Michael Cera Video Interview On ‘Magic Magic,’ Juno Temple, Sebastian Silva, Arrested Development

Yeah, well, I did study Spanish for a few months. First in Los Angeles for maybe two, three months everyday, five days a week…at the beginning I was doing eight hour days and then my teacher told me like ‘I think this eight hour day thing is a little intense, why don’t we go back down to like five hour days’ [laughs]. But I had a lovely teacher which is why I think is the reason I was able to like get my teeth into it. Cause I just wanted to keep going with her and get better and better and she was just this benevolent, patient, wonderful teacher so I really think she’s really a big part of why I got so into it. And apart from that I went to Santiago I was living with Sebastian’s family… practicing Spanish and he showed up eventually he wasn't there for awhile it was just me and them—and then when he showed up we would just spend time together and do things in the city and everyday probably once a day we would talk about the movie—just because we were excited about the movie—and talk about the character and, yeah unwittingly it was like marinating and we were finding little things in the character and finding out how to do it and it all went into the soup.

Well, I had seen his film The Maid, and I really loved The Maid after seeing that I thought I’d like to meet this filmmaker. I didn’t know if he spoke English or anything and turns out he lives in New York and speaks English… And we had very similar sensibility and kind of, sense of humor. We got along right way it was pretty easy to just be friends… and yeah we sort of just said let's maybe work together—find something, and he sent me the script and the character was Chilean in the script at first and I said to him can this person be American and it just came together.

Jeez, I don’t know I mean… for me I didn’t have anything half as challenging as Juno, had to do physically [laughs] and emotionally in the movie I mean she’s like doing these scenes where we’re shooting for like you know seven hours doing one scene where she’s like ferociously crying and I think that’s very physically draining just watching her do that was impressive. And you know I felt for her and then she had to jump into freezing cold water with clothes on in middle of the night—jump into black void. I was really impressed that she was able to do it. It was very scary.

It was really strange… really really strange and very fun, and just totally uncanny and unbelievable and you know I was just always going through waves of processing what was happening because you know it’s not something you’re conditioned to expect when a TV show is cancelled you move on its done. So it’s weird to come back, we were always struggling just to keep our heads above the water and you know getting to work with all those people again was something I never really expected so. I think its possible I think the story could keep going. It merits more, so we’ll see I guess. It’s probably very hard to pull off.