Telegraph.co.uk ~ July 8, 2009

In late April, Gael Garcia Bernal was all set to fly to New York for the Tribeca Film Festival, where his latest movie Rudo & Cursi was to get its US premiere, but the outbreak of swine flu meant that he, like everyone else in a metastasising Mexico City, was fearfully holed up at home. ‘At first, it was terrifying, man,’ the actor recalls. ‘I don’t understand epidemics, who does? Paranoia and panic spread through the city incredibly fast. I was just watching news reports of all these people dying and not having any idea when this thing outside my door would end.’

Garcia Bernal ultimately did make it to Tribeca, but for an actor who’s consistently spurned the advances of Hollywood to make movies in Mexico, it seems entirely yet tragically apt that he should spend the darkest days of swine flu among his countrymen. The gringos could wait.

Ever since bursting on to the scene in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s gritty urban drama Amores Perros in 2001, Garcia Bernal has carved out a reputation as one of the mildest-mannered guys in film. Except, that is, where politics is concerned. Aged 16, he joined marches and demonstrations supporting the rebellion of the Zapatista Indians in Chiapas. Aged 24, more famously, when presenting an award at the 2003 Oscars, he ignored the autocue and gave the night’s first denunciation of the Iraq War.

Today, meanwhile, he’s just as politically outspoken about swine flu: with a couple of months’ hindsight, Garcia Bernal has actually come to see the epidemic as a positive. ‘It gave the people of Mexico City time for introspection, for once, which was liberating. Normally the city is caught up in a Western way of operating, which forces you to work all the time, and sacrifice any time you might spend with your family and friends. Those enforced days indoors gave society the chance to reflect on the way we’ve all come to live our lives.’

Such anti-capitalist sentiment would have been worthy of Che Guevara himself, the guerrillero icon who provided Garcia Bernal with his most famous role to date. In 2004’s Motorcycle Diaries, the actor played a young, pre-revolutionary Che as he embarked on a coming-of-age motorbike journey across South America in 1952. Garcia Bernal played the part beautifully, depicting Che’s dawning political conscience in gentle but telling strokes, as he stumbled upon one social injustice after another.

The film premiered at Cannes in 2004 – alongside Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, in which Garcia Bernal starred as a vengeful drag queen – and on the back of these two hits, the Mexican actor was suddenly cinema’s hottest property. Lucrative Hollywood offers came thick and fast (apparently even for the part of Spartan king Leonidas, in Zack Snyder’s Battle of Thermopylae retelling 300), but Garcia Bernal has to this day refused every single one. Why? Surely he gets offered some parts more meaty and less stereotypical than ‘Chico from the barrio’?

‘Yes, but I’ve never cared for the idea of a career path, or where a film might “take me”. My love is for acting not money, so I only take on roles that I find challenging, in stories I find interesting. I was brought up the Mexican way, where actors are paid very little and every part you take is an act of faith. If people respect that, then great.’

And respect it, they do. The boyish good looks have helped, of course: the doe eyes, sculpted cheekbones and lupine smile – not to mention his compact body (he’s just 5ft 7in) – have made swooning females everywhere sudden converts to Mexican cinema. Previous squeezes include Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley, who admits to ‘going all giggly-teenagery’ over how handsome he was.

Yet Garcia Bernal has always been as much throwback as heart-throb. An art-house pin-up à la Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni, he’s achieved acclaim the world over yet still preserved a conspicuous connection to his homeland – so killer is his gaze, he all but makes the subtitles redundant. Which is no mean feat today, when so much of the old-school cachet has been divested from world cinema.

In London this week to promote his latest film Rudo & Cursi, Garcia Bernal hasn’t fussed too much over his appearance: he sports an overworn Sex Pistols T-shirt and an underwashed pair of denim jeans.

Yet what strikes you most is the sense of warmth and vulnerability about him – two qualities that have helped him make the frequently unsavoury film characters he plays really rather likeable. (Remember his rough-and-ready urchin in Amores Perros who uses his Rottweiler in illegal dogfights to win enough money to run off with his brother’s wife?)

Rudo & Cursi reunites Garcia Bernal with his old mucker and best mate Diego Luna. The two were child stars together in an early-Nineties telenovela, before co-starring in 2001’s marvellous road movie Y tu mama tambien. This time out they play feuding brothers who are whisked away from their jobs at a backwoods banana plantation to become Primera Division football stars in Mexico City.

The lads are ill-equipped to cope with the fame and fortune that come their way – Luna’s character Rudo is distracted by gambling and cocaine, Garcia Bernal’s Cursi by four-by-fours, a vapid television hostess and dreams of pop stardom – and the whole film serves as a satirical swipe on celebrity obsession, which, according to Garcia Bernal, has come to hold modern Mexico lamentably in thrall. ‘We live in an age of spectacle, where celebrity has become a synonym for success. But, like capitalism, celebrity is another poisonous Western idea that has spread itself through our society.’

In many ways, Cursi represents everything that Garcia Bernal could have become, had he given in to the temptations of glitz and glam and not decided to so dutifully follow his artistic muse. (No faded Pistols T-shirts in Cursi’s wardrobe, one would guess.) He says he had ‘great fun with the character’ and messing about with what might have been – especially when performing an über-kitsch, norteño version of Cheap Trick’s I Want You to Want Me, which is Mexico’s most downloaded ringtone in 2009.

A keen footballer himself, Garcia Bernal also enjoyed lording it as a star striker. Acting schedules permitting, he and Luna have played in the same Sunday league team in Mexico City for years, though he admits neither of them is quite the Mexican Maradona. Does this explain why there’s rather little on-field action in the film? ‘No, no, that’s because the story is really a universal one about the rivalry and journey of two brothers. The football’s kind of secondary really.’

This word ‘universal’ is problematic, though. Whisper it softly, but Rudo & Cursi is the first blot on Garcia Bernal’s previously impeccable CV. It’s a clichéd ‘rags to riches and back again’ tale, which could have been made anywhere, and the last-minute-penalty climax is, dare one say it, pure Hollywood.

It’s a far cry indeed from Y tu mama tambien and Amores Perros, which were set against a tantalising backdrop of Mexico on the brink of change, a country plagued by violence and iniquities and all set to eject the corrupt PRI party in 2001, after an uninterrupted 70-year rule. Garcia Bernal and Luna’s characters in Y tu mama were too young, cosseted and sex-obsessed to notice, but director Alfonso Cuarón lingered long on the injustices that pass by outside their car window.

Rudo & Cursi, by contrast, has little to say about contemporary Mexico. The NAFTA-ravaged agricultural sector, mass-migration to Mexico City, and the pre-eminence of drug-lords are all touched on, but ultimately it’s an unchallenging story. And when someone as earnest as Garcia Bernal says he and Luna took on the roles ‘to work with old friends again’ – Alfonso Cuarón here produces, while his brother Carlos (his co-writer on Y tu mama tambien) directs – one immediately fears the worst.

Garcia Bernal, 30, and his long-term partner, Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi, have just had their first child together. Now six months old, little Lazaro is about the same age as papa was when he took on his first acting role. Garcia Bernal played baby Jesus in a nativity play, in his home city of Guadalajara, where his thespian parents both used to tread the boards.

Fast forward 18 years, and having turned his back on telenovelas, the Mexican could somewhat curiously be found mixing cement and lugging bricks around a Hackney building site. He had decamped to London, with no plan other than to ‘get lost in Europe for a while’, but he soon caught the acting bug again and enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama, working part-time as a labourer to pay his way. He picked up English fluently but found London life tough: ‘It’s much more closed and harder to discover than Mexico City, which is vibrant, in your face and all there on the streets.’

It was while studying at Central in 1999 that Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu called to ask him if he’d come home and star in Amores Perros. ‘But it was midterm, and I wasn’t allowed to miss any school,’ says Garcia Bernal, smirking mischievously as he recalls his big break. ‘So Alejandro arranged to [send over] a medical certificate saying I needed to return home urgently because I had caught a tropical disease the last time I was in Mexico.’

On the back of Amores Perros and then Y tu mama tambien, Mexico’s biggest-grossing film ever, Mexican cinema was suddenly on the rise again, and in Garcia Bernal had its biggest star since Pedro Infante. After decades in the doldrums, there was even talk of another Epoca de Oro (Golden Age) to match that of the Forties.

Determined that this renaissance should be no flash in the pan, in 2003 Garcia Bernal and Luna set up Canana Films, a production company aimed at telling socially minded stories and ‘documenting what’s truly happening in Mexico today’. Among its first productions was Garcia Bernal’s directorial debut, 2007’s Deficit – the tale of an ill-fated party in Mexico City, marked by racial and class tensions – but its main aim is more grassroots, to support aspiring film-makers across Mexico.

After modest beginnings, Canana is now responsible for 15 releases a year (both feature films and documentaries) and has struck up a deal with Universal Studios’ art-house arm Focus Features for international distribution.

‘I don’t say this to blow my own trumpet, but Canana serves a strong and unique function in Mexico. It produces films by people with something to say, and never for business reasons. And this gives me more than any pay cheque ever could.’ Take that, Hollywood.

Garcia Bernal and Luna have daily catch-ups with the film-makers they’ve commissioned, as well as daily chats with each other about which project to take on next. Throw in his new commitments as a father, and you’d think he can’t have much space in the diary for starring in any new films. Yet rumours persist that Martin Scorsese has tempted the Mexican into co-starring with Daniel Day-Lewis in his new movie Silence – about the persecutions of two Jesuit priests visiting 17th-century Japan – which starts shooting this autumn.

‘It’s a good story, and I hope to be doing it, but at this stage I just don’t know,’ says Garcia Bernal. Rumour has it he’s wary of working with another A-list director, after his acrimonious experience with Almodóvar on Bad Education. The pair clashed repeatedly, Garcia Bernal resenting the lack of actorly freedom the Spanish director allowed him: ‘He’s a director who tells you what to do, and you end up doing it.’

More concrete is the documentary he’s set to make next year about the Bush-conceived wall that’s being built along the US-Mexico border, ostensibly to cut down on drug-running. Some 624 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fencing has already been put up, along what’s roughly a third of the 1,950-mile border, and needless to say, Garcia Bernal isn’t a fan. ‘It was the short-sighted act of the most stupid man ever to be US president.’ He shoots me that famous killer gaze – one worthy of Che Guevara himself.

‘All walls that go up, one day come down,’ he says.

source

GALLERY LINK
Interview – New York (April 21, 2009)

Also, check out these two recent articles!
Diego & Gael Talk About Childhood
Rematch for Bernal and Luna

GALLERY LINK
Magazine Scans > 2008 > Flaunt (Issue #98 Rise + Shine)

Also, thanks to JB, here are some new stills from Mammoth.
   

GALLERY LINKS
The Good Canary plaque unveiling (Feb. 1)
Movies > Mammoth (2008) > Stills

Latina reporter Vanessa Juarez caught up with new papi Gael Garcia Bernal at the Sundance Film Festival, where the actor was busy promoting his film Rudo Y Cursi. Although he’s very excited about the movie, Bernal’s eyes didn’t light up until we mentioned his newborn son, Lazaro. Fatherhood is clearly this star’s role of a lifetime.

Latina: How has fatherhood changed your outlook on your career?
Gael Garcia Bernal: I think everyone who becomes a father or becomes a mother goes through this change of priorities.

Latina: Has anything shocked you about the experience so far?
GGB: It’s a difficult thing to explain because it’s such a complex thing, and yet it’s so simple. So the best way I can explain it is, finally there’s someone more important than me that I have to consider. It’s incredible.

Latina: Has [actor and friend] Diego Luna offered you any fatherly advice?
GGB: Oh yeah, lots. It was mostly about changing nappies (diapers) and things like that.

Latina: You seem so peaceful.
GGB: Yeah, when you reach 30 everything calms down. You realize now you’re young again.

Source  There is also a VIDEO at this source link!

It is the first production from Cha Cha Cha — a company formed by Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Now Cuaron’s brother, Carlos, joins the trio as a director, debuting with “Rudo y Cursi” which roughly translates into “Tough and Corny.”

The Spanish language film, also written by Carlos Cuaron, tells the tale of two talented soccer playing brothers, portrayed by Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, who are plucked from their small village to play for Mexico’s top teams.

It reunites Garcia Bernal, 30, and Luna, 29, on-screen for the first time since 2001′s “Y tu mama tambien,” which was written by the Cuaron brothers, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and nominated for an Academy Award. That film also thrust a new generation of Mexican talent into the global spotlight.

“It’s a project that’s been done with friends,” Garcia Bernal told Reuters at Sundance about his renewed collaboration with Luna and the Cha Cha Cha team. “We know each other pretty well, so we can say things straight forward without blushing or feeling hurt. Also we are very rigorous in our work,” he added.

He said “Rudo y Cursi” — which has been playing in Mexican theaters for about a month and will be released in North America by Sony Pictures Classics — proved to be a rare challenge for him because it had such complex characters.

“What I can draw from it, because every person can draw a different thing from it, is that it is a story about the fragility of success and how dangerous and how responsible one has to be with success,” he said.

The Cha Cha Cha founders were the talk of the 2007 Academy Awards. Inarritu’s “Babel” was nominated for seven Oscars, winning for best original score. Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” won three Academy Awards and was nominated for three others, and Cuaron’s “Children of Men” received three nominations.

Garcia Bernal credits them with mentoring him and Luna. The two actors, whose parents worked in the entertainment industry, also have a production company that premiered one of the most anticipated movies, “Sin Nombre,” this year at Sundance, the top US festival for independent movies.

“We have known each other since we were babies,” he said of Luna. “It was a natural transition for both of us to become actors and we have a lot of fun doing it and I have got to say it’s the only thing we are not competitive at.” But on the soccer field it’s a different story, with Garcia Bernal declaring: “I am much better than him.”

Garcia Bernal’s success has won him fans worldwide. Yet, the actor — who became a father for the first time earlier this month with the birth of a son — has no plans to make the move to Hollywood.

“If I was naturally an English speaker then the Hollywood thing would come much more easily,” Garcia Bernal said. “In a sense it’s another option … the same as if I was working on films in Argentina, or Spain or France or England, it’s just another option.”

“Right now I do what I like and I enjoy doing what I like,” he added.

Source

  
GALLERY LINK
Magazine Scans > 2008 > Miscellaneous

México City (30 November 2008) – They say that 30 is a difficult stage because many have confliction about what they’ve done in their life. Nevertheless, Gael García Bernal can be calm since he not only is an actor who has worked with film makers like Pedro Almodóvar, Walter Salles and Fernando Meirelles, but he’s also a producer, a director, a defender of social rights and soon he’ll be a dad.

Practically from birth the “tapatío” [a person from Guadalajara] was close to sets because of his parents. Patricia Bernal and José Ángel García are actors. With time, Gael decided to follow the steps of his parents and debuted at age 11 in the soap opera Teresa which stared Salma Hayek.

Later he obtained his first star role in El Abuelo y Yo (Grandfather and Me) along side Diego Luna who has become one of his best friends.

“Thirty, what he’s not 35? He seems older, no?” mentions Diego jokingly about the birthday boy.

Although he had success in television, Gael decided to try his luck in cinema. Towards the end of the 90’s he moved to London to study acting in the Central School of Speech and Drama and then returned to Mexico to his first movie role in Amores Perros under the baton of Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Later came Y Tu Mamá También, El Crimen del Padre Amaro, La Mala Educación that positioned him as an actor that liked taking risks, since in these films he gave life to strong characters: in the first one – a boy who kisses another man; in the second one – a priest who embarrasses a young woman, and in the third one – a transvestite. Then there came The Motorcycle Diaries by Walter Salles; The Science of the Sleep by Michel Gondry; Babel by Alejandro González Iñárritu; El Pasado by Héctor Babenco; Blindness by Fernando Meirelles, and on December 19 the movie Rudo y Cursi by Carlos Cuarón will be released.

“I love how he chooses interesting projects with actors that he’s going to be able to share and learn from, although sometimes they are not the most commercial movies. I admire him very much in every respect, sometimes without giving him the chance of being understood. Nevertheless, he has gone forward with his projects. He tackled the project to open a production company (Canana), an enterprise where he promotes cinema (mainly documentary). He seems enormous to me,” says Ann Claudia Talancón, who starred with Gael in El Crimen del Padre Amaro.

In search of more challenges, this year the actor tackled directing with Deficit, a movie that placed him before the scrutiny of the media, an area that he does not feel very comfortable, since he has always preferred staying removed from public life.

So zealously he has protected his privacy that many romances are not known. Only his relationship for a couple of years with actress Natalie Portman and now with the Argentinean Dolores Fonzie, whom he currently lives with in Madrid and is awaiting the birth of his first son.

With all his achievements, surely Gael will be happy, especially now that he’ll be a father, a role that undoubtedly will mark a difference between earlier and after he is 30 years old.

Source: Agencia Reforma

Article translated by Heather~

Resist is a new film to be released in 2009 with Gael Garcia Bernal.

Resist is a quest for people whose actions are shifting our perspectives on the world, a search for people who are inspiring new ways of thinking, acting and being, who are instigating change from below. Resistance is their primary way of moving forward.

In our film Gael seeks out these life affirming people who are making change happen, who are transforming things for themselves, who see humanity and nature as something more meaningful than just a commodity. The power of this film is that the complexity and enormity of peoples’ struggles will be expressed through highly intimate personalised stories. It will reveal that seemingly disconnected people are in fact bound by their conviction that what is happening in the world today is wrong.

The film won’t be Gael telling us what to do ‘about things’ because he doesn’t pretend to have any answers. Our journey will be one of questioning and learning, rather than telling. Gael wants to explore what lies beyond the traditional discourse of confrontation. People can’t exist in a constant state of resistance but need to simultaneously create alternatives to what they are resisting.

I also found a link to the Rudo y Cursi Website. It doesn’t appear to have any content yet, but keep checking back, as they may add to it. This movie premieres in Mexico in December!

And here’s part of an article that I recently translated into English!

Rudo y Cursi at the Morelia Film Festival - October 6, 2008

Originally the name of the movie character was “Tato”, who was split in two, but in the end they turned into two [characters], one Rudo (rough) and the other Cursi (corny).

For his part, Gael joked about how in the movie he must play the accordion. He practiced close to two months which lead to some of his neighbors being bothered by him. He added that he agreed to sing due to the requirements of the script in order to make a video-clip where he appears playing in a musical group and dressed in the style of Los Tigres del Norte. He emphasized that he was inspired by Julio Preciado, the ex-vocalist of La Banda El Recod.

Luna pointed out that to play Rudo, he did a combination between Jesús Ochoa and Alfonso Cuarón, imitating the first when he answers the phone and the second stuttering whenever he gets angry. Luna expressed that the subject of football [soccer] remainded discarded as an essential part of the cinematographic story.

Rudo y Cursi was filmed in Mexico City, the State of Mexico, Jalisco and Colima. The story relates to the lives of Beto (Diego) and Tato (Gael), the Verdusco brothers, who work on a banana farm and play on the town football team.

The first one of them dreams of being an idol of las chanchas, while the other desires to be a famous singer. They also share the desire to buy a house for their mother, Dolores Heredia. One day they are discovered by a head-hunter, Tato is the first to emigrate and score for the Deportivo Amaranto team, but due to his style of playing they nickname him Cursi (Corny).

Meanwhile Beto, who feels betrayed, travels to the DF [Mexico City] in order to join Atlético Nopaleros where he will get out of debt as an excellent goalkeeper. Nevertheless, both of their lives will take them on different tracks and to futile confrontations.

Source

The Mexican actor who rose to fame with Amores Perros spoke in an exclusive interview with PeopleEnEspanol.com about his work in Blindness

Blindess, the new movie by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener), is one of the most eagerly awaited films of the fall and is based on the eponymous book by José Saramago.

The story is about a world epidemic disease that leaves its victims blind. Not finding a cure, the first victims are interned in an old psychiatric hospital to keep them from spreading the disease to others. The group includes an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), his wife (Julianne Moore), a prostitute (Alice Braga) and The King, a bartender played by Gael García Bernal.

This time the Mexican actor not only shares the screen with some of the best actors in Hollywood, but he actually plays the film’s most controversial character, a role far from the noble and innocent characters we have seen García Bernal play before.

We know you get offered a lot of interesting movies. Why did you decide to make this film?
I always thought this was a transcendent story because it addresses the inability we humans have to live together in peace, as if we suffered some kind of blindness.

I liked the fact that the story creates a situation, in this case blindness, that puts to test the moral and social structures we’ve been taught. Suddenly chaos and corruption govern the different areas of the place in which those infected by blindness are confined. But what is interesting is that, in the end, it boils down to a story about hope, since we realize that the secret to survival is within our own selves.

We’re used to seeing you in the role of the good guy. How does it feel to play the bad guy?
I don’t believe The King (his character) is a bad guy. He’s practical and pragmatic. He may be a cold man because he’s not an idealist and he has no hope, but he’s nothing more than a survivor like everybody else. To say that The King is bad would be to contradict the point of the story. He chooses practical solutions for the benefit of others in the group. And what strikes me as really powerful about him is that his actions always unleash very heated debates.

Mark Ruffalo wore contact lenses that prevented him from seeing, and that resolved his struggling with his eyesight. How did you handle your own blindness?
My case was different from Mark’s. I couldn’t wear contacts because I have light-color eyes and you could tell I was wearing them. So it was a little frustrating, though at the same time it was kind of liberating because it forced me to jump into the plot without using any tricks. I think the hardest thing was to not react instinctively to someone clapping his hands before your eyes and that type of thing.

There were times in which we simply made mistakes following something with our eyes and things like that, but those mistakes prompted a lot of laughter while shooting, and that was good. It’s that we took everything seriously, and when something like that happened we laughed our hearts out and the atmosphere became more relaxing. We should not forget that we do this for the love of it, so it’s important that we also have a good time doing it.

Source