from Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service / by Steven Rea

As a Colombian, and a sophisticated, big-city college student, Catalina Sandino Moreno had a pretty good idea what a drug mule was. She’d seen the newspaper stories, watched the TV reports.

“Sometimes they’re caught smuggling drugs to the United States,” she says. “They’re jailed. They’re bad people. It was a very superficial portrait, and that’s what I believed.”

No more. Two years ago, Moreno, who was studying advertising at a Bogota university but had long harbored a love of the theater, auditioned for a film _ to be made in Colombia, but written and directed by an American, Joshua Marston.

Moreno landed the title role over 800-plus women _ professional actresses, students, laborers, Colombians living in the States. In the devastatingly good “Maria Full of Grace,” she plays a poor country girl who, desperate for money, agrees to ingest pellets of heroin, fly to New York and deliver them to a dealer. A strong-willed and resourceful young woman, Moreno’s character is not an evil criminal, not a greedy drug runner. She’s just a girl trying to find a way to freedom.

“I had no idea of this whole aspect of the drug wars. Like, who are they?,” says the actress, in town recently along with her director, Marston. “But when I read the script, the story of Maria, I saw it’s a totally different thing. … Now I could be a drug mule. I knew that the person has to be in a very extreme situation just to think of doing that. There is great desperation behind the decision for them to make this trip. It’s incredibly dangerous.”

And it’s not just the danger of being caught, it’s the possibility that one of the 60 or so rubber-wrapped pellets could break in the carrier’s stomach and result in death.

“I wouldn’t say it’s based on any one story,” says Marston, 35, who lives and works in New York. “But it’s definitely inspired by a conversation that I had with someone who had traveled as a mule. … It was obviously a very compelling story, and I came to it at a point where I was already very interested in Colombia. I had been following news from Colombia for years, and had also been interested in the drug wars, and wanted to do something on the drug war, and something on the immigrant experience.”

Ironically, after research trips to Bogota and scouting locations in outlying villages, Marston and cast and crew were forced to shoot the first half of the film in neighboring Ecuador. “It was just before the presidential elections and it got a little too heated up,” he explains. “There were bombs going off. It was impossible to get production insurance.”

The second half of the story takes place in New York, predominantly in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, also known as “Little Colombia.”

Winner of the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January, “Maria Full of Grace” is in Spanish, which Marston speaks fluently, although he wrote the original drafts in English.

“My Spanish wasn’t colloquial enough that it made sense. Eventually, I translated it with a Colombian friend into sort of neutral Spanish … and it wasn’t until I started working with the actors that the language became very specific. There was a lot of improvisation. Some of the best lines came from Catalina and the other actors, working together.”

After completing the film in late 2002, Moreno moved to New York City. She has an agent, she’s been taking acting classes, she’s here to stay.

“I’ve been to Colombia a lot of times in the last two years, but I’m staying in New York for work,” she reports. “I think New York’s an incredible city. Why should I go back to Colombia to study advertising if I have this incredible movie and I have a lot of opportunities that I didn’t have in Colombia?”

from TheMovieChicks.Com

Question: Joshua, how did you get involved in this project?

Joshua: Because of a lot of traveling abroad, I have an interest in world politics and I’d been reading about what was going on in Columbia. I was interested in the drug war, and in the context of all those interests, I happened to meet a woman who had traveled as a drug mule in Queens. Like most people, I’d read about it in newspapers and heard it as urban legend that people did this, never really wanted to contemplate what it would actually be like to do it. But when I heard that story, what it was like to swallow grapes to get your throat in training and get on a plane with pellets in your stomach, I realized it was not only a very dramatic intense story, but also a way into doing something about Columbia, the drug war, life in the United States as an immigrant - all which were themes that I’d been interested in for quite some time.

Question: Did you write the script in Spanish and direct in Spanish on the set?

Joshua: After having heard that story, I wrote the first draft of the script very quickly, in a couple of days, in English. I’d never been to Columbia at that point, so then began a process of a lot of research: of going to Columbia, speaking to a lot of people, going to flower plantations, talking to people in prison here and also in South America who had traveled as drug mules, spending time with customs at JFK. I continued constantly rewriting the script, and the script always stayed in English. On the first printed page, there’s a sentence in capital letters that said, Note: all dialog will be in Spanish.

But it wasn’t until about two years in that I worked with a friend who ended up becoming the associate producer, who translated the script into a sort of neutral Spanish. Then, once we had cast all the parts and we started rehearsing, I worked with the actors and we did a lot of improvising and together we did a last real pass of the dialog and made it very specific Spanish to that region of Columbia where their characters are from, really influencing their choices of slang. But all that work, all those rehearsals and the directing was all done in Spanish.

Question: What’s your background in film? Is this your first feature?

Joshua: This is my first feature. I graduated from NYU film school in 1998. When I graduated, I worked as an editor just to make a living and was continuing to write scripts on the side. I’ve done about a half dozen short films. Prior to film school, I did a master’s in political science. I was supposed to do a PhD but realized after a couple of years that I wasn’t particularly happy with political science because it was so academic and esoteric, so I jumped ship with the masters and went off and did something much more creative and visual by going to film school.

Question: How did you do the casting and how did Catalina become part of the project?

Joshua: I always knew that I wanted this to feel very realistic and very authentic. I was committed that all the Columbian characters be played by Columbian actors, perhaps to compensate for the fact that I’m not Columbian. So we were doing open calls in the Columbian communities in New York, New Jersey, Miami. At the same time, we had two casting teams in Columbia. One which was looking at professional actors, mostly people who would be working in television soap operas. Then the other team of people who were going to all the small towns outside of Bogotá, going to schools and community centers and flower plantations, driving around in cars with megaphones on them trying to get people to come in for open calls. Having 5, 10-minute conversations with people who had never acted before in their lives.

Over the course of three months, we saw something on the order of 800 girls and got to a point where we were getting close and it got to be pretty desperate. I was concerned that we were actually not going to be able to do it. Then the next morning, another casting tape came in from Columbia with another dozen auditions and Catalina was the first person on the tape. That’s where my story ends and she can give her version of how she ended up on the tape.

Catalina: I was studying college, advertising, I was studying theatre, too. Somebody knew that I was studying theatre and called my house and told me about the casting and I went.

Question: Where were you in school?

Catalina: In Bogotá.

Question: Had you done any film before?

Catalina: Never, just theatre.

Question: How did you research for the role of Maria?

Catalina: I went to a flower plantation for two weeks and I worked there from 6 am to 7 pm. And I could understand why Maria really hated that job. It’s very, very hard. The fumigants can’t itch your eyes, dry your skin. When you’re 17, you don’t want to be just doing that job. I never thought about talking to drug mules because Maria doesn’t know how to be a drug mule and never do I. So the first time that I see a pellet made was the scene in the movie. And the first time that I had to put the pellet in my mouth was the first time that I took a pellet in my hand.

Question: Was this sort of thing common knowledge down there, the concept of drug mules?

Catalina: I knew superficially about it. I knew that there were drug mules. They’re in jail. But after I did the movie, I realized that you can’t judge people so easily. They have a story. They have the why that they do that. I did understand why they’re risking their lives. It’s very sad to know that in your own country this is happening.

Joshua: We’ve seen drug stories a million times that are told from the top down, from the point of view of the DEA agent or the drug kingpin with the guns and the violence. I was much more interested in telling a story from the bottom up, from the point of view of the person lowest on the totem pole who is living the drug trade day in and day out and suffering the consequences of it in order to have more of an understanding of who that person is and perhaps a little more sympathy and realization that these people are making these decisions for economic reasons and if we’re trying to solve the drug problem, we need to focus less on military solutions and more on solutions that are economic and socially humanitarian.

Question: The way her pregnancy was treated, was abortion an option?

Joshua: In the scene where [Maria and her boyfriend] broke up, there was actually dialog about abortion. [It ended with Maria saying,] “Come on, you know I don’t believe in that.” Ultimately, I decided to take it out because there was so much good stuff that I had to choose just the great stuff to make the scene really focused. With the scene just prior where she’d been in church, I sort of felt like I could hope that it was already implied it wouldn’t be easy for this character to simply get an abortion because she was complex; she was somewhat religious. She was from a very Catholic country.

Question: Is abortion legal in Columbia?

Joshua: No, it’s not legal but it’s practiced regularly on back streets.

Catalina: In really horrible conditions.

Joshua: There’s a street in Bogotá that’s known as abortion alley and depending on how much money you have you can choose what level of clinic you want to go to.

Question: Did you think about including that in the film?

Joshua: Only to the extent that I thought of bringing it into the dialog, except that I didn’t think Maria would ever actually get that close to having an abortion, it just didn’t fit within what her story was.

Question: What about the brutal people in New York? That was a surprise to me that they wouldn’t have been kinder.

Joshua: People have been surprised that they wouldn’t have been more brutal because we’re so trained through “Miami Vice” to expect that drug traffickers are just cold-blooded murderers. I’m sure that the drug trade is horribly, gruesomely, violent. There’s no question about that in my mind. And yet, we’ve seen it so much on television and in movies, I was more interested in exploring other aspects of it that haven’t been shown so much. It was interesting to me to think of these two thugs who were these young guys who know they’re intimidating. Hopefully, you also get the sense that they’re also almost in over their heads.

Question: And this hold they have over everybody’s family back home, is that common practice?

Joshua: Yep, from what I understand.

Question: What about the depiction of the Columbian immigrant community in New York? Where’d you get the idea of that benign don that oversees things?

Joshua: He’s the real man. That character is based on him and is played by the real individual - Orlando Tobon. I was about two years into the process of trying to get financing for the film, a Spanish producer said, “Well, have you met with the mayor of Little Columbia?” Little Columbia being Jackson Heights, Queens, where the story takes place. He’s also referred to as the undertaker for the mules.

I started to find out who this person was she was referring to. It turns out it’s this man, in his mid-fifties; he’s been in the United States for about 35 years and he’s got a little travel agency. It’s tiny and it’s constantly full of people. The reason why it’s packed is not because people are coming to buy airplane tickets, but because they’re frequently looking for some sort of help; he’s a fixer. If you need to rent an apartment, or fix your papers, or you need to get in touch with someone back in Columbia, he’s the person who is there. He’s a man with an incredibly large heart; he’s magnificent, a really wonderful individual.

Twenty years ago he went to a morgue for other reasons and realized that there were bodies, unclaimed, of Columbians who had died as drug mules and were going to be sent to the Potter’s Field and buried in an unmarked grave. He took it upon himself to raise the money to have these bodies sent back to Columbia so they could have a proper Christian burial. In the past 20 years, he’s done that something on the order of 400 times. Authorities here call him when the body’s found. People call him if a family member here has gone missing. He’s known as the person who does this.

Quickly, within a few days of sitting in his office, I realized that if I was going to represent the Columbian community in Queens, this man was an important part of it. So I went back and rewrote the script and fashioned a character based upon him and ended up casting him. In addition to playing the part, he’s also been our associate producer, our main contact in the Columbian community.

Question: To what extent did you have to swallow the grapes and pellets?

Catalina: I swallowed one pellet in the scene. I was in fear. It was very scary because it was the first time that I put that thing in my mouth. And I really had to swallow the big pellet. It was not heroin and it wasn’t latex, but it was the same size and shape.

Question: What was it dipped in to help you swallow it?

Joshua: It can be a number of things. It can be vegetable oil. Wax first, in order to prevent the stomach acids from penetrating. We didn’t actually do that, just for time. Anything to help it go down - it can be salad oil, in this case it was actually something called Avena, which is sort of a fruity-drink.

Question: With how difficult it was to swallow just one pellet, we can’t imagine 62 of them.

Joshua: No, the stories that I heard from people were your whole mouth starts to taste like latex, your throat scratches and burns. They use anesthetic. There’s this weird feeling that you get because you haven’t eaten in 24 hours so you’re really hungry, but then your stomach is full and so you feel hungry and full at the same time. And nervous about what’s waiting for you.

Question: Are the drug mules all women?

Joshua: No they’re not and that’s the first thing that customs will point out in their defense [against racial profiling]. They’ll say, “If we did profile, we would miss 95% of the mules because it’s constantly changing.” It’s been people as young as 12 years old and as old as 84. It’s been men and women and it’s not just really, really poor people. In Columbia, there’s a case of a famous actor who did it as well people the upper end of society all the way down to the poorest.

from PopEntertainment.com / by Brad Balfour

When the petite Catalina Sandino Moreno came into the offices of Fine Line Films for her day of interviews, she seemed as untouched by the absurd excesses of fame and celebrity as she had been before she even heard of Maria Full of Grace—this indie film that has taken everyone by surprise. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival audience award, the opener for this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival first-time feature director Joshua Marston has cobbled together a set of exemplary reviews and accolades as well. Yet it’s been the uncanny casting of the unknown novice Moreno, a Bogota, Colombia, native, as the innocent yet desperate 17-year-old Maria, who rushes from her numbing work in a rose factory into becoming a drug mule. She then journeys to the States and a new life fraught with unknowns and hope as well.

Since director Marston made this surprising mature, taut even sparse drama through extensive research and an instinct for casting, the film has won both the director and its lead many opportunities including an Oscar nomination. For 23-year-old Moreno, and those interviewing her, its been an opportunity to come at this business with a thoroughly wide eyed innocence and freshness as well.

DID YOU EVER THINK YOU’D BE AN ACTRESS?

I never thought I would be an actress.

WHAT WERE YOU GOING TO DO?

I was studying advertising, so for me to be in a movie released in theaters and read all this amazing press, is a dream that I haven’t dreamt.

DO YOU FIND THIS ATTENTION OVERWHELMING?

Sometimes I just want to freak. I don’t want to think, I get really overwhelmed and excited, and I get panic attacks. It’s too much for me because I never expected it.

HOW HAS DEALING WITH THE MEDIA CHANGED YOU?

This is pretty hard. I think it’s harder than shooting, because when I was shooting the movie, every day was different; but every day that I have press is the same. You’re in the same little room–they just put me in here–and they bring people down. In Maria, we just changed locations and it was exciting, and there were different people. And here is like, “Oh my God, again in Fine Line, again in Veronica’s room.”

ARE YOU CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT THE PRESS THINKS ABOUT THE MOVIE?

I’m not really concerned because I can’t do anything to change. My work is there and the press can like it or dislike it.

NOW THAT YOU ARE AN ACTRESS, HOW DO YOU MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT YOURSELF?

Well, I have good people around me; I have an agent, I have Josh—he’s a wonderful person who can give me advice—the producer… everyone from the movie, is very nice to me. They all give me little tips about the press, agents, and managers, and that’s very good, because I don’t know anything about this business.

HAVE YOU GOTTEN OFFERS?

I’m just reading now. The first script that I’ve read was Maria. I think I need to practice a little bit more.

WHAT ABOUT GOING TO SCHOOL?

If I go to NYU or another university, I’m not going to study acting. I’m going to study something else. Anthropology or Sociology—something like that.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MESSAGE OF THE MOVIE?

I think the message is to humanize what is a mule. The first time that I saw how pellets were made was in the movie, in that scene. The first time I took a pellet in my hand there, so when I heard in the newspapers or radio that, they took four mules and they were in jail and we were like, “Ok, that’s good. They were bad people,” and now, I couldn’t say that, because I was a girl living in [a small Columbian town] having an extreme situation and choosing to do that. That’s too much for me.

DID YOU MEET DRUG MULES IN THE COURSE OF MAKING THIS OR AFTERWARDS?

I’ve never met anybody because Maria doesn’t know how to be a drug mule, and me either, so it was our first time that we were involved with drugs.

HAVE YOU EVER MET A DRUG DEALER OR SOMEBODY THAT LATER YOU FOUND OUT WAS ONE?

Never.

SINCE IT TOOK TIME FOR THIS MOVIE TO BE RELEASED, DO YOU SOMETIMES HAVE TO PINCH YOURSELF AND WONDER IF THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING?

Well, in the two years that I wasn’t doing anything, I went back and forth to Columbia and I was studying at Strausburg [the acting school], wondering when the movie was going to come out. I thought that maybe Josh lied to me about Fine Line buying the movie. I was planning to go back to Colombia to keep studying advertising when Josh called me, in October of last year, and told me that we were going to Sundance and Berlin. Then we went to all these places and kept on winning. It was overwhelming.

SINCE THIS MOVIE HAS COME OUT, HOW HAS YOUR THINKING CHANGED?

I know the American dream doesn’t exist. I thought that if you come to New York, from another country, you’re going to have opportunities and money. Then I come here and the life of an immigrant is not easy. They have to work really hard, just to survive. I’m lucky because I’ve never been alone since I moved here. I have Josh. I can call the script supervisor, the electrician, the grip, all these people that I worked with in Ecuador [where the movie was actually shot] and now they work here. So I was surrounded by nice people. I was not alone but I think it would be really hard for a person to come here and to make a new life.

from All Things Considered (NPR, Radio) / Host: Michele Norris

Time: 9:00-10:00 PM

Newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno is already making waves in the film industry with her role in “Maria Full of Grace.” The 23-year-old has won four Best Actress awards. When Sandino Moreno signed on to make the movie, she didn’t really know what she was in for. She says the director, Joshua Marston, only gave her the first half of the script.

Ms. CATALINA SANDINO MORENO (Actress): I read the script, the first part of the script. I read it in 24 hours, and Josh took it back. When he told me I was Maria, he gave the script to me and he took it back. So I went to Ecuador; we shot the first part of the film. And the last day in Ecuador, he gave me the second part of the film. And I read the second part, and I was just waiting for the gun to come out and the blood in Maria’s face to just explode, and it never happened. So I was really happy. In the beginning of the script, I began to read the story about this girl, and now I’m reading the story about this woman. You know, like, the transition between her being a kid and her being a woman was beautiful.

NORRIS: So do I understand this, you only saw the first part of the script? You saw the part up to the point where she was pulled into the international drug trade, but you didn’t see the second half of the film?

Ms. MORENO: Yeah. (Laughs)

NORRIS: Was that by design?

Ms. MORENO: I think he didn’t want us to be attached to the characters. Like, for a lot of actors in this movie, it was the first time. So it was like life; you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

NORRIS: And if you did, you might conduct yourself differently.

Ms. MORENO: Of course. And it’s just nice just–have surprises.

NORRIS: So what did you do to learn more about mules, the men and women who travel carrying drugs in their belly? Did you interview women or men who had done this kind of work?

Ms. MORENO: No, never. Maria didn’t know how to be a drug mule, and me, neither, so why should I go and talk to people before I could do the scene. So when I arrived to the scene, it was my first time taking a pellet in my hand and trying to put it in my mouth. It was all my first time. From that point to the end, it was real, you know, what I felt.

NORRIS: Did you actually, in the end, swallow some of the pellets?

Ms. MORENO: Yeah.

NORRIS: How many?

Ms. MORENO: Through the whole film, I think I swallowed, like, eight. (Laughs)

NORRIS: Colombia is known the world over as a source of drugs, specifically cocaine. As a native of Colombia, a native Colombian, did you have any reservations about making a film that might reinforce that reputation?

Ms. MORENO: No. No. And that was a beautiful thing when I was reading the script, that I was waiting for Maria to be death, because that is what you always expect from narcotraffic and from drug mules. Of course, when you live in Colombia, you know a lot about mules, but very superficial, like you know there’s mules, you know that they’re bad people, you know they’re in jail, and that’s good. And you point the finger on them and you judge them. But after I did this movie, I just can’t do that. How can I judge them for making a living? That’s horrible. So I never thought that Josh was making a bad impression of Colombia. He’s humanizing the mules.

NORRIS: When you traveled back and forth to Colombia by plane from New York to Colombia, I wonder, when you board the plane, if you find yourself looking around and wondering if one of the mules is on board the flight.

Ms. MORENO: Never. Never. But once it happened to me. I was coming back from Bogota to New York, and I arrived in New York, and it was like 6 in the morning with my bags, and everybody was waiting for that plane, you know, in JFK. The immigration were, like, waiting for the plane from Colombia. And I felt, like, so weird. It was after I made the movie. And I’m like, `OK, I just have to be cool. I don’t have anything. I don’t have to be scared.’ But they stopped me. They opened my bags. They were like, `How much money do you have?’ I felt like Maria. And I felt like I had on my forehead, like, `Guilty.’ It’s horrible just to show the passport and they just look at you from head to toe and, `OK, would you come here with me?’ But everybody’s a suspect.

NORRIS: Catalina, thanks so much for coming in to talk to us.

Ms. MORENO: Thank you so much.

NORRIS: Catalina Sandino Moreno is the lead actress in “Maria Full of Grace.” The film opens in New York and Los Angeles on July 16th and in additional cities on July 30th.

from Movie Habit / by Marty Mapes

First-timers tell of mules from Colombia

Maria Full of Grace has been playing to critical acclaim around the country. It’s finally opening in Colorado, and here to answer questions at a Denver screening (and during a day of interviews) are the film’s director and star.

The strange humidity of the day and the late afternoon time-slot make the two seem a little weary, but they’re happy enough to talk about their movie, the first for both of them.

After getting their recommendations (see the sidebar), I asked them about improvisation, being chosen, research, Colombia,”The Scene,” and a serendipitous ending.

Improvisation

Marty Mapes: It’s interesting you recommended Secrets and Lies. What you did sounds like something Mike Leigh does — improvisation, then writing it down.

Josh Marston: Well it’s sort of a somehow an amalgam of Mike Leigh’s approach and Ken Loach’s approach.

MM: I’m not that familiar with ken Loach.

JM: A lot of people put them together because they both make films that have very compelling characters that feel very real. And they both use improvisation but they use improvisation in very different ways. Mike Leigh says that he starts without knowing what the film is going to be about, let alone having a script. He starts developing characters with the actors, and then slowly builds up interactions, and then he creates scenes, and a story, and then goes off and writes, and then comes back with the written text.

MM: … and it’s actually nailed down pretty tight…

JM: … by the time they shoot. Ken Loach has a script written irrespective of actors, before they’re cast, and then casts it, and then shows the actors the script, if at all, maybe the day before — the day of — and does a lot of improvisation in the actual shooting. He starts rolling the scenes well before the scene takes place and continues rolling well after the drama would have stopped on screen.

Being Chosen

MM: Catalina, I’ve read that the casting was a surprise, and that you wanted to go see what this strange white guy was doing. It turns out you got picked over 800 other Marias. What do you attribute that to?

Catalina Sandino Moreno: Luck? Talent? I don’t know. I think the circumstances were so crazy because I was refusing to go to any castings. When the casting came, it was thanks to my mom that I went. She was like “You have to go, you have to go, go and see who this guy is, just go and see him.” And when I went, I saw him, and we’ve been working since. It was just… it was destiny. It was luck. It was, I don’t know, compilations of a lot of things, all together.

Research

MM: Five years in the making! I’m surprised it’s a 90-minute movie and not a book. Is there a book in you somewhere?

“Yeah, I swallowed 8 pellets through the whole movie. And it was as scary as it looks.”

—Catalina Sandino Moreno

JM: It’s not my medium. I like writing and I write, I would love to write a novel at some point, and I wouldn’t mind writing nonfiction, but somehow it just wasn’t the medium that felt right for this for me.

MM: There’s a lot of stuff that you can’t fit into 90 minutes.

JM: True, but there’s also an emotional weight and drama that you can give to something by fictionalizing it that you can’t by either making a documentary film or writing a nonfiction piece of work.

Colombia

MM: It’s set in Colombia, but it was shot in Ecuador. How come?

JM: Because at the time we were getting ready to shoot, it was just before the presidential elections there; things were heating up. There were a few bombs placed, and we couldn’t get production insurance. So we had to move everything to Ecuador, which was probably the most difficult and harrowing moment of the whole film.

MM: Not getting insurance or having to move?

JM: Having to move, because it was one thing to be an American and going to Colombia to tell a Colombian story — who am I to do that? But to take it a step further and be an American going to Ecuador and fabricating a country that’s not my own was very daunting, because I knew I wanted to get it right. I wanted it to feel authentic. And ultimately our way to do it right was to collaborate with a lot of Colombians.

MM: Is Colombia really that unsafe? You’ve got family there. Do you think of Colombia as a dangerous place?

CSM: I lived in Colombia. I lived in Bogotá for 21 years, and nobody ever robbed me. I have nothing related to drugs, like none of my friends were involved with drugs, none of them have been robbed. So it’s pretty crazy. In a lot of place in Colombia of course you find violence, but the rest of Colombia is not like that. In Bogotá I feel safe.

“The Scene”

MM: I was really impressed with the research that was involved. The swallowing scene of course made a huge impression. I was surprised at the low tech — they used latex gloves — then they used this machine, and I’m not sure what it was.

“the fact that it was latex gloves — it was so specific — that was one of those levels of detail that sucked me in”

—Josh Marston

JM: It would normally be used to make homemade vitamins.

MM: I was thinking ‘has the drug trade developed this low tech solution and then developed this high tech machine?’

JM: No. All of it is based on research, all based on stories that I was told. In a way I actually think latex fingers are higher tech than condoms, and I personally never understood condoms, I could never wrap my head around it. Everything about it just seemed wrong.

MM: People used that for swallowing drugs?

JM: That’s sort of the urban legend. That was the only thing I had heard about when all of this started, was the idea of swallowing drugs in condoms and transporting them. And in a way that first story that I heard, the fact that it was latex gloves — it was so specific — that was one of those levels of detail that sucked me in to wanting to tell this story.

MM: On that scene — it’s really hard to watch. Was it hard to perform? Did you ever actually swallow something?

CSM: Yeah, I swallowed 8 pellets through the whole movie. And it was as scary as it looks. The fear that I have in that scene, it was a real fear. I didn’t act. It was good because it was my first time that I saw how a pill was made. It was my first time that I put a pellet in my mouth. I didn’t practice.

MM: Did you ever run into any trouble? You’ve done a lot of research into some dangerous people. Did you ever get so close that you were in fear of your life?

JM: No, not at all. I think making a film about a drug mill is about as threatening to the higher-ups of the drug trade as making a film about a drug pusher on the corner of the South Bronx would be. It’s a low-level person, of whom there are thousands, and doing something that’s fairly commonplace and common knowledge in Colombia.

MM: Catalina, do you think that’s true? Do you think this is common knowledge?

CSM: Yeah. Of course I learn a lot, but it’s not a secret and we know that there are mules. And we know they are caught and they are in jail and that’s good. The other part that I really learned from this movie is that behind every mule is a plot, and you have to respect that. It’s so easy to judge people. You just have to quit judging and just try to put yourself in their shoes and try to think “Why do they do that? Why do they risk their life for a couple of dollars?”

Serendipity

MM: There’s something at the very end that made me like the movie an extra bit. There’s a sign at the airport with the message of the movie. Was that serendipity?

JM: (Sheepishly) Yeah. I could lie to you. I’m very tempted to, because you say that it puts you over the top. It would never occur to me to work on the level of hanging a billboard with the message of the movie in the background. I didn’t even notice it until we showed a rough cut of the film and someone pointed it out to me. And I had to really search for it. I was traveling through the airport about two months later and there was a sign in the same place advertising shoes. I was really glad that that wasn’t what happened to be in the background.

MM: I’m actually glad it’s serendipity.

JM: I’ve looked at it closely, now that it’s been pointed out to me, and there’s no single frame that you can see the whole thing at once. That would be the only way to do it, and if someone had said “we can do it and you’ll never fully see it and we’ll block it and coordinate the camera movement,” I’d be like “get out.”

from Offoffoff.com, July 2004 / by Joashua Tanzer

The first-time film actress, born in Colombia and now living in New York, talks about her powerful, Oscar-nominated debut in “Maria Full of Grace.”

Making a striking debut at only 20 in “Maria Full of Grace,” Colombian-born Catalina Sandino Moreno seems poised to attract considerable attention as a young actress to watch. If there’s only one similarity between her and the character she plays, it’s that both find themselves unexpectedly transplanted from Colombia to New York, pondering their next move. Maria is a drug “mule” who transports heroin to America in her stomach and is on the run from angry mobsters; Sandino Moreno is an actress who after her first role has landed here with a sheaf of rave reviews and a best-actress award from the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. (She has to share it with Charlize Theron, but still.)

Talking with Offoffoff before the U.S. release of “Maria,” the unassuming newcomer acknowledges that the film’s subjects were at once familiar and distant. The country’s notorious drug culture, decades-long civil war and rural poverty were in some ways as remote from her as a middle-class youngster in the city as they are from an American teenager.

Q: You grew up in Bogotá?
CATALINA SANDINO MORENO: I grew up in Bogotá.

Q: And the character that you play, is that very similar to your life or very different from your life?
CSM: No, it’s very different. Maria lives in a little town outside Bogotá. She doesn’t have an education. She has to work in a flower plantation with her mother because that’s the only work she can find. She is stuck in a little town. And I was in a college, I lived all my life in Bogotá, and I never needed to work for money. I worked — because I wanted to work, because I thought it was cool to work. But I never worked for money, so that’s a little bit different.

Q: Was this a familiar kind of story to you?
CSM: It was familiar, but superficially. Like, I know that in Colombia there’s mules — and not just in Colombia, but in South America, you know, the world. There are mules, and there are people that swallow pellets. But I didn’t know why did they do it. You know, you always see in the newspapers: Yeah, we caught five mules in El Dorado and they’re in jail. You say: Oh, that’s good, they’re bad people. And then when I was doing the movie I realized that people have to have another reason to risk their lives, so I understood that and I don’t judge people who do that anymore. It’s so sad.

Q: How did you come to America?
CSM: With the movie. After the movie, I was here, the movie was finished, I had the money [from] “Maria.” I’m like, “You know what? I’m not going to go back. I’m going to study here what I really love.” So I invest in my study. I think it’s a good decision.

Q: Once you came to the U.S., when you tell people you’re from Colombia, do they immediately think, “Oh, she’s from that country with the war and the drugs”?
CSM: The weird thing is that I tell people I’m from Colombia and they never react like that. Never! Well, just one — the guy from the corner on my house. He’s like, “Hey, Colombiana!” And he’s like doing — puff [makes smoking motion]. I really don’t care. I am very proud to be Colombian, and I love my country, and I’m never going to say I’m not from Colombia. That’s horrible. Because I love my country and I’ve lived there, and I’ve never been involved in anything, and the violence is far away from me and it never touched me. So I know there’s violence and I know there’s a lot of people that have been touched with violence, but I can’t say that I’ve been treated bad in my country. I’ve been treated real good.

Q: So how did you get cast in the movie?
CSM: I was studying theater through my whole high school and my whole college, in a little independent theater with an Argentinian director, and somebody knew that I was studying theater in college and called my house. And I don’t know, I feel like curiosity to see who this American was. He’s making a movie about Colombia? And he’s looking for a 17-year-old Colombian girl? What’s wrong? So I went there and had the audition and I went home. I’m like, okay, whatever, I’m going home. And two weeks later they called me.

Q: So you were surprised to get the role.
CSM: Of course.

Q: Did you feel the role was very meaningful for you? Was this the kind of role you would choose for yourself?
CSM: It was a challenge. You know? She’s not like me. She’s so different. That was a challenge for every single actor. And [it was] my first professional work, so of course [it was] even more challenging, and more powerful if I could do a good job.

Q: How did you approach the role of Maria?
CSM: I went to a floral plantation for two weeks. I worked there — I didn’t de-thorn the roses [Maria's job], I cut them. I could understand how hard the work was, because the fumigants that they put on the roses — they burn their hands, sometimes, and the eyes get itchy and red, and the skin, oh my God, sometimes it peels. It never happened to me because I was just there for two weeks, but the people that have been there their whole lives, they have a problem. And it’s very, very hard, because when you’re in Bogotá you’re just like, “These beautiful flowers!” and you put them in your house, but you don’t know what happened before that. So I could understand Maria when she was thinking about the decision to go. She was tired of the work. I was tired after two weeks! I’m like, “I want to go home!” And you know, if you’re living in a little town and that’s the only option of work, that’s miserable. That’s sad.

Q: So from the perspective of Bogotá, it’s a little bit like here. You just buy the flowers and you don’t think about it.
CSM: Yeah.

Q: Or you just see the news stories about the drug mules and you don’t think that much more about it.
CSM: I think so.

Q: I found that the film in general and your performance in particular was not made heavily dramatic. It was just presented as, “This is a story that could happen.” How did you try to achieve that?
CSM: I did not try. That was a good thing. They put the camera in front of me, Josh [Marston] directed me, but I never was trying to do something. It was just coming. And I think it was because I was very lucky to be involved in this project with amazing people. The actors were incredible, were amazing, and he knew if the actors gave me a good performance, I could give them a good performance too. So it was easy, not hard.

Q: Does it surprise you that the film comes off as quite powerful?
CSM: Uh, yeah, because when I was doing the film, I never thought that you were not going to do the film in continuity. So when I was doing the movie I was kind of confused sometimes. I’m like, “So what happened?” So I’d have to go to the script and read, and they told me that [flipping through pages] they’d jumped from this scene to this one, and there was no motive for it so it was crazy. But when people go out crying — In Berlin we were putting the movie in the theater and a woman fainted. I never thought it was going to be so powerful, but to see the woman faint, it was like, “Oh my God, we’re killing people! Aaagh! Horrible!” It’s amazing. We never thought that this movie was going to be like that. Well, I never thought it.

Q: Does this open some doors for you? It brought you to the U.S…
CSM: Yeah. I have an agent now. She is amazingly good. She is making me go and talk to all of the important people. I think that is the first step for people to get to know me, for people to know my work.

Q: What would you like to do?
CSM: Good films. I don’t have a character in mind. I never thought to play a Colombian that was getting involved with becoming a drug mule — I never thought to play that. So I’m just waiting for a good director and a good script. And I’m not rushing. So I think with those good points, I’m going to be okay.

Q: It seems like producers and directors in the future could see this film and have a very strong impression of you.
CSM: I hope so. I really do. That’s why all my energy is [focused] on the release of this film, because I really hope the movie is doing good in America.

Q: Do you have an idea what kind of work you would like to do?
CSM: I don’t know. I don’t want to just stereotype me like a big-drama Latin woman. I don’t want to be this [exaggerated] Latin woman — just like that. Because Latins have the horrible stereotype — they’re sexy, they’re beautiful and we can put her in a bikini. I don’t want to do that thing. I want to be a different Latin. So I don’t want to keep stereotyping me — “Oh, I am just going to do drama.” If I can do comedy, I welcome [that]. I can do … whatever, but I have to really like it.

Q: Press materials for the film mention that you were in [the Frog and Peach company's] “King John.” Have you done other theater here?
CSM: No. It was my first theater in New York. It was Shakespeare. It was scary! [Laughs] I think I did a pretty bad job. The first week they were like, “Oh my God, there’s a lot of agents down there so you have to do a really good job.” Of course, the first week I was like, forgetting my lines, forgetting where the light is going to come. But, you know, it’s practice. I think you have to practice to do a good job. So that was practice for me, and theater — I really respect theater a lot, and I think if I jump again into theater, I have to be prepared. Because audiences are not stupid. They know what they’re watching. And I want to be respected.

from IGN, July 2004 / by Jeff Otto

Colombia’s striking new talent talks to IGN about her daring breakout performance in Maria Full of Grace.

We’ve probably all heard the term “drug mule” before and perhaps been somewhat aware of the process by which these women are used to transport drugs out of Colombia and into America. Maybe you’ve seen a 60 Minutes special or a report on the nightly news. Maria Full of Grace tells the story of a young Colombian girl named Maria. She is struggling in a poor Colombian town. When she loses her job and finds out she is also pregnant, a friend introduces her to a new way to make money. No matter what you may have read or watched on the news about Colombian “mules,” I’d wager that most Americans will walk out of this film with an entirely new understanding of the horrible lengths these women go to and the desperation involved in putting their lives on the line for the chance to escape Colombia or put food on the table for their families.

Newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno plays the role of Maria. When first-time director Joshua Marston came to Colombia in search of real Colombian girl, Moreno decided to try out. At the time, she was a college student studying advertising, but acting had always been a passion for her. The news that an American was in desperate search of a Colombian girl to play a lead role was rare news indeed. After struggling for months to find a girl right for the part, Marston hit the jackpot with Moreno. Here was a smart, tough, daring Colombian actress who was willing to conquer any obstacle Marston threw at her.

When Maria Full of Grace is released theatrically, doors are sure to open for Moreno. Her work here is one of the year’s standout performances, foreign or stateside. We spoke with the young actress recently at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. On screen and in person alike, Moreno is striking, with an essence of strength about her. Her smile lights up the room.

Initially, Moreno’s decision to audition for the part of Maria was more of a casual curiosity than anything else. “I was curious to meet this American that was looking for a Colombian girl. I’d gone to a couple of auditions in Colombia and they never chose me, so to hear there’s an American looking for a Colombian, I really needed to see who he was and [find out] what this movie was about. I read for Blanca the first time and the casting director saw me and said, ‘You should just read for Maria, just to show the director.’ And a couple of weeks later, they called me and said that Josh was coming to Colombia to see a couple of girls and that I was in the top three girls.

“I read the script and I was so proud that an American was not stereotyping Colombia. He never showed a gun. He never showed, like, bloody Maria’s face. He never did those types of things, and for me it was incredible… There’s more about Colombia and what Josh did was an incredible job and I’m so proud that he did it. That’s why a lot of Colombians are so grateful [to] him, because he just put his eyes on Colombia and made an incredible movie.”

Though Moreno had always enjoyed acting, she was never sure if she could make a career out of it until now. “I was studying theater. When I was 13 years old, I began studying theater. Then I was studying advertising, but I’ve always studied theater. I was very shy and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to just jump into theater. That was my background in acting. I’d never done anything professionally in Colombia. To make this was a challenge, because I’ve never done anything like that.” Moreno also had to discover who this Maria character was, because she shared few similarities in her own life. “Maria is very different from who I am. I don’t live in a little town. I was in college and I didn’t have to work because I needed money. I was blessed because I had a different lifestyle than her. And for me, it was a challenge to do it. Thanks to Josh and thanks to all of the actors, they made my work much easier.”

One of the film’s many intense moments involves an airport inspection when Maria gets to America. Moreno could at least identify with that, admitting that she herself has in the past been privy to the harsh inspection that many Colombian women must endure because of all the drug smuggling. “I was studying in New York. I had to go back to Colombia to get my student visa and so, I was coming back to New York, and they stopped me. And it is a very weird feeling when you just put your feet in America coming from a Colombian flight. They’re waiting for you, they’re there. Their eyes are wide open, and you feel like you did something bad, even though you haven’t done anything, but you’re there with your bag, just waiting for them to stop you. And when they stopped me, I’m like, ‘Okay, I know I have to be calm.’ And of course I wasn’t calm, I was crazy. My heart rate was 1,000 and my hands were shaking. Of course, they saw, I was so nervous that they stopped me more and they were keeping me asking questions. I remember, at a point, I was thinking, ‘Okay, I have to be calm,’ because I know they might put me in a little room. But it was so weird. I was, like, acting to be calm and I was not calm. And they knew it. I was so crazy. I just wanted to get out of [there]. It was a horrible experience. They padded me, they took my wallet. They were, like, ‘How much money do you have?’ I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, hopefully I didn’t spend ten dollars.’ I was trying to get the amount really close to the amount that was in my wallet.’ It was very crazy… And I cried. It was a horrible, horrible thing…”

The film’s most trying moment is when Maria must swallow the rubber-wrapped heroin tablets before her flight to America. Marston didn’t want to pull punches on the scene and used many long shots instead of cutaways. Mysteriously enough, neither Moreno nor Marston would tell us exactly how many she swallowed or what they were really made of. Moreno does admit that the scene was done on the fly. “I didn’t practice. Why should I? I think, especially for Josh, it was important to be real. And, for me, just coming in and seeing these pills and trying to swallow them, I was like, ‘I’m not going to swallow that.’ But when he actually put it in the yogurt… It’s not easy. It was really hard, and that’s the scene in the movie.”

Marston believed in letting his actress have the freedom in the film to be natural. Instead of rigidly setting up the scenes, the director followed Moreno with a handheld camera for many of the scenes and let her do whatever made her most comfortable. “In this movie, the camera was handheld. And Josh told me that, whenever you feel that Maria needs to walk, just walk. The camera’s going to follow you, because he just wanted to feel what Maria was feeling. And it was much easier for me [to say], ‘You know what, Maria should just stand up.’ Whatever I wanted and whatever Josh approved, I just did it. It was easier…”

Since finishing Maria, Moreno says that her life has already changed for the better. “It’s changed a lot. Now I’m living in New York. I have an agent… I’m alone in New York, I’m living by myself, so everything has changed. I have to be independent. I think, like Maria, I grew up. In Colombia, it’s a slower process to grow up. You just stick with your family for twenty-something years, then you finish college, then you, you know, get to work, you get married… But here, I’m growing up faster, and that’s good. I’m learning a lot of things that I should have learned earlier.”

Moreno promises that she is not going to let her head swell and that she needs to take some time to figure out what her next part will be. Working with Marston on his first film, she has been allowed to be a much larger part of the production than just the lead actress. “I’m not going to jump in another project so fast. I think I’m going to finish Maria’s cycle of being in the editing, of being in the sound room, I think it is so incredible how they do movies. I think, when I do another movie, I won’t be next to the director in the sound room, to see how they mix the sound, or to be in the editing room. So, I think being so involved in this movie, it’s so personal, that I just want to end this cycle. I just want my head in one place. I don’t want to think about another project, but I’m reading. I’m reading a lot. I really want to do my next role in Spanish. I’m just waiting for the next role. I’m very proud to be Latin, I’m very proud to be Colombian and, to me, it’s very important to keep with that.”