The antiseptic, austere look of the doctor's office and apartment stand in stark contrast to the wilds of the jungle.
Sayles: We chose places that had a modern art museum look lots of big empty walls. The doctor's home [photographed in Mexico City's upscale neighborhood of Colonia San Angel] was a place where both sides of the house were totally windowed; in order to block out a couple of those windows, we built panels which were very much like walls. We designed it to look as if he had some money and his late wife had had some taste. However, [the decorations in the house] didn't indicate that he had ever traveled, so there weren't any knick-knacks or ethnic items from around the country it was more abstract modern art. The same was true with his office. We went into a clinic that was just starting out, and there was something very homey about it, with abstract art on the walls and big spaces of pure, cool blues and whites. With him, we were definitely going for a sense of calm and coolness, though without making a big point of the fact that he lives in an air-conditioned world. The minute the doctor gets out of his car, though, it's hot, and then he's walking through canefields.
[In some of the outlying rural locations], we were going for the idea of a Mayan or Inca kitsch. For example, at the restaurant where the doctor talks to his son-in-law, we used colors that clashed a little bit; it was actually an Indian restaurant which we turned into a Inca kitsch restaurant. And in the lobby of the hotel where he meets an American couple, there are all of these tiki torches and things of that nature. Once again, we went a little wilder with the colors there, because the idea was that there was something inauthentic about this place.
Were sets ever built on the various locations, or were the sites merely redressed to the script's specifications?
Sayles: As far as construction was concerned, our big set was the internment camp, which was actually an abandoned, sunken-into-the-ground sugar mill [located in Veracruz state's town of Jalapilla.] The area was totally overgrown with weeds that were 20 feet high, so our art department and some local guys we hired just cut everything down which is exactly what the army would do. It was easy place to make an internment camp, because there were some standing buildings for shelter, some walls to tie into, and a big hole in the ground where you could put a group of people.
For the huts [the dwellings of] the people living in Cerca del Cielo the art department once again hired local guys to build [structures] using the same materials with which they built their own homes: banana trees, bamboo, or liana. On the day we burned down some of the huts, the local people were upset; they'd had their eye on them [to live in]. So although the huts seemed like facades to us, they were pretty nice houses to everyone else.
Overall, the film has a very subtle use of camera movement, and its framing remains rather stable. The most dramatic movements occur when the camera is following a character's movements or panning from one character to another. What was the dramatic reasoning behind this?
Sayles: To a certain extent, I was trying to keep the camera movement from being editorial, since Men With Guns has more of a fable-like quality than my other work. The 360-degree pans in Lone Star changing from one era to another without a cut may be subtle, but they're definitely editorial. Here, I really wanted to emphasize the places themselves. The doctor's journey begins in this big city where he's very comfortable and knows what goes on at least thinks he does. It's his world, while Indians who are not equipped for that [type of metropolitan] life are begging on the sidewalk. After his journey, he's the one who's not dressed right, and doesn't know how to survive out there in the jungle, and they're the ones who are at home.
Since the setting is so important, a lot of our camera movement was basically prescribed by the point of view. If we're seeing things through the doctor's eyes, we're going to be a little tighter on him and turning corners with him; if the action occurs through the eyes of the woman and her daughter [who provide bookend narration to the doctor's journey], it unfolds almost like a tableau from some distance. I was able to use wider shots [in Men With Guns] than I have in my other movies. If you're in a less natural setting in a low-budget movie, you often can't control the whole world; you end up shooting into corners because everything else looks like the wrong era, the wrong city or the wrong sociology.
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