Interview: Boaz Yakin and Josh Wiggins of “Max”

Posted on June 24, 2015 at 3:11 pm

Boz Yakin wrote and directed “Max,” the story of a weapons-sniffing military dog whose human partner is killed. So traumatized he can no longer work, he goes to live with the grieving family and is cared for by their younger son, played by Josh Wiggins. I spoke to Yakin and Wiggins about the film and got to see Jagger, one of the five dogs who play the title character, too.

“I felt like it had been a while since someone made a movie about the human/animal dog human bond in particular,” sais Yakin. “A story that was was exciting and adventurous and harkened back to some of the things that excited me when I was younger. I wanted to make a family movie but not just for kids. I approached my friend Sheldon (co-writer Sheldon Lettich), who was a Marine and a Vietnam vet. He brought the idea of making it about a MWD, a military working dog. Once that came in the family that Josh is apart of and all that just kind of started to create themselves and it all started rolling from there.”

Josh Wiggins is also experienced with dogs and has three dogs himself, a Rottweiler, a Lab and a little Chihuahua Wiener dog mix, “every level, small, medium, and large.” His father is a K-9 dog handler, who trains dogs to locate bombs. “Before I left to go shoot for the video I ran the dogs and it helped a lot. You learn how to hold the dog and how to compose yourself and stuff like that.” Then he spent some time with the dogs in the movie so they would be comfortable with each other. “Before we started shooting I went to this facility where they were training. We would run around on bikes and get into cages with them, run around trees back and forth. I love dogs, so I was very comfortable bonding with them. It’s just like with a person. When you spend months and months with someone you get pretty close to them.”

Yakin said the dog trainers were as much a part of the making of the movie as the cinematographer and stunt coordinator. “They train a lot of the animals you might see in a lot of movies. And they’re just so specific and so well organized and it really makes your life easy. The dogs respond to that kind of environment so well. It really was remarkable for both of us to see what they were able to make them do.” The two main dogs were named Jagger and Carlos, but each of the five dogs used to play the role of Max had special skills. They had to use a female dog to play Max in the fight scenes because males are not permitted to fight each other. Carlos was unpredictable but uncannily was the best “actor.” In one scene, he had to convey a new sense of respect for one of the characters and he added tip of the head that was all his own. And “there was a moment at the beginning of the movie where in order to show that he’s found the weapons, he is supposed to just sit where they are. So Carlos comes and sits and does this with his head and I was almost tempted not to yell. Like people are going to think it’s like cute dog added right you know. But in fact Carlos was just his jittery self got on the thing and went here ok and sat down on it and I went man this dog is unbelievable. He kept doing stuff like that throughout the film. So a lot of what gives Max his personality is Carlos’ personality.”

Wiggins is terrific as Justin, an unhappy kid who resents his father (Thomas Haden Church) because he is demanding and undemonstrative. And because Justin blames his father for sending his older brother, Kyle, to war. “He’s definitely overshadowed by his brother but I think there is definitely some jealousy, whether he would accept it or not, because his brother is kind of his dad’s perfect image of what a son should have been and Justin is not like that. So I think there is definitely some jealousy. I think Kyle fits in much better with his family than he does. But that doesn’t mean there is resentment towards him. It’s jealousy you know, not resentment. He has to find himself.” There are a lot of stunts in the film, as Justin and Max get involved with illegal weapons dealers. There were stunt doubles, but Wiggins said, “I did a good amount of the bike riding. All the jumps and stuff were my stunt double, Keith Schmidt, Jr., and did an awesome job with it. Of course I’m a teenager, I’ve ridden a bike before but nothing to that extent , with rocks and tree branches and all that. It was really cool to be able to go outside of my comfort zone a little bit which is the cool thing about acting. You do a lot of stuff you really wouldn’t do otherwise.”

Television veterans Church and Lauren Graham (“Gilmore Girls”) play Justin’s parents. Yakin talked about working with them. “Thomas is so close to this character. He comes from Texas and his father who is a “Great Santini”-like a military man. So in some ways the challenge for Thomas was to make something imaginative for himself in that space. For Lauren coming from where she does feeling like a part of this family was a little bit more challenging. She felt a little bit more like an outsider. It was a little bit less clear to her how to get into it. I think she marvelously managed to work her way into this situation.” But, “the whole movie hinges upon Josh,” he added. “With a movie like this it’s easy for it to slip into sentimentality in the wrong situation. You know you want it to be emotional but not sentimental and when we saw Josh’s work one of the things that really stuck me about it was that it’s perfectly appropriate for the scene, it’s honest and it has emotion in it but it never tries to hand it to an audience and it’s never sentimental. Once we know that we had that core we can cast the other kids around him.”

The movie raises some important issues about families and about the military. Yakin wanted the movie to be more than just a boy and his dog. “For me the exciting part and the challenging part is making a family movie that provokes and challenges kids to think about and feel things that they aren’t necessarily asked to think about and feel and that allows adults to enjoy it even though it’s a movie that a young person can see. It allows adults to enjoy it for what it is without just feeling like they have to be there for their kids. So we’re trying to make a movie that can provoke and challenge while entertaining because it’s an adventure movie. And this country has been at war for how many years since 1991, and it’s a pressure that’s laying over everything that we do and feel about all the time. It’s always there and while trying to make a movie that’s entertaining and fun to a degree you know this war and the pressure of what it means to be a man, an American man in an environment where your manhood and masculinity are defined by how you react by this particular stress is always on you. That to me was interesting. Making the movie, it’s a family movie and I’m not trying to lay it on too thick but being an American man in the age of constant war. What the choices are in within the Justin character. That’s what the movie is about.”

Interview: Maya Forbes on “Infinitely Polar Bear”

Posted on June 19, 2015 at 3:25 pm

Writer/director Maya Forbes did not just base her new film on her own childhood; she had her sister contribute to the soundtrack and cast her daughter as Amelia, the character inspired by Forbes herself. The film covers the period when Forbes and her sister were living with their father, who has bipolar disorder, in Boston, while their mother was getting her MBA in New York so she could support the family. Cam, the father, is played by Mark Ruffalo and the mother, Maggie, is played by Zoe Saldana.

Most movies are not very accurate in portrayal of people with mental illness. What did you want to make sure to avoid in creating a more realistic, three-dimensional character?

Yes, there are some movies that are great and there are many that are terrible. And I didn’t want it to be this sort of cute characterization or assembly of quirks. It was very important to me that it felt like the core was Cam, who he was. The mental illness was something he experienced but not everything he was. I had my father and other people who are bipolar in my family and I sometimes are wonder, “Are you manic right now or are you just really happy?” And that sort of anxious feeling because you don’t want to tell someone that they’re manic when they’re just happy. Because they’re not that different. It was very important to me to make it feel holistic. And I was trying to avoid making light of it but I also wanted to show a person who is loved and loves other people and is lovable. A lot of families have mentally ill people and it’s somebody they love who suffers from addiction or mental illness. It is a family issue and so it is important to me to portray that.

What were the challenges of making this evoke the 70’s?

I wanted it to feel like a vivid memory. Sometimes memories pieces are kind of faded and sepia, but to me it felt like memories that are sort of vibrant and alive. And I was drawn to that style of doing it. Especially doing a smaller budget movie you are looking for these evocative environments that have a sort of neutral quality. There is a movie called “Small Change,” a Truffaut film that I love. He shot that in a French village and it’s very simple because it’s mostly the stone facade of these big old French buildings. I was kind of looking for brick and stone and wood. I’m going to look for texture. I’m not going go to Harvard Square because Harvard Square doesn’t exist anymore. I didn’t shoot in Massachusetts actually; I shot in Providence because Providence looks more like Cambridge in the 70s than Cambridge does now. So Providence had all these great locations that have not been gutted up and changed. Also with the clothes I wanted it to evoke the period that does not bludgeon you over the head with “Hey remember the 70’s, wasn’t it cool?” I wanted it to have a bit of a timeless quality but with just smaller touches so working with my whole design team we were looking for these textures and these little touches that would evoke the period without trying to recreate the whole period, which is something that we wouldn’t be able to do anyway.

Speaking of “Small Change,” like that film, this really gives us the point of view of the children, though we understand more of what is going on than they do.

Being embarrassed, that is one thing children do definitely understand. They understand how to be embarrassed by a parent’s annoying behavior. The wonderful thing about the kids is that they really are in the moment. The main thing is just getting them to listen to the other actors. That’s the key; they are listening and they are responding, they also need to seem quite natural. I didn’t go looking for kids that were highly trained because I don’t feel like this movie needed that. It needed a freshness and a naturalness. There was a lot of anger, there was sadness. My daughter plays the older one, so I would take her off into the corner before some of the sad scenes. We talked about the context of the scene then I would start crying and then she would start crying and I would say, “Okay, now….” So that was part of the process of working with her, sort of sharing the emotion in a context with her was helpful to her in terms of bringing her to that place.

Did you see your childhood differently as you worked on this?

I knew always that my sister and I we were a team, we were a team as children going through the world, and we still are. The main thing is I resolved a lot of issues with my mother. I had never felt that she abandoned us but then when I had children of my own…I had two little girls, just like she did, so it was almost like I was reliving something. All these memories came flooding back. I was just catapulted back into my childhood and reliving it somehow.

My mom is an ardent feminist. She has always wanted my sister and me to go out and be in charge. So for her to see me direct this movie, that’s what she thought I should be doing. She thinks it’s important for women to step up and be leaders. But we were having some conflict in the areas of motherhood and career when my kids were younger. She pushes the career so hard and I wondered if she was just trying to validate her choices. I said, “Maybe I don’t want to make those choices,” and she said, “Don’t drop out. It’s hard to get back in. You’ve built a career, don’t drop out.” I was resentful of some of those messages. Then as I was writing the movie I saw things so much from her point of view, what she had been up against and what she had wanted for us and what she had given us in terms of sending us to good schools. My father’s family sort of have a culture of “don’t try too hard.” You want things to come naturally to you. You don’t want to be a striver. And it’s easy to kind of absorb that attitude but it is a crippling attitude; it means that you don’t go out and try because you are not supposed to fail. But my mom is not like that. It almost didn’t matter to me whether it got made because what it did to my relationship with my mother was so profound. She became my hero and I realize she was right about a lot of these things. And, on my mother’s side she had read it and it did the same thing for her seeing my perspective as a child and what it had been like. She was there but I don’t think she as deeply understood some of the painful times, just the complicated emotions that we had, that my sister and I had just because of the situation that we were in it, a lot of different feelings and exposure to things that you maybe don’t want to kids to expose to or to have to deal with. Seeing each other’s stories was really amazing.

She was working really hard at school, she didn’t have a great apartment, she came back to our apartment and it was not like anyone was trying to make it easy for her. We weren’t all taking care of her when she came back. She came back and took care of us. It was very, very difficult and I’m so grateful to her.

Interview: Writer/Director Noah Baumbach of “While We’re Young”

Posted on April 2, 2015 at 3:18 pm

Writer/director Noah Baumbach talked to me about his new film, “While We’re Young,” starring Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as a middle-aged couple. They befriend a young couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, and the movie has a wise and humorous take on the dreams and delusions of all four of them.

What do you miss about being younger?

I miss going to the doctor and being able to raise somewhat extreme worries about health or something. The doctor used to laugh and say, “You are fine, don’t worry.” Now when I go to the doctor I brought up something and he was like, “Maybe we should get a MRI.” I thought our thing was when I would bring up something and he would say it was nothing. I miss that.

Is there anything you don’t miss about being young, that you are glad you don’t have to do anymore?

I think I feel more myself than I did then. I wouldn’t say I’m relaxed but I feel less urgency in a funny way than I used to. I think in my 20’s I felt like: this is happening so I’ve got to get something done, there is no time, everybody’s doing something, what am I doing? I feel more at ease, maybe that’s not the word, but I feel better in that way.

Why are we so fascinated with the effortless coolness of young people?

It’s like the basis of body switching movies. We think we all could be better 25 year olds now or better 18 year olds now than we could then. It does work that way, so that’s totally understandable.

When do you feel a generational disconnect?

A lot of my friends who are in their 20s or 30s tend to have a kind of old-soul quality, they sort of feel older than their years. It comes up more in those conversations like “Where were you when…?” Like when Clinton was first elected, that’s always striking if they were kids then. My first election that I voted in was Dukakis. And then the reverse which is the movie obviously engages in which is them introducing me to stuff, in some cases stuff that I lived through and they didn’t but they are somehow in the way that they listen to music or whatever I’m able to appreciate it in a different way because it is sort of removed from its context.

Why do you think this film is being described as your most “accessible?”

Well, my last film was black and white. And this time I was trying to make my version of a kind of comedy of marriage and there’s more of tradition of those kinds of movies. And so even though it might be my kind of perverse version of that I still felt like I wanted to follow some sort of template, not that there is a template but at least that I had a responsibility to tell a story with a married couple that goes on various detours and comes back together. They have learned and there is hope.

This is the second time you’ve worked with Ben Stiller. What does he bring to your projects?

When Ben saw “The Squid and the Whale” he got in touch with me and we both sort of quickly connected. I think our sensibilities or backgrounds may be different in some ways but we were both born and grew up with creative parents in New York and we like a lot of the same movies and comedies and things. So we recognized something in each other. “Greenberg” was a great experience and for me. I wrote this thinking of Ben, and thinking of Ben’s voice, and I felt like Ben’s calming voice was an important element in this movie too. Since Greenberg was kind of a different role for him and very different from him this would be a way to kind of use his iconography because more comic iconography in something that was more my territory.

How do you see the young couple that your main characters find so fascinating?

I was having fun with this idea that these young people seem too good to be true in some way. I mean they are ultimately projections for Ben and Naomi. They could be younger versions of themselves or romantic versions of themselves but they are also like surrogate children and I felt like in another movie they would have conjured up ghosts, something that kind of comes at the right time. Because Ben and Naomi don’t know that they need this but they do. So that is how I initially came to them and then as I wrote them it got more real. The thing with Darby is that you kind of discover that she is in some ways as much a victim of the sort of experiences Ben has and they have their scene where they kind of bond in a way. People have reacted differently to Jamie and Darby. Some say, “Do you hate hipsters?” And some say, “That’s such a sympathetic portrait.” I felt like whether you like Jamie or not no human being should bear that kind of responsibility that Ben basically gives him. And Ben really hands him the keys and then gets angry when he doesn’t do what he kind of imagined he is going to do.

Do you think couples fall in love with other couples?

Yes, I think they do and that was one of the things that I had in my head because I thought about that for an earlier movie, a script I started years ago after “Squid.” It is very interesting and understandable and I think the way couples project on one another. In this movie you see it even in a more casual way with the two couples at the beginning of the movie, the couple who had a kid and the couple who hasn’t, and I find that very interesting and funny, moving and understandable. And potentially tragic.

You worked with the legendary Ann Roth, who did the costumes for this film. How do you design clothes for characters who are supposed to be very much of the moment when you have no idea what will be cool by the time the movie comes out?

The thing that Ann and I knew early on was that there we would never would be able to actually document Brooklyn youth culture in terms of wardrobe. I mean we would be chasing it forever. The thing about working with Ann is that she sees the whole movie and she talks about characters. She will have back story for characters that I have not even thought about. I worked with her first on “Margo at the Wedding” and she would start talking about one of the characters and her ideas and I was kind of scared because I didn’t have any answer because I haven’t thought about this stuff. And actors love her for that reason. After a fitting with Ann, an actor will come out having all these ideas and all this understanding of themselves as a character that’s a kind of unique experience. With this Ann and I kind of just made up our own ideas. There is this hair groomer movie I love called La Collectionneuse from the late 60s. The actor Patrick Bauchau kind of looks like Adam, or Adam looks like him in that movie a lot. We actually kind of parted Adam’s hair like his and we dressed him in some cases like him too, the long leather jacket that he has that feels like John Lurie in Stranger Than Paradise. There are just things that feels right to her and she’s a great collaborator too. That’s the thing you want in all collaborators — they see the whole movie, not just their department.

I know she sometimes brings in pieces from other movies. Did she do that here?

Naomi is wearing Jane Fonda’s bag from Klute.

What are some of the great “marriage movies?”

The Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I love Holiday, too. Twentieth Century was a great marriage movie because it’s crazier, I guess. To Be or Not to Be also. I miss the kind of movies studios used to make that were mainstream but they were character driven. They would have broad humor but then they would be very moving like Broadcast News or Working Girl or Tootsie. . They are all different kinds of movies but they were all about adults. You know, as a viewer I miss those movies because they are not made really much anymore and I wanted to try to do one.

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Interview: Amy S. Weber of the Bullying Movie “A Girl Like Her”

Posted on March 29, 2015 at 4:55 pm

Writer/director Amy S. Weber first became interested in the problem of bullying when she was producing educational films for young people in 1996, over about a 10 year period. “I was working with mostly teenagers on real life stories documenting what those experiences were for them. We covered social issues, everything from violence in school to eating disorders, teen suicide, child abuse, family life, and unhealthy relationships, the list goes on and on. And it was through the hundreds of kids that I worked with through today actually, any of the young people that I work with and mentor, there is always this common theme to every one of the issues that plague them. And it came down to low self-esteem. It came down to identifying a lot of the issues that they were having, feeling like they couldn’t be themselves, they didn’t fit, they were afraid to be a target. And as we dove in a little bit deeper it was a common theme that being picked on and bullied, being really a target of someone or possibly just that fear overall, kind of stopped them from being who they were and living as their true selves. So this is definitely been a project in the making for many, many years to bring this, what’s going on in today’s world into the spotlight through this perspective. I really wanted “A Girl Like Her” to stem from their beliefs. They were the inspiration and hopefully it will offer some help.”

In the time she has been working with teenagers, Weber has seen enormous changes in the way that technology and social media add to the pressure. “The days of the schoolyard bully and escaping their wrath once you walk in your front door at home and now you are safe, those days are over. The Internet offers quite the tool for an abuser to also collect an army of people who can anonymously pursue a person’s spirit and that’s kind of how I see it.” She quoted the father of real-life bullying victim Phoebe Prince. “He said that bullying is a word that used to exist when you would run away through the fields or down the street from the guy that was going to beat you up. Now it’s a completely different story. And he described what happened to his daughter. It was basically a relentless pursuit of her spirit, the destruction of a human spirit. Social media and the social applications that young people can use have changed this game in epidemic proportions.”

She sees another problem in the increasingly hostile exchanges teenagers see in the media, celebrities, even politicians making harsh accusations. “If were to really just put denial aside and put our busy lives aside to see all the stress that goes on in our lives as adults in this world in which we have created, we would take a very honest look at what’s happening to our youth today. They are simply holding up a mirror reflecting back to us what we have created in terms of a world. What we show them each and every day, everything they see in the media from so-called leaders, from politicians to church leaders, the people who are in the spotlight, the messages that they share, the violent types of programs that teenagers are exposed to, video games, an overall sense of negativity.”

She said, “If you’re lucky enough that you live among people who are very positive and joyful people, you get to feel that and take that in every day. I have a group of people like that and it is wonderful being around them. But how many people can you can say are truly happy? People who find joy every day and see the silver lining in every situation. But how many people are what you would consider lost, miserable, unhappy? Perhaps we believe that children are supposed to rise above what they are learning on a daily basis, and expect them to be better than us; we expect them to know more than us. That is the thing I think has shocked me the most in all of the work that I’ve done with kids.

Weber worked very closely with the teenagers in the movie to develop the story. And it was very important to her that the bully, a “mean girl” named Avery, would not be demonized. “I wouldn’t call her monster. I would say her behavior is very much like a monster who is so unconscious of what she’s doing to Jessica’s spirit, she doesn’t seem to care. She is so unconscious of it that a daily pursuit of Jessica has become quite entertaining to her and her friends. And there’s this desensitizing that has happened, almost this numbing effect that takes place in Avery where she is, even when confronted, unable to see what she was doing, denial at its finest. She’s a good student, she believes she’s a good daughter, and a good friend. Jessica just bugs her and she’s unapologetic about it. This is just the way she feels and she would like to express herself. Then you start to peel back the layers. We get to know Avery and we created a safe space for Avery to explore herself, take a look at life through a different lens and literally gave her a camera that allows her to look at life through a different lens, and it’s not as it appears. The outer shell of perfection, the popularity, the beautiful girl, the friendships, the status in her school, it’s meaningless because of what she is away from that, the true Avery comes out, the unhappy Avery, the insecure Avery, the scared Avery, the one who isn’t proud of what’s going on in her family life, the broken Avery that we begin to see. So we humanize a monster and when you do that we can’t as an audience be in denial of the fact that she’s in pain. Something is going on inside of her that is creating this projection, a coping mechanism, a mental health component, all of these play a role in this character. It is shocking to the audience that when the transformation begins the audience transforms along with it. That’s what’s so powerful about Avery Keller and the dynamic of her character.”

All of the dialog was improvised by the young performers. She gave them the overview of the scene and then let them create their lines based on “the emotion of what was happening in this moment in their lives. And then we would draw from real life to bring that out into their characters. I wanted them to bring their own experiences and their own emotions and their own words because I wanted it as genuine and as authentic, as real and raw as possible and whatever happens in that scene we would just keep going. I think we captured some of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced as a film viewer all my life. But to be on the other side of that camera and to be involved in the scene with these actors as it unfolded was incredible. It was just incredible the raw emotion especially because of the topic and how it has affects so many people.”

Interview: Ryan Potter, Hiro in “Big Hero 6”

Posted on February 24, 2015 at 3:58 pm

Ryan Potter provided the voice for Hiro in this week’s DVD/Blu-Ray Pick of the Week, the Oscar-winning Big Hero 6. Talking to him on the phone, it was easy to imagine I was talking to Hiro himself.

Other than a few moments with Maya Rudolph, who played Hiro’s harried guardian, he did not interact with the other voice performers. But, he told me, he was never recording by himself. “You know, it’s funny, sometimes you work with another actor, sometimes you don’t, but you are never really in a room by yourself. You are in the room with people just as important as other voice cast members of the film. You are in the room with the head of production, the director, the producer, the editor, the sound engineer the head of story. You get to create with people just as important to the film as let’s say Scott Adsit, who played Baymax. So you’re never in there by yourself.”

He was excited to find out that “Baymax is kind of a real thing. Someone over at Carnegie has created soft robotics and it’s unreal. There’s kind of danger of having a robot nurse or a robot caregiver is that they could potentially harm you because they are made out of metal. And we’re not made of metal so we are definitely susceptible to being injured by that. But having a soft kind of robot, not pliable but a rubbery or a bouncy nurse would make total sense. They would be able to be a caregiver without harming you.”

Potter told me that the filmmakers wanted “to cast true to Hiro’s ethnicity, which was Japanese-American. They just couldn’t quite find somebody and I guess they didn’t know about me at the time. And they were calling school programs and church groups. Don Hall was not going to give up on casting a Japanese-American, so when they found out about me I guess they were very excited and it kind of showed in the audition process. You usually to go in do this whole song and dance and go, ‘Oh how did I do?’ and the casting director would go like, ‘Alright, thank you, bye.’ This time I went in and I met Don and he was kind of quizzing me on Japanese pop culture. The two of us vibed. Instead of an audition it was more of a work session. It kind of created what Hiro ended up being in that audition. At the end of the day it came down to me being myself. And it was very surreal, I walked out of there very confident in what would we had done and couple hours later they called and asked what my availability was, and if I could send them everything I have done work wise. A couple weeks later we got the call that we got it and I’m like, ‘You are sure you don’t want to do a second audition?’ It was great.”

In creating the character, Potter had “a little bit of source material with the comic books,” but “Disney wanted to do their own interpretation. I saw how similar he looked to me when I was 13/14 years old. I went in there and said, ‘that looks at me when I was in middle school.’ So it was great.” He has spent a lot of time in both San Francisco and Tokyo, so he especially enjoyed the imaginary world of “San Fransokyo.” “Being able to see the blend is just uncanny. Tokyo is in a constant state of renewal. When a building gets too old they tear it down and build something new. And San Francisco is the very opposite. They appreciated heritage and preserve it to the best of their ability. So seeing how well they blended the two cities is absolutely unreal. They didn’t lean heavily to one side or the other. It’s literally the perfect 50-50 blend of both Tokyo and San Francisco.”

He feels that 2014 was one of the best years in the history of film, especially films with very smart heroes. “The Theory of Everything,” “Whiplash,” “the Imitation Game” are just three that like “Big Hero 6″ celebrate smart individuals in their field. It is an absolute honor to be able to be in ‘Big Hero 6’ and to represent one of the most successful films of the year in a year where film was as important as it was 75 years ago, in a year of legendary classics.”

He is also proud of the film’s ground-breaking representation of diversity on screen, “what the United States genuinely looks like. If the United States is the melting pot of the world you need entertainment, you need visuals that represent that. They were the first multicultural animated Disney characters of all time. I am very proud to be able to be a part of the film that’s going to open so many door for the Asian American community and the Latin American community and the African American community.”

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