On Location: In ‘Rotting In The Sun, Jordan Firstman Confronts The Role Of The Mexico City Tourist

Let’s talk about where you shot this movie.

I have to let you know now—we purposely didn’t call the beach in the film by its actual name in order to protect it. If you know what it is, which you probably do, can you not say?

My lips are sealed. It’s something I think about a lot working at a travel magazine: when should you blow up the spot?

It’s definitely funny to me to have a travel piece about this movie, which is very anti-travel. Something that we wanted to do was bring as much critical thought to the audience as we could. 

Let’s start from the beginning—how early in the writing process for this film did you get involved?

This morning, I looked back to see if there were any pictures from the first dinner I had with Sebastian, and there are. It was at Rosetta, which is the most popular restaurant in Roma. It’s funny that we had it there. I remember railing on Rosetta the entire night. I actually realized that that should’ve been in the movie—the white guy saying, “Rosetta is not even that good!” The butter is not good.

I was in Mexico City in April of 2021; I was definitely part of the problem, like all the Americans were, because the COVID restrictions kind of didn’t exist. People were depressed and just went to Mexico where it was seemingly a lot freer than it was in the US. But I was hooking up with this guy, and randomly showed him Sebastian’s movie Crystal Fairy and the Magic Cactus. I hadn’t thought about that movie, or Sebastian, in many years. I didn’t know that Sebastian was living in Mexico City. The morning after, the guy went to walk his dog and I met him at Plaza Río de Janeiro. When I got there, he was flirting with someone—as I got closer, I recognized him to be Sebastian Silva! I played it very cool, and then a mutual friend set us up for that dinner. A month later he called me with the seeds of a story that was missing something—it was missing me, and he had looked at my Instagram. I kind of encapsulated everything he hated and wanted to make fun of and so he wanted to know if I’d be part of it.

How did that make you feel?

I was really over the internet at that point, and I resented all of my followers. I hated them, actually. I like them a little better now. I met one of them yesterday at Equinox [in Los Angeles]—some guy just like, came up to me while I was on the machine. “You're the guy, you're the guy.” I don’t understand what people want out of that.

That happens in the movie and you have sex with the guy who does it.

This is true. So I was interested in exploring the impulse, and when Sebastian called me he said, “Dude, I just looked at your Instagram. It’s, like, super embarrassing. Are you embarrassed to be posting all that?” And I was in the middle of doing some Pride campaign in West Hollywood and I was actually embarrassed. It didn’t hurt my feelings. It wasn’t until I saw the movie that my feelings started to get hurt. He was sensing way deeper vulnerabilities that I wasn’t aware of.

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