Taglines: Love heals. Love absolves. Love burns.
The Burning Plain movie storyline. From Guillermo Arriaga, the internationally acclaimed writer of Babel, 21 Grams and Amores Perros, comes The Burning Plain, a romantic mystery about a woman on the edge who takes an emotional journey back to the defining moment of her life.
The past and the present have a curious way of effecting one another as several people seperated by time and space are about to discover — Mariana, a 16-year-old girl trying to put together the shattered lives of her parents in a Mexican border town; Sylvia, a woman in Portland who must undertake an emotional odyssey to burnish a sin from her past; Gina and Nick, a couple who must deal with an intense and clandestine affair; and Maria, a young girl who helps her parents find redemption, forgiveness and love. The five will discover that their actions may mean the difference between life and death as well as their own journeys into seeking redemption…and whether or not they will ever find it.
I thought it seemed obvious that the teenage girl who blew up her mother in the trailer was the same person as the older woman, years later, and that the young girl was the baby she abandoned and didn’t want to give birth to. The injured pilot/father was the same as the young Hispanic boy she fell in love with, then left. They are not five characters, or “several people,” but are all in the same family. The “burning plain” refers to the mysterious image that starts the movie and is explicated and given emotional resonance by the flashback/flash forward technique that the film depends on, and uses quite successfully.
Oscar-winner Charlize Theron plays Sylvia, a beautiful restaurant manager whose cool, professional demeanor masks the sexually charged storm within. When a stranger from Mexico confronts her with her mysterious past, Sylvia is launched into a journey through space and time that inextricably connects her to these disparate characters, all of whom are grappling with their own romantic destinies.
The Burning Plain is the directorial debut of Oscar-nominated screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. From 2929 Productions (Good Night and Good Luck, We Own the Night), the film was produced by Walter Parkes and Laurie Macdonald (Catch Me If You Can, Sweeney Todd) and executive produced by Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban, Marc Butan, and Ray Angelic.
While the films Arriaga has previously written often span worlds, classes, and cultures to convey their themes, for his first work as a director Arriaga chose to “let the intimacy of landscapes give emotional and physical space to the characters, as if the landscape itself becomes another character. I didn’t want the setting of the film to get in the way of what is ultimately a story about love and its effect on one character across her life.”
Arriaga’s vision for The Burning Plain was supported by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (The Will Be Blood), and award-winning editor Craig Wood. The film was scored by two of the most influential musicians in their fields: Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight) and the musician Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (of theprog-rock band The Mars Volta).
The Burning Plain was screened at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, in September 2008, before being screened at the Savannah Film Festival, which was held from October 25 to November 1, 2008. It was an entrant of the international competition of the 65th Venice International Film Festival. The Burning Plain was released in theaters on September 18, 2009.. The film grossed $58,749 in its first weekend in North America. It grossed $200,730 domestically and $5,267,917 in foreign countries, for a total of $5,468,647 worldwide.
About the Film
Author and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga believes that you can’t simply sit down and write a story: “You have to wait until the story is mature enough to be told,” he says when explaining that the idea for his screenplay, THE BURNING PLAIN, evolved over almost fifteen years before he began putting it down on paper in 2005. The multi-narrative drama where the seemingly unconnected past and present eventually intersect continues a signature style that garnered him critical acclaim and worldwide commercial success for his screenplays for the films Babel, 21 Grams, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Amores Perros.
To help him bring his vision to the screen, Arriaga approached what at first seemed like unlikely auspices for the project: producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, who in the past have been known for producing big studio-based movies which have found both critical and commercial success, such as Men In Black, Gladiator, and most recently Sweeney Todd.
“It’s not hyperbole to say that Guillermo has pretty much invented a new way of telling motion picture stories,” says Parkes. “What particularly excited us here, beyond the evocation of the “four elements” as the basis of a script, was the fact that Guillermo wanted to use his unique structural approach to unravel and elucidate the emotional mystery of a central character – Sylvia, who is in really the lynchpin of the entire story, and who we knew would attract a great actress.”
Adds MacDonald – “It was both a creative opportunity and a challenge to work with an artist of Guillermo’s stature. The normal rules of screenplay development really don’t apply – but what surprised us was how open and collaborative he was in the process, despite the fact that the story is such a personal one. We didn’t know it at the time but it would bode very well for Guillermo’s ability to direct his movie.”
It wasn’t until after submitting the screenplay to Parkes and MacDonald, and executive producer Alisa Tager, that Arriaga expressed interest in directing. “In some ways, it was a very easy decision to support Guillermo as the director of the movie. His approach to the material is so singular, so personal, and so specific that it is hard to imagine someone else interpreting it,” says Parkes, “The movie existed fully on the page.”
At this point, Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban’s 2929 Productions came on board to finance. 2929 President and executive producer Marc Butan cites the rich characters, the cinematic backdrop, and Arriaga’s unique storytelling style as his main attractions to the script: “This is not a classically structured movie and audiences will have to figure it out on their own, as it unfolds on the screen,” said Butan. But Arriaga disputes the notion that his style is unconventional or unique: “If I want to tell you how I grew up in Mexico maybe I will start with my grandfather who came from a remote state in the south, and then go to my son because my son looks like my father, and then I’m telling that story. This is natural for people, even if cinema hasn’t always approached storytelling that way,” asserts Arriaga.
On Arriaga’s first time behind the camera, Butan notes, “a big part of the decision is whether this is a person who can inspire and command loyalty among a group of people for a period of time.”
Arriaga’s material belies his presence on set. Says Angelic, “He writes these dark, emotional, often times tragic stories and when you meet him he’s one of the warmest, most lovable guys I’ve ever seen on set,” recalls Angelic of Arriaga’s daily interaction with the cast and crew. Butan calls Arriaga “a very straightforward person,” whose richly detailed scripts “are his vision for the movie.” So there were very few surprises from Arriaga, both as a person and from his goals as a filmmaker. And because Arriaga was very actively involved in the productions of his previous scripts, 2929 didn’t consider him “a writer who had been sitting at home writing and all of a sudden wants to direct,” says Butan.
With 2929 committed to making his film, Arriaga needed to find his cast. To play Sylvia, a beautiful but scarred woman hiding from her past, Arriaga knew he needed an actress who would be able to convey a deep interior trauma but who also would be compelling to audiences. Charlize Theron, who had won an Oscar for her portrayal of a woman damaged by a traumatic youth in Monster, was the obvious choice. Arriaga approached their one-hour lunch meeting with trepidation. But as the meeting stretched to five hours and the conversation deepened, Arriaga realized he had his Sylvia.
“When Charlize said yes, that really helped to make this film possible,” concluded Arriaga. Theron was haunted by the story after her first read through the script. “I found myself thinking about it nonstop and that’s always a good sign,” says Theron. “This story and the other characters in the film force Sylvia into a corner,” continues Theron, who saw in her character parallels with her personal convictions about the human condition. “You get to a place in your life where you have to step up and face your demons, face your reality. That’s the difference between us and every other animal: we can overcome our initial instinct to protect ourselves from pain.”
“From our first meeting I realized that we collaborated really well and that we were definitely on the same page with the character,” recalls Theron, who also joined the production in the role of executive producer. “I have to feel that I’m going to have a clear partnership with my director and that there’s going to be a constant dialogue and communication,” says Theron. That’s the only way she’d be able to “really get to the bottom line of the character and what the story is about.” The relationship between actor and director immediately took root as Theron and Arriaga talked and sent text messages continually before she arrived on location in New Mexico, her character’s childhood home.
The feeling of partnership was mutual and Arriaga appreciated the early dialogue that he developed with Theron. “The character’s journey is very painful,” explains Arriaga when reflecting on Charlize’s subtle, minimalist approach to Sylvia’s troubled past. “Charlize did it without simplifying it because this kind of material can easily become melodramatic or stylized.”
Theron felt Arriaga’s way of telling her character’s story was very original in that it shows the audience Sylvia’s pain long before giving it context. Says Theron, “It gives you the feeling of dislocation, like the pain has become something separate from the event that caused it. That’s what Sylvia’s experiencing and that’s also what the audience is experiencing.” And because she’s been suppressing her emotions for so long, Sylvia’s expression of these emotions during the course of the story would necessarily be small and telling, rather than explosive and dramatic.
Though 2929’s Butan concedes that there was a very short list of actresses considered for the role of Gina, the idea came from Theron, wearing her executive producer hat. The role is a delicate one—a married woman and mother of four children who has a passionate affair with a married man from a different background. The only way for the film to work was to get the audience invested in this extramarital affair—the event that causes the cascade of both trauma and redemption. Arriaga found in Basinger’s work to possess “a kind of fragility that suited the character very well.”
On working with Basinger, Arriaga says, “Kim trusted me, which is very important in the relationship between actor and director.” For Arriaga she embodied “this contradiction between what is going on in the mind and the heart. These contradictions are so hard to show but Kim did it.”
Location Shots
THE BURNING PLAIN was shot over eight weeks on location in the Chihuahuan Desert region of New Mexico and the brooding coastal region of Oregon inland to Portland. Not only were the two regions presented as full-fledged characters in the story, but Arriaga feels that their dominant elements represented events and emotions in his characters’ lives. “It’s part of the storytelling so I was very careful with how the landscape was portrayed,” says Arriaga.
“We scouted the entire state of New Mexico with three or four separate scouts,” says executive producer Ray Angelic. “Guillermo really responded to Las Cruces in particular and specifically to the Organ Mountains. Each time we went back he spent more time in Las Cruces and really felt that was the place.” The completely unobstructed stretch of land along the foot of that mountain range provided the perfect sense of vastness and isolation for the love affair between two of the film’s main characters.
For his ensemble of talent, Arriaga wanted actors who would convey the sense of reality that is so elemental to telling his story. To that end, casting director Debra Zane, who cast ensemble dramas like American Beauty, Seabiscuit, and Traffic, scoured both the southwestern US and Mexico for actors who could lend this earthy quality to the story. Arriaga describes working with Zane as “a very intense and beautiful process. She has impeccable taste and was like a rock in the construction of the film.”
Citing Theron as her inspiration for becoming an actress, Jennifer Lawrence got the part of Mariana, the impulsive adolescent reeling from the death of her mother but still oblivious to the consequences of her actions. “After I finished reading, Guillermo came over and kissed me on the forehead,” recalls Lawrence. “Debra asked me if I wanted to see anybody else for Mariana,” reiterated Arriaga, “and I said ‘Nope! This is the one!’”
Lawrence, who plays a teenager confused and burdened by a mother’s rejection of the family after surviving a bout with cancer, displayed an internal intensity during the casting that Arriaga sought for Mariana. “When you first meet my character she’s been the de facto mother of her siblings for the past four years and hasn’t had a chance to be a kid,” explains Lawrence.
It’s that resentment, says Lawrence, “that really drives the story for the rest of the characters.” During shooting, Lawrence maintained that separation off-screen, avoiding her character’s mother, Basinger. It was a relief to Lawrence, however, when the two enjoyed a hug at the end of filming. At 17, Lawrence’s age belies her maturity as an actor and Arriaga found that she had the same kind of commitment to the film as Theron. “They’re both willing to do anything on behalf of the character,” acknowledged Arriaga. “I had two Charlizes on this film!”
JD Pardo, who plays young Santiago, the teen-aged boy whose family has been torn apart by the revelation of his father’s death and infidelity, needed to have a certain tragic chemistry with Lawrence. “A lot of the weight of the film is in the story between Santiago and Mariana,” elaborates Arriaga. “They both have undergone similar traumas but handle it in different ways—for that reason they find each other mysterious. There was a lot of this same weighty chemistry between JD and Jennifer and I had no doubt that they would do it right.”
For Pardo this “true growing-up story” provided all the nuances of what young men go though when trying to get close to their fathers. “You’re asking yourself questions about who your father was and you’re searching…and this really hit home,” says Pardo of his hopeful take on Santiago’s heartbreaking loss of his father.
Arriaga insisted on bringing in Jose Maria Yazpik from Mexico to play Carlos, the older Santiago’s best friend and partner in a crop-dusting business. “Guillermo was very passionate about Jose Maria in that role,” said Butan, who acknowledged that there were several high profile Mexican-American actors interested in it. Arriaga met Yazpik 10 years ago after viewing a short film a student showed him featuring the actor. “I was mesmerized by this actor,” recalls Arriaga.
To prepare him for the role, Yazpik explains that Arriaga “told me stories about his friend Melquiades Estrada. He really exists and he based this film’s character upon Melquiades’ sort of bipolar personality, very happy in one instant and then the next he will just not speak.” Yazpik believes this “Arriaga-esque” love story honors not only the feelings between lovers but also the love between friends, and the love between parents and children. “Carlos is not happy about his friend’s situation or the changes it could engender, but will endure the stark ‘fish out of water’ journey required to make things right again.”
The story takes emotional hairpin turns, often without dialogue. Arriaga admired the actor’s pitch perfect portrayal of Carlos and says, “in Jose Maria’s performance we see this man whose innocence and loyalty to his friend is palpable. He pulled Carlos exactly to where I wanted him to be.”
Danny Pino, who plays Carlos’ best friend, the older Santiago, “brought the character some lightness,” says Arriaga. “He had this kind of hope to his performance, and in this film we needed someone that would represent a guy who has worked his way up in life and makes it even with difficult circumstances: He’s lost the love of his life but manages to find hope and take comfort in the fact that he has her daughter.”
Similarly, Pino finds that the story evokes forgiveness and second chances. “Santiago has managed to raise his daughter with the help of his best friend, but has an obstacle that forces him to reach out to the estranged mother of his daughter,” explains Pino. He was drawn to the story’s complex but very real characters. “That’s part of the genius of what Guillermo has been able to accomplish,” says Pino of Arriaga’s script. “He’s been able to give you a true taste of what these people’s lives are like.”
When a serious injury forces Santiago to send his friend, Carlos, to track down Maria’s mother, all of the pain of Maria’s estrangement from her mother comes to the surface. On finding his Maria, Arriaga says, “I really put a gun to my own head when I wrote the script. Not only did I need a girl who speaks perfect English and perfect Spanish, but she had to be beautiful enough to be the daughter of a Mexican man and a blond-haired blue-eyed woman!” After endless casting sessions in LA and New York, Arriaga and casting director Debra Zane spread the word in Mexico. A tape of Tessa made its way to the casting office. She met all the physical and language criteria, so she flew to LA to meet with Arriaga. “During the casting session I saw that she had a fierce glance when she looks at you, so I hired her” says Arriaga.
“Maria has never had a mother and is used to living only with her Dad,” says Ia of her character. “She thinks it’s monstrous for someone to leave a baby. But she’s also the only one who can put everyone beyond the pain their past.” In working through the delicate reunion scenes between Maria and her mother, Tessa recalls “Maria is afraid to get close when she meets her because she might leave again, but afterwards she lets her come to her world,” explains Ia.
Just as Basinger embodied Gina, Arriaga felt so strongly that Brett Cullen was the only actor who could play her husband Robert—in fact, that he ran after the actor to tell him he’d gotten the part.
“When he auditioned he began talking about his own family and I saw something deep inside this guy,” remembers Arriaga. In talking about his character, Arriaga asked Cullen something that was very difficult for him to answer. “I asked him if Robert knows how to swim, and he said yes,” recalls Arriaga. “Then I asked him ‘Where, living in the desert, did Robert learn to swim?’ and he replied that he needed to think about his answers. So he wrote a beautiful story about his character and he sent it to me. This is something I will be thankful for the rest of my life.” For Cullen, Robert embodied the universal ‘shattered man’ who he says “has been through a very tough period of time with his family and I think it puts in question his belief in himself, his belief maybe somewhat in God.”
Nick, the Mexican-American whom Gina falls in love with, was another difficult character for Arriaga to cast. He had to be someone who still looks and feels Mexican. “We looked at many very fine actors but the problem wasn’t whether they were good actors,” said Arriaga, “the difficulty was the chemistry between him and Kim Basinger. We were running out of options when we finally got to Joaquim, who is not Mexican—he’s Portuguese. But it was one of these lucky moments when the gods looked down and said, ‘Hey, here’s this guy for you.’ Joaquim is a man who looks virile, who looks like he belongs in the landscape and I think he has a sexiness, which made me feel this married woman could be in love with him.”
The role is complicated by the fact that, unlike with Gina, the film would never reveal Nick’s backstory. The depth of their passion would have to be implied through performance rather than exposition. “I wanted the audience not to know how they met, just as Mariana and Santiago don’t know how their parents met—I just wanted the audience to feel the connection between Nick and Gina, obscure but powerful.”
“I only write of things I know and things that have touched me personally,” says Arriaga who would use his own life and stories when discussing an upcoming scene with actors. “He had a very clear vision of the whole movie in his head,” confirms Angelic. “He knows what each character is wearing, where they live and what kind of car they drive. He was great with the cast.”
At their first meeting Arriaga told Angelic that he was looking to create a real feeling of family and team spirit with the cast and crew, and that they would come onboard because they were passionate about the material. From their time together preparing the film Angelic was very aware of Arriaga’s strength as a screenwriter, so the focus of his work was “a matter of surrounding him with creative department heads who could really support, guide and help him in obtaining his vision.”
“One of my luckiest choices in this film was hiring Robert Elswit who was not only my director of photography, but would become my teacher,” says Arriaga. “He taught me many things on this film and I will always be thankful to him. When he came to my office to talk about this film, he only talked about the story. He never talked about lenses or camera equipment or technical things, he just talked about the story, which really impressed me.”
“Robert’s such a hard worker and accepted this film already being committed to another film with a slight schedule conflict, so the last part of the picture was photographed by John Toll,” explains Arriaga. “The film is basically four stories and Robert shot three of them and John Toll shot one of them with the help and preparation of Robert, and I think that having two of the greatest DPs in history was a luxury that not every director is privileged to have.”
Elswit actually brought up the idea of having a different DP do the Portland portion of the film explains Angelic, “and going from one great DP to another made sense to the story too. Oregon is a completely separate story line with a completely different look and different geography from the rest of the film. Elswit and Toll are friends and when we found out that John was interested and excited by it then we became interested and excited about the idea of switching DPs.”
Production Designer Dan Leigh cites the time/space continuum that Arriaga toys with in this story as “a puzzle that makes an audience participate in watching a film.” He was drawn to the challenge of visually helping an audience solve the puzzle, and in his first meeting with Arriaga learned that the original title was “The Elements,” for the medieval concepts of earth-air-fire-water. These elements, and using the film’s locations to emphasize the elemental quality of the story, were a major focus of their first discussion.
“Guillermo identifies certain characters with each of those elements,” said Leigh, so a seamless color pallet between the outside colors and the interiors established that nature force of the characters’ environments whether the earth and air of the desert or the sea and rain of the Pacific coast. One of the most striking uses of color in is the vast red plain of sorghum fields. “Guillermo has always said that one of his feelings about screenwriting is to always bear in mind that you want to show your audience something that they haven’t seen… and I can’t think of a time that sorghum has ever been seen in a movie.”
“Dan Leigh was the gatekeeper of my visions”, affirms Arriaga. “If he had any doubts about the suitability of a location, he was the first to say that it was not what we were looking for. He helped me keep my vision in mind and he was very much into the storytelling.”
Cindy Evans was also an important element to the film. As costume designer, Arriaga says “Cindy brought a sense of reality and storytelling to the characters, adding personality and emotion.
Directing the actors was made easier by the sensible work of Cindy, who helped define the characters through their costumes. Going to Cindy’s workplace was like going to an oasis. Everyone was relaxed, happy and working extremely hard.”
Producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald recommended editor Craig Wood and Arriaga was impressed with his previous work. “He and I have a great connection and he has a sense of the pace and of the characters,” reflects Arriaga who began the editing process with Wood while shooting in New Mexico. “His attention is focused on cuts that will help the character development and he tends to keep the scenes as long as possible and doesn’t feel the need to cut and cut and cut.” Because of the unconventional narrative structure, Wood needed to the scenes to play out elementally, with long takes and traditional cutting styles.
“There is a certain geometry to the way Craig cuts,” says Arriaga, “He orients you so quickly that, even if it can be jarring to go from Portland to Las Cruces, he makes you feel as though you are gently entering a new world, like all the worlds are connected— which they are.”
It was extremely gratifying for Arriaga to go from the solitary life of a writer to actually interacting with characters he created. “After being so lonely, writing so many years, it was the ultimate pleasure being in the desert and beautiful landscapes in Oregon with all these wonderful friends working along so hard with me,” says Arriaga. “It was very tough— all movies are—but I felt on this set everyone was a filmmaker,” says Arriaga, “and for the first time I say to everyone this is not my film; this is our film.”
For Arriaga, that, ultimately, is the paradox of filmmaking: “It’s something that is so difficult and yet people love the process so much.” But it’s also the paradox of The Burning Plain’s story. Says Arriaga, “How does something as beautiful as two people making love cause such an obstacle for love in other characters? That is one of the great romantic mysteries and just to able to explore it even a little bit through cinema is a gift I’ll never forget.”
The Burning Plain (2009)
Directed by: Guillermo Arriaga
Starring by: Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lawrence, José María Yazpik, Joaquim de Almeida, Kacie Thomas, Rachel Ticotin, Tessa Ia, JD Pardo, Rosalia De Aragon, Debrianna Mansini
Screenplay by: Guillermo Arriaga
Production by: Dan Leigh
Cinematography by: Robert Elswit, John Toll
Film Editing by: Craig Wood
Costume Design by: Cindy Evans
Set Decoration by: Sean Kennedy, Ron von Blomberg
Music by: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Hans Zimmer
MPAA Rating: R for sexuality, nudity and language.
Distributed by: Magnolia Pictures
Release Date: September 18, 2009
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