Chronicles of a Wandering Saint filmmaker Tomás Gómez Bustillo: "Making Fun Sh#t With My Friends"

DENNIS ANYONE? with Dennis Hensley

Dennis is joined via Zoom by Argentine-born filmmaker Tomás Gómez Bustillo to talk about his delightful, three-time Indie Spirit Award-nominated film Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, which was first mentioned on this podcast earlier this year when Drew Droege raved about it during our year-end movie wrap-up. The movie is about an elderly woman in a small rural town in Argentina named Rita (Wild Tales Monica Villas) who is so competitive with the other ladies from her church that she fakes a miracle to try and improve her status. Tomás talks about how the film was partly inspired by the time he spent as a young Catholic missionary in towns just like Rita's. He also talks--cryptically--about the giant swerve the movie takes halfway through and how many people he shared the script with told him he could never pull it off. He also recalls getting rejected by Sundance and another major festival and actually having a ritual where he let it go. He burned a piece of paper with the film's name on it, thanked the film for all it had brought to his life and accepted that it wasn't going to be a festival movie...and then days later, he got accepted by South By Southwest, where the film was a breakout hit. Other topics include: graduating college with a degree in Political Science in Argentina and then leaving that path behind to study film at AFI in Los Angeles, his love for magical realism, how his pursuit of music led to him discovering filmmaking, why The Lion King f-ed him up as a kid and the movie costume he wish he owned so he could wear it around the house.

www.chroniclesofawanderingsaint.com