Diego Luna: “The actor never stops learning”



“You know, I’m a part of this huge movie and I have this big limousine, but I’m still going home by
myself and I have to wake at seven o’clock tomorrow to do interviews. Even if the limousine was
ten times bigger, I’d still have to wake up at seven. I’m not complaining, but sometimes you just
need a nice beer, a hammock and the beach in front of you, and that’s better than anything else.” 
- Diego Luna

Steven Spielberg has found the face of a friend in the Mexican of The Terminal, his most recent movie on a passenger who turns out to be forced to live in an airport.  Diego Luna gained the confidence of the North American director to turned what was going to be a minor character into a key someone for the plot, each time with more dialogue, including phrases in Castilian.

“Not a friend at all, that is my reality check whenever I come.  I don’t know what they see in my face,” this young performer jokes.  They can see the face of a star blossoming, now that the actor, that was announced in Hollywood with And Your Mother Too (2001), has joined his name to that of Spielberg in this movie, the first since the popular producer directed Catch Me if You Can (2002).  As he recognizes Luna, 24 years old, his goal in the cinema has always been to work with the directors that he admires, so he jumped jubilantly at the idea of being a part of Spielberg’s film, although at first the role was very little.

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The Terminal is inspires in the lived incident in 1988 by the Iranian exile Merhan Karimi Nessari in an the Charles de Gaulle Paris airport, where he had to reside for a bureaucratic problem with his passport.  In the film Tom Hanks is Viktor Navorski, citizen of the fictitious country of Krakozhia, who at his arrival to New York discovers that a coup d'état has demolished his government, leaving his visa or passport without value, so that he can neither enter the USA nor return home.

ACTORS, NOT STARS

Luna performs the part of Enrique Cruz, one of the airport employees who will start a friendship with Navorski in this fable, and whom he will try to use to reach the woman that he loves, Dolores (Zoe Saldana).

“Enrique realized that Dolores laughs with Viktor and he sees an occasion to approach the woman that he loves.  He makes an agreement with Viktor to exchange meals for information that allows him to gain her heart,” explains the Mexican actor.

“With Tom Hanks I passed the same as with Robert Duvall. They are people you enjoy around you.  Because there are actors and there are stars.  And these two are actors,” confirms the young performer, whose movies in Hollywood includes the western Open Range (2002), along with Duvall and Kevin Costner.  In The Terminal - that also Catherine Zeta-Jones and Stanley Tucci lead.  “Spielberg was very clear that he wanted to show my emotional character and he agreed that first he was saying everything in Spanish, as if I was coming from the heart (soul),” he remembers on a scene in which Hanks helps to Luna to declare his love to a customs agent.
 

In a certain way, that was fitting very well in the philosophy that Spielberg wanted to give to his movie, as he told us: “The Terminal is a real story of immigration, although Viktor is not technically an immigrant but a visiting traveler.  The film sizes up what has caused this country to be so great and strong: the immigrants who came from all the corners of the globe to the ‘land of milk and honey’, a place where they can dream of reaching a better life.  In a certain way, we have lost of sight the situation that the immigrants live in because security is stronger than ever, and with reason.  Our history celebrates the big ‘melting pot’ that is North America.  That's why Viktor can relate easily to the people of different cultures and social classes.  And that’s the reason why I have wanted to have international cast.”

WORKING IN SPANISH

Although Diego Luna’s premiers in Hollywood maintain a solid pace, his sight remains set in his native Mexico, as it did with Nicotine, by the Argentine director settled in Mexico Hugo Rodríguez, that he presented in the last American Film Institute festival, even though he had to get away for the shooting of The Terminal.  “I would like to do more things there.  To work in my language.  For much work in English, it doesn’t suit me as well as doing it in my language,” he admits.  In fact, on his list of directors with whom he would like to extend his career, the only Americans that appear are the brothers Ethan and Joes Coen.  The rest are the Spaniard Fernando Trueba and the Mexican Coarlos Bolado, with who he is already filming Only God Knows.  “Or with Alfonso Cuarón again, someone whom I admire in his career for his aptitude to change genres and make all of them equally good, from And Your Mother Too to Harry Potter,” he indicates.  For Luna, every movie continues being ‘a learning’, a process that “when one is an actor, it never finishes,” he commented.  “There you have someone like Robert Duvall, 73 years old who keeps on finding new challenges, different projects, the chollo of this profession,” admits Luna.

THE CHALLENGES ARE IN MEXICO

In his mind, a big part of these challenges he hopes to find in Mexico, where he had his eye on a new generation of directors ready to revitalize the world cinema.  “That's why I always want to maintain a foot Latin America.  Because they will never have the budget of The Terminal, but they will have better ideas,” he sums up.  And after that having also experienced Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, the new version of the cinematographic phenomenon of 1987, that argues an incredible internationalization for Diego Luna.

Diego Luna is Enrique Cruz, a Mexican emigrant and food employee that uses his employment to come to a mutually beneficial agreement with Viktor.  Enrique is in love with the immigration official Dolores Tores whom Viktor has to see every day to stamp his papers.  “Enrique realizes of that Dolores laughs with Vikto and sees in it an occasion to approach the woman who he loves.  He signs an agreement with Viktor of exchange of meal for information that allows him to gain her heart,” says the young actor.  “To work with Spielberg has been an incredible experience: I met with generous guy, thankful that I was in his movie, that shared many things with me, that was speaking to me constantly.  I recognize that he was expecting somebody completely different, but it thrilled me very much as he likes what I do, how he enjoys his work, all the energy and determination it puts in him.  It is the personified openness.”