Podcast: Ryan Prows on ‘Los Bastardos’

When it comes to cinematic allegories, vampire movies and cop movies are about as rich of texts as you can get. So when you combine the two, like writer-director Ryan Prows did in Night Patrol, you get a movie that's going to be talked about for a long, long time. In this episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast, Prows talks about his new feature and opens up about his love of Los Bastardos, an indie thriller that shares some common themes with Prows's own work.

For Jesus (Jesus Moises Rodriguez), life in the United States is far from the American dream. He lives his life as an undocumented immigrant, working low-paying construction jobs as a way to send money back home. But when someone pays Jesus to do something darker – to break into his home and murder his estranged wife (Nina Zavarin) – it creates an opportunity Jesus cannot afford to pass up. Written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Amat Escalante, Los Bastardos is a slow-burn and feel bad home invasion movie.

In this short excerpt from the episode, Prows explains how the crew of Night Patrol worked to get buy-in from the community given the film's dark subject matter:

The bigger side of that was making sure we did our due diligence, taking it around to the community. We shot LA for LA, we went around to these communities and presented to the movie to them, the script, talked through it. A really great nonprofit — Ceasefire, that does peace work in the community — introduced us around to everybody, helped us with locations.

The Los Bastardos episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast with Ryan Prows is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or the podcast platform of your choice.