Tribeca: Aditya Joshi & Ana Luz Zambrana Add Authenticity in “A West Side Story Story”
The history of West Side Story goes all the way back to Shakespeare, but the musical is relatively young at sixty-four years old. In those years, it has become one of the most famous Puerto Rican stories, yet the men who wrote it are white. In the Tribeca-premiering short film, A West Side Story Story, co-writers Aditya Joshi and Ana Luz Zambrana imagine what this classic musical would look like if it was authentically Puerto Rican.
After the film’s premiere at the festival, Aditya Joshi, who also directed and produced, and Ana Luz Zambrana, who also starred in and produced, sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss the first memories of West Side Story, the disconnect between the story and the people who tell it, and the difficulty of shooting the entirety of the short in one day. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Beyond the Cinerama Dome: I want to start with if either of you remember your first real encounter with West Side Story.
Aditya Joshi: I think I think for me, it was much later in life than it probably was for Ana. I had seen the original, and I think I had seen a college cabaret production where they sang a bunch of the songs. I hadn't actually sat down and watched the movie until I was probably 23 or 24.
I didn't meet Ana until I was 25 and I don't think I really had a conception of what the story meant to the Puerto Rican community. I just remember being like, oh, look at this dancing. I understand why Rita Moreno won an Oscar. You just get sucked into the Sondheim of it all. But then when I rewatched it, the Spielberg release, I rewatched it with Ana.
Once you watch it, you go back and read about it. You're like, oh, Rita was the only Latina person in the entire cast. The guy who played Bernardo was Greek and then he was in The Young Girls of Rochefort like five years later. I love that movie, but he's playing French in it and you're like, oh, he's definitely not Puerto Rican.
Ana Luz Zambrana: I actually don't really remember my first visual encounter with West Side Story, but it was very much a part of who I was when I was younger. Rita Moreno was very much a household name to me. I knew that my father deeply loved it, and the first time he saw it in theaters, he cried. It was the first thing he ever saw himself in a theater.
That was very much in my heart, in my head. I don't even think I even watched West Side Story until I was older. It wasn't something my mom would just put on, you know what I mean? That was not something that she did.
I think, for me, I finally thought, I should watch this when I was probably like 16 or 17.
courtesy of Tribeca
When did the idea come about that you wanted to take West Side Story and make it the Puerto Rican story that it should be?
Ana Luz Zambrana: I work in theater and entertainment. West Side Story just kept intersecting with my life. I got asked a lot as a theater director, if you were to direct West Side Story, how would you do it? When I sat down to actually marinate on it, I was like, I don't think I could ever do West Side Story without commenting on the reality of it. How it lives within me, my people, my family, the culture, and how I've seen it interact in our world.
I was applying for a fellowship and that was a literal question in the interview. Pick one of the five plays that you would want to adapt. One of them was West Side Story. I just keep getting asked this question. I really don't know that I could do it without doing some super metatextual version that’s authentically about Puerto Rico.
I was like, this feels more like a movie than anything. We thought it was a great feature idea and then we're like, but actually maybe it is perfect as a 12 minute encapsulation of what it feels like to try to make art for your community. That’s something that I feel like we encounter every day as people who work in this business.
Can you talk a little bit about the tension that kind of exists with this film and musical? You said that your father cried when he saw it for the first time, but it's still this white guy writing about a world that he doesn't know as much.
Aditya Joshi: It came up even raising money, getting producers, and hiring people. It was a really interesting dance because just like the film, the characters don't have a vitriolic feeling about West Side Story, you know what I mean? There are so many good things that came out of this production like Rita Moreno being the best and Chita Rivera from the original Broadway cast. People like Ana’s father seeing themselves on screen for the first time.
When you're raising money and talking to people who have long, long relationships with this movie and with this play, we have to explain that we want to comment on it, but we're not saying that we're going to rip your favorite musical to shreds.
I think we all know that there's a little something missing.There was a version of this movie that was very screw West Side Story, screw Stephen Sondheim, and screw Leonard Bernstein. Ultimately, as we were working on the script, we realized that's actually not what we're trying to say. This is not about what writers can and cannot tell a story. It's actually more about when someone else is telling your story, and then you're asked to reinterpret it, or you're asked to do something authentic, whether it is an adaptation or not, the pressure that that builds on you. You can feel both pigeonholed and like the weight of the world is on your shoulders and you're doing it for every person you've ever met in your community, including those closest to you.
I think that's really what it evolved into because it could be West Side Story. I'm South Asian, so it could be Slumdog Millionaire, you know? it could be any piece of art that people know about you and where you come from. If you're asked to make it authentic, what does that mean?
If some Puerto Rican person who's unrelated to us comes in and says, that's not my Puerto Rican family, then suddenly you've done a version of what Sondheim did on a micro level, right?
Ana Luz Zambrana: That's the thing. It's a diaspora. There's so many nuances to diaspora. Stereotypes come from reality. We need to keep telling the stories that are there, but there is a world of stories that we need to be seeing for Latinos. This is the way to be. We keep doing remakes of West Side Story? Slay, love it.
What is on the other side of that? How is interacting with the community? How can we expand that dialog and keep figuring out different ways to explore the diaspora in our community? I want someone to come up to me and tell me I hate the short because I want to know their story. Why did you not like ours and what did you need to see? How can we keep expanding that conversation?
courtesy of Tribeca
One of my favorite parts of the short is the people who keep coming up to Ana’s character who say, it's a small thing, it doesn't matter, no one's going to notice. As producers, I noticed in the credits that you guys also had a Puerto Rican catering company. It's those small things that play such a massive role. Could you talk a little bit about that and like any other things that I missed, that maybe were even too small to notice from the viewer's point of view?
Ana Luz Zambrana: From the beginning, when we were making this, I was like, I want to make it with as many Puerto Ricans, or Latinos as possible. There are things that even I'll miss, but if you surround yourself with the people who also know the community, you won't miss a lot because it's a subconscious thing.
I don't blame white people for not knowing things, I totally get it. That's why you have to surround yourself with people who do know things, and that's why who is making the art matters, right? That really was our biggest thing with making this. We had a Puerto Rican catering company. We had Repertorio Español, which is an amazing Off-Broadway, Spanish-language theater who helped us with sets, costumes, and financially.
Aditya Joshi: The Spielberg movie is a great example. Jaws is one of Ana’s favorite movies. There’s real love for Spielberg in this house, but it's also Spielberg and Tony Kushner. They're putting on this production and they're having Lin Manuel Miranda come in and give some notes. They have a bunch of Latinos in the cast. They have Rita Moreno on set and that gets you part of the way there.
But who's telling the story? Who’s the head of the departments? I don't think they had a Puerto Rican cinematographer. I don't know if their set designers and art department were people who understood. It's not just Puerto Rican. It's also Nuyoricans who understand the ’60s. If you're not doing the research and you haven't lived that, it becomes very hard.
I want to give a special shout out to our artisanal team. Josh Echevarria was our DP. Gerardo Diàz Sanchez was our set designer and he dressed the stage for what would be a low budget Off-Broadway production of West Side Story. Then he dressed Ana’s dressing room, too. Rodrigo Muñoz’s costume design was so important. Maybe you noticed that scene with the costume designer, there's a Puerto Rican flag onesie tucked in the back as Ana was arguing about the skirts.
I'm not Puerto Rican. I would have never thought to do that. We shot this in one day, so having every single person on set be totally aligned onto what the thematic vision of the thing was incredible.
Ana Luz Zambrana: We didn't have time (laughs). Yeah, we needed people who knew.
Aditya Joshi: I'm asking them to be like, how would you bring this to life? I went in between two setups to just look at what they've done with the dressing room.
We changed the ending last minute because we only had like 20 minutes to shoot basically the last three minutes of the movie. There was a photo of a woman there, and that was always meant to be abuela. We were like, can we actually center that photo, which was not part of the script, you know? That was a direct result of people who live this struggle every day of being an artist of color and trying to make something authentic.
Gerardo’s senior thesis at Yale was literally about West Side Story, you know? Having them on set and working with them on the project was so beneficial.
I was going to ask about this one day shoot. What was that length of the shoot? I love that you basically gave it the feeling of a one take, even though you have a couple breaks. Did that just come out of the necessity of you having one day in this theater?
Aditya Joshi: It was it was a little bit of both. We had originally conceived it as oner. Then it's like, I don't know if we can do a oner. Then we ended up budgeting out the whole thing and we were like, maybe the only way we can do this was actually is a oner (laughs).
The reason we didn't want to do a oner is because the Birdman comparisons are inevitable, right? We shot it before we'd seen these things and before they'd come out, but The Studio and Saturday Night also do these kinds of things.
We want to build tension, but we want to be original. I think the way that we ended up realizing the power of the oner was, of course, the same reason Birdman and The Studio use it, which is to build anxiety and tension and keep you with the characters.
For me, as a director, it was really like, this is a story about Ana’s character Carolina, and there's not a single frame of this movie that she's not in. In 12 minutes, you’re spending all your time with this one character. Short films are really hard to write. I write on TV and we write features. It's a much different experience. I'd say it's much harder than writing television.
courtesy of Tribeca
Part of that is you need to care about a character from the first second of the movie. You don't have ten minutes of exposition to make you care, because the movie's over. Keeping you with Ana from every single second of the movie in that unbroken way, except for when you see the person who is the inspiration for all of this. I felt like that really was essential to people caring about what was happening.
Ana got eight takes of every scene and we really could only use one.
Ana Luz Zambrana: At the end of the day, our one day shoot lent itself to the finishing of the film because we shot it chronologically. Continuity-wise, my makeup was melting off, my hair was getting frizzy, I was sweating, I was deeply tired and disturbed. By the end of it, I was like, this was great. We didn't have the money to do continuity anyway, so it was like we were able to have that fold in beautifully. I think it actually worked out great, even though it was exhausting and crazy.
Aditya Joshi: And to your question, because we paid everyone union rates and we did overtime and all that, it ended up being about 14 hours inclusive for lunch break.
I was curious because I feel like there's such a crossover in the heart of community theater and the heart of independent filmmaking. I was curious if you could talk a little bit about those two worlds and getting to celebrate both of them at once.
Aditya Joshi: It's a great question. Thank you, Tina. Ana's a theater director, and we've been dating for a while, but the first time that we actually worked together was on an Off-Broadway production in Spanish that Ana directed. We made such amazing friends and community.
It was an Off-Broadway production. We had like a $6,000 budget. We had two and a half weeks to put it all together. The whole run sold out and it felt so rewarding. When we had this idea, we were like, this is a perfect opportunity to bring the people from Ana's first two off-Broadway shows into the film fold.
Everyone in theater wants to be involved more in film and everyone in film wants to be more involved in theater. To be able to bring them in and just populate the set with people who understood what it means to shoot something in 12 hours and understand what it means to get paid $300 for a two week run of a show, you know what I mean?
They are doing it because they love it and they care about it. I think the characters in the short, a lot of them are doing it for that reason. Characters like Ana’s Carolina or Jamie, the stage manager character played by our really close friend Gabriela Torres. Those are all people we've worked with in theater, and it just made so much sense to bring that ethos there.
Courtesy of Adrián Alexander Alea
Ana Luz Zambrana: The Off-Broadway, Latino theater community is amazing. There's so many amazing artists and actors. My dream is to continue making work and bringing my friends and my family with me. I want to keep giving them good opportunities for different kinds of roles. The kinds of roles that maybe they're not getting auditions for. Just keep elevating their voices.
It was just a dream to bring them on this project. I want to keep doing that because it's really amazing to be working with the people that you started with. I want to continue working on those projects that you want to see happen and you don't see happening, so you make them yourself.
Aditya Joshi: One other community better aspect I forgot to mention is we shot this at Brooklyn Music School, which is a nonprofit education center for kids in Brooklyn who don't usually have access to music education. They fundraise to stay open and to provide low cost music education for kids in the area.
Brian Adamczyk is their executive director and is like the most thoughtful and generous partner on this team. We decided to partner together in early June of last year. He was like, yes, I would love to do this. I'm currently fundraising for $100,000 for the school to stay open, but if the school stays open through your shoot dates, I would love to be part of this.
They managed to raise the money and not only that, they helped facilitate our fundraising for the film. I think it's just so true to the ethos of the movie and of the community we're spotlighting that Brooklyn Music School is also a scrappy theater institution that was just so game to partner on something like this, even though they're going through the whole mess of their own troubles.
How has your Tribeca experience been so far? Are enjoying yourselves?
Ana Luz Zambrana: It's been really lovely to be meeting a bunch of similar filmmakers and seeing their work. It’s a really nice sense of community which I really deeply appreciate. I love seeing all these films and we just saw the COLECTIVO group of Latino short films that landed Miranda family funding.
That was a really beautiful experience to be there, see that, and sit with my community and experience our voices on that kind of level. I'm deeply honored and deeply grateful to have our short premiere at Tribeca. I very much cried when I found out. I was not expecting this at all. We're also very deeply grateful to our amazing executive producer, Luis Guzmán.
Aditya Joshi: It's been great to sit with him and his son Cemí, who produced the film. We're all mostly New York based and so Tribeca is the place that we were like, this is where we want to premiere. Everyone can come and we can celebrate. We can do it all in the community, and it'll be great.
Since we really only shot for one day, we actually didn't get to spend that much time with all of these people. Now to be able to celebrate with them for longer than we were on set has been a joy.
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