Juan Salas was 5 months into various films projects when the opportunity came across to work with Damian Chapa, best known for his roles in featured films like “Blood in Blood Out”. Being a fan of this actor, Juan Salas submitted a unique script and received a voicemail from Damian days later. Juan Salas reached out to 2X World Champion Paulie Ayala to train the lead actor, Alexander Luna, for this featured boxing film and give perspective on what it’s like coming up in a boxing world. With a large setup for a sequel and new distribution on platforms like Vudu, “The Devil’s Ring” is making a huge difference in the world of filmmaking. Cameron Vitosh was given the opportunity to play a solid role in this boxing film and has since received new roles to show off his acting prowess. I’m excited that they decided to sit down with me and share their experiences, from a directing and acting perspective.
What was your original backgrounds before these film projects?
Juan: To dive into a little bit about myself, I’m originally from Fort Worth. I started with my film career at the Art Institute of Dallas and learned a lot there and transitioned into music videos. In music videos, I got to work with a lot of local artists like Duro, Big Chief, and Play N Skillz. I did a lot of music videos and that’s where I gained the skills necessary before I went into film.
Cameron: I got my artistic start on this project that we’re going to speak about right now. I caught the acting bug probably like two years ago, right before I met Juan. I just struggled trying to find a way to get onto a set somehow and met Juan. That was my first role and I fell in love with it and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I was playing college football and I stopped because I wanted to act. My friend was number one in Texas for amateur boxing at 154 and I always trained with him since I was in middle school. Michael Williams, who plays Leo Luciano in our film, came into our gym trying to learn how to box so he can look ready for the movie and prepared. He was talking about it, and so I said “Hey, I’m an actor and I want to get into it”. Michael states, “Oh cool. My director wants an extra for one particular scene, like for sparring”. I came in and Juan gives me a script to read. I do my lines and Juan tells me to step aside for a little bit and he starts talking to somebody else. About 20 to 30 minutes later, he comes over to me and he is like “How’d you like to play the little brother of the main character?” That’s how it all began with me and Juan’s relationship and it’s been magic since.
Were there any qualities or methods that you took from music videos into featured films?
Juan: My strategy ever since working on my degree was to go into movies and music videos were just my prep to sharpen my skills as far as telling a story. If you watch my work, you can see the progression from music videos to short films. I did a music video called “Off in a City” and that was a two-part music video, but it operated like a 10-minute short film. After a few years, I got tired of doing stuff for everyone else and I wanted to do something for me that I could put out there with my name. I would create music videos myself off a fixed budget, so that really transitioned well to larger films with different expenses.
Were there any factors that you didn’t expect in your first film project?
Cameron: Well it’s funny that you mentioned football because I will say the thing that popped out to me the most is that you need to be coachable on these sets. It’s not like you’re doing anything wrong, but it’s Juan’s vision. If he comes up to us and asks us to do something different, it means he just wants you to try something fresh. And so being coachable, I didn’t figure it out and it was just something that I was used to. It felt comfortable and felt normal to be in that type of setting.
Juan: Once we get into the movie, Cameron was more than ready for that. It was a good thing he had the football experience. We threw him into the ring sparring, but he was up for it physically. Since we’re on the subject, being a sportsman is like what got me into the Devil’s Ring. I used to play soccer in high school, so being on a team and the camaraderie really sparks a creative drive in me. My son Nathan played basketball and seeing him and his team duke it out on the court can be exciting, because they would lose a game and they would be pissed but come back with a new passion. That’s what sparked the Devil’s Ring, a film around the idea of sportsmanship. I wanted to write a story about sportsmanship and what better than something more condensed like boxing? I didn’t have to cast 12 people around a team. And to do a boxing movie, I knew we had to do something different. For example, I think my favorite boxing movie before we get into Devil’s Ring is probably Rocky 5 with Tommy Gunn. Everyone hates it, but it’s a drama story. What I wanted to do was a topic about the early stages of a boxing story, before they go pro or reach the level of Rocky. I wanted to tell the story of a boxing family and where they go, and that’s what brought us into Devil’s Ring. We were lucky and fortunate to sign on Damian Chapa of “Blood In, Blood Out”. I reached out with a script and thought he would say no, but I took the chance. He loved the idea and I knew I had to get the remaining actors ready for a physical component behind this film. Because being an actor and throwing them into something physically brutal wasn’t what I first thought. We threw Alex in there and the first round of sparring was physically exhausting, so that was that scenario.
Can you explain how physically draining the boxing scenes were?
Cameron: Whenever we got there on the day, I assumed we were going to be doing like tech sparring. This technique is when you’re basically just touching them here and there. I’ve been training in boxing since I think it was in high school, so I was comfortable with everything. There wasn’t any animosity or anything like that, we just got in there and we went at it for three rounds. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t three-minute rounds, because it felt like it was going forever. I don’t even remember if you had a stopwatch Juan, I think you were just calling it. We were conditioning enough too to where we could have kept going, but boy was I tired.
Juan: Being in a movie, you’ll never capture 100% the aspect of boxing. Boxing is real and brutal. I read somewhere that the film Creed included special effects in many of the boxing scenes. This makes sense because you obviously can’t risk the physical dangers on a 10 million actor. You get into our movie with the main actor and we tried to make the earlier scenes brutal, but we had to be more controlled with the later fight sequences in Devil’s Ring. We can’t use special effects, so they’re really ducking and going at it. And even though Alex’s scenes were more stylized, Alex was taken a beating from the other guys. Our lead actor trained for two weeks with Paulie Ayala, a real-life two-time world champion.
Did the Covid-19 pandemic have any impacts on the filming process?
Juan: We did film through the pandemic halfway through the movie. We started in 2019 and signed Cameron on and stopped filming for a while when March 2020 came around. When I noticed full shutdowns, I had to sit down and think about the filming process. Do you just blow it off? Do you risk everyone’s safety? Granted, there was a lot of money at stake. We paid for everything, we couldn’t just cancel and walk away, but we had to. A major studio can do that, but we can’t. Though, I’d rather have lost money than risked anyone at that point. That’s crazy to say, but we waited like five months and proceeded with caution. Everyone quarantined and we went back in to film the second half of the movie. We brought Cameron back as well, and by that point, I think everyone had started to advance. Cameron signed on to the CW’s Walker and the other actors were noticing important prospects as well.
How did you get involved with CW’s Walker?
Cameron: I just got an agent like June 2020, around my birthday. I had just started two months into having an agent and auditioned for the casting directors for my show now. But it was for a different show, it for like some British prince role, but I had to send in three or four self-tape auditions. I did three live auditions on Zoom. Three months later they send me a role for Walker and I also sent in three auditions for it or two live auditions and four self-tapes for it. Didn’t get that role, but then a month later they sent the role that I have now. I didn’t even do an audition process for that one, I sent in one audition and five days go by. What did I do this time? Well the sixth day they called me, and they say you booked the role.
What were the locations for the film?
Juan: For Devil’s Ring, we shot in Dallas a good amount of the time. Then we shot in Colorado and California. House of Dolls, my next featured film is completely in Los Angeles, that’s basically my Los Angeles project. We’re excited to expand in Los Angeles and work out there in the industry. Being in the industry itself has hurdles in production. From a director’s point in the industry, it’s really trials and error. But you must go out there and do it yourself and try to make something happen, as far as a director’s task of catching the attention of a studio or of a big producer. That’s always the goal to keep going and leveling up.
Cameron: I have a different mindset on acting than most people have. Just because you get into the acting side of things and they’re like it’s so competitive. There are a lot of people that are trying to be actors and I’ve never seen it as competitive because there are too many factors that go into it that I can’t control. I go in there, I kill the audition, they love what I did, but I just don’t look like the part. What can I do about that? I’ve never seen it as competitive because I just have the belief in myself that somebody out there is going to book me one of these days. The hardest part is finding the right manager or getting the right team behind you because the connections is really where it’s at. There are plenty of pretty people out there and plenty of great actors out there. I understand that I’m very fortunate, I started acting in January 2020 on this film and that was the first thing I ever did. I’m in class with people that have been acting for 15 years, and they’re still striving for that opportunity. I just need to continue working hard and I can go to acting classes and still get it better. I compare acting to football. As in football, I might get nervous that the quarterback might throw me too short, so then the linebacker is going to clean me up, I have a concussion or something. With acting, I know everything that’s going on and I know everything that’s happening. I have the lines in front of me. I’ve decided on what I’m going to do, what’s there to be nervous about. And so that’s just kind of the way I’ve approached things.
Were there any surprises in the audience feedback of the film?
Juan: It’s good to enjoy the fruits of your labor. For example, at the red-carpet premiere in Dallas we rented four theaters that weekend. We worked on the movie all year and it’s really rewarding when you hear the audience react. They even reacted to things I wouldn’t even have thought. For example, but Al has this big kiss scene at the end, and we heard a big roar from the people who attended. After a whole year of shooting and editing, it was rewarding on that note. When you’re doing episodes as an actor, I guess that’s a lot of character development.
