FAST FOOD NATION
An Interview with Wilmer Valderrama and Catalina Sandino Moreno
By Brad Balfour

November 14, 2006

BITE INTO SUCH RICH MATERIAL IN FAST FOOD NATION

In joining the cast of director Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation" actors Wilmer Valderrama and Catalina Sandino Moreno create a virtual parallel narrative as two illegal Mexican immigrants working in El Paso Texas' slaughterhouses, in this film based on a non fiction indictment of the commercial meat industry.

When author Eric Schlosser wrote his hard-hitting best seller criticizing the fast food industry and the products it sells, he never thought it could become the movie that Linklater created. But Linklater wanted to do more than just document the horrors of the meat processing industry; he wanted to describe a panorama of the people who both work with and consume the meat the book deals with.

To do so, he called on such actors as "That '70s Show" star Valdarrama and Oscar-nominated Moreno to accurately tell the story of Mexican illegals forced to work in a meat packing plant while other such as Greg Kinnear and Paul Dano portray those who are the executives of the fast food world and those who work on the ground level in the fast food joints themselves.

Did you read the book before reading the script?

Catalina Sandino Moreno: I heard about the book but I first read the script and then though it was a lie. I thought they were just making it up. And then I read the book and it was pretty shocking because it was real and very scary. And I thought this movie was—I had to do it. I felt responsible. I thought The whole story was very compelling.

Wilmer Valderrama: I thought it was very interesting. For a lot of my friends who were going to college and to some who are currently in college, this book was mandatory reading. I actually didn't read the book, I wasn't aware of it, But when I knew of the book and then when I read the script I thought "Wow, could this really be?" And it became a project that was so exciting to be a part of. Very few times in our careers [as actors] do we get a chance to play a role that can actually means something and this was that.

Did you have to audition for your roles and what was auditioning like?

WV: Well, I think for both of us it was very different, but I think anyone that claims to be an actor wants to be in a Richard Linklater movie. So for me, I went in for a first meeting and then I went in and talked with Richard about the character and I read for him and the big question was, "Can you do a Mexican accent?" And that's how we [came together]. Richard was really great because he really trusted his cast, so it was a lot of fun.

What did take to develop these roles; was it hard to create authentic portraits of these characters with the scant screen time they had?

CSM: Well, I did "Maria Full of Grace" and learned a lot from that movie. And I learned that when you don't know anything about [something]--if you're going to play a pianist, you're going to rehearse it, you're going to learn it, and you're going to play the piano for 10 hours a day. But in "Maria," the director [Joshua Marston] told me not to talk to any drug dealers or not to even research anything about drugs.

So I think the same was true for Sylvia. She didn't know what to expect from this country. She's never been to a slaughterhouse. So the only thing that I could give Sylvia was the fact that I am an immigrant to this country. And I know how hard the whole process can be and how hard and how frustrating sometimes it could be. And sometimes it's very hard to be surprised in movies because you know what is going to happen, but I actually was. And you know the whole slaughterhouse and the whole desert thing, it is crazy that people do that every day. So I think that the whole surprising thing for me was actually doing this movie.

WV: It's a really pressing question because for us as Latinos. It is such a fact of life and we are so aware of what people go through and what you and I went through in coming to America, so it's very interesting to do research on something that's been culturally a part of your existence. It's interesting that we broke down our characters a lot, and we really took this movie seriously.

We talked about where we came from and we picked very specific places for where we came from, what we said to each other in order to make this crossing, how we met and we really went after those bones, so when we hit the screen, you knew the history without even, you felt the history without even having to show it. We had fun.

Did you take on this movie because it was message-driven and had a political dimension?

WV: I've been working in the mainstream for several years and I have a lot of fans that mean a lot to me; they have been with me for a long time and I've been with them through a lot of stuff and there really comes a point in your life where you stop doing things that are popular. And there's a time that comes in your life during your career where you come across a character that actually means something.

I believe that it's very easy to play characters, but it's very difficult to play a real person especially when it's a person that is sharing issues with society and for me, that's what became so important to me about this as opposed to being a professional move. When you start reading this you think, "Oh my god, Richard Linklater's movie is such a great movie to be a part of." It has a good script and it was so hard to not notice how passionate, incredibly uplifting and awakening the issues we were speaking on behalf of in this movie. So it lifted me up from just making a good career choice to, wow, we could actually do something that matters with our work. You know, nowadays that's not easy to do, there's not a lot of scripts that actually matter.

CSM: Well, I needed to follow "Maria Full of Grace" with a strong movie too. Right now I'm at a point in my life and in my career that I just can't take very light roles. I don't know why, I feel more conscious, I feel more responsible, I feel like right now I have a responsibility, not just for being an actor, but for being a Latina immigrant, a Latina woman. Sometimes they portray Latina girls in such a way that… you're not like that, and you want to change that that's how people perceive this community, that they're not like that. So I never even thought about this being a little movie, I thought it was a huge movie, and it wasn't a chance for me to do anything, it was a chance to show, you know, it was just a chance to keep up the work that I've been doing and hopefully I'll find more scripts like this to keep up.

What was the most eye-opening thing you discovered and did it change your diet?

WV: Well, I've got to tell you. It's probably, I mean, ok, it's mind-blowing that in our society today and in our incredible country that we live in that these things happen, so out in the open and so many people choose to ignore the realities of such things and that was really eye opening and how we let these things happen without doing anything about it.

Are you a vegetarian--did making the film affect you?

CSM: I am. Well, now I'm eating a little meat, because the iron, girls, have to have iron in their blood and my diet is changing a little bit. But every time I eat chicken or fish or meat I'll try to buy it where I know it's safe and I'll check it and you know I'll just make sure where the food is coming. And I think the whole process for me for "Fast Food Nation" was eye-opening. I didn't know anything about this.

And the most scary part of the whole film was when I saw Greg Kinnear's character smelling the big burger. He's like, oh yeah, delicious. I didn't know anything about that. And they do it and it's so scary. So it was not just the immigrant's story and as a Latina, I know what the immigrant can go through. A part of it. I don't know everything, but I know that part of it. And I know both sides and what really freaked me out was the whole industry thing. The whole, this is great, this is going to be marketed to these people. That was scary. It really freaked me out.

WV: I think now we're just very, very aware of what we eat and what we put in our bodies.

CSM: Yeah.

WV: I was always wondering, this is a funny anecdote, why the first 10 minutes of eating fast food is heavenly, and then after those 10 minutes you start feeling like shit and then you start realizing that your body's digesting things that your body's not meant to digest. You know? Or sometimes your body's digesting things that have already been digested. So if you really think about it, that's one of the main reasons—to do that in the long term, to make your body work that hard, I think it's pretty bad for you.

Did you guys ever see Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me?" about his strictly eating McDonalds for a month?

WV: Again, I think it's a great interpretation and a very factual interpretation of what really goes on. And that's one of the reasons why I love this movie, it's very factual and it's not very conventional, traditional; it's also not a Hollywood film. So we don't have a very Hollywood blueprint for this one.

CSM: Well, it's a documentary; it's another part of what happens. It's complementary to what happens in our movie. What happened to these people who can eat, well, I don't think anybody can eat 30 days of burgers, but what would happen... I think we're showing one part of this whole thing and Morgan is showing the other part. What is happening to these people who eat everyday burgers. What happens to their bodies and what changes.

What was it like filming in the slaughterhouse?

CSM: Scary. It was something that I thought they were going to close the slaughterhouse and they were going to hire extras and they were going to put in fake meat.

WV: I thought it was going to be built. But it was real.

CSM: It was a real slaughterhouse. And there was like really, like they were killing cows and you could see the whole process and the people next to us were workers that worked there.

WV: The extras were the actual people working at the plant.

CSM: And the line was really moving.

Did you speak with them?

CSM: You know, it's so scary because their work is so mechanical. They just do it. And they just can't take their lives off that line because they're working with knives and hooks and if they turn their face, you know, who knows what will happen to their hands and that's why a lot of them don't have fingers, which later became like a burger, you know, it's a scary process and you just see these people working there for hours and hours and just standing there and it just, it's so scary.

WV: All these people are expected to become part of the machine. A machine is perfect but a human is not, so mistakes are going to happen. And if they're meeting the quota and they're speeding up the belt, there are things that are going to happen that you're going to have to turn your face and pretend that you didn't, because you don't want to be the one to make the mistake and you don't want to lose your job.

CSM: And the line goes fast.

WV: You can talk about a car factory, but replace the cars with cows. It's really. There were like 60 seconds and a cow would come in.

CSM: I don't know. But you just saw a cow come in and there are intestines in front of you. There weren't, they just come like so fast that it's very scary.

The smell must have been intense.

WV: Yeah. I mean. Yeah! You walk in and we always try to describe what the smell is like, but we can only say, like, seven different things mixed together. Like imagine walking in and smelling a lot of raw meat.

CSM: But like grease and hair and blood.

WV: And open stomachs.

CSM: And heads.

WV: And fetuses. Like babies.

CSM: It was vile.

WV: And hair.

So I guess you're not working with in a slaughterhouse again.

WV: I've got to tell you something. A lot of people say to us that now that you've worked in there, you'll never do it again. But I have to tell you as an actor and someone who really cares about our craft and we took this very seriously, this was so much fun. It was so much fun to go into a slaughterhouse knowing that we're not wearing any makeup—we can't wear any makeup inside there. We only had a few hours to shoot. There were only a limited number of crew members allowed inside the slaughterhouse. It was just like come in, shoot, boom boom, honey, you need to really get your stuff together and that was really exciting.

So what's next?

WV: Well, I have a few things going on actually. December 8 I'm releasing "Unaccompanied Minors," which is a fun Christmas movie for Warner Brothers and then next year I have two projects, I thought I was going to do two movies before, but I only have to actually do "CHiPs."

And you did Eric Eason's dark story set in Brazil, "the Journey at the End of the Night?"

CSM: Oh, Eric. I don't know when it's coming out. I just came back from Colombia where I was shooting "Love in a Time of Cholera"--based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel. Yeah. I just finished that. Otherwise, I have no idea.

FAST FOOD NATION opens on November 17, 2006