Filmmaker Marcos Mereles Refuses to Play It Safe

A photographer, his assistant and a make-up artist are waiting in a London warehouse for a model who is running late. None of them has used the location before, and nothing about it seems strange, until one of them vanishes overnight and the evening begins to bend. That is the premise of All Is Vanity, the debut feature that Marcos Mereles wrote, produced and directed, and which premiered at the 65th BFI London Film Festival in October 2021 before reaching UK cinemas through Verve Pictures a year later.

There is a neat trick buried in it. The people waiting in that warehouse are making a film called All Is Vanity, and Mereles was making a film called All Is Vanity, a doubling he told Hero magazine gave the shoot a layer of subtext all of its own. He was born in La Rioja, Argentina, in 1990, and he is now based in London, where his short films have been selected by more than forty festivals and where he is in post-production on a new one, Common Ground. His answers to the questions we sent to him are brief, courteous and consistently practical.

“What drove me to filmmaking was the idea of being transported to a different reality.”

Marcos Mereles

He remembers a happy childhood. “I recall having a beautiful childhood,” he says. “Staying until late at night with my friends in the summer, football every day at school and going to the cinema were among my favourite things.” He has described elsewhere the Argentina of his youth as a country passing through a dark period, but what he reaches for when we ask about those years is the summer nights, the football and the cinema.

The first thing that reached him there came from an animation studio. “What drove me to filmmaking was the idea of being transported to a different reality, and it all started with animated films,” he says. At around five years old he watched the closing segment of Disney’s 1942 anthology Saludos Amigos, a piece titled Aquarela do Brasil, and what he remembers is how it looked and felt. It was “so beautifully crafted, colourful, and entertaining,” he says, adding that it was “something I never experienced before.”

Wanting to watch and wanting to make arrived separately. At sixteen he took part in a local filmmaking workshop, by which point he had already decided to study the subject, but the workshop settled it. “That first-hand experience cleared all my doubts about pursuing this as a career,” he says.

The route to London went through Amsterdam. He was living in the Netherlands and made a short film there, but, as he put it to Latin Londoner, things were not working out, and London “seemed like the right place”: its film industry is larger and stronger than those elsewhere in Europe, and closer to what he was chasing. A few months after arriving he began writing All Is Vanity.

He starts with his parents. “I love my parents!” he says. “They are always very supportive with my career and always lead by example.” He has spoken before of inheriting courage from his mother and relentlessness from his father, and when we asked how the two show up in the work, his answer was characteristically about the work rather than himself. “I think both of those qualities are necessary to bring any film to life,” he says. “Sometimes things don’t work in your favour when making a film, but that’s when you know you have to keep going.”

By his early twenties Mereles had finished two feature scripts, along with shorts and treatments that few people outside his circle ever saw, and some of it never reached a set. We asked what the projects that went unmade had taught him that the ones that got made could not. “A lot!” he says. He is matter-of-fact about the economics of it. “As filmmakers we work really hard to get films made, and sometimes projects don’t happen for things outside of our control.”

What he took from the ones that fell away is a kind of accumulated craft. “I believe every project helps you sharpen up your skills, define your voice, or create systems that make you better at the craft,” he says, which is a generous way of describing the scripts that never reached a set.

Writing remains his favourite part, and his explanation is simple. “Writing is the least stressful because you let your imagination run wild,” he says. But he enjoys the other two jobs just as much. “I do enjoy producing and directing in equal measure. I love putting together a team and exchanging ideas.” The hard part, he concedes, is that this “is not always as easy and straightforward as it sounds,” though he locates the pay-off clearly enough: “it’s the moment when you start seeing things actually come to life.”

The warehouse was chosen with intent. He told Hero magazine he wanted a location that would let him “create other worlds inside that,” and when we asked what a place has to give him before he trusts it, his answer was a single word. “Possibilities,” he says. “In the way it needs to feel otherworldly from the moment you step in.”

He is blunt about what he rejects. “If the location feels like an everyday place, I don’t find it appealing,” he says, and then, almost as an afterthought, “it’s independent film we are talking about, so it’s got to be interesting.” The practical streak and the appetite for the strange sit comfortably together in the same sentence.

The appetite has a source. Mereles grew up with Latin American folktales, the kind passed down as though they might be true and set in places children actually know, and he says they still shape how he builds a story. “Latin American folktales have been a major influence on my work,” he says. “The notion of something that we don’t fully understand is what sparked my curiosity as a child, and it still does to this day.” That curiosity is what lets him keep “the boundaries between reality and fiction” blurred, and it is also, he says, a method for working on set: “sometimes, working together with the cast and crew, you end up finding something hidden and truthful that, up until that point, hasn’t crossed your mind.” He puts it more simply. “It’s that sense of discovery that makes it special.”

His taste in directors runs through Fellini and Welles to Kubrick and Lynch, a list he contributed to the 2022 Sight and Sound Directors’ Poll, and he is specific about what watching them gave him. “Watching those specific films made me realise the potential of the art form,” he says, and taught him “never to play it safe when it comes to creating.” The practical version of that lesson is “to trust my instincts at every step of the process and to move towards the challenges that seem scary at first.”

The choice of collaborators is the other half of it. There is a piece of advice that has passed from Terry Gilliam to Quentin Tarantino to Mereles, that the people you work with matter more than almost anything else, and we asked whether it had ever been tested hard enough to make him doubt it. “I never doubted that advice,” he says. “The people I choose to work with really make the difference for the best, and I don’t mean this only in terms of getting the job done, but also in terms of creating a worthwhile experience, where everyone involved can take something from it.”

The film he is finishing now tests that advice in a new way. Common Ground is the first project on which he is neither the writer nor the producer, only the director. “So it was an interesting challenge,” he says. He has written, produced and directed his own work from the start, and for once he is handing two of the three jobs to somebody else. He sounds pleased with how it is going. “I’m fortunate to be working with a very talented team,” he says, “and I’m happy with how it’s turning out.”

It has been a while since his last film, and he does not hide that he is looking forward to what comes next. “It’s my first film in a while,” he says, “so I’m very excited to bring it to festivals.”