Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
In a dark room at Warner Bros. Studios in Hell’s Kitchen, Rodrigo Prieto sat on the edge of his chair, notepad in hand. He was putting the finishing touches on his film Pedro Paramo, an adaptation of the enigmatic Mexican novel that had fascinated and puzzled generations of readers. After years as one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed cinematographers, Prieto was directing for the first time.
In a soft voice, Prieto asked to stop the film. A shot of two characters holding an oil lamp and wandering through a deserted Mexican town at night appeared on the screen. Although the scene was quiet, it became a source of obsession for Prieto. The novel’s key events take place at night, and so the first question he faced was how to recreate the light of the moon. “Moonlight can’t be trusted,” he quipped. In real life, moonlight extends as far as the eye can see; Prieto’s challenge was to reproduce its scale and balance between light and shadow. “You want to see the actors’ emotions and at the same time feel like it’s dark,” he noted. “That’s moonlight.”
Previously, Prieto had achieved the desired effect by bouncing light from weather balloons suspended from trees. But here he was faced with the limitations of the location—a 17th-century village with cobbled streets. So he designed a vast structure that stretched above every house in the frame—a metal forest adorned with more than 100 light tubes, spaced to the millimetre. The team likened it to a spine snaking through the streets.
In the studio, dressed in a white guayabera and jeans, Prieto assessed the image. The effect was exactly as he had imagined: an evenly lush light that seemed to come from the heavens. He took one last look, then turned the page in his notebook.
While Prieto was immersed in the details, everyone was aware of a bigger problem. The film was just a few weeks away from opening, and there was no way to predict how audiences would react. Prieto had worked with some of the most accomplished directors, including Martin Scorsese, Ang Lee, and Greta Gerwig, creating the visual worlds of films like Barbie and 8 Mile. But for his first job as a director, he had chosen an exceptionally challenging project.
Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s novel is an epic about the years spanning the country’s revolution. Set in the fictional town of Comala, it follows a young man named Juan Preciado as he searches for his estranged father, a cruel overlord named Pedro Páramo. It’s not a long work—more of a novella than a novel—but it’s wildly ambitious: a meditation on nation-building, oppression, and familial trauma, written in an elliptical, allusive style that critics have described as realismo fantasmal, or ghostly realism. In many passages, it’s unclear exactly where in time the action is taking place, or whether the characters are alive or dead. When Rulfo published Pedro Páramo in 1955, he had to give away free copies to encourage people to read it.
Eventually, the novel found its admirers, including Gabriel García Márquez, who encountered Pedro Páramo at a difficult time in his writing career. “Read it, damn it, so you can study,” a friend told him. Fascinated, García Márquez memorized the pages and set about writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rulfo’s work became a fixture in Mexican schools, a must-read for every serious student. But many directors thought it impossible to translate to the screen: the language was too complex, the narrative too convoluted. Three attempts in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s led to disappointments. German director Werner Herzog toyed with the idea, but ultimately told himself, “Don’t touch it.”
Juan Carlos Rulfo, the author’s son, wondered whether paying homage to his father was a disservice to his legacy, saying that whoever took on the project would have to “overcome their fear of the job.” In 2021, forty years after the last adaptation of Pedro Páramo, Netflix approached Prieto, who was then working on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Prieto knew the book and understood the challenges it presented. But, as he recalled, “I didn’t want that to stop me. Maybe I was reckless, but I said yes.”
In the spring of 1999, Prieto was leaning over a trash can in Mexico City, hastily setting up a camera. He was directing Alejandro González Iñárritu's first feature film, Amores Amores, and the first scene was about to begin.
Sourse: newyorker.com
