Filmmaker Alex Rivera gazes into the future in his debut feature, Sleep Dealer
Made for half of the catering budget one of those Star Wars prequels, the indie sci-fi film Sleep Dealer marks the arrival of a talented new director, New York-bred Alex Rivera. Set in Mexico in the not-too-distant future, the story follows a small-town youth who moves to Tijuana in search of bigger and better opportunities and winds up working in a factory where his consciousness is beamed via the world wide web into a robot worker building a high-rise in a major American metropolis. That’s right, in this future, immigrants can toil for long hours and low pay without having to cross the border. Rivera spoke with GIANT about the origins of this timely idea and why he hopes Sleep Dealer will kick off a whole wave of third-world science-fiction features.
GIANT: How did the idea for Sleep Dealer first occur to you?
Alex Rivera: It happened kind of by accident, when I was thinking about my dad. He’s an immigrant from Peru and when I looked his life, I realized that he lived in the U.S. but would watched Spanish-language television maybe eight to ten hours a night. So I started to think about him using television as a reverse migration, where his body was in America, but his mind had returned to South America via the TV. That led to me thinking about how immigrants use technology to return home. Then in 1997, I was reading Wired magazine and there was an article about telecommuting. Coming from an immigrant family where my dad had to travel 3000 miles to find work, I started to imagine a world where he could have stayed put and worked from home. So I came up with the idea of a telecommuting immigrant, someone who stayed in the south but whose labor is beamed over the border. And that idea became the seed for Sleep Dealer.
GIANT: You made a few short films based around a similar presence before you started work on the feature, correct?
Rivera: Yes, after I had the idea for the telecommuting immigrant, I made a five minute short that looked like an advertisement. What was really bizarre was a lot of people took it seriously! I actually created a website that some journalists took as real. But I’ve been making short films off and on for 15 years now. Some have been straight documentaries that have been shown on PBS and others are animation. I’ve also made a series of pirate films, where I stole footage from other films and collaged them together. I’ve been working in a lot of different forms. And a lot of those ideas are fleshed out and on more display here.
GIANT: Which authors and filmmakers influenced you as you went about bringing this story to the screen?
Rivera: I read a lot of science fiction growing up, everyone from Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury to George Orwell. Whenever I had to read Shakespeare, I’d always get the Cliff’s Notes. [Laughs] Now I read a lot of political theory and social science—those are books I turn to when I think of the worlds I’m trying to imagine in my films. In terms of filmmaking, I look to directors like Terry Gilliam, Paul Verhoeven, Spike Lee and Oliver Stone. I didn’t go to film school so I feel I don’t have the set of paintbrushes yet to realize that kind of vision. But those are the kinds of filmmakers I look to for inspiration.
GIANT: You’re tackling a lot of ideas in Sleep Dealer—illegal immigration, reality TV, disputes over water, the prevalence of the Internet in everyday life. There’s enough material in here for five movies.
Rivera: Even though the film has six or seven big ideas about the future, it’s really one idea—technology connects us and makes the world smaller, but that doesn’t always lead to equality and justice. It sometimes leads to remote control bombings, to corporations extending their reach around the world and exploiting places unable to defend themselves. The film is, at its heart, about a battle over the future. Who is going to control this technology and use it to make themselves more powerful? Will it be corporations, the military or ordinary people? All of the ideas in the film connect to this one central question. Who does the future belong to?
GIANT: One of the things I appreciate about the film is that it establishes a world where so many different stories can be told.
Rivera: If anybody wants to send ideas for the sequel, my e-mail address is on my website! I see Sleep Dealer as a first step into third-world cyberpunk. It’s a very big canvas and I would love to see people create their own versions and angles. It would be great to see science fiction that starts in Jakarta or in Sao Paolo. Why not? The future belongs to everyone.
GIANT: Why did you pick Mexico as the setting for the film?
Rivera: Mexico is a place I love profoundly and when I’m there, you really do feel like you’re traveling through time. You can be in a village where there are scenes that you could have seen 500 years ago and then you turn around and there’s a massive factory. It’s a country that’s very inspiring because of these intense contrasts.
GIANT: That’s an idea that’s carried over into the movie—it’s a future that often looks a lot like the present.
Rivera: I think we’re sold a false bill of goods in a lot of science-fiction. In the future, the cars are different, the furniture is curvy, the road system is transformed! That’s not true. Most of us probably live in apartments that are 85-100 years old, but then we also have an iPhone. The future is a collage. So that was the idea for Sleep Dealer, as well as a cost-saving measure. Our future was not going to be transformed everywhere. Little capillaries were going to course through the world and be changed.
GIANT: Was it a smooth transition from directing shorts to directing a feature?
Rivera: On my previous short films, I had a crew of one person. On this film I had a crew of 100 and I think about 85 of them were angry at me most of the time. [Laughs] It was a difficult production. You had a first-time director trying to make a movie with 1/10th of the budget we should have had and I was working in a country I didn’t fully understand. It was a profoundly challenging experience. For my next film, I’d like to do a movie about two actors in a single room! I’m exhausted.
Sleep Dealer opens in theaters today. Watch the trailer below, read GIANT’s review here and visit the official website for more info.
