John Turturro at the Sarajevo Film Festival Variety Lounge
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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.