Andy Garcia continues to go his own way as he plans his Hemingway movie

Islands have always figured in the life and career of Andy Garcia.

He was born in Cuba and moved with his family to Miami. He grew up in the Cuban-American “island of South Florida,” before college drama classes (at Florida International University) convinced him to trek to Hollywood.

“I only spent 17 years of my life in South Florida,” he says. “I’ve been in Los Angeles, what? Twenty-seven years or something like that. But Miami is still more a home to me than L.A. will ever be. L.A. to me is almost like my second exile.”

That’s why he maintains a second home in Miami. That’s where his family is, where “my culture is” and where the water is. He’s a fisherman who keeps a 34-foot Venture in South Florida for his stays there.

That island background told him to jump when a little-known filmmaker wanted to make a door-slamming farce set on New York’s watery enclave, “City Island.” “City Island” is about a family of New Yorkers who have a lot of love and a lot of secrets.

“I always enjoy a movie with a water view,” Garcia says with a chuckle. “Metaphorically, the Manhattan skyline looms up in the distance from the back of their house. My character’s dream is across the water, in Manhattan.
Oz looming over a working-class man in a working-class village, a guy
who doesn’t have the courage to tell his family his dreams, that he’s
taking acting classes.”

Garcia’s gifts as an improvisor are what give his scenes an extra snap, says Bob DeRosa,
who scripted Garcia’s performance in “The Air I Breathe.” “Every take
of every scene, he gives a unique performance. If he gets angry, he
screams. If he gets sad, he cries. What this does is keeps his co-stars
on their toes. They literally have no idea of what he’s going to do.”

In “City Island,” Garcia plays a 50-something corrections officer, father of two and husband (Julianna Margulies plays his wife) who always wanted to be the next Brando. At 53, Garcia
is past the age when he was “poised to inherit the force and position
of ‘the Italian generation'” of screen greats, as film scholar David Thomson once wrote.

Garcia’s career has been more quixotic. He was a
headliner early on and still pops up in supporting roles in big-budget
fare — in “Oceans 11,” “Confidence” or “Smokin’ Aces.” But you’re more
likely to find him in something smaller in scale, such as “City Island,” which won the audience award at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and which he’s bringing to this month’s Miami Film Festival.

“I like working with the newer filmmakers, and this guy, Ray (DeFelitta), this wasn’t his first barbecue, you know?”

Garcia has made Cuban flavored and Latin subject films, from “Modigliani” to “The Lost City” (about Havana). And that’s where his dream lies, in another indie project and another movie about Cuba.
He’s pulling together financing for “Hemingway & Fuentes,” a film
about the special relationship between the great writer and the Cuban
fisherman who captained Papa’s boat, the Pilar, during his years in Cuba.

“It’ll be my second feature film as director (“The Lost City” was the first). I co-wrote the script with Hilary Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s niece. Sir Anthony Hopkins is attached to play Ernest and I’d play Gregorio Fuentes.” The movie is about the writer’s relationship with Fuentes and with Mary Welsh, his last wife, a role Annette Bening has expressed interest in.

“That time period — the ’50s in Cuba
when he was writing ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ — is the thrust of our
story. That world that Hemingway was so enamored of is why I want to
make the movie, because that’s what inspired him to create what many
feel is his greatest novel. He’s a man who loved Cuba and Cuban fishermen.

“One of the things we express in the script is how
he reacted to getting the Nobel Prize. ‘He said ‘Oh no. Now everybody’s
going to show up here (in Cuba) wanting something.’ And they did, and he left.

“That’s why I think the sea was a place he found
solace in. When you’re at sea in a (38-foot) boat, there’s nobody there
but you and the guy he got to captain the boat for him. There’s not a
lot of information on that relationship. Even though Gregorio lived a
very long time (he died at 104 in 2002), he was never very forthcoming
about Hemingway. He thought that was too personal, and he’d just say
‘None of your business.’

“They were friends. There was respect between the
two of them, a real ‘that’s between us’ attitude. That’s the movie I
want to make and the story I want to tell, about another guy who loved
my island.”

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(c) 2010, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

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