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How to bring flesh to a memory? After having the spoken portrait of my father drawn, I needed someone to perform the memory of him. In this sense, my idea was to cast someone who could incarnate the features (psychological and physical) that were engraved in the drawing. I knew from the start that I wouldn´t work with a script (since in most of my memories I didn´t remember the exact words of people). I also knew that the process of building the character for the actor would be a big challenge since there was no character arc or plot to follow. In that sense, I wanted to find someone who could perform the character with almost no direction at all. In other words, I wanted someone who “was” the character, someone who reminded me of my father.
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We published the spoken portrait on casting agencies. We provided very little information about the project. We said that we were looking for someone who looked like the drawing (or who at least found some connection with it). We gave a loose age range (35-55) and expressed that we needed someone who had talent for improvisation.
We received around 30 profiles and discarded only the ones who were outside of the age range. We gave everyone else a chance to participate in the casting session. A week later, around 10 actors attended our casting experiment. Almost every actor had some sort of vague resemblance to the drawing but some of them were more similar than others.
Back then I wasn´t sure what I was looking for: I questioned if I should make my decisions based on acting skills, on looks, or on how similar the actors’ lives are to my father´s. This would be a process in which the actors needed to embody the character without even trying. Therefore, I decided that it would be best to let the actors discover this character at the same time as me. Additionally, by keeping this conversation open, I would discover the actor´s personalities through the character.
One of the actors, Ulises, said that he saw a man filled with melancholy and regret over a huge loss in the past. He said that he imagined that the man was a painter and that maybe in the depths of his character he was sweet, but his life had veered him towards bitterness. I really never verbalized this about my father and yet this description seemed to fit him.
In real life, my father was indeed a painter and this melancholy is one of the things that is most immediately recognizable about him. To me it was clear that Ulises and I were projecting the same kind of features onto the character. His answers were helping me discover and remember. I kept asking questions.
After this set of questions, I asked them to tell me a real story about their lives that they thought this character could have lived. One spoke about long barefoot walks on the side of the highway, some spoke about fights with monkeys in the jungle, and some spoke about heroic deeds of their past . Ulises told the story of the last night he spent with an ex-lover in a motel in the heart of Mexico City. The way he spoke about it reminded me very much of my father. In real life, sometimes he would talk about previous lovers with this same tone, the same textures and a similar feeling. It was very clear that Ulises was the right choice.
It is important to note that I never explained anything at all to the actors. My idea was that by creating a surface for projection (the spoken portrait) and by asking the right questions, they would help me to remember this character that only existed in my memory. Through a process similar to anamnesis, we were able to discover what this character was like. Later, when I asked the actors to perform something, I barely had to give them directions. The exercise of discovering the character together was enough to make the actions flow naturally and to create the main features of what I wanted.
There was still one big question: who would play the role of me as a 7-year-old?
Since there was no script and my idea was to build the scenes from improvisation, the challenge of finding a child who could improvise naturally seemed almost impossible. I knew that the only way to approach this situation would be to use real-life relationships instead of directing the kid. I needed to find an actor who had a son, a nephew, a friend with a son, or any sort of real relationship that would enable the dynamic I was looking for. Because of this, we asked every actor that we interviewed for the role of my father if they had kids that could act. Almost by divine coincidence, Ulises, the actor we decided was the best one to play the role, had a 7-year-old son. We asked him to participate in the project.
