My favorite way of making films - and what has allowed me to get key scenes in 'Cartel Land' and 'City of Ghosts' - has been when I've been able to operate alone.
I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
I like to say I believe in ghosts so I don't get haunted by one.
This house I grew up in was built in the 1800s, and the back yard was like a cemetery. Naturally, I grew up in an environment where ghosts and supernatural things were very unnerving to me, because my brothers and I dealt with it on a daily basis.
I feel like we haven't dealt with the ghosts of America's past, and the way to deal with it is to confront it, so every time people see me, I want them to be reminded and to confront that ghost.
Indigenous people in films, it's all, like, nose flutes and panpipes and, you know, people talking to ghosts... which I hate.
