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Julio Torres extracts the fanciful from the mundane. In his HBO special My Favorite Shapes, the stand-up riffs on a collection of random plastic objects. Perhaps the most famous of the deeply original, often moving sketches he wrote in his tenure at SNL centered on a man (Ryan Gosling) tormented by the Papyrus font and its perplexing use in the marketing material for Avatar. The hero of his children’s book, I Want to Be a Vase, is a toilet plunger.
“I joke that we’ve had it up to here with magical children in prep school,” says the 36-year-old comedian of high-concept fare. “How is that genre so much bigger than the I-don’t-know-how-I’m-gonna-make-rent genre?”
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It was with this mindset that he made Problemista, his feature directorial debut, in which he stars as an aspiring toy designer in New York City with an expiring work visa who takes a job with an art-world outcast (played by Tilda Swinton) in order to stay in the country. The surreal A24 feature, produced by Oscar winner Emma Stone and fellow SNL alum Dave McCary, draws inspiration from what Torres calls the “Kafkaesque” bureaucracy of the U.S. immigration system.
Ahead of the film’s premiere at SXSW on March 13, Torres talked to THR about Problemista, the inspiration it draws from his own experience as an immigrant from El Salvador and the challenges of shooting in a realistic New York apartment: “There are no windows in the living room.”
In past interviews, you have talked about taking a job as an archivist to be able to stay in the U.S. after college. Did this script come out of that personal experience?
Yeah, it’s very much a mosaic of different experiences. I think it mostly communicates on how I felt at a particular point in time. When you see it, you’ll see it’s not completely grounded in truth, but the seed of it stems from my recollection of a lived experience.
What was that feeling you wanted to capture?
Feeling at the crossroads between finding myself and being in a very — what, at the time, felt like a challenging position. Finding myself in the midst of those problems that at the time felt dangerous but exciting. It’s very much about seeing yourself in all the chaos that life provides. It’s a crucial moment in the life of every young person, every young artist: How does circumstance mold the person you become? I have a friend of a friend, and they don’t say “coming-of-age” — they say “coming into self.” Which I think is a very nice distinction because the character is fully in his 20s, so he’s not growing up, but the pieces are falling into place.
What about the U.S. immigration system — your experience or otherwise — made you want to make a movie about it?
To varying degrees, everyone at some point has felt like an other or like their circumstances are different from everybody else’s. Things can feel very lonely sometimes, and in my case, the cards that I was dealt — the bureaucratic, logistical, Kafkaesque nightmare cards — really informed the person I became. The thing about the quote-unquote immigrant experience is it’s just so vastly different depending on where you’re coming from and where you are in life. People I know who have gone through similar experiences react to it being like, “Yeah, that’s how it feels.” Something that I say a lot is that I’m very interested in portraying things as they feel, not necessarily how they are. I’m very interested in all those bureaucracies that cloud our day-to-day lives that we rarely see in movies. Like, where’s the insurance company movie? Even though those hurdles in life are not as dramatically accessible as falling in love or robbing a bank, they are more common, and they stay with you and scar you and traumatize you and make you grow.
Was the plan always for you to direct?
No. When I was writing it, I thought, “Maybe I’ll be in it.” I always wanted to direct, but when I started writing, I felt like it wasn’t the right time, like it was too soon. The timeline, as we had it, before 2020, was that I was going to write a movie, then I was going to finish a new season of [HBO series] Los Espookys and direct an episode and have that be the trial run. After that, I was going to see how I liked it and then talk about whether I should direct this movie. But then, of course, things shifted and this movie was written and directed all during the COVID hiatus that we had to take for Los Espookys.
What is one lesson you learned from directing that you’ll carry with you to other projects?
The importance of picking good collaborators. When you are liking what you are doing, there’s a joy that comes with that. The work that I have done before this wasn’t super collaborative. Obviously, stand-up is not a collaborative medium. I like it when I work with people who are very excited to bring their own thing to the work. I’ll always be searching for that.
How did Tilda Swinton come on board?
The script got to her and she was already familiar with my work, and so she was very excited to be in it. The thing about working with her is that she’s so giving. It’s a testament to her that she never felt intimidating. It really felt no different to me than the joy of working with friends.
You shot in New York City. Did you have a favorite location?
I loved how real my character’s apartment [in Brooklyn] felt. It wasn’t an idealized version of a young person in New York’s apartment. It’s very cramped. There are no windows in the living room. It was not ideal to shoot in, but it just felt like, “Oh yeah, I know what to do with this.” I know where to sit, I know where to lean.
What does the title, Problemista, mean?
Oh my God, the title. (Laughs.) It changed a lot, but we came to a very happy place with it. First of all, it’s fun to say, which I always like. It looks nice, which I always like. To me, in the way that I define it in this movie, it’s someone who either creates or seeks problems and/or someone who creates art from problems. Someone who is comfortable in problems.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
This story first appeared in the March 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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