Well, the Peruvian voters have spoken. This past Sunday they held a run-off to choose a new president. The losing candidate, Keiko Fujimori, was notable not only because she stood to become Peru’s first female president but also because she’s the daughter (and political heir) of Alberto Fujimori, who ruled Peru for ten years (1990-2000), then was ousted in the wake of a massive scandal involving both corruption and human rights abuse. Today he’s serving twenty-five years in a Peruvian prison.
Why am I so interested? Because in 1990, when Alberto Fujimori first sought the presidency, his opponent was the wonderful writer (and future Nobel laureate) Mario Vargas Llosa. And Vargas Llosa just happens to be the cousin of Luis Llosa, a filmmaker fondly known as Lucho by all of us at Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures. The story of how Lucho came into the Corman fold is a classic. In the late 1980s, Roger was flying to Buenos Aires to check on a co-production when his plane was forced down in Lima, Peru by bad weather. Never one to waste a moment, he took a taxi into town, flipped open the yellow pages, and made a few calls to movie production companies, asking who was the best filmmaker in Lima. Everyone agreed on Luis Llosa. Roger contacted Lucho, made a quick deal, and zipped off to Argentina a few hours later.
As a result of this brief encounter, Concorde began churning out Peru-based movies. Peru, fortuitously, offers a wealth of scenic possibilities: towering mountains, grasslands, jungle, the Amazon River, and picturesquely crumbling South American colonial cities. With Lucho acting as local producer and sometimes director, Roger used Peru as a backdrop for urban action flicks (Hour of the Assassin), Vietnam battle dramas (Heroes Stand Alone), tales of futuristic squalor (Crime Zone), and even a Jules Verne adventure saga (Eight Hundred Leagues Down the Amazon). I have a screenplay credit on Fire on the Amazon, an environmental thriller still watched today because of a steamy jungle tryst in which a very young Sandra Bullock takes her clothes off. But avoiding mosquito bites during nude scenes was not the only challenge faced by Corman people. This was the era when Shining Path guerrillas were on a rampage, and film crews sometimes found themselves detained at gunpoint.
Lucho briefly went Hollywood, directing big-budget, star-driven studio movies like The Specialist (uniting Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone) and Anaconda (uniting Jennifer Lopez and a large snake), before he returned to Lima to stay. What’s special is that his daughter Claudia has taken up where he left off. As a writer-director, she uses her Peruvian heritage to magical effect. I saw her debut film, Madeinusa, at the Palm Springs International Film Festival circa 2006, and have never forgotten it. Her second feature, The Milk of Sorrow, became Peru’s first-ever Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film. I’m thrilled for her and for Lucho. Sadly, I’ve lost touch with him. If anyone out there has a Peruvian connection, please offer him felicitaciones on my behalf.
