Juan Carlos Mercado

Can you explain to the audience your career?

Absolutely. I'm JC Mercado. I'm a Mexican writer, director and producer, and I think the easiest way to describe my career is that I've always been a very ambitious filmmaker.

I like difficult projects. I like ideas that, when you first look at them, make you ask, "How are we actually going to pull this off?" That challenge is one of the things I love most about filmmaking.

Throughout my career, I've worked across many different areas of filmmaking - writing, directing, assistant directing, producing, acting, editing, and even creating music for my projects. Working in so many departments has given me a much deeper understanding of how a movie actually comes together and, especially as a director, how all those departments have to work toward the same vision.

That philosophy is also at the heart of Just Cinema Entertainment Studios. We never want the size of the company to determine the size of our ambition. We approach our films with the discipline and expectations of a much larger production.

And RESET is a great example of that. It was ambitious, it was challenging, and those are exactly the kinds of projects I want to make.

How many years have you been making movies?

I started making movies when I was 11 years old, so I've actually been doing this for almost 20 years now, which sounds crazy when I say it out loud.

Of course, the movies I was making when I was 11 were very different from the films I make today, but the intention was already there. I was writing stories, grabbing a camera, putting people together and trying to turn what I had in my head into something I could actually watch on a screen.

As I grew up, I decided to take that passion seriously and prepare myself from different sides of the industry. I earned my degree in Business in Communication and Entertainment, studied acting, and later earned my Master's in Film Directing at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles.

So filmmaking went from something I was doing as an 11-year-old kid because I loved it, to becoming my education, my profession and ultimately my life. But in a strange way, I'm still doing exactly what I was doing back then - I just have better cameras now.

Why did you start making movies?

I think I started making movies because, even as a kid, watching them wasn't enough for me. I wanted to understand how they were made, but more importantly, I wanted to create my own.

When I was 11, I wasn't thinking about having a career or becoming a professional filmmaker. I just had stories in my head, and I wanted to see them on a screen. So I grabbed whatever camera I could get,

convinced people around me to be part of it, and started making movies.

And I think that curiosity never really disappeared. Even today, when I have an idea that seems difficult or maybe even a little crazy, my first reaction is usually not, "We can't do that." It's, "Okay... how do we do it?"

That's probably one of the biggest reasons I'm still making movies today.

Tell us a little about your project. What will the audience be able to see in your film?

RESET is really a story about loss, memory and the value we give to the things that connect us to the people we love.

Something as simple as a cellphone, a photograph, or even a button that belonged to someone you loved can suddenly become more valuable to you than gold. Not because of what the object is worth, but because of what it represents. And RESET plays a lot with that idea.

The film takes that very human emotion and puts it inside a much more intense situation, where our character is forced to make decisions about what he is willing to risk and what he is willing to lose.

There's actually one shot that represents the film very well for me. We had our actor sitting on the actual edge of a three-story building. When you see that image, there's a real sense of vulnerability because much of what you're seeing is real.

But underneath the action and the tension, RESET is ultimately about attachment. About how something that may look completely meaningless to everybody else can contain an entire world for you.

Why did you do this project?

Because I connected with the idea behind it. RESET talks about something that I think everybody understands in one way or another: the fear of losing something you can never replace.

What interested me was taking that very simple, very human feeling and putting it inside an extraordinary situation. The film can have action, tension and all these larger moments, but if you remove all of that, there's still a character holding on to something because of what it means to him.

That was the movie I wanted to make. Something entertaining, absolutely, but with a very human reason underneath everything that happens.

Directing actors can be difficult. How do you see this topic? What kind of work do you do with them?

I actually love directing actors. I studied acting myself, and I think that completely changed the way I communicate with actors as a director. I know what it feels like to be on the other side of the camera.

There's a phrase I use a lot: everybody can act because everybody can react. For me, acting is much more about genuinely reacting to what is happening than trying to demonstrate an emotion.

So I try not to tell an actor, "Be sad," "Be angry," or "Cry here." I prefer to give them circumstances, objectives and something real to react to.

And I also think you have to understand that every actor is different. There isn't one magical way of directing everybody. Part of my job is discovering how each actor works, earning their trust, and then giving them enough freedom to surprise me.

If you had 100% of the resources/time, how would you distribute them between Direction, Cinematography, Sound, Post-production, Actors and Art/Locations?

I honestly don't think I could give you one percentage that would work for every movie, because the story should decide where the resources go.

There are films where the performance has to carry almost everything. There are others where sound or a location becomes almost another character. RESET, for example, needed a very strong combination of performance, cinematography, locations, makeup, sound and post-production. If one of those elements failed, you would feel it immediately.

So for me, directing is not necessarily about giving every department the same amount of resources. It's about understanding what this particular story needs the most and protecting those elements.

Because ultimately, the audience doesn't care which department had the biggest budget. They only care whether they believe the movie.

What would you have done differently if you had more resources?

Honestly, I would have bought us more time.

We shot RESET in only four days, and I'm extremely proud of what the entire team was able to accomplish in that amount of time. But it also taught me that one of the greatest luxuries you can have on a film set is simply time.

People usually think that having more resources means a bigger camera, more equipment or bigger locations. And of course those things can help. But give me more time with the actors, more time to light, more time to rehearse, and more time to try that one shot that maybe wasn't originally planned - that can completely change what you're able to discover on set.

So if I had more resources, I wouldn't necessarily want to make RESET bigger. I'm very proud of the film we made. I would give the team more time to explore it.

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