Jennifer Lopez

Spotlight By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

*Click here for another interview with Jennifer Lopez!*

After achieving an incredible breakthrough as an actress in the biopic Selena on the life of the late tejano performer who shares the film's namesake, Jennifer Lopez almost overnight became a major superstar. Starring in a string of mostly critically-panned, but commercially successful films like The Wedding Planner and Maid In Manhattan, while also launching a successful career as a pop star directly around the onset of a short-lived 'Latin Music Wave' in American pop, Lopez's increased prominence made her one of the most high-profile Latina celebrities in Hollywood.

Despite a few personal and professional setbacks in recent years, including a hugely-publicized courtship and breakup with actor Ben Affleck, Lopez has used the opportunity to mark a considerably new chapter in her illustrious career and use her acquired clout to pick film projects that are nearer and dearer to her heart. Her latest role is as Puchi, the wife of Latin salsa legend Hector Lavoe in the biopic El Cantante, which focuses on the life of the singer.

Starring alongside Jennifer in the film is real-life husband, salsa megastar and occasional actor Marc Anthony, who plays the King of Salsa himself. It's not the first time a real-life love interest of Lopez's had starred in a film with her as former fianc'e Affleck was on hand with her in one of the biggest critical and commercial film flops in recent years, the mobster comedy Gigli. However, when Jennifer addressed this inevitable question, she claims her and Anthony's involvement together in El Cantante was purely coincidental.

'I got the script 5 1/2 years ago and we were not together at that point at that time,' Lopez insists, 'But I knew he was the guy to play the role, so I called him a month later and said, 'Do you want to do the role and attach yourself to this'' At that time, I didn't even know I was going to play Puchi, to tell you the truth. But I did know that I wanted it to be the first thing that I produced. So I called him as the producer of the film and said, 'Do you want to do this'' and he's like, 'Yeah, of course. I love this. This guy's like my idol.' I'm like, 'OK.''

'We met working,' she adds, 'That's what I think everybody forgets. The first time Marc and I met, we were doing a song together, and it worked. It was on my first album and we just have that naturally, luckily. And doing this movie, I always planned to do this film together, even when we weren't together.'

Though Jennifer claims she did not have a great deal of knowledge about Lavoe, she said she found it deeply exciting learning how the singer was tied in with many of Latin pop's most prominent and legendary performers.

'Yeah, I mean I didn't know a lot of the stuff, to tell you the truth,' she admits, 'I love learning about Fania records and of course, I knew who Celia Cruz was and a lot of these guys, but I didn't know that they all had worked together at that time. I was younger at that time, so I really didn't know about all that. But when you ask your mom and your dad, they all know. They all knew and stuff, so it was a real treat being able to get in there and learn about it and really see what the time was like and try to capture that in the film.'

However, Lopez discovered that as she learned more and more about the life and career of Hector Lavoe, she claims she quickly developed a sense of just how indispensable he was to Latin music, particularly salsa.

'He's kind of the quintessential artist in a sense,' Jennifer notes, 'Necause if an artist is somebody that lives a life, and uses that life to transform that, whether it's music or paint or whatever it is that they do, and it touches millions of people because everybody can relate to.'

'He was that,' she adds, 'He took what was in his life and all the pain and kind of suffering and the good time and the fame and everything about him, you know what I mean. If you look at his repertoire and work and the songs that he performed, there was so much of who he was. And in turn, it was so much who everybody was. Because we all go through the same things in different ways and I just think that's why it was really important to do this film, because it was a great legacy of music he left behind.'

She also mentions that Anthony's status as a salsa star allowed her access to fellow musicians in providing research on Hector Lavoe's career.

'We talked to a bunch,' Lopez mentions, "Marc knew a bunch of them already, because Marc was in that scene and actually had the same road manager, Dade Moldanado, who actually bought me the script years ago.'

As both co-producer and star of El Cantante, we how she dealt with wearing both hats on a constant basis.

'Well, I have a producing partner and it's funny, because, like I said, it took us 5 1/2 years to get the script right, to get the right director, to get the financing, to get it up and running, and have our principal photography be there,' Lopez recounts, 'So when we got there, I was very clear to him, I said, 'When I'm on the set, I am an actress. You will have to deal with a lot of stuff.' I knew that the role was very challenging and I knew I was going to have to concentrate on, plus we shot it in 34 or 35 days, so it was fifteen changes a day, trying to fit in as many scenes as we could. So it was challenging. I made that line once we got into the photography of it.'

Jennifer mentions that there were many significant factors that played a role in how tumultuous Hector Lavoe's life and career became, as documented in El Cantante.

'Well, the drugs,' Lopez states, 'It's hard and like with any iconic kind of artist, there is a bit of mystery that surrounds them. And I think we try to examine the different reasons, what it could be, losing his mother at such a young age, his father doubting him, the brother dying, the son dying, the tumultuous relationship. You can attribute it, the enabling that was around, there's so many things. His pension for drugs, things like that.

'At the end of the day,' she adds, 'We'll just never ever know. And that's one of the reasons I love in the movie, the scene when he's singing 'El Cantante', which is the song saying, 'I'm a singer, You guys don't care what I'm feeling about or what pain I'm going through, it's just, we're paying our money, sing,' That's what the song is kind of about and that was his life.'

Jennifer says that in learning her character's background, she got a real sense of just how intense the bond between her and Hector Lavoe really was in the film.

'She really had lived such a tumultuous life in a sense,' she notes, 'And I think, you had to be a tough lady just to be in that life. She would go into these crack houses. She would pull him out. She'd go in there with a gun. I mean, this isn't the stuff we touched upon in the movie, but it didn't go all the way, because we didn't think people would believe it. But it was true and these were things that were part of her life. And I think to be that type of person, to love somebody, to stay with them, to struggle with them, to not be perfect yourself. It was just what was so interesting about the character. It was so very different from my own life.'

With that in mind, we asked her what she learned from her own life in comparing that with Puchi's.

'I probably could take a lot more than I think,' she believes, 'You know what I mean' It's like, she could take all that, surely I can deal with the stuff that I have to deal with.'

Lopez also says she can empathize with how one can stick by their loved one in such a seemingly stormy relationship through the chemistry between Puchi and Hector Lavoe in El Cantante.

'I think she really loved him and I think if they could have had if they knew to have a different type of life, they would have,' she believes, 'At least that's what I like to think. Again, the mystery surrounding them is something that exists, so you never really, really know. But I think that they were trying to figure it out.'

'They did have their foray into centaria and trying to find something spiritual to hang onto and they try,' Jennifer continues, 'They struggled with it and she did want him to be better. the more and more you examine it, they really had a deep love for each other, as much as they helped destroy each other.'

She also shared with us just how far she and Anthony went in some of their scenes together to really show the characters' intensity towards each other on screen.

'I'll tell you a funny story,' Lopez recalls, 'When we were shooting one of the scenes, actually when she comes home and she sees that he's been getting high in the house and the son is there, we were shooting that scene and we start arguing and she puts the gun away or whatever. I really start going after him. Obviously, a lot of the stuff that we did was improvised. The staging and everything, they just set up two cameras and they were like, 'You two go at it.' And I decided that I was going to literally go after Marc in one part of the scene. I did it in the first take, whatever, and I didn't really go after him.'

'And then in the second take, I just was going to push him,' she continues, 'But I was going to push him and just try to get him out of the house, because he wanted to leave. So I start pushing him and pushing him and he's not expecting it and he starts throwing everything and he starts grabbing and he was like, 'Let go! Let go of my arm right now!' And we start getting into it all of a sudden and he's like, 'Shut up, Jennifer!' And I'm like calling him Hector, he's calling me Jennifer. So I was playing and it just breaks up so intense and they're watching us. They're like, 'Uh, you guys get into fights like this at home'' and I'm like, 'No, I'm not like this.'

With this in mind, we jumped at the chance to ask her whether we're to expect another collaboration with Anthony in the future.

'No, we're not doing anything else together, other than a tour, no,' Jennifer insists, 'The things that we do together happen kind of naturally, not things that we plan out. Who knows' But nothing right now.'

Jennifer says she is very optimistic that audiences of all types will enjoy El Cantante, regardless of one's knowledge of Hector Lavoe, salsa, or Latin music in general.

'For me, one of the greatest joys of this movie for me is people watching it who don't know anything about him and just wanting to know all of his music when it's done,' she notes. 'And that has happened ten times to ten different people I've shown the movie who don't speak Spanish at all, people that I just wanted to see their opinion on the film who I respect, like 'Watch this. Tell me what you think.' First, they're blown away by the life that he lived, but the music is like, 'I want to go download all his music.' So that's the exciting part to me, to be able to expose him to a wider audience than maybe the salsaphiles and the different Latin music fans out there.'

And finally, with El Cantante in the can and a new album titled Brave on the way, Jennifer says that the clout she has attained as a film actress will allow her to pursue many more film projects down the road that are of great importance to her. 'The next thing we have coming out is a border town movie we helped produce with Greg Nava, which is about the murders in Juarez,' she notes, 'And then after that, we're going to produce a movie with a script that Don Ruth wrote that he'll direct and I'll star in called Love And Other Possible Pursuits, about family in this day and age. I'm definitely drawn to things that I feel are important and relevant to say as opposed to just anything.'