Oscar-nominated Mexican sound designer Martin Hernandez has given new details about his latest project, Netflix documentary series The Master Of Monarchs [working title], which will launch on the platform later this year.
The series takes flight with the story of the Monarch butterfly and its journey from Canada to El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, a nature reserve in Mexico. The keeper of the reserve, environmental activist Homero Gomez, was murdered in 2020. It is believed he was killed because he stood up against organised crime groups.
The Master Of Monarchs will feature interviews with Gomez’s wife and children.
“It’s a great documentary. You discover as a viewer many other things that are actually happening… traffickings, methamphetamine labs,” Hernández said of the project, which Mexico’s Peninsula Films is producing. Directors for the series are unconfirmed.
The project is rare foray into documentary for Hernandez, who is best known for his collaborations on ambitious fictional movies like Birdman, Babel and Bardo with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the Mexican auteur Hernandez has known since their student days together.
Hernandez spoke to Screen after his masterclass on Tuesday during the Qumra mentorship and development programme in Doha. He acknowledged that when he started out doing sound on Inarritu’s 2000 title Amores Perros he was very raw.
“I had intuition, zero experience, a lot of bold naivete, ingenuity and stupidity…pretentiousness, ” said the sound artist of this early period of his filmmaking. “It’s a beautiful cocktail!” His motto was “I can because I think I can.”
Hernandez and Inarritu shared the same passion for music and movies as well as the belief that they could succeed without much in the way of resources of experience. Both were also drawn to marginal voices.
“I liked to think I was not in the mainstream when I was in college,” Hernandez said of his college days. “I was not interested in anything that the mainstream offered. I was very much interested in things that were hard to reach and find. At that age, you think everybody else is very stupid except you.
Inarritu and Hernandez ended up working for the college radio station; the latter came up with sound for ideas and stories they developed together. Hernandez edited by cutting tape with a razor blade.
Embedded
The sound designer can’t explain where his gift for moulding sound comes from. “I think it is embedded in you,” he suggested. “The closest I can get to music is through the job I am doing because I am not a musician…but I get to work with music.”
Hernandez has collaborated with many prominent musicians including the late Japanese composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Bryce Dessner from The National. Hernandez used some of the music Dessner wrote in one of the late scenes of The Revenant.
He has recently been working on US director Matthew Brown’s drama The Sand Castle starring Lebanese actress-director Nadine Labaki and Zlad Bakri, produced by Front Row Entertainment. Zain Al Rafeea, the child actor from Labaki’s hit film Capernaum, is also in the cast.
Hernandez was drawn to attend Qumra through his links with Doha Film Institute artistic advisor Elia Suleiman. “I met him in Mexico many years ago because of a common friend, [programmer and film curator] Ricardo Giraldo. We always talked about me coming here and giving a workshop.”
Hernandez is a co-founder of post-production company Cinematic Vision, where he runs the Sound Post Division. Over the last six years the company has been recruiting apprentice Mexican technicians, to train them to work across every aspect of post-production.
“You can start in one very specific job and it depends on yourself if you want to keep going into other areas,” Hernandez said of the training initiative.
“Working is a relationship…the better the communication is, the better you end up doing your work,” he said of what makes a good sound designer. “My work depends on how efficient the communication is that I have with the director. If that gets broken and stops working, my job is going to be severely affected.”
Approaching three decades into their collaboration, Hernandez enjoys the variety of his partnership with Inarritu.
“It’s a very old friendship but as in every long friendship, sometimes you don’t understand each other. But that’s a good thing. It happens with old couples - and we are like an old couple!”
Qumra closes today (Wednesday, March 6); before an online version of the project presentations from March 9-11.
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