From Interview Magazine, February, 1993
Interview by Susan Morgan
Andy Garcia left his native Havana in 1961. He grew up in Miami Beach and arrived in Hollywood movies in the mid-80s. Garcia’s acting conveys a kind of glissando style, a low-key elegance that doesn’t get tangled up in mannerisms. As the drug dealer with the beguiling smile in 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), he danced like a master around Jeff Bridges’s boozehound cop. In The Godfather, Part III (1990) he waltzed his way up through the underworld with remarkable grace. More often a cop than a robber, he’s turned his righteously disarming gaze on Al Capone’s hoods in The Untouchables (1987), the unidentified murderer on a motorbike in Black Rain (1989), Richard Gere in Internal Affairs (1990), and a serial killer stalking Uma Thurman in Jennifer 8 (1992). When we met in his office on the Paramount lot, Garcia was focused on two new projects as a director. He’s just completed a documentary on the legendary Cuban musician Cachao (Israel Lopez) and is in pre-production on The Lost City, a feature written by Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
ANDY GARCIA: I grew up in Miami Beach, in a Jewish community. I had a great childhood; I was embraced by this country and its culture. Cuban culture was very alive in my house, but outside my house it was a Jewish environment. I went to a lot of bar mitzvahs.
SUSAN MORGAN: Do you still have a home in Miami?
AG: I did recently buy a vacation home there, but I’ve always maintained a home there, in the emotional sense. My parents, my family, my roots are there.
SM: Joan Didion has compared present-day Miami to a Latin capital.
AG: There is a very strong Latin culture in Miami proper, and now South Miami Beach is becoming like the South of France. People have compared it to St. Tropez in its heyday. I think Ocean Drive at night might be the closest that any city of exiles has come to re-creating the energy of Havana in the late ‘50s. It’s wild there on a weekend night: thousands of people on the sidewalk, all the clubs and cafés, and music seeping out of all the different bars. Fashion moguls have bought up the old apartment buildings right on the strip and turned them into villas. I always loved it down there; the architecture was great, but now it has become hip. When I was growing up, I used to hang out in that area, but all those buildings were retirement homes.
SM: When did you start listening to Cuban music?
AG: There was always music whenever there were people gathered together, but I didn’t really hear it performed by masters until I was twelve or thirteen. My friends and I would go down to a bar called Johnny’s, on Seventy-first Street. We were too young to go inside, but it was on the ground floor of a hotel and the back door opened right out onto the beach. We would sit on the sand, leaning against the door, drinking coffee and listening to the music. I used to stay out very late, sometimes until sunrise. I remember my brother would drive down Collins Avenue and say "Hey! Time to go home!" He always knew where to find me. Now when I think of my daughters, I wonder what I was doing out at that time of night on my own. But Miami Beach was very different in those days. I remember one night when Mongo Santamaria was playing. After the first show, the manager came out back and said, "C’mon in and sit in the back corner, but don’t say a word." It was a slow night and he sat us in a back booth, in the dark, just four or five tables from the stage. Mongo Santamaria came on with his band; it was when "Watermelon Man" was a big hit. They started to play and I couldn’t believe it. It just blew me away. From then on, I was a junkie for that music.
SM: Are you also a musician?
AG: I’m a closet musician. Not a classic musician, a closet musician.
SM: And you’ve just made a documentary about the bass player Cachao.
AG: Last summer, we did a concert in his honor. We shot a documentary around that and did some interviews. The first half of the concert was with a symphony orchestra. In 1939 Cachao and his brother Orestes were experimenting with syncopation and the Cuban danzón. They wrote a tune called "Mambo" and it started the whole craze. It’s very different from the big-band mambo that followed; this mambo was more classical, with a lot of strings. The second half of our concert was jam sessions. In the ‘50s Cachao started the movement called the descarga the Cuban jam session.
SM: I know someone who complains when music is "too far from Africa." In Cuban music, you can always hear Africa.
AG: A lot of my percussionist friends have discovered their African roots through Cuban culture. That African sound that has been suppressed in other cultures has survived in Cuba. It’s very pure.
SM: The influence of music and movies is always evident in Cabrera Infante’s novels.
AG: He is a fanatic for Cuban music - not just a connoisseur but a musicologist. The script for The Lost City is a homage to the music of that era; characters and sequences have been born out of songs. I think that was the hook for bringing him into the project - he saw that I was as obsessed by this music as he was.
SM: In his semi-autobiography, Infante’s Inferno, he has that wonderful line about the movies: "Born with a silver screen in my mouth."
AG: Yes, but my favorite line in that book is the scene in the kitchen, when he is about twenty and an older woman approaches him sexually. ["speaking that esperanto of love"]. While they are kissing, she keeps talking to him. Infante says that later he would be able to say that he was more interested in her tongue than her mother tongue. He has a very Cuban sense of humor, a real love of language. Infante is unique; his work is a genre unto itself.
SM: Did you know him before you began working on The Lost City with him?
AG: No, but I had always been eager to make a movie about Havana, circa 1959, the last days of the city during the revolution. When I read his novels, I knew that I wanted to do a movie with him.
SM: When Vanishing Point [screenplay by Infante] came out in 1971, it was a cult hit, the ultimate existential road movie. The images from it are incredibly distinct - the white Dodge Challenger, the blind DJ in the storefront radio station.
AG: The way the blind DJ was always connected to the driver no matter where in the world he was - that was a fascinating cinematic device, like a Greek chorus, in the piece. Vanishing Point has such an American perception of things, but Infante wrote it having only briefly been in America.
SM: Was Vanishing Point the only other screenplay he’d written before The Lost City?
AG: He did write a draft of Under the Volcano that was included on those lists of ten best unproduced screenplays. I’d like to read that, because sometimes when a movie is made, the other drafts of the script are so different that if you changed the title you could make a different film. Infante’s experience with that film was not very good, so I was fortunate that he took on this relationship. He understood where I was coming from and wanted to get involved. His first scripts for The Lost City was more of a novel; it was incredible, but it was 325 pages. I was ready to make that movie, but I don’t know if many other people were. But he continued to address the material, and we now have this beautiful script - it’s the natural movie that came out of the much longer version. A movie is visual, but it is also literature, especially when a man of literature writes it. It would have been interesting to see how Hemingway would have written a screenplay. Infante is a great man of literature, and we have to protect that in this town. In Hollywood, people always want to destroy scripts by changing them. It took me a year to get into the club and start to work on making this movie. It is an invigorating battle. I like it.
SM: Did the idea for the story originate with you?
AG: It was inspired by Infante’s books. I wanted to incorporate the essence of his books into a movie. There’s a particular monologue at the beginning of Three Trapped Tigers . . . the emcee at the Tropicana delivers an amazing diatribe as he welcomes people to the club; I knew I wanted to start the movie with that monologue. I told Infante this, and we went to work. You don’t have to tell him much. Not about Havana in the ‘50s.
SM: Infante has lived outside Cuba since 1965 and is now a British subject. Do you think that Cuban identity is maintained more strongly because of this kind of displacement?
AG: I don’t have a very objective perspective on that. I can’t say that my passions as a Cuban are any greater than how a Polish exile would feel. I do recognize that Cuban exiles are very nostalgic and have a great yearning and love for their country.
SM: There is a long tradition of Cubans in exile. In New York, on Central Park South, there is that incredible status of [Cuban revolutionary leader] José Martí being shot from his horse. Martí spent more of his life in exile, in Europe and in New York.
AG: He was on the road, raising money for the revolution. He was probably the last person to represent a very idealistic revolution. After the war for independence, Cuba had a politically tragic life. We’ve never had a healthy era of democracy. The history of the government has just been a series of dictators.
SM: Martí had hoped that people would become citizens of the Americas.
AG: It’s an idea that has never crystallized. The desire for power has always taken over. The political figure in Latin America is a curious beast. The idea of the man in power is based on a kind of machismo. It’s like a strange love-hate relationship with a father. What Cuba really needs is a mother. I know we could talk about this for weeks, and even though we are speaking very casually I will end up sounding like some sort of political animal. I really have a distaste for politics.
SM: Do politics figure in The Lost City?
AG: Yes, the antagonist is really politics, and the protagonist is culture.
SM: Culture has been described as how we talk to one another, and politics as what we do to one another.
AG: The Lost City is about the political system seducing the culture into a darker world. I suppose being antipolitics makes my political in the sense that any strong opinion is a political opinion. But I’m just an actor. Let’s talk about movies.