"I was born in Merida, Yucatan in Mexico. I was three when my parents moved here. I went back when I was ten and lived there for two years, which was a very special, very important part of my life. I lived in a really small town called Ixmal. The church was the center of the town; it was huge. There was a pyramid right across the street from where I used to live.
This is the first time I’ve had a lead role in a love story. Gabriela is a very confused, very sensitive individual. She’s a very emotional person, but doesn't realize it. It is a realistic portrayal. The culture has a lot to do with it. The fact that she comes from Mexico and has this Mexican background. You deal with the Catholic beliefs of how when you’re raised that way, if your living with someone, for example, that’s the guy that you marry. Your first sexual experience is with the man of your life, and he is supposed to be your soul mate. You’re raised with those beliefs, which makes things a little more complicated when you all of a sudden find after five years, six years, that your living with this person that you don’t feel is your soul mate.
[Writer-Director] Vincent Miller wrote a dynamic character and it was a great opportunity for me. Gabriela is going to be great for the Latin community. You hardly ever see those kinds of characters and they exist in our community and our society. There are Latin women who are doctors, psychologists, and professionals, but you rarely see them in films. I feel we’ve come a long way and that’s why Gabriela is so wonderful because it shows strong, professional women and it shows how far along we are now.
Gabriela being a therapist was something that was easy for me to identify with because working with kids has always been a part of my life. When I was sixteen, I taught AIDS prevention at juvenile hall, so I dealt with a lot of high-risk youth. So it wasn’t very difficult to feel comfortable in that atmosphere.
Vincent allowed us to play with the characters and gave us the freedom to adapt them to who we were and find natural ways of expressing ourselves through these characters. Vincent was a great director in the way that he did allows us to be free and just play and enjoy the process of discovering and living through these characters.
I think the love scenes are one of the most difficult things to do as an actress. You’re showing a part of your life that, at least for me, I like to keep private. The Director was not exploitative; we were very specific. We choreographed most of it and we would do it shot by shot. If something was showing that we didn’t want shown, we would cut or we would change, so it was almost like a dance, in a way. It’s easier, because it’s choreographed so you do feel like your going through a dance. Jaime was wonderful to work with. He's incredibly talented. And I was very fortunate and very lucky that I had such a supportive co-star. Someone who cared about what I felt and cared enough to go out of his way to make me comfortable and make sure I was okay.
I did this film because it was a really beautiful love story and it’s very rare to find that. If you don’t have someone jumping off a building and dying, blood all over the place or some explosion somewhere, someone killing someone, then people feel that it’s not as marketable. We’ve forgotten about the romantic and we’ve forgotten about the positive and beauty and fantasy of life. We need more stories like that, so whenever we get the opportunity to have a movie like Gabriela, it’s great. It’s a very important film."
"I felt great about being cast in a role that wasn't written specifically to be Latino. It's nice that I was approached to do this thing as just an actor, period, as opposed to being a Latino actor. One of the most important things about making the decision to do this film was the fact that the Latino characters were portrayed in such a positive light, as real people, as opposed to being caricatures of drug dealers or prostitutes or whatever.
The thing that I felt since the first time that I met Vincent [Miller, the Writer-Director] was that he had a genuine quality to himself. He was very much about doing something very artistic and very, very passionate and with a lot of heart. That was the first thing that I keyed into. It was a pleasure, because when things got kind of crazy, he was always very calm and always very levelheaded, never frazzled or out-of-control.
The fact that we had two weeks of rehearsal, working every day for four hours, five hours a day turned out to be such an advantage when we got into shooting, because we had already done it. And we already knew what we wanted to do, as opposed to trying to find it on the set, seeing what happens and then having to shoot it. It really helped the production moving time wise and I think it shows on screen.
Vincent was absolutely open to the contributions of the actors. I think that is important to make everybody comfortable and really feel that it is a collaborative process. I think one the best things was that he allowed us the freedom, not necessarily to make it better, because it was there in the writing, but to make it our own.
What attracted me to Gabriela was the idea that it was a love story. There weren't any shoot-outs, explosions or car chases, which is always fun to do, but it dealt with things on an emotional level, which we don't see very often anymore. Everything is smash'em-up and explode’em.
There are a lot of things that are written in love stories that people think are hokey or don't make sense. That's what love is. Love doesn't make sense a lot of times. Things happen and you do things that are totally unexplainable but you do them anyway and your thought processes go off. It'd be nice to see more love stories, more passionate things about relationships, like we saw in the forties, that brought tears to your eyes, because people were so in love, but they never took the chance to really go for it.
This film is a testament to people that really want to do the work and who are passionate about what they do. We made a really good film. I think people are really going to love it. It’s great, so write your congressman! Rush out to the theater and see it!"
Pat is a fairly straight-laced, unimaginative, focused man whose work is pretty much his life, and he really does love Gabriela a lot. He’s probably not the greatest in terms of communication skills.
As far as the plot goes, one of the pivotal moments in the film is when I discover that my fiancée, Gabriela, is in my house, in my bed, making love with another man. Needless to say, it does not thrill Pat to find that scenario going on under his nose. Unfortunately, I did have an experience where I actually did catch someone that I was in a long-term relationship with cheating on me. I didn’t walk in on them, but I did discover that I was being deceived; I guess would be the appropriate word. So yes, that dredged up a lot of painful memories during the shoot for me.
In Gabriela, the challenge for me was that I’m really used to a style of filming where the camera is very close to me. So, I’ve sort of developed an intimacy, over the years, of just the feeling of the matte box and the lens being this close to me for close ups and things like that; it’s a certain king of comfort for me. The way Vincent shot it, he would have that camera all the way across the room and use big lenses so that it still looks that close, but it’s kind of like an unobtrusive camera. It’s about 15-20 feet away, so the major challenge I had at first was technical. It was so unusual; it took me a little while to adjust to it. I eventually found it kind of liberating, because you can then kind of forget about the camera in general and concentrate more on the situation.
Seidy is a very talented actress. We rehearsed on a stage in the Santa Monica Theater row. We went in there and we did it maybe two or three times just the way it was written. And then Vincent said: ‘why don’t you basically use the text, but do whatever you want with it, go with what feels natural to do.’ So, we just started saying whatever came into our heads. So we found a little shading and just nice, subtle things that perhaps expanded and made the relationship clearer. So immediately you know that these two are having some problems or the familiarity has breed contempt or both. I find it a rare situation when I can rehearse at all. Most of the times, there’s very little rehearsal, if any.
Honestly, the main reason I was attracted to the project was that the script was very good. Because there’s such a dearth of good material out there, when something good, warm, human, real and funny comes along and you read it, it strikes you. I really, really liked it. I guess everybody else had the same reaction to it because they got a lot of really good people.
Lupe Ontiveros (Grandma Josie)
"Gabriela is going to make an impression that is long overdue. That is to tell a simple story about love, about family, about two people in our society, two young people who find themselves attracted to each other. A quality, universal story with dynamic people who just happen to be Latinos. This is one route that we can go and I think we have to educate our audiences like we did with Il Postino, like we did with El Norte, like we will with Gabriela. And slowly I think it will come around.
One of the best things about Gabriela, in my opinion, is that Gabriela has treated me in the most respectful, unexpected way. That's one of the most unique aspects of Gabriela, and after all of these years of being used and abused, I'll say it that way, because that's exactly how I feel. They treated me with respect on a financial level, which had never happened to me before. And I would say one of the reasons why I decided to do the film was that it was a profit-sharing investment for me. My hat is off to them for being creative and inventive. To say to the artist, ‘I want you but I can't afford you, but let me make it sweet for you.’ People always say Our Project. You're in a big time film and it's Our Project, it's a Family Affair. One time a producer didn't want to pay me for one day's work. He said, 'don't you realize that it's a family affair?' I won't say whom, but it was a well-known Hollywood film. I told my manager and agent, the day I share in the profits, then it becomes a family affair and I'll be more than happy to bend over backwards and do whatever I have to do to promote this film. That was not the case at that time. It is in this situation that we find ourselves in with Gabriela. We finally have a real family situation with a Latino film.
I loved the character of Grandma Josie in Gabriela. At the rehearsal, Vincent [Miller, the Writer-Director] said, do it your way, try whatever you want with the character, I wrote it for you. This is a very, very comfortable feeling for an actor, that people can trust you so much. I got it down as a Latina, as a woman, as a mature woman, I got it down who I am, and this is one of the things that make me a success. I'm not going to be modest about this because it matters a great deal. When you see my work, I make you part of my family. People relate to me."
"I met Vince Miller when he came to see a play I was in called August 29th. We met this young kid after the play and he started telling us he’s going to do a movie and we’re like: ‘yeah, yeah, kid whatever...’ I mean, I was ‘That’s nice, good for you, good luck.’ You know that kind of a thing, because you meet so many people who say ‘I’m going to make a movie.’ So I kind of forgot about it. Then my agent called and said Vince wanted to see me for a couple of roles and I went in. I did the audition in Spanish and stumbled all over my Spanish. I was born and raised here and my Spanish is kind of like half English, half Spanish. This was a more sophisticated kind of Spanish because Sofia is an attorney and she’s from Mexico. When he cast me Vince said, ‘but you have to promise me one thing.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘You have to work on your Spanish.’ My husband is from Mexico, so he helped me, but I was conscious of my accent and trying to speak it correctly. But we had done some rehearsals and Vince said I sounded good. So I faked it pretty well!
It’s rare to play a professional Latina. The roles we usually go up for are suffering gang mothers, kneeling in front of La Virgin de Guadalupe, ‘Oh, please, God, my son, he’s a gang member‘ - that kind of stuff - and it’s so boring and such a victimizing image of Latina women, I really hate it. So this role was great. I think I decided to do this role because she was an attorney and sophisticated and plus it was in Spanish and it was going to be a challenge for me. That was great. You can see where she’s coming from, but I think most people are going to look at Sofia and think: what a bitch. And I think that’s fun. We Latinas hardly ever get to play bitches and it’s fun to play a strong woman, such a strong character. We’re always playing these wimpy victims: we’re so poor and uneducated. So it’s fun to play a strong character like Sofia.
I think that Gabriela is unique because it’s a Latino story without it being an issue that we are Latinos. The characters just happen to be Latinos. I think that all of the characters are very positive. None of them are stereotypical. I think that it's a whole new take and I think that it would be a good direction for us to go in with independent Latino films.
I think Vince wrote the characters realistically, and he was very open to suggestions. I mean, so many times I go on auditions and I read scripts and go, ‘Oh god, I can’t believe somebody really wrote this.’ The characters are usually so stereotypical; it’s written in really broken English. You get tired of people thinking Latinos are only one way. Vince did a great job."
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