In The Rules of the Game, author Luis Alberto Urrea reads a passage from The Devil’s Highway, his account of a group of migrants attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border through the Arizona desert.
Rather than presenting the excerpt as a traditional author reading, the film surrounds Urrea’s words with imagery, motion, sound and music—creating a visceral interpretation of the danger, desperation and human stakes within the passage.
The original request was simple: film Luis Alberto Urrea reading an excerpt from The Devil’s Highway. But a static shot of an author reading to camera felt like it would underserve both Urrea’s performance and the power of the material.
Instead, I treated his reading of “The Rules of the Game” as the foundation for a short film. I developed and filmed supporting imagery, created motion graphics, and used editing, music and sound design to build an emotional and visual world around his words.
The imagery wasn't intended to literally illustrate every sentence. It was designed to evoke the atmosphere and intensity of the passage—to make the heat, isolation, danger and uncertainty feel immediate.
The objective was to transform an author reading into something audiences could experience, using filmmaking to extend the emotional power of the written word.