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MillimeterFade to Black: John Turturro, Director
Jul 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Beth Pinsker
Part of John Turturro is always missing when he is acting, even when he is at his most intense. Not that anyone would notice. Ever since the lanky Brooklynite made his screen debut as an uncredited “guy at table” in Raging Bull when he was 23, he has been one of his generation's most sought-after character actors. But in one of the only clichés in a career full of imaginative and original performances, what he really wants to do is direct.
“I really feel like I'm using all of myself,” Turturro says from the set of his third directorial project, Romance & Cigarettes, a $10 million musical in the old Hollywood style that stars James Gandolfini as a philandering working class dad who is trying to be a good guy. Susan Sarandon plays his wife and Kate Winslet is his mistress, with Mary-Louise Parker and Mandy Moore as his daughters. It's due to be released in 2005. “If I could do just this for the rest of my life, I'd be really happy,” Turturro adds as he digs into ribs from the craft service table.
Turturro first got serious about getting behind the camera in the early 1990s on the set of Barton Fink, which took him from bit parts as an Italian neighborhood guy to a starring role in a vexing character study. He was shooting scenes where Fink sat at a typewriter supposedly pecking away at some obscure and inscrutable work, and he wanted to get in character by actually writing something instead of just randomly hitting the keys. So he started chipping away at a screenplay he had been developing in his head.
It would take him a dozen years, 30 more films as an actor, two other directorial projects and a year off in 2000 before he got Romance & Cigarettes into production in partnership with United Artists, the Coen brothers, GreeneStreet Films, and Icon Productions.
Turturro didn't stray far for the shoot, as he did for Mac, which starred his brother, Nicholas Turturro, or Illuminata. He shot entirely on location in New York, mostly in one little house that would be described as being in a quiet neighborhood if it weren't directly under the flight path to JFK International Airport. The house is just five blocks from his childhood home in the Rosedale section of Queens, where his mother still lives. For the director, that realism was part of the charm — not to mention being able to go home for lunch — but for the sound engineer, it was excruciating.
Tod A. Maitland, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Seabiscuit, JFK, and Born on the Fourth of July, spent most of the production trying to time scenes to the thundering arrivals and departures. “There are some days where they are just frighteningly close,” he says from his little perch in the house in what was a child's bedroom. Maitland's other big technological challenge was matching music to the performances since most of the production numbers are lip-synched, with very little original singing.
Cinematographer Tom Stern had to work in even tighter quarters, shooting the 35mm production from doorways and corners, with not much room for additional lighting and little natural light coming in from the few windows.
“A studio would definitely have been easier; this is almost impossible how small this is,” Turturro says, waving his hands around the living room of the house, which is filled with monitors and other equipment. “But the level of crew and cast we got by working in New York was incredible.”
