Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. John Turturro has had a wild ride this year. He put forth one of the strangest and most wonderful performance in what is probably the biggest money-making film he's every been in--TRANSFORMERS. And after many years of struggle, heartbreak, and more struggle, he finally pulled his wildly entertaining ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES (which he directed) out from limbo and essentially self-financed its release in a New York theater, but I'll let John tell that story himself. The run was so successful, it's actually getting released in other cities (including Chicago, where it opens this Friday at the Music Box Theatre) slowly in the coming weeks. For those of you in the Windy City, Turturro will be in town for a discussion after one performance on Saturday night. If I weren't at BNAT this year, this is what I'd be doing Saturday night.

I spoke with John between takes (literally) on the set of Adam Sandler's next film, YOU DON'T MESS WITH ZOHAN (he must have an uncredited cameo in the film, because I could not find his name in the film's cast list). But since our conversation wasn't part of some press junket, we actually had a bit more time to talk. He told me specifically that he wanted to give me all the time I needed to get all my questions in, which are the greatest words someone like me could hear from someone with such an illustrious career as Turturro. His repeated collaborations with Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers (who produced ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES) are the stuff of legend, but his films as a director (MAC and ILLUMINATA) have also genuinely impressed me. We cover just about every aspect of his career, and this turned out to be one of my favorite interviews of the year. I'm really, really glad more people are going to get to see ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES, a tribute to love, family, music, and dirty, dirty sex. Enjoy…

Capone: Hey, John. How are you?

John Turturro: Hi. Just to warn you, they may call me to the set at any minute, but I should have a few minutes. You never know. I can always call you back.

Capone: Right. What set are you on right now? The film with Spike Lee?

JT: No, I'm just doing a cameo for Spike in January. I'm doing a thing with Adam Sandler, we're finishing up, this is my last week of shooting.

Capone: What's the film about?

JT: It's called YOU DON'T MESS WITH ZOHAN. It's a Middle-Eastern comedy that we're making.

Capone: So, I just watched ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES last night, so it's fresh in my head.

JT: You watched it, what, on a DVD?

Capone: Right.

JT: So you didn't get a chance to see it in the theater with a living audience?

Capone: The only screening they held in town was for critics, not exactly a “living audience.” But I couldn't make that screening. I watched it with my wife last night, so hopefully that counts.

JT: It's a fun movie to see with a regular audience. People get pretty rowdy. It's pretty consistent.

Capone: Some people are familiar with the path the film has taken up to this point. What I'm curious about is, a lot of other filmmakers would have thrown in the towel and just let the film live its life on DVD or on cable. Why did you refuse to let that happen?

JT: Basically, when you see it with an audience, from the very first rough-cut screening we ever had, when people didn't even know who was in the cast [which includes James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Steven Buscemi, and Aida Turturro], we screened it over and over again. And then we did a test screening. And whether we've taken it to Venice or Toronto, and whenever there's a screening anywhere--San Francisco, where we had a screening a while ago, or New York, where we did a benefit before it came out--I watched how it played in London, in Italy, where it ran forever, like seven months in the theaters. When you put it before a crowd, people just really respond to the movie. And I just kept scratching my head and so did Joel and Ethan [Coen], who helped me raise the money and help me cast it, helped me edit it, they were like, “John, it's really good.”

Sometimes life smiles on you, and everything goes great. I wouldn't have made the movie without a very strong distributor behind us, because that's how I got people to say, “We like the script; we'll do it for little money. We know it's going to have good distribution.” It wasn't even like the company changed regimes. It was the company was bought in merger. We knew from the beginning that unless the powers that be would see it with an audience, they weren't going to get it. Because if you see it with an audience and you're the people who have to sell it, then you can see what looks kooky and crazy, what people are laughing at or enjoying. If you show it to 100 people, 90 people will really, really like the film. And that's true every single time. My business is holding someone's attention, and if I see something is holding somebody's attention and is entertaining them and see people dying laughing and be moved and surprised, then you go, “I wasn't crazy.” It's like walking away from myself. And every time I get an audience, people are delighted by the movie.

This is a movie you've got to come to open. If you're not open, you're not going to get the movie. But if you're open to it, it'll take you somewhere. It's very accessible. It's heightened, but it's a story most people can relate to. And even the way music is used is the way most people use music.

Actually, one of your Ain't It Cool News people saw it at Toronto originally and flipped out over it, and I just knew it deserved a hearing. Then once we released it in New York, we were only going to have this modest, one-theater release, we got a rave review from Stephen Holden [of The New York Times], and you couldn't get in the movie theater at first. We were like the number one independent movie for a couple of weeks, and we made a lot of money there, and that's why we asked if we could go wider. And Sony gave me some support for that. They said, “Right now, we don't have any room for it on our plate. We see that it's doing business.” So I said I'd take it out myself, and we had to deal with all these merger issues, which is about pay-television deals and DVD. Who had what? Was it United Artists? Was it MGM? What did Sony have? It was like a Kafka-esque nightmare. And there were some people who wanted to give me more, but I said, “Look, if it's a big problem, I'll just do it. I have a job; I'll take some of my salary, and as long as I can get some of the money back from the box office. If I come close to being even, then I'll be very happy because it's getting out to the audience the way it was designed.

This is a film that was designed as a communal experience with an audience, and that's the reason I didn't throw in the towel. And basically been proved correct, whether it's through Roger [Ebert's] support, your support, or The New York Times or The New Yorker or salon.com. The people who haven't liked, even critically, are people who haven't been open enough to it. But in an audience response to it, it's predominant, it's 90/10 people go for the film, maybe higher than that.

Capone: You brought up a couple points that I want to touch on. First off, the music. I think there are many things that people will take away from this film, but I have to say the music is the thing that I still think about, not just the song selection but the way the characters perform them and how they tell the story as much as the spoken words. How long did it take you pull these songs together?

JT: I'm glad you enjoyed them. The first song I had in mind when I was typing during BARTON FINK, I always had that song in mind.

Capone: Which song was that?

JT: The Engelbert Humperdink song [“A Man Without Love]. That kind of spawned the whole movie. That was a song that…my grandmother used to watch that show, my parents sung it. That was just in my consciousness. And the last song I had, [Irving Berlin's] “The Girl That I Marry.” After that, the only song I knew that I really wanted to get in was [Tom Jones'] “Delilah,” and I kind of had a subplot for that. But after that, I was just listening to songs; I had a lot of songs that didn't make it. Singers like Etta James, who I listen to almost every day and is a real inspiration, she didn't make the film. It was always my favorite songs that I put in, but they were songs that I felt were most appropriate. And then after doing that, when we did a reading, I trimmed some of them. I realized I had too many. And then Joel and Ethan, who had asked to read the script because a guy who works for them John C. Cameron had heard I'd written a script, said we'd love to take a look at it. And they really liked it, and they gave me this guy Chris Robertson from Diamond Time, it's a small company that does movies and documentaries. And I gave him a small fee and he worked with me, doing timings of all the songs, obviously they were approximate timings[of the amount of time each song appeared in the film]: we had a tier—three minutes, two-and-a-half minutes, two minutes, etc. It took us about a year and a half to clear everything.

Bruce Springsteen was the first guy who came aboard. I had written him a letter saying this is really a movie about the people you write songs about. And maybe you'd like to be in the movie. And he was intrigued, but he said “That really scares me. I'm not an actor.” And I said, “Yeah, but this is kind of your world. You're a terrific actor when you sing.” But he said predisposed to give me his song “Red-Headed Woman” at a good price. So he was the first guy to come aboard. We had a favorite nations deal. We had certain prices we were willing to spend, and we basically got everybody. The hardest song was “Piece of My Heart.” We had to beg for that for about a year, and we got it. We've got three different versions of it; we've got Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin, and at the end we have Erma Franklin, the original version of it. And that was just a perfect song for the movie, and a lot of singers that I chose, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Jones, Janis Joplin, they're all visceral singers, they all have husky voices. I wanted most of the music to be lodged in the back of the character's brains, so I didn't want to have too much modern stuff. The most modern song is the Nick Cave song “Little Water Song” performed by Ute Lemper], which basically answered my question, How the hell is he [Gandolfini's character] going to finally get rid of her [Winslet, who plays his mistress]? She's burning on fire, once we use that song initially with the "El Cuarto de Tula" song from Buena Vista Social Club, how are we going to put that out? Once I read that the Cave song was about someone drowning someone, I was intrigued, and once I heard it, I loved it. Each song had it's own story.

Capone: From a technical standpoint, when the cast members are singing the songs, we hear their voices over the recorded track. They aren't lip-syncing because we hear both sets of vocals. Why did you choose to do it that way?

JT: First of all, I wasn't interested in actors singing, except for the a cappella song at the end because I don't think actors can really express the songs right. The whole idea of my movie is that people want to be able to sing like Tom Jones and Janis Joplin. I thought it would be kind of cool to do something exactly the way people sing along in their car, in their basement, in their bedroom, in their bathroom. I didn't want to be beholden to that with every song, but I thought it would be a very interesting idea to try. And once it worked in the first song, I loved it. We did a little rehearsal, and I said, “This could be really good.” There were songs where it didn't song. For example, Kate did “Little Water Song,” and she did a beautiful rendition of it, almost as good as Ute Lemper's. But Ute Lemper's a professional singer, and it didn't work having the songs echo each other under water. It was much more haunting with her solo. But most of the time you see the characters singing along, sometimes they sing for real, like Aida and Bobby [Cannavale] and Mandy [Moore]. All the people who song in the choir, they sang the church song “He Reached Out His Hand” [aka "When the Saviour Reached Down for Me"], that was recorded live. Then I caught the church choir singing along to “Piece of My Heart” to incorporate them, and I rerecorded some of them later on.

We added voices for certain songs to make it a little richer here and there. Bill Maxwell, another guy who Joel and Ethan have worked with, came on as the music producer and he enhanced some of the songs. But I thought it was an interesting thing, because that's how people usually sing along with their private soundtracks. Some people don't, sometimes they just hear it. But that was the whole idea, people trying to escape or fantasize or articulate or remember. It's emotional transportation, especially when you don't go anywhere. So that was the idea. I think that's close to the way really use music in every day life.

Capone: One of the things I remember about seeing your first film as a director, MAC, it had a lot of yelling in it. And so does this film. Clearly, yelling in the family is something very close to your heart.

JT: Yelling, yelling [laughs]. There's much more yelling in MAC. This has a couple of those scenes, actually it doesn't have many of them really. The scene in the beginning that sets the whole movie up, but after that, maybe there's two other scenes, like the fight scene on the street, and the scene between Kate and James. It's mostly…don't forget, I grew up in a very emotional household, so for me that was normal. And for other people, they go, “Oh my God.” I actually think this has a lot less than MAC. But there's definitely an operatic quality when you grow up in certain kinds of cultures in close quarters, and that's the form of expression. I had friends and I'd go over their houses, and they were Jewish, everybody was very emotional. My house was Italian, everybody was very emotional. Same with my friends who were black. So there were a lot of people, there's a velocity that goes on within a house. It can't be constant. But this film is a nice balance. MAC is a much more muscular film because it's about that world. If I did MAC now, I'd probably do a little bit less. But I equate that with emotion, not with anger. And that's close to singing in some ways, if you think about it. It was the logical next step for me, wasn't it? [laughs]

Capone: Indeed. And on top of the emotion, ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES is just one big sexual escapade. Everybody is either doing it or talking about doing it.

JT: Isn't that like life? In most movies, there's only one handsome guy who gets to have sex with a woman who's 28 or 32 years old, maybe 25 years old. That's it. But in real life, everybody has a sexuality. Most people have a tender side to them, and everybody has an imagination. So I like to create a world where there are people who are living and breathing and oozing. And I thought it would be kind of cool to raise the flame a little bit. There are a million songs, so if I was going to meet the love songs, it's kind of a Charles Bukowski collaborates with James Brown and Bruce Springsteen. And since that world is a world I know something about, I felt like I was on solid territory.

Capone: Is it liberating being able to write so frankly about sex? Polite society doesn't always smile on this kind of discussion.

JT: You know what? Polite society gets in trouble, that's why there are all those scandals. That's why our country still has this pilgrim type of thing. And why is pornography one of the biggest money-making industries? Because people are animals! You don't even see anything in my movie; people just talk. Even when they're having sex, they're talking. I tried to be as honest as possible without being exclusive of the sacred side or tender side or spiritual side. The profane and the sacred co-exist, and when you deny that, you get these scandals like you see in the Catholic Church and other places too. It's hard for people to deny that. And you can't always be romantic; you can try to be romantic. If you're in a marriage, sometimes you've got to use your imagination. [laughs]

Capone: Speaking of talking during sex, the Kate Winslet sex scene with Gandolfini is hypnotic. Did you actually write that monologue that she spews out during sex?

JT: The scene afterward is all written, the one where she's eating chicken. You're talking about when she's sitting on top of him?

Capone: Right.

JT: I wrote half of it, and she did the other half. There you go, you're an animal just like me. The reason I wanted Kate was, I saw her do HOLY SMOKE, and I figured that if she could do that, she could also flip it on its head. You can see that this is a girl who still wants, underneath, something else. Not just that. And I knew Kate could do that. And I think Kate's incredibly moving when you see the other side of her, and she's kind of desperate. She isn't playing a hooker, but people who become that, they were born to someone too. They came out of a situation too. And people forget that. I am interested in that.

I read an article in Playboy years ago with Mel Brooks, and he said, “I like to be romantic and this and that.” And they asked, “Well, what do you think about sex?” And he said, “Oh, I like dirty sex. I like it when it's dirty and people are saying dirty things.” I remember when I read that, I was laughing, but as you get older your realize the guy had a point. I little bit of that can be liberating in a way because you see…my movie is a love story but it's not sentimental; I don't think so. There's a real honesty to it. Even the wife, she still loves her husband. He doesn't do this all the time, but she can't accept him fully back so soon. And I tried to be really honest. When I was most uncomfortable, I thought that's the realm I want to stay in. I think people, when they watch it, people are really liberated. There was a grandmother in the audience the other day in L.A., and she said, “I loved the movie. Nothing offended me. I've seen all of this stuff.” And she's in her 70s. If you see people dying laughing, the laughter comes out of recognition. Things can be very painful can be very funny later. Or things that are just true. People have sex, and one person finishes before the other, and that makes a scene because there's an obstacle. Without an obstacle, it's just pornography.

Capone: In your supporting cast, guys like Walken, Buscemi, Cannavale, are the classic go-to actors that a lot of filmmakers cast when they feel like their film needs a little spark injected in.

JT: I just wanted all those guys because they all come from a certain milieu. I didn't know Bobby before. I liked them. In Steve's case, for a while he couldn't do it, and I didn't recast the role because his dialog always sounded crude and it didn't sound funny [with another actor saying those lines]. In Steve's case, when he says all that stuff, you think, “Maybe he's fantasizing or bullshitting.” It just came out so funny with Steve, and I couldn't think of anyone else better than him. And it just seemed a little too sleazy with somebody else saying it. But with Steve, you say, “The guy is just bullshitting.” There was that Ralph and Norton quality between him and Gandolfini.

Walken is a friend of mind, and I had him in mind because the character was based on my cousin. If I couldn't have gotten Walken to do it, I would have done it, because Walken in an Elvis freak and he's a dancer. Bobby was recommended to me, and when I saw him, I think he does a great job. Everyone grew up with a guy like Bobby on their block, who wanted to be a star. He was the star on the block. Maybe his stardom was a two-block radius. These are people are like, and they all come from a similar world. Almost everybody in the cast came from a working-class background. Kate certainly came from a very modest background. I like movies that surprise me and movies that show me how someone thinks about the world, and this movie is really like opening up the inside of my brain, for better or worse, but I accept that.

Capone: The idea of smoking looking good on camera is almost as old as movies themselves, especially in films that sexually charged. But this film it comes with consequences, which you hardly every see.

JT: I grew up with that. I lost a lot of people to smoking and cancer. I grew up in my parent's generation where everybody smoked and equated it with being well mannered, whether it was Bette Davis being romantic or Humphrey Bogart. Everybody smoked in the movies When Paul Henreid [in NOW, VOYAGER] put the two cigarettes in and they light it, I was going to use that clip once when they watch TV, and I couldn't get it. And I thought that was the epitome of that. My parents used to do that, but my mother quit. But a lot of people equated it with that. My father said something like the title when he'd gotten sick, and it kind of got lodged in my brain: “To be free, to be able to do what you want to do.” And he said it in an ironic way, and it was indicative of a lot of people of his generation. I thought it was kind of an ironic title. There's a juxtaposition that goes with the title, because there are consequences.

Capone: You mentioned the Coens earlier. Have you seen NO COUNTRY FOR OLD ME?

JT: Oh yeah, I went with them to a test screening, when people wanted to cut certain things out the movie and do this and that. I thought it was a fabulous collaboration between them and Cormac McCarthy, a great meeting. I thought they did a masterful job.

Capone: Is it different for you watching one of their film when you're not in it?

JT: No, no. They're my friends. And they helped me so much on my film that I feel like it's another film we made together. They spent so much time in the editing room once I had a rough cut. They were instrumental shaping the film and helping me get the money. So that's another film we worked on together. They are great guys, they come from good stock. I've known them 20 years, and I've never had an argument with them.

Capone: When I was talking about actors who are brought in to spark up a film, I think a case could be made for that applying to you for your role in TRANSFORMERS. How did you get involved in that film?

JT: They just asked me. They were thinking about bringing in someone to “spark” things up in some way among all those robots. I did a lot more stuff that never made it. I guess they threw a lot of the comedy stuff out because they wanted more fighting between the robots. There are a few things I wish had been left in, but I had fun doing it. My kids were all excited, they wanted me to do it. And I had fun working with Michael Bay, and I think in the end, they were trying to find a balance. There were so many different tones in the movie, but I had fun working on it. It was arduous at times, but it wasn't uninteresting.

Capone: I'll admit, when I saw the film, I didn't even know you were going to be in it, much like I was surprised by your appearance in MARGOT AT THE WEDDING.

JT: Yeah, that's a really small thing, but I did it because Noah [Baumbach] had talked to me about doing THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, a little part in that and I couldn't do it. And I know him a little bit through Wes Anderson. And I kept saying, “Look, this is such a teeny role.” And he said, “Well, it's important.” And I did it, and I enjoyed working with him and I think he did a really good job with the movie. And I think Jack Black and Nicole and Jennifer and the boys all did a really good movie. I just wanted to support him. I probably wouldn't do that size a part again, but maybe I'll work with him down the line.

Capone: It's funny, your character is one of the only truly likable people in that movie, so naturally you disappear as quickly as you appear.

JT: Right, right. That was the idea. He felt that it was really important to have someone in the role who had some kind of strength.

Capone: You also shot a film with Barry Levinson recently [WHAT JUST HAPPENED?] with a stellar cast.

JT: Yeah with Robert De Niro as the lead character. All of my scenes are with Bob, who plays a producer, and I'm his agent, so I'm his hypochondriac agent. Stanley Tucci plays a writer. Bruce Willis plays my client, who's based on an incident that happened. Catherine Keener plays the head of the studio. It's a really well-written script [based on Art Linson's book]; I think it's pretty funny. We'll see how it turns out.

Capone: You mentioned at the outset that you had a small part on Spike Lee's MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA.

JT: I'm going to do that. I'm going to do a cameo for him. Spike likes me to do…I haven't done a role since CLOCKERS really, and just little cameos here and there for him since. But if it's in New York, we have a long thing, I'll do it for him. I'm like his lucky charm or something. It drives me crazy [laughs]. I'm like, “Spike, if you're going to use me, give me a part. Enough.” But he's a good friend, and he's doing an really ambitious film, so if you can help a bit, you do that.

Capone: John, thank you so much for talking, and continued luck with getting ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES out there.

JT: Well, thanks to you guys for talking about it so early in the process. That was truly encouraging.

Capone