![]() They provided me with a vocal coach, one of the best in New York, a woman by the name of Liz Caplan, and she was just so wonderful. I am also someone who loves a challenge, so this was an opportunity in what was ultimately a very safe environment. I’ve had a long-held desire to be a singer, but never believed that I had the ability to do so. The truth is, I have zero singing background. It’s a pretty fascinating process but a kind of lonely one.ĬS: So Gael told me that he was relieved that you were also nervous to sing for the film.īenjamin Bratt: Yeah, completely! First of all, he sounds beautiful in the film! His two songs are really beautifully rendered. From that collection of recordings, the directors will choose the performance they like and cobble the story around that. So the good news there is that you have the opportunity to do take after take and you’ll do any given line some fifty different ways. You’re solely relying on this instrument, your voice. It’s actually, I think, a bit more difficult to succeed at creating a believable performance or an entertaining performance because the other two things that we rely on as performers, our body and our facial expressions in creating a character, they’re eliminated. Lee Unkrich and Adrian, but Lee loves to read the off-camera lines. In fact, it’s quite a isolating experience, because it’s typically just you, the actor in a booth with a microphone or two and earphones, and the director who is reading the off-camera lines. We don’t record our performances together at all. And I think he would have been proud.ĬS: Can you talk a bit about the experience of doing voice work for Pixar?īenjamin Bratt: That’s the big secret about animated movies that most people probably don’t realize there is zero interaction with other actors. So, in a way, it’s kind of a tribute to my memory of him and my time with him. I moved in with him and I learned a lot from him. I was exposed to that more once I entered my preteen phase. My father was 6’3″ with a broad shoulders and a booming voice and although not as sophisticated as those guys, someone who walked into a room and just commanded attention, and just had swagger and confidence. Before we learn more about him and how complex he actually is, it’s fun to kind of watch him run the room, if you will.ĬS: Did you base your performance on anyone?īenjamin Bratt: Other than watching a lot of YouTube video clips on those guys, and what’s provided to us in the page, which is the initial road map any actor uses for coming up with a portrayal, I thought a lot about my own father, who was a completely different person from Ernesto de la Cruz, but someone who shared a similar animal magnetism, if you will, in his own life. So this is a guy who, within the story of the film, who thrives on the adulation and attention that he gets. Gentlemen who were as well known for their beautiful singing ability as they were for their star-making roles in films. Guys who were as popular and as talented as Frank Sinatra in their day. The filmmakers pointed me in the right direction by suggesting that I watch old film clips of equivalent stars from Mexican cinema like Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante, who make a brief cameo appearance as skeletons in the film. He had natural magnetism and a whole lot of swagger. He’s someone who is a larger-than-life person. ![]() He’s dead now, and likely more popular in the land of the dead than he ever was in the land of the living, and he had international stardom before he met an untimely death. And even in this exploration of death, providing a kind of hopefulness for what that might look like.ĬS: For people who haven’t seen the film yet, tell us a little about Ernesto de la Cruz.īenjamin Bratt: Ernesto de la Cruz is widely known as the most famous singer and musician in all of Mexico. I know that sounds like a marketing pitch, but this movie is so celebratory of having a dream and setting off to achieve that dream, but also, at the same time, celebrating the uniqueness of Latino culture, in this case, Mexican culture and iconography. It’s the perfect movie, really if your intent is to watch something that makes you laugh and makes you cry. Seeing the completed version last night with a full house, it was quite an emotional experience. Even with that, it packed an emotional wallop. They explained it before I watched it, incomplete animation, substitutions, stick figures, just charcoal drawings. I saw several months ago now, a version that was two-thirds animated. Benjamin Bratt: It’s funny because last night was the first time I had seen the film completed.
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