How a Movement in Chile Is Transforming Film Worldwide

Here’s what you need to know about the Eli Roth-backed filmmaking movement known as Chilewood.
A scene from The Stranger.
A scene from The Stranger.courtesy IFC Midnight

Chances are you haven’t heard much about The Stranger—it’s been hard to pick up any frequency other than “Jurassic” this week—but director Guillermo Amoedo’s unnerving sophomore feature is worth your attention. On the surface, it’s an atmospheric genre movie about a bearded nomad out to kill his lost wife, who shares his thirst for human blood. But that’s just the story. Deeper down, in its marrow, it is the embodiment of filmmaking in Chilewood—a movement of indefatigable artists who are poised to change how movies are made in 2015.

The term “Chilewood” refers to an emerging camp in its eponymous country where genre films are being made by a myriad of talents and attracting high-profile names like Eli Roth and Keanu Reeves. And the etymology of the catchy name originates with its creator Nicolás López, who dropped out of high school at 15 to produce a show for MTV Latin America and never looked back. “When I was 10 years old I used to direct short films with my friends and we called that Chilewood,” says López. “Now I’m 32 and I’m still playing with my friends, but this time, the movies are longer.”

It’s true: At 32, López has written and directed seven feature length movies, attracting like-minded artists from around the world to come and work in Chile. The Stranger, hitting theaters and VOD today, is just the latest offering to come out of the movement López started as a kid. Here’s everything you need to know about Chile’s most fascinating new moviemakers.

Chilewood’s Mission Statement

Every burgeoning movement, filmic or otherwise, needs a raison d’etre. For Chilewood, that purpose is simple: “We want to make genre movies that we want to see for the entire world,” says Eli Roth, an instrumental player in the movement’s growth. Since joining the Chilewood camp in 2012 with Aftershock, Roth and co. have been largely successful in crafting those genre pictures for the masses. They’ve done so by constructing, from the ground up, their own methodology. “We can take bits and pieces of the best from all the different systems,” says Roth, “and really shoot however we want.” For Roth, this means moving away from the studio system, where he believes “things get overdeveloped to death and are very star-dependent.” In Chile, they prefer to “go on instinct and not second guess ourselves,” says Roth. “We take chances and cast new faces.”

Making Good Genre Movies For Less Money

So how exactly do films like The Green Inferno, the Keanu Reeves-starring Knock Knock, or The Stranger get made in Chile? In an attempt to keep pace with the degenerating attention spans of contemporary culture (a noble, if futile, endeavor), Chilewood movies can be defined by a single guiding principle: efficiency. “There are labor laws, but there are no unions,” says Roth. “In Chile, everyone does everything. It’s more like film school, shooting with your friends.” This process is antithetical to Hollywood, where “the camera people can’t touch the grip equipment,” says Roth. He continues, “I’m not anti-union, but in Chile they don’t know how many people it’s supposed to take to do a certain job, so one guy does the job of 10 people. Two people built the entire village in Green Inferno. A goldfish grows to the size of its bowl.”

Certainly the absence of unions breeds productivity, but what if the goldfish, overworked and unsuspecting, explodes? López insists that some unions do exist, but they prefer hiring independent contractors. “We pay them better, and we’re trying to do what they used to do in the old Hollywood system,” he says. “We have everybody on our payroll and we pay them for a full year. Instead of having a different editor for every project, I have one really good editor that gets a salary every month.”

Chilewood Filmmakers Are Inspired By Woody Allen

Unencumbered by the stifling bureaucratic hoops plaguing Hollywood, Roth and co. make movies quickly and cheaply. As a result, they’ve adopted Woody Allen’s model for moviemaking: “Make enough to do another,” says Roth. “The Woody Allen documentary changed our lives. ‘We said, this guys is 78 years old, what’s our excuse?'” Of course, Allen’s career has often suffered because of this ethos, where quantity supersedes quality. Nevertheless, Roth insists that he and his cohorts “try to not exceed our bandwidth, but we like pushing ourselves to see how fast we can finish a movie.”

Stranger director Guillermo Amoedo.Stranger director Guillermo Amoedo. courtesy IFC Midnight

The Emerging Talent from Chilewood Is a Teenager

At the tail-end of 2013, López was promoting Best Worst Friends—the sequel to his beloved film Promedio Rojo—when he met Nicolas Duran, a sprightly teenager sporting “a shirt of Santos, which was my biggest flop ever.” Some friendly idle chatter was exchanged between the rabid fan and López before they went their separate ways. Jump ahead three months and The Stranger is mired in pre-production, unable to move forward until López and director Guillermo Amoedo find a kid that could “speak English perfectly without any accent,” says López. Failed attempt after failed attempt led them to social media: “One day Guillermo tweeted we needed somebody for the role of Peter, and suddenly Duran started responding like crazy.” Duran, who never finished middle school or high school but was on Chile’s version of X Factor at age 15, booked the role of Peter, the mercurial graffiti artist. “It’s like a Hollywood story,” says López, describing Duran’s unexpected ascent to stardom.

Eli Roth Is Using Data Testing to Discover an Audience

With the erosion of privacy and emergence of connectivity, it was only a matter of time before resourceful artists found a way to systematically unearth an audience. To market their movies to a specific, niche demographic, Roth has been working through his digital company, CryptTV, which he says is “partnered with a data company that does very specific data testing and is incredibly effective.” He continues, “we’re able to build an entire audience through the content we’re putting out on CryptTV, and retarget that audience for films like The Green Inferno.”

Chilewood’s Latest Film Was Funded By Their Government

It’s hard to envision a day in which our elected officials up on the Hill decide to dump tax dollars into a horror flick, but that’s precisely what happened with The Stranger. “It was a special exception,” says Roth. “We got a grant from the Chilean government to make this and it allowed us to shoot the movie entirely financed.” However, for most of Chilewood’s ventures, the money for their next project is made through “pre-selling all the foreign territories,” then slowly rolling out the picture through VOD and iTunes.

They’re Using Top-of-the-Line Equipment

Without spending an exorbitant amount of money on special effects, the ingenious Chilewood squad has managed to make low-budget movies that don’t look it. “We’re doing everything now in 4K (starting with The Stranger and Knock Knock),” says López, “shooting with the new Canon cameras.” For López, being on the pulse of technology has always been a top priority. “For Fuck my Life (released in 2012), that was the first movie shot in the world with a Canon 7D that was in theaters.” He continues, “everybody is now shooting with drones, but we’ve been using drones since 2010, instead of using a crane or GoPros.” But despite the fancy gear, everything that’s shot is still being completed in-house, brought to life by a tight-knit group of determined artists, hungry to create.