Creativity and Craft: An interview with Julio Torres

Ahead of an appearance in Portland, the writer-director-comedian and "Los Espookys" actor talks about consumerism, authenticity, and his recent HBO series "Fantasmas."
Julio Torres in “Problemista”

Julio Torres might not yet be a truly household name, and it doesn’t seem as if he cares much whether that happens or not, but if he keeps it up at this rate, he’ll be well on the road to ubiquity before long. And, at a time when popular culture seems increasingly flattened by algorithmic appeasement, it’s refreshing that a creative mind as particular and fertile as his can get even a toehold on the zeitgeist.

Raised in El Salvador before moving to New York to attend the New School, Torres’s first major entertainment gig was writing for Saturday Night Live, where he penned, among many others, the now-legendary “Papyrus” sketch, in which Ryan Gosling plays a man obsessed with and offended by the fact that the movie Avatar, despite its massive budget, used the free font “papyrus” for its title design. He first showed up on screen in the Fred Armisen-produced Spanish-language HBO series Los Espookys, as one of a group of friends who use their love of horror movies and crafting skills to set up a small business. Torres’s feature-film debut as writer-director-star was Problemista, where he played a Salvadoran immigrant and aspiring toy designer who gets an internship with an eccentric art dealer (Tilda Swinton) in order to secure a visa. Earlier this year, his second HBO/Max series Fantasmas debuted. It’s a six-episode cavalcade of bizarre parodies, set in a mild dystopia where access to goods and services requires a “proof of identity” card. In it, Torres’s character embarks on a quest to find a lost oyster earring so that he can determine whether the discoloration on his neck is melanoma or a birthmark. Meanwhile, one of Santa’s elves (Bowen Yang) sues his boss, and a sibling-owned small business offers the opportunity to discorporate your body—for a price. You get the picture.

Torres will be in Portland on Friday, Oct. 18, for an appearance at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater as part of their “Carte Blanche” series. While he’s currently on a stand-up tour (oh yeah, he does that too!), this isn’t part of that. He spoke with Oregon ArtsWatch, and the first thing we wanted to know was: what exactly would it be?

(Questions and answers have been edited for context and clarity.)

OREGON ARTSWATCH: What should audiences expect at this event?

JULIO TORRES: This event is sort of a moderated conversation, and the event asked me to, like, think about a subject I would like to get into. So far it feels like it’ll be my thoughts on, sort of like, millennial design and advertising.

OAW: Forgive my ignorance, but is that, like, a recognized school of design, or is that more of just sort of a mood, or…?

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JT: I think that’s what we’re trying to get into. I’m referring to, like, very soft lines, like pastels, very sort of like infantilized advertising.

OAW: It seems like there’s a certain Venn diagram overlap there with the aesthetic that you’ve explored in your TV shows, which are rich in design. That must make you an expert on the topic!

JT: Well, certainly an observer on the topic. What does it mean for a viewer or an audience that everything that’s sold is so soft and kind? The word “kind” is everywhere in advertising, and it is sort of like a dog whistle that they’re using. I think that the idea is that the consumer seeks to be soothed and seeks to feel like a baby.

OAW: And does that come out of some sort of inborn Millennial angst?

JT: Yes, this state of assumed helplessness. And the pacifying of a generation. Instead of empowering it, pushing it to give in to being a baby and having the illusion of being taken care of. The products become like mommy, right?

OAW: Are you implying that corporations don’t really want to take care of us and have our best interests at heart?

JT: (laughs) I am certainly of that mindset, yes.

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OAW: I don’t want to make you reveal your whole spiel. We need to save some surprises for the ticket buyers. But it certainly sounds like something less—and I’m sure this is a word you’re sick of hearing—whimsical than some of the other work you’ve done. I use that word because, reading about your work, the same adjectives come up time and time again: whimsical, surreal, absurd, fanciful, quirky. Do you have a preference among them, or do they all just clang on your ears at this point?

JT: They really feel like home. I don’t think of myself as odd in any way, and I never seek to be deliberately obscure. This is just the way in which what I want to say or what’s in my head comes out. I definitely never deliberately set out to make something that seems obscure and inaccessible, but I think that, to me, the surreal is effective when it gets to some kind of articulation of a real feeling, and that is just where my mind tends to go. It’s not weird for the sake of weird, it’s just a way of illuminating something. So, I’m not averse to any of those terms as labels or shorthand explanations.

OAW: The flip side of that might be that, although you’re not trying to be willfully bizarre, you’re also not censoring or moderating yourself to try to provide something that a so-called mainstream audience would find palatable. You’re just expressing yourself in an honest, unfiltered way.

JT: Completely. I have certainly never thought, like, “What do audiences want to see?” I think that is, to a certain extent, a pretty, like, useless exercise. There are a lot of things that shouldn’t, on paper, have been big commercial hits—not that that’s what I’m striving for. I think when you are trying to anticipate a result too much it just feels, like, belabored and inauthentic.

OAW: A cynic might recall the quote, sometimes ascribed to George Burns, “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

JT: (laughs) Sure! I mean, it depends on how you define success. There is this Hollywood obsession with things “having a heart.” But what they mean by that is certain keywords at a specific time in a show or a movie, hitting those marks. Heart can look like many things. It doesn’t have to look like a resounding speech at the end of a film.

OAW: Well, formulaic is about the last word one would use to describe the stuff you’ve done. You mentioned your interest in design already, but it’s apparent in the look of everything from the “Papyrus” sketch to the props and costumes in Fantasmas to a lot of your standup material. If this showbiz thing doesn’t work out, I feel like you could have one hell of an Etsy storefront. There’s an appreciation of hand-crafted, unhoned objects, and I wonder where that comes from?

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JT: It just really brings me joy. Seeing things being made brings me joy. The process of making things brings me joy. My mother is an architect. My sister is in design as well. My father is a civil engineer, so he is a maker. We’ve always been around constructing things and creating things, tangible things. That’s always felt like home to me.

OAW: And, as a viewer, one gets the sense that these objects are actually there in the same physical space as the performers.

JT: That is actually very exciting to me. When you watch a movie that was shot entirely in front of a green screen, it’s almost as if, because absolutely anything can happen, everything sort of becomes white noise. It feels less real because anything can happen, so it doesn’t really matter what does happen.

OAW: I want to shift gears a little and talk about Fantasmas, your most recent project. Specifically, the casting, which is like a Jackson Pollock painting of interesting people. You’ve got musical artists like Kim Petras, visual artists like Martine Gutierrez, cast members from Los Espookys, plus SNL colleagues like Bowen Yang, and Oscar-winning megastar Emma Stone (also a producer) along for the ride. And that’s not counting the many others I’m presumably too old and not cool enough to recognize, and that I didn’t have a chance to Google. How fun was that casting process?

JT: Oh, so fun. I love tailoring a part to an actor. I think that one of the most fun, one that definitely unlocked something, was the decision to have Julia Fox play Mrs. Claus. That takes it into completely unexpected territory.

OAW: I’m not the first one to note that Problemista and Fantasmas both tell stories that hinge on identity documents, which makes sense in the context of narratives about immigration and the immigrant experience. But I wonder if there’s something even broader than that going on, exploring the ways that we all play assigned roles, whether those roles are assigned by government, society, economics, or what have you?

JT: I do think that I’m interested in this idea of, like you say, being assigned a role and then feeling the itch of, like, breaking out of that. And I do think that the protagonist and antagonist of Problemista and also in Fantasmas, these roles end up feeling very lonely. This is where the idea of being ghostly came from. I’m interested in the concept of ghosts, because of their limitations. Like, they can talk to some people, but not certain other people. They can walk through walls, but they cannot lift an object. There are all these mythologies about the do’s and don’ts of ghosts, and I think we are all ghostly in that way.

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OAW: In the sense that we all have certain, almost random, limitations on what we’re allowed to do, or are even capable of doing…

JT: Yes, and in our desire to be seen, our desire to be heard, and our loneliness.

OAW: Last question. You’ve done feature films, television series, writing, performing, stand-up, craft art, and you’re an excellent talk show guest. You’ve developed quickly into a triple, or quadruple, threat creative force. Are there other arts that you’re interested in exploring moving forward?

JT: I certainly want to continue making movies. I really enjoy that, and I want to do more. But I’m also thinking of, like, maybe making a housewares collection.

OAW: Well, Amy Sedaris is one of the many cast members of Fantasmas, and home décor seems to be one of her interests. Perhaps you two could collaborate and get a line in Target.

JT: I don’t know about Target…

OAW: Well, you’ve got to start somewhere.

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(Julio Torres: Forever Baby is on Friday, Oct. 18, at 7 p.m. at the Tomorrow Theater, followed by a screening of Problemista.)

Marc Mohan moved to Portland from Wisconsin in 1991, and has been exploring and contributing to the city’s film culture almost ever since, as the manager of the landmark independent video store Trilogy, the owner of Portland’s first DVD-only rental spot, Video Vérité; and as a freelance film critic for The Oregonian for nearly twenty years. Once it became apparent that “newspaper film critic” was no longer a sustainable career option, he pursued a new path, enrolling in the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in the fall of 2017 and graduating cum laude in 2020 with a specialization in Intellectual Property. He now splits his time between his practice with Nine Muses Law and his continuing efforts to spread the word about great (and not-so-great) movies, which include a weekly column at Oregon ArtsWatch.

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