from Orange.co.uk

We talk to Catalina Sandino Moreno about Fast Food Nation and upcoming Ethan Hawke project The Hottest State

Do you eat meat, Catalina? ~
Catalina Sandino Moreno: I stopped eating meat once when I got a big steak and I opened it and it was just like an artery and it was just full of blood. I decided not to eat meat after that – it just grossed me out.

And did Richard Linklater come to you or did you have to chase this movie role?
Catalina: No I got the script and then the next day I was like ‘I really need to do this’. I went to meet him and I wanted to let him know that I can do this and I want to do this and I will give 100% to this project. So I met him and I got it.

Were you surprised to find something you were so passionate about?
Catalina: I was very excited to just find a project. With many scripts I can read them and if I don’t like it I just don’t keep reading. Sometimes I just turn three pages and I’m like, ‘No, thank you! I’m not going to read anymore. I’m not going to waste my time.’ But with this script it was a page-turner. That’s why I had to read the book because I didn’t understand why or if these things were real and then Eric Schlosser, the writer, dissects everything. It was a very interesting way to relate to the world going from the script to the book and from the book to the script.

Do you think the film is trying to dictate what people should or shouldn’t eat?
Catalina: I don’t think this movie is just for the fast food industry. This movie doesn’t tell you, ‘Don’t eat more fast food’, or who’s a bad guy or who’s a good guy. I just think that this is a movie that everyone can react to in different ways. Everyone can take anything from the movie because it’s an open movie this doesn’t tell you what’s bad and what’s good. It just tells you what’s happening and I think you need to know this and it’s your right to know how things are functioning.

Does that bother you about working for studios?
Catalina: For me, I just feel very proud of this movie. From the first time that I read the script I thought it was an important thing to tell people. I think everyone has the right to know what’s in their food. I feel happy that Richard gave me the chance to put a face and a voice and a body to this girl that just wants a better life and will do whatever it takes to take care of her family.

Some scenes were quite disgusting to watch. Was it the same to shoot?
Catalina: You know I’m an actress who likes to feel the heat. So I was so happy that we were going to be shooting in that slaughterhouse because I could be able to touch and I was touching and testing. My job was to take the shit out of intestines and clean it and then after you do that you just drop it in a bucket.

I was doing that for the last part of the film and for my character it was perfect because I’ve never been to a slaughterhouse. I didn’t go to a slaughterhouse before to see what it was like or how cows were killed. I waited until the shoot, and it was a very shocking scene. We went there and the line was moving and you can just see these big things – I don’t know what they were they were just big pieces of insides. It was easier for me to do that because sometimes when you’re shooting a movie you have so many little surprises that you just have to be surprised yourself. You know what you’re character’s going to do, you know how you’re going to end but if you take those decisions not to do things before and just surprise yourself you will look real and that’s what I did.

Did your involvement with Ethan Hawke’s next project The Hottest State come about after making Fast Food Nation together?
Catalina: No, I met Ethan at the Oscars the year that I was there. He was with Richard Linklater and Julie Delpy. I met him very briefly and then I went to New York to see Hurlyburly and then I met him there again. He told me that he had a script and he wanted me to read it and it was a romantic story and I was a little scared because I’m not a romantic person myself so I said, OK, I’ll read it, of course.’ And I read it and I think it was a point in my life where I was very vulnerable and I loved it.

from Guardian Unlimited / by Ed Pilkington

In Richard Linklater’s new film, Fast Food Nation, fans of Anthony Hopkins’ butchery of a prison guard in Silence of the Lambs are in for a treat. In the last five minutes of the movie several cows are subjected to similar processing: first they are stunned and hung up, still writhing, before their throats are slit. Then their limbs are hacked off one by one, and they are skinned. Finally their entrails are disgorged and sent blobbing down a chute, like oversized jellyfish. It’s not a pleasant scene, and it is all the more disconcerting because in the middle of all the gore and spouting blood, a beautiful woman is standing. Her pale face is splattered red and her eyes are dilated with an expression of deep shock.

The woman is the Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno, and her traumatised appearance is not merely testament to her acting. The passage was shot as if live, capturing her first experience of the inside of a slaughterhouse. “I didn’t want to go in just to see, I wanted to do it with the camera rolling. I’d been warned there would be lots of blood, but it was still very shocking. One minute we were driving through the countryside watching cows eating grass and having fun. Then suddenly we were inside and there is the cow hanging upside down, its eyes still blinking. Then here’s another one, and another one - it’s like a machine, and the workers were like robots, not talking to each other, just killing, killing, killing.”

Sandino Moreno is no stranger to the role of young Hispanic woman thrown wide-eyed into the centre of gruesome events. She burst into view in 2004 - grabbing an Oscar nomination for best actress as she did so - in her first movie, Maria Full of Grace, in which she played a Colombian drug mule to the United States. In a memorable scene - similarly shot without any prior preparation - she swallows several packages of white powder wrapped in condoms, her neck distending as the boluses go down.

Like Maria, Fast Food Nation focuses on the irresistible lure of the great power to the north for Hispanic immigrants who are seeking to build a new life, and who are prepared to take terrible risks to do so. A docu-drama based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Eric Schlosser, who co-wrote the script with Linklater, it follows the hopefuls as they make their perilous border crossing only to be rewarded with dangerous and low-paid work in the meat processing plants of Colorado. Fast Food Nation goes one stage further than Maria in that it also explores the impact of the rush for fast-food profits on the existing US population: the suppressed wages, the environmental degradation and, above all, the literally shitty food - the burgers are contaminated with cow faeces.

It has been three years since Maria Full of Grace, and Sandino Moreno had starred in just two other films in the interim, and one of those was a short-role in a portmanteau movie. She accounts for her low work-rate by saying she was waiting for another script with a message. The huge success of Maria had taken everybody - including its debutant director, Joshua Marston, and equally green lead actress - utterly by surprise. With the benefits of such success, she says, came a growing sense of responsibility to stick with what she calls “socially powerful” cinema. “When I was travelling to all these festivals I realised how people were reacting to Maria and how many were grateful to us for making it. When we showed the movie in New York a lot of people who came were Colombians wanting to remember back home - it was so great to be in the theatre surrounded by people from Bogota, Cali, Medellin, Pereira. After that, I really wanted to concentrate on a new project that was as powerful.”

Maria rocketed her, in a matter of months, from an utterly unknown amateur actor to the Oscars. When Marston came knocking at her door, she was training to be an advertising executive; her biggest ambition in life was to “be put on a campaign selling spoons”. She went along with the movie, she said, simply because she thought it would be a “fun ride”, never expecting it to go beyond a limited release on pay TV. That she has enjoyed such a short-cut to stardom is in itself a reflection of the wider boom in interest in Latin-American film. Though Latin-America has been making movies for as long as Hollywood, it is only recently that the output has been recognised among the mass cinema-going audience in the US. Its new status is partly, perhaps, because of the rising demographic importance of America’s Hispanic population, and partly because of the wealth of talent emerging from the new generation of Hispanic film-makers.

Fernando Meirelles opened the floodgates with his 2004 Oscar nomination for best director with City of God, and others have rushed in behind him. By the time Sandino Moreno took her seat at the Oscars the following year, she was joined at other tables by the three rising stars of Mexican cinema: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro. “It was amazing to see those guys up there, and they’ve come on a lot since then. Alfonso Cuarón has grown so much as a director, and del Toro, who has always been so dark, the hard boy of Mexican cinema, suddenly produces this movie [Pan’s Labyrinth] that is so beautiful, it just flies.”

The paradox about Sandino Moreno herself is that, having made two films with strong storylines involving young Hispanic women being sucked from their own countries to the American economic powerhouse, she has herself followed the same trajectory. Her biography reads like a version - albeit a comfortable, middle-class one - of El Norte, the celebrated 1983 movie about the long journey of Latino immigrants to the US.

Certainly, her relocation to New York has been legal and relatively pain-free. Her upbringing in a family of doctors and her education in a British school means she is at home in her present neighbourhood, Manhattan’s upper east side, as she is back home in Bogota. There was no swallowing of boluses when she flew into JFK. But the economic imperative for a young actor to be in America is little different, I suggest to her, than that of Sylvia, the illegal immigrant she plays in Fast Food Nation. Although since Maria she has become one of the foremost Latin-American actors of her generation, almost all the movies she has appeared in have been directed by North American film-makers, including the soon-to-be-released The Hottest State, a romance directed by Ethan Hawke. The only exceptions have been a five-minute segment of the portmanteau movie Paris, Je T’Aime, directed by the Brazilian Walter Salles, and the forthcoming period piece Heart of the Earth by the Spanish director Antonio Cuadri.

In response she insists that she still harbours ambitions to make films in Spanish and with top Latin-American directors. “That’s my priority, and it would be stupid to cut myself off from that, to say, ‘I’m living in New York and I’m only going to make American movies’. No, not at all. There are so many intelligent film-makers working in Latin America, in Colombia.”

Another upcoming film saw her return to Colombia for the shooting of Mike Newell’s interpretation of Love in the Time of Cholera, based on the novel by her compatriot Gabriel Garcia Márquez. The two months spent on location in the port of Cartagena gave her the rare chance to exhibit her home to the wider world. “We shot the film where Márquez wrote the book - Cartagena is like another character in the film: its presence is always felt. I felt so proud while I was there, showing off my beautiful home to my colleagues.” Being back in Colombia, she says, also gave her exposure to the healthy influence of her strong family, particularly her mother who she says keeps her grounded despite a heady rise. “Every time I spoke to my mother she would tell me to remember where I was, to control my life and not to let any of these things effect who I am.”

That’s not quite the reaction, though, of her grandmother, who has filled her house in Bogota with pictures of Catalina and is forever distributing DVDs of her to her elderly friends. “Her house is like a museum,” Sandino Moreno says. With Fast Food Nation, Heart of the Earth, the Hottest State and Love in the Time of Cholera all to be released in quick succession, the one-time advertising trainee from Bogota is going to be much in view this year. Her grandmother has a busy few months ahead.

· Fast Food Nation is on general release.