Jose Rivera Interview, TRADE

MoviesOnline caught up with award-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jose Rivera ("The Motorcycle Diaries”) at the Los Angeles press day for his new film, "Trade,” directed by one of Germany’s leading young directors, Marco Kreuzpaintner, in his American feature debut. Inspired by Peter Landesman’s chilling New York Times Magazine cover story on the U.S. sex trade, "The Girls Next Door,” the film is a thrilling story of courage and a devastating expose of one of the worlds’ most heinous crimes. When 13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) is kidnapped by sex traffickers in Mexico City, her 17-year-old brother, Jorge (Cesar Ramos), sets off on a desperate mission to save her. Trapped by an underground network of international thugs who earn millions exploiting their human cargo, Adriana’s only friend throughout her ordeal is Veronica (Alicja Bachleda), a young Polish woman captured by the same criminal gang. As Jorge dodges overwhelming obstacles to track the girl’s abductors, he meets Ray (Kevin Kline), a Texas cop whose own family loss leads him to become an ally.

From the barrios of Mexico City and the treacherous Rio Grande border, to a secret internet sex slave auction and a tense confrontation at a stash house in suburban New Jersey, Ray and Jorge forge a close bond as they frantically pursue Adriana’s kidnappers before she is sold and disappears into a brutal underworld from which few victims ever return. Producer Rosilyn Heller ("American Heart”), a long-time advocate for women’s rights, met Landesman while he was still researching his article, and immediately sensed the potential for a significant and powerful film. "I had been following the subject for a long time, and had even been offered other projects,” she says. "But they had been set in Cambodia or Eastern Europe. What interested me is this was about Mexico and the U.S. – something happening in our own backyard.”

Heller contacted her producing partner Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day,” "The Day After Tomorrow”). "Roland was interested in doing more provocative and personal projects besides the big Hollywood blockbusters he’s known for,” says Heller. "He owns a house in Mexico and has a tremendous interest in Mexico’s culture and people.” Emmerich enthusiastically signed on to the film. "This was such an important story for me that I was determined to see this project born,” says Emmerich. "It might be smaller in budget, but it’s huge in terms of its emotional core.” Landesman wrote a story about a low-level Texas cop haunted by the memory of a missing child; Emmerich, on the other hand, came up with a tale of a young Mexican boy whose sister is kidnapped. "I wanted to make this a story about a kid who could have been one of these young traffickers,” Emmerich says. "He was being practically trained for it, yet in an instant his whole life – and his whole mission in life – changes 180 degrees, and that’s what we follow.” The filmmakers decided to combine the two narratives and have the two characters take the journey together.

With Landesman committed to other projects, Emmerich and Heller approached the award winning playwright and screenwriter Jose Rivera. Soon Heller and Rivera were on a research trip to Mexico City, where they met with many prostitutes and former sex slaves. "It was my hope to try to tell the story at least on some level from the inside out,” says Rivera. "I wanted to know the journey and the experience from their point of view as well as they could tell it to me. Some girls wouldn’t speak or couldn’t speak – but some were quite articulate.”

Rivera’s plays have been produced worldwide and translated into seven languages, including "Cloud Tectonics,” "Each Day Dies with Sleep,” "Sonnets for an Old Century,” "Sueno,” "Giants Have Us in Their Books,” "Marciela de la Luz Lights the World,” "Adoration of the Old Woman,” and "Massacre” ("Sing to Your Children”). His "School of the Americas” premiered at the Public Theatre in New York in July of 2006 in a co-production with the LAByrinth Theatre Company. Rivera is currently writing "The Untranslatable Secrets of Orlando Corona” and a screen adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road” for Walter Salles. He will make his feature film directing debut with”Celestina,” based on his play "Cloud Tectonics. Here’s more of what Jose Rivera had to tell us about "Trade”:

Q: Can you talk about the genesis of this project and what attracted you to it?

JOSE RIVERA: It started way before I was involved. Peter Landesman was working for the New York Times and he wrote the original article that the film is based on called "The Girls Next Door” which actually I had read before I was ever involved with the film. Peter had this intense interest in the idea of sexual slavery and where it is and what’s happening and how big is it. He wrote a very provocative and slightly controversial article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. So that article as far as I remember or can tell was optioned by Roland Emmerich who you know is "Day After Tomorrow” and all that stuff. They were looking for a writer and it was just before "The Motorcycle Diaries” came out that the buzz around it had been created from Sundance.

So we met and Roland had read the article and I liked Roland and met him at his house and he said, "Would you like to write this?” and I said "Yeah.” It really started that way and then my research and work began at that point. Roland and Peter had come up with a rough story of how they wanted to pursue a story about sex slavery. They had created the girl from Poland. They had created the brother and sister from Mexico and the cop from Texas. If you look at Roland’s movies, they’re all kind of the same interweaving subplots and he loves to put two characters that don’t belong together together. That same element was in this story as well. So I listened to the story and I thought it was fascinating and well done and I said I would undertake the script.

Q: Did you feel that this story would have more of an emotional impact as a dramatization versus a documentary?

JOSE RIVERA: Well that’s a good point. I think a really groundbreaking wonderful documentary about this has yet to be made and I think it would be pretty good if they did that. Roland’s world is not from documentaries so I think for him it was always necessary to make it a narrative work of fiction, and, in a way as grim as the subject matter is, to also fashion a piece of entertainment, to make something you are engrossed in. You don’t just walk away from because it’s too difficult a subject. He wanted to make a commercial piece of entertainment around a very difficult subject.

Q: Can you talk about the research involved in writing this script?

JOSE RIVERA: I relied heavily on Peter who knew a lot of the people in this world, so anything he gave me I used and read and he turned me onto a lot of sources. So there was that side of the research which was a lot, but probably the key, the most important part for me, was when the producer and I went down to Mexico together and we interviewed prostitutes on the streets and we spent time at a women’s shelter in Mexico City that had former prostitutes there who were living there and sex slaves as well and there were several of those.

So that was to me the key, the biggest part of it, because when I was writing it, I wasn’t interested in making a film about victims. That didn’t seem as interesting. I wanted to write a film about survival and so my questions to the girls when I met them down there was: How did you survive? What did you mentally do? How did you get through these horrible experiences?

That’s really the most important thing I learned down there was how resilient they were, how tough they were, and even some of these girls, like there was one girl who was 12 years old who had been a sex slave since she was 9, still had a sense of humor, still acted like a goofy kid, and I thought that was kind of amazing to see that spirit still alive in someone who had suffered such terrible things. And I was really interested in making a film about how people help each other in times of extreme need and get each other through these events.

So, to me, one of the key aspects was to forge that friendship between Adriana and Veronica even though they don’t speak each other’s languages, but the kind of big sister/little sister bonding that they had helped them survive. When I went to Mexico, that was really the turning point for me because suddenly aside from all the great research that Peter gave me, I had a human face, or many faces, to this thing. There’s nothing like being with these girls and hearing their stories. That, to me, was the most important part of the research.

Q: Was it difficult for them to talk to you?

JOSE RIVERA: Again, Peter helped because he turned us on to a friend of his, a young man named Jorge who’s a lawyer in Mexico City, and Jorge knew some of these people and knew the woman who ran the shelter that some of these girls were at. So without Jorge’s participation we never would have gotten to them and they trusted him so they figured we can trust a friend of Jorge’s. People want to tell their stories.

That’s what you learn. I’m sure you know this. You’re journalists. People want to tell you their stories so it didn’t take long. Sometimes they were shy, sometimes they were embarrassed or ashamed. You know I’m very non-judgmental when it comes to these things and I just want them to be able to open up so they did, especially the younger ones who were very verbal about what happened.

Every time I did an interview in the shelter, I was always with the woman who ran the shelter because she was like a mother to them and she would coax them sometimes when they started crying and she would say things like, "I know this is hard but when this movie comes out, this will help other girls. You’re helping other girls by telling your story.” So that was a big factor that they felt "Okay, well I don’t want to talk about it, but maybe it will help somebody.”

Q: When you are writing a story like this, how difficult is it to strike a balance between telling it honestly without it becoming exploitative?

JOSE RIVERA: That is the absolute key question. When I was given this assignment, the thing I said to myself is I don’t want to make a movie for pedophiles. I don’t want to make a movie for voyeuristic pleasure. The trick is if you’re going to deal with sex slavery, and you’re going to deal with it honestly, you have to show scenes of sex of some kind and the trick is to do that without making it an erotic film. And the last thing – and Roland and I talked about this and Marco -- that we wanted to make was an erotic film.

And so the sex scenes in the film are very harsh as you know. The rape of Veronica and the exploitation of Adriana, all these things are really harsh and hard to watch, but they had to be there because this is the truth of the situation. So how this movie will be judged, I think it will probably be judged on that basis. Is this a film that successfully describes this world without exploiting the people in it? I personally believe we succeeded and I think a lot of that credit goes to Marco – the way he shot it and how much compassion he was able to create for the two girls in the center of the story. But we’ll see. The critics will tell me.

Q: You went on a research trip to Mexico City where you interviewed prostitutes and former sex slaves. Did you speak with any women who have gone through this in the United States?

JOSE RIVERA: Well actually I spoke to one. When Peter Landesman wrote his article, one of the central characters in his article was this Russian girl who had gone through all this stuff herself and so Peter arranged for me to meet her, but the Russian girl really was not capable of speaking about it. I think she just wanted to leave it all behind. But it was good to meet her anyway because she was another one of these really kind of strong willed, tough women that seemed to survive. This I don’t know statistically, but it seems to me that the vast majority of women in the United States who are in this situation are from abroad. They come from Thailand, they come from the Philippines, they come from Mexico and Eastern Europe and places like that. So going to Mexico to interview women for Mexican seems appropriate to me. I didn’t need anyone here.

Q: Were you able to do any research on the website or talk to law enforcement? It seems strange that this topic is out there enough that you can talk to people who are involved in it and yet authorities have turned a blind eye to the whole thing.

JOSE RIVERA: Peter did do a lot of research with law enforcement, FBI people, police, and border patrol and stuff like that. In his article, he expressed the frustration that the law enforcement, they know prostitution. Prostitution is clear and it’s a crime and so women engaged in prostitution are treated as criminals.

Sex slaves are completely different. The girls who are sex slaves are not criminals. They’re victims of crime but it’s a hidden problem and a lot of law enforcement deals with what is visible and what’s out there and what’s completely in our face and they don’t deal with the victims. Law enforcement doesn’t see its job as rescuing victims. It sees its job as prosecuting criminals. And so sex slavery falls into this nebulous world where law enforcement is really not particularly trained or good at dealing with that.

I think part of the problem with that is that unlike prostitution where you can drive down Santa Monica Blvd. and see women, the girls who are sex slaves are in basements. They’re hidden, they’re secret, you can’t see them, you don’t know them. One of the things that Peter’s article does so well is that it makes the point that these sex houses and these girls literally are next door and can be in suburban Philadelphia and suburban Tucson and it’s a problem that’s pervasive but it’s invisible. I think that’s the problem.

In a way, we didn’t want to make a film like "Traffic” which is heavily on the law enforcement side as well as the [inaudible] just because we didn’t want to be derivative of "Traffic.” My central obsession with this film is: What happens to the girls? What’s their life like? And what’s their story? That’s really where we put our energy.

Q: The relationship between Ray and Jorge is so dynamic and poignant. How did you go about developing it?

JOSE RIVERA: That originated with Roland and as I said, he loves to put characters that don’t necessarily belong together together in extreme situations like in "Independence Day” the two guys who go off in a space ship. It’s like what are they doing together? And this was similar. Roland has deep relationships with people in Mexico and I think for him it was really key to show a budding relationship between an American and a Mexican especially since the American cop is very racist at the beginning and very dismissive of Mexicans and doesn’t have a clue as to Jorge’s reality, just a bunch of clichés, and as the story progresses, those clichés get knocked down and a true affection develops between the two.

And in a way I think Roland is a bit of a romantic as I am. I think the United States and Mexico completely misunderstand each other, that there is really an amazing lack of compassion between the two countries, and I think if you can just show it on film. It’s not a metaphor for Mexico-U.S. relations but in a way it is because it’s about two unlikely people really bonding over trying to save somebody. To me, I agree. I have to give the credit to Roland for imagining that, then I tried to give it some humor and make that relationship kind of interesting.

Q: By the end you really had a sense of a father-son, familial relationship. He lost his daughter but he gained a son.

JOSE RIVERA: He gained a son. Exactly. You know because it is a movie, it needs to have some emotional power that’s satisfying to the audience or else it’s not going to work as entertainment. I think that relationship provides us with that emotional satisfaction aside from the satisfaction of seeing Adriana rescued which is enormous. But we do lose Veronica and there’s so much pain and misery but having that bond and that hope is really key.

Q: What about Laura and the green eyes?

JOSE RIVERA: Well that you know it’s funny because the script went through many, many incarnations. Originally, Ray’s daughter who was obviously sucked into this world, her eyes were two different colors. One was blue and one was gray. And that character Laura had blue and gray eyes in my original script to make it absolutely clear that this is Ray’s daughter. For some reason, that went away. I don’t think they found that real. I don’t think Marco really liked that idea but we kept the idea of the blue eyes to at least hint that maybe this really is Ray’s daughter. But in this case, she’s so far gone that I think in Ray’s eyes she’s beyond redemption at the end. The idea of bringing him so close to the object of his search is kind of an interesting idea.

Q: Can you talk about what you have coming up next?

JOSE RIVERA: Well there’s "On the Road” as you know. I’m about to finish a screenplay called "Letters to Juliet” which Gary Winick is going to direct. It’s about these women in Verona, Italy who get mail for Juliet, the fictional character, because she’s supposed to have been buried in Verona. And these letters are like "Dear Juliet, I’m in love with a boy but my parents hate him. What should I do?” There are 9 women who answer these letters from all over the world. They speak all these different languages. So I wrote a film about that.

You know I’ve been trying to finance an independent film called "Celestina” which would be my directorial debut in features based on a play of mine ("Cloud Tectonics”) about a woman who’s been pregnant for two years and makes time slow down wherever she goes. It’s kind of a magic love story. Julio Caro is producing that. He just produced "El Cantante” with Jennifer Lopez and Walter (Salles) is executive producing. So these are some of the projects that are out there.

Q: Thank you.

JOSE RIVERA: Thank you. Good luck with everything.

"Trade” opens in theaters on September 21^st.