The Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva surveyed a Brooklyn gay bar the other night and found it wanting. It was too cold, too empty, and he was starving. He pitched a companion, the writer and actor Jordan Firstman, on an alternative: Speedy Romeo, a pizza joint. The place was packed, and Silva wasn’t getting anywhere with a surly waitress. “What can we do to get her to like us?” Firstman asked. “I don’t think she has a problem with us,” Silva said airily. “It’s just life.”
Their responses—Silva’s blithe nihilism, Firstman’s wish to make nice—mirrored the dynamic in “Rotting in the Sun,” a new pitch-black satire in which the two play versions of themselves. The film Sebastian is a suicidal auteur who pores over E. M. Cioran’s “The Trouble with Being Born”; the film Jordan, like his real-life counterpart, is a comedian who got famous on Instagram during lockdown (in one viral bit, he is banana bread’s publicist).
Silva, dressed in a pink baseball cap and a gray hoodie, noted that the “death wish” in the film was his own; so were the dog, the apartment, and the building manager. (One of the only professional actors in the cast is Catalina Saavedra, who plays Sebastian’s housekeeper and gradually emerges as the star.) Silva is known for his fine-grained, occasionally brutal insights about human nature. At the film’s New York première, he was introduced as a purveyor of “existential dread”—a compliment that alarmed him.
One of seven siblings in a conservative Catholic milieu—his eldest brother is now a prominent far-right lawmaker in Chile—the young Silva, who was in the closet, gravitated toward psychedelics and philosophy, devouring Castaneda. “I couldn’t wait to be eighteen to do mescaline,” he said. The impulse shaped his 2013 breakout film, “Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus,” in which Michael Cera plays an American tourist in Chile embarking on his own hallucinogenic quest.
Silva and Cera also collaborated on the psychological thriller “Magic Magic,” but for “Rotting in the Sun” Silva found himself in need of a new annoying American. “I was thinking it could be more of a bro-ish real-estate guy who’s buying and selling houses during the pandemic,” he said. Then he met Firstman, on the streets of Mexico City. Firstman, who had recently rewatched “Crystal Fairy,” invited Silva to dinner, where he brought up his Instagram. A few weeks later, the director called him. “Dude, I just watched your Instagram. It’s so embarrassing,” he said—then asked him to be his leading man.
“I was already so disillusioned by the Internet and my own persona at that point,” Firstman, who was wearing silver hoop earrings and a white shirt, recalled at Speedy Romeo. “So it came at the right time for me, where I wanted to explore the darker side.” He added, “If I had never seen one of your movies, there is no way I would have done this. There’s zero chance in hell I would have used my name. Or my cock!”
Firstman was raised on Long Island and was openly gay by the time he was a teen-ager. At twenty-one, he moved to Los Angeles without a plan; after a series of short films and writing gigs on such shows as “Search Party,” his viral impressions made him a social-media celebrity. Until the dinner in Mexico City, Silva had inhabited a totally different corner of the Internet. “I don’t follow influencers. I don’t follow people that post selfies. I don’t follow actors,” he said. He pulled out his phone to demonstrate the kinds of clip that Instagram served him: a cat video scored to Beethoven’s Fifth, political stuff, a monkey eating a banana.
“It does show how tailored the algorithm is,” Firstman said, refilling their wineglasses. “I can’t escape culture, and you can’t even get to culture.”
After “Rotting in the Sun” screened at Sundance, culture came to Silva. Robert Pattinson had signed on as a producer. The film was embraced by such auteurs as Pedro Almodóvar. Its matter-of-fact treatment of suicidal thoughts led to a flood of D.M.s from viewers with similar experiences. It was a vulnerable place for Silva to be, but also a surprisingly comfortable one. His instruction to all his actors, he said, was “Just be the worst version of yourself.”
Firstman had no trouble with that. “My biggest laughs in real life are usually at the expense of other people,” he said—generally people, like the Jordan in the film, who have no idea how they’re coming off.
Silva agreed, but added a distinction: for the joke to land, you need someone to share it with—a moment of conspiratorial connection. “For me, it’s seeing someone like that, then making eye contact with a friend.” 
Play the Worst Version of Yourself
Source: News Flash Trending
0 Comments