#carpax

[comicweek]

Ángel Manuel Soto - on Carapax backstory and shooting Blue Beetle

Brian Davids: I’ve always liked Raoul Max Trujillo, and Carapax represents a huge opportunity for him. Was the character’s School of the Americas backstory something you pulled from your Bane pitch? 

 Ángel Manuel Soto: Yeah, when we were building the character of Carapax as a Latino villain in the movie, I purposefully wanted him to have a reason why he’s a villain. Oftentimes, when Latinos are villains in movies, they never tell you why. They’re just bad people, and I think that stereotype has been very harmful to our community. There’s a lot of obscure history in Latin America that the history books don’t teach us, but all of Latin America knows it. A lot of the violence has been perpetrated in part by U.S. military interventionism, and one of the more obscure topics is the School of the Americas, which started the whole neoliberalism movement. Even before it was called the School of the Americas [in 1963], it was a more organized attempt from the CIA to inflict the same type of interventionism, only they were using locals to do it for them.

So this history has never been taught in schools, and we wanted to have our characters live in a world that is grounded in the realities that affect us. And when we were developing Raoul Max Trujillo’s character, we always had the idea that maybe Carapax and Bane came from the same experiments. Of course, the backstory of Bane is different. His whole journey is very different from Carapax, but the fact that they’re both victims of historical exploitation in our communities is something that I wanted to share. Maybe they brushed shoulders or maybe they never saw each other, but they’re both victims of a similar experimentation.

BD: Can you say what you went back and added earlier this year during those couple days of additional photography? 

AS: To be honest, we didn’t add anything that wasn’t in the script already. We shot things that were in the script, but we just didn’t have time to do them [during principal photography]. In order for me to finish the movie, we needed those extra days. So they weren’t necessarily reshoots, but we did reshoot one scene to make it tighter. Everything else was a lot of the backstory that was very important to the story and Raoul Max Trujillo’s character. It was very important for me to tell the backstory of our villain, and that was pretty much the reason why we continued shooting. So I don’t call it reshoots; it was just finishing what was promised to me.

BD: Besides the Nana reveal, Carapax’s backstory was my favorite part of the movie, especially since it led to Jaime (Xolo Maridueña) showing compassion.

AS: I fought for that scene and to be able to tell the story of the interventionism in Latin America. If you go through Latin American cinema, all this stuff has been explored, but it’s never been explored in mainstream Hollywood. So we had a minute to showcase this history of violence and how the exploitation and the weaponization of somebody else’s trauma has been used, historically, to inflict more violence on behalf of corporations that only want greed and power. So now that you mention it, it was very important to show that, and I think that is my proudest moment in the movie. We need to recognize that these issues are not just fantasy. They’re very, very real, and if we’re more aware of stuff like this, I believe that we can have a more compassionate and empathetic world.

BD: And revealing Carapax’s backstory in reverse probably had a lot to do with the moment landing as well as it did.

AS: Yeah, doing it backwards was a creative decision. We designed that whole sequence as a peeling back of layers to get to the root of Carapax’s trauma, which was the fact that this kid witnessed the death of his mom. And then through that experience, he now understands that the woman [Victoria Kord] who’s been exploiting him was responsible, to some extent, for everything that caused his trauma.

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swag

[justeraaron]

Wat do u men dats not a word????? Isnt dat wat peeple ask when they try too buy da new car??? A CARPAX????

[el-is-away]

lusii ... aooaaohhoah

[el-is-away]

ultimate bebito. sees ghosts floats in the air like a really cool dude that he is and then passes out from exhaustion. also looks like he listens to my chemical romance (more like my chemical matesprit? lmao wh)