| Wilmer Valderrama and Catalina Sandino Moreno Bite Into Rich Material In "Fast Food Nation" |
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Page 1 of 2  In joining the cast of director Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation," actors Wilmer Valderrama and Catalina Sandino Moreno create a parallel narrative as two illegal Mexican immigrants working in El Paso, Texas slaughterhouses, in this film based on a non-fiction indictment of the commercial meat industry.When author Eric Schlosser wrote his hard-hitting best seller criticizing the fast food industry and the products it sells, he never thought it could become the movie that Linklater created. But Linklater wanted to do more than just document the horrors of the meat processing industry; he wanted to describe a panorama of the people who both work with and consume the meat the book deals with. To do so, he called on such actors as "That '70s Show" star Valderrama and Oscar-nominated Moreno to accurately tell the story of Mexican illegals forced to work in a meat packing plant. Others such as Greg Kinnear and Paul Dano portray those who are the executives of the fast food world and the ground level workers in the fast food joints themselves. www.foxsearchlight.com/fastfoodnation
 Wilmer Valderrama and Catalina Moreno  Catalina Sandino Moreno  Wilmer Valderrama  Moreno and Valderrama play Mexican immigrants in "Fast Food Nation"  Director Richard Linklater on set  Wilmer Valderrama at Fashion Rocks '05 CSM: I heard about the book but I read the script first and then thought it was all a lie. I thought they were just making it up. And then I read the book and it was pretty shocking because it was real and scary. And I thought I have to do this movie. I felt responsible. I thought the whole story was compelling. WV: I thought it was interesting. For a lot of my college friends, the book was required reading. I actually didn't read the book because I wasn't aware of it. But after I heard about the book and read the script I thought: "Wow, could this really be?" And it became a project that was so exciting to be a part of. Very few times in our careers [as actors] do we get a chance to play a role that is meaningful. Q: Did you have to audition for your roles? If so, what was the experience like? WV: Well, I think for both of us it was different, but I think anyone that claims to be an actor wants to be in a Richard Linklater movie. So for me, I met with Richard and we talked about the character. After I read for him, the big question was, "Can you do a Mexican accent?" And that's how we [came together]. Richard was great because he trusted his cast. Q: What did it take to develop these roles; was it hard to create authentic portraits of these characters with the scant screen time they had? CSM: Well, I did "Maria Full of Grace" and learned a lot from that movie. I learned that when you don't know anything about [something]--if you're going to play a pianist, you're going to rehearse it, you're going to learn it, and you're going to play the piano for 10 hours a day. But in "Maria," the director [Joshua Marston] told me not to talk to any drug dealers and to not even research anything about drugs. So I think the same was true for Sylvia. She didn't know what to expect from this country. She's never been to a slaughterhouse. So the only thing that I could give to Sylvia was the fact that I am an immigrant to this country. And I know how hard the whole process can be and how frustrating it could be. And sometimes it's very hard to be surprised in movies because you know what is going to happen--but I was. And, you know, the whole slaughterhouse and the whole desert thing; it is crazy that people do that every day. So I think that the most surprising thing for me was the whole process of filming this movie. WV: It's a really pressing question because for us as Latinos it is such a fact of life for us. We are aware of what people go through when they transition to America. It was interesting to do research on something that has been culturally a part of our existence. We broke down our characters a lot and took this movie seriously. We discussed and picked specific places for where we came from. We talked about what we said to each other in order to make this crossing, how we met and we really went after those bones. So when we hit the screen, you knew the history between the characters without showing it. Q: Did you take on this movie because it was message-driven and had a political dimension? WV: I've been working in the mainstream for several years and I have a lot of fans that mean a lot to me; they have been with me for a long time and I've been with them through a lot of stuff and there really comes a point in your life where you stop doing things that are popular. And there's a time that comes in your life during your career where you come across a character that actually means something. I believe that it's very easy to play characters, but difficult to play a real person especially when it's a person that is sharing issues with society and for me that is what became important about this as opposed to being a professional movie. When you start reading this you think, "Oh my god, Richard Linklater's movie is such a great movie to be a part of." It has a good script and it was so hard to not notice how passionate, incredibly uplifting and awakening the issues are that we were speaking about on behalf of in this movie. So it lifted me up from just making a good career choice to, wow, we could actually do something that matters with our work. You know, nowadays that's not easy to do; there are not a lot of scripts that actually matter. CSM: Well, I needed to follow "Maria Full of Grace" with a strong movie too. Right now I'm at a point in my life and in my career that I just can't take light roles. I don't know why, I feel more conscious, I feel more responsible, I feel like right now I have a responsibility, not just for being an actor, but for being a Latina immigrant, a Latina woman. Sometimes they portray Latina girls in such a way that--you're not like that, and you want to change how people perceive this community. So I never even thought about this being a little movie, I thought it was a huge movie, and it wasn't a chance for me to do anything, it was a chance to keep up the work that I've been doing and hopefully I'll find more scripts like this. Q: What was the most eye-opening thing you discovered and did it change your diet? WV: Well, I've got to tell you. It's mind-blowing that in our society today and in our incredible country that we live in that these things happen so out in the open. And so many people choose to ignore the realities of such things and how we let things happen without doing anything about it. |