Zoe Saldana

Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

For someone who has yet to be a household name, Zoe Saldana has been building up a body of work that is uncommonly impressive. Since her movie debut in Center Stage, she's starred opposite the likes of Ashton Kutcher (Guess Who and Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean. She's even worked with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg in The Terminal,

Haven, the new independent movie from newcomer-director Frank E. Flowers, gave Saldana the chance to work with her Pirates co-star Orlando Bloom. "It felt like the same, and then, different. The same, because you're working on a film together again, and different, because our characters are linked [this time]," she says. The relationship between their two characters, Andrea and Shy, is probably the emotional core of the film. "It was also good to see a familiar face. Up until that point, that was the riskiest character I was going to play, and I wanted it to be with an actor that I can trust," she says. "And once I heard it was Orlando, I felt so much at ease. I knew him, I know how he works, I know that he's a dedicated professional."

It didn't hurt that she also thought the script was amazing. "I read the script, and my agent tells me, apparently it's a twenty-four-year-old kid that wrote this and is going to direct this. And I'm like, really. I just wanted to meet that kid."

She found a lot to admire in director Flowers. "We knew the script before we really knew Frankie, but we knew him through his words. You always wait for stories like that, that are not just, you know, here's a token black girl, here's a token gay guy, he's flaming, she's ghetto, here's a pure little blonde girl'Guys don't usually have that deep understanding of human psychology in terms of how people work, especially a guy of twenty-four, would never understand what its like to be a seventeen-year-old girl. But he did. He exposed everybody's colors, and they still managed to remain innocent."

The film is also striking of its portrayal of the sometimes brutal class system in the Cayman Islands, where it is set. Race is a non-issue in the film compared to the boundaries between the rich and the poor. ""Any type of discrimination is always going to be a step back. Do I think that we're better off discriminating each other because of money' No. I think that also brings in huge consequences. But it's Caribbean culture'I don't know if it's universal, I can only speak about that because that's where I'm from. There's no middle class, there's only poor and rich'it's all about money. It's not about the Jew, or the Arab, or whatever, it's about the rich and the poor."

Speaking of money, doing a small independent film like this was also a bit of an education. As Bloom mentions in his interview, during one take, Saldana got so caught up in the moment she ended up kicking and denting a car that the production had to pay for. When this is brought up, Saldana bursts out laughing. "It was just in the moment, I kick this car, and then they tell me it belongs to Frankie's best friend, and I'm like, are you joking me' After Frankie yells cut, they all run toward me, and I'm thinking, damn, I killed this take, and they all come right past me, looking at this car." Saldana ended up having the last laugh: "Hey, that's the take that made it into the movie."

Next up for Saldana is a few independent films she's excited about. "We're just waiting to see where they go." She's also going to the next level and producing. "It's sort of my chance to get my feet wet, I'm producing a film called Lucy'I love the control and the power you have, by nurturing something from scratch. It gives me much more control as an actress, too." For her, it's a way to create good projects instead of hoping they appear. "You're opening doors and doing films that you yourself would like to see."