How to ambush a star for your art
Gamble by first-time producers got Oscar winner for new movie
It takes guts to wait at the back door of a theatre so you can ask an Oscar-winning actor to star in your low-budget, made-inCanada movie.
“Gutsy, desperate and a little bit of luck” is how Toronto actor and now producer Ana Golja describes her last-ditch effort to get Louis Gossett Jr. to star in “The Cuban.”
Golja, her producing partner Taras Koltun and director Sergio Navarretta had tried all the usual channels to get Gossett (“An Officer and a Gentleman”) interested in their movie: his agent, his business manager, his lawyer, his publicist — to no avail.
So Golja and Koltun got tickets to a Toronto International Film Festival screening of Gossett’s 2016 movie, “King of the Dancehall,” and staked out the back entrance of the Ryerson Theatre, script and “pitch package” in hand, waiting for the star to emerge.
“We essentially forced it into his hands,” Golja said in a phone interview. “At that point he had already been bombarded by his whole team about our project. He smiled and said, ‘Yes, I know about this project.’ ”
Within a month, Gossett had said yes to playing Luis Garcia, once a famous Cuban guitarist, now languishing in a longterm-care home in Canada with dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Had not the COVID-19 pandemic intervened, Gossett, who’s about to turn 84, would have been back in Toronto last month for the official opening of “The Cuban.”
Instead, the movie opens the Canadian Film Fest on Thursday on Super Channel Fuse.
“It’s still going to be in theatres,” said Golja, who’s 24. “It’s just a matter of when.”
If you don’t know Golja’s name, there’s a good chance you recognize her face. She’s been dancing since the age of five and acting since nine when she landed a guest spot in the CBS crime series “1-800-Missing” on her very first audition.
She also starred in the 2011 series “Clue,” in a couple of different iterations of “Degrassi” (as troubled Zoe Rivas), as an
Olympic gymnast in the 2015 movie “Full Out” and with John Travolta in the 2019 movie “The Fanatic.”
She has performed musical theatre on Broadway and in Toronto and released an EP under the name MUAZANA.
Music is a big part of “The Cuban” and, in particular, the positive effect it can have on people with dementia.
Golja has observed the effect herself in her great-grandmother, who’s 93 and has dementia and Alzheimer’s. When Golja played music from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, “my greatgrandmother would just light up. She would start singing. She became a whole lot more social and engaging.”
That experience, combined with a conversation with Koltun about his late grandfather, planted the seed for “The Cuban,” in which Gossett’s character is transformed when his caregiver Mina (Golja) brings a turntable to his room and plays him Cuban jazz records. (Cuban-Canadian jazz pianist Hilario Duran consulted on the music and jazz bassist Roberto Occhipinti produced the score.)
The seed of what began as a short film was nurtured further by director Navarretta and his partner, writer Alessandra Piccione, who also had experience with Alzheimer’s in loved ones.
Thanks to Navarretta, the cast boasts not only an Oscar winner, but an Oscar nominee: Shohreh Aghdashloo plays the Afghan aunt of Mina.
“When Sergio Navarretta approached me and told me about the subject matter I had to interrupt him and tell him I will do it no matter what,” Aghdashloo said in an interview in Brantford, where much of the movie was filmed in 2018. (It also shot on location in Toronto and, for a week, in Havana.)
“I’ve had the experience. I lost my father to dementia,” said Aghdashloo, recalling how her father “came to life” when her brother played Iranian music for him during a family get-together. “The first time it happened I was so surprised. I went to my mother and I said, ‘He remembers all our names.’ ”
Navarretta apologetically told Aghdashloo she wouldn’t have a lead role. “I said, ‘I don’t mind, I just want to be a part of it.’ ”
Golja described working with Gossett and Aghdashloo as “a dream come true.”
“I had just gotten off a project working alongside John Travolta and went right into ‘The Cuban,’ ” Golja said. “When you’re working with actors of that calibre it almost feels like less work because they just bring you right into that moment.”
But at the same time, there’s pressure “to be 100 per cent prepared and able to really show up when you’re doing scenes with these actors.”
The pandemic, of course, has put all film and TV production on hold, aside from projects that can be made remotely.
Golja is working on her next EP in her newly installed home studio, developing her second feature film as a producer, about a high school basketball prodigy, and optioning books for other movies. She’ll be seen later this year in the movies “I Do, or Die” and “Drama Drama.”
And she’s very much looking forward to promoting “The Cuban” around the world when such activities are possible again.
“The Cuban” airs at 9 p.m. Thursday on Super Channel Fuse. See canfilmfest.ca for the full schedule.