J Paul Johnson
Director Francisco Ordoñez and lead actor Sofia Yepes share a unique collaboration on their film The Low End Theory. Some of the story elements originated in Yepes’ own life, and the two from there collaborated on an idea that eventually became a neo-noir populated with characters from their own Latinx and LGBTQ+ communities. For both of them, the neo-noir idiom made for a home to the themes of predestination, morality, and mortality they were eager to explore.
Yepes plays Raquel, an aspiring hip-hop producer who’s caught up laundering money for a drug running criminal (Eddie Martinez) to whom she’s indebted. She’s also stuck in a lifeless affair with his sister, Giselle (the non-binary actor Ser Anzoategui). When Raquel meets a beautiful, troubled singer, Veronica (Sidney Flanigan, Never Rarely Sometimes Always), the palpable sexual attraction between the two seems like it might offer a way out, but instead, Raquel is drawn even further into a web of crime and violence.
The Low End Theory recently made its world premiere at the 2024 New York Latino Film Festival. Yepes and Ordoñez spoke with Film Obsessive’s J Paul Johnson about the film’s reception there as well as its conception and production. The transcript following the video below has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Let me welcome you both to Film Obsessive. I understand that just ten days ago, your film premiered at the New York Latino Film Festival. Were you both there with it? And can you talk a little bit about that experience?
Francisco Ordoñez: So the New York Latino Film Festival is the first film festival where I presented my work many moons ago. It was where I presented my thesis film at a film school and Sofia was in that film. So is Rene Rosado, who also stars in The Low End Theory, the film we’re going to talk about. It was just really nice to come back after all those years with our first film. And actually, it was also really nice that the festival director, Calixto Chinchilla, came. He came to the end of the Q&A and he said some really nice words about our resilience and, you know, having come back after all these years and made our first film. It was just really nice to hear that from him. In addition to all the other great things that happened at the festival and obviously just presenting the film to the world for the first time and all that.
And Sofia, you played an important role, I know, in the conception of the project and imagining the story, what was it like for you to get to see it unfold on a big screen, on a big screen in front of an audience like that?
Sofia Yepes: I don’t know. It was a very surreal moment for me because the thing about the New York Latino Film Festival, it’s like we had that full circle moment, but we also were surrounded by the people were we were raised by, you know, our families, our friends, who believed in us when we were little kids saying we’re going to do this thing. And so to be able to share that with them was a profound moment for me. It was like a dream come true for me.
That’s really exciting. So for our audience’s sake, let’s hear about what the film is and what it does in terms of your character specifically, and her, well, ordeal, shall we put it for lack of a better word, or conflict, that she goes through.
Francisco Ordoñez: I know a lot of people call it a thriller and we do as well. But what it really is at its core is a film noir. I guess a neo-noir because it’s not from the classic period. And so we say that because really the mandate for us creatively was to take the classic tropes of the genre and I don’t mean that in a negative way. I mean, the classic elements of the genre and to rework them in a 2024 setting, in a Latino context, in an LGBT context. And so whereas, you know, the noir hero classically and film noir was a genre that came out of World War Two, and the film noir hero was always a male often somebody scarred by World War Two, and then, of course, gets themselves involved in some morally questionable situations, right? Often revolving a femme fatale, stolen money, et cetera, right? And so we wanted to take that and put the character that Sofia plays in the midst of that and have her go through a film neo-noir or journey. And that’s the idea.
And specifically, the story The Low End Theory tells is of Sofia’s character Raquel, who, when the film begins, she’s found herself in a rut working for a drug dealer. She basically launders money for him. She she’s in a loveless relationship with his sister. She really dreams of becoming a hip hop producer. And so she’s out at the sort of fly-by-night music companies, and one day she meets this beautiful femme fatale. Her name is Veronica, a would-be singer. And they fall in love, and she starts cheating on her live-in girlfriend with Veronica. And one day, Veronica shows up beat up, and it turns out that Veronica owes a lot of money to these very dangerous people. And then Raquel, being that she handles her boss’s money, she comes up with a way to pay back the debts of this woman now, the femme fatale, this woman that she’s fallen in love with. And of course, the screws get turned and hilarity ensues from there.
The screws get turned and things ensue, indeed! I’m not sure I was thinking in a lot of in terms of a lot of hilarity there. It’s pretty serious! And what your character Raquel goes through, Sofia, does seem like she really is between a rock and a hard place here.
Sofia Yepes: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s a neo-noir, and, you know, the concepts are big. But if you break it down to human feelings, I think it’s super relatable. You fall in love and you really want to take care of somebody. She has trauma that she’s trying to overcome and that plays a huge role in her life. And there’s always that feeling of how can I vindicate myself? How can I be better after this thing, and she sees that opportunity in helping Veronica and someone she loves, I can help her. I think that so many times we have those moments in our lives. I think that was part of the reason why we had an opportunity, Francisco and I, to make a film like this because we’ve both experienced something like this before, you know? And aside from that, then there’s the moral dilemmas where you think you’re doing something good, and you truly believe that it’s the right thing to do, but it’s possible that you’re hurting somebody else in the end and You know, we all go through that too.
Francisco Ordoñez: I mean, what I’ve always loved about film noir is that it’s like the first early cinematic genre where that really explored antiheroes, you know, flawed people, right? And to me, we’re all flawed. That’s the universality of it, right? Like even the dilemma that, which in a lot of ways, is by her own making, it’s something that’s universal because we’ve all done versions of that, smaller things, right? And to me, that’s the universal aspect of it, and the thing and that’s the way in which antiheroes and the genre really digs into the human condition for me. And that’s what made it really interesting.
I really like the way you put that. And it’s very much a favorite style or mode of filmmaking of mine as well. Thinking back to the classic era, are there films that you had in reference, maybe you have in the back of your mind, as you’re making The Low End Theory?
Francisco Ordoñez: Definitely Double Indemnity. To the extent that our film in a lot of ways, I always call it there’s the Noir Sin. There’s that one big sin that the character commits, Double Indemnity, it’s killing off his lover’s husband in order to keep her, right? And that happens. The film is bifurcated in the middle by that act. We definitely had that. If you look at it, there’s that happening. There’s the beginning, there’s the build up to that, and there’s ramifications of this thing, the sin that our character commits at the middle. And I think also what theirs that I like, because there’s the private sins, right? Yeah. But there’s the ones that are more about tragic love, right, and wrapped around a sin. And I think that those are the ones that I’m more interested in.
Another one that I love is maybe people don’t really see it at first, but if you’re familiar with A Place in the Sun. I was always thinking of that, and another one is if you know the film, you could probably see our third act in it’s Scarlet Street. And which is a remake of La Chienne, And so Scarlet Street was the Hollywood remake by Fritz Lang.
I thought for a second, you were going to mention In a Lonely Place in there as well when you were talking about the high price of love there at the end. You know, then the human foible and frailty that really motivates it.
Francisco Ordoñez: For sure, for sure, absolutely. And then I think the other thing about film noir—anybody who knows me and my work and what I always talk about is that I’m really drawn to spiritual themes. Not so much about making necessarily a religious movie as opposed to making a movie that explores religion, or religion as a phenomenon, or as a psychological phenomenon. Obviously, Raquel has this sort of fixation on Karma, she’s created this whole theory of Karma that she lives by.
And to me, in a lot of the classic noirs, there is this sort of undercurrent of fatalism, of mysticism, right? And that’s something that’s always been really interesting to us. And we wanted to take that undercurrent and bring it to the surface, and we did it in this context of the layperson’s version of Karma. She’s not a Buddhist. It isn’t real. But she has this sort of every day what comes around, goes around, good or bad kind of thing. And that was our way to kind of take that film noir mysticism and take it from underneath from the subtext and bring it to the text.
I’m going to come back to some specifics of the noir style or idiom in just a second, but I also want to ask too about the importance of representation, especially of Latinx and LGBTQ+ plus people onscreen. And it’s something that, you know, strikes me as relatively rare, obviously, nearly completely silent in classic noir, but also scarcely visible, really, even in most modern neo-noir, except at the periphery or the margins of these narratives. And I wanted to ask specifically what you’re trying to bring to the genre, in casting and creating the film in the way that you have.
Sofia Yepes: Well, I think one of the biggest factors, was, obviously, being a female and wanting to be the star and creating this film to to tell the story. That was already a big jump from the classics and even the majority of the neo-noirs, putting it in the LGBTQ community and casting a majority of Latino actors. To us, it wasn’t so much of it wasn’t that we had to do it in order to create this film. It was just we happen to know a lot of phenomenal actors, and they were friends, you know? And so what better opportunity to make a movie than doing it with your friends and being able to do this together and knowing that they can deliver, right? So that I think, brought a different look to some of these characters that we typically see, not in the Latino context. They bring in elements of themselves, and I think that it’s important to see all these full well rounded characters from different environments. We just happened to have a lot of Latinos in our community.
Then as far as LGBTQ, well, one, I think the theme of the film noir, having the femme fatale was kind of like we had to have that, but it was also for me, in particular, a journey of that experience for me, a journey of the coming out, a journey of we’re going to tell this story in this way and how can we do it in the most realistic, most organic, real connected way. And for me, it was telling the story of of being that, but it didn’t have to be about being queer, it just happened to be. And I think that was really important for us to just tell a really good story where these elements just existed without it having to be a thing. Does that make sense?
It does, absolutely! I mean, a film narrative really need not depend so much on those elements to make them the pivotal plot points or the big surprise moments on which the plot has to turn. And I don’t think that this genre or style, in particular, really has the best track record of representing queer people in particular on screen. There’s been some really thorny examples in the past. But, you know, it’s great to see films where people can simply be non normative, if that’s the word to use here, and exist in the plot without the plot having to depend entirely on, some big revelation of a secret or something like that.
Sofia Yepes: Totally, yeah. Also, growing up, you know, I wanted to be in those kinds of films. I I never saw myself in one of those, but I was like, Man, that’s a cool story. I want to do something like that. And so we said, Well, let’s just make it.
Francisco Ordoñez: Also, the flip side of that is that sometimes you’ll hear from within our community, that you’ve made another movie where Latinos are criminals and such. And what I say to that is that it’s kind of limiting because in the same way that, you know, Sofia is saying, you know, she watched Double Indemnity or something and was like, Wow, imagine me playing something like that and through that dark journey, right? That dark journey really requires a really great actor. I mean, what Sofie had to put herself through. I mean, you’ve seen the movie. Once anybody’s seen the movie, just imagine being in that state of mind for the entire time that we shot the film. She had to do that. She had to deliver. She’s in every scene. It was designed that way. There’s only one moment when you see the movie where she’s not physically in the scene, but she’s kind of like there, she’s privy to what’s going on.
But the movie is designed for that actor to carry that role and to go through this incredibly morally ambiguous and strenuous journey. And I think that it should we shouldn’t limit ourselves to movies that don’t do that, right? Some of the greatest movies, as we all know, are noirs, some of the greatest movies that have ever been made, have been about people who live on the wrong side of the law, The Godfather. Those movies, a lot of those movies in the ’70s give birth to these amazing careers for Robert De Niro and Al Pacino and many more. And so, I think, you know, we also deserve to explore the dark side of humanity. And to do our best at doing it. And yeah, we deserve to do that, too. And that’s what I say to that other conversation that happens as well, sometimes in our communities.
Right. And there are important cultural and societal reasons why those films became popular at the moments that they were. And it was in part because they were good, but it was also not only because they were good, but because in the wake of the scandals and trauma of Watergate and Vietnam, that people did not have a particularly black and white notion of the institutions that governed them. And the same was true in the wake of World War Two, in particular, that people were really struggling with the fallout of the very real, palpable, possible end of humanity and what that meant for them.
I’m also just going to say, in a genre like this, you get opportunities for some really cool action sequences, and props to you for really delivering on some really excellent gunplay in particular at one point in the film. I know that’s not necessarily easy to direct, but it can be exciting to direct. And I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about production on the set, where and when you shot the film and what kind of things you were doing there.
Francisco Ordoñez: Yeah, I mean, to the extent that anybody likes the special effects for the shootout, the gunplay stuff, we had an amazing team. And so and we were fortunate to have them. I had done stunts before. Nothing as elaborate as this. When people see the movie, the big sort of gunplay scene, we shot that over two days with two camera bodies going. It was kind of crazy because we couldn’t control the light. And I was really worried about it being able to be cut together where you’re not like somebody’s blasting with the sunlight and cuts and then they’re in under a cloud. But we also had an amazing colorist. And all that came together really. You don’t think about that for like a scene like that in an independent film that it’s all about the colorist, but it’s about being able to shoot all this action, all this material that you need to shoot very quickly without controlling the light. That’s when the colorist also comes in so that we can actually use all the takes that we want to use.
So we had a great team. It took a lot of planning. We did a pre visualization, a good amount of it. Meaning that we went to the locations with like broomsticks, and like some plastic guns, and our coordinator Gabe, he and his team came in, and we basically shot the whole thing on an iPhone. We tweaked and we got it all right that when we came to that, we had done all that practice, and so we can shoot it fairly quickly. Yeah, I mean, I guess another interesting thing is that I wanted to do everything practically, meaning the blood gags. I wanted to do them practically, and we tried. And I learned that when you don’t have a lot of time, go for the VFX, but I hadn’t had a lot of experience with VFX blood. It’s amazing what you can do with VFX blood. I mean, it’s my first feature, that much gun play, and it was a learning experience, but I was lucky to have a great team.
Well, it looks like a great team. It looks like a great sequence. What’s next for the film, and then subsequently, what’s next for each of the two of you?
Francisco Ordoñez: We’re at the Nvision Latino Music and Film Festival happening in Palm Springs, October 10 through the 12th. We screen on October 10. And then November 2, we’re screening at the GuadaLAjara LA Film Festival. So Guadalajara International Film Festival has an LA branch. And they pick some films, and they screen them in Los Angeles. And we’re going to be screening at a brand new theater that I think has only been opened since August in Norwalk. We’re just excited because we know it’s going to look great and sound great. Props to Moctesuma Esparza for opening up that theater in Norwalk.
Next for me, I have a project that I’ve been working on for a very long time. It’s now called St. Paul. It’s based on experiences that I had when I was a sociology student, and I had done a paper on this religious movement in New York called the Black Israelites, which are basically made up of Black and Latino guys who believe they preach that they’re the true Jews of the Bible that the world is about to end. They believe in a lot of conspiracy theory. I did a paper when I was an undergrad as a sociology student, and it really affected me. I mean, these are people at the extremes of politics, religion, all of it, right? And so I wrote a script about a college student that he does what I didn’t do. He infiltrates them. He sees that he’s not going to get anywhere being honest with them, so he actually starts telling them I want to actually want to join, and he gets himself in a bunch of trouble, and it’s a film for me It’s really close to my heart, and it’s a film about it’s about belief, it’s about extremism.
Yeah, I’m interested: I want to see it right now!
Francisco Ordoñez: So I’m working on that, and I have one of the two production companies, it’s Shakti Sol, which you made when you watch the movie, you’ll see, it’s one of the splash screens at the beginning of the movie. That’s my company with Rene Rosado and Krish Tewari. And so we started the production company when we were making this movie, and we have a couple of really cool projects that that we’ve got in the pipeline, they’re being written right now.
And Sofia, how about you? Are you traveling with the film to those festivals?
Sofia Yepes: Yes, I’m traveling along with the film, getting to meet some people and for me, the projects that are coming up are I’m a single mom. And so it’s been a journey being a single mom. And so part of my work, I think, is to empower single moms and teach the healing journey of single mom. I have a podcast that I’m developing in regards to that, as well as a film that I’m working on that is it’s going to be a fun comedic romantic type of thing, but it’s going to be about a single mom.
Okay, I will want to follow up on that too in the future. In the meantime, let me just thank both of you, Sofia Yepes and Francisco Ordoñez, for joining us at Film Obsessive to talk about your film. The Low End Theory is currently enjoying its festival run, and as you can see, I think it’s a film that I find really insightful and invigorating and even important in some interesting ways. Congratulations to the two of you on its completion and getting it out in front of audiences and best of luck to both of you for its future.
Sofia Yepes: Thank you, Paul. Appreciate it!
