“And no, it’s not dangerous to confuse children with angels,” says William H. Macy’s former-child-star persona in the film Magnolia (1999). A new film from director Christopher Zalla (Law & Order, Blood of My Blood) revisits said notion and clearly illustrates the idea that children hold the future in their hands, and rightfully so. Starring Eugenio Derbez (CODA) as the “radical” teacher in charge of some brilliant minds, the powerful new Spanish-language drama Radical brings us to a tense Mexican border town plagued by corruption, crime and more.

We recently caught up with Zalla to learn more about Radical, which is based the true story detailed in a famed 2013 article in Wired magazine.

‘Comedy Is Almost a Cover’

Audiences well-versed in Mexican cinema will know firsthand that Derbez is a comedian at heart, so it’s a refreshing change of pace seeing him take the lead in a more serious project. He also played the music teacher in CODA, with both roles having their fair share of comedic moments despite the otherwise more dramatic content. “Like most comedians, his way in is from a place of pain,” director Zalla told MovieWeb in describing Derbez’s character Sergio in Radical. He continued:

The comedy is almost a cover, a protective mechanism and a shell… But I challenged him. And there was actually a freedom knockout fight over his hair — that, this time, ‘What if we don’t let you have a costume, a disguise that you hide behind? You’ve never done it before.’

“And the real character that we’re telling a story about was flying by the seat of his pants, he had a nervous breakdown, he was desperately trying something new,” added Zalla. “And my theory is, if we rip off your security blanket, we’re gonna get that same kind of vulnerability. Now, I’m telling this to a guy who is light personified, he is just this beautiful human being. And he can’t pick up a pen without making you laugh. So you have this kind of resource already. But to work with him was magical. And he sent me the project. A place that is completely devoid of life, of hope or possibility? That’s going to be an interesting process.”

A Film 15 Years in the Making

Radical is a film that’s been conceived in Derbez’s mind for years, as Zalla also told us. He described how it all started in bringing the true story to life after years of it remaining in the development stage. “My very first movie was my thesis film for the graduate Film School of Columbia. And I hired, as the producer of that movie, my classmate Ben Odell, who knew Eugenio. This is 2007, and that movie went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, for U.S. dramatic features, and it was a great experience.”

“And at that time, Eugenio said, ‘Someday I’m gonna go there and I’m gonna call you.’ He did. It took him 15 years, but in the meantime, Ben and Eugenio ended up continuing to work together, forming a company together called 3Pas, which is now a powerhouse studio. In fact, it’s probably the biggest studio focused on Latino content in the world. They have the top-rated show on Apple and the top-rated show on Amazon in Latin America.”

“And so Eugenio — coming off the accolades from CODA, and now it’s sort of the height of his career and he’s able to do whatever he wants, including literally getting offers for Marvel movies — chose instead to tell this story and to return to Mexico and to do a movie that was in Spanish,” explained Zalla. “And first of all, it speaks to who he is. But for me, it was just this amazing opportunity to get the band back together.”

Related: Mexico is Making Amazing Movies: Why Isn’t Anyone Watching Them?

Eugenio Derbez Brings Radical to Life
Pantelion FilmsParticipant

As discussed in our recent interview with Derbez, one of the film’s most earth-shattering moments is when teacher Sergio pulls aside the class clown student, who just made a humorous outburst in front of the other students. Instead of giving him a scolding, Sergio tells the boy, “Don’t ever change.” It’s an uplifting turn of events that lays the groundwork for the rest of the film and the “radical” way Sergio teachers his pupils.

“One of the most remarkable things about this process was watching Eugenio take my writing — and as a writer, as a director, you’re always looking for tension and drama, and that usually involves conflict — and he would constantly just pull out the part where his character was doing anything to assault the dignity of the person he was talking to,” said Zalla.

And the scene was written, I can’t remember the exact what the exact thing was, but the actual line, ‘Don’t ever change,’ when he said that in rehearsal, he asked me, ‘What do you think about this?’ I just cried right there. It touched me so deeply. And I’m telling you, this movie turned me into a crier, but it was stuff like that happening all day, every day.

“You can’t help but just be humbled at the kind of enormity of it all and on some level, the mission of the project, which I think we all felt extremely responsible to pull off in the right way, to do it justice,” added Zalla.

Related: The Best Movies About Teachers, Ranked

‘Embrace the Joy of Learning’

There are plenty of other memorable moments from Radical, to say the least. Collectively, they make for an inspiring feature that leaves us hopeful for the future of education. “The scenes I enjoyed the most were watching the kids embrace the joy of learning,” said Zalla. “We have this school scene in the middle of the movie, and one of the things I think none of these movies have ever done that I wanted to see was, what if we actually see it happen? We’ve never seen the process of, first of all, trying to light the spark, but secondly, having the spark lit from both sides.”

And it was so fun because the kids were participating in the scene, ad-libbing off-script with their thoughts and their answers because they were actually there doing the learning and having fun themselves. And that’s when I felt like, ‘Okay, we’ve got something here. We’re on to something.’ But those scenes of just the discovery of the joy that comes with having your curiosity satisfied paid off, having that hunger fed.

Zalla left us with a general thought about the power of cinema as an art form: “A couple times in my life, there are a few pieces of art I’ve seen, one was the Richard Serra exhibit in Bilbao at the Guggenheim. And one was “Starry Night” modernism, where I felt like this person was communicating to me. And it’s that connection when we make art, where it’s like, the whole reason you’re doing it is to have that communication. And then, when you get it, it’s like, ‘Alright, I did my job.’ It’s very gratifying.”

Radical is now playing in U.S. theaters, and it’s very, very gratifying.