In Spanish, the word problemista can mean a number of things: It can refer to someone who is problematic or a troublemaker to others. In writing his debut film, Problemista, now in theaters worldwide, filmmaker Julio Torres designates the term to those with a compulsion to create nightmare scenarios for themselves. “Maybe there is something that you can take away from the nightmare,” he tells Vogue.
In Problemista, Torres draws from his early days in New York to play Alejandro, a hapless but whimsical toy designer thrust into a bureaucratic maelstrom when he loses his job and needs to secure a sponsor to stay in the States. He sets his hopes on Elizabeth, a tempestuous art critic played by Tilda Swinton, who takes him on as her freelance assistant—and emotional stress ball. Wu-Tang Clan rapper RZA, Chilean actor Catalina Saavedra, and Torres’s college roommate Spike Einbinder also make appearances, and looming throughout the film is the voice of Isabella Rossellini, who narrates this topsy-turvy maze run through the US immigration system.
Torres, 37, is a celebrated left-field comedic voice with credits on Saturday Night Live; he has also been a star and writer on the HBO show Los Espookys, a favorite among Latinos of the goth persuasion. But before he built this impressive résumé, Torres was my classmate at the New School in New York City—the soft-spoken son of a civil engineer and architect in El Salvador, most discernible by his sweaters and under-the-radar wit.
“I came here in pursuit of being a filmmaker,” says Torres. “I used the tools that I had at my disposal—not a ton of money and not very good grades. So I screwed up.”
We first met in 2010 as writing majors and student workers at the university’s Welcome Center. A sterile, glass terrarium facing Fifth Avenue, it was designed to appeal to prospective students seeking a progressive (read: expensive) campus in chic downtown Manhattan. Behind the New School’s glossy commercial exterior, Torres and I conducted campus tours on behalf of the admissions department.
As an international student, Torres was tasked with giving tours to parents from all over the world—including Colombian actress Sofia Vergara, whom he describes as “our queen”—but at the same time, he was navigating the deep labyrinth of US immigration policy, quietly panicking about his ability to procure a work visa after graduation. “It felt a lot like wandering in a dark room, just feeling around and seeing what comes next,” he says. “I thought, I don’t know how, but I intend to make the best of this.”
I meet Torres again in early March for a Friday-night screening of Problemista at an AMC in Los Angeles. He’s wearing a loose-fitting trench coat and two dashes of what he calls “archival glitter” on his eyelids, which he says he cribbed from the Euphoria stash at the A24 headquarters—one of the perks of debuting his film with the cult studio. We spoke about his days of precarity in New York, finding a close friend in Swinton, and the bright side of being a trouble seeker, or a problemista.
Vogue: Seeing this representation of your early years in New York, it felt like I was reminiscing with you on the screen. What, if anything, did you pull from that experience in writing this movie?
Julio Torres: When we met, I very much wanted to be a film or TV writer. Because it was the New School, I fully graduated and I still didn’t really know how to do it. You have to want to know how. Having to take so many jobs that you’re not great at was [a big part of] the experience. I was a miserable tour guide. I didn’t hate it, but I was just not good at it. That became a pattern for my postcollege years. When I graduated, I was begging them to keep me on staff.
They needed international students for the gig—it made them seem very cosmopolitan. Can I tell people you gave Sofia Vergara a tour?
Our queen! She won’t remember it. International students were a population they were trying to attract. But there is a narrow window of jobs that you are allowed to take as an international student. You could not take any off-campus job, but you could only take three kinds of jobs. So even though I was bad at it, I was very grateful to have it. I thought, At least I’m in the right place. I’m in New York.
I do think our alma mater was a space of incubation for all these offbeat people—people who just didn’t know where they belonged, besides knowing that it definitely wasn’t NYU. How did that become a cornerstone of your writing?
The New School is definitely an island of misfit toys! I remember telling my roommate, “God, we’re all just a bunch of dented cans on sale here.” But those are the kind of people who take center stage in my work—those othered by any means, even if only psychologically. Protagonists who are unusual protagonists.
Despite what American studios consider the most marketable immigrant stories—i.e. feel-good stories—real immigrant stories are not one-size-fits-all. But if there’s anything that connects immigrants here, it is the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of staying in the US. It renders undocumented people invisible, as we see in your film, but even at its most inefficient, it lends itself to great absurdist comedy. How did you come to find levity in something that can be so devastating to others?
That’s just how I see life! It’s how I process it. I think I made something that feels emotionally honest and isn’t righteous or didactic. It’s just life as I experience it. And the only narrative that I held onto was the minutiae of the process of getting a work visa, which provided the outline for the movie. That gave it the twists and turns.
Alejandro meets so many characters along the way who participate in this system—and they seem helpless, but they’re really not. Alejandro feels deeply and tries to appeal to the humanity of everyone in this process but is constantly let down.
First of all, I am prone to making a tangible argument a more philosophical one, which is where I think I lose a lot of people. But I hope that the movie gives people the curiosity to look at these enforcers and be in their shoes a little. My friend River [Ramirez], who plays the Bank of America employee, brought so much humanity there. You could see that that character was just so torn [about charging an overdraft fee]. That’s something that I told all the actors—even the woman firing Alejandro at the beginning of the movie isn’t, like, the great big American villain in this immigrant story. She has a really hard time at work, and now she has to contend with this employee who’s incompetent. So it’s either her or him.
Speaking of finding humanity in difficult people: Tilda Swinton plays this demanding, entitled white woman whom some might describe as a Karen. But we meet her as the problemista, or someone who makes trouble. She is the problemista referenced in the film’s title, right?
They’re both the problem! Alejandro is choosing the hardest route. And he could always say, What am I doing? I’ll just go back home, be an English teacher, and have some sort of dignified life waiting there for me. But he doesn’t want that. They both have this addiction to problems.
I do like that they’re both the problem! I think Alejandro finds some valuable things to learn from her. What can the rest of us learn from the prickly people in the world?
In Elizabeth, Alejandro sees a challenge. He’s drawn to it. And I think you can learn from someone without taking their totality. I’m not saying she isn’t a nightmare; she definitely is a nightmare! But maybe there is something that you can take away from the nightmare. Eventually, that’s how Alejandro gets what he needs.
In working on this film, you and Tilda developed this beautiful friendship. At what point did you feel really connected with her as a person?
It was really our first Zoom. It was just so funny. Then it got more cemented when we started talking about her hair and look—the back and forth [when] sending pictures to each other, it was a great time. Working with her felt as comfortable as working with my friends.
On the topic of hair: How did you land on her frizzy red mop?
I kept seeing red for her. And I know that she’s spiky. And then Tilda brought up the texture. We kept adding ideas and adding ideas, and then I thought, Maybe that’s what her hair is: too many ideas! We wanted a hairstyle that would really be at odds with her hair texture, to imagine that she had something different in mind, but her hair just wouldn’t allow that, but she chooses this highly demanding hairstyle anyway. It’s like the worst of all worlds. This lady chose the hardest thing and is also the least equipped to handle it.
That’s how deeply you develop your characters—hers just rips through every moment onscreen. I just thought of the part where she’s furiously thumbing through her iPad and getting flustered at a photo of a cockatoo. Did you write some of these gags as you were shooting?
I wrote her in as “pecking manically at an iPad.” And when we wrote the shot listing, I thought, We need a shot of her hands running through the iPad. So production design asked, “What kind of pictures would this lady have on an iPad?” I was like, “Surprise me.” And so they really, really nailed it—she has a bunch of pictures from a museum. And maybe a parrot she saw once in a garden.
And she is...an exotic bird of a person.
She’s an exotic bird! Something I really aspire for as a director is to provide a playpen for every department to expand their imagination, even in the smallest of details.
I do want to talk about shifting into a director role. You’ve come up as a very skilled writer and comedian. You played the blue-haired heir to a chocolate fortune in Los Espookys. What made you decide to take the roles of both lead actor and director in your first feature film?
I knew I wanted to be a director, but I thought, Maybe it’s too soon. I was supposed to direct at least one episode of Los Espookys to see if I liked it, but then COVID shifted every timeline. For [Problemista], we were having a hard time thinking of an appropriate directorial choice. Tilda was one of the main motivators—she told me the most exciting choice would be if I did it. That choice helped the movie [become] its truest self. I don’t know if it’s the best movie, but it’s the most honest movie that way.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.