While Guerrero says the script described the lab as “more old-school, vintage,” she wanted to make it “as savage as possible” so that “if we compare the two worlds, it’s going to impact people insanely.” “Even when she’s bringing back Santo, it’s still not giving her answers.”īut once Marisol awoke in the real-world of the lab, things took a different turn. “We feel uncomfortable because we are exactly on the same journey as her,” she says.Īnother important element to this was “making all of the characters around her clueless,” Guerrero says. Her confusion at what was happening only intensified with the repetition of some of the actions, which in turn was designed to feed the audience’s confusion.
While at first glance Marisol appeared to be stuck in a “Groundhog Day” scenario, each time she awoke, she was in a newly-colored dress and had memories of the past days. One essential part of the puzzle for Guerrero to work out was the sequence of Marisol waking up in the virtual world. “You have to be able to tell a consistently, and equally, linear story for our audience and our character.”
The duo worked closely, Guerrero says, to balance the visual elements and style that would be true to a virtual world without tipping the truth about that world too early to the viewing audience. Guerrero worked with cinematographer Byron Werner to design shots shots in which the camera stood in for the character, slightly breaking the fourth wall during pivotal interactions and arrivals within the virtual reality simulation. “What if those propaganda posters came to life? We feel on edge.”įurthering that feeling was the use of Marisol’s point of view. It feels vintage, but we can’t tell where,” she explains. And that was exactly what I was describing: We are in a timeless Pleasantville. “They were too-perfect, but at the same time they looked very timeless: They looked like they could belong in any era. For the former, she shares that one of her biggest inspirations were the propaganda posters from the 1950s. The other two worlds Guerrero had to create for “Culture Shock” were the false “Pleasantville” and then the reality of the lab in which the immigrants were being kept. the perspective of an immigrant who knows the culture inside and out, I pitched my heart out, and it was amazing that immediately saw that for me.” I really, really wanted to tackle that story, which is so relevant today. “When I read the script, it was just really refreshing and really exciting. “I felt it in my heart,” Guerrero says of the “Culture Shock” script.
She previously directed the short horror film “El Gigante,” which was also a border-crossing-gone-wrong story. Guerrero created three distinct worlds within “Culture Shock,” starting first in Mexico, for which she wanted to “bring a lot of culture.” Guerrero was born and partially raised in Mexico, before moving to Canada in her adolescence. But for “Culture Shock,” she wanted to save more of the visceral horror for the end, focusing first on an increasingly “uncomfortable” feeling as the audience follows Marisol’s struggles to understand what has happened to her just as she is trying to piece everything together. “Actors know, with me, they’re not going home clean,” she says. The horror genre has been Guerrero’s playground of choice for the better part of the last decade, and she shares she normally has a Super Soaker filled with fake blood with her on set. Therefore, Guerrero wanted to lean into the surrealism of genre to allow the audience to “escape the realities and experience the horror that we live in in a different way.”
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