HOW DID YOU COME TO MAKE A BORGES FILM?

In 1991, while I was in post-production on EL PATRULLERO, I was asked by the BBC if I would be interested in directing a short story by Borges as their contribution to a "strand" of Borges teleplays in connection with the 500th Anniversary of the Spanish Invasion of the New World. 

I was pretty ignorant about Borges.   I started reading and discovered this marvelous writer, of course - extremely highly regarded in Latin America and Spain.   In the US and Britain he's often called a "cult" writer, which is  depressing - as if great literature were a "cult" instead of a zenith to which all writers should aspire. 

Pretty quickly it became clear I should direct THE ALEPH.   There were other good stories, like GARDEN OF THE FORKING PATHS and THE CIRCULAR RUINS, but THE ALEPH was fabulous - "Quality" Period Piece Meets 2001.   I proposed it, and was told it wasn't a good idea because it would be too difficult.  The difficulty was part of the fun, of course, but I asked the BBC producers' what their thoughts were.  They faxed me a list of about five titles:  it turned out they were the only stories to which they had the rights!  Among them were EMMA ZUNZ and DEATH & THE COMPASS. 

WHY PICK DEATH & THE COMPASS AND NOT EMMA ZUNZ?

At first I favoured EMMA ZUNZ and we discussed Cathy Burke playing Emma.  But the more I thought about it the more politically charged it seemed: it's the story of a woman who fakes her own rape so as to get revenge against an evil factory owner - it works brilliantly on the page but on screen it could prove quite dubious.  So I went for DEATH & THE COMPASS, the story of a brilliant detective whose brilliance and eclectic methodology bring about his destruction.

Borges' work is great material for the cinema because it is so visual - his descriptions of places, of melancholy times of day, of deadly doppelgangers, of dark coincidences formed out of chaos, are visually spectacular..      But some things are harder to translate than others - like the scene in DEATH & THE COMPASS where Lonnrot finds himself in a mirrored room.

That scene seemed like a homage on Borges' part to LADY FROM SHANGHAI - he had been a film reviewer and wrote one of the very best reviews of CITIZEN KANE.   It is brilliantly written, but it was too daunting to attempt to emulate the work of Welles.    So I left it out entirely.

We shot a 50 minute version in 1992, which was screened by the BBC and Spanish television.  The following year I was asked by the producer Karl Braun to shoot more scenes with money he'd obtained from our Japanese partners, Katsumi Ishikuma and Kuniaki Negishi.  We shot another 40 minutes - adding a robbery in which an old friend of Lonnrot's is killed, various special effects shots, and the scenes of Treviranus
on trial and as an old man. 

Once the new stuff was shot we ran into a new wrinkle:  there were no additional funds for post-production.  Carlos Puente and I prepared a rough cut of the feature version and set it aside.   A couple of years later I directed a "work for hire" - a cable movie called THE WINNER (1995).  It was re-edited by the producers in the clumsiest fashion, and the magnificent soundtrack by Pray For Rain was removed and replaced by porno tunes. 

But the money I earned on this unhappy assignment made it possible for me to  complete DEATH & THE COMPASS - which had been lying in pieces in the negative vaults of laboratories in Mexico City, London, Seattle, and Los Angeles.  The film was mixed by Victor Barragan at Churubusco Studios, and completed in 1996.

HOW DOES THE STORY DIFFER FROM THE FILM?

You should read it!  It is only 13 pages long.  It is constructed like one of Borges' pages from an imaginary dictionary or gazetteer of a fictitious country:  the last adventure of a great detective.   The plot of the story and the film are quite similar, although the narrative of the film is less linear -- it is broken up by the interview with Treviranus, his eventual downfall and disgrace, and the robbery at the Used Money Repository:   Treviranus is our unreliable guide through the labyrinth.

DID YOU USE THE SAME CREW AS EL PATRULLERO?

Pretty much, yes - we had the same cameraman, Miguel Garzon, the same production designer, Cecilia Montiel, the same costume designer, Manuela Loaeza, and the same editor, Carlos.  We had gone for muted colour schemes in EL PATRULLERO:  this time we wanted for DEATH & THE COMPASS a brighter, more extreme design.   Cecilia came up with a specific colour strategy for each of the principal characters.  It was important to us all to try something different, to make a film that was quite different from our previous one. 

WHY IS IT NECESSARY TO BE DIFFERENT?

I don't know.  It just seems important to be constantly attempting new things.  After SID & NANCY I was offered several projects about junkies;  but I have no real interest in junkies, and I had to turn them down.  After WALKER I was offered several violent projects, including NATURAL BORN KILLERS.  But I am not interested in violence per se, either.  WALKER was about violent colonialism.  I'm not interested in staging shoot 'em ups and sadistic action sequences for their own sake.

THE CHARACTERS IN DEATH & THE COMPASS INHABIT THREE SOLITARY WORLDS;  THEY SEEM TO HAVE NO FRIENDS;  THEY ARE ALIENATED.

In my films all the characters are alienated:  the alienated youth, the alienated adults, the alienated criminals, the alienated cops, the alienated aliens.  Vanderbilt in WALKER is completely isolated and alienated, and he is the richest man in the world.

WHAT OTHER BORGES FILM ARE THERE?

According to Edgardo Cozarinsky (whose book URBAN VOODOO Bennie Reyes is reading in his room at the beginning of THREE BUSINESSMEN) there are two films with screenplays by Borges:  INVASION , directed by Hugo Santiago in Argentina in 1968;  and LES AUTRES, directed by Santiago in France in 1973.  Films based on Borges' stories include DIAS DE ODIO (66 minutes, Argentina, based on "Emma Zunz" and directed by Leoplodo Torre Nilsson in 1955);  EL HOMBRE DE LA ESQUINA ROSADA (70 minutes, Argentina, directed by Rene Mugica in 1961;  EMMA ZUNZ (54 minutes, France, directed by Alain Magrou in 1969);  and Bertolucci's SPIDER'S STRATAGEM (based on "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero") - made in Italy in 1969. 

(There is even another version of DEATH & THE COMPASS - a black & white short film directed by Paul Miller at the London Film School back in the far-off seventies, and shot by Dave Bridges -- later the cinematographer of WALKER.   Apparently Nigel Hawthorne plays Lonnrot.)

Maybe the obscurity of these films is inevitable.  Borges is cynical, sharp-witted.   He documents hopelessness and pessimism, the impossibility of change or escape, the inevitability of fate and meaningless violence.    You could not make a Mel Gibson movie out of one of these stories, nor a Merchant Ivory film.