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The Two Escobars

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Pablo Escobar was the richest, most powerful drug kingpin in the world, ruling the Medellín Cartel with an iron fist. Andres Escobar was the biggest soccer star in Colombia. The two were not related, but their fates were inextricably-and fatally-intertwined.

 

Q&A with Director Jeff Zimbalist, Director Michael Zimbalist

 

(Q): How did you first here of this story and what got you interested in telling this story?
 
(Michael Zimbalist): Jeff and I were in Columbia developing another film about the first peace community in Latin America, and we heard about ESPN’s 30 for 30 series which focused on sports and society. And we had been talking at that point with a good friend and former soccer player, Nick Sprague, about the murder of Andres Escobar, and all of the huge doubts that still remained in Columbia as to what had happened that night.

So we set out sort of to investigate the murder of Andres and very quickly realized that this was an incident that couldn’t be understood without understanding the full context of how narco monies had been introduced to the sport of soccer in Columbia, and entering into this whole terrifying and yet fascinating world known as narco football, or narco soccer, in Columbia. I think that was sort of the beginning of when we uncovered what felt like this secret phenomena where there were anecdotes about the millions of dollars being poured into these drug owners’ teams, and players being kidnapped, and referees killed.

Within that whole world emerged yet another story, which to us felt bigger than soccer, bigger than narco, which was really the story of the hopes and dreams of the Columbian people and the great power that soccer had at that time in Columbia to not only change the country’s image on the international stage, but also to restore this sense of identity and self worth during a time of unthinkable violence and suffering. And I think that ultimately was the story that really resonated with us.
 
(Q): In a strange way there are no bad guys in this movie. Yes, there are people getting murdered and shit, but somehow you kind of enjoy everyone, including Pablo Escobar. There’s a ridiculous amount of footage of this guy. What’s your take on that? Why did this guy have a camera on him all the time? Was he really that public a figure?
 
(Jeff Zimbalist): There was a time period where cocaine was a party drug, it was a social tool, it was tolerated. Before Len Bias died, before the war on drugs became international I don’t think people felt that he was doing as much harm as he was good by filling the bars and the restaurants and stimulating the economy. And I think that got to his head. He was the most powerful person coming out of the working class poor in a country historically dominated by this elite oligarchy.

I think his greatest flaw was his pride, and I think he celebrated to a certain extent what he had accomplished and what he had achieved, and that meant that he brought down two filmmakers from the United States to film him at villa, at this ranch that he had built, for a week or a week and a half. And some of that footage had never been seen before. We were able to find these guys, it was buried away.
 
(Q): Where did you find these?
 
(Jeff Zimbalist): We had seen some earlier stuff and some private archives from his family, from his sister. It was kind of one of these fast-forwards wait a minute, what was that? Pablo with a steadicam riding a motor bike through the woods? Where did that footage come from? Slowly you branch out and you find the sources of this stuff. That was the most time consuming part of this production, was going into the broadcasters that had long since shut their doors, finding the local filmmakers, peaking with the military police about getting footage that they recovered from prison after it was demolished.

You remember the shot of Pablo playing soccer, the black and white shot at the prison? So that was buried in the floorboards and the police uncovered it when they demolished the prison after Pablo escaped. So ultimately we bought archives from 40-something sources, 54 sources. And finding the archives was a process, but I’ll tell you, getting them full-res and getting the licenses; a whole other beast. That was massive.
 
(Q): So it’s one thing to find the footage. But you need it broadcast quality and now it’s a whole other thing. One of the first guys you interview in this movie is talking about how many people he’s killed. What’s it like to do an interview that way? Did you get scared making this film?
 
(Michael Zimbalist): I think there were definitely elements of being afraid at certain moments. We worked with a great team, a great Columbian fixer who does all the tough stories for the “New York Times” when they want to contact the head of the paramilitaries or the head of the guerilla armies out in the jungle. They’ll go to her and she’ll use her network of contacts to track these people down. And then we would lay out sort of a safety protocol to make sure that we were going to be okay when we would go in to do the interview. We had actually just done the interview with the son of the Cali Cartel. The day before we were going to go to Columbia’s highest maximum security prison to interview Popeye and Fernando, who was also in the piece speaking English. We had told him we were going to interview Popeye and he gave us a very stern warning about going into a room with him because they had of course been mortal enemies outside of prison and then were in the same prison and had gotten into quite a bloody fight at one point. So he sort of planted the idea that Popeye was capable of anything, and when we arrived at…
 
(Q): You seem like a tough guy. [laughter]
 
(Michael Zimbalist): Yeah. I was relying on my brother’s martial art skills. So we arrived at the prison and I think there were about 10 checkpoints to actually get into the cell, and at every checkpoint they wanted to strip us down. At the first checkpoint we took off our shoes, our belts, and anything that had any metal at all. And they had a problem figuring out what to do with the film equipment, because we’re going in to film the guy, and yet we had all this metallic equipment and all kinds of sharp stuff. So they had to clear it and said “Go in with the equipment; that’s okay. Let me take my pen.” I kept thinking the whole time about that scene in “Casino” where Joe Pesci just goes ballistic on a guy’s neck at the bar.
 
(Q): I like that you were going up a guy that’s killed dozens of people but you were like, “But I have a pen.”
 
(Michael Zimbalist): I was more worried about him having the pen.
 
(Jeff Zimbalist): Mike actually dropped the pen when he tried to get the release signed and I saw his face go white. He like froze and Popeye’s sitting there with the pen like “You all right, man?” I actually would say that 90% of that interview you felt like you were sitting with a guy at the bar. Part of our advantage with this film was that we didn’t have the emotional closeness or proximity to the trauma of those times, and so you get wrapped up in this person’s point of view. And you talk for three hours and most of the time this is a good storyteller, and then there are just these glimpses where you actually recognize this is a sociopath.
 
(Q): One of the things that’s really remarkable about your film is you’re telling a very complex story. I love storytellers and filmmakers who are not telling me how to think but rather they’re pushing me to think. And you have an idea that there is no solution, I mean that’s what’s so complex about it, and not only just the drug issue but generally what we aspire to as human beings. You touched on so many things and you were able to get everyone to speak in a very eloquent way and you really were able to open them up. How much experience did you have with this and how much was this learning on the job and trial by fire?
 
(Jeff Zimbalist): I don’t think we could have gotten, first of all the contacts, but also the relationships built with these people had we not already been working in Columbia. We had about a year to make this film before the World Cup, and that was not enough time to gain people’s trust. These are topics that are not just taboo, but still dangerous 15 years later. Speaking about Pablo Escobar, this is a country where they have this phenomenon called the Mano Negra, which is this dark hand. You feel that you’re being watched. There are these anecdotes of journalists just disappearing of sabotage.

And I made a film before this in the Favelas of Rio called “Favela Rising,” and there was a literal danger. You avoid the bullets when they’re flying and then you go home and you sleep well at night. In Columbia nothing happened; I don’t feel like we were ever face to face with literal danger, but our imaginations were running the whole time, and that’s very frightening. The imagination can be more frightening I think than the literal sometimes. And so for that reason it took a long time for people to trust that we would represent them well, but also to open up with us.

Once they did, to varying degrees the interview started rather contained, and by hour three emotion was pouring out. It was cathartic to a certain extent. A lot of the emotion and trauma from that time period has been bottled up; it’s not something you talk about, for the reasons I just mentioned. And so when you’re in a controlled setting with my brother and me and you have an opportunity to let it out it’s almost therapeutic and it just all flows. And the interviews we start framing them wide, and then by the end of the second or third hour you’re really into that tight, extreme close-up.

And if you noticed in the film, almost all the shots used are from the ends of the interviews, where you’re in that extreme close-up, where the emotions are the rawest. Some of the stuff we couldn’t use in the film because it was either endangering or incriminating. We wanted to make sure the safety of our subjects was our first priority.
 
(Q): The film starts and you think this is going to be a movie about solving a crime, and fairly shortly you realize there’s no solving this, there’s no solving the crime, you can only explore how complex it is. It’s amazing when you have these god moments, when you experience things you realize are so much bigger than you; problems that will exist for generations, way beyond your own existence.
 
(Q): I’m curious if you guys ever discover why the goalie wasn’t released from prison in time for the World Cup?
 
(Michael Zimbalist): It’s actually a question we’ve gotten a number of times, partly because it’s its own little movie if you really tackle it. Higuita had always sort of run with Pablo and his gang, had been one of the players that grew up quite poor and had been a good friend of Pablo’s. It came at this moment of course when the government was pouring millions of dollars into this PR campaign.

They actually hired a US PR firm for millions of dollars a year to redefine the image of their country, and the centerpiece of that campaign was the Columbian National Team, with Andres Escobar really emerging as one of the top spokespeople. And then Higuita starts visiting Pablo and talking to the press and creating this commotion. So actually what you find is that the government found another motive, because it wasn’t illegal for Higuita to go visit Pablo, but they found another motive, which was that he had mediated the rescue of a narco trafficker’s daughter and he had received money for his aid in doing that.

So this is something that he was kind of doing on the side all the time, but they really put the surveillance on him and found him guilty of this one thing specifically as a way to keep him from travelling to the US. So he was released from prison shortly after the World Cup.
 
(Q): I’m amazed by the quality of footage that you have throughout this film. Also just the amount of moments that were not recreations but were just part of the actual news footage. When you started to actually get into it were you kind of blown away by what was available?
 
(Jeff Zimbalist): Yeah, it greatly expanded the scope of the project. We knew there was an excellent A story here, but we also didn’t want to make a talking head documentary. We shot the interviews as best we could, but it wasn’t until we knew there were scenes, there was movement, we could place the viewer back during that time period so we could put the viewer there that I think we understood that we could make a theatrical length film. We were psyched; every single gem you find is worth it. We could dig through unlabeled tapes in some dingy, unventilated archive vault for two weeks, and if we came up with a shot that was three seconds and no one had ever seen before it was worth it.
 
(Q): That must be an exciting process in itself, just the digging. There were two really great sports docs of the last decade, “When We Were Kings” and “One Day in September,” and for me I think the film falls really nicely in the tradition of those two films, which is really the expanding of an event you think you know something about, and then once you start to see all this other footage and you get all this insight into the event. It’s beautiful visual story and it just kind of expands your mind.
 
(Q): It’s kind of a poison, a virus, that resulted from Andres. I understand the need to give a sense of hope, but do you think that virus has dissipated in any significant way recently? Is it evident in other Latin American countries?
 
(Jeff Zimbalist): It was important to us to not just extend the negative stereotypes of Columbia, that a majority of the stories we have access to about Columbia and about the developing world in general through mainstream media are stories of things falling apart; op-eds of violence and corruption. And this is a tragic story and we couldn’t coerce this into a cause film or a positive message film like maybe the others that we’ve made. But we also have friends and colleagues in Columbia that we feel very close to. We’ve fallen in love with the country over the course of multiple years and multiple projects working and living there.

There are hardworking, peace loving, law abiding, moral people, and in our experience they are the majority of the population, and yet this minority gets all of the attention. And so as we were going through the process I think what was revealed to us as we sort of had this ethical dilemma about how we were gong to portray Columbia, was that we hitched our wagon to Andres Escobar, to his sister, to his fiancée, that we were giving voice to this other population that historically was rather voiceless in international media. By the end, these people strongly belief that Andres’ death could not be in vain. Whether conscious or unconscious, Andres’ choice to walk into the position of being the sacrificial lamb did start a process of healing in the eyes and in the perspectives of his family and his colleagues and his teammates.

It was important to us that the message at the end, or the conclusion, the final analysis be through the voice of that constituent, who really were our heroes and who I hope were able to challenge our preconceptions about Columbia. Whether or not the film at the end paints Columbia as a pretty place, probably not, but does it point to a Columbia that’s working hard and struggling to overcome their obstacles, and that is slowly succeeding in taking down their homicide and corruption rates, yes.
 
(Michael Zimbalist): I would just second that, that I think it was also a big part of the process of getting the interviews and having the subjects open up because there was such poison at that time that had caused such tragedy and pain that obviously that wasn’t a subject that anybody wanted to revisit if they didn’t feel that there was some prescriptive element there. And that was really I think the straw that broke the camel’s back for these interview subjects, saying it wasn’t in vain and yes, there is a lesson here, and Andres’ has been an inspiration in our lives moving forward, and we do want to tell that story because there is a gem of conviction and goodness in there that not only drives us and our country to make these great strides and progress that we’ve seen in the last few years, but also presents a new Columbia, and hopefully will present to international audiences a more intimate connection with the hardworking people.

As Jeff said, that was our experience of Columbia. We got an apartment and we were living in Columbia for the better half of the year during the production until we had to come back and edit, and a lot of that time was just spent without the cameras with us. Pablo Escobar’s sister is another person that’s gone through an incredible amount of pain, and we met her up in Barrio Pablo Escobar, where you saw the community that Pablo had created for the people that were living in a municipal dump. And it was their 25th anniversary and that was our meeting point, and we spent many dinners getting to know the subjects before we got to that point where we also felt comfortable that this was a story that we wanted to tell because it wasn’t just going to be a downer.
 
(Q): Why is it such a short release and then goes to dvd?
 
(Jeff Zimbalist): It was initially made as a part of the ESPN 30 for 30 series. I don’t think any of us realized that we were going to end up with a theatrical-length documentary, something that could be shown in theaters. ESPN’s gotten behind us, which we’re excited about, and we’re just blessed that we are having a theatrical release with the film. But it’s a part of a schedule and we’re working closely with the distributor. I think it is unconventional, but the fact that we can reach audiences in the theater, which is the way we like to see the film, is important to us.
 
(Q): This is something you never expected, for it to be released theatrically. This is the bonus. I’m really proud of ESPN for actually doing this. It’s a remarkable endeavor, and hopefully particularly this film will be proof to other people to invest in this kind of thing.
 
(Q): Tell me a little bit about how you got your music and your editing to the music.
 
(Jeff Zimbalist): We’ve made films before that have almost always had some element of a music story, music documentary. There’s some element of movement in there and usually the use of music and beats, rhythm especially, is justified because you’re in scenes where people are making the music. In this case, just to create the pace and the momentum and get the drama working we initially cut to songs we liked. It was just editing sort of metrically, because that’s our style, and ultimately saying we’ll probably get rid of the beats because we don’t need them.

We tried it, we actually pulled the beats out at some point and went with what a more traditional score would be, and felt that we lost a lot. We lost a lot of our personality, we lost a lot of the emotion, and it was important to us that the experience of watching the film was consistent with our own experience of living and working in Columbia, and hopefully consistent with the rollercoaster ride of emotions that living in Columbia during that time period was.

So we went back and replaced the songs that we had stuck in there which were too expensive to buy rights for with original composition of the same beats per minute with a similar vibe but a little bit more Latin based. We have a great composer named Ion Furjanic, who we worked with on “Favela Rising” as well, lives in Malaysia. We had another composer in Hong Kong, three musicians in New York, and we were using FTP just firing stuff all over the globe. It’s important to use to keep enough of our budget for post so that we can work with the best as far as sound mix, sound design, cleaning of the sound. Especially if we’re going to hit theaters, which eventually was our dream with this, and then knowing that we were going to play at Tribeca and Cannes, we said we’ve got to hit this out of the part.
 
(Q): How comfortable was Andres’ family with first telling the Pablo Escobar storyline, which is more well known?
 
(Michael Zimbalist): Of course the process for us was one that evolved over time as well. So we were always presenting our understanding of what we were going for at any given moment. Andres’ family has been, we could have a three hour conversation about the back and forths there, and both real joys and amazing collaborations, and also there have been some misunderstandings that we had to overcome those hurdles. Generally I do think that from the football side of the equation there was a real strong reluctance to talk anything narco. Not only because it’s generally a taboo subject in Columbia, but also because it stood to undermine the great success that this team had had and the great talent that was quite real that was playing on the field.

And so we did want to try and draw some distinction in that regard between the purchasing power that the money gave and the strong arm tactics that helped from the side from these drug cartels, with these amazing players who might not have played in Columbia if they hadn’t had that economic backing. I also think similar to Andres’ family sort of sitting down and having a certain sense that they had a message they wanted to tell. I think his ex-fiancé really brings it home. We spoke to her for probably an hour and a half just about her own struggle. For three years she was really on a couch in the direst straights and it took a lot for her to get back up. We talked a lot about that process for her, and ultimately I think it was the motivation for her wanting to sit down and do the interview.

And that cathartic experience for her I think was also something present for the soccer players. For example, the head of the soccer federation during that time who was later in jail for six years for money laundering, he was difficult. He hadn’t spoken to anybody after getting out of jail and it had been years, and he was very reluctant to sit down. And he said “I’ll sit down on one condition, which is that if anybody mentions the word “narco” I’m standing up and I’m walking out.” And we said that was fine and we went in and we started the interview just really talking about soccer, and he did a pretty darn good job of explaining the financial climate of Columbian soccer in the late ‘80s without mentioning anything narco.

He was really picking his words carefully, and then finally he just kind of threw his hands up and said “Alright, look. This is the deal with narco money,” and then we went off. He was a three-plus hour interview where he was saying how are you going to talk about the Chicago Bulls’ success in the ‘90s without mentioning Michael Jordan. Let’s be honest with what happened here, and yeah it helped. Actually, after the interview stopped he then went on to tell me all kinds of anecdotes about his close friendship with the cartel and stuff, which I’m not allowed to say here.
 
(Q): I remember hearing the story of the guy who scored a goal in his own goal back in ’94, and I never really knew the full story. I’m so thrilled that I know at least part of the complete story now. I was so touched by your film, and I know everyone here was as well, and it stayed with me for days. That’s kind of the truest test of a great film, so thank you for making this film.

End.