Interview : Andy Garcia

Posted by: Sheila Roberts

I recently participated in a Q&A with internationally renowned, Academy Award-nominated actor Andy Garcia who is currently promoting his latest film, The Lost City. Garcia makes his directorial debut as well as stars in the film which is a dramatic and historical romantic tribute to his native Cuba set against the background of the Cuban revolution. Garcia left Havana when he was five years old when his family fled to Florida after Fidel Castro’s takeover, and he has been nurturing this project for 16 years. The film is handsomely produced and shot on location in the Dominican Republic.

Written by Cuban master novelist, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who became one of the most important voices of opposition against the Castro regime, the film follows the bittersweet tale of one family, three brothers and a beautiful woman whose fates are dramatically intertwined with that of a nation caught up in revolutionary turmoil in the late 1950s. Fico Fellove (Garcia), the owner of Havana’s classiest music nightclub, El Tropico, struggles to hold together his family, his club, and the woman he loves. The entertainment that takes place nightly on the stage of his nightclub mirrors what is happening to his country.

Joining Garcia to film this tale of love and betrayal were Bill Murray (Lost in Translation), Inés Sastre (Beyond the Clouds, Io No, Sabrina, Count of Monte Cristo), Tomás Milian (Traffic), and Dustin Hoffman who appears as Meyer Lansky. The cast also includes Enrique Murciano (Without a Trace), Nestor Carbonell (Suddenly Susan, Laramie Project), Steven Bauer (Traffic, Scarface), Julio Oscar Mechoso (Legend of Zorro), Danny Pino (Cold Case), Richard Bradford (The Chase, A Trip to Bountiful), Millie Perkins (The Diary of Anne Frank), and prima ballerina Lorena Feijóo. In other pivotal roles, Jsu Garcia was cast as Che Guevara, Juan Fernandez as Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, Tony Plana (Resurrection Blvd.) as The Emcee, and Victor Rivers as El Indio.

Frank Mancuso, Jr., who first teamed with Garcia on Internal Affairs in 1990, produced the film along with Garcia, the actor’s CineSon Productions, and Crescent Drive Pictures.
Pre-production was almost non-existent as the cast and crew were being contracted right up until the cameras rolled. Production designer Waldemar Kalinowski was able to take great creative advantage of local sources for the 1958 period look and locations similar to those of Cuba during the same period. Oscar-winning costume designer Deborah Scott (Titanic, Legends of the Fall, Minority Report, and Hoffa) brought her extraordinary taste to recreate the haute couture of 1950s Havana. Production was completed during the months of July and August of 2004, a demanding season to shoot in the Caribbean with hot, humid weather and rapidly changing lighting conditions.

With so many talented and busy figures onscreen, the production had to be fast because of the actors’ previous commitments and Garcia’s continuing role in Ocean’s Twelve that at times overlapped his own film. The entire film was shot in 35 days. All post-production was done in Los Angeles. The film was completed in June of 2005.

Here is what Mr. Garcia had to say about his latest movie, The Lost City:

Q. I always wondered when somebody has a dream to do something that they carry for as long as you did with this, and then it’s written and you direct it and you see it, how different is it from the original dream that you had?

A. The dream is the same. The story never changes...never changed. The execution of the story changes because you have parameters that you have to function under. You know. Budgetary, weather, location. If I had my druthers, I would have filmed it in four different countries. But I could only be in one because that’s all I could afford.
So you adapt yourself to tell a story, but the story never changes. Just the way you design it a little bit changes it.

Q. This was like a wait and hurry up project because it took you so long to be able to get the money and make it and all of a sudden, bam, you gotta go, you got 35 days to shoot it. What was that like for you?

A Well, we prepped it in 6 weeks, you know, once we had the decision that we got the banking from my partners, Tom Gores and Johnny Lopez. And they said, ‘No, we’re going to make this movie. We’re good, and this is the budget. It’s $9.5 million.’ And that’s all in with the bank loan, the interest and everything. The $9.5 million… I don’t have $9.5 million to work with. I said, ‘OK. But if we’re going to do it, we’ve got to shoot no later than June 1st because if we wait any longer, the hurricane season really kicks in and it will be raining every day, and I wouldn’t put you through that financial risk. You know, we’ve got to get in there before…you know, it’s going to be in the Caribbean.’ So we made a commitment to hit those dates. Bill Murray jumped in. Dustin Hoffman always told me, ‘If I’m available, I’ll do the movie.’ Figuring I’ll never be available. (laughter) So I said, ‘You’re available?’ And he goes, ‘Yes, I’m available, but you’ll have to come to my daughter’s wedding.’ So we went to the wedding and then we flew together to the Dominican Republic. But, so, they jumped on it, and obviously, the rest of the cast … It was very… We’ve been waiting sixteen years to make the movie so we had six weeks to prep the film, and we then didn’t get bonded until the last two weeks before we started. The movie can’t get financed without the bond because the bank loan won’t kick in and all that stuff. So Mr. Gores was sending checks, you know, personal checks every week to meet the payroll knowing that, you know, waiting for the bonds.

So this is how… You know, six weeks to prep a movie is like… to prep even a contemporary movie… is very difficult. Let alone a period piece in the Dominican Republic with cars that don’t have engines in them. (laughter) So you know, we had …we were so blessed. I can’t tell you how lucky…how all the stars lined up for us. First of all, it never rained. It rained only one afternoon. We lost the scene that we shot the next day so I picked it up. Then we had…most of the cars that we found, they weren’t operable. They had told us, ‘There’s plenty of old jeeps in the military’ and stuff like that. But we went there, and they hadn’t been turned on for 30 years, you know. They’re all rusted, and I’m going ‘Oh, my God.’ We got one jeep in the movie that worked really well so that’s the jeep you see in the entire movie. (laughter) And we had Batista’s car that worked which was a beautiful white caddy, and two black cars to follow it. And my car… we found the red car. And just about every other car in the movie was pushed into place. And I don’t think, if you watch the movie, that you see that. These are just some of the logistical things that you have to deal with, and I knew always that it was going to be difficult and very problematic, you know, trying to shoot this movie in 35 days. And no matter how welcoming the Dominicans were and all that, we were still in a country that doesn’t have the…we don’t have the accessibility to as many cars as we would have here and things like that. There were going to be snags, but as I said to Frank Mancuso, I couldn’t have made this movie without his organization, without him taking care of my back. I said, ‘I want to be in the position to have those problems, because if not, I’m just still talking about the movie.’ I said, ‘We’ll solve the problems, but I just want to be there. Throw me some problems, will you?’

Q. You have such an amazing list of behind-the-scenes talent?

A. Oh, incredible.

Q. Was that just as simple as offering them the job or did you have to romance them a little bit?

A. Well, Waldemar Kalinowski was my production designer. We met on Internal Affairs in 1990. He went to Cuba in 1991 to scout the film so we’ve been working on it since we met on Internal Affairs. And Deborah Scott was my first choice, and once I was financed, I thought ‘I’ve got to call Deborah to see if she’s available.’ I’ve never worked with her, but I’ve known her for years. And her children grew up with my kids, and I’m a great admirer of her work. I was shopping at Gelson’s and I ran into her at Gelson’s, and I said, ‘Hey, Deb. How are you? So what are you doing?’ And she said, ‘Oh, nothing. I’m just looking … I just finished this huge film and it was … I don’t know. I feel like I’d like to get back to the days when we made more personal films.’ And I said, ‘Let me buy you lunch.’ (laughter) So she says to me, ‘If I would have known…If I wouldn’t have gone to Gelson’s that day, I wouldn’t be here in the Dominican.’ And I said, ‘No, I would have tracked you down.’ So she came on board, and I said, ‘The only thing I can tell you is that the budget you have to design this movie is the budget you had for the shoes of the Titanic. (laughter) Not even the shoe laces, just the shoes.’ So she did… they did extraordinary work with nothing on a period movie. To make a period movie… Their budgets were nothing… But they’re magical people, and they were able to articulate the ideas that we shared between us and get it done, you know. And also, you know, Emmanuel Kadosh, the director of photography, I had done a movie with him called Modigliani, and I was always very impressed with him as a photographer. We shared the same sensibilities about the theory of how to make movies, and how to light movies, and he got… he articulated my idea and we shot that movie in 35 days. Hopefully, most of you saw the film. You saw the scope of the film and also the beauty of what we were able to do. We worked a lot with available light and stuff like that to get the job done because we had to shoot a lot of material. The assembly of the movie was 3-1/2 hours long. So there was a lot of material, you know.

Q. Do you expect some reactions or are there already reactions from the Cuban regime or Fidel Castro?

A. I haven’t had any phone calls from Fidel Castro yet. (laughter)

Q. Are you hoping that this film will clear up some common misperceptions about Cuba and its current government?

A. That would be nice because there is such a lack of understanding or knowledge of what really went down in that time period. Most people think that the Cuban revolution was a socialist…a Marxist revolution. It was not. It turned into that, but that was not what was articulated. That’s not what people were fighting for. In fact, that was not what Fidel Castro’s whole manifesto stated which was the restoration of the constitution, of democracy, elections, and all that. It only turned once he took power.

Q. I have Cuban American friends and they’ve asked me if I had the opportunity to personally thank you for making this film and telling the truth about this story.

A. Thank you. That’s why we made it. I wish I didn’t have to tell this story because then it wouldn’t have happened. And I wouldn’t be here. I’d be growing potatoes in Havana (laughter) and probably playing the piano. I’d be very happy. I’d be a gentleman farmer piano player.

Q. What do you want Americans and people of other cultures to get out of this?

A. To me it’s a movie that reflects all the classical elements of the films that I’ve responded to over my life. The movies of Visconti, about the end of a way of life, Casablanca, Dr. Zhivago which I saw when I was very young and I was very taken by. And you know, it’s a movie…it’s a celebration...it’s a look into the end of an era. It’s a celebration obviously of a culture that I hold very dear and the music of that culture. The music is a protagonist in the film and it’s about impossible love, about having to leave the thing that you most cherish. And then, what do you do? In the movie, before he leaves, the soldier says to him, ‘You can’t take Cuba with you.’ But you can, and I did.

Q. How much do you remember from your actual leaving because you were so young?

A. Leaving? Everything. I went through that same thing that my character goes through in the picture.

Q. You were five?

A. Five and a half.

Q. But what specific do you remember of leaving your country?

A. Well, specifically I remember that particular moment. I was there with my sister and they were going to take off her …. She had these little ringlets and she couldn’t get them off her hand because she had grown into them. She was like 12 years old. And they started talking about what they were going to do, and I remember as a young boy looking up because, you know, it was very impressionable when you have people with guns around and stuff and dressed in military fatigues and stuff like that.

And they came in with cutting shears and I thought they were going to cut her hand off to take the rings off. So I remember that was a very strong impression that to this day I remember, and they cut the rings and took them off. And then my mother had a watch, and the guy was going to take the watch and it happened that one of the soldiers that was there was apparently one of her students. She taught English in high school. And apparently my mother used to use the watch to help teach them English and tell time and stuff like that. And the soldier threw her a towel and said, ‘No, that watch is a cheap watch and plus they need it for the kid when it’s his feeding hour. I know those watches. They’re like toy watches. Let her through.’ And that’s the only thing she took out was that watch.

Q. You said that the cinematographer went down to Cuba …

A. No, no, the production designer. We were scouting. We had a script, and we went and scouted all the actual locations from our script that were, you know, the actual locations. And detail work. I wanted him to get familiar with it and stuff like that.

Q. Music plays such a prominent role in the movie. I was wondering if you could talk a little about your own musical background and how that played into your choosing a sound track and even scoring the movie?

A. Well, I started collecting Cuban music when I was very, very young…before I can drive. You know, I was already collecting. And once I drove then I could really start collecting because then I could get to the stores whenever I wanted to. And I also started studying percussion at that age in my teenage years and so in that collection, you know, I started formulating the idea of making the movie, and I had this vast collection at my house, and myself and Mr. Infante who has also dedicated his life to writing about that world of music seen in Cuba and the cabaret world and stuff like that.

Between his suggestions and my own desires, the movie was motivated by specific pieces of music and sequences were designed around specific pieces of music. So I had all those original recordings that I could pull from. Then I had recordings that I had been doing with Cashao for the past ten years that I knew I was going to use in the movie like the original mambo that opens the piece. Well the original mambo is an old recording that the fidelity is so bad that you couldn’t really use it in the film so we rerecorded it. I started rerecording some things that I knew we were going to use in the picture and then… So that’s like the second element, and then I prerecorded a couple of my themes before I went that I needed. The attack on the palace I prerecorded like a week before I left, and there’s a piano piece called Solitude which is one of my character’s main themes. And then as I was editing I had a piano in the editing room and then I finished the score by composing the themes as I was editing.

Q. Did you think about making this movie in Spanish?

A. Very briefly. Not really. Because Infante writes so Cuban in English, you know. And I knew that this movie would be difficult to finance and if it was Spanish would have been even that much more difficult to finance because your market is reduced and where you can show it. So I wanted it to have its widest possible audience and facility to finance so... It took me 16 years in English. Imagine in Spanish? (laughter)

Q. Could you discuss your relationship with Infante?

A. I met him … I went to see him when I got the blessing from Paramount. They asked me what I would like to do and Frank Mancuso, Sr. said… I said, ‘I’d like to make sort of a movie like Casablanca in Havana at the turn of the revolution.’ And he said, ‘Great. Find a writer.’ And I said, ‘I have one. He’s in London. His name is Guillermo Cabrera Infante. He’s only written one other screenplay, but he’s like one of the great novelists in Latin American literature’ and so forth and so on. And he said, ‘OK. Go see him.’

So I went to meet him, and I went into his room and he lives in a flat and it was about the length (looking around the room)…It was rectangular, about the length of this room, and he sat like this in front of his chair and behind him was like a 40-foot-high ceiling because it was one of those old London flats, and from the entire length of the wall this way was books completely piled up one…you know, they were in bookshelves but also piled up around him. You couldn’t fit another book. You could only put on top of another book. And after I got a little comfortable, I said ‘Maestro, have you read all these books?’ And he said, ‘Only once.’ (laughter) He had like 3,000 books, you know. So I told him the idea, this basic idea of sort of Casablanca, and the idea that someone would own a cabaret and it’s all inspirations also on his books like Three Trapped Tigers and stuff like that, and although that’s not the story, the world that he created. He would just nod and he’d say, ‘OK, OK. It can be done.’ And I said, ‘We can have a sequence where we attack the palace.’ And I went through some…. I guess he was curious that a young guy would be so interested in Cuban history and knew Cuban music and stuff. I guess that touched him. And he said, ‘OK. We can work with that.’ And that was it. And then I went away and he delivered… in May 1990, he delivered a 350-page screenplay.

Q. Since that was 16 years ago, did you always intend to play Fico or …?

A. Yeah, always Fico, but not at that age (laughter). He was the middle brother, I think, when we started and then… but you know, I always knew that because this movie for some reason was difficult to make and I always knew that … I never really lost faith in it but I knew that if I had to play the father and not Fico that I would do that (laughter). There was always a part that I could fall into if they wanted me to.

Q. How much did Bill Murray ad lib?

A. Very little. Very little. I told him, you know, I gave him the liberty. I said, ‘Bill.’ I have great respect for him. He’s not only a great actor, but he’s also a great writer. And I said, ‘Feel free to play with the material. I know you understand.’ And he said, ‘No, I like it the way it is.’

Q. It’s so him.

A. Yeah, he added little things. He played a scene and then like he added little like blow offs and things like when he’s talking about that I should turn the club into the Merry Widow of the Revolution. Before he left he said, ‘I’m going to run…I’m going to see if I can nail down the rights, if you don’t mind.’ That was Bill, you know. Things like that. But the scenes were… He was riffing off the scenes, not like so much just riffing. The dialogue was written very much, you know, for Bill Murray. Really, it was incredible how he … When he read it, that’s what he responded to. He saw it. He saw the dryness of the character and the absurdity of… sort of like a Groucho Marx quality to him.

Q. You were already a favorite son of the Miami Cuban community. What do you do for an encore now?

A. (laughs) We had an extraordinary screening of the movie at the Miami Film Festival. Some people fainted and had to be carried out. It was really incredible. Uh, I don’t know. I’m in service of our story. That’s all I do. So whatever I can do to continue. Plus, you know, it stimulates me. I’m stimulated by my culture and there’s a lot of stories there, you know. Those stories I want to tell. And it stimulates me as an actor and as a musician, so I can tell you I almost have one of those stories in my back pocket to try to get made.

Q. What is next for you? Your next film?

A. Well, next? I mean I did two movies this year, independent films. One is called The Air That I Breathe and another one was Smokin’ Aces with Joe Carnahan, and they want me to participate in the Ocean’s Thirteen in the summer. And so I don’t think I’ll do anything before that. I want to take some time with my kids in the summer, in June, and just go fishing.

Q. How about your wife? Do you ever argue with her about anything? Like politics?

A. Ah, no. We argue, but not about politics. (laughter) But we have a… We have a …. I mean I’m blessed to have that relationship in my life, you know. She’s a very special lady, and our arguments are not really important arguments. They’re ‘Come on, we’re going to be late’ or something like that. ‘The dogs haven’t eaten,’ you know, or ‘I forgot to pick up the dog food.’

Q. Do you try to keep up the Cuban history and culture that you have with your children? Is that important?

A. Yes, they’re in the movie. Three of my four children are in the movie. One of them I had to cut out (laughter). No, not because she was bad. It’s just that the scene was just lifted…

Q. What do they play?

A. My daughter, my eldest daughter (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) plays Enrique Murciano’s wife in the movie, my younger brother’s wife, Mercedes. And then my little boy plays their son. The little boy in the picture. And then my daughter, Daniella, my middle daughter … There was an actress, actually a Cuban-Chinese girl, who I cast to play the waitress in the Cuban-Chinese restaurant, and the night before she was supposed to arrive to work the next morning, and she couldn’t leave America because she didn’t have her papers in order. She had just arrived from Cuba and didn’t have her papers. They wouldn’t let her go out. I mean if she went out, then they wouldn’t let her come back in. So we got that news and my daughter, who’s also an actress…she’s going to Cal Arts, she’s starting Cal Arts next year, stepped in and played the waitress on a moment’s notice.

Q. Was Coppola kind of an influence on you as a director?

A. Absolutely. He’s influenced everybody.

Q. I know, but you worked with him?

A. Yeah, of course. It was a great experience for me because I also got a chance to hang out and pick Gordon Willis’ brain a lot as we were making the movie, and I used to go to dailies with Gordon and talk to him a lot about his theories about composition, and part of my movie is shot in a classical style that way. Part of it which relates to the family. I wanted those things to be fairly static and classical in their framework, and then outside of that, more chaotic, more handheld and stuff like that. So, yeah, of course, watching all these people work on one of the first movies that I did. And Hal Ashby also took me under his wing, and I used to go to dailies with Hal and watch the movie, and he was… So, you know, I’ve always been interested in directing. I was very stimulated by it. So I took the opportunity as I worked… I had these opportunities to work with some great people and to take advantage of that schooling, and you know, use it as my film school, and I continued to do so. You know, when you work with someone like Steven Soderbergh...he’s a genial talent. All you have to do is watch. You know, have the interest to watch, and then you can converse if you have a question. You can say, ‘Hey, you know, how do you feel about that? Why are you doing this?’ But if you sit back and watch them work, then the schooling is right there.

Q. Can you give us a Cuban recipe?

A. Cuban recipe? Well, I like very simple things. I mean I like the fricassees. You know, it’s good but... Well, the classic peasant dish is one of my favorites. You take white rice, and before you boil it, you fry it in a little bit of extra virgin olive oil and garlic. Right? You fry it up a little bit. Then you make the rice, put the water in so it has a little bit of the garlic flavor. And then when it’s ready, you fry two eggs, you know, sunny side up in extra virgin olive oil. Put them over the rice and you have it with fried bananas, sweet bananas. And then you mix it all together and you eat it with a good Spanish wine. Red. (laughter) And that’s breakfast. And then you can mix it with a meat. Usually they have what they call picadillo which is like a Cuban version of a Sloppy Joe with meat, with the onions and tomatoes, ground up, and raisins, and capers, and olives.

I thanked Mr. Garcia for taking time out of his busy schedule to discuss his exciting new film. It is a daunting task to produce and direct a project on such an epic scale in which you are also the lead actor. Garcia should be commended for his passion and commitment to the enterprise. The Lost City opens in theaters on April 28th.