“It’s f— World War III out there,” says Gilberto Martinez Jr. as he skateboards while holding on to a car partway through Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed crime drama “One Battle After Another,” about a group of revolutionaries being hunted by the U.S. government.
Driving the vehicle is Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who enlists the help of Mexican American “vato skateboarders,” the neighborhood watch, to guide his friend Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), as he tries to escape the authorities during a chaotic protest when a sanctuary city comes under attack.
Gliding through tight indoor spaces and nimbly jumping across rooftops under the night’s sky, the courageous skating quartet is composed of El Paso natives cast locally: Martinez (34), Luis Trejo (30), Elijah Joseph Sambrano (27) and Julian Corral (29). That Anderson included them in this searingly political narrative as a heroic force felt validating.
“As skateboarders we’ve kind of always been the underdogs, seen as the outcast or the rebels,” says Martinez during a recent video interview with the whole squad gathered. “But in a way we’re showing freedom, we’re not trying to be put in a box, we express ourselves through this skateboard. We’re trying to give hope to other kids like us.”
Their skill set on the board landed them the part, but their presence influenced the production beyond their screen time.
“We all speak Spanish, and we were helping them on set to translate a lot of the things that they needed,” Martinez said.
Martinez and Trejo, who’ve been “homies” for a decade, learned about the opportunity from a mutual friend, Mark Martinez, involved in the El Paso film industry. Sambrano found out from a bartender pal, while Corral got word from the owner of the tattoo shop where he works. The four of them knew each other from hanging around the border town.
The group first met with casting director Cassandra Kulukundis, who read them their lines and asked them to recite them back to test their memorization skills.
“She pulled out her iPhone and we just started skating around her and giving her the lines,” Martinez recalls. “That’s pretty much what she showed Paul. And that’s when he was like, ‘These are our guys.’” [Laughs].
Though they had heard rumors that DiCaprio and Del Toro were in town, they couldn’t know for certain. “I was like, ‘It’s not true,’ just so I would not be so nervous about it,” Martinez said. It was only after signing nondisclosure agreements that they were made fully aware of the artists involved.
“They took us up to Sensei’s apartment to get an idea of the perimeter and what everything looks like,” says Martinez. “That’s when we first saw P.T.A. with his Adidas shoes and we were like, ‘Whoa.’”
Shot over the course of 11 days, their scenes took place in downtown El Paso, just a few minutes from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on the other side of the border. “Every single day was just magic,” says Trejo, who is also a musician. “This movie made us feel like we’re part of something on a big scale. It blew our minds that each of us had his own purpose in it.”
The “vato skateboarders,” as the production referred to them, recall speaking with stunt coordinator Brian Machleit ahead of their scenes. “He was very honest with us and said we needed to take this seriously,” Martinez says. “We really focused, and we weren’t playing around.” They practiced their stunts during the daytime, so that they could be prepared for shooting at night.
Anderson, they say, asks for multiple takes — often around 10 — changing his direction to have plenty of options to choose from when editing.
“Paul is always experimenting,” Trejo said. “He’s like a scientist, and he’s doing his poetry.”
Martinez revealed that his big moment, when he skates holding onto Sensei’s vehicle, transformed as they filmed it.
“My direction at first was to do it scared towards Sensei, like asustado,” he said. “After watching the dailies, Anderson came in with new notes.
“Paul’s like, ‘Hey Gil, this sounds like a zombie apocalypse. It’s not a zombie apocalypse, it’s a riot. Pretend like you’re going to go grab a beer and drink it on a rooftop, and then just say some s— like, ‘It’s f— World War III out here.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I like that. That sounds more me.’”
To personalize his close-up, Martinez had a suggestion of his own. “I was like, ‘Can I add some Spanish?’”
“Paul really let us use our lingo,” Martinez adds. “Leo was like, ‘Hey, how do I say ‘brothers’?’ And we told him, ‘Carnalitos,’”
In the film, DiCaprio’s Bob refers to the skaters as such.
Throughout the conversation, the group often refers to DiCaprio and Del Toro by their characters’ names: Bob and Sensei. Sharing the screen with A-listers they’ve grown up watching on screen was shocking at first, but then grew to feel a genuine closeness.
“I’d freak out when I got home,” Martinez said. “But on set, the first couple days you had to show them that you were like a brother to them. You can’t be like, ‘Hey man, we got to take a picture.’ It was more like, ‘We’re here to do our job.’ I never called him Leo. I always called him Bob. We just stayed in character. And then he’d be like, ‘What’s up bros?’”
Corral recalls a day when his foot hurt, and the production sent him to rest for a bit on his own. “Next thing you know, they put the other vatos in there and then they put Leonardo in there and we are just like, ‘How should we break the ice?’” Corral says. “And he did. He is like, ‘So what’s good around here to eat?’”
A musician like Trejo, and once involved with El Paso Kids-N-Co, a nonprofit community theater, Sambrano recalled sharing a moment with Del Toro.
“Benicio was like, ‘You play music? What kind of music is it? And I was like, ‘Alternative.’ And he said, ‘Oh, like the Mars Volta.’ And I thought, ‘Oh he knows of the culture, the Mars Volta is from El Paso.’”
Sambrano explains they were allowed to wear their own clothes on set. Early on, he happened to be wearing a T-shirt he got from Goodwill emblazoned with the image of the late wrestler Eddie Guerrero, also an El Paso native, and his nickname, “Latino Heat.”
“They were bouncing off each other, improvising,” Sambrano says. “And that’s when Benicio was like, ‘What if I just say Latino Heat?’ And then they were like, ‘OK, that’s the shirt he’s going to wear.’”
For the “vato skateboarders,” seeing their hometown depicted at the forefront of the resistance in such a high-profile film has strengthened their pride. “We’re from a frontera, a border city, and I’ve lived here my whole life. The community is amazing, people are friendly,” Sambrano said. “And seeing them highlight that is pretty awesome.”
And it’s not lost on them that immigration, and the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, especially in a place like El Paso, are key subjects in Anderson’s film.
“Paul did do justice to how real life is in a comedic way so that maybe it reaches a different type of audience that is not tapped into these situations,” Trejo said. “The movie touches on things that a lot of people are afraid to talk about. They are afraid to get too political.”
The four skaters watched “One Battle After Another” for the first time at a cast and crew screening in El Paso at the Plaza Theater. “It was really special to watch it in a historic building in El Paso,” Martinez Jr. says. “And having our friends and family there to watch it a week before the movie came out was a beautiful moment for all of us.”
The friends wish to continue acting, and they already have other projects lined up, thanks in part to Jacob Cena, a location assistant on “One Battle After Another,” who is pushing them to seize this breakthrough.
For now, however, they’ve been diligently studying Anderson’s work. “We got pretty obsessed; these are all his movies,” says Martinez Jr. with a smile holding up a stack of the director’s movies on physical media.
