a place for us somewhere a place for us
this is a tradition on all of our movies where we toast the fur shot and we show us the last shot
and i just want to say that we have been actually in production on this for
months the choreography the dance rehearsals the music we've all been doing this with gustavo
dudamel and david newman conducting the new york philharmonic orchestra janine tesori's work
getting everybody primed and ready to sing these great songs as great as anybody has ever sung them
but now to actually bring all those elements together as one voice into an ensemble
to the times we now live in
i'm just so proud and honored that i got this shot late in my career i'll
be able to tell this story directly based on the 1957 broadway musical
i'm so proud to be here
amazing i sweep as good as you pay yeah look it oh
i wish i could say it was my idea was tony kutcher's husband mark harris's idea to change the
character of doc into his widow and have his widow be puerto rican and have her be rita moreno you
make fun of the way i talk one more time blondie she did west side story in 1961 and i didn't think
or know if she would want to be in west side story twice but we brought her the offer and
she read the script and adored tony's screenplay it was just a natural fit keep looking for better
the fact that she's been able to capture and hold on to her youth
she danced with the sharks in the jets during rehearsal she came in
every week and talked to us about what it was like growing up as a puerto rican in
america she brought so many interesting stories and she so motivated the cast
and i thought that she really needed to be the executive producer she did to serve more of a
managerial role not just to come in as an actor but to really help us frame the messages the west
side story needs to extend to people who see it and she's been very very causal on all of that
we gave her this song somewhere and she does it wonderfully and she did it with a cold but it
was so authentic i didn't want her to come back into a recording studio and change it
because she did somewhere live that day we shot the sequence
so i have been challenged by what would be the right musical to take on
and i could never forget my childhood i was 10 years old when i first listened to
the west side story album and it never went away
they have been able to fulfill that dream and keep that promise that i made to myself
you must make west side story
divisions between unlike-minded people is as old as time itself
and the divisions between the sharks and the jets in 1957 which inspired musical
were profound but not as divided as we find ourselves today it turned out in the middle of the
development of the script which took five years things widened which i think in a sense sadly
made the story of those racial divides not just territorial divides kill the lights more relevant
to today's audience than perhaps it even was in 1957 one of your own kind stick to your own god
it's such a profound story it speaks to every generation puerto rican is that okay
that i'm not i don't know it's just that love bridges every divide
it's timeless in the sense that we'd be reminded of that story as often as possible
thank you for joining us on the behind the scenes for west side story directed by steven spielberg
on just many things that had changed with this film i heard there was a lot of new things not
having subtitles in the film and everything like that and having kind of like a spanglish vibe
throughout the making of this film and including that that's very big and ambitious for any
filmmaker let alone an academy award winner like steven spielberg and he's done things more or less
like this when it came to schindler's list and then changing that big time and being very uh
gritty and um forthcoming with uh saving private ryan let me know down below in the comments down
below um if you are interested in that i am from miami myself a lot of people speak spanglish
my dad's from the bronx so it happens a lot in new york as well as you saw
from uh west side story and uh over in california which is where i'm at now
they do a lot of that as well here so let me know where you're from and where you're at
and have you heard any spanglish yourself and is there like couple words you know maybe in spanish
because this is really big it being a second language here in the united states
so uh i'm very excited about this film so let me know down in the comments down below um what your
thoughts are as well and if you think this is a huge uh big leap forward an historic leap forward
uh for filmmakers so let me know down in the comments down below like this video hit the
subscribe button i do a lot of these types of videos and i'll see you here next time later