“It’s about a whole bunch of things,” Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios says when quizzed with reference to his newest function, La Cocina, debuting this night on the Berlin Film Festival. “In equal parts, it explores the topic of work, the American dream, the failure of the American dream, and abortion rights. That’s a really tough question as a director.”
Ruizpalacios has a degree. Starring Rooney Mara and shot in a crisp digital black-and-white, La Cocina is tough to outline. Running simply wanting two-and-a-half hours, the pic is a posh and formally bold story, maybe finest described as a tragicomedy, set in a deathly busy New York City restaurant referred to as The Grill.
The movie opens throughout the lunch rush at The Grill, the place, to the fury of the restaurant administration, cash has gone lacking from the until. As a consequence, all of the undocumented cooks are actually topic to a rouge investigation and Pedro (Raúl Briones) is the prime suspect. Pedro is a dreamer and one of many kitchen’s largest characters. He’s additionally in love with Julia (Mara), an American waitress who refuses to decide to their relationship. But when Rashid, The Grill´s proprietor, guarantees to assist Pedro together with his immigration papers, he sees a future for himself with Julia within the U.S. But when an surprising revelation about Julia is revealed, Pedro spirals, inflicting an explosion within the kitchen.
Ruizpalacios, finest recognized for his 2014 debut Gueros, says La Cocina was impressed by his time working at a restaurant he describes as a “horrible tourist trap” referred to as the Rainforest Cafe throughout his time as a pupil in London.
“In those types of places, you meet all kinds of people from all corners of the world that you would never really meet outside work,” Ruizpalacios says of his curiosity within the catering enterprise. “Kitchens become a microcosm of how the world works. A caste system develops. And what attracts me to that subject matter is how one survives a place like that. And the only way is through friendship and camaraderie.”
La Cocina marks Mara’s first function performing credit score since 2022’s Oscar-nominated Women Talking. The pic can also be certainly one of solely three films she’s accomplished since 2021, following a prolific spell that noticed her in 10 films between 2015 and 2017.
“I loved Gueros, and Alonso sent me the script and this sort of mood board and a letter,” Mara remembers. “I get sent things like that a lot, and most of them are bad. You can usually tell they’re a template, and you’re like the third person to receive it. But Alonso’s was so personal and poetic. I really wanted to work with him.”
Ruizpalacios tells us he was equally captivated with collaborating with Mara and first observed her distinctive display screen presence throughout a memorable journey to the cinema in 2011, the place he caught David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Mara stars alongside Daniel Craig, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright within the thriller.
“I started writing, and I began picturing her partly because of the fierceness in that film,” Ruizpalacios says. “And then I saw Carol. She was just so good at the subtext in that film. She was so frail and could communicate so much with very few words. She’s a lady of few words. But she’s really intense, and I needed that for this character.”
La Cocina was largely shot on a studio set in Mexico, the place Mara mentioned the manufacturing constructed its “incredibly realistic back of house kitchen.”
“I had shot a few days in Mexico before on a Terrence Malick thing, but I had never really made a film there before,” Mara says. “I don’t speak Spanish very well, but I can understand a lot of it. But it was just the best collection of people ever. It’s great to be in a different country working.”
The expertise of a shoot, Mara continues, is what she thinks about most when deciding which initiatives to tackle.
“Pretty early on, I had some very negative experiences. After working with David Fincher, I realized the director is everything. That’s who I follow. That’s my North Star,” she says.
“It’s all about whether the experience will be good. It’s such a crapshoot, even with the best directors, if something is going to be good and resonate with people. So I don’t think about that. To me, it’s about the experience because that’s what I’ll have to take with me. It’s my time and my life.”
La Cocina is Ruizpalacios’s fourth function and, curiously, his fourth time opening a movie at Berlin. The movie screens in competitors tonight at Berlin. Hanway is dealing with gross sales.
“I fought to open in Berlin,” Ruizpalacios says of his determination to carry the movie to the German capital. “Unlike Cannes or Venice, the screenings in Berlin are sold to general audiences. So it has a very different feel.”
Despite his worldwide pageant pedigree and Mara aboard, Ruizpalacios says he nonetheless struggled to piece financing collectively for the pic.
“I had so many f***ing Hollywood meetings. Every single studio, every platform, and they said, ‘We love it, but it’s just a bit too risky,’” Ruizpalacios explains.
The prospect of capturing in black and white, he remembers, “really scared a lot of people,” together with the difficult political subject material.
“But that’s the film,” he exclaims. “So we didn’t budge, and luckily, I have wonderful producers here in Mexico that have my back. And then, finally, Fifth Season came along, and they said, we believe in this movie.”
While Mara has been rare onscreen of late, she was set to have a comparatively buzzy 2024, starring reverse her associate Joaquin Phoenix in Oscar-nominated Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s subsequent function, The Island. However, we first reported final May that the pic was shut down on the eleventh hour because of the impending SAG strike. Very little has been heard in regards to the undertaking since.
“Me, Joaquin, and Pawel still have hope that we will make it,” Mara says of the movie. “We just don’t know when that will be. It doesn’t look like that will happen this year. But we’re all committed to the project.”
There have additionally been questions in regards to the Audrey Hepburn biopic Mara had set as much as produce and star in at Apple since Call Me By Your Name filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, who had been hooked up to direct, revealed in an viewers Q&A in London that he was now not engaged on the undertaking.
“The project is not completely dead,” Mara says of the Hepburn biopic. “Luca is now not going to be directing it, however the undertaking remains to be very a lot alive.
She provides: “I can’t say more than that right now.”
La Cocina screens this night on the Berlinale Palast within the German capital.
The Berlin Film Festival runs February 15-25.