Filming ‘Sin Nombre’ on the fly

Writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga faced a challenge making “Sin Nombre” that many independent filmmakers never come up against: His main set was constantly in motion. A large portion of the film, a tale of immigrants south of the border, takes place atop a moving train as it slowly winds its way north across Mexico. Fukunaga had access to a real train for only five days, so for the rest of the shoot he had to use a fake one built on the back of a flat-bed truck. “We used 2 1/2 trailers and built a train shell that was the height of the actual train,” Fukunaga said. As it turns out, the fake one was pretty difficult to maneuver. When the truck upon which it was perched reached the end of a road, it took about 90 minutes to get it turned around to continue filming. Certain sequences were filmed on the fake train, on the real train and on the side of the tracks. “We never shot listed or storyboarded,” Fukunaga says. “I was doing a lot of the editing in my head.”

-- Patrick Kevin Day