Andy Garcia
speaker
217 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Andy Garcia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And you did the score. Yeah, that would be number two. Because, you know, Francis to me was, Lost City is, I think, In a way, you know, personally, probably the most important work I've done from a cultural standpoint and personal. But again, it was just dog with a bone.
And eventually someone came, Sam Gores, who was my agent at the time, said, my brother, he really respects you and he knows you're trying to do this movie. And I talked to him about it and he wrote a check. It was outside the business. Nobody in the business ever supported the film. Once we made it, we sold it back into the system.
But it just took someone who believed in me, and it was Tommy Gores and Johnny Lopez's partner, and Sam, his brother, who orchestrated it. And it was produced by Frank Mancuso Jr., my brother.
Well, what happened with the music was I got the script in 1990 while I was doing The Godfather. Frank had given me, Mr. Mancuso had given me money to develop the material, the idea. And I went to Guillermo Cabrera Infante, an extraordinary Cuban novelist and writer in London, one of the most important writers who also had written some screenplays, had started the Cuban Cinematheque pre-Castro and
He loved the idea, and he delivered a 340-page document. The screenplay, for those who most don't know, is at the very, no more than 120. That's already a long screenplay. 105, 100, you know, depending on the story is better. And so I had this 340 page, 304 page document that I had to, you know, with him, you know, he was hard for him to cut it down because he was so attached to it.
So eventually I kept shaping it down to it. I got it down to like 126 pages and that was the movie we made. But in the script, it said that my character played piano, solitary, on his own, privately. And I always wanted to play piano. I had studied percussion all my life, and I was a percussionist, and Afro-Cuban percussion.
So I rented a piano while I was doing The Godfather in my house there in Quattro Miglio, which is just near the Cinecittà studios outside of Rome. I had a little upright piano there, and I'd come home from work, and we'd have dinner, and my wife and I'd sit at the piano and start with two fingers.
ding ding ding ding ding ding like that you know just kept fiddling with it for years and just basically self-taught you know my aunt showed me a chord she see me go instead of doing that do this and she showed me a chord and then i started applying my percussive training to the piano and that opened up a whole other rhythmic thing for me i just kept with it with it and with it and then as we were cutting the film i started playing with themes as we were cutting the movie i had a piano
hooked into the Avid. It wasn't an Avid, it was a Steambank, which was still, it was like the old, but it was digital, but it was, and we just had it plugged in there. And I would, once we had sequences cut together, I would lay down themes on the piano. And then I had been recording music with Cachao for years for the movie and the albums that we had done. So those were pre-produced songs.
And then we had needle drops from the era. And then I had the original score that I just wrote, the percussive side. And then I worked with an orchestrator if I wanted the theme to be, like you say, bring in a chamber orchestra and here's the theme. And I would work with him on, you know, I said, let's feature the violin here, whatever. And And that's how it came about. So it was very organic.
I always joke that when the movie gods said, when you can play the piano well enough, we'll give you the money. You know, I was just trying to do it so I can fake it in the movie. You know, it kind of looked like I know what I'm doing. But it took so long, I eventually, you know, taught myself how to play.
That story was important to you because... Because that story has never been told. And it's our story. I mean, the family is not my family. It's our family. Everybody went through that on different levels. I mean, my father was not a club owner. There's not a movie like that. There's not a movie like that about the Cuban people that I've seen.
No, I mean, they made the Robert Redford Havana movie from the point of view of an American in Havana. But no, there hasn't really been one. There's a new movie out called Los Friques, which is about, you know, the punk rockers in Cuba. Leonie Chasso has made movies, a great Cuban director. Also about that subject matter, that Cubans in exile, like a super incredible film.
Oh, you can make the story.
I appreciate it. I'm very proud of it. And the movie I know holds up very well. And people talk to me a lot, you know, and I always show it, you know, I get opportunities to screen it like in a festival. They'll go, we want to honor you. It's a festival. And I said, thank you so much. Well, what movies do you want to show?
And I said, well, you can show whatever you want, but I want to show the lost city. Because, you know, everyone's seen the Untouchables. I don't need to go there and show the Untouchables, you know. Sometimes they'll say, well, we'd like to show that. Okay, but please show this movie because some people have not seen it, you know.
They've been seen all over the world, but not everybody has seen it. So it's always a good opportunity to continue to tell the story, to not forget the story. It was an uphill battle, you know, for that film for sure.
And it had a lot of support and it also had a lot of people who tried to discredit it in the press and stuff because obviously they had sensibilities that aligned themselves with the Castro regime. I was just telling a historical story. It wasn't a propaganda movie. It was things that really happened using their words.
Everybody has an opinion. One person could say, eh, I didn't get it. The other person could say, oh my God, that movie moved me so much. So there's no right or wrong. There's just opinions, as they say. Everyone has one. The great writer William Soroyan, I learned... Years ago, I read something where they asked him, and it was very helpful to me as a young man.
They asked him, do you care if your plays are successful? And he says, the fact that my plays exist is success enough already.
Showing 161–180 of 217 · page 9 of 11
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