What actor looks for: Movie with a twist
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Cuban-born, Miami-raised Andy Garcia knows that you have to make an effort to avoid being typecast in Hollywood. Breaking out beyond his Hispanic roots is one thing, but he also seems trapped playing a series of police roles.
"I don't particularly look to play cops," shrugs the actor whose breakthrough role was as a young federal agent in 1987's "The Untouchables."
Since then, his rŽsumŽ has been filled with lawman parts in such films as "nternal Affairs," "Jennifer 8," "Night Falls on Manhattan," last year's "Confidence " and his latest, "Twisted," which opened Friday.
"When they're around and it looks like an interesting thing to be involved with, I do it," says Garcia, 47. "They make a lot of cop movies."
In "Twisted," he plays a San Francisco homicide detective partnered with Ashley Judd, who seems to know personally all the victims of a serial killer who might be out to kill her next. Garcia candidly admits that the reason he picked up the badge again was the chance to work with director Philip Kaufman ("The Right Stuff," "Quills").
"I admire him as a filmmaker, and that's what I look for, to be in collaborative situations," he says. "Many scripts are still in flux when we get them, so the director becomes a very important issue."
"Twisted" was definitely one of those flux projects. It plays as if there used to be a more interesting movie in it but the nuances were lost in the editing. Garcia nods in agreement at that description.
"That tends to happen to thrillers. They're so plot-driven that sometimes the studio gets impatient with behavior," he suggests. As to his character, Detective Mike Delmarco, he says, "There was nothing there, and I had to fill in everything. And then they decide to take out whatever they want. Studios are driven by commerce basically. They're in the "Mission: Impossible" world or the "Ocean's Eleven" world."
Garcia has been married 20 years to a woman he met in a Coconut Grove disco, and a father of four, which is motivation enough to make big-budget, high-grossing commercial movies such as "Ocean's Eleven."
But he sounds like his heart is in small independent films, too specialized for studio involvement. Such as 2001's "The Man From Elysian Fields," a little-seen film in which Garcia played an aspiring novelist who subsidizes his writing by becoming a prostitute.
"I'm a realist. I know that a movie like "Elysian Fields " could be limited in how well it gets distributed, but people will discover it, especially nowadays with DVD and cable. The important thing is that you wanted to make the movie, to have that creative experience and create the art."
He knows he should be pushing "Twisted," but Garcia would much rather talk about other projects, such as the just-completed Modigliani, in which he plays the tortured Italian painter.
"I'm very proud of it," he beams. "We have no distribution (yet), but we made an extraordinary movie. No one wanted a movie about Modigliani, because it's a dark subject matter. For the same reason that Modigliani kept painting when no one bought his pictures, you have to make the film if you care about it."
Garcia is also proud of his performance in "Modigliani," an ethnic role, but far from his Cuban roots.
"For every actor, there's some hurdle, some struggle not to be typecast. Some actors just physically have more range than others, in terms of appearance," he notes. "Marlon Brando's not Italian, but he's certainly the Godfather. I mean, I'm not Italian, yet Francis (Coppola) cast me in "The Godfather (Part III)". "I felt proud that I think I managed to fulfill that role. And that's really a credit to him that he didn't have a rigid image of who could play that part. It wasn't 'Italians Only,' it was let's bring everyone in and let's see who's the guy to play this part.
"I don't have a problem with playing Hispanic characters. I just have a problem playing badly written characters. Listen, there is no doubt that my culture is a very important part of my life, but there's also no doubt that I am as American as the next guy."
Hap Erstein writes for The Palm Beach Post.
