Julio Torres on going beyond the punchline of his new HBO series Fantasmas

The world isn’t ready for Fantasmas, the ghostly, genre-bending, glowier-than-all-hell new series from Julio Torres. Returning to HBO, the home of his debut series, Los Espookys, Torres’ latest comes on the back of his first feature film, Problemista. In many ways, Fantasmas serves as a spiritual sequel series to Problemista, exploring what New York City might have done to poor Alejandro in a few more years. Instead of a toymaker, Torres’ latest millennial Willy Wonka figure, an aspiring creative named Julio, wants to develop a clear crayon called “Fantasmas” that expresses the color of the emotional space between people. But before he can make his crayon fortune, Julio faces eviction, a problem he is compulsively unable to face. Instead, he distracts himself with a search for a missing earring before disassociating into a free-flowing world of psychedelic satire, exploring cultural touchstones like reality television and the masculine urge to keep empty Gatorade bottles next to the bed.

If Problemista was a step to the left of our world, Fantasmas is a full leap into the unknown. Torres’ New York no longer evokes the scuffed white walls of Apple Store-inspired studio apartments. It’s drenched in light reminiscent of Janusz Kaminski’s Minority Report cinematography. The cluttered sets pop with hidden jokes, disorienting visuals, and sickly green filters. It’s “glowier” to Problemista’s “shinier,” according to Torres.

Fantasmas is also one of the funniest of the year, finding an original angle on New York’s ghosts, the people living in those in-between spaces, commuting into stories via a Chester Cab, with no telling who’s going to pull focus. The show’s discursive structure dips into vignettes either from a nearby screen or episodes that can last seconds or minutes. There’s no telling where Torres is going to take us, but the destination is always remarkably coherent, building on the comedy we’ve seen Torres develop on stage, SNL, and TV and film.

The A.V. Club spoke with Julio Torres about Fantasmas, juggling his many projects over the last few years, the pain of compromise, and how to make your show glowier.

Julio Torres: It feels so jumbled now because I sold the idea of Fantasmas to HBO. Then, I was due to start writing Problemista. Then, we began shooting Los Espookys. Then, COVID hit. Then we stopped kind of halfway, and I started writing Fantasmas and Problemista at about the same time in 2020. Then I wrote and directed Problemista, then I finished Los Espookys, then edited Problemista, and then shot Fantasmas. Then, the writers strike pushed everything back. It’s so jumbled. It’s been such a messy desktop for so long.

AVC: Problemista and Fantasmas compliment each other with similar motifs and ideas. How did you keep the ideas separated?

JT: There were choices in Fantasmas that were informed by the idea that the audience could’ve seen Problemista before they saw this. It’s okay if they’re complimentary, it’s okay to be a little repetitive, but just make sure you’re showing different shades of something. Even Bibo, the little robot, has a little cameo in a different iteration in Problemista.

AVC: You have a really wonderful cast. Joe Rumrill as Bibo is perfect. Martine Gutierrez plays your Agent Vanesja and gives an incredible performance. Can you talk about your relationship with her? I haven’t seen much of her.

JT: You haven’t! She’s a reluctant actress. She’s a performance artist and a photographer. She had a basically non-speaking role in Espookys as the girl with an anchor through her chest. Ever since we met, I’ve been so enamored by her, so it just made so much sense to have her in this project. It’s a collaboration that I want to keep working on again and again and again.

AVC: Your character is so stubborn to the point of disassociation. Why was it important to show Julio giving into the crayon executive at the beginning of the show?

JT: To show how painful compromise can be. [Laughs] And how strategic. It’s a delicate balance to stay true to who you are. It sets the table for the kind of person he is, the part of me that I’m showing in the show.

AVC: The show is very unconventional. The setting can be so spare. Did you get any pushback, like Julio in episode one?

JT: No, I found HBO and our producers to be permissive and encouraging of what the show wanted to be and that came with big logistical hurdles, but the goal was for the show to be what it is.

AVC: Like Problemista, this is the story of a creative. Why are stories about creatives, creativity, and imagination so important to you?

JT: To me, it was a very early expression of love. It’s just how I was raised. To motivate creativity in each other and play and create things that are new. I think creativity and empathy go hand-in-hand. Creativity and emotionality go hand-in-hand. It’s something I’m very, very interested in, allowing people to think beyond what they’ve been able to do. To that end, I take it as a great compliment that actors, department heads, and crews, all feel like they get to play when they’re working on something of mine.

AVC: Spike Einbinder’s Carl is a potent character of how we perceive creativity today and the relationship between consumer and “content creator.” How has that relationship changed the way we think about creativity?

JT: Carl’s one of my favorite moments in the show because we see someone who is so stifled by the irony that they’re consuming things that are supposedly magical and out there but are actually so rigid. He’s trying desperately to be loved by a system that can’t love them back. Because these rules have been so calcified, he can only imagine himself succeeding within them as opposed to breaking out of them. So when he’s given the opportunity to write anything, he keeps going back to the superhero. It’s almost like Stockholm Syndrome. In many ways, that is the ideal consumer for corporations, and it’s sort of the job of the artist to crack that open and move things forward. I adore Carl. He breaks my heart.

AVC: Carl would be a punchline on a lesser show,

JT: Yes, he’d be the nerd [mimics pushing glasses up nose].

AVC: But you treat Carl with such unexpected empathy. The show goes on these tangents, where you arrive at the gag, and then the show keeps going until we see the characters’ humanity. Is that something you strive for, or is that just how it happens?

JT: It’s how it happens, but it’s something I remind myself of again. This idea of keeping things going is something that I learned was so important in the editing of Problemista. There are so many characters, and you get very brief glimpses into their lives, but I aim for them to feel fully fleshed out, even if they’re waiters or cashiers. There’s a scene in [Problemista] where the subletter and the roommate are left alone after my character, the protagonist, leaves, and we stay with them a little longer because I’m interested in that. I’m interested in what happens if we stay with these people. What happens if we dig a little deeper? This show is sort of about that. It’s about that level of curiosity. It happens organically, but I remind myself this is why I’m doing it. It’s not the joke. It’s what’s behind the joke.

AVC: What were some of the influences on the tone and look of the show?

JT: Ghostly. Sam Levy, our D.P., and I kept talking about making the most ghostly choice and making things glow, glowier. When we were color correcting Problemista, Fredrik Wenzel, my DP [on the film], a phrase that kept coming on was “more shiny, more shiny, more shiny.” He’s Scandinavian, and we were color-correcting in Europe and kept being like, “more shiny, more shiny.” But with Fantasmas it was “more glowy, glowier, glowier.” It’s so fun.

AVC: Do you let the situation guide the look or are you putting Fantasmas on these different scenarios?

JT: It’s a very delicate balance. You need to treat each of the vignettes very carefully and make sure the situations aren’t swallowed by the sets or the visuals but that they complement each other. So, some of the sets needed to look more real, and some of them could be more artificial. For example, the urgent care looks like “what would an urgent care look like in a nightmare,” but it should still feel like an urgent care. It should still evoke those feelings, so you exaggerate all the signage around them. And I was like, “what if they had remnants from every holiday?” They had a Halloween, an Easter, Christmas, Hanukkah [poster], and it’s because they put them on, but they never take them down. It’s a tricky, delicate balance. How to tell things in a way that is visually interesting but never lose track of the humanity.