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| Interview: John Turturro on "Romance & Cigarettes" |
by Peter Sobczynski
The acclaimed actor-turned-director talks about his latest project, the musical "Romance & Cigarettes," and its long journey to the screen.
Assuming that you are a moviegoer of taste and discretion (why else would you be reading these words), I would presume that if I were to tell you that there was a movie coming out with a cast featuring the likes of James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Mary-Louise Parker, Mandy Moore, Aida Turturro and Christopher Walken, that collection of individuals might spark your interest. If I were to inform you that the film in question was a sexy and silly comedy-melodrama in which a weak-willed and hopelessly romantic working-class husband (Gandolfini) finds himself caught between his strong-willed wife (Sarandon) and his sex-bomb mistress (Winslet), I think that you might be further intrigued. Now how would you react if I told you that the entire film was also a full-blown musical that sees the aforementioned cast singing and dancing to an eclectic collection of tunes from such artists as Englebert Humperdink (“A Man Without Love”), Janis Joplin (“Piece Of My Heart”), James Brown (“It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”), Ute Lemper (“Little Water Song”), Connie Francis (“Do You Love Me Like You Kiss Me?”), the Buena Vista Social Club (“El Cuarto de Tula”) and Bruce Springsteen (“Red Headed Woman”)? My guess is that while such a revelation might turn a few of you off, it might make such a film seem even more irresistible in the eyes of many other potential viewers.
In case you were wondering, John Turturro, the actor best-known for his appearances in many of the films of Spike Lee (“Do the Right Thing,” “Clockers,” “She Hate Me”) and the Coen Brothers (“Miller’s Crossing,” “Barton Fink,” “The Big Lebowski,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”), wrote and directed just such a film in 2005 by the name of “Romance & Cigarettes.” “Well, if it was made in 2005, why haven’t I heard of it?,” you may ask and therein lies a sad tale of contemporary Hollywood. Turturro, whose previous directorial efforts have included “Mac” (1992) and “Illuminata” (1998), made the film for United Artists, which was then a division of MGM. Just as the film was about to be released, however, MGM was purchased by Sony Pictures and when the new people in charge got a look at the film, they didn’t know what to make of it and decided to put it on a shelf. Since then, it has been trapped in a strange studio limbo and rumors began circulating that Sony was simply going to dump it directly to DVD. Luckily, like most examples of the musical genre, the saga of “Romance & Cigarettes” has a happy ending after all. Using his own money, Turturro has been slowly distributing the film himself around the country and it has been receiving the rave reviews and packed houses that it should have gotten two years ago.
Recently, Turturro got on the phone to discuss “Romance & Cigarettes,” the challenges of filming an offbeat contemporary musical and the even greater challenges of getting the film seen by the public.
For those of you in the Chicago area, John Turturro will be appearing at the Music Box Theatre (3733 North Southport) on December 8th to introduce screenings of “Romance & Cigarettes” at 7:00 PM and 9:30 PM. For information on obtaining tickets, go to the Music Box website at www.musicboxtheatre.com
Although you are primarily known as an actor, you have made three films as a director–“Mac” (1992), “Illuminata” (1998) and now “Romance & Cigarettes.” How do you think that you have developed as a filmmaker over the course of those three films?
I’ve gotten crazier. I think this is the freest that I have ever been as a filmmaker. I let my imagination kind of run wild a little bit. I think it is connected to my other two films. One [“Mac”] was about my dad and his generation and the next one [“Illuminata”] was a turn-of-the-century theater piece that was about a world that was changing. The two of those films together sort of gave birth to this–a creative and theatrical exploration of the world that I grew up in.
What was the initial inspiration for “Romance & Cigarettes”–was it the story or the notion of doing a musical?
It was always to tell the story. I always thought that there was something there but I didn’t know how to do it. What happened was that in my second film, I did this musical fantasy sequence in which the playwright is imagining that everyone likes his play when in reality, they aren’t. That gave me the idea of how to attack it. I had been thinking about it and I had written down a bunch of things when I was doing “Barton Fink”–I had wanted to really be working on something and so I wrote the stuff in the beginning leading up to the Englebert Humperdink song. I had ideas and scenes and some snatches of dialogue but it wasn’t until my second film until I knew what to do with it.
I thought that I had a completely original idea until people told me to look at Dennis Potter[ the creator of such acclaimed musical dramas as “Pennies From Heaven” and “The Singing Detective”], whose work I was aware of but had never actually seen. I watched a little of his stuff and I was impressed by it but I didn’t want to be beholden to it. I did read a book of interviews with him which was very inspirational because he talked about growing up dirt-poor and the potency and power of popular music. I realized that this was kind of what I was thinking, although I was going for a slightly more racy version of it.
One of the things that is interesting when watching the film is that it combines a number of different dramatic approaches that you wouldn’t normally think would work together. You have the down-to-earth and realistic working-class milieu that the characters inhabit, the highly-stylized song-and-dance numbers that they break into at the drop of a hat and dialogue that is almost Charles Bukowski-like in its blend of poetry and raunchiness.
I like Bukowski. I was offered the chance to adapt one of his books, “Women,” which I didn’t think was that adaptable at the time. I kept thinking that he writes about poor people and people like James Brown and Etta James and Bruce Springsteen also write about poor and lower-middle-class people and since I grew up that way, I knew that world. Everybody has an imagination and a sensuality and I just thought that it would be an interesting thing to explore. With popular music, the less people have, the more they use it as emotional transportation to escape your surroundings and as a way to fantasize or express how you feel when language fails.
You mentioned that you had the Englebert Humperdink song in mind right from the start. How did you come to choose the other songs included in the film, an eclectic group that ranges from Tom Jones (“Delilah”) to Connie Francis(“Do You Love Me Like You Kiss Me?”) to Bruce Springsteen (“Red-Headed Woman”)?
That song was like the template in a way–it had this kind of romantic and operatic quality that was kind of cheesy in a way that you could laugh with and enjoy at the same time. I knew I wanted to start the whole thing with a big circus or parade and end it a capella–I always had that in mind because I think that is what happens in life. I had those two songs–“A Man Without Love” and “The Girl That I Marry”–and after that, the only song that I knew that I wanted to work in for sure, because I was thinking about a subplot for Chris Walken, was “Delilah.” With the other songs, I listened to lots of songs. Some of them were in my vocabulary, obviously, but I listened to literally thousands of them to find the ones that would help me propel the plot.
Were there any songs that you wanted to get but were unable to secure the rights?
I got every song that I wanted. There were other songs that I was interested in that I had in my first draft, like “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” by The Crystals. That was a hard song to get and I could have gotten it but I didn’t want to use it. There were other doo-wop songs but I felt like I needed any more of them.
Although the cast is an uncommonly strong one, most of the performers are not exactly famous for their musical capabilities–Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon have appeared in musicals and Mandy Moore is a singer but that is about the extent of it.
I wanted people who were earthy and that you would believe lived in these very modest circumstances and who had humanity to them and who could be humorous–people who could juggle, in a sense. If they could sing a little bit, that would be great because everybody wants to be able to sing. I didn’t know if they were going to sing along or lip-sync at first–most of the time, we had them singing along to their private soundtrack that is embedded in their unconscious. Obviously, the dominant singer is the professional one, the one that they want to be, and that is something that we played around with. That was my main concern–I didn’t really want to cast people who were known for musicals. The whole idea of the film is that people want to be able to do that even though they aren’t able to do so on that level.
Of course, when you are watching Kate Winslet doing her numbers, you would think that she had been doing musicals all her life from the way that she throws herself into them.
It is a really amazing performance that she gives. She actually sings really well–she grew up singing because her dad was in a band. That “Little Water Song,” she actually did a beautiful version of it and I didn’t put it alongside the Ute Lemper as it played along because the Ute Lemper was just a little bit better since she is a professional singer but Kate’s was really good, as was the Connie Francis. I think she gives a miraculous performance–she basically gets to do everything in just about a half-hour of screen time.
Can you talk a little about the stagings for some of the musical numbers? Some of them are done in the simplest manner possible while others are given a much more elaborate and stylized treatment–the sequence in which Tula dances amidst an apartment fire to the strains of the Buena Vista Social Club looks like what might have resulted if Frank Tashlin and Russ Meyer had somehow teamed up to do a musical.
[Laughing] Well, that was kind of a non-linear song in that it doesn’t really have a progression. That was a complete fantasy in Nick’s head so when I got the song, I thought about what I wanted to do with it. Almost all the firemen in the scene are real firemen, actually. We shot a lot of footage for that scene because that song just goes on and on–we had to truncate it a bit. That was a fun thing to shoot.
How close is the final version of “Romance & Cigarettes” to how you pictured it in your head as you were writing it?
I’m really proud of the film. When you see it with an audience, it is a real audience-pleasing film. Audiences are surprised and delighted and they really laugh in a hearty way because they recognize certain things in the film. I think it may have surpassed what I thought. I’m pretty happy with how it came out. It is always different from how you imagined it but I am certainly not at all disappointed. I had a great cast and I think it is beyond what I imagined. I got some incredible performances and I got the music that I wanted, so I am very happy with it.
The one dark side to “Romance & Cigarettes” is the fact that it has been sitting on a shelf for over two years after being orphaned as a result of MGM/United Artists, the studio that you made it for back in 2005, being bought up by Sony, who decided not to release it.
With a film like this, you have to have a champion. United Artists was our investor–they understood it, shepherded it along, saw it play with test audiences and were preparing a nice, medium-sized release. I was working with 200 people and in a matter of a couple of weeks–we knew they were going to be bought but we thought it was going to take a long time and that they would still be there by the time we finished. In a matter of weeks, everybody was gone. I have made movies for companies where the regimes have changed and they have bee dumped. This movie wasn’t even dumped. We asked them to see it with an audience–we didn’t force them to see it with an audience and maybe we should have–because we were worried that they wouldn’t get it if they saw it alone because they weren’t equipped for it and they had no idea how people would respond to it. We were right–when they saw it, they said that they didn’t understand it and didn’t know what it was. We said that the upside of the film was that it was different and that it plays fantastic with an audience.
Then we got stuck in this very difficult place because while the movie wasn’t gigantic, it wasn’t small, so the asking price was a reasonable price but kind of hefty for a smaller company. As for other companies, they were asking “Why don’t they want it?” because they assumed that they tested it and that it didn’t test well, which was as far from the truth as possible. These things happen in life but we have been able to bring it out and the “New York Times” and “The New Yorker” and “The Boston Globe” gave us rave reviews and Roger [Ebert] gave us a tremendous review. I am really happy to be showing it to audiences because it is the kind of film that was made to watch in a communal setting. It is a great thing that I have finally been able to get it out. That is why you make something–to share it with other people.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2311
originally posted: 12/04/07 13:34:21
last updated: 12/04/07 14:51:12
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