She’s the star of the biggest film in, well, since James Cameron last rewrote the record books, and according to the Internet Movie Data Base (www.IMDB.com), she’s the hottest actress on the planet right now. More importantly, Zoe Saldana, who plays Neytiri in Avatar and appeared as Uhura in JJ Abrams’ rejuvenation of the Star Trek franchise, is a Woman We Love. Here, we present more of the exclusive interview she recently did with Esquire…
Esquire: You worked on Avatar for two whole years. How did James Cameron’s revolutionary motion capture technology impact on the experience for you as an actor?
Zoe Saldana: It was a huge impact at first because I had never done something of this calibre before or done any performance capture movie. I had a lot of questions that he always made himself available to answer. We were creating different shortcuts with the technology as we were going along. The one thing I loved about how this film was shot, and how vigorously Jim worked to evolve the technology quickly, was that he didn’t want to lose the same intimacy that he would have with the actors if he was shooting a live action movie. Even though this film was shot with the same technology as Beowulf, this was much more advanced. Because of the new technology he didn’t need to be removed from the actors. Sometimes he would be five inches away from Sam [Worthington] and I when we were performing. We would have this one-on-one contact with Jim because in the set and under the premise of the way we were shooting, he was invisible to the cameras that were picking us up. He didn’t have to be so distant.
ESQ: Did you have to wear special suits?
ZS: We had those Velcro suits with the dots that the cameras on the ceiling would pick up. We’d also have dots on our faces and harnesses with cameras that would pick up the dots on our faces.
ESQ: What did you connect with in the script? Was it the wider issues of injured war veterans, the threat to the environment or the dangers of consumption in the modern world, and on ancient peoples?
ZS: I think it was a combination of everything. Also, politically and socially speaking, all these big topics were things I was becoming aware of while we were shooting. At first, the biggest attraction was that it was an amazing story with beautiful characters, and I found it really hard to part with them after reading the script. It was the privilege of working with Jim on a project of this intensity was the biggest attraction for me, and then it was all the beautiful things that we would be conveying in the story.
ESQ: You’ve worked with some incredible people in the last 10 years. Tell us about the experience of working with Steven Spielberg on Terminal, a film we love at Esquire…
ZS: Every director leaves something, like a really beautiful aftertaste. What Steven definitely gave me was a lot of hope and a lot of faith that no matter how big a director can be, or an actor – whatever, they’re still people – they’re sons, they’re fathers, they’re husbands and brothers. The same goes for women. Spielberg is a film lover and he will never ever stop watching movies. Before meeting him you would never imagine a person of the calibre of Steven Spielberg taking the time to see Drumline [one of Saldana’s first big movie roles, in 2002] and for him to say to me that he has kids, and he remembered me from the movie. And even in the audition for a part [in Terminal] that was originally written for an older woman, he sent new lines and directions to me. There are people who still do their homework, who are not lazy. I regard Steven with so much respect because he is a film lover and he fights so hard for films.
ESQ: We understand Spielberg gave you a bit of advice: Y’ou have to know where you’ve come from to know where you’re going in cinema’. Why did that resonate with you so much?
ZS: It was like, know your history. To know who Steven is you have to know his love for Alfred Hitchcock and once you see a Hitchcock movie you recognize shots that he’s used. You learn the history of the pioneers who created all these movements in film. I love respecting the history of everything. Even Charles Chaplin, who is one of the people I most admire. Look what he did, uniting with all these filmmakers and creating United Artists and coming from vaudeville to cinema. He was always morphing and adapting because film was changing at a much quicker pace in the early 1900s. For him to keep on that wave, I have so much respect for him. He was also able to emote so much with very little to say, and I have a dancing backing before acting so I have a lot of respect for artists hat know how to use their bodies before using their voices, and they can still make you feel so deeply.
ESQ: Returning to Avatar, Neytiri, your character, is beautiful but also clearly an action character who is not to be messed with. Could the same be said of you?
ZS: [giggles – and Zoe Saldana has a great giggle] I’m from New York, so I don’t know. I guess it’s inevitable for you to infect your character with something of you so I’d have to let you be the judge. But if you ask me, I think I did. There was a lot of me in Neytiri and as soon as I was done playing the character it took a full year to get her out of my system.
Avatar is out now
January 25th, 2010
