FOREWORD BY JOHN LEGUIZAMO

I THINK THE DAY I REALLY FELL IN LOVE WITH FILMMAKING was when we shot the nightclub scene for Carlito’s Way. Brian De Palma was directing, and I was acting with Sean Penn and Al Pacino. That was 1993.

Flashback to 1981, my sixteenth birthday. My mom had saved up all of her single-mom-working-four-jobs cash to get me a ticket to see American Buffalo, a play written by David Mamet. It was off Broadway at the time, and it was starring Al Pacino. So I’m in the theater, and Pacino comes out and he’s so electric, man. He’s powerful. And I’m watching him, and he’s spitting all over everyone. It was like I was being baptized into acting with that spit. It was the most exhilarating performance that I’d ever seen, and he was right there in front of me. He was so… free.

I had a similar experience when I watched the movie Mean Streets. There were a ton of great things about this film, but Robert De Niro’s performance just grabbed me. When I watched it I said “Oh my God. This guy is… I don’t even know how to describe him.” He was the coolest, most dangerous actor I’d ever seen on film. Everything he did felt unexpected. It was like watching a chemistry experiment. You didn’t know what the hell he was gonna do, but you knew something was gonna happen. He was unpredictable. So I’m watching Mean Streets, and I can feel all of this inside me. Then I’m watching American Buffalo, and I feel all of that inside of me again. And then finally, in Carlito’s Way eleven or twelve years later, I’m in scenes with Al Pacino. Now I’ve had different coin-dropping moments in my life; aha! moments. That was definitely one of them.

De Palma let me have thirty-seven takes in that nightclub scene. Thirty-seven! Nobody was doing that at the time. If I do an independent film and I want to do an extra take, I have to prove to them why I want to do an extra take. I have to give a dissertation on why I want to do an extra take. You only get two or three tries to get it right. De Palma gave me thirty-seven. It was fun. That was when I fell in love with cinema.

The filming of each movie is different every time. If I’m working with one of the masters—and by that I mean the greats, like Brian De Palma, Baz Luhrmann, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay—they’re all brilliant, but they all have different processes. There might be a long rehearsal time, or a long conversation where the actors get to talk with the director about the characters and share thoughts and opinions. It might come early, or late, or happen in a way you aren’t expecting. They all digest the information and transform it into art in their own unique way.

And then you’ve got the actual script. Sometimes you play with the dialogue, change things to feel more natural. If it’s really well written, like exceptionally well written, then you just say the lines as they are. But even with something like Romeo + Juliet, a movie where I recognized that it was really well done, I still tried to improvise. I tried to add in lines, but Baz Luhrmann knew better.

But each movie is different, and making each movie is different. That’s really the only way they’re the same.

So I did Freak on Broadway, and it earned some accolades. And I thought, “I got some accolades. Let me take these accolades and go ask who would be the perfect director to direct a filmed version of Freak.” And it was Spike Lee. So I said, “Spike, I would like you to direct this. I know it’s a big ask. I don’t know if—” And he was like, “Yo, I’m down.” And he came on and he started planning how he was gonna shoot it and where he was gonna shoot it. And when he shot it, he just allowed for everything to happen.

Like, when I crashed into the camera guy during the show, he kept that in there. He just really caught the magic of what was happening in that theater. He really caught what was happening between me and the audience. And audiences, kind of like for the first time, some of them were seeing themselves represented onstage. Latin people were coming in there, and people of color were coming in there like, “That’s my life. That’s me. That’s who I am.” And when you see somebody talking about that stuff, celebrating it as special, it’s powerful. Spike captured all of that when he filmed that show.

There are some scenes that people always ask me about. The gas station scene in Romeo + Juliet is one of them. There were a lot of stunts and tricks with the guns, and I wanted to do them all myself. So we’re filming the shootout, and in one part I jump and land behind a car. I roll a couple of times, get up, spin one of my guns around my finger, and then put it back in the holster. That’s what you see in the movie. But in real life, I jumped and landed on a mattress. If you watch the scene, you can see that I’m looking to try and make sure that I land on the mattress.

But that scene was a lot of work. I had teachers who taught me how to do the gunplay. I spent three months in my hotel room doing it. At first, I was dropping the guns on my feet. I had all these cuts and black and blue marks. I started wearing Timberlands while I was practicing so I wouldn’t get hurt. The neighbors in the hotel started complaining because you could hear the guns banging around each time I’d drop one of them, so I started practicing while I was standing on top of the bed so I wouldn’t make any noise. When we finally filmed the scene the crew applauded when we did it. Baz added some cuts in afterward because that’s his style and he’s a genius. But I did the tricks all myself.

There are so many movies that shaped me, or inspired me, or helped me through tough times. Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Serpico, Stir Crazy, Live on the Sunset Strip with Richard Pryor. There are so many.

Before there was YouTube, I used to go to the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City on Fifty-Third Street. And I was just a kid, but I would go to this museum and see the history of comedy. I’d watch all these comedians. I’d be there for hours and hours, just lose myself. I’d take it all in. I’d get lost in it. Theater and film have different effects on the psyche, I believe, and both of them are good. When you see great theater, you feel like you had that experience. You feel like it happened to you, in a weird way. You take it in physically, emotionally, intellectually. When you see a film, it blends your dreams and your reality together. It seeps into your subconscious. It takes the part of you that daydreams—no matter how old you are, it takes the part of you that daydreams and it empowers it.

A good movie makes anything feel possible.

Even your dreams.