Writer-director Lucio Castro follows his acclaimed 2019 debut feature, End of the Century (Fin de siglo), with the brooding and seductively enigmatic After This Death featuring a captivating central performance by Mía Maestro. Reverberating with love and loss, Castro’s latest work—which is dedicated to his late mother—received its world premiere at the 75th Berlinale.
Maestro plays Isabel, a pregnant Argentinian voice-over artist living in Upstate New York with her husband Ted (Rupert Friend). Attending a concert with her best friend Alice (Gwendoline Christie), Isabel becomes infatuated with Elliott (Lee Pace), the lead singer of an underground band with a dedicated cult following and the two embark upon a passionate affair. When Elliot vanishes without warning, Isabel is forced to fend off his obsessive fans as she tries to uncover the truth behind his disappearance. Left to confront her fractured marriage and fighting to reclaim her identity and her voice, an ominous atmosphere builds as Isabel is visited by a mysterious messenger (Jack Haven) with a cryptic song.
Following the Berlinale premiere of After This Death, Lucio Castro speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about the origins of his screenplay, constructing the film’s visual language, casting Maestro in the central role, his approach to the sex scenes, creating the songs for the film’s fictional band, and the queer artists who inspire him.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: When we spoke about End of the Century you told me, “I’m not any of the characters, but I am all of them”. I wanted to throw that quote back to you and ask to what extent that description applies to this screenplay?
Lucio Castro: “Yeah, it does one hundred percent. It’s a movie that really comes from the deepest membranes of my brain. Myself, my family, my history; everything is in this movie. It’s deconstructed and there aren’t any factual events that happen in it, but it’s totally personal in a way that’s not directly my life. It really represents me in a very fractured way. I’m clearly in all the characters and in all the situations in the film.”
“At the point when the producers were deciding whether or not to get on board, I said, ‘It’s a movie that you either accept as it is or you say, ‘no’. You can’t correct anything or make changes to it.’ From the start, they always supported the vision that I had for it. I wrote it the same way that I wrote End of the Century, which was without knowing where it was going to end. I was just going from A to B and from B to C. It’s very personal in a different way to End of the Century and the experiences that they talk about are different, but I’m everywhere in this movie.”
I love how enigmatic it is. How intentionally did you set out to write something mysterious that doesn’t give us all the answers?
Lucio: “That idea came to me because of a rumour that I heard after my mother died. Years later, someone told me that she’d had an affair with a poetry teacher who she was taking classes with at the time. What really stuck with me was the idea that a rumour will never be killed. I’m almost not interested in confirming that rumour. It was her life. In a way, I couldn’t confirm it even if I wanted to, because what is truth? So I wanted to make a movie that was okay with things not being confirmed one way or the other. In life there are things that we will never know the truth about and we should be okay with that. So the mystery in the film is ingrained in the idea that I wanted to make something about being okay with preserving some mystery in life. “
I love Barton Cortright’s cinematography. It’s not showy, but it’s intentional and looks beautiful. I particularly like the way the camera is slowly moving on shots that initially seem like they’re static. What were your guiding principles for him in creating the look and enhancing the tone of the film?
Lucio: “Bart’s amazing and I started working with him early on. We did a shot list, looked at references together and agreed that it would have almost a glossy feel to it. As you said, there are static shots that start moving in a way that feels slightly unnatural, eerie or uncanny. They come from a stillness that starts moving. They have quietness and a stillness ingrained in them even in the movement.”
“Bart really understands colour and composition and he made such an impact even with relatively simple shots. For instance, when we were framing the waterfall he suggested framing out the bottom of it where the water hits the lake, because not knowing where the water hits makes it a far more interesting shot. We did it both ways, and it’s true, the way he suggested was great. There’s another shot where Isabel and Elliot’s brother Ronnie, played by Philip Ettinger, are talking in the cabin and it’s framed so that we don’t see the table that they’re resting their elbows on. It sounds simple, but not seeing the table makes that shot slightly eerie. It almost suggest an endlessness. These are really small details, but we were meticulous about each shot and conscious of how even slight changes would affect the audience’s perception of the other moments.”
I know you’ve spent a lot of time in Upstate New York, how integral is that setting to this film? I love how you captured the colours of the changing seasons.
Lucio: “I used to live there for half the year. I actually wrote this movie when I was living between there and China. So the film is very Chinese in many ways. If you know China, you’ll know that some of the cave names and the hiking trails there have all these crazy, funky names that I was always Google translating. The experience of being there alone in a foreign country, as well as my time in Upstate New York, inspired the film.”
“Upstate is a funny place because it’s the countryside, or the mountains, but it’s also a satellite of New York City so it still depends on the city in a way. People want to escape it, but they also bring the city with them. So it’s like, what is this place? We’re in nature, but we’re not fully in nature. Are we close to the city? In terms of the seasons, we started shooting when it was really hot and ended with the first snow. I love that range that Upstate has with the colours and the leaves and the light. It’s really beautiful and we wanted to show it in that range.”
Mía Maestro is brilliant in the film. She had a supporting role in End of the Century and I remember you telling me that you’d known her for a long time. Did you write Isabel with Mía in mind and what was it like to see her embody the character?
Lucio: “We’ve known each other since we were 14, so we’ve been friends for a very long time, and I totally wrote this character with her in mind. Mía was a singer in Buenos Aires, and I didn’t know this until after we’d edited the movie, but a week before my mother died she went to see Mía perform. So in retrospect, I realized that was actually the reason why she had to play this character. There was almost some sort of missed connection at that time that happened in my mother’s life. Also, Mía looks a lot like my mother.”
“I love the idea that she’s someone who came to live in the States and at first she was profiled as a Latin woman—with what that meant in the early 2000s—but I wanted to give some complexity to that and examine that. I wanted it to be a character who is complex in many ways and at a moment in her life when she’s deciding whether to be a mother or not, and questioning whether she is meant to be alone or be with other men. She is someone who is at a time in her life where she needs to make some bold choices. Mía is a really strong person and I wanted to give this character a strong sense of self. Even in her doubt and in her pain, she’s someone that really stands in a lot strength and that’s palpable on screen.”
Let’s talk about the sex scenes. I love how unconventional they are, like Elliot going down on Isabel in a public parking lot with the car door open and then there is the foot worship scene, as well as the fact that Isabel is heavily pregnant.
Lucio: “A woman’s body is really politicized and when it comes to a pregnant woman’s body some men think that they own that body and that they own the baby. So I thought it was interesting to show a pregnant woman having sex. I’ve heard from many friends that they can feel very sexually aroused when they’re pregnant, so I wanted to look at that and show it from reality. I feel like we don’t often see that in film. Somehow there’s this idea that pregnant women are supposed to be nonsexual. I think it’s good when film talks about stuff that we see in reality and asks questions and to me it was interesting to show the sexuality of a pregnant woman.”
The sex scenes also show us how Isabel connects with Elliot in a very different way to how we see her with her husband.
“Totally, like with the foot fetish scene. She’s able to do that with him and maybe with her husband she’s not. She’s able to explore with Elliot. She feels very brave with him and more free sexually. I also thought it was interesting to show her take on this persona with fewer boundaries sexually with this man that she’s just met.”
Jack Haven is wonderful in the film as the mysterious messenger. How did you come to cast Jack?
Lucio: “It’s funny because in the script that character was described as an older man with long white hair because that whole scene came from a dream that I’d had of a figure with long white hair. I know Jack through one of the producers, Luca Intili. So Jack read the script and was like, ‘Oh, that role’s perfect for me!’ And they were amazing. I gave them the lyrics to the song that they perform and the message that they deliver, but then they musicalized that into a song. The dance and the movement with their hands all came from them too. They brought so much to it.”
“They were like, ‘I’ll show you what I’ve come up with, let me know if it works or not.’ They did such a great job with it. Jack is such a magnetic actor. They’ve been an actor since they were a little kid and you can see that they’re this trained, real New York actor, but with an amazing, mesmerizing persona which makes everything slightly off-kilter in a really great way. It was so easy to shoot that scene because Jack was so prepared and they knew the song and knew the movement. That was such a sweet scene to shoot.”
In end credits I spotted that you wrote the lyrics to the fictional band’s songs that Lee Pace performs as Elliot. What did you want to bring to the film with the music?
“Robert Lombardo did the score with his wife Yegang Yoo. She also designed the costumes. Robert and I worked on the music for the band together for a long time. We wanted the band to have really great music that we would love. I’d never written lyrics before, but I had written poetry and I thought it might be similar or more like spoken word. It was actually much easier than we’d both thought it would be to add the lyrics to the music. Then we had to think about the chorus and how that would sound. Lee did such a great job performing the songs. He came to the studio a lot to rehearse with us and work out how he was going to perform them. I’ve never done any music before so it was a totally new experience and a lot of fun.”
“At first I thought the film would only have the band’s music in it and we wouldn’t have a score at all, but Bart’s cinematography almost demanded a score because it’s so beautiful and now I absolutely love it. To begin with I said, ‘Let’s be sparing and add some score here and there’, but then it started having music all over it. That was something that changed dramatically in the edit.”
What were your references when it came to the band’s music?
Lucio: “We definitely looked at Suicide. We looked at Joy Division. We also looked at Sparks—not for their music per se because their songs are funnier—but because it’s a duo that there was an uncertainly around. Now they’re very famous, but I’ve loved them forever and for a long time we didn’t know if they were brothers or whether they were lovers. I loved the idea of these two people who are very secretive and of it not being clear what they are to each other.”
Hitchcock is mentioned at one point. Were there any particular films or filmmakers that influenced After This Death?
Lucio: “The mention of Hitchcock was actually for my mother. She absolutely adored Hitchcock and, like Isabel describes, she couldn’t go to bed without watching a murder mystery on TV. So that was definitely for my mom.”
“In terms of references, Bart and I looked at the work of Angela Schanelec. She’s a director that I really admire who was in the Berlinale two years ago with Music and before that with I Was at Home, But…. I love how she uses the camera and how she jumps in time as well. She uses such bold cuts that sometimes it’s hard to tell how much time has elapsed in between the scenes. There’s something that I find really brave and inspiring about that. We looked Todd Field’s Tár too because of the way it portrays this character crumbling down throughout the movie in a very bold way. It’s almost like the camera and the storytelling match her as a character.”
“I’m a huge cinephile so as well as those direct references I’m sure there’s stuff in there that I wasn’t consciously aware of being influenced by. Every time I watch it, I recognize things that I hadn’t notice before.”
Last question for you, what’s your favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you over the years?
Lucio: “Alain Guiraudie. He’s a queer French director I absolutely love and who was also a huge reference. I adored his last movie Misericordia. I also love the work of Muriel Spark, who died in 2006. She was a lesbian Scottish writer and I’m adapting one of her novels right now, Loitering with Intent. Both Muriel and Alain approach queerness in a way that’s not necessarily about sexuality, but it’s more a way of looking at the world with a sense of dissidence and with an eye for questioning things. I really connect with those people and the kind of work that is queer in that sense.”
By James Kleinmann
After This Death received its world premiere at the 75th Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival.