The Lessons
"Frears forced me to think what I wanted. He wants you to be sure of everything," Méndez says. "There are many questions that, even now, I'm trying to answer. I should leave certain answers to the audience, but, as a writer, I like to know – and then decide what I want the audience to know."
Many film-makers don't hesitate to go into production with an unfinished script. Alternate endings can always be shot. Frears once did that, but not anytime lately. "My experience is that if you get things wrong, you’ve probably got it wrong in the writing," he says, adding that you cannot simply use ambiguity. "It's an excuse for something that perhaps isn't a good idea. When you start making films, you're not quite sure about anything, and it [the result] is all a bit generalised. People can't tell what your intentions were. Then, as you gain more experience, you're more confident and become more precise in your intentions. Then, of course, you're accused of having the wrong intentions. So you find a new way of torturing yourself."
Lucky for Méndez that he had such well-established compass points from Frears, since the first days of shooting with Dioses left little room for anything but dealing with a production crew that turned out to be rather larger then necessary. "The first week was tough… everybody was shouting all the time," says Méndez. "But the main ideas that stuck with me [from Frears] were to be precise, to find the meaning of each scene and stick to it. There were no big discoveries. No big surprises. I don't know if this is good or bad, but my producer is happy!"
Extracted from an article written by David Patrick Stearns for Mentor & Protégé, a magazine documenting the 2006/2007 cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.