JOEL & ETHAN COHEN
präsentieren
Regie und Drehbuch von
JOHN TURTURRO
Romance & Cigarettes
James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi
Dauer : 106 Min.
FILMVERLEIH MEDIENBETREUUNG
MONOPOLE PATHÉ FILMS AG Esther Bühlmann
Neugasse 6, Postfach, 8031 Zürich Niederdorfstrasse 54, 8001 Zürich
Tel 044 277 70 83 Fax 044 277 70 89 Tel 044 261 08 57 Fax 044 261 08 64
http://www.pathefilms.ch/
UNITED ARTISTS
AND
JOEL AND ETHAN COHEN
PRESENT
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
ICON ENTERTAINMENT INTERNATIONAL
A
GREENESTREET FILMS
PRODUCTION
A FILM BY
JOHN TURTURRO
ROMANCE & CIGARETTES
JAMES GANDOLFINI
SUSAN SARANDON
KATE WINSLET
STEVE BUSCEMI
BOBBY CANNAVALE
MANDY MOORE
MARY-LOUISE PARKER
AIDA TURTURRO
AND
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN
EDDIE IZZARD
BARBARA SUKOWA
DAVID THORNTON
ELAINE STRITCH
Written and directed by
JOHN TURTURRO
Produced by
JOHN PENOTTI
JOHN TURTURRO
Executive Producers
JANA EDELBAUM
MATTHEW ROWLAND
NICK HILL
Executive Producers
JOEL COEN
ETHAN COEN
Director of Photography
TOM STERN
Production and Costume Design
DONNA ZAKOWSKA
Edited by
RAY HUBLEY
Casting by
TODD THALER
A
JANUS FILMS
CO-PRODUCTION
Unit Production Manager
MATTHEW ROWLAND
First Assistant Director
TODD PFEIFFER
Second Assistant Director
SHEA ROWAN
Choreography by
TRICIA BROUK
“Delilah” Choreography by
MARGIE GILLIS
Music Supervisor
CHRIS ROBERTSON
Production Sound Mixer/Designer
TOD A. MAITLAND, C.A.S.
SYNOPSIS
Romance & Cigarettes is a down-and-dirty musical love story. Nick (James Gandolfini) is a New York ironworker married to Kitty (Susan Sarandon), a strong but gentle woman with whom he has three grown daughters. He is secretly carrying on a torrid affair with the flame-haired Tula (Kate Winslet). When his wife catches him and Tula wants a commitment, Nick finds himself a prisoner of his primal urges. A good man at heart, he must find his way back to his family before he runs of out chances.
Drawing on inspirations as diverse as Charles Bukowski and The Honeymooners, this romantic adventure features songs that are anthems of our time—from James Brown, Janis Joplin, Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, Bruce Springsteen, and more—which illuminate the characters' hopes and dreams. When pushed to their breaking points (and beyond), these conflicted characters break into song, singing along—sometimes lip-synching, sometimes in full voice—with the music lodged in their subconscious.
ABOUT THE FILM
By John Turturro (Writer/Director)
The idea for this movie was born during the filming of Barton Fink. I decided that I should be writing something for real when I was being photographed. On my typewriter I typed the title, the theme, the first scene, and the song “Man Without Love,” and a list of ideas for other scenes. I thought it was a great title and an interesting idea, but put it away for a long time.
While I was editing my second film Illuminata, there was a small musical sequence in it which seemed to spring a leak in my brain: the fantasy that we all have of being able to express ourselves musically, in whatever mood we’re in.
For me, Romance & Cigarettes is a working class opera. When people don’t have money, they escape through song, much like prayer. Being a lover of Fellini, Powell and Pressburger, and Buñuel, I was encouraged to not think I was completely out of my mind. Life isn’t a comedy, or a tragedy, or a musical, but all of these elements are part of our everyday experience. According to Aristotle, a drama must have plot, character, thought, poetry, music and dance. I just added sex.
I hope the audience receives the film in the spirit in which was made—full of love and wonder and occasional dirty thoughts.
MORE ABOUT THE FILM
In writer/director John Turturro’s description, Romance & Cigarettes was inspired by the Queens, New York, neighborhoods where he spent his childhood, and the flights of imagination his friends and family used to escape them.
Turturro grew up with a deep sense of community, with all its supports and antagonisms. “You knew everybody on the block,” Turturro remembers. “I only had a few good friends there, but you don’t really grow up alone.” Diversions were in sport, family, and fantasy. “You didn’t have a lot of money to go travel,” he remembers, “so you kind you were forced to use your imagination a lot. That was a major part of my life.”
The possibilities of popular entertainment suggested a multi-faceted, high-low imaginative universe to the young Turturro. “I like things that are heightened,” he says. “You know, I’m from the theater, so if you look at the Greek plays, they say you’re supposed to have character, thought, poetry, spectacle, dance, and music. They had all those elements. Nowadays you don’t see them coexist as much.”
“But that kind of stuff appeals to me,” Turturro explains. “I like imaginative work. It’s interesting to me because sometimes when you heighten something, it winds up being truer than when you try to be completely realistic.” “When people don’t have a lot,” he continues, “they escape through the movies or popular song. There’s a reason why people are big pop stars. There’s a reason why Bruce Springsteen speaks to a lot of people; he puts his finger on the pulse of how they feel, and tells stories about them.”
WHERE IT STARTED
There is a nice symmetry in how this imaginative film made it film: Turturro started writing it while on the set of a movie, Joel and Ethan Coens’ Barton Fink, in which he played a writer. Turturro’s character was a playwright working on a Hollywood screenplay. In this case, Turturro decided to take a literal approach to the actor’s craft. “I had experienced writing something,” remembers Turturro, “and I realized it’s a lot different than the way it looks in the movies.” So not only did he go to secretarial school to improve his typing—he had to work an Underwood period machine—but when the cameras started rolling Turturro actually began writing something of his own. “I thought that would be a good exercise,” he says. Some of the first words he committed to paper were the title and first few scenes of Romance & Cigarettes. “I loved the title and the story,” he recalls, “and I’d seen lots of people go through these kinds of experiences. Some things I had observed, some things I imagined. My initial thing was that Joe Orton black humor, with the toe and cigarette. I wrote the scene and I said, ‘Oh wow, that’s good!’”
But it would be many years before the project finally came to fruition. “It was really a fertile time for me,” he recalls. “My wife was pregnant so a lot of things were going on in my life. You can’t do everything so you write it down and put it away.”
A BREAKTHROUGH
It wasn’t until Turturro was working on his second film, as director—Illuminata—that he returned in earnest to his musical black comedy. While in the editing room, Turturro was struggling to solve a problem involving the score, when suddenly what he describes as “a little door” opened in his imagination. He could see just how the music of Romance & Cigarettes would be incorporated into the drama: as an expression of the unspoken feelings and hopes that popular music played in the lives of his family and neighbors as a child.
“I liked the idea of using my unconscious when I was writing it,” he recalls. “I started plotting it out but then left a huge section open. I wanted to see where that would take me.” A large part of that opening left to be filled was the music that would eventually give the film such nerve and style. “I basically knew where the plot was going,” he says, “but I was also trying to listen to songs. I had The Man Without Love, which was a song I grew up with. And I knew The Girl That I Marry. After that, I made a list of thousands, and listened to them. I tried to select what was right for the plot, not just my favorite songs. But there’s certainly a connection to some of the singers, they’re like these guy-guy singers: James Brown, Tom Jones.”
THE PERFORMANCES
Turturro enjoyed a rare advantage while working with his cast: his own background as an actor. “It’s pretty easy for me because I know how to have a rehearsal with them,” he explains. “I made them do silly games and exercises, which they never do. They were mortified but you want to get them to be free. Sidney Lumet saw the film, and he couldn’t believe how free everybody was. He said ‘What did you do, give them drugs or something?’ I said ‘No. I didn’t have that kind of budget.’”
Turturro’s uncommon approach to rehearsal built up a high level of trust and produced a positive rhythm for the production. “I can demonstrate things and make a fool of myself,” he explains, “and that kind of sets a good precedent. I know what it means to be up there and how hard it is. So sometimes you do a bunch of takes in a row without saying, ‘Cut.’ Once they’re relaxed, they can go further. If they’re not relaxed, there’s only so far you can go.”
The presence of music in the film also presented some interesting challenges and possibilities. As Turturro explains, “in movies you see people trained to sing, and they sing pretty well, but they don’t really sing. The result is that they’re not that expressive and it’s really not that moving.” When Turturro realized his actors were willing to actually sing along to the soundtrack, he felt it was almost perfect. It was like they were singing to their own private soundtrack, “like a shower musical.”
The performances that resulted were, even for the director, revelatory. “James did musicals in high school,” Turturro explains. “But I didn’t even know he could sing. He actually has a nice voice. He was nervous; who wouldn’t be? In my opinion he gives a multidimensional, humorous, tender performance. He’s an interesting actor, James; this big guy, but he’s very sensitive. He’s one of the best actors I’ve ever seen, if not the best, acting opposite of a woman.”
THE INSPIRATION
The inspiration for Romance & Cigarettes and its realization are the result of a passion which has been building for a long time. “I try to give a lot of myself in everything I do,” Turturro says, but even when you believe in something it’s easy to get waylaid, to “lose your impulses and say, ‘I’m going to do what I really want later.’ And by that time, whatever you really wanted is gone, it’s lost, you haven’t cultivated it.” Passion, says the filmmaker, has “got to be like an itch you want to scratch. I think about that all the time. Maybe that’s enough, but the nature of being alive is, after a couple of years go by, something’s itching me and I want to scratch it.”
CAST BIOGRAPHIES
JAMES GANDOLFINI (Nick Murder) is currently shooting the sixth season of HBO's Emmy award winning drama, The Sopranos, in which he stars as the series lead, Tony Soprano. His portrayal of Tony Soprano has brought him three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series, and three Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards, including two for Outstanding Male Actor in a Drama Series and one shared with the entire cast of The Sopranos, for Outstanding Ensemble Cast.
Gandolfini has also made a mark in more than 20 motion pictures. He most recently finished shooting Lonely Hearts, opposite John Travolta and Salma Hayek, and All the King’s Men, directed by Steve Zaillian, starring Sean Penn and Jude Law. He has worked with the Coen Brothers previously, in The Man Who Wasn't There. His other film credits include Joel Shumacher’s Eight mm, with Nicolas Cage and Joaquin Phoenix; Steve Zaillian’s A Civil Action, with John Travolta and Robert Duvall; Nick Cassavetes’ She’s So Lovely, starring Sean Penn and Robin Wright-Penn; Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide, starring Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington; True Romance, starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette; Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls on Manhattan, with Andy Garcia and Lena Olin; and Get Shorty, with Danny Devito and John Travolta.
Born in Westwood, New Jersey, Gandolfini graduated from Rutgers University before beginning his acting career in New York Theatre. He made his Broadway debut in the 1992 revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire" with Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange. He currently resides in New York.
SUSAN SARANDON (Kitty Kane) brings her own brand of sex appeal and intelligence to every role, from her fearless portrayal of Annie Savoy in Bull Durham, to her Oscar-nominated performances in Thelma and Louise, Lorenzo’s Oil, The Client, and Atlantic City, to her Academy Award-winning and SAG Award-winning role as Sister Helen, a nun consoling a death-row inmate in Dead Man Walking.
Sarandon will next be seen in Elizabethtown, directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. Recently, she has been seen in Shall We Dance with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez; Alfie with Jude Law; Noel with Robin Williams, Paul Walker and Penelope Cruz; Brad Silberling’s Moonlight Mile, with Dustin Hoffman; Igby Goes Down with Jeff Goldblum; and The Banger Sisters, with Goldie Hawn and Geoffrey Rush.
Sarandon has worked with writer/director John Turturro before, in his erotic farce Illuminata. Sarandon’s other screen credits include starring roles opposite Paul Newman and Gene Hackman in Twilight; opposite Julia Roberts in the poignant comedy Stepmom; and in Tim Robbins’ drama Cradle Will Rock; Wayne Wang’s Anywhere But Here; and Stanley Tucci’s Joe Gould’s Secret. She also provided one of the voices for the hit animated features Rugrats in Paris, James and the Giant Peach, and Cats & Dogs, and served as narrator for Laleh Khadivi’s documentary 900 Women, about female prison inmates. She has also starred in HBO’s Earthly Possessions, based on the Anne Tyler novel and directed by James Lapine.