She looks the part, even if he doesn’t

The poster promoting the new movie “Maria Full of Grace” shows the title character apparently about to receive communion. She’s looking pensively at a hand reaching down with what might look like bread. It’s actually 10 grams of heroin wrapped in latex. Maria isn’t full of grace. She’s full of opiates.

“It’s an interesting image,” says the film’s writer-director, Joshua Marston. The title “is intended to be poetic and subtle. She’s a character who discovers grace in herself that allows her to move forward as a mature adult.”

On paper it might not come across that way. Maria is a pregnant teen who refuses to marry the father of her child, quits a job that helps support her demanding family and agrees to work as a drug mule for $5,000, smuggling 62 pellets of heroin in her stomach -- endangering the life of her unborn child -- from her native Colombia to the U.S. Once in the U.S., she cruelly lies to a fellow mule’s immigrant sister to secure a place to sleep.

Despite these unvarnished truths, audiences have no trouble seeing that this young woman is indeed full of grace. The film won the audience award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Audience awards generally don’t celebrate unlikable people.

“The trick for me was actually making her not sympathetic,” Marston says. “The obvious choice for her to do this would be incredible economic hardship. I realized that if that were too dominant, her decision would be overdetermined. It wouldn’t be any decision at all. The more interesting thing was to imply that she had other options. In fact, what she’s really wanting is not economic relief but something beyond that. Ironically, I think that makes her more sympathetic because you invest more in her as you see her consciously choosing to do something, even if she’s rushing into it naively or impulsively.”

While Marston has certainly thought this through, there’s no getting around the fact that he is a 35-year-old Jewish male from Los Angeles who has written and directed a first-person narrative about a 17-year-old Colombian girl. When Marston appeared onstage after a public screening at Sundance, the audience fell silent as if to say, “That’s the director?” He shows up to an interview in a fancy midtown Manhattan hotel wearing sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt. He looks like a grad student.

“It’s startling for a man of his background to capture that world,” says Colin Callendar, president of HBO Films, which financed the film (it’s being released theatrically by Time Warner sibling Fine Line Features). “It was astonishing how steeped he was in the story.”

Marston’s success at steeping himself in the story had a lot to do with his background. He attended UC Berkeley and then the University of Chicago as a political science major and speaks four foreign languages: Spanish, French, Italian and Czech. His heart was in movies, so he switched to New York University’s film program, graduating with an MFA. When he decided to make a film about a drug mule -- inspired by a woman he’d met who worked as one -- he applied the techniques he acquired as a social scientist, accumulating information by talking to customs officials, imprisoned mules and emigres. His insistence on verisimilitude did have one downside for potential financiers who otherwise liked the result: It was in Spanish with English subtitles.

“One company said, ‘What if Maria’s family had a governess who taught her English and the family loved practicing English so everything was in English?’ ” Marston says. “I’m like, ‘You’re joking.’ People were recommending Penelope Cruz and Jennifer Lopez. It was ridiculous.”

“It benefited from being told in Spanish,” Callendar says. “It’s part of the immigrant experience. I also felt that the narrative of the story would be very clear even if you didn’t understand Spanish.” Of course, simply being true to the milieu and the language wasn’t going to get Marston inside the characters’ heads. In fact, he says he never really felt certain of Maria until he cast Catalina Sandino Moreno. Then, when he had the rest of the cast assembled, he did three weeks of rehearsals in which the actors improvised on the script, which he rewrote, incorporating their changes.

Sweating the small stuff

Marston also made certain that the physical details were right. His original intention was to shoot the first half of the film in Colombia (the second half would be in New York) with a very small crew, but the country’s civil unrest soon scuttled that idea. Neighboring Ecuador was the next option, although security people at HBO were discouraging that as well, so they were on the verge of scouting Venezuela when that country underwent a coup. They ended up in a town called Amaguana, near Quito, Ecuador. They painted it bright Colombian colors and had the transportation department in Bogota make them Colombian street signs.

Obviously the filmmakers did not have to jump through these hoops to shoot in New York, but they still had to get the immigrant experience right. In this they were helped by Orlando Tobon, who runs a travel agency in Queens, and is known unofficially as the Mayor of Little Colombia. For the last 25 years, as part of his (unpaid) service to the community, he’s helped repatriate the remains of some 400 drug mules to their families in Colombia.

“The people die,” Tobon says simply. “Somebody had to do something.” Tobon plays himself in the film and also has an associate producer credit. Originally his character wasn’t even in the story, but it dawned on Marston that any film about Colombian drug mules in New York would have to include him.

Easily the most attention-grabbing aspects of Marston’s mania for accuracy are the scenes in which Maria must ingest the pellets (and later expel them). Life-size facsimiles were produced on-camera by a Colombian who’d made a living at manufacturing the real things (according to Marston, he is now in a Venezuelan jail). And there are no cutaways from Maria when she practices with grapes or later swallows pellets whole. Moreno is really swallowing them (though obviously they don’t contain heroin). The effect is so unnerving that one audience member at the Berlin Film Festival, where the film was competing, fainted.

“I needed to bring home the horrific gravity of what we’re talking about when we say someone is a drug mule,” Marston says. “What drove me to make the film was hearing people describe what it’s like with a packet of drugs that you know can kill you, swallow it, and do it over and over again. And then get on a plane for six hours, and then stand in front of a customs officer and talk your way through it, and then defecate it out. That’s the only way you’re able to understand what we’re talking about.”

It’s fair to say that Moreno wasn’t too thrilled about swallowing something the size of a thumb -- over and over again.

“It was like a nightmare,” she says. “I couldn’t swallow the grape. I said, OK, I just have to swallow and the camera is there and I’ve never swallowed this before. It was so hard. It was painful. And then he was, ‘Let’s do another take.’ I’m so proud that I did it, but I’m not going to do it again. It was gross.”

Moreno’s spirited yet understated performance, gag reflex and all, won her best actress awards in Berlin, Seattle and Cartagena, which is ironic because she had given up the idea of acting professionally after a series of discouraging auditions for Colombian soap operas. She was doing theater at a Catholic college in Bogota, intending to pursue a career in advertising, when her mother persuaded her to audition for Maria. Now she’s living in New York, taking acting classes and reading scripts, hoping, she says, to find a Latina who isn’t a sexpot, girlfriend, drug addict or maid. According to Callendar, Moreno is living out the same aspirations Maria is, only on a different level -- a Hollywood level.

“Agents, managers and lawyers,” Moreno says of the feeding frenzy that surrounded her at Sundance. “I was like, ‘Do you have to have all of those people to do something here?’ ”

Validation from a kid

The film has been equally well received on the festival circuit and by audiences in Colombia, where it opened two months ago.

Marston makes a distinction between how it was accepted by Colombians here and in Colombia: In the U.S. they were happy to see a film that works against the stereotype that Colombians are “here to steal jobs from Americans and they’re all greedy and they’re not suffering in the least.” In Colombia the film is viewed in terms of its anti-drug message. The first lady of the country has screened it several times. The Colombian office of the United Nations wants a copy. However, in one phone call Marston may have received all the validation he needs.

“Three weeks ago we got a call from this 17-year-old in Colombia,” Marston says. “He said, ‘I’m calling to thank you. I was going to go as a drug mule. I had everything set up. I’d already committed myself. Two days before I was supposed to travel I went to see it and I pulled out.’ He’s seen the movie three times and thinks it saved his life.”