He’s Keeping It Real

In the new film “Our Lady of the Assassins,” the shock of viewing a plague of chillingly casual murders on the streets of Medellin becomes even more surreal and disturbing when one learns that the cast and crew faced similar dangers during the film’s production.

Director Barbet Schroeder’s journal on the making of the movie cites threats of kidnapping, theft and death he and fellow filmmakers endured while shooting on the streets of the hauntingly beautiful Colombian city. In person, Schroeder (“Reversal of Fortune,” “Single White Female,” the upcoming “Murder by Numbers” with Sandra Bullock) downplays the problems now that he is at a safe distance, dining at West Hollywood’s Asia de Cuba, which overlooks Los Angeles.

“It was not unbearable,” the 60-year-old filmmaker says now. “It was fun, actually. The crew was wonderful, and I was reunited with many friends.

“Medellin is a wonderful city,” he continues, “full of very joyous, proper people. What I show is a tiny slice of reality, which is deep down. Otherwise, it’s a city like any other.”

True, he says, the city has a history of both political terrorism and, more recently, drug wars, and the murder rate is three times that of Bogota. The well-to-do travel with bodyguards because the threat of kidnapping is prevalent. But, he contends, the situation is only a heightened version of what goes on in other cities. Given a similar set of circumstances, he cautions, “the whole world could become Colombianized.”

“Our Lady of the Assassins” is based on a semiautobiographical novel by Fernando Vallejo, a Colombian expatriate who resides in Mexico. In the novel, the central character, also named Fernando, returns to his native land to die. Weary, he has simply given up on life. Ironically, in the face of constant death he regains his will to live and falls in love. He becomes attached to a poor young man, an assassin who has to stay one step ahead of his own pursuers. Fernando subsequently encounters another young man with a similarly turbulent history.

Like Vallejo, who also wrote the screenplay, Schroeder, who was born in Iran, has great affection for Colombia, where he spent much of his childhood. Later moving to France, Schroeder attended film school in Paris. He began his career as a producer of such films as “My Night at Maud’s” and “Claire’s Knee” and eventually turned to directing. But Colombia remains close to his heart, and he travels back to South America annually.

“What I appreciate [about Colombia] is the dark sense of humor and its vitality. Along with Argentina and Cuba, it is the most literate Latin American country, with a strong cultural tradition.

“Vallejo is someone of my generation who has seen the same idyllic reality in his childhood when the cities were small, and it was a kind of paradise.”

As he shows in the film, chaos has overtaken Medellin through years of political strife and the escalation of drug lord Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror. “Some form of rampant civil war has always existed, but the new drug money has corrupted everything. Escobar hired kids as killers. He created a school for killers.”

Adding to this unnatural mix, he says, in this most Catholic of countries, was Escobar’s adoration of the Blessed Virgin, which he instilled in his youthful mercenaries.

“It created a strange reality,” he says, as if the noted Spanish director Luis Bunuel had decided to make a film of “A Clockwork Orange.” The political battles and the drug gang warfare became hopelessly intertwined, he says, corrupting everyone they touched.

To capture the apocalyptic quality of this situation, Schroeder literally took to the streets, choosing to shoot in digital video both for the ease of movement and its cinema verite qualities. The high-definition tape, he says, “allowed me to do something crazy, to explore a new form of cinema.”

Schroeder used multiple cameras, carefully rehearsing and blocking scenes and then shooting them quickly (scenes would take an hour to shoot but maybe a whole day to plan), which gave the movie a energetic sense of movement. The sound, in most cases, was also direct and not studio enhanced.

The depth of focus possible in digital video also allowed him to heighten the contrast between the horrific actions at the center of the drama and the startling beauty and poverty of Medellin, an upside-down world where the poorest neighborhoods are situated at the top of the city.

“This film is not only a love story; it’s the portrait of a town,” says Schroeder. “I wanted to get the sensation of the town’s vitality, so it had to be shot rapidly.”

There were practical exigencies as well because of the city’s tropical climate with constant shifts in the weather.

Then there was the safety issue. Although Schroeder had an alternate plan for moving the film crew to another city should anything go wrong, shooting exteriors progressed largely without incident until the final week, when the death threats started to arrive, but he completed filming with the presence of armed bodyguards.

In casting the young assassins, Schroeder also chose to go in a different direction. Although there were any number of young professional actors in Colombia, none possessed the “magical” face Schroeder was searching for, and he turned to nonactors, many from the same backgrounds as the characters they were portraying. “These boys had nothing, so making a movie was actually important to them. When they realized the responsibility, they were impressed.”

Vallejo adapted the dialogue to capture the argot of the young Colombian men, and Schroeder rehearsed them exhaustively. “It was difficult to get their concentration going,” he says, “but I ended up with wonderful results. The whole crew was in awe of those boys. They brought so much joy and energy to the film.”

“Our Lady of the Assassins” proved to be a big hit in Colombia and provoked a great deal of controversy. Based on the excerpts of Schroeder’s diaries on the making of the film, which were printed in the Guardian newspaper in London, Colombian critics expressed outrage even before the movie was released.

“One critic, from the right, wrote an incendiary article about the film before it was released. He said he’d seen it on video [which Schroeder doubts] and it should be banned and the theaters bombed. There was a revolt among the intelligentsia, and it provoked a great deal of talk about whether Colombia should be ignoring their reality or discussing it.”

But audiences embraced the film, he says. While American moviegoers are not likely to receive it in the same way, for Colombians it played rather like an absurdist comedy, says Schroeder. “They picked up every little turn of irony and humor. People were laughing from beginning to end.”