SILVA'S SCREEN
Filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s Latest feature, Crystal Fairy, celebrates the fine art of tripping.
The mid-morning crowd at Café Smooch in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood is populated almost exclusively with creatively dressed guys clicking away on their laptops. Sebastián Silva, filmmaker and unofficial Toast of Sundance, is among them. His look: scruffy beard, denim baseball cap, worn-in shirt, age-old MacBook. His attitude: expansive. As I introduce myself, he takes a break from a screenplay-in-progress and envelops me with a big hug before endorsing Smooch’s avocado-topped ciabatta.
We’re here to rehash Crystal Fairy, one of the two films Silva introduced at the Sundance Film Festival back in January, where he landed the Directing Award in the World Cinema category. Both Crystal Fairy, which is out in July, and Magic Magic, his first studio film that just finished screening at Cannes, star Michael Cera and are set in Silva’s native Chile, although the filmmaker now lives in New York City.
Silva’s first full-length feature, 2009’s The Maid, was where the buzz began, but as he explains it, the proverbial overnight success story doesn’t really exist in Hollywood. “After Sundance, I went to the Golden Globes and got all this attention, and I thought that projects would fall in my lap, and money would fall from the sky,” he says emphatically. “But it’s not like that. There are so many people making movies, and everybody gets an award every two months. It’s not ordinary, but it’s really not that special. You need to be prepared for failure, especially after success.”
But The Maid did generate some sort of a break. “Michael wanted to meet me because he had watched the movie, and we got together at The Standard when I was in L.A. for the Globes,” he recalls, taking a bite of toast. “We became buddies right away, and I was like, ‘Dude, I will keep you in mind.’” Silva cast Cera in his next project, an HBO GO series called The Boring Life of Jacqueline, before adapting a character for him in Magic Magic. “While we were waiting to make the movie, Michael was in Santiago, living with my family for four months, learning Spanish. He became one of my brothers—one more Silva!” he says. “He still Skypes with my mom.”
During that period, they staved off boredom with Crystal Fairy, a road trip movie that was directly inspired by an incident from Silva’s life. “I really did meet a girl named Crystal Fairy at a Wailers concert,” he recalls. “I was such a hippie back then. Anybody who would smile at me, I would be like, ‘Hey, come to my house, I’ll feed you.’ She was dancing like a maniac, and I was smoking weed. I passed a joint, and she was like, ‘I’m Crystal Fairy.’ That name was such a hook for me. So I invited her over to my place, and then I invited her on this trip my friend and I were taking, and she went!”
Which is basically the plot of his film: An American traveler named Jamie (Cera) meets a fellow countryman, Crystal (Gaby Hoffmann), at a concert in Santiago, invites her to a party, and ends up insisting that she join his pilgrimage to hunt for the mystical San Pedro cactus that, when boiled down, makes for a pretty powerful hallucinogenic.
Cera and Hoffmann, along with Silva’s three brothers who round out the cast, took off in a couple of vans and filmed most of the movie in the Atacama desert over the course of two weeks, armed with little more than a 10-page outline. “I had a story—I would never try to shoot something that I don’t know the ending of,” says Silva. “But unless you’re Ingmar Bergman and you’re making Confessions of a Marriage, your dialogues are meaningless.”
Both Jamie and Crystal are initially obnoxious—Jamie for his single-minded and selfish pursuit of the drug, and Crystal for her relentlessly sunny, New Age sensibilities. “I was very amused by the real Crystal’s Tarot cards and Mayan calendar predictions,” says Silva. “And also, her obsession with the year 2012. It really sucks that the world didn’t end. I had bought so many white candles! Me and Michael were so excited for the adventure that was coming, but I just found myself checking my e-mail.”
By the end of the film, as the group finally procures the drug and ingests it in the world’s highest-elevation desert, all sorts of revelations are made. The cast, of course, was credibly under the influence. “Gaby was really tripping—she insists she wasn’t, but she was naked and rolling on shells like crazy,” says Silva with a laugh. “But for the boys, it was very mild, probably because we were in work mode. Directing and performing were more important than letting ourselves go.”
The scenario seems pretty cavalier for one of the industry’s most relevant new voices, but it’s Silva’s sense of childlike wonder that makes his films so much fun. “When I was a kid, my mother asked my brother and I what we wanted to be when we grew up. He said a soldier, and I said a squirrel. I still have this picture of a squirrel that I’m obsessed with—it could kind of bring world peace. Look here.” He brandishes his iPhone. “Maybe you could publish it in the magazine?”