Julio Torres (El Salvador, 37 years old) admits that since he was a child he was always attracted to robots, ghosts, non-human beings, everything that felt “a little bit different.” He remembers that Pinocchio It was one of his favorite movies, as well as The Brave Little Toaster (1987), another film that comes to mind, about a small toaster that, along with its appliance friends—a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, an electric mat, and a radio—go on an adventure to the big city to try to return to its owner.
Fantasy and metaphors, along with unusual protagonists, were always part of his life, even when he left his native El Salvador to attend college in New York in 2009. There, he faced a new life in the United States that came with challenges, changes that overwhelmed him, and rules that seemed like obstacles, but that would become a seedbed of ideas for what was to come later. Despite everything, with the support of his parents, a civil engineer and an architect and fashion designer, he never stopped achieving his goal nor did he give up on the quest to achieve his American dream. Both of his parents instilled in him the resilience to persevere.
All that experience as an immigrant led him to imagine the genesis of Problematica semi-autobiographical story he wrote, starred in and directed, which introduces Alejandro, an aspiring toymaker from El Salvador who is looking for a sponsor so he can extend his visa and stay in the United States to work. He thinks he has found just that in Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), an eccentric art critic who tells him she will support him if he helps her organize an art exhibition for her cryogenically frozen husband.
What follows is a series of twists and turns marked by surrealism, metaphors, fables and the style of absurd comedy that distinguishes this author. In the film, everything symbolic and fanciful has the purpose of “showing feeling,” he explains in an interview, such as how stressful a phone call can be or arguing with someone intimidating and portraying it as a fight in a cave with a dragon; or showing how difficult it can be to fill out a form and showing it as a labyrinth, to cite a few examples.
“Not showing fantasy just for the sake of it. I think that’s where surrealism and visual fantasy work best. I find it easier to share feelings that way and that’s how I know how to tell stories,” he explains.
It was the production company A24, which in recent years has become synonymous with quality in independent productions due to its sense of risk — such as the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once—who bet on Torres and hired him to write the script for ProblematicThe Salvadoran comedian had already begun to think about the story five years before writing it and describes the creation process as “building a sand castle,” which he builds “piece by piece.” The idea was not for him to direct the film. Torres had considered directing at some point in his career, but in about 10 years. When the script was offered to various filmmakers, they rejected it for a reason that he “quite liked,” he admits.
“They (the directors) felt that the film was a world that was too constructed and that they were not going to be able to put their personality into this script. In addition, the script had reached Tilda, who loved it, and she was one of the first to say, ‘you direct it’. So that’s how it was,” she recalls.
She wrote the script and was set to star, as was the famous British actress Tilda Swinton, winner of the Oscar and Bafta for best supporting actress for Michael Clayton (2007), nominated three times for a Golden Globe and with an important career in auteur cinema, had not only agreed to be his co-star, but also believed in him as a director so that he could materialize his own work.
The ‘Saturday Night Live’ experience
Torres attended The New School, where he earned a degree in literary studies. From then on, with an innate inclination towards comedy, he began making shows of stand up in New York and scriptwriting jobs for television shows, until seven years later, in 2016, he was hired by Saturday night Live (SNL), one of the most prestigious comedy and improvisation shows that has been on the air for almost 50 years and has catapulted the careers of talents such as Steve Martin, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell, among many others.
His three years in SNLwhere he remained until 2019, in which he wrote at least almost about thirty sketches -as Papyrus either Wells for boyswith Oscar winners Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, respectively—allowed him to be on several film sets, understand the process of creating a short film and learn from the director. In addition, he saw how he had to talk to actors and the different departments to make his directorial debut possible. Problematicwhich at times works with touches of humor throughout the footage that come from that school of comedy in which he was able to gain experience.
“One of the reasons Alejandro designs toys is because it allows me to have these humorous moments through the creations he imagines in the film. It allows me to still be in a world that feels a little familiar and that helps me,” he says.
His time on the popular TV show sketches and stand up allowed him to forge relationships that helped him in his future projects. After proposing a Spanish-language comedy to the HBO network, Lorne Michaels, creator of SNLand his colleague and comedian in the same ShowFred Armisen, bet on his proposal and that’s how it was born in 2019 The Espookys. The series is about a group of friends in a surreal Mexico City who decide to turn their passion for horror and gore into a very peculiar business: providing terrifying scenes to clients who request it. Torres’ first foray into television obtained two seasons before being cancelled in 2022.
However, that first experience allowed the same network to offer him his comedy special. My Favorite Shapesreleased in 2019, and that the door remains open to future collaborations. And so it was, after the critical praise it received Problematicthat HBO once again bet on Torres with its new project, Ghostsa series he also stars in, writes, directs and now co-produces.
In this, true to his style, he tells the story of a lost golden oyster. In his search for the precious object, Julio reflects over six episodes on the extravagant characters he encounters in introspective, often disturbing and always comical vignettes, set in an alternative and dreamy version of New York City.
“Ghosts It’s like a mosaic, it has a lot of little pieces and it has a lot of worlds. It’s more theatrical. After working in Saturday night Live I was left wanting to continue doing sketches or short stories. I wanted to continue telling stories in that way. I was very interested in the idea of doing my version of that and that’s how this series was born,” Torres says.
Faithful to its Latin origin
In each of his projects, Torres has remained faithful to his Latin roots, always incorporating Spanish, the experiences of migrants in the United States, as well as cultural and social references from Latin America. He appreciates that, for example and to mention one, colleagues like Marcello Hernández, of Cuban-Dominican descent, are in SNL and can share their experience from where they come from. It is part of the representation and the different voices that the industry still needs.
“I hope we are free to create as we want to create. Because if you look at my work and Marcello’s, they are extremely different. And we are quite indigenous to who we are. I can’t do what he does and vice versa. I hope we are allowed to show different nuances of experience. That is felt in everything, in the immigrant, Latin American or gender issue. It is not just one thing, but several. The more we see, the more we will learn that each person is unique,” she says.
He believes that showing, preserving and protecting the essence of people, through different cultural products, is now much more important in light of the shadow of Donald Trump once again approaching the White House, with his violent and aggressive discourse against immigrants that is permeating different spheres and spaces of American society.
“It’s about maintaining our dignity. It’s about being able to make the kind of art we want to make without worrying about where we come from. And, through that, being able to advance the cause of humanizing the immigrant, humanizing Latin Americans. I think that’s what it’s all about, that the more examples of different types of people we see, the more we realize how precious they are,” she concludes.
