In a darkened room in the Warner Bros. studio in Hell’s Kitchen, Rodrigo Prieto sat on the edge of his chair, with a notepad in hand. He was fine-tuning the latest cut of his film, “Pedro Páramo,” an adaptation of a mysterious Mexican novel that has fascinated and baffled generations of readers. After decades as one of Hollywood’s best-regarded cinematographers, Prieto was making his directorial début.
In a gentle voice, Prieto asked to pause the film. The screen filled with a shot of two characters holding an oil lamp as they wander a desolate Mexican town in the middle of the night. It was a quiet scene, but a source of obsession for Prieto. Key passages in the novel unfold at night, so the first question that he had wrestled with was how to mimic the moon. “Moonlight can’t be trusted,” he said wryly. In real life, moonlight spreads as far as the eye can see; the challenge for Prieto was to recreate its expansiveness while also finding a balance between darkness and light. “You want to see the emotion in the actors and yet feel that it’s dark,” he said. “That’s moonlight.”
In the past, Prieto had achieved the effect that he wanted by bouncing light off weather balloons suspended from trees. Here, he was constrained by the location, a seventeenth-century village with cobblestoned streets. So he designed a sprawling structure that extended over every house in the frame—a metal scaffold hung with more than a hundred light tubes, the distance between them measured to the millimetre. The crew likened it to a spine winding through the streets.
In the studio, Prieto, dressed in a white guayabera and jeans, surveyed the image. The effect was just as he had envisioned it: an evenly abundant light, which seemed to glow from the sky. He took one last look, then flipped the page on his notepad.
As Prieto fussed over details, everyone was conscious of a larger concern. The film’s première was just a few weeks away, and the response was impossible to predict. Prieto has worked with a succession of prominent directors, including Martin Scorsese, Ang Lee, and Greta Gerwig, creating the visual world of movies as distinct as “Barbie” and “Eight Mile.” But, for his first film as a director, he’d picked a singularly difficult project.
The novel, by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, is an epic of the years around 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 brutal overlord named Pedro Páramo. It is not long—more a novella than a novel—but it is wildly ambitious: a consideration of nation-building, oppression, and familial trauma, written in an elliptical, allusive style that critics have referred to as realismo fantasmal, or ghostly realism. In many passages, it is not clear where in time the action takes place, or whether the characters are alive or dead. When Rulfo published “Pedro Páramo,” in 1955, he had to give away free copies to entice people to read it.
Eventually, the novel found a following, including Gabriel García Márquez, who was introduced to “Pedro Páramo” during a torturous period of writer’s block. “Read this, dammit, so you can learn,” a friend had told him. Transfixed, García Márquez memorized its pages and got to work on “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Rulfo’s work became a staple of Mexican classrooms, a book that every serious student had to read. Yet many filmmakers believed that it was impossible to bring to the screen: the language was too intricate, the narrative too circuitous. Three attempts, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, had resulted in bracing disappointments. The German director Werner Herzog entertained the idea, then finally told himself, “Don’t touch it.”
Juan Carlos Rulfo, the author’s son, wondered if the reverence for his father was doing a disservice to his legacy, saying that whoever undertook this project had to “overcome their fear of the work.” 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 recognized the challenges that it posed. But, he recalled, “I didn’t want that to stop me. Perhaps irresponsibly, I said yes.”
On a spring afternoon in 1999, Prieto was bent over a trash can in Mexico City, rushing to put a camera in place. He was directing the photography of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first feature, “Amores Perros,” and the opening scene was about to roll.
Nine cameras would film the sequence: a violent car crash in a busy intersection, where the film’s multiple story lines converge. Prieto and Iñárritu had mapped each shot, then devoted hours to figuring out the exact time and speed at which the two cars would collide. But, in the middle of dress rehearsal, one of the bumpers had fallen off. As technicians worked to repair it, a crowd of onlookers was growing, and the production was running out of time. With a bare-bones budget, it was impossible to return the following day. They had a single chance to get it right.
Prieto was obsessing over the light, which was waning quickly as evening approached. Even subtle changes required manual adjustments to the cameras, which were scattered all over: inside vehicles, behind street signs, hung over roofs. When, at last, the car’s bumper was fixed, everyone was ordered to clear the frame. Prieto ran back to operate a 35-mm. reflex from behind a restaurant window.
As Iñárritu was getting ready to yell “Acción,” a cabdriver pulled into the street, mere feet from the shot. Crew members yelled at him to move, but the driver, determined to park, simply turned off his engine and walked away. Minutes later, filming began. The cars involved in the crash, a Grand Marquis and a remote-controlled Nissan Sentra, started rolling, and within seconds they reached the intersection. As the two vehicles collided, there was a loud boom; their windshields shattered, and the scene was engulfed in smoke. The Grand Marquis instantly caught fire. The Sentra caromed into the taxi, climbed up its hood, and came to rest. The crew rushed to put out the flames, and when the stuntman emerged uninjured everyone lunged to hug him. The insurance would take care of the cabdriver’s bill later; “Amores Perros” now had an opening scene.
Prieto had met Iñárritu six years before, when, as a young cinematographer, he got a call from Z Films, a production company that Iñárritu had helped found. Prieto knew him from his time as a d.j. at Mexico City’s most popular rock-and-roll station—a subversive, inventive presence on the air. They hit it off right away, as Iñárritu was drawn to Prieto’s technical skill and his easy manner.
Z Films made much of its money with a series of breezy, entertaining commercials. But Prieto and Iñárritu were restless. They wanted to make movies—ones that would push against the constraints of the Mexican film industry. At the time, powerful unions dictated who could work in the business. “It was practically illegal to make a movie outside of the unions,” Prieto told me. “Someone had to die or retire for the rest of us to work our way up the ladder.” The films, made by a small group of directors, largely revolved around familiar tropes: tales of forbidden love, bawdy comedies, and border thrillers. Aside from school, the only place for young filmmakers to encounter new ideas was the Cineteca Nacional, a monumental theatre complex in Mexico City. “We were watching foreign movies and aspiring to do things differently,” Prieto said. “The techniques and ways of doing photography in Mexico were stuck in the sixties.”
In 1998, Iñárritu told Prieto that he had a film project in its early stages: “Perro Negro, Perro Blanco.” The script, written by Guillermo Arriaga, had gone through thirty-six revisions, and Iñárritu was finally ready to show it. “It was an enormous surprise,” Prieto said. The text, partly inspired by “The Sound and the Fury,” traced the stories of a lustful model, a homeless man, and a fiery young couple; it was both a critique of class and a portrait of a city defined by startling beauty and violence. When Iñárritu invited Prieto over to talk about the film, Prieto unzipped his bag and took out a book: “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” a collection of raw, gritty images by the American photographer Nan Goldin. Iñárritu smiled; he had set the same book aside for Prieto.
The two decided to use handheld cameras, an unusual technique in Mexico at the time, to make the film feel viscerally realistic. They distinguished the interwoven story lines by assigning each one its own kind of film. But Mexico City proved particularly hard to capture. Smog tinged the images gray, rendering the city colorless. Prieto wanted to bring the capital to life, as Wong Kar-wai had done for Hong Kong in “Chungking Express.” He experimented with techniques until he landed on bleach bypass, which skips a step of bleaching in processing the film. Among filmmakers, it was seen as a potentially destructive maneuver—the silver left on the negative could damage it over time. But Iñárritu and Prieto were willing to take the risk. If you were lucky enough to make a movie in Mexico, it could very well be your last, so why hew to convention?
As the movie went into final editing, no one could tell how it would be received in Mexico, much less abroad. Gael García Bernal, one of the lead actors, asked Iñárritu for a VHS copy, in case it never reached the big screen. Prieto had decided to move to Los Angeles. At thirty-three, he was burned-out on making commercials for a living and wanted to commit to a career in film.
On the day that “Amores Perros” had its première, at the Cannes Critics’ Week, Prieto was at the D.M.V. in Hollywood. His phone rang, and when he flipped it open he heard Iñárritu yelling, “Cabrón! We won!” Prieto gasped, then started shouting with joy. “Sir, sir, quiet it down,” a clerk said, before finally asking him to leave. “Amores Perros” was a hit in Mexico, grossed a total of twenty million dollars, and became the first movie to represent Mexico at the Oscars in more than two decades. Critics described it as an evolutionary leap—an emblem of what became known as the New Mexican Cinema. Soon after its release, American directors started calling Prieto. They wanted to know how he had made it look the way it did.
Greta Gerwig, who hired Prieto to create the visual landscape of “Barbie,” described him as “an artist who is always focussed on the story that he’s telling above all else.” The two spent months together at a Warner Bros. studio outside London, working to bring Barbie Land to life. Gerwig hoped to convey a sense of “authentic artificiality,” which resonated with Prieto; his job is to deploy layers of artifice to make an image look real. He suggested shooting digitally, to produce a flawless, almost texture-less image. There would be no obtuse angles; the idea was to maintain a feeling of innocence, like that of a child opening a toy for the first time.
Prieto believes that every shot is autobiographical: his visual language derives from his memory of light. “I am always observing its behavior,” he told me. “It’s like a voice in the back of my head.” He can still summon distinct mental images of sun seeping through the windows of his childhood home, in Mexico City. His sensibility stems in part from his mother, an American painter. With her help, every Halloween, Prieto and his brother turned their home into a haunted house, covering the windows and walls with bedsheets and cardboard. They carved shrunken heads from dried apples and hung them from the ceiling; Prieto sculpted little monsters and their victims out of clay. Upon entering the house, his friends were greeted with bits of horror-movie soundtracks. The shrieking strings from “Psycho” were reserved for the final act: the arrival of Van Winten, a ghost incarnated by Prieto.
Prieto’s father, an aeronautical engineer from Mexico, helped supply an early technical education. One visitor to the haunted house mentioned stop-motion, telling Prieto that all he needed to animate his monsters was a still camera. Prieto’s father lent him an 8-mm. Bell & Howell and explained that he could merge twenty-four still images into a second of live action. Prieto made sketches to figure out the technique, and then used it to create a short stop-motion film. When Halloween came around, he screened it on a bedsheet, and his friends were mesmerized: the figurines had taken on fearsome proportions. “It was a hitazo,” Prieto said—a huge hit.
Prieto made it into Mexico’s premier film school, the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, where he found that cinematography offered a vocation. Though his classmates all seemed to want to direct, Prieto felt that photography allowed him to play and experiment, the way he had as a child. His school projects drew the attention of Emmanuel Lubezki, a cinematographer whose work Prieto admired as daring, seductive, and refined. When Lubezki asked Prieto to work with him on a project with an up-and-coming director named Alfonso Cuarón, he agreed to do it for free. The film, “Sólo Con Tu Pareja,” brought together a generation of filmmakers in search of a new visual language. “We were all brimming with energy,” Prieto said. “It was a beautiful period.”
Still, work was scarce. After NAFTA passed, the Mexican film industry was hobbled, and production stalled to as few as nine movies a year. “It was almost irresponsible to study film back then, because there was no way to make a living,” Prieto said.
The release of “Amores Perros” transformed his prospects. Soon after it appeared in U.S. theatres, Prieto got a call from Oliver Stone, inviting him to his office in Santa Monica. When he arrived, Stone slid a copy of the film into a VCR and barraged him with questions. Which cameras and lenses had he used? What had the developing process involved? Then Stone asked Prieto to join him on a research trip to Africa. Within weeks, they were on a plane to Addis Ababa.
Stone and Prieto went on to collaborate on six projects. “I liked his courage,” Stone told me. “I’ve seen other cameramen wilt under pressure.” They travelled to Havana, where Stone met with Fidel Castro, and to Moscow, where Vladimir Putin welcomed them to the Kremlin. While shooting a documentary about the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, Stone and Prieto were taken in a blacked-out van to a clandestine site occupied by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. “He could work under all conditions—and they were tough conditions,” Stone said.
To Iñárritu, Prieto’s greatest virtue is his flexibility, both stylistic and personal. “Many cinematographers are very talented, but, if you look at their C.V.s, they rarely work with the same director again,” he said. Prieto has maintained a series of long relationships, adapting to varied production sizes, budgets, and styles. Every film has required him to understand—and, to some extent, meld with—a director’s world view. “I’m not looking for shots, or a cool moment of lighting, or an unusual angle which will stand alone,” Prieto has said. “I’m looking for how a given shot will work for that moment in the movie, that emotional moment for the characters.”
In 2003, he shot Stone’s biography of Alexander the Great—a multi-continental epic in which he captured Alexander’s near-death in battle using infrared film, tinging the scene with bloody hues. His next film was radically different: “Brokeback Mountain,” Ang Lee’s tale of two cowboys’ illicit romance in an idyllic glade in Wyoming. Here, Prieto’s mood-setting was subtler. When the men left the mountains for town, where they were no longer protected from judgment, the images grew grainier and more unsettled.
Lee himself began the production in an uneasy state. His previous movie, “Hulk,” had opened to harsh reviews, including one, in the Times, that called it “incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid.” He was thinking of retiring, but as he worked with Prieto his faith in making movies began to return. “He’s a good soul for art,” Lee told me. “He acts like a novice—and I’m like that, too.” During the production, Lee asked Prieto to play a Mexican prostitute who solicits Jake Gyllenhaal’s character. Prieto agreed, replacing another actor at the last minute. “Ang liked his acting, but he was shorter than Jake,” Prieto said. Laughing, he added, “The backup Mexican—that was me.”
In 2012, Prieto’s agent called to say that Martin Scorsese wanted to meet him the next day. “I barely had time to process it,” Prieto said. “I got on a flight to New York.” He spent the flight reading the script for “The Wolf of Wall Street.” They had their first conversation at the director’s home on the Upper East Side. Scorsese told me that they “talked through the script and worked out a very gradual shift in the visual tone and the quality of the color as Jordan Belfort goes deeper into his world, from warm to cool.” During the filming, Scorsese added, “he introduced me to so many methods and devices for making camera movements more flexible, easy to maneuver.”
Along with Iñárritu, Scorsese has become Prieto’s longest collaborator, over a decade-long string of films. “Martin won’t let go of him!” Iñárritu told me, half joking. “He stole him from me.” Scorsese and Prieto share an interest in historical sweep, and in mimicking the film used by the photographers of the period being represented: Kodachrome, with its richly saturated colors, for the nineteen-fifties; Ektachrome, with its cooler tones, for the sixties and seventies. In “Killers of the Flower Moon,” an epic about Oklahoma’s oil boom, Prieto portrayed the settlers who sowed fear in the Osage Nation by emulating the Lumière brothers’ autochrome technique, which was invented around the time that white people poured into the area. To sharpen the visual contrast, Prieto photographed the Osage in natural colors. “The challenge is always figuring out the right balance,” he said. “Having a repository of techniques and knowing what to apply where, without pulling the viewer out of the film. I try to push up to that point.”
There is a crucial part of the movie in which the violence against the Osage reaches the protagonist, an Indigenous woman named Mollie Burkhart. In the script, Burkhart’s family is awakened at night by a violent explosion, and, as her husband ventures outside to see what happened, she stays behind with the kids. “As it was written,” Scorsese said, “we had Mollie standing in the living room, holding the children. We all looked at each other and wondered: Why is she standing in the middle of the living room? Shouldn’t they be taking shelter somewhere?” Lily Gladstone, who plays Burkhart, suggested a storm cellar in the house where they were shooting. “We went to the cellar door,” Scorsese recalled. “I could see the looks in the faces of the crew, basically saying, ‘Please don’t let him open that door.’ I opened it, looked down. I said, ‘This is great!’ ” He turned to Prieto, who raised his eyebrows politely. “It is very easy to imagine another cinematographer—and that includes cinematographers I’ve worked with—who would have said, ‘That’s going to take too long to get it set up for today,’ ” Scorsese told me. “Rodrigo just said, ‘O.K.,’ and he went to work. It took a few hours to light and to figure out the movement, and then we shot it.”
In the studio in Manhattan, the lights went down, and Prieto settled in next to one of his sound mixers, a wiry man named Rich Bologna. The film’s post-production supervisor, Vanessa Hernández, sat behind them on a leather sofa. The three had spent weeks fiddling with the sound, a phase of production that Prieto had never led before—but, he reasoned, the mind-set wasn’t that different from the one he used with lighting. He had scoured the text of “Pedro Páramo,” which has scores of references to ambient sound, for details to replicate. “They’re small things, as small as a bird’s voice or the sound of water lapping on rocks,” Prieto said. “But, taken together, they amount to something.”
He asked Bologna to rewind to the opening scene. Onscreen, Juan Preciado, one of the protagonists, stood on a vast desert plain. He heard the braying of a donkey in the distance, then walked over to a man who was leading the animal.
“Why are you headed to Comala, if I may ask?” the peasant said.
“I’m going to see my father,” Preciado replied. “All I know is that his name is Pedro Páramo.”
The peasant, with a cryptic look, said, “I’m also Pedro Páramo’s son.”
The movie’s first scenes faithfully recreate the opening of the novel, as Preciado heads off on his journey. Intent on fulfilling his mother’s deathbed wish, he returns to Comala, which she had left when he was an infant. “That place sits on the burning embers of the earth, at the very mouth of Hell,” the peasant warns him. “Nobody lives here.”
Netflix executives first approached Rulfo’s family about a new adaptation in 2020. “We really felt that this was the time to make the film again,” Francisco Ramos, the company’s vice-president of Latin American content, told me. Netflix had recently acquired the rights to “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and, with the Spanish-language market growing, it wanted to expand its collection of the region’s literary masterworks.
The family was skeptical. “We didn’t want to let go of the novel, because we’ve only got one,” Juan Carlos Rulfo, the author’s son, told me. The last attempt to adapt “Pedro Páramo,” in 2007, had foundered; the production, led by a Spanish filmmaker named Mateo Gil, never secured enough funds to start filming. Eventually, the family agreed to sell the rights to Netflix, but for a limited time. The company would have just four years to develop, produce, and edit the film.
Ramos called up Gil, the Spanish filmmaker, whose script had sat untouched for more than a decade. Gil’s first reaction was “I can’t let you have it.” He had dreamed of adapting the movie since he was a student, and he wasn’t going to let someone else take his place. Ramos waited a year, then called again. “By then, I had come to terms with the fact that, if Netflix adapted ‘Pedro Páramo,’ there would be no room left for a second movie,” Gil told me. “Besides, I had already shed enough tears for that script.” Gil signed on, under one condition: that the script remain scrupulously faithful to the novel. “It’s the essence of my adaptation,” he said.
Netflix was already talking with Prieto about directing the film, but Juan Carlos wasn’t entirely convinced. “I had serious doubts about his ability to direct,” he told me. “I worried it’d turn into an overly aesthetic movie with no depth.” (Juan Carlos, who has directed numerous documentaries, added, “I have to confess that, at one point, I wondered, ‘Will they be asking me?’ ”)
Before getting started, Prieto sat down with Juan Carlos. The two men knew each other from film school; Juan Carlos had been Prieto’s camera assistant on “Sólo Con Tu Pareja.” The author’s son referred Prieto to a documentary series he had recently finished, “One Hundred Years with Juan Rulfo,” an ode to his father’s career. He had dedicated an entire episode to the film adaptations of Rulfo’s work, providing a detailed survey of the decisions that resulted in failure: casting agents selecting John Gavin, an American actor and diplomat, to play the lead; screenwriters trying to flatten the novel’s circular structure; directors struggling to interpret the work. Prieto watched all seven episodes and concluded that any version he produced would invite criticism. But, he said, “I had to set aside that fear—the fear of failure, of being judged by generations of intellectuals and literary experts. I decided to focus on producing the best film I could.”
In the summer of 2022, Prieto got to work on refining the script. He was shooting “Barbie” in London, and he spent his weekends on Zoom with Gil, deliberating over Rulfo’s work. Prieto wrestled with choosing what to keep and what to leave out. “He was so enthralled with the novel that he wanted to be able to capture it all,” Gil said. “And I would tell him, ‘Rodrigo, it just doesn’t fit!’ ” They also had to contend with the realm of the dead, a prominent feature of the novel. “Those ghosts had to be dealt with somehow,” Gil said. The screenwriter believed that there needed to be a visual cue to distinguish the spectres—something as abstract as a shadow. Prieto wanted the uncertainty to remain unresolved. “It was all about sifting through and interpreting the clues present in the novel,” he said.
When the time came to scout locations, Prieto looked around Aguascalientes and Tlaxcala, in central Mexico, before arriving at San Luis Potosí. As it happened, Prieto’s grandfather had grown up there, then left at sixteen to join Emiliano Zapata’s revolutionary forces. “For me, San Luis has always been some kind of a myth,” Prieto said. At family gatherings, his grandfather recounted tales of the revolution—“then my grandmother would interrupt him and say, ‘No, Jorge, that’s really not how it happened.’ ” Prieto got hold of a pile of scouting images taken for the British director Tony Scott, who had worked on a movie about Pancho Villa. In one, he found a town south of San Luis Potosí with a derelict plaza that appeared stuck in time—as if the town had been wrecked and never rebuilt, just like Comala.
Prieto prepared in his habitual way: he mapped out each scene, angle by angle, in a fifty-seven-page shot list. He took inspiration from still photographs, including many taken by Rulfo, who carried a camera wherever he went. By the time Prieto arrived on set, he knew exactly when the camera would pan or tilt and how the actors should interact with it. Yet his uneasiness was evident. “At the beginning, I could sense that he was a little tense,” Ilse Salas, who plays a lead role, said. “He was very focussed on the cinematography. Little by little, he began to let go and straddle both worlds—that of the actors and the cinematography.” Another lead actress, Mayra Batalla, added, “He’s got a millimetric eye. But he reminds you constantly that it’s all a game—a very serious one, but a game after all.”
As a cinematographer, Prieto had distinguished himself by putting his virtuosity in service of other directors’ visions. Making “Pedro Páramo” raised the question of whether he was capable of creating a vision of his own. Prieto knew that he wanted to keep the photography simple; the structure and content of the novel were complex enough. Nico Aguilar, a young filmmaker who worked with Prieto on the cinematography, told me that he seemed guided by a self-effacing principle: “How do I make myself as invisible as possible, in order to make the story as loud as possible?”
Last March, Rulfo’s family was invited to a private screening at Netflix’s office in downtown Mexico City. Juan Carlos deflected the invitation more than once. “I didn’t want to see it,” he said. Ultimately, he and his wife attended, along with several of his siblings. “We were very pleased,” he said. Juan Carlos believed that his father would’ve felt similarly about the movie. “ ‘It could’ve been more mysterious,’ is probably what El Jefe would’ve said,” he surmised. “But I think he would really have liked to see that he was taken into account.”
Since the film’s release, last November, critics have been divided over whether Prieto was too reverent toward Rulfo’s work. In the U.S., where the book is largely unknown, many suggested that the film would have been better served by a bolder revision, marked by grand visual metaphors. In Latin America, there has been a wider appreciation of Prieto’s achievement. No director before him had matched the novel’s originality in visual form—let alone with painterly beauty and nuanced performances. As one review put it, Prieto’s success was in translating “the novel’s narrative complexity to film.”
In the private screening, one sequence made Juan Carlos bristle. At the death of a key character, Prieto introduced a scene of his own invention, in which scores of bodies float in the sky, spinning like a tornado. “The murmurs cease,” Prieto wrote in his shot list. “And there is complete silence.” His intention was to give more gravitas to a key passage in the novel—and, for that, he had had to stray from it. Why? Juan Carlos asked. “Because I wanted to,” Prieto replied. ♦
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