'Desierto': Action thriller or political parable for our troubled times?

"Desierto" is a parable for our troubled times. The new film by Jonás Cuarón, the 33-year-old son of Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, is set along the U.S.-Mexican border, where a psychopathic American vigilante (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is methodically murdering illegal Mexican migrants with a high-powered sniper rifle. One of those migrants (Gael Garcia Bernal, who also was executive producer of the film) becomes enmeshed in a high-stakes showdown with his adversary.

Cuarón, who shared a screenwriting credit with his father for the Oscar-nominated 2013 film "Gravity," has an extended filmmaking family. Aside from his father, his uncle is writer, director and producer Carlos Cuarón; his mother is actress and writer Mariana Elizondo; and his half-brother is actor Diego Cataño. While in Washington for last month's Latin American Film Festival, Cuarón sat down to talk about the deep roots of "Desierto" (Spanish for "desert") and its sudden relevance.

Q: You've said the idea for "Desierto" predates "Gravity" and, in fact, may have inspired it. How so?

A: Years ago, I showed the first draft of "Desierto" to my dad. He liked the concept - about a solitary character in a harsh, unforgiving environment - so we adapted it to space. That sort of nonstop action movie has many layers of meaning. In its own way, "Desierto" is a little bit based on "Duel," (Steven) Spielberg's first film about this truck just chasing this car the whole movie. Eventually, the truck becomes a metaphor for whatever you want. It could be the bully at school. It could be your boss harassing you. We liked the idea of doing a whole movie with almost no dialogue - it's pure action - but that spoke of other stuff through visual metaphor, through cinematic language.

Q: So after "Gravity," you revisited your original idea?

A: Yes, but it was still hard to raise the money. I took so long that Gael would make fun of me and say, "By the time you're done, it's not going to be relevant." Sadly, a couple of months before releasing the movie at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival, my wife showed me this video with Donald Trump announcing his candidacy, and he did it saying incredibly racist things.

Q: Is he the elephant in the room here?

A: What happened is, we opened in Toronto, and since Trump was just starting in the political scene, obviously the press kept trying to get me and Gael to comment on him. Back then, Gael and I had a rule that we didn't want to mention his name, to give him more power. My wife, who's from the U.S., told me, "Look, you can avoid talking about him, but he's becoming a reality." I started listening and following the campaign more closely. And I started noticing that the campaign was filled with this rhetoric of hatred. Sometimes these politicians speak so much that I worry that society doesn't see the violence in their speech. In May of this year, when "Desierto" opened in Mexico, I decided to edit a video using images from the film to illustrate that speech Trump gave.

Q: Did you conceive of Trump's words as an advertisement for the film?

A: No, it was just a video I did on my own, because I feel images are more powerful than words. If you just illustrate what this guy Trump is saying, it's pretty horrific. Once I edited the video, I showed it to Cinépolis, the distributor in Mexico. They became very interested. They launched it through the website of Carmen Aristegui, this journalist in Mexico that I really admire. It went mini-viral.

Q: Was your initial reluctance to bring up Trump's name because he was -

A: A joke? Yes. Look, all of what I said in the video is my own view on it. In October of last year, when we were in Toronto, it made sense to not talk about him. I believe that Jeffrey's character is more of a metaphor for what the rhetoric of hatred could lead to.

Q: So it's not just about what's going on with immigration here in the states?

A: You hear it everywhere. When I showed the movie in France, all the journalists kept wanting to pinpoint Trump, yet in France they have (politician) Marine Le Pen. To me, what's scary is that this speech is getting legitimized, this hatred.

Q: I read that in an early version of the film, you had Jeffrey's character listening to American talk radio, not country music, in his truck. Why was that changed?

A: In that scene where he's listening to the music, I originally cut a version where he was listening to a political talk show, and I edited it with a real podcast. I showed it to my dad, and I remember my dad's reaction. He thought I had scripted this. But I had just stolen it from the internet. My dad was like: "Oh, you should take that out. It seems fake. People don't actually say those things."

Q: You also shot a lot of scenes that fleshed out the back story of Jeffrey's character, but you didn't use them. Why?

A: Two things happened when I tried them in the editing room. One: It lost the drive of the movie. And two: I didn't feel like there was any point in trying to justify Jeffrey's character. No matter what back story we tried, the film made his actions horrible.

Q: How do you balance the need to have a villain with the need to make him a recognizable human?

A: A lot of the things that were in those back stories, to me, ended up being in the movie, but in a subtle way. It's important that we get a glimpse that he's not in a good economic situation. He has drinking problems. All those things were part of the character, because I do believe the real danger in all this political hate speech is when it starts being directed toward the most vulnerable parts of society. Sooner or later, those vulnerable people are going to be looking for a solution, and they can easily be manipulated. When I first started this story, 10 years ago, I was traveling through Arizona. It's a really poor state.

Q: It's the home of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff who got in hot water for racial profiling.

A: I was traveling with my brother to a film festival in Tucson, where the Mexican Consulate invited us to tour their facility. Arizona is where the largest migratory flux happens in the U.S. I became interested in the subject back then. It took three years to find the right approach to the subject.

Q: Who is the film's target audience? Americans or Mexicans? Conservatives or liberals?

A: For me, there's a very wide audience. "Desierto" has all these thematic readings, but in the end it's a pure horror movie. It follows the formula of a bad guy who starts chasing you and killing your friends, one by one. I've always been a fan of '70s genre films in the U.S. - movies that spoke to a deeper subject matter, but disguised under the mask of genre.

Q: Is "Desierto" a political film?

A: I've been curious about how the American audience will react to a movie where the hero is a foreigner - a migrant - and the bad guy is an American. In a way, that's the opposite of the genre formula. That's why I chose Gael. When you hear the speeches about immigration that refer to migrants as this faceless entity on the other side of the wall, bringing an actor like Gael to portray the migrant, to me, is interesting, because his is a face that creates empathy.

Q: In the closing credits you offer special thanks to such Mexican filmmakers as Guillermo Arriaga, Alejandro González-Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, Rodrigo Garcia, Gerardo Naranjo and Emmanuel Lubezki. What have they done for you?

A: What makes the Mexican film community so strong is that they support the new generation. All the people in the credits gave me notes and criticism that really helped me. The first people I go to when I need notes are my dad and my uncle. But it's also helpful to get notes from other directors.

Q: Do all those names also deliver a subliminal message? Look at what else comes out of Mexico.

A: That's true, but completely unintentional. I didn't mean it that way.