Problemista’s Julio Torres wants us all to be curious like kids

Julio Torres is one of the great millennial oddballs. The Saturday Night Live writer and Los Espookys co-creator, writer, and star is a soulful weirdo who pours his singular comedic voice into shows about queer horror nerds scaring people for fun and profit and comedy specials where he talks at length about his favorite shapes. His latest work is Problemista, a movie best described as his attempt at a fairy tale.

Torres wrote and directed Problemista, and he stars as Alejandro, a young immigrant who’s facing deportation back to El Salvador after he loses his (strange) job at a clinic where rich people go to freeze themselves for the future. His one lifeline is Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a difficult art dealer he needs to convince to sponsor his work visa so he can pursue his (also strange) dream of making odd toys for Hasbro.

Recently, Torres spoke with Polygon over Zoom to talk about Problemista’s autobiographical aspects, his interest in inanimate objects, and why people who use voice notes are just the worst.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Image: A24

Polygon: Alejandro’s interest in making unusual toys is similar to your stand-up work in My Favorite Shapes. What attracts you to telling stories about inanimate objects?

Julio Torres: As a child, my first stabs as a storyteller were like, casting toys and objects as my actors and then coming up with little stories for them. That’s a practice I’ve continued. It becomes a really fun, creative exercise of sorts. I think that’s something most people did when they were kids, but most people grow out of it. And I just didn’t.

Do you think that’s important to your comedy or your work? Reminding people of things they might have grown out of?

Maybe, yeah. Or like, ways of thinking. Children are very curious. Children ask a lot of questions. And then as we age, there’s a shift — as a kid, you ask a lot of questions. And then somewhere along the line, we’re told that asking a lot of questions is bad, or that being too curious is not a good thing. It always pissed me off in middle school, going into high school, with the teacher saying, “I’m gonna explain it one time, and you have to listen to it.”

OK, well, some of us need to hear it more than once! [Laughs] Like, you don’t want to be wasting your breath explaining something? I hated that. I was always, always, always encouraged by my parents to ask questions. My father is a very curious person. I think that curiosity is the gateway to empathy. And that’s a very important human quality.

Right, and in the context of Problemista, the antagonist is kind of this bureaucracy that’s meant to stonewall any questions.

Right. You cannot ask it questions.

Alejandro’s struggle isn’t against a person or group — people or groups hostile to immigrants exist, but a lot of the terror is so mundane. You use this great image, where every immigrant has an hourglass they can’t see.

Image: A24

Yeah, my path as I lived it — it was facing up against systems that were faceless. You know, systems where there are people hired to uphold those systems. When you talk human-to-human, they don’t really connect with or agree with the rules they’re upholding. So then it’s like, What is this invisible thing we’re fighting?

One of the movie’s best jokes about this is the dream scenario where a bank employee yells “I stand with Bank of America!” through tears, because she can’t help someone, she can only enforce bureaucracy.

So that’s my friend River [L. Ramirez] playing that woman. River is an absolute genius. But what I love about River’s performance is that there’s real humanity there. You see someone who — you know, we gave her a name, Estefani. She’s wearing her little badge. And it’s like, this woman has to pay her bills. This woman has a job at Bank of America. And this woman has a family who failed, this woman is married, she’s wearing a ring, and she’s put in a position where if empathy comes up, that could cost her her job. We’re all trapped in one way or another.

A lot of the film is about Alejandro’s relationship with his difficult boss, and one way you show that difficulty is that she uses voice notes.

The thing about voice-notes users is that if you have the voice-notes gene — once you discover it, you just don’t go back. And if you don’t have the voice-note gene, getting [recorded memos] is so annoying. Because it’s like OkK, now I have to stop what I’m doing to listen to this, and it’s like, Uggghh, why don’t you just write it?!

Do you have the voice-notes gene?

I don’t.

Problemista is now playing in theaters.

Via