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Step Up 2 the Streets in our magazines

THE MOVIE: Step Up 2 the Streets

THE STARS:
Briana Evigan • Robert Hoffman • Adam G Sevani • Cassie Ventura
DIRECTOR: Jon M Chu

THE CONCEPT:
Rebellious newcomer Andie (Evigan) is an outcast trying to fit in at the elite Maryland School of the Arts, while still holding on to her dream of once again dancing with an underground Baltimore street crew. Chase (Hoffman) is a rising star at the school, who is looking to break out of his mold by forming a crew to compete in Baltimore’s biggest, most raw street dancing battle, ‘The Streets.’

U.S. RELEASE: February 14 2008, Nationwide
• Rated: PG-13

THE COMMENTS:

JON M CHU:
“I loved the first movie, but we just wanted to have fun in our movie, we don’t have anyone get shot, we don’t have drugs, we just wanted to jam it with great dances that we haven’t seen on You Tube and My Space, to really put it on another level and integrate it into a story. I would watch all these dance movies and there’d be seven numbers, and I’m like, ‘Where is all the dancing? Why are we spending time about the dead mother? Screw that! I don’t want to know about the dead mother, I want to see them dance!’”

ROBERT HOFFMAN:
“Briana and I clicked right from the beginning. I had read with a couple other girls and nothing was really happening. I was like, ‘Oh no, this is going to be tough.’ Briana was the last girl they brought in, and it was magic, right off the top. We just gelled. We understood each other. We hadn’t been directed to, but she and I went right off the script and started bantering, the jabs were there from the first minute, and yet the undertone of attraction was right in place.”

BRIANA EVIGAN:
“I think a lot of people can relate to Andie because she’s a girl who’s had a lot of problems with her family. She doesn’t have a mother. She doesn’t have a father. She’s adopted into another family and lives in an area that you maybe don’t want to live in. She’s just trying to follow her dream, and has all the ups and downs in the world, loses her friends, her boyfriend and her school, and she’s still strong enough to be able to get through it all and go the ‘The Streets.’”

CHU:
“There are very few leads that have a presence, that are cool and can dance. I met Robert on another project and I knew immediately we had to have him. Once we locked him down it was about finding the girl who could match him and have the same chemistry. Our movie is a fairytale, you have a prince and a princess who don’t realize the power they have in their own little world, and together they figure it out. With her we wanted to find a Disney princess, but what was cool about Briana was she had a edge to her. She has the raspy voice, she’s a very real girl, and I think that made the movie feel more real. Briana’s a great dancer, but we surrounded her with the best dancers, so she had to really pick up her game, and she worked her butt off and made it happen.”

HOFFMAN:
“Some of the dance moves were dangerous. I’ve trained since I was a toddler, so I’m as capable as you can get to execute them safely. But there were injuries. I had a terribly sore back, and my knees were just banged up to all hell. The trickiest thing was dancing in the rain, and I didn’t see it coming. I had a jacket, a t-shirt and jeans on, all of which were completely drenched in water. So, a very basic move, with me just kicking off my back onto my feet, I couldn’t do it because I had 10 pounds of weight on me. But it wasn’t slippery, I was really worried about that. We used a carpet that was the color of the concrete, and a wet carpet actually is a wonderful dance floor, surprisingly.”

EVIGAN on seeing the opponent crew’s dance they do at the end of the movie:
“Oh, God, we were terrified. We were intimidated by them. They were building pyramids and jumping off each other, and we had straight choreography. But they’re all really nice people, so there weren’t any personality conflicts with anybody. The dancing was like, ‘Whoa, they are good!’”

CHU:
“This was my opportunity to make a real dance movie, the dance movie that I always wanted to see. We ripped the script apart and came in with a totally different concept, and said, ‘We want to show popping, locking, breaking, salsa, I want to put a trampoline into a club scene, and we want to dance in the rain, ‘ because I’d watched Singin' in the Rain so many times. It’s not as easy as it looks.”

Written by Judy Sloane. Back to top

Images above © Touchstone Pictures
Feature © 2008 Visual Imagination.
Not for reproduction.

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