'Twilight' Director Chris Weitz Shoots 'The Gardener' — With Help From The Homies

What do vampires and homies have in common? Besides a love for brooding music, the answer is Summit Entertainment. The company responsible for the "Twilight" franchise will also distribute “The Gardener,” a film directed by "New Moon" director Chris Weitz that is currently shooting in Los Angeles.

Featuring a Hispanic cast, the film is about a Mexican gardener and his son on a hunt for their stolen truck. Weitz's production is being supported by Homeboy Industries, an enterprise run by former gang members.

The homies have taken “The Gardener” under their wing, helping the filmmaker navigate the neighborhoods and to be as "authentic" as possible. Weitz even adjusted the language in the script to match the slang of not just the city, but of individual streets.

Demián Bichir, who played Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” is in the starring role.

Thankfully, "The Gardener" attempts to dial in to our current political climate — the film is about an undocumented worker who not only has to worry about making a living, he is raising his son alone, while holding the underlying immigration threat at bay.

When the New York Times asked Weitz why he had chosen to make “The Gardener” after “New Moon” gave him so many choices, the director said it “was a chance to reconnect” with his family heritage. His grandmother, Lupita Tovar, from Oaxaca, Mexico, was a star who sometimes made films shot simultaneously in English and Spanish. She married Mr. Weitz’s grandfather, the agent Paul Kohner.

A recent shoot took place in and around Ramona Gardens, a sprawling public housing development. According to NYTimes.com, neighbors vaguely remembered a film crew’s having been in the area to shoot scenes for “American Me,” a 1992 film, directed by Edward James Olmos, about a Mexican-American Mafia kingpin. Others mentioned “Colors,” in which Sean Penn and Robert Duvall, as a pair of Los Angeles police officers, chased gang-bangers around the city in 1988.

Stacey Lubliner, a producer of “The Gardener,” said the film might be done in time for release this year. “We’d hope to be one of those films in contention,” she said of a looming awards race in which this movie, with a little luck, could be positioned as a kind of homegrown “Slumdog Millionaire.”

With the film's production extending to other Hispanic neighborhoods, Chris Weitz is clearly on a mission to promote the Latino experience. "This was a chance to get in touch with the language,” said Mr. Weitz, who figured that 30 percent of the dialogue in “The Gardener” would need English subtitles.

He added, “I’m one of the few people in my family who doesn’t speak Spanish.”

Source: [NYTimes.com]

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Tags Chris Weitz, Summit Entertainment, The Gardener, Twilight