Julio Torres talks about working with Tilda Swinton on his riotous feature debut, a film about wanting weird things out of life
When Julio Torres first came to New York, he couldn’t work out why there were so many flags. “I thought, well, wait – are all those government buildings?” says the standup comedian turned showrunner and brains behind Problemista, the year’s most wildly imaginative comedy. “Like, we all know where we are! Why do you keep declaring it?”
Torres came to the city on a scholarship to study literature at the New School, a Manhattan liberal arts bastion whose alumni include James Baldwin and Jack Kerouac, from his native El Salvador, and was struck by “how much Americans are obsessed with the United States. Because I come from a country where it’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re from here, and that’s it.’”
Torres wanted to pursue a career in film and television, but after earning his degree soon became lost in a “cloud of bureaucracy” owing to his emigre status. As per US migration rules, he was granted a one-year visa extension on the proviso he took work related to his degree – a tall order, as anyone graduating with a liberal arts degree will know. Thus began a hazy period in which Torres took various jobs to get by, until reality finally bit and he found himself needing $5,000 in admin fees to apply for a visa extension. Launching a GoFundMe (“LEGALIZE JULIO”) to advertise his plight, he succeeded in drumming up funds, planting the seeds for his feature debut into the bargain.
Seeking a foot in the door with the industry, Torres took to standup comedy as a way to “showcase his writing” and develop his narrative voice. On the second attempt, he won a gig as a writer on Saturday Night Live, which he graced with such classic sketches as Papyrus (starring Ryan Gosling) and Wells for Boys (with Emma Stone). From there he made a cult comedy, Los Espookys for HBO, with another show, Fantasmas, following in June this year.
With Problemista, Torres has concocted a terrific and surprisingly poignant showcase for his faintly touched comic sensibility, pitched somewhere between the lo-fi surrealism of Spike Jonze and the sideways style of documentarian John Wilson. Starring Torres as chronic introvert Alejandro, an aspiring toymaker trying desperately to secure leave to remain in NYC, the film is dominated by a towering comic performance from Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth, a chaotic and overbearing widow who sucks him into her orbit. Lured by the promise of her sponsorship, he begins working to procure paintings by her late artist husband – now in cryogenic stasis, naturally – for a planned exhibition which she hopes will secure his legacy. In return, she teaches him the importance of finding his voice, and how to effectively throw someone off balance in an argument by telling them to “stop shouting at me”. (Seriously, try it.)
The two share a fascinating dynamic that Torres, for whom “being agreeable was for a long time a kind of survival instinct”, was able to paint from personal experience. “Alejandro and I are both the kind of people that immensely difficult people find solace in,” he says, laughing. “I don’t know why, but we’re quite good at that. We’re like dragon tamers or lion whisperers.” Elizabeth, for her part, sees Alejandro as a “rock in a tempest” instinctively in tune with her goals; Alejandro, with his weird shuffling walk and one lick of hair sticking up off his head (Torres says it’s an homage to his dad), is moved by her mad determination to honour her husband and applies it to his own career in toymaking. Ultimately, it’s a film about wanting weird things out of life, and having the courage to run with that.
Swinton was drawn to Torres’s script after watching Los Espookys and a 2019 special, My Favorite Shapes, which featured a neat gag about the actor’s intimidatingly avant-garde home. Torres knew Swinton’s comedic chops from the likes of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer – “she turns what would have been a brutally bleak film into this, like, absurdist Kafkaesque journey” – and felt certain she’d nailed the part of Elizabeth when she sent him a voice note reciting lines from the film in a west country accent. “That was when I felt like, OK, now we’re doing this,” says Torres, “because it presented more questions that further enhanced the character. It’s like, how did she end up here? She’s a bit of a mystery in that way, and it made her feel like more of an outsider because she’s not this posh lady from London.”
Swinton is far from the only big-name credit on the film – former SNL sparring partner Emma Stone produces, Wu Tang’s RZA shows up in a cameo as Elizabeth’s husband, and there’s brusque narration from none other than Isabella Rossellini, which to be honest feels like showing off. Torres says he’s yet to take all of this in, and hopes “from some distance to be in awe of it, because I’ve been wanting to do this for a while”. But mostly, he’s just excited to turn play into a full-time job. “I think what I’ve learned about having incredible collaborators, whether they’re world-famous actors or peers that are interesting and magnetic, is that really exciting collaborators are attracted to interesting worlds. And if you build the sandbox that feels exciting, they will come.”
Problemista is available for digital download now.
