“21 Grams” and “Babel” writer haunted by “The Burning Plain”
By Michael Knox, mknox@modernfilmzine.com
Guillermo Arriaga still remembers the blazing image of his neighbor’s home that sent him and others from his neighborhood racing down the street.
The home was fully engulfed in flames when a fireman told Arriaga that there was still someone inside the home, burning.
The scene was one that Arriaga would later build on for his directorial debut on the movie, “The Burning Plain.”
“Just that image of someone burning inside a house haunted me for years and years and years,” Arriaga said.
Arriaga talked about his experience with his film, “The Burning Plain,” during the RiverRun International Film Festival held in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Arriaga, who is the Oscar nominated writer who penned, “21 Grams,” “Babel,” and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” said the image of his neighbor’s burning home was one aspect he used for his story, as well as a story of his own when he was nearly struck by a crop dusting plane.
He was on a hunting trip and he had gone in an area that no one had warned him about.
“And suddenly a crop duster appeared from nowhere, and we almost got into an accident,” Arriaga said. “Nobody told me they were going to crop dust that place and nobody told him I was going to be there. It was really close.”
Arriaga built on those images to tell the story of “The Burning Plain,” featuring Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger and Jennifer Lawrence.
In the film, a couple is having an affair when the house they are staying in is destroyed in a fire. Another section of the story has a father flying a crop duster and getting in a crash that sends his daughter on a journey to find her mother.
But the story is not told in a linear fashion, with the film covering four different time periods at the same time, each initially presented as if they are a part of the present story-line. It is only after paying attention a bit do viewers realize that some of the scenes are in fact flashbacks.
The different time periods include the present, with Charlize Theron’s part of the story; a sequence in which the mother of Jennifer Lawrence’s character is alive; a sequence where the mother of Jennifer Lawrence’s character is dead; and then the sequence that takes place with the father in the plane crash. Before long, the events of the plane crash, which took place in the immediate past, collide with the present, intersecting with Charlize Theron’s character.
Arriaga said it took him years to find the right anchor to tell the story of his film.
“The concept is the four elements,” he said. “Each one of the story has to do with one of the elements,”
Earth, wind, fire, water, all became elements for each part of the story, used to tell the story of Charlize Theron’s character.
“It’s a mystery, it’s what happened with this woman, what’s going on with her, what’s damaging her,” Arriaga said. “First of all this is a story told from different times, but its the same story and I want them to be connected. The acts of the present can influence the future.”
In the film, the mystery builds as to why Theron acts the way she does. Plus there is a point were Arriaga uses a scar on one of the character’s to help tell the story, and build on why Theron acts the way she does. There is also a sequence were we see that Kim Basinger’s character has a scar from surviving breast cancer. There is also one scene were two characters scar themselves to remember an event.
“I feel scars tell the story and that scars mean we are alive, that we have a wound, whether symbolic or a real wound,” Arriaga said. “And if you are cutting yourself you are trying to make yourself feel you are alive. So scars are something we tend to deny. Someone who has a scar has a story to tell.”
Arriaga’s directing debut pulls together a cast of established actors, with Theron leading the cast. But Arriaga admits he sort of held Theron “hostage,” in order to get her involved in the movie.
Theron agreed to meet with Arriaga before she had to go to another meeting. Time was short, but in the brief time together Arriaga knew he wanted Theron in his movie.
The two were only supposed to meet for an hour but they kept talking and talking, to the point were Theron missed her meeting and Arriaga missed an airplane flight he needed to catch.
“Charlize we can not get up from this table until you say yes,” Arriaga remembers telling Theron. She was initially hesitant, because of her work schedule, but fell for the story and eventually became an executive producer of “The Burning Plain.” It was Theron who suggested Basinger for the movie.
Arriaga took Theron’s suggestion, but has one rule when deciding who to pick for his films.
“I cast for taste.,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad taste, but I like to work with people who have the same taste I have.”
Arriaga said this was his first outing as a director and he loved the opportunity it provided him outside his career as a writer.
“Writing is a very solitary actually, you are all by yourself,” he said. “Creating is a very thrilling experience and when you are directing you are interpreting that world.”
The beauty of directing, over writing, is Arriaga doesn’t have just his own vice to listen too, he said. “The good thing about directing is you can turn to somebody and go, ‘I have no idea how to do this.’ Charlize told me that the mistake most directors make is trying to know everything.”
Arriaga said he made sure his crew knew he valued their aid. Every day he would finish a shoot he would thank and hug his crew members.
“I was very sad because many of them told me I have been in this business for years and this is the first time a director touched me,” Arriaga said. “This is not my film this is our film.”
A part of that crew would eventually include famous movie music writer Hans Zimmer as well as Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of the band Mars Volta.
“And putting those two together it was like a privilege,” Arriaga said. “The good thing about being a director is you have front row with the greatest actors, you have front row with the greatest musicians. You always have front row. Working with Hans Zimmer was a dream come true.”
But don’t expect tons of music from Zimmer or Rodriguez-Lopez. Because, ultimately, it’s the story that matters to Arriaga, and the characters that inhabit that story.
“I think personally most of the things have too much music,” he said. “I want to make a contained movie and I don’t want anything to distract from human beings.”
