An Interview with David Riker
continued

Silvia Goiz as 'The Seamstress' in "La Ciudad"

 

DZ: You could see their lips moving.

DR: You could see their lips moving. I went back to London where I had grown up, and I took an adult ed course in video documentaries and it was a great class. It was part of London that had State funding at the time for adult ed. But for the entire length of the course, we never had a video camera. Every time we met the instructor would say, "It looks like it's coming, we're going to walk through how you set it up again. We don't have the lights or a camera, but this is the idea...." and it became a joke. All of us were unemployed, and different ages, and we went through the whole course with never having a video camera. [audience laughter] And he was teaching us how to say, "Action" and the different positions, but we had no camera. And it was around that time with a High-8, no, it was regularly 8 mm video -- a friend of mine bought one and I was visiting my family in Boston, and we learned that there was a strike going on in Maine, a strike by paper workers who were four generations in a small remote community in Maine. They were French-Canadian descent. They had never been on strike before. They had had a relationship with the company, the paper company that was like very paternalistic. When you buy a carton of milk today, you'll see that it's almost always International Paper that made the carton. And this was International Paper. They're the largest private land owner in the United States to this day. They own huge vast sections of land and they're the largest paper company in the world, and these paper makers were standing up to them.

We went up with our 8 mm camera to make our first documentary. And we had a budget, I think we had $500, and we were planning on doing the documentary in two weeks with no understanding of what we were doing. It ended up taking us more like a year and that project was a learning experience for me about two things. One, what does it mean when you begin to have people speaking at the same time that we're seeing them. In other words, that the image and the words were combined, created a lot of new issues for me. And also, what kind of relationship do I have with the people who are going to be in the story, with the subjects of the film. And that question has been the main question I've faced for the last twelve, thirteen years. You have a camera, and you have an intention, but what is the means of inviting people to participate?

In that first film which is called "Many Faces of Paper," we literally got up on stage at a mass meeting and introduced ourselves. There were three of us. We were called the Black Cat Collective and we wanted to take International Paper by surprise, in the same way a black cat could. [audience laughter] And we made a documentary that gave people in Maine a chance to speak about the strike. We were invited into their homes, and they began to show us their family photographs, and to talk to us and the experience of making the film, really was like a bug that had bitten me. I immediately started to get involved with video activism in the United States, with Deep Dish TV, with Paper Tiger TV, with the Public Access Movement in Somerville, Mass., I did two years of producing a weekly live show. I was excited with the agitational potential of videotape to move people to action.

And after finishing that, I made another documentary in Boston, called "Roxbury, USA" that was the story of a community of recovering addicts who when they put down the needle, or put down the pipe, they began to get clear, they saw the reasons why they had picked it up to begin with, and they began to organize. And so this project in Roxbury became a film about recovery, not just in the sense of getting your body clean, but recovery in terms of recovering back everything that's been taken from you. And at the time in Roxbury, the biggest construction project was a new prison. And the recovering addicts marched on the prison to shut it down.

I wanted to continue the work I had done in Maine, but I wanted to make the collaboration even deeper by training the recovering addicts in video production, and inviting them to be the filmmakers with me. One of the women and her daughter became really excited by it, and so that film was a collaborative project between myself as an outsider to Roxbury and a woman from Roxbury trying to reflect what was happening in the movement.

But neither of these two documentaries, when they were completed, and I wish we could show some clips tonight, were successful in the way that I wanted them to be, in expressing what I saw. And what I learned was that, as an example, in Roxbury I would be filming with Savena, the woman who was working with me, I'd be filming all day and at 11 at night, we would put the camera down and would be in another woman's home sitting around the kitchen table, having a coffee and at that moment, the mother of the home would say, "I don't care what they do, I'm never movin'. I'm not leaving my home. They can come and try to lift me out of my seat, and I'm never leaving." And all I could do was look at my camera. You see what I'm saying? The most important moment that was expressed was not on film. And anyone who makes documentaries knows what I am talking about. You catch some of those moments but you don't catch them all. And then you start thinking -- this woman was named Florence -- I'd be thinking, maybe I could go back to Florence's house next Sunday just for a visit, and then when the camera's running, say, "Hey Florence, how come you never leave?" [audience laughter] with the hope that she'll repeat the same thing again. You see what I'm saying?

DZ: Never the same way though...

DR: And it's never the same way. But I realized that even though my intention was this kind of honest and open collaboration, it was limiting in [how much] they could really collaborate. I was hoping to catch the moments. In the same way every documentarian is casting the characters in their program. I mean, I'm assuming that the teenagers that are in your film are there not because they were the first twelve that showed up...

DZ: That's right.

DR: ...but because you went, you looked, you watched, you listened, and you started thinking these are the characters that would be interesting. The experience of making those two films and documentaries and seeing that the results didn't reflect what I had observed, made me realize that the documentary was a limitation for me. I wanted to go back to Florence, without the camera running and say, "Florence, do you want to make a film with me about your life, about what you are going through, about what your hopes are right now, as a 70-year old woman in Roxbury, Mass., let's talk about it." And then I would have to spend time listening to her story. And then asking her, "You know how you feel so strongly about not being evicted from your home, where would you imagine saying that, expressing that... in your kitchen, in the living room, on a train?" You see what I'm saying? More actively inviting her to conceptualize the story with me. So after a period of --I think it must have been six or seven years of making these documentaries, working in community access, working as a video activist, I made a decision to go to film school, that was a very painful one. I was 27 years old. I ended up in a place I vowed never to step foot in, in New York City, called NYU Film School [audience laughter]. And I began studying narrative films, and looking at world cinema, for the first time really. And La Ciudad is the first project that came out of this change. I'm sorry to take so long to lead up to this but, the decision to begin script writing, and casting, formally casting, and asking people to act, and doing rehearsals came directly out of my experience in documentary where I that felt people weren't really being given a chance to fully be involved, even though I thought I was doing that by teaching them and inviting them to stand behind the camera.

And so, for La Ciudad, my starting point was very different. My starting point was, I need to listen to thousands of stories. I need to listen for months or years, and try and get a sense of the essence of the story and then I need to ask the people who have told me the story whether they want to actually perform the parts. And without going into La Ciudad, it was that process that led me there. I found myself in film school completely isolated with people who had come from very very different backgrounds. You know, sadly, when I tell people, even relatives, that I'm a filmmaker, they say always, "Don't forget about us when you're rich and famous." Yet if I told them I was an elementary school teacher, they would say, "Ah, you must be so committed to your work." [audience laughter] You know what I mean? And I wanted people, when I told them I was a filmmaker, to say that, "Jesus, you must be so committed to your work." But the film school was filled with people who wanted to be rich and famous. And the film business is filled with them. And so, I'm happy to be here tonight, you know, because none of us are [audience laughter]. Is that right...?

DZ: Yah, that's...

DR: Now we're probably going to be evicted before we...

DZ: No, but it's, I mean... that really does take us up to La Ciudad --both kind of the experience of making that film and what the film really is. One very significant thing that you've done is you've taken a perspective and a kind of a commitment and an outlook on how to make film that usually stays in the realm of documentaries. And you know those of us making documentaries are always struggling with these issues that you raise. And you translated it into narrative and I think created something very new in that process. And this is something that I hope that we'll get into. Also the film has a very big audience, it was successful both on its own terms and on the terms of the film distribution world. Although that was very contradictory, and I'm sure there's a lot to talk about, about that. But I think, for example, the story you told about your grandmother's friend?

DR: Georgia.

DZ: Georgia. That's striking because it's very similar to how a lot of the stories unfold in La Ciudad. They're startling in their in the multi-dimensionality of what you could say are very simple stories. You know, they're not simple, they have that appearance, but they're very complex, and you see them, you know, from the inside out. Just taking the fact that this is a film about immigrant workers from Mexico and from Latin American in the United States--people who never appear in films to begin with, but then, not only to do that but to do that in such a complex way is a real accomplishment. Why don't you just talk a little about the process, you know, that you went through to do that?

DR: Okay. I want to comment briefly that it was difficult for me to accept that almost all of the committed filmmakers in this country are working in documentary. And I learned this only after I started making La Ciudad. Why is it [that] in other parts of the world, you have a lot of committed, engaged, I don't know the language that's the right one to use, people who are making films not just to entertain but also to change the way we look at the world. The committed filmmakers in the United States, tend to be working in documentary, if that's a generalization, I don't know if we accept it here, but it's been my experience. Whereas in other parts of the world, that's not the case. In other parts of the world, there are very very strong political filmmakers working in narratives, and I tried to work out what happened.

And in going back, I began to see that two events happened. The first was after the Second World War, in Italy, as a direct consequence of the anti-fascist movement, a new type of narrative film making was born, what is now called Neo-Realist film making in Italy. ItÕs difficult to overestimate how powerful it was at the time. It directly influenced filmmakers around the world. In India, the parallel cinema of Sagit Ray (?) was directly influenced by Neo Realism. In Latin America, there was not a film school until after the Cuban Revolution, in 1959. So the Latin American filmmakers who wanted to study, they went to Rome and they studied in the film schools in Rome, and they were directly learning from the Neo Realist masters there. The French new wave, the Czech new wave, the Kitchen Sink Cinema in England... all of these new cinematic movements had a direct relationship to what was happening in Italy.

So what happened in the United States? What happened is that 1946 and Ô47 saw for the first time, a majority of Hollywood films, studio films, under the genre called social dramas, hard boiled social dramas. And the moment that happened, Joe McCarthy began his persecution of the so-called communists and directly attacked the film industry, they locked up ten writers, and directors, and producers and the consequences of the black list in 1948, Ô49, Ô50, Ô51, Ô52 are, I believe, that since then committed filmmakers in the States have moved into documentary. This is my own sort of assessment. And so, for me, moving into narrative felt like I was on my own. There's so many committed filmmakers working in documentary, and then I found myself in a setting where I was on my own. But that wasn't the question that was asked, so... [audience laughter]

DZ: No, but it's very interesting because the black list tends to be seen, and I know this is how I've seen it up until now as mainly a question of how careers were destroyed, which is very true. But how it actually influenced filmmaking, and what got made, you know, what kind of films got made-- I think that's a very interesting point...

DR: You know, because today there's a so called independent film movement in the United States. Everyone's talking about this independent film movement that has its roots more or less with [Spike LeeÕs] "She's Gotta Have It," but if you look at that independent film movement, you don't see an engaged cinema. You know, you don't see filmmakers who are really making committed films. Rather you see it in documentary, you see it in the work that the people here are making.

But in any event, the making of La Ciudad, the process of making it, I want to sort of describe it briefly so it can be opened up for questions. The starting point, as a point of principle, was to invite the community, in this case, Latin American immigrants, to directly collaborate. That their stories would help to craft or shape the scripts, that in fact they would themselves would be invited to read the scripts and change them, that the dialogues would be their dialogue, and most importantly that the actors would be themselves.

That was the starting point. And there are many consequences to that. The first one for me was since I was dealing with the new Latin American immigrant community in New York City, I was dealing largely with a community that doesn't speak English. And at that time I didn't speak Spanish. And so for that reason, for those two reasons, I knew that in order to make the film, I knew that I had to go through some transformations myself. I had to learn the language, and I had to earn the trust of this community, a community who had every reason to mistrust me, to distrust me. And it's good to put that straight up front when we're working. Not see it as a problem, but see it as a reality, that the way I look, unfortunately puts a huge obstacle between myself and a Peruvian woman who arrived in New York yesterday. A great obstacle, because I look like the INS. I have the face of the person that she flees from, you see.

And so the starting point for me was that I had to change myself. I had to find a way to learn the language, I had to find a way to build trust. And they came hand in hand. The people who taught me Spanish were the people who grew to trust me. But it also meant that the film making process took a long time. So, I had no gray hair when I started the film [audience laughter], I looked much younger. And it was a six year period, from Ô92 to Ô98. I shot the film in segments. If you haven't seen the film, it's made up of four separate stories. And the process and the relationships evolved during that time. But in each of the stories, I looked for an individual who could be a bridge between me and the community.

So for example, there's a story about the day laborers in New York City who stand on street corners in the morning looking for work. And I knew that there was a Dominican organizer named Miguel Maldonado who for a year had been going out every morning trying to organize these day laborers, trying to create a situation where rather than competing against each other every time a car pulled up for work, that they would be organised and the contractors would pull up to an office and say, "I need three electricians," and it would be the first three people that were on the list that morning that would get hired. Very very difficult job to organise day laborers because it's one of the most itinerant sectors of the working class. You can meet a person Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then they'll never be there again. Secondly, those day laborer corners, at first sight, from a distance just appear to be a mass of men, but when you get closer, you realise that on one corner it's Mexican workers, on another corner it's Guatamalan workers, and on the third it's Peruvian, and so forth. And I asked Miguel if I could go out with him, if he would let me observe the day labor pools, and introduce me to people, and it took me some time to gain Miguel's trust. But once he agreed to bring me out, I found myself on street corners in Astoria in Queens, in Woodside, and in Bensonhurst and Bayridge in Brooklyn.

And I've told this story before, but I remember being, this is sort of 5:30 in the morning, being on a street corner in Queens watching Miguel with leaflets to organize the workers, calling out to them, they would come running around and gather, and he would talk to them. And I felt like I had no business being there, you know, that I didn't know what I had to offer. I knew that I wanted to make a film that would allow us who are not living their life to understand it in a way that we didn't. So I had to understand it in a way that I didn't, but I was standing on the street corner and I didn't know how to do it. And this was repeated at all the day labor pools. At the end of the day, I had one of those moments of inspiration, clarity and I said to Miguel, "I know what I can offer to these men. I can offer them coffee. I know how to make coffee, and they're thirsty..." [audience laughter]

DZ: At NYU film school, you learn how to make coffee...

DR: And I had at that point probably a $40,000 debt, I knew what to do. I went out to Chinatown. I bought industrial coffee makers, bought a lot of coffee beans, and I would get up at 3:30 and start percolating coffee for two hundred. And I would go out with him, he would hand out the leaflets, and at the back of the car, I would set up the coffee, the milk and the sugar. And I would call out, "Hot coffee and hot tea," and the men would come over, and they'd get their hot coffee and walk away from me. I would say whenever I could, "How you doing, my name is David Riker, I want to make a film about your life." They would stir their sugar and go back to their street corner. [audience laughter] But I did it every day. And after a while, and they have nothing better to do because they are standing around, they'd say, "Why do you want to make a film?" And so I began to talk to them.

And after a period of weeks, and eventually a period of months, some of the men began to talk to me about what they were going through. And some of them said, "Listen, if you really want to find out about my family, you can come visit on Saturday or Sunday and have lunch." I started going into their homes, but my work as a filmmaker was simply to listen, to listen and take notes. And then I took a camera out and I started to photograph them. I worked, by the way, with a Polaroid camera so I can take people's portraits and give them to the people immediately. And this was also because for all those years as a still photographer, I took, I literally took their photos. You know, I took the photograph and I left. With a Polaroid camera, I could leave the photograph with them. And I would come back to the street and two other people would say, "Hey, you took Gabriel's photograph. Why don't you take mine, what's wrong with me?" And I would take theirs. And I would photograph hundreds and hundreds of day laborers. And they began to speak with me. And after a while they said, "This guyÕs gotta be crazy. He's really planning to make a film about us."

At that point I would begin casting. I said that you are going to be the actors and they said, "But like Silvester Stallone, you want us to be the actors? Because I could be a Silvester Stallone." [audience laughter] And I said, "No, not like Silvester Stallone, just like yourself." We would do the casting wherever they were. In other words, you have to change the way of thinking of a normal narrative film, where you have a room like this and you invite the actors to come to you, you have to bring the film to them. So the casting would be in the bodegas on the street corner, on the street itself, in churches nearby or community centres nearby. And in the case of the day labourers, just to follow through that story, the first day, I think 15 day labourers showed up. And I would ask them, I would take their portrait again, I always take their portrait against a white background. And I've done that now for the last eight or ten years, and I find that it allows me to see their face in relation to the other faces that I'm meeting. But I would ask them, just five or ten minutes we would talk, I would ask them where they were from, what their journey was like, where their family was, and then I would ask them, "Why do you want to be in the film?" And if they said, "I want to be in the film because I want to be an actor," I would make a note that this person is probably not the best choice. But if they said, "I want to be in this film because I'm being screwed, I know what I'm going through isn't right and I want people to know about it," then I would make a note, he's a very strong candidate.

So this period of casting is an outgrowth of the interviewing and the listening and the building of trust. And after a certain period of time, I have maybe two hundred day labourers who have come to castings, who's names and phone numbers I have, some of whom are showing a real interest and I begin to see who the core group will be. In that story of the day labourers, I wanted the group to be an ensemble of ages, different parts of Latin America, I wanted indigenous features, I wanted African features, I wanted very light skinned features, I wanted young kids and I wanted old men. And so these were kind of the thoughts I was going through as I was choosing this small group. And eventually I decided to work with them, to invite them back for a second casting, a third casting, and during these, I would do improvisations exercises with them. In some cases, because they're not professional actors, I just need to know whether they're really reliable. They might have great heart and interest, but they're not reliable. So sometimes I would set up three or four meetings with a person, the only function of which was for me to see whether they were serious. And if they made all three or if they called because they were going to miss it, I would know that they were really serious about it. So I need some help in shaping this discussion because... I'm not sure if this is really of interest, or whether it's too detailed...

DZ: [laughs] No, I'm fascinated. I think it's very interested again because, I mean, one thing, the very process of listening and, you know, kind of recognizing what your relationship is to begin with, and transforming that relationship principally through listening to the people, is, to me that's one of the cardinal rules of an artist, is to listen, Mao Tse Tung said that, the first rule is to know the people , and the way you're describing it to me is very interesting and inspiring because it's not an easy process. It's not just like, yeah I'm a filmmaker I can just go in and ask some questions, and that kind of thing. But [you have to] kind of direct it towards how some of the stories came about. I mean, because that's kind of an extension of what you're talking about in terms of the casting because the stories came from the people themselves who are in the film. One story I remember hearing, I don't know remember where I heard it, but it was very interesting, was in the seamstress piece, how the idea of having the prayer on the subway came about. Maybe if you could tell a couple of those stories.

DR: All right. The idea I'm trying to express is just that, if you want people to genuinely participate in telling their own story, I learned through documentary it wasn't enough to go to their home and film them. It meant having a deeper level of relationship with them. And it meant eventually them being able to tell you where you are going to put the camera, and them being able to tell you what the emotional feeling of their story is, and them being able to change the ending of their own story. So all of this mechanical process that I've been talking about, of serving coffee, meeting people, going to their homes, listening, inviting them to casting, it is not just designed so that you have authentic "faces" in the film, but the hope is that they will take the film as their own. Do you see what I'm saying? That they will become collaborators in the deepest sense. And it means that you have to be prepared for those consequences, that the film you begin wanting to make isn't going to be the film you end up with.

In the case of Seamstress, I knew I wanted to make a film that was a denunciation of the sweatshop. You know, that was my objective. I wanted to show that the sweatshop is a return of slavery. Yet as I began interviewing garment workers, and I would ask them, "What is the most important struggle in your life today," they didn't talk about the sweatshops. Almost none of them wanted to talk about the sweatshops. They said, "It's living in this country with the fear every moment that I'm going to be deported." Or they said -- because many of the women in the garment industry have had to leave their children behind -- and they said, "It's living away from my children." "This is what the core of my story today in New York City as an immigrant worker is. It's not about the fact that I'm getting exploited for not being paid, or that the conditions are so bad that I get hit at my sowing machine. The issue for me is that I have to live apart from my daughter or my son." Do you see what I'm saying?

I went in with one idea, to make a film that denounced the sweatshops, the way I made my documentaries, and I could find a garment worker and say, "Look, I want you to talk about how bad it is in the sweatshop," roll camera and listen to her describe the terrible conditions. But she was telling me, "My story is not that. My story is about being a long distance mother." So right from the beginning, they're shaping the story. So I was running up beside them, taking note, saying, "Okay, this is not a story about sweatshop labour, this is the story about an immigrant, at the end of the century who has become a central character in the planet, not a marginal character -- this isn't an exceptional story. This is a common story. Parents all over the world are having to live without their children. So this is what the film is about. But of course, she is a sweatshop worker, she is a seamstress, and so we're gonna set it in the sweatshops. Now it's just a matter of finding a connection between them. Now you begin putting together all the stories you've heard to find a way to connect them. And what do you hear? You hear that the most painful thing is when a garment worker or a day labourer gets a phone call that their child is sick, or that their parent has died and that they can't go home. So then I said, "I want to talk to women who have left their children and who have experienced getting that phone call." And that's what I started interviewing, and what it was like. And there I learned that the biggest problem is that they don't have money to send home.

So the whole structure of that story comes out of a process of inviting garment workers to tell me what the important story is and then starting to find a dramatic way to link it. I then wrote a script, I wrote an outline for the story, and what you're describing is the first time that I presented it to the garment workers. By this point, I've had six months of meeting them, of interviewing them, I've started to do casting, I have photographs of maybe three hundred garment workers, they've seen the earlier parts of the film, they have a sense for what we are doing. And about forty of them gathered on a Sunday afternoon to allow me to present the story to them, sort of like the way we are right now. I stood up at the front, there was a blackboard, it was a day I can't easily forget because I thought it would go differently than it did. I wrote up on the board an outline of the script in a very succinct way according to the screenplay rules of a three act structure, introducing the character, introducing her problem, the struggle to find money to send home, the end point... and I thought that all the garment workers would be overwhelmed and appreciative and they told me that I should leave the room. As soon as I had finished, they thanked me for the presentation, they told me that I could leave now and that someone would come to get me when they were done [audience laughter]. And I went outside, and I stood there, and I sat there, and I went to get a coffee, and I was out there for over an hour, and then someone came out and told me to come back in. And I learned that while I was outside, they had broken down into groups of five or six, and had discussed the merits and the problems with my outline, they had elected a delegate, each group [audience laughter] taken notes, I sat in the back and one after another the delegates came to the front and very formally, you know, their arms like this, "This is what we think of your script. This was good, this was bad, this was good, this was bad."

If you invite people to do this, you have to be prepared already to listen to them. You know what I'm saying? It can't just be an exercise of formally getting their acceptance. You have to deal with the consequences. But it doesn't mean that you just have to do what they say. I describe it like a collision, between you as a writer or filmmaker, and the community that you're working with. Not just that you're going to listen to them, not that they're just going to listen to you, but there's going to be a struggle. They said for example, several of the groups said, "We like it very much, but at the end of the story, we want to see the main character get paid." [audience laughter] The story is about a garment worker who hasn't been paid in a sweatshop where no one has been paid for five weeks, she gets a phone call with the news that her daughter's sick, she tries to get the money from her bosses, from her friends, and from relatives and she fails. And at the end, out of despair, in front of her sewing machine she refuses to work. And when the manager tries to throw her out, she holds on to her machine. And her refusal, and her resistance leads to all the other garment workers stopping their machines in an act of solidarity. That was where my script ended and they said, "Yes, but then Anna Ð this was the name of the character -- needs to get paid. We need the victory." And they really wanted to see the scene where she's licking the envelope at, you know, Western Union, and mailing it home. [audience laughter] And maybe even seeing the daughter get the operation, and at the very end, you know, being well. And I said, "This is not happening today. Right? That story was based on all of the people who told me about not being paid. And when you -- the garment workers in the room -- when you stopped work, what happened?" Because I was there, in December Ô97, when they stopped work, the managers came out and beat them with baseball bats and with two by fours until they were bloody. And the police arrived and stepped over the bloody workers to ask the managers, "Is everything okay?" Like an old boys club. And we had to take the workers to the union clinic. And they didn't get paid. "So why do you now want to make a film where Anna is sending the money home? Do you see what I'm saying? And moreover, what kind of victory is it if Anna gets the money, but no one else does?"

So, in other words, it was a collision. And I said... and there was a debate and in the end, while some people still wanted her to get the money, there was an agreement that it was okay as it was.

But on another point, almost every group, every delegate said, "When we are faced with a situation like this, and we've been to the boss to be paid and we don't get it, and we've been to our friends and we don't get it, and we've been to our cousins and we don't get it, before we give up, we pray, we would have a prayer. We would ask for some help from Papa Dios." They all said this, every delegate. So I had to say to the group, "Then we'll put a prayer in the film, but I don't know how to pray, not exactly. Or I don't know how you pray." Do you see what I'm saying? I've seen films since I was eleven years old where, when the character prays, we see the church in a wide shot, and we go inside and see a close-up of a cross, and then the camera pans down, and then we see the person on their knees. Do you know what I'm saying? You've seen this. I'm sure you've seen this. Have you ever seen that scene? [audience laughter] And that's, I think, what they wanted. And then everyone understands there's a prayer. But I said, "I need to know about your prayers. I need you to actually tell me how you pray and where you pray. What do you say?" And I began to meet people and to interview them about their prayers. And what they told me was, "This is going to sound crazy, but I pray on the way to work, on the train. Or I pray on the elevator going up to the sweatshop. Sometimes I pray at my machine. I pray at home in the kitchen. I pray in bed before I go to sleep." And someone else said, "I pray on the train." So many people in fact told me that they pray on the trains, the elevated trains, in this case the number 7 train from Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, that I began to see that that elevated train is like a moving church. It's a church on wheels and everyone is praying. Do you see what I'm saying? Everybody is praying in that church, in that train. And yet I would never have known that. I would of had a prayer's scene in a church.

And so I wrote a scene, based on that, where at this particular moment of defeat, the main character prays in the "church," on the train.

In a similar way, in the story of "Home," the love story, I had written and I'm a little bit ashamed to say this now, but I had written... This is a story of two young Mexicans who meet in a Quinzenetta [sp], a sweet fifteen party in the Bronx, and they fall in love and the woman invites the man home to her house, and the next morning, the young man goes out to buy breakfast for them both, and gets lost and can't find his way back to see her. And I had written in my script that when they went home, they slept together. And the two actors who are from Mexico, one of them a garment worker, the other one was a baker and an actor who's here tonight, Cipriano Garcia, who I hope will say a few words later, but they looked at me and they said, "No, we're not gonna to sleep together. You know, why are you putting us to sleep together? We wouldn't sleep together. It's not gonna happen. It's conceivable that two young Mexicans who meet, and fall in love at a sweet fifteen party would sleep together the first night, it is conceivable and it's probably happened. But if you make that the script, you're talking about an exceptional event, not about the experience of all of us. And you change everything to make it more real. And this relates to what David is saying, which is that I'm not an immigrant from Latin America, I don't live with the fear of deportation, I'm not separated from my family, I don't have the feeling of being trapped here, I'm not at risk of being put in an immigration jail, I'm not beaten at a sewing machine, I'm not at the risk of dying at a construction site, who am I to talk about these stories? Right, that's the question after all. Who am I to even think that I can talk about these stories.

Well, filmmakers always have. There's nothing that Hollywood hasn't dealt with. But their films are so damaging and destructive because they precisely don't care about what the truth is and my experience has been that it doesn't matter that I don't know this life, if I'm able to develop a way of working, where the people who are living it genuinely have the chance to shape the story, shape the dialogues, and appear in the lead roles in front of the camera.

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