overall storytelling style that builds on the relationship of Orozco’s social context to his painting, and again between his painting and his emotional life. Fortunately in the case of Orozco, a rich palette of elements—narrative, aural, and visual—was available, and we used just about every means imaginable to get the highest quality reproductions of these elements.

First was all the incredible art: in addition to Orozco’s murals, we had access to his other artwork, from caricatures and drawings to oil paintings, which we either shot on HD cam or acquired from museums in 4×5 transparencies or digital hi res files.

A great deal of the vintage photographs we used came from the Orozco family and other private collections — I traveled to Mexico with my scanner just to scan them, making these very large files to get maximum detail.

We had always envisioned animating some of these elements into visual effects that would be whimsical and capture Orozco’s irony—his artwork is so dark that his wicked sense of humor doesn’t always come across. So we storyboarded these visual effects tableaux that would evoke both wonder and amusement. The hard part was finding the right visual artist to do the work. We were more than lucky when Jessica Yu’s producer Sue West connected us to Robert Conner in Los Angeles—it was a great collaboration, and the highlight of our week would always be when Robert would send a rough version of an effect. We’d pop it into the computer and burst into laughter. Very original, and totally in sync with Orozco and with our vision for the film.

For the archival motion picture, we thoroughly scoured archives in the United States and Mexico. Some of our favorite footage is the rare 16 mm shot by Orozco’s colleague Miguel Covarrubias. Another gem was unidentified footage of the Mexican Revolution at the Library of Congress. It was a major problem to find any motion picture of Orozco, who unlike Diego Rivera stayed out of the public eye. We eventually found a few seconds of Orozco painting at Dartmouth College in the 1930s—but it was on a 20 year old 3/4” videotape, and the original film had been lost somewhere between Dartmouth and WGBH in Boston. After going to extreme lengths to trace it, we had to settle with the old video as our source.

As for acquisition, there were over a hundred providers of visual materials. Rights and permissions can be very complicated with visual art, where there are up to three rights holders for an individual work.

Getting everything in-house was the usual nightmare, complicated by the fact that much of it was coming from abroad and that it needed to be up-res’d to High Def for the on-line. We actually fedexed a 100-gig drive back and forth with our visual effects artist. Fortunately our editor Ken Schneider was able to stay on as Postproduction Supervisor—not only did he master the technical intricacies of preparing for an HD on-line, he really knew the show and could troubleshoot any problems that came up. Video Arts did the on-line and the team there really got behind our vision and took the final show to another level.

What is the length of the film? How long did it take to complete? Website/publicity materials?

OROZCO: Man of Fire is 57 minutes long, what we call a broadcast hour. From conception to completion was 5 years, during which time Rick and I both worked on other projects. Our non-profit educational media company has a website www.paradigmproductions.org that has a basic but developing web page devoted to the Orozco project.

Where did the money to make the project come from and what was the budget?

OROZCO: Man of Fire was a 98% publicly funded program. Our major funder was the National Endowment for the Humanities, followed by CPB through Latino Public Broadcasting and the Independent Television Service, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Private funders were the Brown Foundation, LEF Foundation, Nion McEvoy and Nu Lambda Trust. The total budget was around $750,000.

Previous experiences as a filmmaker, or is this your first?

This is my directorial debut. My co-producer/co-director Rick Tejada-Flores is very seasoned. His program Race is the Place, co-produced/co-directed with Ray Telles, was broadcast on PBS Independent Lens and screened at festivals in 2005. His other co-producing/ co-directing credit with Ray is The Fight in the Fields-Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers’ Struggle; and with Judith Ehrlich, The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It. Some of his own films include Low ‘n Slow-The Art of Lowriding; Si Se Puede; and ELVIA, The Fight for Land and Liberty. He also directed and produced Rivera in America and Jasper Johns, Ideas in Paint, for the PBS series AMERICAN MASTERS.

What hopes, dreams do you have for this project?

In making the documentary, I wanted to create for the viewer the experience of being in the presence of a great work of art—which for me has always been like a ‘religious’ experience, transcendental. Orozco believed in art as a way to bear witness to the injustice and tragedy of our times, that’s a vision documentary filmmakers can certainly embrace.

Orozco was a master painter, a genius really, and yet he faced tremendous obstacles in his long journey of becoming an artist. I don’t think many of us can relate to a one-armed artist painting a hundred feet above the ground, but we can relate to Orozco’s very human struggle to become who he really needed to be—that he achieved and that we can all relate to and admire.

Although Orozco’s reputation has been overshadowed by his more flamboyant colleagues, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Frida Kahlo, he had a profound and lasting influence on American art, from the WPA muralists, to African American modernists like Jacob Lawrence, abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and the Chicano mural movement.

OROZCO: Man of Fire presents the human drama of one artist’s struggle for recognition. It is also a story of cultural exchange between two peoples in which Orozco and his fellow muralists were trailblazers. Today, with the birth of a new civil rights movement headed by Mexican immigrants, there’s an urgent need to create awareness of the contributions of Mexicans to American culture and society. What’s lacking is a sense of history: mainstream television continues to focus myopically on undocumented immigrants as a contemporary social problem, overlooking the long history of their participation. In making this film, we draw attention to a significant, overlooked chapter in American political culture.

What are you currently working on? Future projects?

My co-producer/co-director Rick Tejada-Flores is working on a personal documentary about his family’s history in Bolivia. He’s also co-producing with Ray Telles a documentary for kids about migrant farmworkers for the Southern Poverty Law Center. I am working on a series of short experimental documentaries about women artists and activists. I call it Shakespeare’s Sisters. I also hope to get another biography into development in the upcoming cycle of funding from NEH.

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