from The Post-Standard / by Joan E. Vadebonceur

“Maria Full of Grace” is memorable on two counts.

One is the introduction of a radiant actress, Catalina Sandino Moreno, who promises to be an international star.

The other is not as pleasant to report. In several sequences, Moreno’s Maria participates in revolting actions necessitated by her desire to escape her humdrum life in Colombia. She must ingest heroin-filled pellets and then vacate them, so they can be retrieved by drug traffickers.

The 17-year-old loses her menial job as a dethorner of roses when her boss fails to realize she is sick - pregnant actually. This makes a hardship on the family dependent on her for money to feed grandma, mother and older sister, who has an ailing baby.

Although writer-director Joshua Marston does not depict the teen as a rebel or a daredevil or her living conditions as unbearable, she agrees to be a smuggler. Apparently, her pregnancy by uncaring boyfriend Juan (handsome Wilson Guerrero) sets her in motion.

Of course, it proves more dangerous than explained by her Colombia contact, a genial, grandfatherly looking Javier (Jaime Osorio). Customs officials challenge her entry into the United States. She separates from her best friend, the feisty Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), and a new friend, Lucy (Guilied Lopez), becomes seriously ill.

Marston is not without his gaffes as a writer or director. On the former count, he has Maria seeking an address from Lucy, who has only her sister’s, when Blanca has the hotel where they were due to stay, and Blanca had not departed at that point.

As a director, he permits Moreno to appear guilty in her confrontations with authorities. Further, by making her 17, he annoys, since the actress clearly is older. It’s his script, so why does he not place Maria in her early 20s?

That said, the film is consistently arresting. And, when Moreno makes her final decision, her expressive face goes from fear and dread to hope and some confidence in the space of a minute, proving this is an actress who bears watching.

from Fort Worth Star-Telegram / by Christopher Kelly

DALLAS - Catalina Sandino Moreno. Remember the name. Come next Oscar season, you’re going to be hearing it a lot.

Yes, August might be early for such predictions. But this one you can take to the bank: Moreno - a 23-year-old Colombian woman making her acting debut in the drama “Maria Full of Grace” - is going to be one of the five nominees for the Best Actress Oscar come January.

A lot of blustery hype? Not when you consider that this time last year another unknown actress was dazzling critics and audiences, a little girl named Keisha Castle-Hughes, in the movie “Whale Rider.” Castle-Hughes went on to become this year’s biggest surprise nominee. Hollywood loves its come-out-of-nowhere, up-from-your-bootstraps, a-star-is-born-overnight sagas, and Catalina Sandino Moreno’s is especially gripping.

She was studying advertising in Bogota when a friend told her about an open-call audition. “I just went because I was very curious to see this American guy trying to make a Colombian movie,” Moreno explained recently, before a benefit screening of “Maria Full of Grace” in Dallas.

Actually, the American guy’s team was conducting the auditions. The American guy - California-born, New York-based Joshua Marston - was in New York, terrified that his debut film was going to fall apart because he couldn’t find a lead actress.

“Over the course of three months, we saw something on the order of 900 girls,” Marston says. “And I couldn’t find the right one. Literally, the morning after we postponed the shoot, another tape came in from Colombia, with another dozen auditions. She was the first one on the tape. … I went to Colombia and had to pretend that I hadn’t already decided to cast her, because I wanted to see her do something in front of me. I was really trying to play it cool.”

Marston hit paydirt indeed. As Maria - a naive, poor girl working on a flower plantation who travels to New York City as a drug mule, with dozens of pellets of heroin in her stomach - Moreno is in virtually every scene of the movie. The fledgling actress gives us an ordinary girl who is no hero. Her Maria is stubborn, selfish, apt to tell lies - but also a victim of her own lousy circumstances and naivete. The actress pulls all of this off with surprisingly little dialogue; mostly, we watch as a gallery of emotions dances across her wide-open face.

It helps that she’s so beautiful - with a mane of dark hair that falls past her shoulders and brown eyes so deep as to be teasingly elusive, as if she’s keeping a secret the rest of us will never be able to learn. The camera could never possibly get enough of her.

“Maria Full of Grace” premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was one of the strongest entries in the competition (it won the Audience Award there), and where all the buzz seemed to center on Moreno. That buzz carried to the Berlin Film Festival in February, where Moreno won the festival’s best actress award. That’s when Moreno realized she was going to have to start practicing at this whole “movie star” thing.

“After Berlin,” she says now, “everyone knew my name, and everybody was taking a picture of me. I didn’t have an autograph. I was just trying to print my name like a superstar. Even today, I don’t have an autograph. I just have my little signature.”

In person, Moreno is a bit of a fidget, albeit an endearing one. She’s apt to pull her black turtleneck sweater up over her mouth in between questions, or mess with her hair, pinning it up and letting it fall back down. When an audience member gushingly compliments her in Spanish on her performance, she seems to be on the verge of blushing. She’s a case study of the movie star before a thick layer of polish has been applied.

But when she speaks about her work, she’s mature, intelligent, razor-sharp in her analysis. She claims she has never acted before, but if that’s the case, she must have watched every episode of “Inside the Actor’s Studio” ever recorded.

“I never learned to swallow the pellets,” she says, of the most notable scene in the film, where Maria practices swallowing pellets of heroin by trying to swallow plump, purple grapes. “In my preparations, I was preparing to play a 17-year-old girl who worked in a flower plantation. I was not preparing to play a drug mule. In my preparations, I didn’t want to talk to people who have done this. I didn’t want Maria to have preconceptions of how to be a drug mule.”

So how does one navigate the potentially rocky road from Sundance darling to, well, potential Oscar nominee and bonafide international movie star? After “Maria Full of Grace” wrapped production, she moved to New York City and took acting classes (even though she stresses that she misses Bogota, where her mother is a pathologist and her father a veterinarian). She’s presently reading every script that is sent to her. (”The only real script I’ve read is “Maria,” so I need to learn more of what’s out there.”) Perhaps most important, she’s secured an agent at William Morris, courtesy of the HBO executives who helped produce “Maria Full of Grace.”

She explains: “In Sundance, I had a lot of business cards from agents, lawyers, managers, from everybody. I’m new. I don’t know who’s good, who’s not good, who’s a liar, who’s not. HBO told me, if I want help, I should give them all the cards. They really tried to help figure out who I should talk to.”

And if she could write her own ticket? She says she would like to be “Gael Garcia Bernal as a woman” - referring to the Mexican star of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and two high-profile films this fall, “The Motorcycle Diaries” and Pedro Almodovar’s “Bad Education.” She’s excited by the way Bernal has become an international star without ever having made an English-language film.

“I’m waiting for a Spanish script,” she says. “I really want to keep acting in Spanish.”

All in due time, no doubt. For now, there are a few more stops on a promotional tour for “Maria,” a few more autographs to sign, a few more compliments to blush her way through.

Oh, and an Oscar nomination to secure. Remember, you heard it here first.

from Chicago Sun Times / by Cindy Pearlman

It was not a graceful beginning. When Catalina Sandino Moreno was offered a role in her first Hollywood movie, it wasn’t an agent who turned down the offer.

Her mother just said no.

One must understand that Moreno comes from a long line of very strong women.

The Bogota native’s mother is a pathologist — and a woman very weary of Hollywood men coming to Colombia and trying to corrupt her beautiful 17-year-old daughter with visions of stardom.

Most mothers would be suspicious. One day Moreno was a shy student studying advertising at a local university. The next, she got a call saying she was cast as the lead in “Maria Full of Grace,” now showing in Chicago.

“It was pretty shocking,” Moreno says. “I went home and told my mom, ‘I’m going to Ecuador to film a movie and I’m postponing a semester of school.’ My mom said, ‘You’re not going anywhere with anyone. I want to meet this director.’ ”

In the end, it turned out to be a great career move. Moreno is receiving raves, and her film was the hit of the last Sundance Film Festival.

In “Maria Full of Grace” Moreno plays 17-year-old Maria Alvarez, a young girl in Colombia who lives in a house jammed with three generations of relatives. Her day job is the thankless task of removing thorns from flowers at a rose plantation.

Suddenly, Maria is offered a highly lucrative job that involves travel and excitement. The position is known as drug “mule” and she must do everything and anything to survive while bringing drugs into the United States. Specifically, she carries a heroin-filled condom of drugs inside her stomach in the hopes of eluding U.S. Customs.

Joshua Marston, screenwriter and director, says he based Maria on real-life women in Colombia who lead dead-end lives. They turn to drug-running out of desperation or to help their own families keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

The means they use to hide drugs is not for those with weak stomachs.

“Some have had buttock implants to fill themselves with drugs. There was another woman who was stopped at U.S. Customs holding a baby. It was a dead baby and its carcass was filled with drugs,” the director says.

Of course, there are girls who die because of medical complications. “It’s typical for the drugs to burn through the condoms and then the girl dies.”

This angst seemed like perfect movie fodder, but from the start Marston’s biggest problem was finding his Maria. He scoured the Colombian communities in New York and New Jersey but came up with nothing. Then Marston sent a casting team down to Colombia.

“We scoured schools and community centers. I had my people drive around with a megaphone on top of their car announcing auditions,” he says.

Some 800 girls later, he still didn’t have his Maria. Finally, the Colombia team sent him a tape of a dozen new auditions, and there was Catalina Sandino Moreno.

But there was a twist. She wasn’t that interested in acting and was studying advertising at a local university.

Moreno says, “It was very strange. My mother received a phone call one day saying, ‘I hear your daughter has studied theater in the past. An American film is searching for a Colombian girl,’ ” she recalls.

Doing the taped audition was a lark. “I was curious. I thought, ‘I’ll never be in an American movie, but I want to be part of this process,’ ” she says.

As for the actual acting, Moreno insists it wasn’t a lifelong love of hers. “I was just a very shy girl and one day I came home from school crying. I told my mother that I had this terrible shyness and I was so scared to give a speech at school. I told her I couldn’t say a word in front of other people.

“My mother enrolled me in a theater class to help me,” she says. “I liked it, so I studied for 15 years with a very good teacher, but I never thought I’d become an actress. I was going to do something serious with my advertising diploma.”

Well, not so fast.

Moreno’s very strict mother was very wary of Hollywood invading her small town.

The director says, “Showing up in a strange country and saying you’re looking for a 17-year-old girl for a movie is not the most believable thing in the world. I had to take Catalina’s mother out for dinner to have a nice long conversation. Mostly, I had to convince her that it really was a movie.”

The subject matter of the film hit home for Moreno. She cautions that people shouldn’t hate the girls in Colombia who find themselves in this terrible life. “I sympathize with them. I understand. That’s how I played Maria. I had to care about her. She just made bad decisions.”

The young actress says she didn’t know any mules in Colombia. “I’d hear about these girls on the news and think, ‘Those are bad people.’ But if you listen to a news story, you never understand why they did it. You just knew they were carrying drugs. These girls would go to jail and I’d say, ‘Good.’

“Now after doing this movie, I’m much more aware of what’s going on in my own country,” she says with great sadness.

Moreno doesn’t want to dwell on depressing issues. The shy actress smiles when asked about her toughest critic’s response to the film.

“My mom looked up at me on the big screen and said, ‘You look so skinny!’ But by the fourth time she saw the movie, she said, ‘I like that Maria girl.’ She’s very proud of me and happy.”

Since the movie, Moreno has moved to the United States and lives in New York. “I have an agent now and we’ll see what happens,” she says, adding that she really misses Colombia. “I miss my family. I miss my bed. I’ve had the same bed since I was 10 years old. I also miss the food.

“But most of all it’s hard to be away from my grandmother, eight cousins and my brother. It’s a big, happy, crazy family and I miss all of them so much, but they’re supporting me. My mom always told me, ‘If you want to do it, just go do it.’

“I’m going to do this for her,” she says.

from W / by Jamie Rosen

In the new film Maria Full of Grace, Colombian-born newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno plays a Bogota teenager who becomes a drug mule, boarding a flight to New York with 62 heroin-filled capsules in her stomach. Moreno’s own ticket out of Bogota was more easily won: The 23-year-old actress, who had never read a film script or seen an independent movie before she auditioned, beat out more than 800 girls to nab the role. That’s not to say there weren’t some challenges. During filming, Moreno had to swallow four of the pellets–and though not actually filled with heroin, they still brought on a mean stomachache.

Which may be a small price to pay for her naturalistic and captivating breakthrough performance. Maria Full of Grace won the dramatic audience award at Sundance. And at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Moreno shared the best actress prize with Monster’s Charlize Theron.

“Watching her, there’s definitely this feeling of witnessing the birth of a star,” says writer-director Joshua Marston, who had so despaired of finding his Maria that he postponed the start of production before he finally saw a tape of Moreno. “She is at once incredibly poised and professional, but she still has this giddy quality.”

Moreno, who had acted in commercials and Bogota theater productions, was studying advertising in college when she got the part. After she shot the second section of the film in New York in 2002, Moreno stayed in the States and took classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Manhattan, where she currently lives But having gulped down those capsules for the higher cause of her art, she has decided that realism has its limits. “I’m not a Method girl,” she says. Instead, she’ll continue to rely on the same instincts that she used to play Maria. She hasn’t found her next role yet, but she’s hoping for “a Latina like Maria that has power, that has strength, that does everything instead of showing some leg.”

from Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, August-September 2004 / by Kerri Allen

If smuggling talent into the US is a felony, then Catalina Sandino Moreno is in trouble. The 23-year old colombiana crept onto American movie screens this July with the feature film Maria Full of Grace (Maria Llena Eres De Gracia) after being chosen from more than 800 actors to play the title role. Writer and director Joshua Marston’s harrowing film about a teenage girl ensnared in the world of drug smuggling may have handed Sandino a permanent visa to Tinsel Town.

In 2002, Catalina Sandino Moreno was well on her way to a career in radio advertising when a college buddy told her about a local movie audition. A sometimes theater student content with her life in Bogota, Sandino was reluctant to go. She remembers asking, “Why are they going to pick me for a movie?” Urged by her mother and friends to try anyway, Sandino gave a screen test that instantly captivated director Marston. She signed on to the project, hardly knowing where it would lead–or where it would even play. “I knew it was a great opportunity for me, but I never thought it was going to be so big,” Sandino recalls. “I thought it was going to be on TV, not in theaters!”

Maria Full of Grace was indeed in theaters, captivating audiences worldwide and tacking up awards from continent to continent. The Audience Award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Maria also brought Sandino the Berlin Film Festival’s Best Actress award (an honor for which she tied Oscar-winner Charlize Theron). The film won six awards at the Cartagena Film Festival and will travel to France in the coming months. But the touching story ultimately belongs to Sandino’s homeland.

The tremulous odyssey of 17-year-old “Maria Alvarez exposes the realities of drug smuggling in Colombia. “Marston’s initial aim was “to look at what it is to be a drug mule and try to imagine it from that person’s perspective and begin to understand what would propel somebody to do this.” Based on “1,000 true stories,” the movie was shaping up to be quite dark and harsh. After Sandino got on the set, though, the story began to evolve. “We developed a script that was less and less about a drug mule and more and more about a young woman trying to break out and kick against a world that seemed to be pressing in on her,” says Marston.

As Maria Alvarez’s world was pressing in, Catalina Sandino’s was expanding. Since wrapping up Maria Full of Grace, Sandino has relocated to New York City and appeared in various off-Broadway plays, “all while wading through heaps of Hollywood scripts. So what’s up next for the South American starlet? Unlike the impetuous and complex character she embodied so well, Sandino is simply patient. “I have to wait for that next good script. I’m not rushing.”

from The Boston Herald / by Stephen Schaefer

Take the daughter of a famed director/one-time TV star, an up-and-coming actor, a Colombian discovery and an ex-child star parodying his image and you have four of the more fascinating faces in movies opening today. Here are the stars you’ll want to see on a big screen near you.

Catalina Sandino Moreno is living a bit of the Hollywood dream.

Moreno, now 23, was a 21-year-old college student in Bogota, Colombia, when a friend told her about an American who was looking for a Colombian girl to star in a movie called “Maria Full of Grace.”

Now Moreno can look to her shelf and admire the Best Actress Silver Berlin Bear she won at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival alongside Charlize Theron for “Monster.”

“I didn’t believe it,” she said. “The reporters made me realize it was big. Of course people say, ‘I knew it all the time!’ But my family are very amazed. Their little girl is on the big screen, and they’re so happy and proud. That’s what I need, for them to be proud. I don’t need anyone else to be more proud than them.”

Writer-director Joshua Marston set the wheels in motion for this latest Cinderella story when he decided to make his feature film debut by taking newspaper headlines about Colombia’s “mules,” cocaine and heroin smugglers who ingest the contraband, and present a story from a personal angle. To do this, the right actress had to be found to play Maria, a headstrong teenager who longs for a better life and decides her best option is to become a mule.

Marston had seen more than 800 candidates and was discouraged until Moreno, who had never acted professionally, arrived.

“I’d never had in the back of my mind, ‘Maybe I can be Maria, maybe they’ll pick me.’ I hate to expect something that in the end I’ll be disappointed,” she said.

Once she was cast, Moreno delved into the script, an unflinching look at the drug trade.

“The first thing Josh told me was he was trying to make a story about a Colombian girl - and he never said anything about drugs. He just gave me the script, and with my mother, we discussed the drug part. It’s so well-written and treated.”

Like many of those who are moved by the film, Moreno had little inkling what the reality was for these drug couriers.

“My familiarity was very superficial. You hear and see in the news or newspapers that there are people who do these jobs. You never know how desperate they are,” she said.

“You think it’s great the police caught them and they’re in jail. That’s the end. And, of course, you think those are bad people who do it. It’s a bad image for the country. And to risk their lives for a few dollars - is it worth it? I didn’t know until I made this how hard it is for them.”

Moreno, who now lives in the United States and speaks English fluently, has already acted off-Broadway and has an agent.

“I’m not rushing into another movie. I don’t want to go so fast I can’t focus. I’d prefer to act in Spanish. I’d be more comfortable, but if there’s a script in English I like, she added, sounding very much like the gutsy Maria, “I’ll fight for it.”

from Film Freak Central / by Walter Chaw

“Hi there, you’re Joshua Marston?”

“Yes. I am.”

Such was my introduction to indie flavour-of-the-second Joshua Marston, writer-director of Maria Full of Grace: a full head of curly hair, and an ego the size of a brick shithouse. He turned away from me in the balconied hallway of Denver’s historic Brown Palace Hotel after confirming his identity–ignoring my hand outstretched–to chat with someone else he’d alienated, then realized that he had to talk to me as part of his publicity duties for his first shot at feature filmmaking. It’s a tough business: you fly in, you spend the night, you fly out, and in between you talk to about two dozen faceless, mostly nameless ink-stained wretches who generally ask you the same questions. It’s one thing to do it in New York and L.A., it’s another altogether to muster the strength to do it in a backwater like Denver. Thing of it is that people don’t always stay where they are at the moment–and that Denver isn’t all that dusty a horse-town as it used to be.

It’s fairly easy to take shots at “talent” for not being in a great mood–for being so fatigued that they forget themselves. But there’s something alarming about a young guy who’s just directed his first film turning phrases like “the kind of filmmaker that.” As in, “I’m not the kind of filmmaker that” or “I’m the kind of filmmaker that.” Writing one book doesn’t make you a novelist, nor does helming one well-received film mean you’re a director–particularly when the bulk of most commentary about said film has zeroed in on its star. Mr. Marston warmed up by the end of our interview as it became apparent that either I wasn’t like every other journalist or I was enough like every other journalist that he could fall back on his stock answers and thus resume a level of detached comfort.

The break-out star of Maria Full of Grace, Catalina Sandino Moreno, looking disarmingly like a younger, more petite Salma Hayek, didn’t have much to contribute over the course of our three-way conversation. She grabbed Marston’s knee at one point; I’m not sure if that signified horror at the direction the interview was going, affection for a lover, or an example of a more openly affectionate Columbian upbringing, but there you have it. Most of the rest of the time was spent playing with a lamp on the end table and tracing the design on her tennis shoes. For a few minutes as I sat fiddling with my recorder and arranging my notes, Marston and Moreno happily chatted together in a steady stream of Spanish. I only took four years of Spanish and another four of Latin and from what I could gather, they were comparing notes on their previous interview and discussing dinner. A less worldly gringo might wonder if the two were engaged in something more directly unkind–I just vaguely wondered what they were going to say about me after I was gone.

So first impressions were not good, and the desire to say something about the nature of the “what have you done for me lately?” world of first-time sensations and their sophomore nightmares was almost overwhelming. In other words, both Marston and Moreno are two weeks or so from being forgotten, no matter how many pieces in the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES or FRESH AIR. Their names are moments away from inheriting the suffix “Oh yeah, that movie–has he/she done anything since?”

There’s a scene in Bull Durham where veteran catcher Crash Davis discovers mold in the bath sandals of rookie pitcher Nuke LaLoosh:

“Think classy, you’ll be classy. If you win twenty in The Show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press’ll think you’re colourful. Until you win twenty in The Show, however, it means you’re a slob.”

Marston and Moreno are sharp, passionate, sincere young folks who are, at the moment, on top of the world. Some rides last longer than others–I’m betting on Moreno, especially, becoming an important figure somewhere down the road. Her performance in Maria Full of Grace is just that good. But it’s up to them how smooth the ride is. If they’re as good as their press indicates, and a few eyebrows are beginning to arch, it doesn’t matter how they act. If they stumble, well, vultures have to eat, too. Ugly. True. And not just in the screen trade.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: What’s your philosophy of film?
JOSHUA MARSTON: I’m more interested in making films that open outwards. For me it’s more of an excuse to go out into the world and listen to people’s stories and explore environments that I know nothing about. To the extent that I write what I know, I’m writing thematically about what I’m interested in, but I’m more interested in using film to find out about what I don’t know. I’m interested in telling stories that the audiences don’t necessarily know about so that they’re discovering something new. Emotional stories told within a political and social context–films that stay with people, that you remember longer than the time it takes to eat dinner afterwards.

Why was film your medium of choice in this endeavour?
JM: I’d been a photographer, gone out and taken a lot of photographs in the documentary style. After a while I found out that I’d frequently come back with these photographs from my travels, and I’d have to tell stories as to what was behind it, what was going on when I took the pictures. I felt like photos were too thin, that they didn’t tell enough of the story, so I wanted to move into a more narrative medium.

And political science, your major in school: too esoteric to be expressed in photos?
JM: Exactly right. Too academic, too esoteric–certainly hard to affect people through just that academic study when there was never going to be more than fourteen people seeing the work that I was doing. Film was a chance to do something more popular, for sure, but also a chance to do something that was more creative, more visual while also still being political.

So the idea for the film came from one of your photographs?
JM: No, the idea for the film came from hearing a story from someone who had done that job, been a drug mule and swallowed grapes to prepare her throat, and to swallow pellets, to get on a plane. I think like most people I had heard about drug swallowing, but had never really visualized what it was like. But listening to this story, I was forced to look at it and I found it fascinating and compelling. More, this story encapsulated so much of what I was interested in: the Drug War, life as an immigrant in the United States, Columbia.

Did overtly political cinema inform your choices in the picture?
JM: Well, I was really influenced by Ken Loach, by Mike Leigh, Hector Babenco, Costa-Gavras…

Your picture actually reminded me a lot of Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever.
JM: Um, yeah, I really didn’t care for that film. I appreciated what it was trying to do, but it was far too bleak. If my movie was like that movie, all my characters would have been killed in a hail of machine-gun fire.

What does the term “grace” mean for each of you?
JM: Well you ask it that way and I can’t give my stock answer. (long pause) I guess in the context of Maria, grace has to do with coming to some inner knowledge or wisdom or maturity that in this case Maria arrives at for Maria from within both literally and metaphorically.
CATALINA SANDINO MORENO: I always felt like grace for Maria is something inside of her that has always been with her. From the first moment that you see her smile, she has the grace inside, and I felt her that way–when I was watching the movie, I saw Maria in a lot of different facets. The simplicity of just a smile–she’s always had that grace in her but she doesn’t show it, maybe she doesn’t know it. The last shot of the film, you see her just glowing–she’s a warrior, she’s a survivor, and it’s because of that grace.

An interesting facet of your performance was Maria’s growth–I know this is your first film, I know that you shot out of order–how did you manage to keep place in Maria’s evolution?
CSM: It wasn’t really all that hard because we went to Ecuador to shoot the first part of the film and the film was mixed, but it wasn’t too crazy. It wasn’t like we were shooting the end on the first day. But I did have to have the script near me all the time so that I could always get up-to-date on what was happening to her right before that scene. It was a little complicated, and sometimes Josh would have to help me get back to the right place in her development, but pretty much we had good continuity and it wasn’t all too difficult.

Did rehearsals and workshopping help in that process?
JS: Yeah, we had twelve days of rehearsal–more than that, almost three weeks–for the first half of the picture. Lots of rewriting, improvising, brainstorming–I’m not a native speaker of Spanish, so it really helped to have that kind of input. Also for the Maria character, Catalina brought so much to the character that I could never have written.

What changed in the second half?
JS: Well one thing was we had to start the first half without having locked the cast for the second half so when we got back to New York we had to do all the casting. Plus New York was a union shoot so we were working with union labour and SAG. [We] could only do Monday-Friday–much more beholden to the clock. All that and the dollar didn’t go as far so our rehearsal flexibility felt much more restrictive to me.

Tell me about the image of stripping thorns off roses.
JS: The most interesting process for me in making films is the discovery process. If I learned anything in making this first film it was to remain open as long as possible and not get attached to the page, but rather to be open to discovery and organic development. I think that the script developed that way, too, over the two years of research, so I can’t claim that I sat down and looked for metaphors and symbols. The flower industry was there and that was something I really wanted to investigate. I didn’t know that Columbia was the second-largest exporter of cut flowers in the world, so it was more of a sociological interest. Obviously, though, when I realized that flowers had this symbolic potential, I tried to make that resonate. But I’m not the kind of filmmaker that starts with the metaphor or the symbol first–I don’t like to put the cart before the horse in that way.

You’ve been described as unaffected by your sudden stardom. Are you starting to feel the heat from all the positive reviews?
CSM: No. I love to read positive reviews of me, who doesn’t? But it’s weird to be called a star, I don’t feel like a star. When I was doing Maria I never thought we were going to win awards, it was just a chance for me to get in front of the camera and show people what I could do. But for me to read blah blah blah the new up-and-comer, it’s weird because it was more of a collaborative effort. I think I need a little talent, but I think I need good actors around me, too–from Blanca to the cab driver. There were amazing people around me–without them, I wouldn’t have these kinds of reviews.

I’ve read that you’re bothered by Latin stereotypes in Hollywood–examples of what bothers you.
CSM: Women Latins are sexy, involved with drugs, or poor and desperate and selling their kids. It’s too much, way too much. In this movie, I was just a 17-year-old Columbian girl, that’s all. Sofia Vergara, you know, Columbian actress…

Chasing Papi.
CSM: Yes! Disgusting. All we see of her is her in a bikini–I think that’s the stereotype: the lusty Latin. It’s very sad–you have to fight and claw for these good roles and I will. I will. I’m not going to show any flesh–I’m an actress, not a model, I really want to do good projects.

What kind of projects are you getting offered?
CSM: The typical ones–they’re desperate or they’re horny and sometimes they’re a maid in a sexy skirt. If I can’t find a good role in the movies, I’ll just go into the theatre. I think the theatre may be the last place you can still do what you want to do. I can play whatever I want there, I don’t have to appease the public taste and play to those stereotypes. For film, I want to work with people who write the films that they direct–I want to open a door for Latin actresses who want to be respected. I want to fight so that the generation hopefully coming behind me can enjoy the freedom to be a real person.