Diego Luna gave a decisive step
for his career. A dance step. He entered American cinema with
the right foot, the same one that spins and stomps the
choreography of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights,
his first lead role in an American movie. This month the
perspiration will dry off to shoot Criminal,
meanwhile he waits for the premiere of Open Range
where he acted next to Kevin Costner, and the Mexican film,
Nicotina. Luna is
rising to the moon.
How does a Mexican actor obtain
a major roll in the Dirty Dancing sequel without knowing how to
dance?
Diego: "It was not all charisma. I learned to dance, which
I will always be thankful for, because I no longer have to be
drunk to dance," he indicated smiling.
In addition to English, Luna had
to perfect the Cuban accent, the nationality of his character.
Diego: "The English was good. I did a Cuban accent because my
character is a Cuban man from 1958. It was a nice job; something
that had never been done, a major character in English,"
commented Luna.
Nevertheless, his
character was not related to the protagonist of Dirty Dancing,
the first movie.
Diego:
"I did not have a chance to work
with Patrick Swayze in Havana Nights. It was not
incumbent upon me to know him," he added. "The cliché follows
for Latinos."
Although the actor has had the luck
of steping onto foreign sets, he recognizes that rejection from
Mexicans still exists.
Diego: "The
cliché is there,
the interesting thing is to look for characters that have not
been written for Latinos and that can be adapted to your person,
equal to the rest of the characters. But it is in us to remove
this cliché."
A few weekends ago, BUZZ decided
it might be fun to attend the New York press junket for "Dirty
Dancing Havana Nights." No, this isn't the most independent
flick of 2004, but it is a Miramax/Lions Gate release, we were
huge fans of the original back in our adolescent days, and...
well... it's worth losing all indie cred to spend a Saturday
afternoon in a room with Diego Luna. This time our mis-matched,
gyrating young lovers are living in revolutionary Cuba in 1958,
as young American bookworm Katey (Romola Garai) moves to Havana
with her parents and ditches the country club set to hang out
with hot poolboy Javier (Luna). When he needs cash to support
his family, she suggests they secretly enter the big dance
contest -- Afro-Cuban rhythms and PG-13 sex scenes ensue. At the
junket, actress Garai ("Nicholas Nickleby," "I Capture the
Castle") admitted she took the role because she thought it
"would be a laugh. It was a fun script and I really wanted to
work with Diego after I saw 'Y Tu Mama Tambien.'"
Luna said he signed on to the project because it was a chance to
play a lead character (and a "smart young person") in an
English-language film. He continued, "My character is a very
political guy, and I hope young people become more political and
get involved in changing the reality they live in, or at least
analyze where they are." Picking up some new dance moves was a
side benefit -- Luna said he's not a born dancer. "I'm a
terrible dancer," he said. "I had to be really drunk... it was a
way of getting close to a girl without having to speak. If I
ever opened my mouth, they would leave, so this was a way to
keep them close (laughs)." After two months of training, the
young pair more than hold their own in the big dance numbers.
The film is partly based on the life of choreographer JoAnn
Jansen, who lived and loved as a teenager in Cuba. Director Guy
Ferland told indieWIRE, "I call it a companion piece [to the
original hit]. It's not a sequel or a prequel or a remake. It's
a retelling or reimagination, it's a chapter in a book of Dirty
Dancing stories." (Fans of the original will be happy to see an
aging but nimbile Patrick Swayze making an appearance in "Havana
Nights.") I asked Ferland, whose "Telling Lies in America"
played the New York Film Festival in 1997, if he had any horror
stories after working with not one, but two, formidable film
companies on this film -- Miramax and Artisan (now Lions Gate).
"Everybody wants to make a really good movie, that's first and
foremost," he said. "When you've got that energy, and people
expect to collaborate, it's not a bad experience at all... I
knew exactly what I was getting into it. It was nothing like the
Biskind book."
Q:
When you first got the script for this and you started reading
it knowing that one, you weren’t Cuban and two, you couldn’t
dance, what were you thinking?
Diego: "That’s exactly the kinds of roles I want to accept.
Roles that are not like myself. I love trying to be somebody
else for a couple of hours and this one was crazy because I had
to learn how to dance. I had a few scenes in Spanish and I had
to learn how to speak in Cuban. I had to enjoy dancing, but that
was easy I have to say. Dancing really felt great, once you
believe you can do it, it’s amazing."
Q: You look like you enjoyed
yourself.
Diego: "I did."
Q: How challenging was it to
learn these dance steps?
Diego: "It was really tough
because I was not a good dancer, but we (co-star Romola Garai)
did everything together. We started together and we started to
see our progress together and we got excited together. That was
good because we developed chemistry between us and we were proud
of what we were doing."
Q:
So after all your preparation and hard work it started to feel
natural?
Diego: "We got to the point of
really thinking that we were amazing dancers who were
professionals. I’m sure I was a pain in the ass with the
choreographer because I would give my advice like, "Oh no, that
move is not going to work." In a way that was good because we
owned the routines. It’s not like she did the routines and we
had to imitate them. We learned how to do it and we created
these things with her. I think you can tell that, we felt free
when we were dancing."
Q:
Now, were you a fan of the original Dirty Dancing movie,
or did you go out and rent it and watch it a hundred times, or
did you choose not to watch it?
Diego: "I saw it two weeks
before we started shooting this movie. I was eight years old
when Dirty Dancing came out, so it’s not really the kind of
movie you’d look for if you are eight and you are a boy. You
were looking for Star Wars or something like that! It was great,
but I decided to do this movie because of the story we are
telling and the script and the people who were involved with
this movie. It’s not about the other movie and that made this
one unique. It has its own soul, it could be called just Havana
Nights and still be a good movie. It doesn’t need Dirty
Dancing behind it."
Translated
from:
http://www.univision.com/content/content.jhtml?cid=223873
