INTERVIEW WITH AUGUSTO GARCIA
Augusto Garcia is an Argentinian-born filmmaker living in Sydney. This year he directed the short film 'Tony's Dream' about a Latin-American Australian kid who is struggling to adapt to the new culture of his new country. We had the opportunity to chat with Augusto about his experience writing and directing this film and about his life as a Latin filmmaker in Australia.
VER MAS:
Hello Augusto, It's a pleasure to be here with you today to talk to you about your short film, 'Tony's Dream', and about your life in Australia as a Latin filmmaker. Please tell us about your background and your career in the past few years.
Augusto Garcia:
I come from Argentina, from one of the provinces near the mountains called Mendoza, land of Malbecs. My dad and I immigrated and then my brother joined us. From there I attended university in Queensland School of Film and Television in Brisbane, and then I did a postgraduate course in Griffith Film School. I started to get into filming little by little, it was very hard being from a Latin American country trying to find your way into the cultural environments of Australia. So that has been a long journey. Later, I came eight years ago to Sydney where I thought that the industry was more developed and there would be more opportunities for me. I joined the Sydney Film School and from there on, I had been trying to get jobs in the industry as a production assistant, assistant director and tend to still work my way towards direct feature films.
VER MAS:
Tell us about Tony's Dream. The short film that you directed this year.
Augusto Garcia:
In short, the story of Tony's Dream is a magic realism story about a kid that just immigrated to Australia and is trying to find his sense of belonging. And he travels into his dreams and in his dreams, he finds an Incan goddess who tells him that who he is, is fine, which is a metaphor for self love. So that's the metaphor of the story. Tony’s Dream, it's kind of in a way a search of what values does the Latin American culture have and we can share with the rest of the cultures. The idea was to bring together a team of Latin creatives and be able to talk about certain elements of our realities, and express them in an aesthetic way that represents our vision of art, represents our vision of our culture.
"Growing up in Australia without elements of your own culture can be sometimes very confusing, like you turn on the television and what you see are not the values of your own culture. There's not a true representation of Latin American values or their stereotypes. I found it very disorientating as I grew up. I think it is very important for when you're a filmmaker to find your own voice."
VER MAS:
How did you come up with that idea? Did you write the script?
Augusto Garcia:
I was researching the story of the immigrations of the Latin Americans to Australia as part of a process of finding my own voice. What stories can I tell as someone who was born in Argentina? What are unique elements of storytelling that I can bring to Australia? An element that it's traveled through the Latin American cultures is magic realism, the literature movement that is a post colonial language. It has really acquired an autonomy of itself in Latin America. It is not the place where it’s born, but it definitely is the place where it has a stronghold, from Colombia where you have Marquez, and you have Borges in Argentina. You have different outsources using magic realism. A common ground from where I could tell a story using those elements and bring them here. I began saying, okay, I got to tell that story about magical realism, I want to talk about identity. I want to make this very easy for an audience to understand. So I use a character that is a kid and from there I start to search the spiritual elements, we know about Aztecs but we had never seen Incas. I coming from the mountains, where we have a bit of history with the Indians in Mendoza, I can bring some elements of that culture and show it to people. And, I think it looks really good.
VER MAS:
After you wrote the script, How did you get to make it? Did you present it to a producer? Tell us about the process of producing the film.
Augusto Garcia:
I started to look around for elusive people that were from Latin America and I found a producer that was from Colombia, he didn't speak Spanish, but he wanted to connect with his culture. So suddenly we had some synergy. We started to look for funding and we found that the Blacktown Art Center here in Sydney was funding short films. Blacktown has an important story of immigration of different cultures and being interested in multiculturalism was perfect for this project. We got a bit of financing, and with that backing, that made us official in the industry so you can find help to unlock equipment and other things if you have the right connections. We brought into the project a very talented Colombian cinematographer called Carolina Izquierdo Duarte. (She just won the ACS award for this short film) She has been building a relationship for the last 10 years in the industry with Panavision and first ACs, second ACs. We had a really talented gaffer as well who's from Argentina.
"It's funny how that happens once you prove to the community what you're trying to do, and then you start to find those talents that perhaps you haven't found yet because, again, we're not very connected, but then you find that they are out there."
VER MAS:
It's great to hear that you were really interested in building your crew and your cast with people from Latin America. The main character is also a kid with a Latin American background. Tell us about the experience of working with him and the rest of the cast.
Augusto Garcia:
His name is Oliver Madigan and I knew him from a reference from other actors. He's been working in 'Bump' here in Australia, so he had some set experience that was important for me so you can hit the run and start working on set rather than explaining things. He has a lot of personality. Perhaps what is more tedious for a kid is that on set, it takes a long time to set up the camera, set up the lights and do the blocking. So sometimes you had the kid, very restless. The mother was there, that was a relationship I had to be able to build to explain her things, once you have that, I think you can make it easier for them and for your crew.
Paula Garcia is a Colombian actress who acts as the mother. She's also in 'Bump'. I met her when I was working on 'The Twelve', as a production assistant. We got in touch and I said: 'hey, I'm writing this screenplay. Would you like to be on it?' And she said yes. She speaks like four languages, it was pretty good because she can switch from English to Spanish very easily. That's what I was looking for, the mother arguing with a teacher in English and explaining things in Spanish to his son. Then another actor we had was David Field. David Field's an actor with a lot of experience in Australia. And for me, it was also challenging to work with someone who has so many years of doing this. You can learn a lot from him.Sometimes, I felt very nervous. We had another girl, Ava Caryofyllis, who is also a very talented young actress. I also met her on 'The Twelve'. She also acted as young Natalie Portman on Thor, so she has a lot of credits under her belt already by her young age. So it's amazing to see and act with them.
"People who have many hours on set, and then you can hit the ball running and you're like, okay, I get it, let's do this. And you start to play with them."
VER MAS:
What was the biggest challenge that you encountered while creating the short film? What do you think was something that was really difficult for you to navigate?
Augusto Garcia:
I think funding is always a challenge. I feel like the challenging part of stories is finding a way of making them happen, especially if you want to execute the story at a certain level. You can really go with those funds and shoot something but if you want to make it in a larger scale and use certain different departments, you need a budget and the ability of finding those financial goals perhaps is one of the most challenging things, it takes a long time. Once you have the funding, finding the people, that's why we still have to be networking as we look for funding. Because when you have the funding then you have very little time to secure your crew. Hiring professional people on the shooting always helps. If you have people with experience, that makes the day go as planned. The experience of the crew helps you to avoid different problems.
Something that we learnt on set while setting up the same scene for the day and the for night was by finding on the day that perhaps we should have shoot all the day scenes first and then do the night scenes. Our thinking was like, well, now that we are in this angle, let’s shoot the day and let’s shoot the night from this angle, and then we were like, oh, we need to move the lights, we need to move this, and that takes a lot of time. Next time I'm going to set up my day scenes first and then my nights scenes. But that quick on the ground decision making is thanks to the people that have the experience. So having that network is kind of challenging. And finding the budget is very challenging as well.
VER MAS:
To finalise, what would be a piece of advice that you will give to Latin Americans that want to make their way into the filmmaking industry here in Australia?
Augusto Garcia:
Wow. What a question, I feel I'm still learning myself. So I feel like what I struggle a lot is what kind of stories I can tell. Sometimes I was trying to copy what Australians were doing or copy what English people were doing. And I feel that Latin Americans have our own point of view about things and it's very valid and it's very worth it. I think that being able to tell the stories with our sensibility and being able to express it with confidence is very important. So I think finding stories that we can tell even in Spanish, they don't have to be in English, is important for our culture to not disappear. I feel like we had to be the first ones to defend it and the first ones to put it out there and interact with people so they can come and learn something about our journey as well.
VER MAS:
Thank you so much Augusto for sharing your experience of creating 'Tony's Dream' with us today.
Augusto Garcia:
Thank you for your time.