Interview with Joshua Marston and Catalina Sandino Moreno

Originally published on July 22, 2004 | No comment

Category: 2004

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.