How ‘Roma’ Turned an Empty Lot Into a Bustling Avenue
They paved a parking lot and put up paradise.
To shoot a scene on a vibrant avenue in the period drama “Roma,” the filmmakers constructed from scratch an immense replica of part of a Mexico City street (and the shops that line it) in an empty lot amid warehouses. They brought in period vehicles, including a streetcar, and built working storefronts, transforming a cracked concrete slab overrun with weeds into a vibrant intersection.
That’s one way to recapture your childhood.
“Roma,” up for 10 Academy Awards at the Feb. 24 ceremony, is the writer-director Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical recollection of his early-1970s life in the Mexico City neighborhood of the title. To say that Cuarón cared about details when capturing that world is an understatement. With a reported budget of $15 million, the film also includes an elaborate restaging of a student protest, the communal dousing of a large forest fire and a challenging ocean rescue.
In the street scene, the nanny, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), chases after one of her charges on the way to the movies and comes upon the intersection of Baja California and Insurgentes avenues. Cuarón wanted to shoot at the actual crossing, but when he returned to the neighborhood all these years later, he saw it had changed significantly.
For one, there’s a major bus stop in the middle of Insurgentes where streetcars once ran. For another, the movie theater that plays a key role in the film had been demolished, replaced by a shopping center. And many of the businesses were no longer the same.
Cuarón explored the option of substituting a similar-looking street in a smaller city for Insurgentes. But while there were locations with more period buildings, none carried the same big-city heft.
“It had a certain cosmopolitanism that I couldn’t find in any other place,” he said in a phone interview.
And the idea of using computer-generated images to turn that shopping center back into a movie theater was not a popular one. The director said that his film needed a certain level of physicality that came from characters operating in real, not digitally constructed, environments. “Gravity,” this is not.
“I didn’t want to just illustrate the location, I wanted it to permeate the whole essence of time and space,” Cuarón said.
In other words, grab a hammer and a nail.
Cuarón worked with his production designer, Eugenio Caballero, to research the look of the avenue in the early ’70s, viewing old photographs and matching them with the director’s memories. After they decided how much ground to cover in the shots, Caballero drew up a plan based on the actual measurements of the intersection. Then the goal was to find a space to match those requirements.
The area they needed was larger than most studio backlots could provide, so they had to get creative. They considered the parking lot of Aztec Stadium, but it was too small.
“The location crew stopped looking from the ground and instead started looking at satellite photographs of the city,” Cuarón said.
They found a spot in a collection of warehouses used by the Secretariat of Public Education. It included a giant empty lot covered in cracked concrete overgrown with weeds. Caballero and his team transformed it by building rails and cables for a streetcar, and adding sidewalks and shops alongside them.
But Cuarón didn’t just want facades. He wanted to be able to enter and populate these spaces with extras. So a shop like a travel agency would serve to show the class divide in this part of the city as well. (It should be noted that in the finished film, computer imagery filled out the far end of the street and the building tops.)
As Cleo approaches the intersection, the screen fills with the energy of pedestrians and traffic, the evening city lights shimmer and the entire frame projects a tone of heightened wonder. Cuarón wanted to capture his recollections as a child crossing at this spot.
“I had a very good sense of the feel of this,” he said, “the excitement I felt arriving at that big avenue on the way to the movies, coming from the more sheltered streets of my neighborhood.”
After the shoot, the entire set was demolished. Now, that warehouse parking has never looked nicer.
