Catalina Sandino Moreno's acclaimed role in 'Maria' just meant being herself
NEW YORK -- She was plucked from a pool of nearly 1,000 similar candidates: unknown young women from Colombia. She played the part, then created a sensation by snagging the top acting prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in March, tying with seasoned veteran Charlize Theron. But as the title character in "Maria Full of Grace," Catalina Sandino Moreno has a confession to make: She wasn't always pretending.
Case in point: in a pivotal scene, the novice lead, playing a drug "mule" from Colombia, arrives in Queens. According to Moreno, 23, her wide-eyed wonder is genuine -- she was seeing New York, where she now lives, for the first time. "I was Maria," said Moreno of the moment. "The first time I went to Queens was with a camera. I was staring at the people, the houses. It was real."
The actor was brought up in Bogota by a veterinarian (father) and pathologist (mother), both of whom she described as "incredible" and supportive. In contrast, Maria is a poor worker on a flower plantation looking for a way out of a dead-end life. She has just broken up with a boyfriend she doesn't love and lives with a family she doesn't get along with. An opportunity presents itself, and Maria risks death and imprisonment -- to earn the equivalent of about five years' wages.
The film marks the feature debut of writer-director Joshua Marston. "I felt like the story of a drug deal had never been understood from the inside," he said, speaking separately in New York.
Marston recalls the first time he laid eyes on Moreno. He had spent three months auditioning 800 girls, many of whom responded to megaphone announcements made by his casting team to rural towns outside of Bogota. Having scoured the countryside, the director had found no one compelling and was about to postpone the shoot.
The next morning, he received a videotape from his casting agent in Colombia, and halfheartedly put it into the VCR. Moreno was the first actress on the tape, and he knew immediately he had found his star.
"It was recognizing this character that I'd seen in my head all this time," he said. "Sort of like when someone says they knew when they saw their wife." When Marston flew to Colombia and met the actor, the deal was sealed.
Moreno, who had studied acting since 14, had auditioned for other roles without success. So she went to college to study advertising.
"In Colombia, if you study theater and are lucky, you get on TV and play in soap operas," said Moreno. "I didn't want that for my life. I figured theater would be my hobby." Landing the lead role in an American film was the kind of miracle she had already dismissed.
From the beginning, Moreno was touched that "this American was making a story about this girl," without the usual Colombian stereotypes about drugs or violence. Moreno had no idea that her character would become a drug mule: when shooting wrapped in Latin America, the actor had only read half of the script. Keeping the actors in the dark was Marston's intent; he gave them the first half of the screenplay, and reclaimed it after 24 hours.
"They get attached to the written word and you ask them to improvise, and they can't," explained the director, a self-described anthropologist. "Three weeks later, I would say, `Do you remember the scene where so-and-so happened?' and `Let's do an improvisation.' They'd be coming up with dialogue I couldn't imagine. Then we'd open up the script and collectively rewrite the scene."
This approach allowed Moreno and the other key actors to define their own voices. "On a detailed level, they're making choices about diction, slang, and word choice that I could never make," said Marston, whose fluent Spanish didn't necessarily inform him that "bacano" and "chevere" are both regional colloquialisms for the word "cool."
In a blow to Marston's careful authenticity, violence in Colombia lead to the first part of the shoot being moved to Ecuador. Despite the change, Moreno said it was easy for her to "keep it real." She did research, working incognito at a Colombian rose plantation belonging to a friend.
"He told me not to distract the other workers, and to be calm," she said. "But I had to distract them. I'd ask them questions and they didn't answer for the first four days. The fifth day they began to open up. In that process, I felt Maria in me." Moreno smiled. "After two weeks, I got fired. They said I was asking too many questions!" The scene was shot in a working Ecuadorian plantation.
After Ecuador, the shoot follows Maria and her fellow drug mules to New York City, where events take a tragic turn. Moreno, who had appeared onstage in Colombia, identified her biggest surprise during the shoot as the existence of the camera crew, with its 30-odd members. "I didn't know you had to act in front of all those people," she said with a laugh. "They were waiting for me, depending on me. The light, the sun, the hours. It took a week to get used to it."
The film's coming-of-age feel also finds a link in real life. The end of shooting marked the actor's move to New York, in fulfillment of a dream she'd had since high school. She said she's conquered homesickness, an initial resistance to the city, and the idea of living alone. Now Moreno reveals a savvy that belies her youth. "I'm reading a lot of scripts," she said. "And I like to travel, especially with a good movie behind me."
Marston agreed heartily. "I feel like a proud father watching her accept all these awards and walk down the red carpet," he said. "In Berlin she got the award in front of all these photographers, and she held it, threw out her hip, and smiled. In a way part of me was shocked. She looked like a movie star."
Jean Tang can be reached at jeandelinstang@yahoo.com. 