Movies With Butter

Zoe Saldana now has three franchises to her name: Avatar, Star Trek and Guardians of the Galaxy. Her passion project has been a biography of musician Nina Simone, and she’s wrapped filming on the movie Nina. She expects it to be ready for next year’s Cannes Film Festival.

“We’re working on it and hopefully by Cannes of next year we’ll be walking down that red carpet with Nina,” Saldana said at a press conference for her animated film The Book of Life.

Learning to sing as Nina Simone actually paid off when she had to perform some singing in the animated film too. “I sang when I shot Nina and I worked vigorously with an amazing voice coach,” she said. “By the time I started doing the sessions for Book of Life and we got to sing it had just been a year, year and a half. I sort of still remembered all those things. It’s amazing what you discover that you’re able to do once you really put your body and your soul into a skill and you try nothing but to master it. You discover a lot about yourself, that you can actually do something if you put your mind to it. I realize that I’m not as bad and I’m not as tone def as I thought I was, and that some people would appreciate my shower singing. It was fun.”

Both the Avatar sequels and a third Star Trek film are scheduled to begin next year, and there will be a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel too. Saldana joked that keeping track of her three franchise characters - Neytiri, Gamora and Uhura - gets a little schizophrenic sometimes. “It does, at night,” she said.

Saldana will also give birth before those films shoot, but she does not expect to slow down much. “Well, I might need to slow down to breast feed but other than that, the sky’s the limit. As long as I wake up every morning with the passion to be an artist, I’m going to continue knocking on doors, beating down barriers and playing as many roles as I possibly can.”

The Book of Life opens Friday.

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