Yesterday I got the call from Filmax telling me that I got the part of James Rooster in their new film Donkey Xote! And today we had our first meeting/rehearsal. Even though there will be 25 actors working on this film, only the eight main characters were invited (and paid!) today.
James Rooster is one of the “main” characters in the film, but if I won an award for my work on this project, it would be for Best Supporting Actor and not Best Actor. My part is somewhat comparable in size to Edna ‘E’ Mode in the Incredibles – a comic secondary role.
First, the director, José Pozo, showed us around the studio. It was like going back in time to when I worked at Disney. I love seeing all the conseptual drawings and how the characters change over the development process. I wished I had my digital camera with me to sneak photos of the three different films that they’re currently working on. Very impressive stuff.
Then we went into a screening room where we read through various scenes and worked on our characters. This was so refreshing. Normally, the drill here in Spain is: once you get cast for a part, you have about 15 seconds in front of the microphone to come up with your character’s voice, personality, and all the nuances therein before you have to start recording. It’s usually a question of money that dictates this procedure but that didn’t seem to be a sticking point in this project. They even had a cameraman there to film us for the “making of”.
After the four hour rehearsal, the director asked to speak with me in private. He told me that the character of James Rooster was more developed (i.e. had more lines) in earlier versions of the script (we have version 8.3). They cut out most of his (bad) jokes and now he’s just a bumbling/James Bond/bodyguard/pipsqueek. José then said that because he liked what I had done with the character so much, he was going to go home and write me some more scenes this weekend! That is pretty damn cool.
We should start recording the voices sometime next week. Donkey Xote is scheduled to be released in cinemas in 2006, or as the trailer and posters say, “As sooooon as possible.”
CONGRATS!!!!!
Congrats Josh. FYI, from today’s Wall Street Journal:
Quixotic Journey
January 21, 2005
This week marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of Miguel Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” a book as widely acclaimed as it is little-read today. It is a long, difficult book, rambling and at times bordering on the incoherent. But for all that, Cervantes gave the world one of literature’s immortal characters, the would-be knight errant who tilts at windmills as if they were giants.
Cervantes’ Quixote is a complex character; his is a form of madness that leads him to do things both foolish and noble, but Cervantes does not offer any clear answer to the question of whether his foolishness outweighs his pretensions to nobility.
In our time, Quixote’s madness is often seen as noble in itself. More people today would recognize the starry-eyed dreamer of the 1965 musical retelling of the story than the difficult man of Cervantes novel. In that incarnation, Quixote dreams the impossible dream and so sees potential in people that the more hard-headed characters miss. The Quixote of “The Man of La Mancha” wields madness as a means of self-overcoming, and we are meant to admire his refusal to bow to mundane reality — he challenges the audience to join him in seeing the world as it should be, rather than as it is.
It’s unlikely Cervantes would recognize this character as the one in his book. But truly great literature is large; it contains multitudes. And it is to Cervantes’ credit that each age finds something of itself in Quixote. All of us feel the occasional urge to tilt at a windmill, but it was Cervantes who gave us the image by which we understand the urge. Four hundred years from now, another age will see Quixote still differently, but it’s likely that he’ll still be there, and will still have important things to teach us about the impulses that animate mankind.
CONGRATS! I AM SO HAPPY FOR YOU!
That’s awesome dood! Congrats!
Well done!!!!!! Look forward to seeing it!