While in Seattle to promote his latest film, our Seattle General Manager Tracey got to speak with Nick Fost about his latest comedic offering.
What inspired the making of Cuban Fury?
This isn’t a sure answer, there are a few different things. I’ve always loved
dancing and I’ve always been kind of pretty good at it. There’s a weird look that
people give you if your a big man who likes to dance and it’s a look essentially
that you might give to a child who has battled and overcome a childhood illness to
complete a half marathon.
They kind of feel a bit sorry for you and that to me is a
big fuck you, no matter what shape you are. It shouldn’t matter if your good at
dancing or if you enjoy it, that is all that should matter. As a result of that, I
tended to not dance or if there was an expectation to dance then immediately I then
don’t want to dance. At my wedding, I didn’t want to dance with my wife. We did
about three seconds of it and then I broke off and turned my back to everyone and
felt kind of like Napoleon Dynamite, until my aunts came out and made it feel
alright. It’s a really expensive form of rehabilitation for me. After doing Paul,
Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, I thought it was important to do a film that is so
different that people would’ve never expected. I thought a dance film was it and it
was also a way for me to conquer my fear of dance.
The big finale was obviously shota couple of times but from top to bottom that four minute dance was live in front of 600 of Britain’s best salsa dancers. If you had a fear of that, that is how you get
over that. So it was all of that. I sat on this idea for three years and something
would knock on my conscious thought and say you need to tell somebody about this and
I would just ignore it. One night I came back from a party kind of late and pitched
the idea to my producer and I pressed send and went to sleep. The next day I woke up
feeling weird and uneasy as if I French kissed an aunt, you know that weird moment
of what did I do last night. I checked my inbox and there was an email from my
producer that said she thought it was a great idea. From that first initial email to
the first day of production was fifteen months.
What kind of training did you have to go through for this film and was it difficult?
It was seven hours a day every day for seven months so I would lift weights in the
morning for an hour because I was loosing weight through the dancing but I didn’t
want to loose weight because it wasn’t a film about that so I had to put it all back
with muscle mass. It was cool but it was a pain in the ass. After the first hour of
the first week I kind of looked at my self since your in a mirrored box for a man
who there’s no escaping yourself, you can’t not look at yourself. It never got
easier because the better you got the more the would pile on you.
Were there any scenes that were cut from the movie that you would have liked to have
left in?
There was tons of stuff we cut. There was a whole other story line with the
character Helen and her boyfriend and there was a kiss that we shot between myself
and Rashida at the end and I made sure we shot that several times. It looked odd,
not physically odd but in terms of the story it just didn’t fit. Bruce does what he
does for himself and not for her.
So other than acting, producing and writing what other things are you passionate about?
Cooking, especially with my son. Making sure he’s a good eater and not afraid of
anything. I think our biggest fear was having a child that would hate food. I think
we would have to put him up for adoption because I love eating.
