How was your SXSW 2023?
Alex: It was great! This was our second time, and being able to bring the kids up from the [Rio Grande] valley, with the school principal at the screening—having the Texas community there was really cool.
Sam: Kind of a whirlwind. We should’ve seen more movies!
Speaking of! At SX this year I saw your movie, Going Varsity in Mariachi. It was a fun and uplifting movie, informative to boot. It moved me and the crowd—a couple of the viewers getting emotional at the Q&A afterward.
And it had me wondering, why? Why make a movie about high school mariachi?
Sam: We recognized this to be at the center of a lot of contrasting ideas. It’s Texas, a state with fraught immigration politics, financing programs that celebrate traditional Mexican culture. It’s high school kids, engaging with traditional folk music that a lot of us Mexican-American kids grew up thinking was old-people-music. Those two ideas alone were meat on the storytelling bone.
Alex: Y’know, just the fact that high school mariachi competitions exist—this signaled to us music, culture, Mexican-American coming of age stories. It was a nugget containing things we’re interested in as filmmakers.
Sam: Also, it was a source of joy—which is somewhat rare, cuz often these stories are rooted in trauma and the crisis of crossing the [Mexico/Texas] border. The film doesn’t ignore those things, but it celebrates the culture that springs up in that place.. I think that’s why we had a relatively simple time financing the film.
Our students, at a post-screening Q&A. Personalities still shining.
From the very beginning I was hooked. The confidence and nerves as the team walks out onto the stage; the anticipation as the violin bow raises! And then all that follows; an amazing montage of energy, joy, and history. I feel like I learned the vibe of mariachi in 30 seconds, without words!
Alex and Sam (laughing): Yes! Thank you!
Alex: We didn’t want to make a history doc, or for the movie to be full of talking heads telling you what mariachi is. Instead, we wanted mariachi to be felt. Through the images and the music.
So we’re following teens. Not kids but not adults, playing music that’s not theirs yet making it theirs. What was it like working with / observing these younger people doing this?
Sam: I had an idea what it’d be like, having gone to high school, but then I realized that that was a while ago and that I had forgotten what it’s like to be around teenagers. It’s unique. They’re at this place in their life where they think they are ready for anything, which might be true, and yes, they can handle a lot, but then I’d see these little tells and think, ah, maybe you’re not quite ready. It’s a special intersectional moment, where these kids need guidance. And the kids in this class were open to that; not craving direction, but recognizing that it’d be helpful.
Alex: They were looking for community. High school is a hard time, though these kids had a safe space in their mariachi group that I didn’t have in high school. Seeing the way that they’d interact with each other there, being a family with each other, was pretty amazing. It also brought me back to the feeling of having so much hope, being so open to the world and what might happen. From one day to the next, they’d change what they’d want to be when they got older. What an idea, to be able to be anything that you choose to be! Such a cool place to be.
How’d you think through the sound and music use? It surprised me throughout (in good ways).
Sam: I’ve made a couple of music docs, and I’ve learned that music can’t be at the center of things. There needs to be a human story arc that we can follow; without it, the story isn’t powerful. This is why we’d make decisions like cutting away from music at certain times, making the score what it was (music living in the same world as mariachi, but modern, like the kind of music the kids would listen to outside of the group). Camilo Lara, the composer, really achieved that. A human story, rather than a story of mariachi.
Alex: As you see in the opening scenes, when you expect to hear them play music but then we introduce you to their world, the story here isn’t the music, it’s the world these people live in; how mariachi affects them and helps them move through their lives. And also, there are so many competitions! At a certain point we had a four-hour cut of the movie and you could hear the same song over and over again . . . We had to think through making this interesting, through how to bring in other music that these kids listen to. Pacing and adding tension where we could. Camilo was amazing to work with.
How did you decide to structure the movie this way? For example, several of the scenes showed our subjects outside of school, learning to drive or asking someone out to prom. They were well-paced and brought us closer to our subjects, but what made you choose these specific scenes?
Sam: We’ve always pitched the project as the competition being the bones and coming-of-age being the meat. These scenes were changing up until our last day of editing, though. Just a million ways to configure them. And there are a million scenes we shot that aren’t in the movie. So who to include? was a question we answered late in the game, and there are great people whose scenes we didn’t include. We all only have the brain space or patience for a few subjects and we had to keep in mind including a narrative arc for these subjects—important that the audience feels them change in some way. More of these scenes would’ve been overwhelming; any fewer would’ve made the film too simple, we think.
Alex: We worked hard to tie each rehearsal to someone’s personal life. So one time it might be clear Drake is the weakest link in the team. Another time it’s Mr. Acuña being exhausted and taking it out on his kids. As we get deeper into their personal lives, the rehearsal space takes on new meaning in their journey to becoming a better team.
How much did you record? For how long?
Alex: Sam and I filmed for a year. We lived in the Rio Grande valley for nine months. All told we had 300 hours of footage over 106 shooting days.
Shootin in Texas.
That’s . . . a lot!
Alex: It was! And a lot of that was just me and Sam, but for a few scenes we had the DP or a larger camera crew come in. We were lucky that our editor started in February 2022—we finished filming in June 2022, so she was watching footage and fleshing out storylines. That lead to valuable advice as we continued to film. The big competitions were the most stressful. We’d have something like seven cameras, and our executive producer would pop in without notice . . .
During the big competition, you have these asides, sorts of living portraits of your subjects. Poetic, almost. Tell us about those.
Sam: I’m glad you brought them up. We ended up shooting twelve of these and didn’t know what we were going to do with them until the last second. We called them character portraits and we tried to do them for every subject who we’d had meaningful footage of. We wanted these scenes to show off different parts of the valley, where these people lived, places that we thought represent the kids. Sometimes the kids gave us the ideas; sometimes they were ours. The goal is to show them at their peak power—the way they see themselves and the way we see them, in the context of this pivotal competition.
Alex: Like putting on their trajes. And I think we were playing with the idea of a school portrait, too. We have portraits throughout the film—of each section, of the two other teams, the title card. A snapshot of life in senior year high school.
These were probably the most fun parts to film as well, because at a certain point the kids got over the cameras being around all the time . . . that documentary again . . . But then we’d put them on their portrait set, with lights, and they perked up like movie stars!
Portrait of a Young Team Captain.
The kids seemed comfortable with the cameras throughout. Is that right?
Sam: It took a while, so a larger ratio of the footage comes from shots filmed closer to the end of filming. We’d shoot less because they opened up more.
Alex: Certainly became comfortable. And the screening you attended at SX was great, with some really moving responses and comments from the audience. But man, having all the teenagers there, laughing at inappropriate parts . . . Anyways, it was really special!