During his recent Bay Area promotion of the Simon and Schuster publication of The Night Buffalo, I met up
Guillermo Arriaga to discuss the novel and his screenplays. After introducing myself, he asked about my family name, where my family was from and queried whether I knew that I shared the name Guillén with the Subcomandante Marcos. Of course, I smiled, my friends always wonder where I go when I'm missing for weeks at a time. He laughed. Our brief conversation was engaging and a bit unnerving as Guillermo never once averted his gaze. He has a shaman's piercing stare.
Before we focus on The Night Buffalo, I want to congratulate you on your wins at Cannes, last year for the screenplay for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and then this year for Babel; I understand it did very well.
Thank you very much.
The Night Buffalo. This is your first novel published in the United States?
Yes, it's my first novel.
But it's actually the third novel you've written?
Yes, it's my third novel and I wrote all of my books before writing screenplays.
The first two novels will also eventually be published?
Yes. One of them's published in English but in England and all the English territories, well, former English territories.
Can you synopsize The Night Buffalo?
This is the story of a man who has a very good friend who's called Gregorio. Gregorio is a schizophrenic young man and he has a great love for his girlfriend, Tania, and a great trust and love for his best friend, Manuel. These are the people he trusts the most. But while he's going in and out of the mental asylums, his girl friend and his best friend begin having a relationship until they fall in love. Obviously, the relationship between Gregorio and his girlfriend is broken and the friendship is broken. When these friends seem to reconcile, Gregorio kills himself, and he leaves Manuel a box with secret messages after being dead, with letters, photographs, tapes, and slowly Manuel begins to get into the spiral of madness that his friend has been living. So this is a story of madness, of love, of a sense of being lost, of guilt, and how in the end you have to realize and assume the consequences of your acts and the valued importance of love.
"Consequences" is a term I see applied to your writing a lot. Mainly I know your writing through your screenplays and it strikes me as a blend between quantum physics and eastern metaphysics. [Guillermo chuckles.] In physics they say every action has a reaction, but with you it seems more like it's a richocheted reaction, more of an indirect reaction. Why the interest so much in consequences? Or culpability?
Because we have been very superficial in many [ways]. Even in the news, no one cares about human life. In the movies right now, the hero kills, everyone has accidents and no one cares... it's not about moral consequences. It's like having some gravity on human acts. Having some substance with what's going on with the human condition. Assuming that your decisions have consequences is part of the human condition. The
existentialistas - the existential philosophers - were always very aware of these things. Your life is defined by the decisions you [make] and you are your decisions. I am obsessed with this way of thinking.
I commend you for wanting to add that depth to human understanding because I agree with you - there is a lack of understanding. Another aspect of that blend between Eastern metaphysics and quantum physics is the term tat tvam asi - thou are that - which means that we are not separated at all. Separation is an illusion that physics and metaphysics discount. What I see in your writing is a lot of that quality, that you strive to profile the connections between people even if they're not aware that there are connections, but moreso to show that the separations are false, the politics are false, the obvious is false, and you make a viewer strive to understand what's deeper in human interaction.
My basic themes and concerns are the human substances. Other people are more into style, or more into the structures, but I'm trying always to write everything into the service of trying to understand humanity, especially contradictions in human conditions. My teachers told me in literature and cinema that I must create loveable characters and I am against that. I must create interesting characters. And the way for me to create interesting characters is to portray the contradictions of humanity.
Your narrative style - speaking of style - is what poet
Gary Snyder might call a riprap style, a backtracking narrative overlap style. How did that develop? Why did that become a narrative tool for you?
First of all, I have ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder, so I jump from one place to another. Second, I am very influenced by
Juan Rulfo and
William Faulkner who say each story has a way to be told. And third, I'm influenced by the way we tell stories. In our daily basis we never go linear.
That's true.
You tell me, "My parents come from Michoacan, or maybe they come from France", and now you know I have a girlfriend in France, and that's the way we tell stories. So that's the three reasons I write?riprop, you say?
Riprap. Which, if you're backpacking or hiking, it's the way you zigzag up or down the mountain. Even as I was reading the first chapter of The Night Buffalo, when you were describing the gun Gregorio uses to kill himself and he summons the image or memory of how he stole it from a convenience store police man, I could already see how you might film that memory, because in your past films you often flash back to some earlier, important moment to deepen and amplify the plot. I agree with you that we operate on many levels at the same time.
And we never get lost. We're telling stories and we go back and forth but we never get lost.
Because the storytelling is genuine. That's probably why people are relating to it so much and why you're doing so well. The next two novels, what are they going to be about? Are they related to The Night Buffalo?
They are related thematically, but the settings are completely different.
The Sweet Scent of Death is set in rural Mexico and also has to do with the importance of death, especially of the survivors, as in this one. And the other is
The Guillotine Squad. It's a story of the guillotine in the Mexican Revolution. There was no guillotine in the Mexican Revolution. I made everything up.
That's your right as a writer.
That's a comedy, by the way. It's black humor all the way along.
Speaking of black humor, here in San Francisco, our local film critic Mick LaSalle took offense to Three Burials because he said it had too much corpse violation humor. Now, I'm a Chicano, and I understand the role of death in Three Burials, but how would you defend yourself against a statement such as LaSalle's?
I will tell you something. When I was young at high school, we had a skeleton, a real human skeleton in the classroom, in high school. I grew up with a skeleton. And no one seemed bothered by the skeleton. You can put a skeleton here and people will say, "Ah, a skeleton." But if I put a corpse, it becomes threatening because it reminds us of where are we going. And how we are going to transform ourselves. The body is going to be devoured by worms. I wanted to take the danger of [the] corpse and make it more real, more close, more like a friend, the corpse being a character. To take out the threatening parts of it and make some humor about it. I know that some people get offended because of the presence of a corpse, but that means that they are threatened by the presence of death. In a society where they are taking our sense of death, they are also taking our sense of life. If you don't have thoughts about death, you won't have thoughts about life. It becomes a bland substance, like a gelatina, a gel, so I think confronting yourself with death makes you reconsider your life. That's the purpose.
The decaying of the body is mentally challenging. The skeleton, the bone, the hueso - the word is the same for a bone and the seed of an avocado - it's something that's actually living, a bone can bloom. But a decaying body is something different; it challenges the mind.
Challenges, yes, it's threatening.
What I appreciated about Three Burials was the love he had for his friend. He was able to get over and basically accompany that decaying corpse to its rightful place of burial. That was a powerful, beautiful image.
I think, as [with] all of my work, this is a story of love. Friendship is a manifestation of love.
Babel, which did so well this year at Cannes - referencing its Biblical origin, are you trying to say that people are not as disconnected as we think we are?
Something that globalization has taught us is that human beings have much more in common than differences. We have essential things in common - love, power, death, hate, fear - it's the same in every culture. That's a little bit why it's about
Babel. At some point it seems we are suspicious, one of the other, but in the end we have the same worries and the same concerns. Now in a world where everyone is suspected of being a terrorist, y'know? - everyone is suspicious - we have to get closer and understand that we have much more things in common. That's what is running beneath
Babel, the movie.
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