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| John Turturro with his Heart of Sarajevo award Photo: Courtesy of Sarajevo Film Festival |
John Turturro received a Heart of Sarajevo award at the Sarajevo Film Festival last night for his career.
The actor, known for films including Barton Fink and Quiz Show, took part in a conversation event at the festival yesterday to talk about his work in front of and behind the camera.
He partially credits his love of film to his parents who were big film lovers. He also says that as they didn’t travel around much as a family films were “emotional transportation for me”.
He said his big inspiration was when he saw a clip of Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy when he was about aged 12.
He recalls: “I couldn’t see it because it was rated X at the time.”
He adds: “I was shocked because I was thinking, well, that guy looks like someone in our family. And that really blew my mind”
The original production of Danny And The Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley in 1984 “put him on the map”.
In 1987, he starred in Five Corners, alongside Jodie Foster and Tim Robbins, as an unhinged rapist. Recalling going to the premiere of the film - which includes a particularly visceral scene with his character’s mother - with his parents, he says: “My mother was crying. My father was roaring with laughter.”
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| John Turturro on the Coen Brothers: 'We always have a really good collaboration and I think when you do have that, that’s a big advantage' Photo: Amber Wilkinson |
It was Five Corners that led to Turtorro catching the eye of Spike Lee, who subsequently cast him in Do The Right Thing, which charts simmering racial tensions in New York.
Turturro says: “I grew up in a Black neighbourhood, he grew up in an Italian neighbourhood. I read the script and we talked about what role I should play and I thought the role of the racist son was the most interesting.”
He adds: “I got to do the other side of that in Jungle Fever and that was important to me.”
Some of Turturro’s most memorable roles have been in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen - from Miller’s Crossing through films including The Big Lebowski and Barton Fink to O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
Turturro studied with Frances McDormand, who married Joel in 1984. Referring to the Coens, he says: “They saw Five Corners and said they were going to write a role for me in Miller’s Crossing but I guess they had writer's block in the middle of that. Then they wrote Barton Fink and so after I did Miller’s Crossing, they said they had this other film.”
He adds: “We always have a really good collaboration and I think when you do have that, that’s a big advantage. You have a shorthand that you develop and you can push it and you can try things even if they’re wrong.”
When it came to The Big Lebowski, his character of ten-pin bowler Jesus Quintana, it was inspired by a paedophile in Reinaldo Povod’s La Puta Vida, which the Coens had seen Turturro play. In a key scene in the film, his character poses and licks a bowling ball before scoring a strike to the Gypsy Kings’ version of Hotel California.
Turturro says his horsing around was “really just for their pleasure”, adding: “I didn’t really think that they were going to put that in the film. It was like a first-grade type of thing when you try to make your friends laugh. I didn't know they were going to use the Gypsy Kings.”
In a wide-ranging conversation with Alissa Simon, from Variety, the star also talked about his own writing and directing career, including NYC working-class musical Romance & Cigarettes, which features James Gandolfini and Kate Winslet as a couple. Recalling the shooting of a sex scene between them, Turturro says it wasn’t working with the pair of them together, so he ended up perching Winslet on a gym ball.
Talking about Winslet’s Tula, he says: “She was a scary character, very vulgar.”
“I put her on an exercise ball and had the prop person hold their feet - I also made them put towels in their mouth because I didn’t want them to laugh. She was improvising, she had a monologue and it was really obscene. I couldn’t use all of it.”
He adds: “But then the problem was the reverse on James, how do we connect that? So I just took Kate’s wig and I flicked it [into the shot], Ethan, one of the producers, called and said, ‘We’ll just add sounds of fruit being crushed’. And you believe it completely because of your imagination.”
Turturro may have become famous for his indie work but there’s also some blockbusters in his back catalogue, including the recurrent role of Simmons in the Transformers movies.
“One of my kids said, ‘We like the toys, we like the cartoon, you shouldn’t read it, you should just do it’.”
He adds: “I call it my electrical film. Normally, what I do is plumbing, but that’s my electrical film. It’s more of a sketch-like approach than a detailed painting.”
Turturro says his performances in the film were inspired by the franchise’s original director Michael Bay. “I basically imitated him and he would get really upset. ‘Do you think this is a joke? This is a serious movie’ … based on a toy!”
The actor says he used to bring a Transformer toy to set and say, “They said it was a toy…but we know better. He would say, ‘You can’t do that’ and I would do it over and over again.”
He adds: “I enjoyed was was a bizarre collaboration but I basically was aping him a lot of the time. It was fun.”
