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“I Want to Humanize That Symbol”: Isabel Castro on ‘Selena y Los Dinos’

By Natalia Keogan


Grainy photograph of the singer Selena, standing in front of bright stage lights.

Selena Quintanilla. Courtesy of Sundance Institute


Isabel Castro’s sophomore feature centers the family band that catapulted Mexican American singer Selena into pop stardom. Given voice as never before through “hundreds, potentially thousands” of hours of archival footage, Selena Quintanilla constantly gushes about her band—sister Suzette on drums, brother A.B. on bass/producing duties, eventual husband Chris on guitar, and parents Marcella and Abraham as just about everything in between—as the key to her fame. Chronicling the family’s scrappy ventures in the late ’70s through the singer’s cold-blooded murder in 1995, Selena y Los Dinos offers die-hard fans a glimpse into the pop star’s tender interiority while also serving as a comprehensive primer for those who are unfamiliar with “The Queen of Tejano Music.” 

March 31, just two months after the film’s Sundance world premiere, will mark 30 years since Selena’s assassination. While the singer’s legacy has remained monumental—with her visage often appearing on mass-produced products—Selena y Los Dinos preserves the charismatic and sentimental soul behind the fashion-forward, ruby-lipped entertainer through the memories of her beloved family, with Suzette and A.B. signed on as producers. 

I spoke with Castro a week before her film’s Park City debut, which was yesterday. We discuss the herculean process of combing through the Quintanillas’ archives, paying homage to Gregory Nava’s 1997 biopic and the filmmaker’s favorite Selena song. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

 

DOCUMENTARY: How did you become involved with the Quintanilla family to tell this story? 

ISABEL CASTRO: My first film, Mija, is about two young Latinas navigating the music industry. After years of Universal trying to make the Selena film, the Quintanilla family said, “Okay, we’re ready.” They reached out to me and asked if I was interested, to which I replied, “Obviously.” I met with Suzette over Zoom and we hit it off. That was about two and a half years ago. 

D: How many hours of archival video were at your disposal? What was the process of sifting through it all? 

IC: We had hundreds, potentially thousands, of hours. The archive was the most time intensive part of this filmmaking process. We started by going to the Quintanillas’ headquarters, Q Productions in Corpus Christi. They have a closet where they keep everything they’ve ever screened or filmed: hundreds of VHS tapes, beta cams, some original film canisters. The producer, Daniel Torres, and I went to Corpus over 10 times and cataloged every single thing. We worked with Selena’s keyboardist Ricky Vela, who now works at Super Productions, to watch everything and figure out whether we had the highest quality version that we could find, which we would then digitize in high-res to create a digital archive. 

We also worked with an amazing archival producer named María Cristina Alemán. She was based in Mexico City and did a wealth of research, reached out to local news syndicates and dug through social media and YouTube. Another thing that Daniel and I did was we went to a university in Texas where one of Selena’s biographers donated all of his research. Last but not least, we went through all of the family's personal albums and scanned every single image. This entire process took over a year and a half. 

D: Was there any resistance at all, particularly from Chris or other band members, to participate? 

IC: The family, Chris and her bandmates were so incredibly warm and receptive. I very deliberately chose to keep the interviews within the family and the bandmates. I didn’t want to have talking head interviews from experts or film executives or folks talking about her cultural legacy. I wanted the film to feel as personal as possible. A big objective for the film was to have it not just be about Selena and what she symbolizes, but Selena the person. By the time we interviewed them, we’d already been working alongside the family with this archive for over a year and a half, so Daniel and I knew them pretty well, which resulted in the warmth and openness that you feel in the interviews. Everyone just felt really ready and kind of eager to share their experience of growing up with Selena and what it's been like since her passing in 1995. 

D: It appears that the talking head interviews with Selena’s immediate family unfold during one day of shooting. How did you guide them through your desired story beats? 

IC: It was an incredible feat. We did the interviews over the course of one week. Each of them are three to seven hours long. When we started the interviews, it was still unclear to us exactly how the story was going to be shaped. We had strung out a lot of the archive in chronological order, but we didn’t have a concrete understanding of the major story beats. The challenge was to try and be as comprehensive as possible while being as emotionally specific as we could. I worked on the interview questions over many months. While we were doing the archival research, we were going out to lunch and dinners and having conversations with Mr. Q and getting a sense of the stories that meant a lot to them. 

Across all of my work, my interview process is that I work on the questions, review them, print them out, have them on my lap and then I just don't look at them. I organize them by chronology and by topic, so it’s kind of like I have a way in my brain of moving through a conversation. They were all just really, really long conversations in which I could glance down at a cheat sheet and make sure I was covering certain timeframes, themes or ideas.

D: Obviously, the most famous film about Selena is the 1997 biopic. How did you ensure that you didn’t get bogged down by its legacy? 

IC: How do I differentiate myself from that film while paying homage to it? Selena is really well-written and constructed, so inevitably there were going to be a lot of parallels. The number one objective of my film was to make it feel as intimate and emotionally authentic as possible. That extended to the way that we shot the interviews, which was meant to feel really photographic and warm, to the way that we dealt with the graphics, which was to show them in photo albums. The 1997 film is the “Hollywood” version of her story. Our film is the scrapbook version. There are a lot of anecdotes that are the same in both, but I tried to be as rooted in the emotional experience of her family as possible, so you can experience Selena’s life through their eyes. 

D: Like Gregory Nava’s film, yours also opens with her iconic Houston Astrodome performance. What inspired you to start here? 

IC: From the beginning I had wanted to start with the Astrodome show to pay homage to the ’97 film and because it’s one of her most iconic looks and performances. It was her last major concert before she passed away. In the ’97 film, you start backstage and then you go into the performance. There were a lot of different ways we tried to have the viewer connect to her on an intimate level before you saw her on stage, so that’s why we landed on this face-to-face interview where you feel like you’re almost talking to her.

D: Something your film uniquely does is grapple with Selena’s legacy after her death. What was important to capture about the moment of her passing and how her legacy has evolved? 

IC: We’re coming up on 30 years after her death. The way that that grief has suspended and shifted over the years for everyone at Q Productions has been really interesting. I wanted the viewer to feel the stages of grief while watching it—disbelief, then anger and then deep, deep sadness. Then we land where we’re at now, where she’s just become a symbol, but I want to humanize that symbol. She was a young woman whose life was cut too short. Something that most other films have never dealt with is looking at the way that her family has managed that grief. They lost their sun, you know? I think the Quintanilla family’s been misunderstood. In the wake of her death, they have really oriented their energy into trying to keep her memory alive. 

D: My final question is one of personal taste: What would you say your favorite Selena song is? 

IC: I am just a sucker for “Como La Flor.” It’s really emphasized in the film, so I think you’ll probably feel my bias. 


Natalia Keogan is a critic and journalist based in NYC. Her bylines include Filmmaker Magazine, A.V. Club, Reverse Shot, and Paste, amongst others.