Among piles of cash and bottles of liquor, Tony Montana and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán sit together inside a painting. One fictitious and the other real, the drug traffickers seem indifferent.
“That's us!” says filmmaker Raúl “RJ” Sánchez with cheerful mischief as I point out the centerpiece on the main wall of his office in downtown Los Angeles. Sánchez's partner in art crime, Pasqual Gutiérrez, tells me they got the frame nearby on Santee Alley.
Located in a corner of the Fashion District, his space, which also doubles as a man cave, reflects his creative influences, his ties to Los Angeles, and his unconventional sense of humor. Before moving in 2021, the location was a shoe store called Latino Fashion; the store sign remains.
Enter and you'll find the lower half of a mannequin flaunting male genitalia (“That was our stunt penis.” [the short film] 'Shut up and fish,'” Sanchez says, laughing. There's also a bulky metal frame that resembles a torture device, a teal couch (which they got for less than $100), photography books, and memorabilia on shelves that once displayed footwear. It's a mini museum of its history so far. Or, as Sanchez calls it, it's “a living brain.”
Known artistically as Cliqua, the sought-after duo has already worked with some of the biggest names in the music industry. His resume includes directing videos for Bad Bunny (“The Difficult“), the weekend (“Save your tears“), J. Balvin (“Reggaeton) and Rosalía (“Me x You, You x Me“).
This year, Gutiérrez transitioned to film with his docufiction debut “Serious People,” a deeply personal “crime comedy” that he co-directed with his old friend Ben Mullinkosson. Following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, the film was released theatrically in November and is now available to stream on multiple VOD platforms.
On screen, Gutiérrez and Sánchez play versions of themselves: music video directors in an industry that takes itself too seriously. While expecting his first child with his partner Christine Yuan, also a filmmaker, Gutiérrez found himself caught between his commitment to his partnership with Sánchez and his responsibility as a future father. Gutiérrez from “Serious People” hires a double to replace him in his professional commitments.
“We were presented with some things that, if Raúl and I weren't available to do them, would disappear. Customers wouldn't be interested if it weren't the Cliqua brand,” says Gutiérrez. “That was deeply frustrating and disturbing for me because I thought, 'Raúl doesn't choose to have a baby, but I do. And this is affecting us, because he can't do everything by himself because people won't let him do it.'”
Although both Gutiérrez and Sánchez fit under the generic identity umbrella of “Mexican American,” each of them consciously embodies a distinct “flavor of Mexican.”
“I definitely identify a lot with Chicano,” Gutiérrez says. “I'm second generation and when I was a kid I knew about lowriders and the neighborhoods of East Los Angeles.” Raised between East Los Angeles and Pomona, Gutiérrez believes his Latino identity is unique to Los Angeles.
Sánchez, on the other hand, is the son of immigrants from Mexico City and Jalisco. As a first-generation child in the South Bay city of Gardena, his worldview took a different shape.
“We have always had that division. You represent more what it means to be in this country for more generations, and I feel like a new person. The culture I associate most with is Mexican but more ranch,” Sánchez explains. A vivid memory for Sanchez is of his grandfather butchering a pig and driving around South Central in his truck selling it. “Chicano heritage wasn't something for me, it was more the immigrant experience,” he says.
“I grew up speaking more Spanglish,” Gutiérrez says. “But Spanish was Raúl's first language.”
Their artistic alliance is a fusion of what each brings to their friendship. Sánchez brought Gutiérrez into Los Tigres del Norte y corridos, while Gutiérrez introduced him to “Lil Rob's”summer nights“and the 1993 movie”Blood in Blood coming out”, which Gutiérrez considers a fundamental cultural artifact in his life.
“We have both crossed paths a little more towards each other,” says Sánchez. The two met through their then-girlfriends (now wives and mothers of their respective children) almost a decade ago. At that time each one was already directing music videos.
“We really bonded over that shared experience of 'What's it like trying to navigate this industry as a Latino?'” Sánchez adds.
For Gutiérrez, one of five siblings, his interest in cinema is linked to one of his older brothers who had a kind of double life. “I was a gang member, but also a low-key movie buff,” he says. “I used to work in arthouses and we used to see weird stuff for a little kid to see. A lot of 'Blood In Blood Out', but also stuff like 'Amélie'.”
With his father's support, Gutiérrez attended Chapman University to study film production.
“My dad said, 'When I was a kid, no one asked me what I wanted to do. That wasn't even an option for me,'” Gutiérrez recalls. “'And the fact that you got accepted into this school, we'll just find a way. We'll take out all the loans. Go try to see what it's like.' My father gave me the power to confidently follow my dreams.”
Sánchez had a less linear path to film. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in ancient history with the intention of going to law school. Instead, he returned to Los Angeles to try his hand at filmmaking, an interest that grew out of his enjoyment of video games growing up and film studies courses in college.
But how do you start making music videos?
“In the beginning, you often record videos for your friends,” says Gutiérrez. “If you're a creative in Los Angeles, you meet other creatives and one of them is a musical artist or one of them is a rapper or they're in a rock band. And you start that way.”
“My sister was dating a rapper, so I recorded his videos,” Sánchez adds.
Still, both aspired to make feature films.
“Even when we were at the beginning of Cliqua, the language that we have always used even to talk about music videos has always been focused on cinema,” says Sánchez. “Those are the influences. We talk in the movies.”
After meeting and hanging out, Gutiérrez and Sánchez were eager to work together. That opportunity came with the video for “Reggaeton” by J Balvin, for which they had to sign up without being able to do much preparation. Following that positive experience, they decided to create Cliqua, which originally also included musical artist Milkman (MLKMN).
The name comes from the book “Varrio” by Gusmano Cesaretti, an Italian photographer who documented the culture of East Los Angeles in the 1970s, including the Klique Car Club.
J Balvin's video boosted their careers. They soon found a niche when reggaeton became popular globally and a new generation of artists revitalized its aesthetic. But even when they eventually crossed over to other corners of the industry and landed steady work with The Weeknd, they were aware of the limits of their creative freedom.
“The video clips are fun because they are obviously not our work either, we are at the service of another artist,” explains Sánchez. “We're executing someone else's vision even if the brief is generally open. It's not really us, but we're there.”
“Music videos are hard, man,” Gutiérrez adds. “The difficult thing about music videos, as opposed to feature filmmaking, is that it's very fast. You have a concept, and you maybe have two days to come up with an idea and write a treatment for it. Then from there, you have a shooting date, but the shooting date can be delayed or withdrawn depending on the artist.”
In 2023, Gutiérrez and Sánchez released their first narrative short film, “Shut Up and Fish,” about four “Edgars” (young Latino men with bowl cuts) on a boat. His impulse was to subvert the expectations of stories that involved characters from his community.
“We wanted it to look like a [Ingmar] Bergman, because we had never seen that, especially with these kids,” says Gutiérrez. One of the actors they cast in the short, Miguel Huerta, plays Gutiérrez's chaotic double in “Serious People.”
For “Serious People,” Gutiérrez and Mullinkosson invoked artistic references, such as the vignettes of Swedish author Roy Andersson’s films, or the sense of surveillance in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” Gutiérrez makes a point of mentioning these inspirations in Q&As and interviews in hopes of piquing the curiosity of those who watch “Serious People.”
“Doing [that culture] Accessibility has always been a goal, whether conscious or unconscious,” says Gutiérrez.
It was an anxiety-induced dream that first inspired Gutiérrez to write “Serious People” to satirize the entertainment industry. In the dream, Gutierrez went to Craigslist to hire someone similar so he could balance his personal and professional commitments. As soon as he woke up, he told his dream in detail to Yuan, who suggested turning it into a movie.
Gutiérrez brought in Mullinkosson given his experience in documentaries and because he thought co-directing it with Sánchez might make him too meta for comfort.
“This industry is so competitive and so demanding that every director is afraid that if you say no to just one project, you'll never get hit again,” Mullinkosson says over Zoom from Chengdu, China, where he lives. “At the end of the day, we're just making movies, and this isn't that serious.”
Sánchez was initially hesitant about appearing on camera, but his loyalty to Gutiérrez proved stronger than his reservations. “I actually really enjoyed seeing myself on screen,” says Sánchez. “When you see yourself projected that big, you start to understand how you feel about other people in the world, which was a very interesting out-of-body experience.”
“Vulnerabilities are what make movies special, especially this one because Pasqual, Raúl and Christine opened their real lives to being in front of the camera, and it's very personal,” says Mullinkosson. “When you can be as brave as them to share your real life, something beautiful happens.”
Gutiérrez and Sánchez, who also became a father shortly after our interview, are currently developing a new film, “Golden Boy,” which they describe as a “Stand by Me”-type story about four Edgars. One of them believes that former boxer Oscar De La Hoya is his long-lost father. They embark on a trip through California to confront De La Hoya.
“We started with music, but the goal has always been to make feature films, to make feature films,” says Gutiérrez. “And now, with 'Serious People,' there's one out there.”
