Sleep Dealer's Leonor Varela Plugs in

Sleep Dealer, which opens today, is a must-see. It’s an inventive sci-fi movie by first-time director Alex Rivera that dares to take on immigration, labor issues, technology and the primal human desire to connect and rolls it all up into one cool, smart package that also manages to be funny and sexy. Starring Leonor Varela and Jacob Vargas, it centers around Memo, a 20-something guy from rural Mexico (newcomer Luis Fernando Peña), who lives in a near-future where the border has been closed, but American corporations still manage to exploit workers through remote robotics. Chilean actress Leonor Varela plays a journalist whom Memo meets on his way to search for work in Tijuana. I spoke to Leonor about her thoughts on the movie’s message and her own nomadic childhood after leaving Chile after the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet.

SITV.COM: This movie takes a lot of things that have become part of our every day lives—technology, blogs, internet, immigration—and spins it in a fresh new way. What is the most interesting aspect of it for you?
LV: I love the way Alex (Rivera) weaves technology into a sci-fi movie that is not the typical perspective of a sci-fi movie. Here you have a hero that comes from a rural piece of land. It’s not Tom Cruise. It’s a completely different hero. Here you have a sci-fi movie that takes place in Tijuana. It’s not in New York, it’s not Tokyo. So we’re looking at a story that is told from a very different perspective. It makes it feel like it’s making the sci-fi genre Latin, making it very specifically part of our culture. And by doing so, it becomes very universal.

SITV.COM: But it’s funny in parts, too.
LV: Alex instilled it with many little great moments of humor amidst all this crazy technology, that includes plugging into these nodes that go into your nervous system. It puts you in a place of being fascinated by the technology and yet he instilled between fear and fascination, humor. So there are these great moments of absurdity that puts everything into this perspective and make the movie flow very easily.

SITV.COM: So you play Luz, who is a journalist, whom Memo meets on a bus on his way to Tijuana. She wants to write a story that will change the world. What attracted you to her?
LV: She really does feel like she wants to tell a story that will make a difference and actually help people connect. Luz represents hope in this movie; as her name means in Spanish, light. She brings light into the situation. She makes the story really move forward, with her desire to make people connect. She looks for stories that are about real people, real feelings and she uses paradoxically, this incredibly advanced technology, where she literally downloads her memories into a blog called TrueNet, which doesn’t allow her to lie. She literally has to go back into her memory with a stream of blurry thoughts that come into the screen in this series of special effects. And she saw, she shares, and people can go up there and buy her memories.

SITV.COM: What do you think the movie has to say on the U.S. position on immigration and the way it uses labor fom other countries?
LV: It’s definitely a very strong critique on that topic, in the sense that there is definitely a sense of wanting the labor, but not wanting the people. Like, ‘Wouldn’t that just be perfect? We just solved the biggest labor issue. We can get the labor, without having them live in our country.’ And I think this is true for many developing countries that face migrant workers from Third World countries. But what I love about the way Alex laid this out was that the overview is critical, but not pessimistic. I think what his message is mostly about is a desire to say that there is a way to do things that is different, there’s a way to not box people behind walls and limits. If corporations are beyond borders, so should people.

SITV.COM: You’re the ultimate immigrant. You and your family left Chile for Costa Rica, then moved to France. What impact did that have on you as a kid?
LV: It’s one of the things that really resonated when I read the script. I know what it is to be a migrant, to always be the outsider and constantly be adjusting. What it was for me was a fantastic opportunity to be extremely malleable and open-minded. And as a child, you have much less fears of people being different from you. So you are constantly watching how people do things and learning from them—their language, culture and their outlook on life. I incorporated a lot of that into the person that I am now. It gave me a certain open-mindedness. It also helped me learn a lot of languages and prepared me for this gypsy life of an actor, which is constantly adjusting to something new and constantly learning, starting from zero, adopting a new skin and leaving it behind.

SITV.COM: You grew up with a dad who was a renowned biologist and a philosopher [Francisco Varela]. That sounds so incredibly cool. What did he teach you about life and about yourself?
LV: I’m very proud of my father, of the amount of work and incredible insight he had on the human brain. He passed away six years ago. I think that one of the biggest lessons he left me was the way he lived his live and the way he died. He was a devoted Buddhist practitioner and installing Buddhism into science was one of the most groundbreaking things he did. Scientists are usually very much about the facts, but my father was very much about the experience and how you have to acknowledge experience into the objectivity of the science. And that led to five books that he did with the Dalai Lama, where they exchanged thoughts between science and Buddhism. The result was very inspiring for a lot of people and for me too. He was just very present, a smart and present human being to the last minute of his life. That stayed with me.

SITV.COM: What projects do you have coming up?
LV: I’m really excited by this documentary that I’m finishing up, called Tortel, about a little town of 500 in la Patagonia chilena, this incredibly pristine area where these rivers come to the ocean and a big corporation wants to dam. They want to get energy, which my country needs. But as opposed to investing in renewable energy they want to dam and create irreversible damage to that place. That’s just not OK. My feeling was to give the people of this town a voice and allow the world to see them, because they live in such harmony with their environment.