New York City based Argentinian writer-director Lucio Castro continues to prove himself to be one the most exciting and adventurous contemporary independent filmmakers, delivering one spellbinding film after another as he plays with form and structure in imaginative and unexpected ways. He follows his acclaimed debut feature, End of the Century (Fin de siglo), and his brooding and enigmatic sophomore effort After This Death, with the sensual and evocative Drunken Noodles, which world premiered at ACID Cannes and is now playing in select theaters from Strand Releasing.
Drunken Noodles follows Adnan (Laith Khalifeh, making his captivating film acting debut), a contemplative but open and curious art graduate student in his 20s who arrives in Brooklyn for the summer where he has an internship at a hip gallery exhibiting the work of an unconventional older gay artist (Ezriel Kornel). As moments from the young man’s past and present begin to intertwine, a series of encounters—both artistic and sexual—open cracks in his everyday reality. The film also stars Matthew Risch (Looking, Tales of the City) as Adnan’s handsome, grieving older boyfriend Iggie, Céline Clermontois as a preoccupied gallerist, and Joél Isaac as a charming and poetic food delivery biker, Yariel.
With Drunken Noodles now playing in New York at IFC Center and in Los Angeles at Laemmle Monica Film Center and Laemmle NoHo 7, Lucio Castro speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about how thread painting artist Sal Salandra and his work inspired the film, his unusual approach to writing the screenplay, incorporating the work of 8th-century Chinese poet Li Bai, his intention for the cruising scenes, and the authors he is currently studying.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: I understand that the spark for this film was artist Sal Salandra and his work. How did you first encounter his thread paintings and how did that develop into Drunken Noodles?
Lucio Castro: “I really owe this movie to my friend Tony Cox. He has a small gallery on the Lower East Side in New York called Club Rhubarb. It’s a great space and he’s great at finding new art. I saw Sal’s work there and it was one of his first shows. I really loved it. There was something so fresh and warm about. It was S&M, myths, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, a kinky sex dungeon, and teddy bears, all mixed together in a way that I really loved. I also loved the fact that he was in his late 70s and that he had only been doing this erotic work for about the last ten years. I love people and characters in some sort of shift between worlds.”
“After seeing Sal’s work at that show, I wanted to make a documentary about him. I’ve never done a documentary before, but I took my camera and sound recording equipment and went to meet him at his home in the woods in the Hamptons. Sal is a really warm, lovely person, but during the interview I realized that I’m a fiction filmmaker, not documentarian. Documentarians approach a subject by spending many hours living with them. They generate this intimacy. I’m not that sort of filmmaker.”
“It felt like I was asking questions of Sal that he answered in a totally fine way, but somehow I wasn’t getting to anything that was interesting to me. I left there unsure of what I was going to do with what I’d shot. I love Sal and his work, but I wasn’t sure if my movie was in there as a documentary. Then I spent three years thinking about how to do it. Finally, I understood that I was going to make a movie about his art by creating a fiction that was parallel to it and just see how his work jumped into that. That was how it all started.”
Sal’s not a formally trained artist and I don’t think he is interested in analyzing what he does necessarily. He enjoys creating and having people engage with and appreciating his art, but he is not the kind of artist who would write a thesis about the importance of his work, is he?
“Exactly and he’s actually very proud of not having gone to art school. There’s an innocence that happens in his work that I really like. Although I watch many movies and I went to film school and I teach film, I also think that I’m a filmmaker who likes to approach things with some sense of innocence. So I guess there’s something there in his work that resonated with me. An innocence and a playfulness.”
In the end credits you thank your two young daughters for inviting you into their world of play with them. A lot of adults lose or forget how to play, whereas you’re still tapped into the possibilities of play and imagination. I think that comes through in your films, especially in the surreal elements and the bending of time.
“I almost bend the story in unexpected ways. That playfulness and that sense of innocence is important to me.”
How did the narrative structure take shape?
“Basically, it’s the way that I wrote it, I didn’t rearrange it in the edit. At first, it was going to be four separate segments, four short stories, but then I realized that it was actually the same character going through each story over two summers. As you said, I like to play with time and fold time, so that structure was always there from the beginning. It wasn’t something that I manipulated intentionally to create an effect. As an audience member myself, I like it when I’m slightly confused during a movie and then the movie finds me again. It’s a feeling that I really enjoy. If I’m fully confused the whole time then I lose tension and I disconnect. If I’m fully on it then I also disconnect because I know what’s going to happen. When I’m watching a movie I like thinking, where am I in the story right now?”
Me too, I think being a little disorientated keeps you engaged.
“Exactly, yeah.”
You worked with cinematographer Barton Cortright on Drunken Noodles, following your collaboration on you last film After This Death. The shots are really beautifully composed and lit and I love how long you hold some of them. What was your approach to creating the visual language for the film and to what degree were you influenced by Sal Salandra’s work?
“Bart and I talked a lot about doing a movie about an artist and his artwork and how we could bring that in. There are some very literal references, like the orgy tableaux, where I even reproduced some of the body compositions of his art work. But in general, it’s more about the color. It’s a movie that, in my mind, was always going to be colorful because Sal’s work is so colorful. We filtered light in a very specific way to highlight green, yellow, and blue. I wanted it to be a lush, colorful movie because with cruising and S&M the expected color is black. I wanted to break away from that because I love kink and all that stuff, but I I wanted to give it warmth. It’s always depicted as something dark, brooding and dangerous, but I wanted to make it wam and colorful because it’s about people caring for each other and connecting. It’s a performance and there is a sense of play in there. The delivery guy, Yariel, has all of those lights on his bike wheels and during that hookup scene in the park we can see the lights reflecting on their faces. So that was another way of bringing in some color.”
I like the way you play with our expectations of danger when the group of delivery guys in their helmets arrive at the apartment where Adnan is staying. I also enjoyed that connection through cruising that you mention, that’s underscored in Yariel’s poetry too. There is perhaps less of a connection between Adnan and the first man he meets in the park where he’s confused about whether he said gum or cum.
“Even with that encounter, when the guy leaves he looks at him for a little bit and there is something that remains between them. There is a connection. It is a tiny one, it’s a very brief exchange, yet there’s still something there between them and I love that. I love small connections, big connections and how they affect our lives. I love cruising specifically. It’s a very gay male practice and of course, historically, it happened because it had to. There was no place out in the light for men to have sex with each other, so it had to be in the shadows. But I think that still today there is something really magical about it.”
“The park where we shot the cruising scene is McCarren Park and it’s an active cruising spot right in Brooklyn. It’s a park for kids during the day, it’s where I take my daughters, until about 8pm and then it becomes a cruising spot. I think that’s really great. It’s like a portal in the middle of the city that most people don’t know about. They’re unaware that these things happen there. It’s like a plane with two realities; one reality during the day and one at night; the innocence and the sex. I love those portals in the city. Even though there are scenes set upstate, this movie plays with the warmth of the city in the summer and how it opens itself up to you.”
You shot in Brooklyn in a neighbourhood that is close to home and familiar to you. It feels very authentically New York. Was it your own cat too?
“Yeah, that’s Cleo.”
Why did you call the cat Susan in the film?
“It’s a detail that no one gets, so I almost don’t want to mention it. Because it’s very much a men’s story, in each of the segments I wanted to have a female guardian that oversees things like an invisible witness. At one point, I even thought about telling the fragments through these female characters.”
That’s fascinating. There’s Susan the cat. The gallerist. The artist’s mother.
“Yes, then there’s Iggie’s twin sister who has passed away. He puts a photo of her next to the bed. Like I say, no one picks up on it, but the intention that I had was to include these female presences.”
I love that the cat is called Susan. I wondered if, like me, you’re a fan of Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan.
“Yes, for sure, I love that movie.”
Let’s talk about your lead actor Laith Khalifeh. To what extent did the character he plays, Adnan, take shape after you had cast him?
“It was a very unorthodox approach. First, I had the locations, then I found the actors, and then I wrote the story. In a way, it is how my daughters play in that they have the spot they’re going to play in, then they have their toys and then they decide what the narrative is or what game to play with the toys. I took a similar approach. When I initially approached Laith last year I asked if he wanted to make a movie in August. He said ‘yes, what is it about?’ And I said I don’t know yet.”
What drew you to Laith and what did you enjoy about working with him?
“Actors that I really like have something that is inaccessible to me and they’re able to to preserve that mystery. There’s something inside them that we can’t access, but we’re interested in getting to. Laith is totally that kind of actor. There are many great actors like that such as Marlon Brando or Johnny Depp, at one point. There are many actors who have something that you want but you don’t fully understand what that is. Laith is like that. Even though we are friends now and I love him, there is something that I don’t fully get about him and for the camera that’s interesting because it keeps you guessing. It’s almost a question in itself that you really want to answer. Then of course, he’s very handsome and has such an interesting look.”
I love that subtle air of mystery, or of something being held back from us. I remember Sam Neill telling me that he always approaches playing a character with a secret that he doesn’t reveal to anyone. We do get a strong sense of who Adnan is, but at the same time there is a passivity to the character, a sense that he is going through life and letting things happen to him.
“In very intuitive ways I’m realizing that’s what I always write. I like characters who are in between something. In between relationships. In between countries. In between a career and school. I think that there’s an openness when I place a character in these states of flux. If they’re in a fixed job or in a happy relationship then their world is very small, but if they’re between two things, or they’ve just arrived in a new place, then they have an openness to the world. I think that’s an interesting way to look at a character.”
How about the rest of your cast. Let’s start with Matthew Risch.
“I Like Matt a lot. I first met him at Frameline seven years ago when I was there with End of the Century and he had a short film he’d made playing there. To me, he reads as a long-term relationship kind of guy. I don’t know why that is, but that’s the vibe he gives me. So I asked him to be part of the film and he became Iggie, the long-term partner of Adnan. Actually, at a screening in Paris someone at the Q&A asked me if the sex scene between Laith and Matt was real, which I think speaks very highly about their performances.”
“Joél Isaac who plays Yariel is another enigmatic person. Someone who is also hard to pin down, which I love. Ezriel Kornel who plays Sal is adorable. He is such a warm and amazing man. He’s really funny too. I learned from doing this movie that humor needs to be delivered truthfully. The actor can’t be too much in on the joke. When Ezriel says, ‘my mother is in the house’, he’s so naturalistic and truthful and that’s why it’s funny.”
He obviously spent some time with Sal because he captures his physicality and his spirit in a really uncanny way.
“Yeah, he did. They’ve become friends. Ezriel is actually a neurosurgeon, but I think he wants to be an actor full time now.”
I like that we get an insight into the world of the delivery bikers in this film and it’s perhaps different from our preconceptions. For a lot of us in the city, we see delivery people zoom by all the time but we don’t really think too much about their lives.
“We make assumptions about them. We assume that they’re immigrants and that they’re straight. We assume their only focus is to make money to send to their families back home. And sure, that can be true and all of that is great of course. But what if they are poets? What if they are art lovers? What if they cruise and have sex with other men? It’s also crossing that class boundary. As you say, the delivery guys zoom by us all the time in the city, but why not be curious about them and imagine something about them?”
“There is also a generational boundary that is crossed when Adnan has sex with Sal. That connects with a memory, something that happened in his past that we discover later. I think it’s great, but when the audience first sees that encounter I imagine that some people will think, wait, he’s a guy in his 20s and the artist is in his late 70s, maybe that’s too big of an age gap. Then later on in the movie, we come to understand exactly what happened the night before and how that is connected to an old fantasy that Adnan had.”
I think you stage that encounter really well, and Ezriel plays it beautifully too, because as you say he is a much older man, but he is so warm, tender and sincere. I think it’s great to see an older queer person on screen who is sexually active and horny because we don’t often see that.
“Actually, Sal told me when I interviewed him that he never has sex now, which I understand because I think his art is his sexual outlet, but I wanted a sexualized Sal in the film.”
I love your use of poetry in the film. The first time I saw it I cried when I read the poem that appears on screen at the end. It is so simple but really poignant and profound.
“Thank you for saying that, I’m happy to hear that it moved you. Basically, the movie started with Sal and his work and then I contrasted that with Li Bai’s poetry. I’ve loved his poetry since I was a teenager. China is a very industrious country and there is a sense that its society only values work and productivity. Li Bai was a young man who would hang out with friends, get drunk, toast to the moon, and was fine just looking at the sky. He spent weeks observing a flower bloom. I loved the idea of a movie that’s really about desire and wanting a career that turns into being fine just laying on the grass and looking up at the sky.”
“There’s something there that I really like and I think that was a perfect contrast with Sal’s work which is very active, where all the characters are happy and dynamic, moving, and fucking. Whereas this guy is fine being by himself doing nothing. In the movie, when Adnan’s at home reading a book he is actually reading Li Bai. I shot a close-up of the book, but it was emphasizing te idea too much, so I took it out. But that’s the book he’s reading.”
I love the music, what was your approach to that aspect of the film as you collaborated with your two composers, Robert Lombardo and Yegang Yoo?
“The music came from the writing. I had a very specific idea for the first part. Many times when I see these delivery guys on their bikes, they have bluetooth speakers playing amazing, sort of bonkers music. Sometimes I follow them on my bike and and Shazam the music, but I can never find it. So I told my composers that I want something like that. I sing on it. That’s me screaming. It has bike sounds incorporated into it as well, like bike bells ringing.”
“For the faun scene in the second part, the music was built with sexual panting sounds to give a sense of horniness then the breathing turns into something more mythical. The third segment is more melancholy because the relationship is ending. It starts with the waterfall and the composers used wind instruments and a synthesizer. The fourth part is an eleven-minute piano sonata that plays throughout that section. Then there’s another piano theme that goes with the titles cards.”
The real Sal appears in each of those title sequences doing needlework, doesn’t he? As well as in a cameo in the gallery scene towards the end.
“That’s right. Actually, when I finished the film, I was sure that I had made a documentary because there was a little bit of Sal in there doing the threading, but all my friends were like, ‘no, this is not a documentary at all!'”
You mentioned that beautifully ethereal and sexy scene with the faun, which, to me, is essentially about opening oneself up to artistic inspiration. What are some of the things that inspire you as a filmmaker?
“It really varies. I watch a lot of movies, but lately it’s actually been more through literature. I’m being very specific about which writers I read at the moment. There are two who I read and reread a lot and love. One is Muriel Spark who was from Scotland and the other is César Aira, an Argentine writer who has been translated into English. I’m currently working on an adaptation for Film4 of one of Muriel Spark’s novels, Loitering with Intent.”
“Aira’s work is so free in the way his stories unravel and I find his writing really stimulating. Even if I write something that doesn’t have anything directly to do with Spark’s work or Aira’s writing, inspiration comes from me connecting with work that excites me. The same thing with the films that I watch.”
Have you encountered any LGBTQ+ culture recently that’s made an impact on you?
“It’s not new, but I just rewatched the German movie Taxi zum Klo. I really love that movie and how it’s all real sex in it. I also love that he’s a teacher. There’s something really natural about the way that’s handled in the film which is very hard to do because putting kids and sex in the same film is taboo. There’s something really fresh about Frank Ripploh’s approach.”
We ran into each other at the Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma NewFest screening, did you enjoy that?
“That was really fun, but in general that question is difficult because I don’t really divide things as LGBTQ or straight in my mind, so it’s hard to think of queer things specifically.”
We’re queer, so we bring that to the art we encounter anyway.
“Exactly, to me everything is gay.”
By James Kleinmann
Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles is now playing in New York at IFC Center and in Los Angeles at Laemmle Monica Film Center and Laemmle NoHo 7.
