Sequels and Prequels:
An Interview with Alonso Ruizpalacios, director of La Cocina
by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer
Over the last decade, the Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios has established himself as one of the most daring filmmakers working within his national film industry. At a moment when Mexican cinema is divided between big-budget regional comedies such as Cindy la Regia (2020) and Unhappily Ever After (2023), and small-budget independent films about artists and their personal dilemmas like Fauna (2020) and El Mirador (2024), Ruizpalacios stands out for his willingness to address national topics—the 1999 UNAM strike in Güeros (2014); the 1985 heist at the Museum of National Anthropology in Museo (2018); and Mexico’s storied history of police corruption in A Cop Movie (2021)—while maintaining a personal perspective. His latest film, La Cocina (2024), reinterprets Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play of the same name as an immigration drama set in a Times Square kitchen. The film follows a Mexican line cook named Pedro (Raúl Briones) who becomes embroiled in a love-hate relationship with Julia (Rooney Mara), an American hostess.
Ruizpalacios intended La Cocina to be his first film. This is evident in the final product, which is full of adventurous camera tricks and cinematic gestures that reflect the spirit of a young soul keen to make an impression and start genuine conversations about immigration and identity. Such ambition is common in feature debuts, it’s rarer in a work by a filmmaker with three features under his belt, and proof that Ruizpalacios shows no signs of slowing down when it comes to expanding his unique sensibilities. Ahead of the film’s presentation at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, Ruizpalacios sat down with me in the lobby of the Roxy Hotel to discuss his film’s distance from realism, his love of black-and-white filmmaking, and his forthcoming western about the U.S.-Mexico border. La Cocina opens this week in general release.
Reverse Shot: Definitions and quotes are often very present in your films—in Güeros (2014) the terms “naco” and “güero” feature heavily, and in La Cocina the word “America” is constantly contested. How does this instinct to define and describe words relate to your filmmaking practice?
Alonso Ruizpalacios: I think asking questions and, like you say, contesting things is part of the writing impulse. That’s part of what becomes a script. In the case of La Cocina, there were many questions and I think that the script and the movie had to be an attempt to answer them. And I like it when the answers aren't definite. I hope that's the case with La Cocina and that it doesn't provide easy answers. In this case, the questions had a lot to do with the way we are living now. Have we made the right choices? Is work what life is all about? Is being productive the meaning of life? Is there a space for dreams in this working structure that we built? That’s also one of Arnold Wesker’s questions. In the play, Pedro says, “You can’t dream in a kitchen.” They ask him: “What’s your dream, Pedro?” And he says, “You can’t dream in a kitchen.”
RS:I’m curious about the movie’s personal focus. Could you speak a bit about what drove you to return to the moment when you were working at a Rainforest Café in London and you first read the play?
AR: Some projects take a really long time, and some are the opposite. For example, my last film, A Cop Movie (2021)—we came up with the idea, we started doing the research, and then in a year’s time we were shooting. This was the opposite. It was originally set to be my first movie. I directed the play in Mexico about 12 years ago. It was very fresh in my head, I started thinking about it as a film and I started writing the screenplay. And because I love the play—it has a lot of themes that I find fascinating, which are things like contesting the status quo, breaking free from an oppressive situation, the power of dreams, and then obviously the whole migration thing that started driving the project. Once I started doing more research on migration, the more fascinating it became. And it also became more present in daily Mexican life.
Coming to New York to do the research when I was writing the script about five or six years ago, and doing a trip just to research, go into several kitchens, interview cooks, and just hear all their stories really informed the film I was trying to make. It moved me a lot, hearing the stories of each one and all they have to leave behind, and realizing that this country, the United States, is made of immigrants. Everybody has that story. I had to shoot it, I had to make it into a movie.
RS: You've also said that this film is not just about immigration, but that it's also about spiritual homelessness. What’s the relationship between spiritual homelessness, work, and immigration?
AR: I think those ideas are related because one leads to another. I wanted to make a movie that dealt with what happens once you cross over. Most migration movies, certainly Mexican ones, are about the journey. They’re about crossing over to the other side and then the movie kind of ends there. There are very few movies that deal with what happens once you're there, with whether the American dream becomes real. I wanted to explore that. In my research, I found that a lot of people who are here now were experiencing a feeling of homelessness. They’ve made a home here, but they don't feel at home here. And they can't go back because people rely on the money that they bring back. And when they do go back, they no longer feel at home there. They do become homeless in a way, and they’re very sad stories. That's kind of what the story that [the film’s character] Nonzo says in the alley is about––the immigrant scar. He talks about crossing over to the other side via this alien abduction and it leaves a scar. It's the immigrant's scar. I wanted to pay homage to all these people that have made this journey, not just Mexicans, but people from all over. That was another important part of the film, that it's a Babel Tower.
RS: Since you keep mentioning dreams, I wanted to mention that I feel like in your films there's both a very heavy interest in dreams and also a social realist impulse. How do you reconcile these interests?
AR: You’re right, they’re two strands that seem to be opposed but they're not really. I very much admire the work of people like Fellini, who have this tradition of marrying the two. Fellini comes from the neorealist tradition in Italy and then he made his own style by incorporating his dreams, and then he went further with it until Felliniesque became a word. I find that approach to filmmaking inspiring because he does marry these two seemingly opposing threads. But I think they are related because dreams are part of every person and when you pit them against a working-class story, it enhances the story. I’m kind of tired of just realism, hyper-realism, and naturalism. I like when cinema goes beyond that. That's the kind of cinema that calls to me, personally.
RS: In A Cop Movie you have the framework of a regular documentary, but it breaks down. And it seems to me that you're saying that it's not enough to just capture reality as is, that it doesn't convey the full experience of your protagonists.
AR: I admire people like Ken Loach or other social realist filmmakers who stick to that and make it work. But I think you have to be true to your own impulses and my own impulses are always more playful. I have a tendency to not take things too seriously when they're getting too serious.
RS: Where do you think that impulse comes from?
AR: My approach to filmmaking is play. I know that for other people, filmmakers that I admire, they're very serious and it's a very serious affair for them. But for me making a movie is a playful event. There’s this beautiful quote by Truffaut, “Films are divided into two films, those that reflect the joy of filmmaking or films that reflect the pain of filmmaking.” I lean toward the first, because I think it's a very privileged medium and it’s a very privileged vantage point from which to see the world, so I think you should play with it. For me, it's a fun game that should never be taken too seriously.
RS: I wanted to go back to what you'd said about staging the Wesker play before. I know you worked with Raúl Briones on that and now you've worked together on multiple films. Could you tell me a bit about your working relationship with him as a filmmaker and how that's evolved over the years?
AR: I met Raúl when I directed the play for these drama students in El CUT, one of the major Mexican drama schools; they hire outside directors to come and do their graduating third year or fourth year shows. They hired me to direct one and I chose La Cocina. That’s where I met Raúl. I was instantly amazed by this young actor who was so focused and so, so talented. He’s very committed to his work. From there, I invited him to do another play, so we did a Tom Stoppard play. Then, because I have a theater company in Mexico, I invited him to be in that. It’s been a long working relationship. We obviously became friends. Now, I needed somebody I could trust for this part. I only wanted friends and allies in this movie. I think it's important that you have allies in a movie because it's such a difficult enterprise and you're going to be up against a lot of shit, so you need people in your corner. I know Raúl is somebody that I can trust, and I know he won't quit, like he'll always do another take. He takes risks, he's outstanding.
RS: Was that version of La Cocina a direct stage adaptation, or was it similar to the film you have now? Or, was it somewhere in the middle?
AR: It was somewhere in the middle. I think it was the first step towards this film. A lot of the ideas in the film started with my stage adaptation. It’s a 1950s play set in London. For the play, I already had this idea of setting it in the U.S. with Mexican immigrants, and a bunch of the storylines and characters started coming together. For this new iteration, I used more of my adaptation than the original play. I almost didn't go back to the original play so it's like two steps removed already.
RS: Another thing you returned to is black-and-white. What called to you about using it this time?
AR: I like to joke that it’s a commercial decision because I know it'll sell more tickets. For anybody who does a black-and-white movie nowadays, it's still a statement, and it has to be because it's almost financial suicide, unfortunately. For me, there was no question. When I started writing it, I saw it in black-and-white. I think it helps this movie. This story, like you said, could have been shot in a very social realist way––in color, handheld, the whole thing––and I didn't want to do that film. I wanted it to be like a fable. Doing it in black-and-white makes a subject matter like this, about working-class people inside their workspace, into something else. It also makes it hard to pinpoint where exactly and when exactly it's happening. That was important. We went through a lot of pains to make it timeless. There are no cell phones, the wardrobe and everything is like, you can't quite place if this is happening now or 50 years ago.
RS: I also wanted to ask you about how you partially shot this film at Estudios Churubusco, because there's an interview in which you mentioned feeling a sense of pride representing Mexico at the Berlin Film Festival. What motivates your desire to keep working in Mexico and having it at the heart of your projects?
AR: That’s where I’m from and I’m proud. Mexico's given me so much. I wouldn't consider myself nationalistic, it’s just a thing of having a shared experience of life with Mexicans. I've lived abroad for many years, but I've always decided to carry on living in Mexico, because that's where I feel at home. That's where my spiritual home is. There are so many stories to be told in Mexico. I feel that here in the U.S. people are scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with original stories. In Mexico, it doesn't feel like that to me. Here they're doing sequels and prequels and sequels of prequels, and in Mexico, it just feels like there's all this virgin space of stories yet to be told that haven't, that people are just starting to tell. I like being a part of that. And then, the history of Mexico… I mean, I've dealt with its history a little bit in some of my movies… I'm writing a film now that is a western set during the Mexican American War. Looking at that period and how Mexico lost half its territory, it's just endlessly fascinating.
RS: You described deciding to shoot on black-and-white as “financial suicide.” I've read it's tough, but I didn't know it was necessarily likened as such, because so many movies nowadays switch between aspect ratios or color or whatever. Could you speak a bit about the financial difficulties you found yourself in trying to get a project like this off the ground?
AR: I could talk for hours about the difficulties. I'll just say that investors were, and still are, scared of risk, and streamers are scared of risk. It’s so strange and it's even stupid, because this art form has only thrived on risk. This thing, where you get these notes from executives saying, “It’s not a very risk-taking moment we're in right now,” it's like, what are you talking about? That should be the norm.
RS: Your last film was quite risky for a Netflix production in that it tricks you into thinking it’s a regular documentary about cops but transforms into a meta-commentary on the performance of authority, with its two leads being revealed as actors who underwent police training to gain access into a significantly privileged space in Mexico. How were you able to convince Netflix to fund this?
AR: I don’t know. There’s always a couple of smart people along the way that see something and help you do this smuggling. But they’re becoming fewer and fewer. In the case of Netflix, the people who curated the documentary part were a really smart team, but I think many of them are no longer there. They were in favor of taking risks, but I think they get punished by the company.
RS: I know companies like Netflix and Amazon are expanding more and more across Latin America, and I think that gave us an interesting amount of movies for some time, but I'm worried if the pendulum is swinging in the other direction now. You’ve made several films with different distributors and investors in Mexico, so I’m curious as to what you think the country’s cinematic prospects are moving forward.
AR: Mexico has the fortune of having the Mexican Film Institute. I think it's our obligation to guard and nourish it. It's a complicated place, but I think it still supports auteurs and art cinema. I think that strengthening the Mexican Film Institute is the only way that our cinema will survive, because the market is very cruel. It’s the same in Europe, they have such great cinematic histories because they have these institutions that defend them, that defend culture. Art cannot survive without strong government funding.
RS: We’ve seen that recently in Argentina with INCAA, that supported a lot of filmmakers and with this presidential change, it’s been completely gutted.
AR: Obliterated.