Rodrigo Prieto’s Risky Directorial Début

In 2003, he shot Stone’s biography of Alexander the Great—a multi-continental epic in which he captured Alexander’s near-death in battle using infrared film, tinging the scene with bloody hues. His next film was radically different: “Brokeback Mountain,” Ang Lee’s tale of two cowboys’ illicit romance in an idyllic glade in Wyoming. Here, Prieto’s mood-setting was subtler. When the men left the mountains for town, where they were no longer protected from judgment, the images grew grainier and more unsettled.

Lee himself began the production in an uneasy state. His previous movie, “Hulk,” had opened to harsh reviews, including one, in the Times, that called it “incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid.” He was thinking of retiring, but as he worked with Prieto his faith in making movies began to return. “He’s a good soul for art,” Lee told me. “He acts like a novice—and I’m like that, too.” During the production, Lee asked Prieto to play a Mexican prostitute who solicits Jake Gyllenhaal’s character. Prieto agreed, replacing another actor at the last minute. “Ang liked his acting, but he was shorter than Jake,” Prieto said. Laughing, he added, “The backup Mexican—that was me.”

In 2012, Prieto’s agent called to say that Martin Scorsese wanted to meet him the next day. “I barely had time to process it,” Prieto said. “I got on a flight to New York.” He spent the flight reading the script for “The Wolf of Wall Street.” They had their first conversation at the director’s home on the Upper East Side. Scorsese told me that they “talked through the script and worked out a very gradual shift in the visual tone and the quality of the color as Jordan Belfort goes deeper into his world, from warm to cool.” During the filming, Scorsese added, “he introduced me to so many methods and devices for making camera movements more flexible, easy to maneuver.”

Along with Iñárritu, Scorsese has become Prieto’s longest collaborator, over a decade-long string of films. “Martin won’t let go of him!” Iñárritu told me, half joking. “He stole him from me.” Scorsese and Prieto share an interest in historical sweep, and in mimicking the film used by the photographers of the period being represented: Kodachrome, with its richly saturated colors, for the nineteen-fifties; Ektachrome, with its cooler tones, for the sixties and seventies. In “Killers of the Flower Moon,” an epic about Oklahoma’s oil boom, Prieto portrayed the settlers who sowed fear in the Osage Nation by emulating the Lumière brothers’ autochrome technique, which was invented around the time that white people poured into the area. To sharpen the visual contrast, Prieto photographed the Osage in natural colors. “The challenge is always figuring out the right balance,” he said. “Having a repository of techniques and knowing what to apply where, without pulling the viewer out of the film. I try to push up to that point.”

There is a crucial part of the movie in which the violence against the Osage reaches the protagonist, an Indigenous woman named Mollie Burkhart. In the script, Burkhart’s family is awakened at night by a violent explosion, and, as her husband ventures outside to see what happened, she stays behind with the kids. “As it was written,” Scorsese said, “we had Mollie standing in the living room, holding the children. We all looked at each other and wondered: Why is she standing in the middle of the living room? Shouldn’t they be taking shelter somewhere?” Lily Gladstone, who plays Burkhart, suggested a storm cellar in the house where they were shooting. “We went to the cellar door,” Scorsese recalled. “I could see the looks in the faces of the crew, basically saying, ‘Please don’t let him open that door.’ I opened it, looked down. I said, ‘This is great!’ ” He turned to Prieto, who raised his eyebrows politely. “It is very easy to imagine another cinematographer—and that includes cinematographers I’ve worked with—who would have said, ‘That’s going to take too long to get it set up for today,’ ” Scorsese told me. “Rodrigo just said, ‘O.K.,’ and he went to work. It took a few hours to light and to figure out the movement, and then we shot it.”

In the studio in Manhattan, the lights went down, and Prieto settled in next to one of his sound mixers, a wiry man named Rich Bologna. The film’s post-production supervisor, Vanessa Hernández, sat behind them on a leather sofa. The three had spent weeks fiddling with the sound, a phase of production that Prieto had never led before—but, he reasoned, the mind-set wasn’t that different from the one he used with lighting. He had scoured the text of “Pedro Páramo,” which has scores of references to ambient sound, for details to replicate. “They’re small things, as small as a bird’s voice or the sound of water lapping on rocks,” Prieto said. “But, taken together, they amount to something.”

He asked Bologna to rewind to the opening scene. Onscreen, Juan Preciado, one of the protagonists, stood on a vast desert plain. He heard the braying of a donkey in the distance, then walked over to a man who was leading the animal.

“Why are you headed to Comala, if I may ask?” the peasant said.

“I’m going to see my father,” Preciado replied. “All I know is that his name is Pedro Páramo.”

The peasant, with a cryptic look, said, “I’m also Pedro Páramo’s son.”

The movie’s first scenes faithfully recreate the opening of the novel, as Preciado heads off on his journey. Intent on fulfilling his mother’s deathbed wish, he returns to Comala, which she had left when he was an infant. “That place sits on the burning embers of the earth, at the very mouth of Hell,” the peasant warns him. “Nobody lives here.”

Netflix executives first approached Rulfo’s family about a new adaptation in 2020. “We really felt that this was the time to make the film again,” Francisco Ramos, the company’s vice-president of Latin American content, told me. Netflix had recently acquired the rights to “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and, with the Spanish-language market growing, it wanted to expand its collection of the region’s literary masterworks.

The family was skeptical. “We didn’t want to let go of the novel, because we’ve only got one,” Juan Carlos Rulfo, the author’s son, told me. The last attempt to adapt “Pedro Páramo,” in 2007, had foundered; the production, led by a Spanish filmmaker named Mateo Gil, never secured enough funds to start filming. Eventually, the family agreed to sell the rights to Netflix, but for a limited time. The company would have just four years to develop, produce, and edit the film.

Ramos called up Gil, the Spanish filmmaker, whose script had sat untouched for more than a decade. Gil’s first reaction was “I can’t let you have it.” He had dreamed of adapting the movie since he was a student, and he wasn’t going to let someone else take his place. Ramos waited a year, then called again. “By then, I had come to terms with the fact that, if Netflix adapted ‘Pedro Páramo,’ there would be no room left for a second movie,” Gil told me. “Besides, I had already shed enough tears for that script.” Gil signed on, under one condition: that the script remain scrupulously faithful to the novel. “It’s the essence of my adaptation,” he said.

Netflix was already talking with Prieto about directing the film, but Juan Carlos wasn’t entirely convinced. “I had serious doubts about his ability to direct,” he told me. “I worried it’d turn into an overly aesthetic movie with no depth.” (Juan Carlos, who has directed numerous documentaries, added, “I have to confess that, at one point, I wondered, ‘Will they be asking me?’ ”)