John Turturro at the Sarajevo Film Festival Variety Lounge

Variety

Transcript

00:00So Lisa, before you give me the fifth degree and put me on the hot spot,

00:05you saw me in a play in 1984?

00:08Yeah, at the Humana Theatre Festival in Louisville.

00:11Wow. This was really kind of my beginning when I got out of Yale Drama School.

00:16That was the first time we actually did a production of it,

00:18and then we did it in New York, and I got a lot of work from that play.

00:22And you got awards too, right?

00:24Yeah. What you saw, that was very special, because we didn't do it every night.

00:29It was in repertory, and I remember there were slaps against the wall,

00:34and I had to punch the wall, and I cut my hand up really badly a bunch of times.

00:39Wow.

00:40Yeah.

00:41Yeah, that was a big deal.

00:53You've been directing theatre a lot, but when did you decide that you wanted to do a movie?

00:58Do a movie, yeah.

00:59Well, my first movie is Mac.

01:01Right.

01:02I did it as a play three different times, and all the people that I was thinking about directing it,

01:07they were like, you know, we have our own projects.

01:10I thought, you know what, maybe I should think about directing it,

01:14and Nancy Tenenbaum was my producer, and she got me money to do a short.

01:19It wasn't a short that had one little story,

01:23but you could see the interactions, the interrelationships, and the humor of the piece.

01:29After I did that, people offered me movies to direct, but I didn't think I was a director,

01:37but I could direct something that I understood,

01:41so I've been very sort of selective about what I've done.

01:48Blackberg is a free man!

01:49What is going on here?

01:51It's poetry!

01:52I really like Romance and Cigarettes, it makes me think of Dennis Potter.

01:56Yes, I think he was really on to something really profound, in a way,

02:02about the potency of cheap music, as he says, and I think he's brilliant.

02:08You know, he came from a very poor background,

02:11so the power of music, it's almost like prayer, you know, to transport you,

02:17and so I used a lot of music that I grew up with.

02:21It took me two years to clear the rights before I shot the movie,

02:27and I worked with someone, Joel and Ethan, Chris Robertson, his name is,

02:31he helped me, and Bruce Springsteen helped me, too.

02:33It's something that's very close to my heart, that film,

02:37because it's very personal, and there's a lot of imagination, too.

02:42I see that you're in two of the most anticipated festival films of the fall,

02:47that being Amo Devar's The Room Next Door, and also Sean Ellis' The Cut.

02:52Can you talk a little about that?

02:54Well, Pedro's movie is his first full-length film in English.

02:58I've known Pedro since 1992, I'm a huge fan of his.

03:02I'm in support of the ladies, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore,

03:06it's really their film.

03:08I play both of their ex-boyfriends, of both women.

03:12So I have a nice part, but it's a beautiful script,

03:15and it's the first time he's worked in English, I mean, in full length.

03:19And Sean Ellis is someone I really like, I like his work very much.

03:23Orlando Bloom is the protagonist in the film, but I have a really good role in that.

03:28What's the advantage of having a long-term relationship with a filmmaker?

03:32Well, it's a big advantage because you develop a level of trust with each other.

03:37There are directors that I've worked with, you know,

03:40he passed away, Francesco Rosi, Robert Redford's not making any films,

03:44or Tom DiCillo, I really like Alice and Anders.

03:48Sometimes you don't get a return engagement

03:51because they don't have the right thing for you or whatever,

03:55but it's a very big advantage because you start out

04:00with a history of knowing that you're on the same page.

04:04And so you can try things without the fear of someone wanting to fire you

04:11or just say, this doesn't work.

04:14And you can make a mistake, you can try something and say,

04:17OK, you don't like that, I'll try something different.

04:19And if you look at people throughout history who've had long relationships,

04:24it's really served them well.

04:26You mentioned the late, great Francesco Rosi,

04:29you were Primo Levi in La Truce, how did that come about?

04:33He had seen me in Barton Fink.

04:35I was doing a play off-Broadway at the same time,

04:39a Brecht play called The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uy,

04:43which I was playing basically a version of Hitler.

04:47And he sent me this thing about Primo Levi.

04:50I had never read Primo Levi, he wanted me to do it

04:53and it took us many years to get it together.

04:56So by then I had read everything on Primo Levi about subject matter.

05:01I spent five years, as I was doing other things,

05:06reading and talking to him, and then we got to do it.

05:10The movie's maybe not perfect,

05:12but there's a lot of beautiful, beautiful things in the movie.

05:15We shot most of it in the Ukraine, a lot of it in Lviv.

05:19I lived there for six months and it was a great experience for me

05:24as a human being, as a reader, as a student.

05:29Of course you can only get as close as you can,

05:32but it really affected me throughout the rest of what I did afterwards.

05:36That was the one role that it took me a long time to sort of come out of,

05:43and I'm such an admirer of Primo Levi.

05:46He's a person that I go back to and read

05:49when things are happening in the world,

05:52because I think he's a great writer.

05:55He brings you to the subject matter where you could imagine,

05:59well, what if I was in that situation, how would I behave?

06:04And he doesn't write as a victim at all.

06:07We've been talking mostly about independent films,

06:10but you've also been in some big Hollywood titles too,

06:13like the two Transformers films.

06:15Three, I made three.

06:17Three Transformers films, and the Batman.

06:19When Transformers came, both of my kids, they said,

06:22you should just do it, and don't read it, just do it.

06:25And so I did it really for them.

06:27It's a different kind of work.

06:29It's kind of like maybe not as detailed of a painting,

06:32it's more of a sketch, you know, with black and white.

06:36But within that, you have to have a lot of inventiveness and energy.

06:40It's like playing with your kids.

06:42And then the Batman thing, I was always a Batman fan,

06:46but I said I would do it if I could wear certain glasses,

06:49so I could have my own mask.

06:51What else have you got coming up?

06:53Basically I'm concentrating on my own projects.

06:56I have a project based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book

07:01called Is There No Place on Earth for Me.

07:05And it's about a woman who's a schizophrenic,

07:09and her whole family, and it's all about the whole mental health system,

07:13which, because of my own personal experiences,

07:16I know fortunately and unfortunately a lot about.

07:20And it's something that I would love to do in a screenplay form,

07:24and I have some of the people, so I'm hoping to do that.

07:28But it's a very hard subject matter,

07:30because they always do the exception in that story.

07:34They don't actually do the journey of that,

07:38and that's a different world.

07:40And it's much more complex, actually,

07:43and a lot less sensationalized,

07:46but with a lot of black humor in it.

07:49So that's something I feel like I'd be able to give voice to some of those people.

07:54It's very meaningful to me, so I hope to get the opportunity to do that.

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