The Cast of "The We and the I" Take a Film Making Journey

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 04 April 2013 04:12

Written by Renzo Adler

Never one to shy away from experimentation, Michel Gondry's (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) latest film, The We and the I, chucks out the usual over the top visuals his previous films have been associated with in favor of a more low key setting and cast. Gondry started an acting workshop in the Bronx where he scouted local teens with little or no acting experience for his new project: a film that takes place almost entirely on a bus as high school freshman go home after their last day of class before summer vacation.

While the performances fluctuate and the story veers into melodramatic after school special territory, there is an earnest quality to The We and the I that makes it very charming. At Lincoln Center, cast members Alex Barrios, Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz, Brandon Diaz, and Meghan Murphy, along with screenwriter Jeffrey Grimshaw, talked about the strange experience of making a film in one setting with a cast that has never been in a film before.

Q: How did you get involved with this project?

RD: I was a part of this acting group and we would act around the Bronx and New York and do acting at The Point. They said they were having a movie night and showing Be Kind Rewind, so I saw it and this French director popped out and said “We’re doing a movie! Do you want to be in it?”

BD: I got word of it because I was doing community service in another area and they got word of Michel coming to The Point and doing this workshop thing and they told us and took us down. Michel did the Be Kind Rewind screening and asked us if we wanted to be a part of it and that’s how it got started.

JO: I got involved because I was working at The Point as a student activist.

MB: Same here, I was working with Jon as a student activist and our group leader told us Michel Gondry was having a workshop and showing his movie, Be Kind Rewind. I’ve been acting since high school, so I was interested.

MM: For those of you that don’t know what The Point is, it’s a community center in Hunts Point, just to clarify a bit. I got involved with this movie after my friend, who portrays my best friend in the movie, she was telling me about these acting workshops at the community center and that they’re really cool and I should get involved. So it sort of snowballed into this big project.

TL: It was the same thing [for me]. I’ve been going to The Point since I was five, so that’s how  got involved. It’s an awesome  place.

Q: Had any of you acted before?

MB: Like I said, I’ve been  acting since high school. I got into acting in my sophomore year and basically did a lot of plays.  I was in a playwriting workshop in my junior year and we all wrote our own plays and they were entered into a contest where the winning play got casted, performed with a professional director. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff like that. One of my classmates plays One and I got casted as one of the main cast members and we went to Broadway. I forget the theater, but Billy Elliot was playing there and I got to meet Hilary Swank and it was a great experience. I’ve been acting for a long time.

RD: I do stage acting and a lot of improv. Basically I also teach about HIV prevention when I do act. It’s about teaching how to protect yourself and other things that go on, so we use acting instead of just doing a speech about it. We act it out on stage.

Q: When you got with Michel, did he already have the idea about the bus, or did you all get together and figure it out from scratch?

JO: It took a long time, because there was no idea about a bus. It was just like we’ll sit all together and pretend like we’re acting, and we’ll put our stories together. That’s how it came about.

NM: We developed the idea for the movie over time.

Q: How long did it take?

NM: Technically, four years. It was spanned over my entire high school career. We started doing workshops and I met Michel when I was a freshman, and then we wrapped filming when I was getting ready to be a senior. So there was a lot of planning going on.

TL: The bus idea he had because he was on a bus and watching high school students interact, and that’s where he got the idea from. Then he just wanted to have Bronx students instead of French students, I guess.

MB: That’s where the workshops came into play because he used those times to kind of study us to get our stories out of us so we’d open up and get comfortable with him. Once we were comfortable we opened up and the real stories came out, like what you saw with Brandon. It was pretty comfortable.

JO: At the start we all came from different places. Even though some of us were from the same place and we were comfortable with and familiar with the faces, but having a whole bunch of other people come in, it’s new and a little nerve wracking because you’re acting with a bunch of people you don’t know, so it took some time. But during the workshops we played theatre games and thing like that, theatre techniques to feel each other out. And Michel, he’d see that we had our own little cliques, so when he did the workshops or when we had facilitators, they’d put us in different groups with people we didn’t know. They’d see us chill with them [people we know], so they’d put us with people we don’t know and see what chemistry is. That’s how it came into place. They’d see how we were as individuals then they came up with the concept of every character.

Q: Was Michel working with you  all the way through or was there someone else you also worked with when Michel was off making a movie in Hollywood or something?

MB: We had a talent coach that helped us out with acting a lot and we wrote down in journals how to act and things like that.

Q: Was the movie shot in chronological order or out of sequence?

RD: The first day we did shoot it was the opening of us coming out of the school, which took two days to shoot, but you only see it on screen for a few seconds. One day we do one scene and the next day another scene. And when I see it I’m like “we didn’t do it like that.”

Q: When was it filmed?

RD: During the summer.

Q: How long was the shoot?

MB: Six weeks. They told us we had to keep our schedules clear. No tattoos, no piecing, the way they see you before everything starts, that’s the way you gotta come to set every day.

MM: During shooting we learned the definition of a long day, because was 7AM to 7PM every single day.

Q: Each of you drew on autobiographical elements, but how much of it was just completely made up?

TL: 95% of it was our real stories, but some people didn’t tell their own stores, some people told other people’s stories. Like my story wasn’t my own. But there were some parts that were invented, like the party scene, but there was always something that we experienced that was similar. So even if it wasn’t our own personal story, it was something relatable and something like that happened at some point in our lives.

RD: Also our personalities had to change. Us bullies aren’t bullies all the time, we had to change our personalities and act like jerks and stuff.

JO: My character is nothing like me. I’m really not a bully. I just did it because Michel thought it’d be really funny for me to be a bully. So I said I’d do it with the wig. It made him happy.

MB: I’m not really two-faced. If I’m your friend, I’m your friend. I’m actually a nice guy, I’m not gonna act like an asshole. What you see is what you get.

MM: A lot of the stories that were presented in the movie had some truth to them. The character I played was this really shy, sort of co-dependent servant to her best friend, and I guess that sort of speaks to the dynamic me and my best friend had when we started the workshop. Michel just took that concept and ran with it. It was really interesting to play myself as a freshman because we didn’t start filming until I was a junior. It was interesting to go back to that point in time and develop this character that was based on me when I was 14 years old.

MB: When we were shooting I was a sophomore in college, so to play a sophomore in high school was really funny. The time we stopped the workshops and began preparing for filming, we were all at different points in our lives. So when we got the final script and had to memorize the scenes, it was kind of hard because we couldn’t remember half the stuff we did in workshops because it was over a four year span. So when we came back we were all like “oh I wouldn’t say this, can I change this, can I change that?” Michel was nice enough to actually give us the freedom and pleasure to change things we didn’t like or switch it up or take it out.

Q: What was it like working with Michel as a director?

TL: He can come to my wedding. He’s just awesome. He’s just really down to earth and worked with us because, obviously we’re not like Hollywood, so we didn’t always know what we were doing. And when he did have us buckle down, we didn’t get upset with him for getting frustrated with us because he was down to earth to. So we didn’t mind when he got strict.

AB: His son is lucky to have him as a father. I’d love to have him as a father. He’d crack jokes, make people laugh. Sometimes when we were shooting scenes and he’d see people doing something that wasn’t in the scene, he’d be like “Alex, go shoot that” and put it in the movie. He was awesome.

MM: Michel is a great guy to work with. He’s eccentric, but it just felt like he was another member of the cast. He’s the antithesis of your stereotypical Hollywood director. He’d be like “how can we approach this” and ask for our input. Totally not the experience I was expecting to have when I was told we would be working on a movie. It was great.

JO: Michel was pretty cool because between shoots he’d mingle with us, he wouldn’t put himself on a pedestal.  He knew how to work with us, so we got comfortable. So when real shooting begun and he had to get strict we were like “okay, you got Michel, you do what you gotta do, because you you’re cool with us.”

TL: The only time he really got mad was at the camera man.

MB: He got it the worst.

Q: When you started working with him, was it always definitely gonna be a movie?

RD: We were like, “we’re doing all these workshops. Are we gonna shoot now?” “No.” Constantly waiting and most of us were like “is this really gonna happen?” People went to college, people had babies, everything. When it finally came to shooting, it was about getting everybody in the same room because they all came from high school and after school and now we gotta work. It was hard getting everyone back together and when we did it was so weird because now the cameras are here. When it finally came together it was amazing.

AB: We really had to wait because when Green Hornet came out they had to put us on hold. The whole funding for that project stopped and we were just waiting until we got a message that they were gonna shoot this and everyone got excited.

Q: How was this movie written?

TL: We had journals we wrote in and basically those stories became part of the crazy process they [the writers] deal with.

JG: It was absolutely based on that. Michel always had a structure when we came in. The structure you saw there, the three parts that was kind of embedded from the very beginning, it was ending with those three kids on the bus. We interviewed and worked with the kids. At the end, the only scene that completely came from us was the one with the pizza and the kids getting off the bus. Everything else either came from the kids or was in Michel’s original treatment. He had a treatment that was about 24 pages long based on his bus rides in the South of France in the 70’s.

Q: It’s like a mélange of experiences.

JG: Lots of melanging.

MB: It was an interesting experience when I got the script and saw what they added, I was like “how is this gonna work? This sounds really stupid.” Then we started filming and I saw things come to life, I was like “oh that’s really hot.” When you read something, it’s different from when you see it put together.

Q: Was it always planned that the movie gets thematically darker and heavier as it goes along?

JG: That was also completely built into it from the beginning. That’s always what he wanted to do. I think in the treatment the titles were The Chaos, The We, and The I, instead of the The Bullies, The Chaos, and The I. He kept wanting it to end with that he told us were “philosophical discussions” and people changing. It drove us completely crazy. The physical darkness, he always wanted that as well. His original ending shot was going to be Teresa, who at that point was a different character, and Michael, walking down the street, and they would be kicking street lamps to make the bulbs go out, and he desperately wanted that. He wanted us to come up with a way to do that. We said it’s the last day of school, the first day of summer, they’re basically getting out at 12 o’clock,  it’s a nine hour bus ride, minimum. So he just kind of went with it. The best solution we came up with, and I wish it was in there, was that we wanted to have a solar eclipse. We had written that in and it stayed in through inertia for about five drafts until he finally realized what it was and then it was gone. Our concluding shot in the first draft was kids who had gone into Manhattan to shop in SoHo were going to be on the Highline watching the solar eclipse with their backs to it on their cellphones. We had a song about it.

Q: How much of the dialogue was scripted?

RD: A lot of it was adlibbed. We stuck with the structure of the script and knew the structure of the script, but at the end it was like we wouldn’t say this, so they said change it into your own form of speaking, however you feel comfortable saying it. If it looks good, we’d go with it, so I adlibbed. It was like have a conversation, act like you’re on the bus, there are no cameras, and you’re just with your friends. And that’s how I came across.

MB: It was hard though, because even though you had to act like the camera wasn’t there, they was there.

Q: Did he have trouble understanding your slang?

RD: I liked it when he would say it.

JO: He’d try real hard to understand what we meant.

TL: He’d ask a lot of us to slow down, because as you can see, we talk really fast.

MM: I think we had a little bit more trouble understanding him most of the time. He has a very thick accent and at the time I had got Rosetta Stone for French and I swore that I would be able to speak French by the end of the summer and sometimes Michel would come and talk to me in French and I’d be like “uuuhh…”

JO: At the beginning it was like what the hell is this guy saying, but the longer you’re around him it starts becoming more clear and natural, it’s like you understand what he’s saying. When he tried to imitate us it was really funny, so we were just cracking up all the time.

Q: Do you guys want to keep acting? When you guys saw the movie for the first time, what was it like?

RD: I want to keep acting for sure, there’s no doubt about it. As far as seeing it, I cringed. I was like I hate hearing my voice and to see my big face crying on the screen. But after seeing for the sixth time, I got used to it, you can watch me cry.

JO: I was scared. Everyone’s always critical of themselves when everyone is watching them, especially on the big screen. We went to France and had the big premiere in the theater and it was nerve-wracking. We had seen it at the studios before in Manhattan. But when we seen it, everyone was there watching it, I was thinking I hope I look good. All these things you think about before you even see the film, so when you see the film you want to cover your face, walk out the theatre, run, just give up on life. It was crazy. I definitely want to keep acting, I like the hard work that goes into it, the dedication I have, and the dedication everyone else has as well. It’s very interesting to see how we open to [acting] coaches, and it’s great to see people giving such great feedback and caring even if they’re not from the South Bronx or not being from America. Seeing how people feel about the film is still something I can’t get over and it feels just great.

BD: Watching it for the first time it was only like half the cast and we were in a studio with headphones on, and when the credits went up and I saw my name, it was the most overwhelming feeling knowing that, even though it was a month, a whole month of 16 hour days, but seeing a whole month’s work put into an hour and 45 minutes is a real overwhelming feeling. It’s like wow. And after all four years of stopping and going and hesitating on the work, it added up, and when it was finished it felt real good.

AB: To me, when I see it, I feel like I did a horrible job, but then people started coming up to me and saying they like my character, but I don’t really like my character. I did a lot of cursing. If I could do it again, I would change that. It’s crazy, but I would love to keep acting.

MM: Part one of your question, I don’t know if I want to continue acting on film, but acting is really fun and I’d like to explore other types of acting. So maybe stage or something like that. We’ll see what’s in the cards. As far as my reaction to the movie, it’s a mixture of I wanna throw up, I’m so happy, I’m so proud of everyone, so it was kind of a jumble of things. You have a certain level of objectivity when you’re watching other people in movies, but when you’re watching yourself it’s a whole other weird experience and you have to have done it to know what it feels like. So that was really interesting and I enjoyed it.

Q: You all look so confident and sure of yourselves. Were you always like this, or did the movie change you?

MB: Honestly, before the movie and everything, I was kind of a quiet person. If I hadn’t done this movie, but had to stand in front of all of you, I’d be shaking, I’d be sweating bullets, things like that. Doing this movie boosted my confidence, it showed me what I gotta work at, and my reason for acting. It made me feel more approachable. I hung with these guys I normally wouldn’t hang with, meet new people, make friends, stuff like that. It was just great. I feel more humble, and definitely more confident. I’m used to talking in front of big crowds now, I’m not nervous, I’m outspoken.

JO: I see myself now as more of an outgoing person. During high school I just tried to stay by myself. I just wanted to do my time at high school, finish my four years, then go to college. Within the movie, notice how we had the cliques, the bullies stayed with the bullies and so forth? That’s how it was in high school. Now I’m more outgoing, I don’t look at anybody for no reason. Everything is open now, I’m free to do whatever. It really opened me up to the world. Everybody’s different, accept everything.

BD: To me it was a great experience and just doing it was good, and just seeing myself up there is amazing. But now when I ride the bus I still sit in the back.

RD: This whole experience did change me in a way. It did give me more confidence in front of a crowd. When I first came up I was like I’m so scared, what are they gonna say, what are they gonna ask me? But then when I got on stage, I was just like, just talk, it’s perfectly fine. It definitely made me more confident.

MM: My reaction to that question is you think I’m confident? Thank you. I’m totally fooling everybody. It was interesting to have this movie begin and end as my high school career began and ended. This movie is like a little fossil of my high school personality. It’s interesting to see yourself that way and getting to delve into my personality when I was a freshman in high school, it helped me learn from myself, so I guess that’s where any confidence came from. A lot of people who were involved in the movie feel the same way because we really got to discuss who we were. That’s something you sort of touch on in high school, but you don’t necessarily do it on that level, on the level we did. So that was good to do.

TL: The movie changed me, but I can’t really put a finger on it or give it a word. But I know during those six weeks I went through a total transformation. Like a completely different person from beginning to end.