CRYSTAL FAIRY written and directed by Sebastián Silva, with Michael Cera, Gaby Hoffman, Juan Andrés Silva and José Miguel Silva. A Mongrel Media release. 98 minutes. Opens Friday (July 26). For venues and times, see listings.
Michael Cera is sweating.
“I’m in my apartment right now with no air conditioning, and it’s awful,” he says from New York City in the middle of last week’s heat wave. We trade notes on miserable temperatures and suffocating humidity, and then the conversation turns to nicer things, like the time he spent shooting Crystal Fairy in Chile.
“I was there in the winter for three months,” he says. “It was really very cold. I think they got, like, the first snow in years when I was there.”
Crystal Fairy stars Cera as Jamie, the alter ego of writer/director Sebastián Silva – a naive young man whose determination to experience the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus makes him, well, kind of an asshole.
Okay, maybe that’s a strong term.
“It’s just that everyone else is just a servant to his agenda,” Cera explains. “Everyone else having a good time is not as important to him.”
When Jamie impulsively invites a flighty but equally self-absorbed young woman (Gaby Hoffman) who calls herself Crystal Fairy to join him on his trip, things get complicated.
“This was a real story that happened to Sebastián,” he says. “So I think a lot of those elements were taken from his experience. I don’t think there was as much contention between them in real life. They were friends. But, yeah, that’s like the crux of the drama in the movie, their incompatibility, and I think that goes hand in hand with their [having] their own agendas [and being] set in their ways.”
Crystal Fairy is one of two movies Cera made with Silva. The other, a psychological thriller called Magic Magic, goes straight to video next month. Cera’s philosophical about it.
“I think it’s kind of what we always anticipated would happen,” he says. “It’s not a really marketable movie. I think it’s amazing, and I really love it. It leaves you with a feeling of dread that I think is really powerful, but it’s not something people tend to watch, I guess.”
And with the new season of Arrested Development on Netflix, I’m obliged to ask if there’s any talk of more episodes or that feature film creator Mitchell Hurwitz is always talking about.
“I really don’t know,” Cera says. “The only time I hear about it is people asking about it. But I think this last part was so open-ended that it would be nice to do more.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
