Kids say the darndest things, or so he hopes

Not many screenplays have a warning on the cover: “Do Not Show to the Actors.� But Peter Sollett’s script for “Raising Victor Vargas� contained just such an admonition. The writer-director wanted his cast of nonprofessionals to find their own way through his coming-of-age tale set in New York’s Lower East Side. “I wanted to be surprised, and the only way I could assure that was to not give them anything to read,� says Sollett.

It was a daring experiment. Populated with complex characters who are grappling with sex, love and the confusion of growing up, “Victor Vargas� transcends the teens-in-heat genre. Victor is a preening but sensitive 16-year-old with a crush on the icy but vulnerable local beauty, Juicy Judy. He lives with his old-school grandmother and two younger siblings, doing the wrong thing about as much as he does the right thing, which makes the film pretty close to real life. In “Raising Victor Vargas� Sollett, 27, enters the last golden summer of innocence before reality intrudes. (The film opens Friday in Los Angeles; it premiered earlier this month in New York to favorable reviews.) It’s a kid’s-eye view of the world reminiscent of Francois Truffaut and the Italian neorealists. “I was making a conscious effort to give pleasure along with the pain, and my goal was to find the beauty in that,� he says.

It all started in 1998 when Sollett was casting “Five Feet High and Rising,� a short film he did for his thesis at NYU. He came up with an autobiographical story about a 13-year-old’s sexual awakening and first kiss in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, where he was born. Assisted by his girlfriend, producer and casting director Eva Vives, Sollett began to audition kids sent in by agencies. “They were all eyebrows and cute smirks, mimicking the kind of acting they saw on television. But we were trying to make a realistic film,� Sollett says.

So Vives suggested that she put up fliers in their neighborhood in the Lower East Side. Most of the kids who came in were Latino (as opposed to the Jewish kids from Brooklyn) from 5 to 18 years old, and none had acted before. They were fresh and eager in a way the professional kids weren’t. In auditions Sollett devised an improvisational style of working that would carry over to the filming. “We saw very quickly that if we gave the kids lines on paper to read, we got lines on paper back. They were much more interesting when they were just hanging around,� he says.

Judy Marte, a 14-year-old who grew up not far from where the film is set, was cast as the female lead. But Sollett was still having trouble finding a boy who could tame his hormones long enough to take direction. Eventually a soulful neighborhood kid named Victor Rasuk wandered in after seeing the fliers.

Vives had been doing an improv to audition the boys in which she played a neighborhood bully who had beaten up their kid sister. Most of the guys played it aggressively. “But Victor was just the opposite,� recalls Vives

“He was very visibly upset and emotional and told me in a very quiet tone how much his family meant to him.... I was speechless. It was what we were looking for.�

So Sollett’s Brooklyn Jewish story became a Lower East Side Hispanic story. “Five Feet High and Rising� won the Grand Jury Prize for short films at Sundance and a similar prize at Cannes in 2000.

The next step

From the moment Sollett finished the 30-minute short he knew that he wanted to continue to work with the kids. “By the end of the film we’d become great friends and I was excited by how good they were,� the director says. “I wanted to not only pick up where the short left off, but do something that existed not as a translation from my experience to theirs but was coming more directly from their lives, and that was ‘Victor Vargas.’ �

While Sollett was working out the story with Vives, he would hang out with Marte and Rasuk, who had become students at the Professional Performing Arts High School in New York. He absorbed the details of their lives, but the actors did not play themselves; only the emotional coloring was theirs.

“Pete wanted this macho image, but that’s totally not the way I am,� says Rasuk. “I’d have to say stuff like, ‘You haven’t been with a man until you’ve been with me,’ and after every take we’d crack up.�

In the film, Judy pretends she has a boyfriend so Victor will stop bugging her. When that doesn’t work she makes him think he is her boyfriend, but he’s not. “Peter kept getting on my case about not being bitchy enough,� remembers Marte. “He’d say, ‘I know you have it in you.’ I thought I was doing it enough, but, no, I had to be more bitchy.�

Sollett wrote a traditional script with action and dialogue, and sharpened it at the Sundance Writers Lab. He raised $800,000 for the feature from Studio Canal, and rehearsals started in July 2001. It was a hot summer in New York. “We didn’t have any air-conditioning in my apartment, so we rehearsed on the roof every day for a month,� says Sollett.

Feeling their way

Using his screenplay as a road map, Sollett would guide the actors through broad improvisations. “Where they needed a line, I would give them one to shape the scene, and I would sculpt everything down to tell the story I wanted to tell. But I wouldn’t give them anything on paper. I preferred them to say things in a way they felt they needed to say them.�

Besides, it would have been nearly impossible to confine a spontaneous personality like Altagracia Guzman, who plays Grandma, to a set script. The role had been difficult to cast. There aren’t a lot of 70-year-old women thinking about becoming actors. Finally, close to shooting and desperate after seeing dozens of people, Ulysses Torrero, who cast the feature, had an inspiration: “Well, there is my aunt.�

A tiny, feisty native of the Dominican Republic, Guzman had more than enough of her own stories to go around. In the film she paints a vivid picture of growing up on a farm, milking cows and drinking the milk. “Each time we did a take she told a different story from her life, and each one was wonderful,� says Vives. “You couldn’t get her to be like, ‘OK, tell the story of the cows again.’ �

Sollett was trying to create an environment in which amateurs could feel comfortable enough to be themselves. He put together a small crew and shot in 16 millimeter to keep things fast and fluid. For one scene, the cameraman got into the bathtub with Victor; a 35-millimeter camera would have taken up the whole tub. “We wanted to give the actors as much freedom as we could to see how much they had to offer,� says Sollett, “and I didn’t want to be getting in the way of that with elaborate lighting setups and marks on the floor.�

For Sollett, “Victor Vargas� was a poem to a rich and vibrant neighborhood rarely represented on screen. When the film went to Cannes in May 2002 it received a standing ovation, and it’s been a hit on the international festival circuit. “One of the goals in writing this script is that it could take place anywhere -- Tokyo, London, L.A.,� says the director. Audiences may have never met these people or been to this place, but they recognize the truth when they see it.