by Gill Pringle
“I fall in love with stories, whether that’s a comedy or a drama or a tragedy or a horror film,” says Bichir, who follows up a role in 2018’s The Nun, with another entry in a horror franchise, The Grudge. “It’s all about the characters and the story. The Nun happens in the ‘50s, so that was very attractive to me. And in The Grudge, this is another type of character that I haven’t explored before. So that alone says many, many things and Andrea’s [Riseborough, lead actor in The Grudge] name was also very important. I had this fantastic meeting with Nic [Pesce, writer/director], before saying yes to the project. I just wanted to meet him and see what was in his head.”
The Mexican actor’s prospects exploded when he was nominated for an Oscar in the barely released but heartbreaking and life-affirming A Better Life (2011). The right people noticed, including Oliver Stone (Savages), Richard Shepard (Dom Hemingway), Robert Rodriguez (Machete Kills) and Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight).
“Writers like Quentin Tarantino, they’re very, very, very protective of everything they write. Every comma and every vowel and every letter and every word, they want to make sure that, that’s what they wrote. Because we actors tend to explore and play with words and play with the circumstances and try to go from one place to another and try to extend the range of it… And sometimes we’re wrong, but sometimes we’re right. Sometimes something works and they keep it.
“The most wonderful thing about having a chance to work with those guys, you realise that, that’s why they are who they are,” he continues. “Because they believe in the way films should be. This is a collaboration of many different people. And they’re not dictators or anything. They are big because they bring the best team possible and then they want to hear from you. And that’s how every department achieves what we all want. And of course, the director is the conductor, but as in an orchestra, you will see musicians from Poland and Russia and Latin America and the U.S and that they all come from different backgrounds and schools and all of that, and training. But when you play the symphony, it has to sound beautifully, perfectly in the same tone and pace and rhythm.
“With The Grudge, Nic is a fantastic director,” Bichir acknowledges Nicolas Pesce (The Eyes of My Mother, Piercing). “He’s very young, he wrote the script. He welcomes your input at all times. Sometimes a small little thing here or there can change. Maybe we can skip one or two words, or one or two elements, or bring something else. Maybe that’s the only part of the process of an actor that is similar to a writer or a painter…”
And how does Bichir deal with working on film sets of Mexican films, low budget films or big budget spectacles such as Alien: Covenant?
“I come from the independent world, independent meaning $1 million films or less than that. That’s how we shoot films in Latin America, in general. All the way to $100 million films. And I can tell you it’s the same thing. The only thing that changes is the time you. The smaller the budget, the less time you have for everything in general. So that’s pretty much the only difference really, time. You buy a lot of time with a lot of money. But I think Latin America in general, we make fantastic films with very little resources. If we think about this as baseball, we have a really good batting average.”
Lastly, we ask Demian Bichir why he thinks that audiences respond to horror in cinema? “It’s a rush. That’s why people go into theme parks and stuff like that. They want to be upside down. The faster and the crazier the ride is, the better. I can’t handle that. I’m okay with where I am. To me, every time they say, ‘Action’, that’s my fucking ride, that’s my rush.
“But I think people are fascinated in the same way that they’re fascinated with crime stories and true crime shows,” he concludes, having worked in the US remake of The Bridge among other crime-themed films and TV. “I believe it’s because we human beings are that, we can be both great or terrible. We can be an angel or demon, we have that. I guess it’s because it is human nature.”
The Grudge is in cinemas January 30, 2020
