2 weeks ago
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How does life change after your first film gets into Sundance and emerges as one of the best-reviewed films of the festival? “I’m still broke,” Joel Alfonso Vargas said with a laugh during a recent Zoom conversation with IndieWire. But the writer/director, who made his feature debut on “Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo),” is well-aware that he’s living the indie dream.
After a winding early career that included a Fulbright scholarship in London, he returned to his hometown of the Bronx to shoot a tender, semi-improvised coming-of-age story about a directionless teen selling “nutcracker” cocktails on the beach who is forced to quickly grow up when he impregnates his much younger girlfriend.
It debuted to glowing reviews at the 2025 edition of the festival, en route to follow-up screenings at the Berlinale and New Directors/New Films before opening in theaters this weekend, courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories.
After spending much of his twenties traveling, it was the forced slowdown of the COVID-19 lockdowns that prompted Vargas to write a film about his own youth. While the movie is not autobiographical, the hyper-specific details about life in the Bronx demonstrate his personal connection to the neighborhood. He came up with two characters — the enterprising and blindly confident nutty salesman Rico (Juan Collado) and his soft-spoken but wiser underage girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) — that were amalgamations of people he had encountered in his own life.
“I was just doing a lot of reflecting and thinking about my childhood and just had a lot of space to do that. For once in my life, I didn’t feel like there was this crazy urgency,” he said of the pandemic. “But in that thinking and reflecting, this sort of character started popping up. He was based on a lot of the people that I grew up with, people in my friends’ circle, people in my own friendship circle. My brother, who is 10 years older, his friends were these sort of tornado people who really had this predilection for self-sabotage. I don’t know what it was. And with my mom, who was a teen mom, I was thinking about her experiences. I have a brother on my dad’s side who was a teen dad, very much Rico this character. So it was all these things coming together.”
Vargas and his ensemble of both professional and first-time actors used a semi-improvised approach to shoot the film. While he admits that he had to produce “30 or 40 pages” of a traditionally formatted script to show to investors, he preferred to rely on outlines and let the dialogue emerge naturally. That forced him to adjust his shooting process, relying on longer takes and shorter shot lists to maximize everyone’s time to experiment.
‘Mad Bills to Pay’Oscilloscope Laboratories“It was challenging. I’m not going to lie. We were very stressed. I think by the end we were just like, ‘Wow, we all just want to go home, this was hard.’ But I think what facilitated that sort of schedule and cadence or whatever was the fact that we were just shooting one setup. So it just allowed us to move through, get through a lot, or cover a lot of script in a day. So we were shooting maybe 12, 15 minutes a day, moving really quickly,” he said. “Having that one setup also gave me more flexibility to work with improv or to change the improv from take to take because we weren’t cutting for continuity. So it would mean that whatever we did on the first take, if that wasn’t working, we’d completely scrap it, try something new in the second take or take the best from what was working and then do it that way.”
“Mad Bills to Pay” endured many of the same logistical tribulations that have plagued indie films since the beginning of time, including a lead actor who dropped out three days before the start of principal photography. But now that he has a chance to look back on the experience, Vargas feels that shooting a feature is not significantly harder than making a short. The biggest difference is relying on organization and routine rather than a brief burst of energy.
“I feel like I’ve been telling people lately, ‘Actually, it’s the same amount of work, shorts and features, because you got to do locations, you got to find a cast, you got to find a producer, you got to find money.’ Literally, the biggest learning curve for me though on the feature was it’s just like the schedule is longer and everything is just longer,” the filmmaker said. “And so where you can make a short six days without sleep and just bulldoze your way through it, with a feature, it really, at least in my experience, is so much more about sustainability. Making it sustainable and resting, because you need that stamina to go those two, three weeks.”
Vargas emerged from “Mad Bills to Pay” with the experience and connections that should hopefully power his next film. He’s currently weighing two potential scripts for his sophomore effort, another Bronx-set story and a film about the Dominican community in London, where he currently resides. But even as he preps his next project, he’s taking time to enjoy a moment that doesn’t arrive for every filmmaker.
“It feels kind of like a Cinderella story because I feel like the way I grew up in public housing in the Bronx, my mom still lives there, and it’s not typical for someone to come out of that and just be in this space,” Vargas said. “I’m very grateful to be here now and to have these opportunities and this privilege.”
“Mad Bills to Pay” is now playing in select theaters.
English (US) ·