VOCES

Man

Phillip Rodriguez, take one mark.

Rodriguez

This film's about a strange guy, Oscar Acosta, a very energetic, crazy, courageous, insatiable guy, who just didn't get his due in history.

Acosta

This is our land. The sooner we get that thing in our heads, the sooner we'll get our land back. Or else they're gonna keep on killing us.

Rodriguez

Many people, for many years, tried to make a picture out of this guy because he's so appealing, because he's so enigmatic, because he's so impossible, really. And so I finally got the opportunity. Oscar was made infamous by Hunter Thompson, by being Hunter Thompson's lawyer in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And that's how we knew him, as a sidekick. I figured, let's try to make a film with a verve and a vigor and a color scheme and an energy and movement. Acosta's story is wild. There's a lot of exaggeration, so you had to do it with a lot of extra color and a lot of extra pizzazz, because it gives the storyteller the opportunity to make, kind of, a legend out of him, which is what he wanted for himself. And that's what I want for him. The real Acosta was extremely accomplished, a civil rights attorney, a revolutionary, didn't wear shoes to the courtroom, took drugs on the way in, had a pistol in his briefcase. That notion captured my imagination.

Acosta

It's always, the brown man or the black man or the poor man that does the dirty work for the man.

Rodriguez

Like a lot of Mexican Americans of that generation, they thought they were white. But at some point in his life, he reaches this realization that, oops, there is a ceiling for me too. Then that really incites him and he proceeds to challenge the system. He challenges in the courtroom. He challenges violently in the streets. He challenges it in the novels he left behind. It's about a guy who, like everybody else, just wanted his day in the sun. (funky music)