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Maria Bello: I didn’t know you spent three months…

PH: She taught herself Albanian!

MB: Tell us that (laughs)… I’m interviewing now. Moran, please tell us about your process.

Moran Atias: For me, I was in a different position. No one wanted me for this part so I had to convince a lot of people that I was suitable for the role so I started researching it from here in the US, reading any book, documentary, piece of music, that was about gypsies. It just stayed in my head the idea of the character. Then when Penelope Cruz got pregnant, I said, “Okay, I’m going to Italy to find this character in my bones and skin.” I lived with them for a period of time and created a daily activity with them. The first thing was begging for money and that was probably the hardest thing that I did, because nobody wanted to give me money regardless of what I was wearing or how nice I was. It was impossible to come back with more than a euro. So then I started washing windows with them to find out where my character was in the rankings of the gypsy clan. So all of these positions made me understand that my character wouldn’t be apologetic for what she’s become and she needs to survive. I didn’t want to victimize her … I portrayed her with this force of life and pride.

PH: I also told her as an early direction, “If you have hair on your body, let it grow.”

MK: You told me that too! I had a unibrow!

PH: (laughs) Yes, I tell all my actors that. But Moran’s character lived in a place with no electricity and where they didn’t bathe.

MA: OK, enough with the details. The hair was annoying. The eyebrows at a certain point it was one brow and I thought it was too distracting.

PH: But same with Mila. I thought, honest to God, she couldn’t play this role. She was too beautiful. … And we had lunch and in ten minutes I saw what she could bring to it. It’s so exciting when that happens. Same with Sandra Bullock in Crash and Adrien Brody here. I thought he was too much of a lady’s man and he said, “Paul, I’m an actor.” And with Moran, I didn’t know how she was going to do the role, but I knew it was going to be really interesting.

MK: I loved doing this movie, because I was doing something I loved again. I’ve said this before, but you go and do a film with a director and they have you do a character in every which way, because they don’t trust themselves and they don’t trust you and they ultimately want to Frankenstein you in the edit bay and make a character that they feel comfortable with six months later. Paul’s the opposite. He trusts you and empowers you and gives you this great character to play with so you can live it for a little while and have this really great therapy session with this character and go through life with her with all of the faults and mistakes you’ve made and play the character with that…

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