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MillimeterDirector Stanley Tucci
Sep 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Matt Cheplic
"I look for people who have a great sense of humor," declares Stanley Tucci. "People who can get something across comically are usually great actors. If you say 'Well, I only do drama'... then you're not a good actor. You haveto be able to do everything."
Such a credo might be evident in the funny, poignant Big Night, Tucci's critically lauded debut as a writer-director. But it comes bursting through in his second film, The Impostors. Much broader than its predecessor, The Impostors is a charming, frenetic romp that makes good use of not only Tucci's acting skills, but those of Oliver Platt, Steve Buscemi, Lili Taylor, Isabella Rossellini, and other notables. The story of unlucky actors trapped aboard an ocean liner brimming with surreal characters and even weirder circumstances, the film is set during the Depression and likewise invokes a golden-age sensibility.
"I like the distance the past affords. People are freer to enjoy themselves. It's more playful to me, more theatrical. It's also a tribute to films I grew up watching on TV: Things like The Twentieth Century, Marx Brothers' movies, Preston Sturges' stuff, His Girl Friday. It ultimately goes back to theater, like Comedia Dell'Arte, where you have all these stock characters." Content with the cast he had assembled, Tucci then endeavored to make them stretch a little. "I tried to cast them in roles that they'd never played on film. For instance, people might cast Hope Davis in Lili Taylor's role. But that's too easy."
Prior to Big Night, it was Taylor who introduced Tucci to Ken Kelsch, who would serve as DP on both films. Tucci was familiar with, among other things, Kelsch's work on a number of Abel Ferrara's movies. "When I saw Bad Lieutenant, I thought it was beautifully shot. It's so bizarre, but it has real beauty-but not Hollywood beauty, more like a European film. I liked the coldness of it. Actually, I was a little nervous to hire him at first, because Ken's a big personality."
But Kelsch lent Big Night the hardcore photography knowledge Tucci had never picked up ("I'm bad with film stocks-all those numbers..."), during his classical theater training. That, and the work of co-director Campbell Scott, helped Tucci make a relatively painless entry into filmmaking. And while The Impostors features Scott as a lovesick, fascist crew member, it is a solo directing job for Tucci. Taking the trend even further, he reveals he will not even act in the next picture he directs, a Howard Rodman screenplay adapted from New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. But that does not mean he harbors an inflated sense of his directing talents. "When I'm acting, and I finish a scene, I'll walk right over to the director and the DP, just to listen. I can't help it. You have to be careful not to step on anyone's toes, but it's really just curiosity."
While his young filmmaking career is colored by shifts in style, tone, and setting, Tucci's work is informed by a straightforward, narrative quality often found in New York-area directors. "It has to do with irony. I see that more in New York scripts and people than I do in things that come out of Los Angeles. A lot of scripts that come out of Hollywood could only come out of Hollywood-they seem to come from other films, not from life."
"I just don't trust a place where the sun shines all the time," he continues. "In New York, if a kid goes to private school, he still has to get on the subway or the bus and have contact with people. In L.A., they get in the car, they go to school, they get back in the car. There's no, 'Let's walk to the museum.' I mean, the walk to the museum a lot of times is a lot more fascinating than the museum itself."
