making the film

FRIDA's team of artists re-created nearly 50 Frida paintings, including The Two Fridas (1939), Portrait of My Sister Cristina (1928), Frida and Diego or The Wedding Portrait (1931), My Dress Hangs There (1933), Self Portrait dedicated to Leon Trolsky (1937), The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1938/39), Self Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), The Broken Column (1944), and Fruit of Life (1953).

In scenes where Diego was seen painting a mural, the crew stretched a canvas across a scaffold situated in front of Diego's original work. The set artists sketched outlines and painted portions of their makeshift "mural." Since the camera flattens objects at a distance, the edges of the canvas blended into the existing mural, creating the illusion of a work in progress. For close- up brushstrokes and scene coverage, smaller portions of several murals (including the famous Rockefeller Center mural) were re-created on the FRIDA stages at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City.

For Mexican-born director of photography Rodrigo Prieto, production designer Felipe Fernandez and art director Bernardo Trujillo, collaborating with Taymor and Hayek was both a welcome labour of love and a source of pride in their native country's culture.

"We're telling the story of these incredibly important visual artists in Mexico, which is my country. I've known of them since I was very young," says Prieto, whose credits include the award-winning AMORES PERROS as well as ORIGINAL SIN. "You feel a sense of responsibility to tell the story well, to do your very best job. In addition to telling the events of Frida's life, we wanted to get into her mind. When Julie Taymor and I first met, I was very excited by her ideas about camera movement and speed, colour and lighting to visually suggest what is going on internally."

"We had never worked together, but we were really in sync with each other," Taymor says of her relationship with Prieto. "I could see the artist in him, and we talked a lot about trying to get the reality of the time, and of the subjectivity, and the point-of-view of Frida."

"I had books on Julie Taymor's work. I was dying to work with her," Fernandez says. "I had worked with Salma before, and she's one of my friends. And of course, as an artist, I have long known and loved the work of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. When I heard that Salma and Julie were doing a film about Frida and Diego, I put together a whole presentation. I wanted to be part of it. It's really an honour and a privilege to be on this film. That's why my department and 1 work hard every day. We are all thrilled to be part of something so special."

Using unfiltered sunlight and all of Mexico's vibrant colors, Taymor and Prieto painted Frida's world in bright, bold strokes. "We talked about using the rich, vital colours from Frida's paintings," Taymor explains. "We actually had to find locations which weren't as polluted because colour was much more clear in the 20's than it probably is now."

Prieto says this stylistic choice was also informed by insights in her letters and diaries. "Although in her paintings she doesn't use a lot of light and shadow, Frida was very aware of it in her life," he says. "She talked a lot about how the colours changed after her accident. We used that in our film."

"Frida talked about it in interviews later and wrote it in a letter to Alejandro Gomez Arias, her boyfriend at the time, that after the accident everything went white," Prieto says. "Suddenly life lost its mystery and everything became white like ice and very transparent. She said she could see everything. The mystery was gone."

To that end, Prieto's crew intensified the glow of the whites in the hospital and in scenes that followed. Taymor played with shadows, which Prieto says "reproduces the mystery of interiors, in which you have dark areas where you don't really know what's there, so you see what you want to see."

transformation

"We were visiting with some of Frida's students, who are still living, and they had things that belonged to Frida," actress Mia Maestro, who plays Frida's sister Cristina, remembers about a visit she and Hayek made. "They had clothes that belonged to Frida and gave Salma a dress to try it on. It was a perfect fit. We couldn't believe it."

"I felt a little bit like Cinderella and I thought to myself: 'This really is mine,"' Hayek adds. "It fit perfectly. That felt good."

Transforming Salma Hayek into Frida Kahlo - one of the world's best known faces - required a team effort. The actress and artist shared the same petite frame, big dark eyes and long black hair, but costume and make-up enhanced their on-screen similarities.

To re-create Frida's braids and elaborate hair designs, stylist Beatrice DeAlba used a combination of Hayek's real hair and pieces she braided and attached. To mimic Frida's decidedly unaltered eyebrows, make-up artist Judy Chin individually attached tiny hairs to fill out Hayek's naturally thick arch. To create Frida's striking wardrobe, costume designer Julie Weiss scoured wardrobe houses, Mexican markets and history books for the clothes and jewellery reminiscent of those worn by the artist.

"Her sketches were wild and wonderful. Her attention to detail is impeccable," Taymor says. "She did an amazing job because she went out and gathered antiques and really great clothing from the period."

Weiss found their location essential to every aspect of her work. "I think that here in Mexico, people would like the story of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to be told in a way that shows the pride of who they were as individuals and the pride they took in the Mexican community," Weiss says. "As a visitor here I'm very dependent on that spirit. 1 need that spirit to be shared with me, and fortunately, the people here have shared and opened their hearts, re- creating these costumes without limit."

Weiss drew upon the stories and descriptions shared by many people connected to Frida. "I worked with a tailor who met Frida in church when he was a little boy," Weiss says. "There was this tiny little poke, and he said 'l met her, I can help you.' Another person brought in something wrapped in tissue paper. I opened it and found an antique rebozo [shawl] from a woman saying, 'It's an honour to be part of this.' Those are the things the camera dances with that make the story come to life."

the characters - the principal cast

"This is a huge. passionate love story - not just a story about Frida - told against the canvas of Mexico during an exciting, largely unknown time in that country's history," Taymor says. "It was a vital, volatile time, with a strong sense of intellectual and political commitment. There was also a lot of humor and whimsy. We had to look for the key events and aspects of each character and make sure these things were seen within the context of the time."

The many personalities in Frida's life were as colourful and vibrant as her paintings. Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and Tina Modotti were all larger-than-life characters who were passionately committed to a political and artistic revolution. These extraordinary individuals necessitated an exceptional, international, multicultural cast.

"They were so courageous and outrageous then," says Taymor. "People think today we push the envelope, but not when compared to this circle of artists and political figures. These were real individualists trying to live out their beliefs."

"It was a group of very inspired creative people who were also profoundly concerned with the human condition," says Judd. "I was fascinated by the time and people in this circle of activists, intellectuals and artists."

"I love the fact that in this Mexican environment you had Breton, who is French; Frida and Diego who were Mexican, and Trotsky who was Russian and they all found common ground in broken English," Rush says. "I like the way people have to struggle to express themselves in a mutual language none of whom are working in their own. It was an amazing cross-section of minds and artists who gathered together with a need to explain and share."

The cast was also thankful that Taymor had such a respect and careful understanding for their characters. "It's fantastic to have a director who has a very specific vision of what he or she wants to shoot and comes well prepared," Molina says. "She creates a real sense of safety and comfort because you know exactly where you're going with it."

"She's incredibly precise, knows what she wants and has very strong taste and very good taste," agrees Saffron Burrows, who plays a lover of both Frida and Diego. "She has a strong overview from art direction to make-up to props, which pulls everything together into a singular stunning image."

"There's an added responsibility on the actor with playing a real person not to misrepresent that person to be kind and truthful, whether one likes that truth or not," explains Molina, who gained more than thirty pounds and wore body padding to fill out Diego's huge girth.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for Molina was finding the balance between Diego's negative and positive attributes. "Diego was a very difficult man. He was unfaithful, capricious and hugely selfish with an enormous ego."

Molina says. "But he was also a great artist and storyteller, a man committed to his political ideals and deeply in love with his wife. You show the good and bad sides. You don't judge."

For Hayek, Molina fit the role because "he's a tremendous actor and a big man in many ways," she says. "I'm not just talking about his physical size, but his spiritual size as well. He's generous and kind and wonderful to have around."

Another challenge for Molina was perfecting the artist's distinctive brush stroke. "I was talking to one of the artists in the art department who's been working on the murals and I was telling him 'l can't draw, I can't paint, so I better work out a way to fake it in a way that's realistic and believable.' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. That's what filming is, it's mastering the lie,"' Molina says. "And I thought that was brilliant. That's what we are: 'masters of the lie.`

Valeria Golino describes her character, Lupe Marin, as " eccentric, strong, extreme, loud, and jealous of Diego. She had two kids with Diego and remained close to him and Frida." "Some in Mexico called her' mad," she says. "She's a great character. There are all kinds of stories that I heard about her that we don't see in the movie, but things [that] definitely helped me to understand a little bit what kind of a person she was."

"I looked specifically at what kind of impact Trotsky made on the emotional thread of the story," Rush says of his character. "It seems as though I come in at a very low point in Frida's life and marriage and provide some tonic and inspiration. Although he's a major political figure, I tend to see him as an artist, almost too idealistic for his own good."

"Geoffrey is a terrific actor who can play just about anything and get into anything," Hayek says. "Trotsky had to be somebody who had the seriousness and intelligence of a political icon and the humility of a broken man in the worst time of his life."
Golino was struck by Rush's ability to "do a little shift to his personality with his accent and voice, the way he moves, the way he looks. He's so completely different but at the same time himself - like all great actors - manage to do. He's not imitating anybody, but he gets it 'real."'

"His presence was a huge, huge boost for us almost half-way through shooting," Molina recalls of Rush's arrival. "He takes his work seriously and takes himself not seriously at all. That's a very disarming, beguiling quality in anybody. He's great, great fun."

"The thing I love best about Tina Modotti is that she was banned from several countries for insurrection activities and a lot of people were glad to have her in Mexico because she was so outspoken," Judd says of her character. "She ended up being kind of a citizen of the world without a country, committed to human rights, workers rights and became a photographer to document what she saw.

Judd saw her participation in FRIDA not only as an opportunity to play a great character, but also as a way to help Hayek realise her dream.

"You know she thinks I'm doing her this huge favor by juggling my schedule," Judd says. "But the truth of the matter is it's a privilege to have a friend that you care about and admire who'd do this sort of thing. I don't think I'm going to make movies unless I am equally as mobilised as she is about this. She's bringing such a personal vitality and love to it. We should all make movies with that kind of passion and vigour."

the supporting cast/ shooting the film/ the music score
The director and the writing team