Just by sitting there and putting them together, and letting them meet the people, too. There were so many young Portuguese-American girls on our set, and I really encouraged Emmy to hang out with them and really understand them. Emmy is like a sponge, she loves to do homework and she did that. Sofia came to the film four days before I started rehearsal with her. She really had no time to do this and she literally just flung herself into it. We found her a fado teacher who is also an incredible fado singer. So Sofia, in every spare waking moment, was with Ana Vinagre who taught her the essence and the meaning of fado, what it was and how she was to hold herself, and how the performance feels. Sofia just bathed in it.
All Lupe [Ontiveros] had to do was walk up and down the streets of New Bedford. There are always the ladies dressed in black, the widows who lost their husbands to the sea. If you go to the Maritime Museum, which is right near the front wharf, you see all the commemoratives to the men who were lost at sea. That’s a real thing. Every year there are ships that just get swallowed up by the sea and fishermen lost. It really is so real that everyone got immersed into the whole feeling of that.
There were families that would sit down and would talk to all three of the girls and really go through what their problems were, what their dilemmas were, what they’d listen to at night, what the family dinners were… We just immersed ourselves in it. Shockingly, I only had 3 ½ weeks of pre-production on this picture. We had a looming actors strike, which meant that if I did not start by a certain date, SAG was not going to give us a waiver.
That's a lot of pressure to work under.
I used to have people look at it and ask, “Oh my God. Did you shoot this during magic hour?” I’d look at them and go, “No, we shot it during rush hour,” because every day was rush hour. When it came down to getting the scene right and getting the characters right, all of us lived in every moment and really tried to make it come to life.
It's an emotional experience to watch Sofia Milos' character sing in this movie. How difficult was that to film that? Was it hard to capture that emotion on film?
Yes, it was really hard to capture it on film because she had to be absolutely dead-on with the sync. My camera absolutely had to be completely dead-on with its moves. I was taking a 4 ½ minute song and really condensing it into 2 ½ minutes, because generally you can’t really on film do a 4 ½ minute song. It was knowing every shot, every dissolve, and every movement. [Knowing] how we were going to shoot from behind and in front.
It was the only location that I actually built. Everything else was shot on an existing location. I built that restaurant – it was an existing restaurant that had been deserted. I really needed the camera to have the freedom to move in and get a crane in there, so I could have the camera sort of swing around and capture her face and the audience at the same time. It was a lot of intricate work but I did so much homework on it with my cinematographer that when we came to it, we found it was exhilarating. But it was also getting the lighting right and the feeling right. I really wanted to capture the essence of fado and be faithful to it.
I actually wanted to see more scenes of Sofia’s character singing.
Me too.
