'Dirty Dancing' remake had to start with baby steps for stars
By Olivia Barker
USA Today
They were almost babies themselves when Baby and Johnny mamboed across movie screens in 1987's original "Dirty Dancing."
Lions Gate Films
But the challenge Romola Garai and Diego Luna faced when filming the quasi-remake "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," which opened Friday, was the minor fact that they couldn't dance.
Katey (Romola Garai) and Javier (Diego Luna) practice their moves in a new version of "Dirty Dancing" set in Havana, Cuba.
Not too long ago, Garai's dancing experience was limited to a stint in kiddie ballet. "I was a flower pot when I was, like, 5," says Garai, 21, a Hollywood newcomer best known for arty films such as "I Capture the Castle," made in her native Britain.
Once upon a time, if her co-star wanted to dance, "I had to be drunk, and I had to really like a woman that was over there," on the other side of the club, says Luna, 24, who seduced audiences as one half of the peripatetic duo in the 2001 film "Y Tu Mama Tambien," shot in his native Mexico.
"The only reason to dance was to get close to someone you couldn't approach with words," he says.
So the pair went to boot camp — six hours a day, every day, for eight weeks — to get to the point where they'd make a believable Katey Miller and Javier Suarez.
Katey is an 18-year-old American ingenue who moves with her family to Cuba in 1958, just before the communist revolution. Katey's own cultural and sexual revolution comes courtesy of Javier, who shows her there's more to life than starched conformity and more to dancing than the foxtrot.
Both "Havana Nights" and the original Catskills version are based on true stories, and both feature similar components: friction between the haves and have-nots, which is dissipated by the all-important dance contest, which, of course, boasts fabulous costumes. In fact, Garai and "Dirty Dancing" star Jennifer Grey shared the same dance teacher: Miranda Garrison, who played middle-aged vixen Vivian Pressman in the first movie.
Garai is intimately familiar with both Grey's and Garrison's characters: She owned the video growing up and, watching it alone or with girlfriends every three months or so, estimates she's seen Baby and Johnny (Patrick Swayze) cavort in the Catskills maybe 50 times.
Luna, on the other hand, didn't pop in the "Dirty Dancing" DVD until a couple of weeks before shooting began.
But with the setting of the two movies dramatically changed, stylistic differences emerged. For the new film, perhaps even more than the old, it's about color — "color, color, color, in everything: the cars, the dresses, the rooms," says Garai, who looks more '80s than '50s in a slinky off-the-shoulder black top, navy and white-striped skirt and knee-high black boots.
There's the form-fitting, generously plunging orange dress Garai's Katey gyrates in, a sign that she's trading in her crinoline and ponytails for good. It's her heaving-bosom moment: "If nothing else, it drew attention away from the sort-of-sloppy footwork."
What helped was that Garai and Luna started out from the same rhythmic level: zero.
"Partner dancing is about chemistry, it's about communication," says Luna, in a dark blazer, T-shirt, jeans, sneakers and scruffy facial hair, his main accessories a blue lighter and a pack of Camel Lights. "That was the most important thing to have, and we found that, and that made everything easier because we got there together."
Not surprisingly, Luna's friends assume he regularly busts out Johnny Castle moves in real life. Though dancing these days can be a "weapon" when it comes to luring the ladies, Luna says it's a limited one. "Everyone expects amazing steps, and I'm the master of one routine."
Garai won't salsa on cue, either. But in the pub on a Friday night, "after a few pints, maybe," she'll sashay and shimmy. "It has been known," she says, smirking.
