The Mars Volta: Eventos Familiares
There are many moving sequences in Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, an artful new documentary exploring the almost-cosmic brotherhood between multi-instrumentalist Omar Rodríguez-López and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala. But the most profound moment is, on the surface, the most mundane.
At this point in the film’s chronology, the bandmates have experienced the first real fracture in their decades-long friendship, with Bixler-Zavala tweeting in January 2013 about the (now-temporary) collapse of The Mars Volta, the unclassifiable “prog” band they co-founded 12 years earlier. But now, after a recent whirlwind that’s included personal sacrifice, a life-changing death and Bixler-Zavala’s stint in Scientology, the soul-siblings have reunited at the singer’s home. Their intention was not to discuss music, though—just to reenter each other’s orbit after a painful few months and to start healing.
“In one way, it’s not mundane,” says Rodríguez-López, recalling the encounter. “Seeing him again—me on the street, him coming outside his house to greet me, meeting his kids. Those, of course, are huge [moments]. I cried. Those feel like how it feels to fall in love—the uneasiness in your stomach. Your armpits are sweating, and you think you smell bad.
“What’s happening on the outside seems like a direct contrast to that. It’s like, ‘Did you find it OK? Traffic was crazy. There he is! He’s so cute! Did you eat?’ But they’re actually one and the same,” he adds with a laugh. “We didn’t talk about much, but we did talk about a whole lot because it’s underneath everything. With our relationship, there’s no need. Sometimes with a few words and sometimes with only a look, we know what the other is feeling. Both of those things are really beautiful.”
That principle, of mining the sacred from the seemingly humdrum, is the brilliance of Omar and Cedric, directed with admirable delicacy by Nicolas Jack Davies— and compiled from copious amounts of intimate footage originally captured by Rodríguez-López (or whomever he entrusted with his camera at the time). The film’s scope is startling—it incorporates the multi-instrumentalist’s surreal film experiments with Bixler-Zavala during their time in post-hardcore act At the Drive-In, blistering live footage from their various bands and fly-on-the-backstage wall point of views from most stages of their art-life journey.
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For Rodríguez-López, the desire to chronicle life in visual form dates back to his childhood, watching his mother create family portrait albums and his father utilize a VHS camera to craft “eventos familiares,” a sort of play on both “family events” and “familiar events.”
“I thought it was so cool, and I always wanted to be like him, so I started picking up the camera, especially once he bought his own,” he says. “I have [footage of] the birth of my brothers, of them breastfeeding. All the obsessions you have when you’re little, they just continue. Being able to observe the world around you through a viewfinder is something very special.”
That obsession only grew after his family ventured to El Paso, Texas. Following a tumultuous teenage stint hitchhiking around the country, he joined Bixler Zavala’s emerging band, At the Drive-In— first as a bassist and then as a guitarist with a radical ear for noise and texture.
“I would film our rehearsals, whatever I could,” he says. “At a certain point, I just wanted to be a filmmaker, but I had what I would call this ‘accidental career in music.’ I said, ‘I’m gonna do this one tour, and then when we come back, I’m gonna make my film finally.’ And then we came back from that tour, and they offered us a record deal. We said, ‘Alright, we’re gonna make this one record and this one tour, and then…’ [Laughs.] Sooner or later, when the band started making money and I was able to purchase my own camera, it became very clear to me. We were making money because we were working so much. I was like, ‘OK, this is the film. I’m not gonna have time to make a film, so I have to just film everything happening around me—and one day this will be a film.’ Obviously, at that point, I didn’t understand that it wouldn’t be me making it.”
Technically, he has somehow carved out time to make multiple films, including the surrealist 2018 horror-drama Amalia, in the small gaps of time when not making music. (In addition to all of his bands and one-off projects, he’s released dozens of albums under his own name.) But he ultimately needed a collaborator to finish Omar and Cedric, a fan holy-grail epic that required a certain amount of distance. “It became very clear to me, years later, that I had no objectivity,” he says. “I didn’t know what’s important and what’s not because it was so much film.”
Enter: Nicolas Jack Davies, a music industry veteran who’d previously worked with major artists like Mumford & Sons, Gorillaz and PJ Harvey. But those credentials didn’t make him an automatic hire—in order to ensure their sensibilities meshed, Rodríguez-López invited the director, at that point “almost a complete stranger,” down to hang with his family in Puerto Rico, before eventually deciding to hand over the footage. They were on the same wavelength, with one rule at the forefront—be willing to show it all.
“There’s no point in making something like this if you’re going to put up guardrails,” says Rodríguez-López. “If you’re going to put guardrails, just do a Behind the Music or Classic Albums where the guys show you the track—all the boring ‘80s/‘90s pop-rock stuff. You can do the entertaining thing. But if you’re going to make a film, a documentary… I get [Cedric’s] approval on everything: ‘Hey, I’m handing off this footage, but if we do this, everything is on the table. We have to talk about everything and be honest; otherwise, there’s no point in doing it.’ That was the launching pad. In order for this to be real and good, you have to give yourself up. Can you really be in any relationship, like a band or a marriage, if you’re not 100% willing to put it all on the table and be completely vulnerable and risk losing yourself?”
“I can only relate it to my experience working with other artists,” adds Davies. “But if you work with any contributor who tries to control the narrative and self-edit, it eventually becomes a bit shallow. Sometimes we try to manipulate our own image. But there’s strength in being vulnerable—admitting what happened or being wrong. From my perspective, I had to earn the right to have those conversations.”
That kind of right should be earned— after all, this is the kind of footage any documentarian would salivate over. Rodríguez-López almost always had his camera running, and without that commitment to the process, the film wouldn’t exist in this form. Take, for example, one of Omar and Cedric’s most pivotal scenes—a snippet of a 2001 At the Drive-In show where the guitarist, clearly drained and frustrated with the band’s trajectory, simply stopped playing his guitar. It may have, again, looked like a boring moment to an outsider. But collaborator Danielle Van Ark, who was filming at the time, knew from body language alone that something big was happening.
“That moment when I was standing by my amp and not playing—[that’s] covering all aspects,” says Rodríguez-López. “When we’re playing, who’s going to be able to make it something interesting and not just a wide shot of the band playing? Who’s going to have an eye toward: ‘There’s something happening internally.’ Externally, it looks mundane—there’s a guy standing in front of an amp. But she knew what it meant right away. She knew it meant that I was done. This change in my corporal language meant that this was important.”
Without knowing the context, these scenes might feel almost too cinematic—like an intriguing reality TV show heightened for the screen. But the key, as these guys both note, is making that camera feel invisible. When that thing is constantly rolling, it becomes part of the scenery, no more out of place than a guitar stand. (Davies’ assembly of the film—favoring narration over vibe-ruining talking-head interviews—is crucial to maintaining that feeling. The footage tells the whole story.)
“People aren’t aware of all the work it takes, but once you start [filming a lot], it just becomes second nature,” says Rodríguez López. “You’re like, ‘Get the tripod, hit record and now I can make my coffee.’ That makes you forget that it is there and takes away the weight of someone saying, ‘We’re filming!’ Due to the fact that everyone in my band, and everyone around us, was used to me being the annoying guy who took the big, bulky camera around, after a certain point, they let their guard down and things really start to happen.”
“You go, ‘I wish we had the footage of when the band breaks up,’” adds Davies. “Nobody films when the band breaks up, but Omar sort of did—or got someone to [film it]. Essentially, the whole thing, for me, is practical. If you do it enough, you capture things.”
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The level of access Davies received is rare for any project in this vein, but Omar and Cedric isn’t really a music documentary. The film—which premiered at SXSW 2023 and had a limited theatrical release in late 2024—is something deeper. It’s a fascinating, beautiful and often tense portrait of a lifelong friendship, built around two creative people who just so happen to make music.
Speaking of which, Omar and Cedric is filled with time-capsule footage for hardcore Mars Volta fans, including behind-the-scenes banter, monster live clips and a necessary look into the underrated contributions of their late co-founding sound manipulator Jeremy Michael Ward. But the heartbeat, obviously, is the dynamic between the title musicians—up through their healing reunion. Davies doesn’t dwell on the albums they’ve recorded since, including 2022’s The Mars Volta—the band’s first in 10 years— and its all-acoustic companion edition, Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazón. But the future of their collaboration is implied. For Rodríguez-López, another Mars Volta album could take shape at any point—it all boils down to his longstanding creative dynamic with Bixler-Zavala.
“The quickest way to say what I’m trying to say is: ‘I’m always recording and I’m always handing Cedric demos, and I always choose what an album is based on by what he reacts to right away,’” he says. “If I send him 100 tracks and there are 10 tracks where he’s like, ‘I thought of this right away,’ I take that as the impulse of, ‘That’s the album.’ I rely on his instinct, and he relies on my instinct. There might be something [I like], but if he’s not reacting to it, there’s no reason for him to try to create energy. I just try to find a place to transfer it to. At any moment in time, we could have something that we could put out because I’m constantly recording and then I’ll fly to LA for a couple of weeks and record him and then come home and do what I have to do to finish everything.
“The real element at play is when, psychologically and psychically, you’re ready to go through that process,” he continues. “In other words, when we play shows, it’s a visceral live thing in the moment. You put out a record—it was yours for however [long], and then you put it out and it’s everybody else’s. They have their opinions about it, and you have to accept that. You get to do a series of interviews where basically they’re just asking you: ‘Explain why you did this.’ [Laughs.] Obviously there are worse things in the world, but both things can be true: We can be so lucky that we can live from this, but it can also be true that it can be psychologically exhausting for 30 years to have to explain why you did something— especially when why you did it comes from a very deep and honest place. It’s like trying to answer over and over, ‘Why did you fall in love with this person?’”
Ironically, after watching Omar and Cedric, you walk away understanding, most crucially, why these two humans fell in love—as friends, as brothers, as artists chasing visions they often only seem to share with each other. And it was critical that this film took you there with no restraint. The doc also reminded Rodríguez-López of his relationship to filmmaking in general, becoming an “obsession with trying to capture this beautiful stuff happening around us.”
But that “beautiful stuff,” Rodríguez López says, isn’t always obvious. “[It also] includes what somebody might interpret as dark or heavy,” he admits. “That still has the same amount of power and beauty as a triumphant moment.”
