La Máquina showrunner Marco Ramírez, on working with Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna
Raquel Laguna/ SUCOPRESS. La Máquina showrunner Marco Ramírez talks in this interview about working alongside Mexican actors Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna in the Hulu´s drama series. The six-episode series La Máquina follows Esteban Osuna (Gael García Bernal), a boxer on the downswing of his career whose manager and Botox addicted best friend, Andy Lujan (Diego Luna), is trying to make a star again. But Andy’s own dealings with the criminal underworld pull Esteban and his ex-wife Irasema (Eiza González) into a dark side of boxing that neither wants to be involved in. Even though Esteban knows the boxing rematch has potentially dangerous consequences, the aging Mexican fighter wants to go ahead with the fight at a time when accumulated neurological trauma is making it harder for him to determine what is real. Lucía Méndez, Jorge Perugorría, Andrés Delgado, Karina Gidi and Dariam Coco also star in La Máquina.
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00:00What inspired you to tell this story about a boxer in such a vulnerable moment in his life?
00:06Yeah, I think we've seen a lot of stories of boxers kind of rising from poverty to make it
00:11and we haven't seen a lot of stories of boxers who have already made it
00:14who are just trying to exit gracefully.
00:16And so I think that's what I was really interested in here
00:18is the thought of a retiree, of a boxer who wants to make sure he's remembered well.
00:24How was the collaboration process with Diego and Gary?
00:27It was amazing.
00:28They came in with very specific ideas for who they wanted the characters to be.
00:32The whole project began with a conversation that they had.
00:35Supposedly they were drunk in Berlin and had a conversation about the characters that they wanted to play.
00:40And Guy really wanted to play a boxer
00:42and Diego really wanted to play a very kind of larger-than-life manager.
00:46So the whole project begins with that conversation
00:49and with them saying, I want to play this kind of a character.
00:51And they know they have that kind of chemistry
00:53and so by the time it came to me, it was a couple years later,
00:55it had kind of grown a little bit
00:57and I knew the thing that we needed to keep front and center
00:59was their chemistry and also their ideas for who these characters were.
01:03What can the audience expect from this TV series?
01:07I think it's a cliche to say expect the unexpected,
01:10but I will say what they can expect is a tone unlike any that they might have seen before.
01:15The tone of the show, it's not just a boxing show,
01:18it's not just a crime show,
01:20it's not just kind of a fun brotherhood, you know, road trip show either.
01:25It's its own other weird thing and that's what drew me to it
01:28and that's what drew all of us to it.
01:29We didn't want to make something we had seen before.
01:31We wanted to make the kind of thing we had never seen before.
01:33The show even has karaoke in it.
01:35What was the biggest challenge for you?
01:37Putting together, like, writing, showrunner, producing, everything, doing everything.
01:43The biggest challenge, there were two.
01:45The biggest challenge was we had a production window,
01:47we knew we had everybody available
01:49because these actors, Asa, Diego, Guy, are all very sought after,
01:52so we knew we have availability,
01:54so we had to hit those dates.
01:56And we did, luckily.
01:58The other big production challenge was probably the big fights,
02:00the biggest arena stuff,
02:02which I luckily, as writer, got to just step back and say,
02:05you guys, I'll deal with it,
02:06but Gabriel, the director, did a great job of making those arena fights,
02:09we have two of them in the show,
02:11making them feel huge and alive and epic
02:13and we rented out whole stadiums to be able to shoot the show.
02:15Besides boxing, of course, La Máquina explores themes like friendship, failure.
02:23What kind of message did you want to tell through this story?
02:28I think the message that we're told through a lot of boxing stories,
02:31through a lot of sports stories,
02:33is that winning in the sport is winning in life.
02:37And I think we all understood something deeper than that and bigger than that here,
02:40which is, like, winning in the ring doesn't necessarily mean winning in life,
02:43and similarly, losing in the ring doesn't mean losing in life.
02:47Basically, that sport is wonderful and sport got these characters as far as it did,
02:50but there's something a lot bigger outside of that, and that is life itself.
02:54What's next for you?
02:55Next for me, I have a musical opening next year on Broadway.
02:59I wrote a musical based on the music of the Buena Vista Social Club,
03:02and that'll be opening in March.