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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Actor-director Stanley Tucci talks about his new film, "Joe Gould's Secret," his struggle with the Writers' Guild and the importance of ambiguity in art.
Apr 11, 2000 | Few contemporary filmmakers are as sensitive to revealing the intimate experience of a character, to exposing the precarious intermingling of souls, to framing an implacably nuanced world by way of silences and small moments and a keen attention to detail as Stanley Tucci. In the final scene in his film "Big Night," Tucci tacitly established a profound reconciliation between two warring brothers by preparing breakfast, pulling up a chair and placing a hand just lightly on a man's back.
"I find the mundane of the everyday incredibly interesting," the 40-year-old writer-director-actor says about his lyrical new film, "Joe Gould's Secret." "I think that what we do in our everyday lives is very dramatic -- the intricacies and delicacies involved in our relationships, and how we lie to ourselves and to each other in subtle ways, and how we tell the truth. These seemingly mundane things, they have great meaning."
Sipping his tea in a restaurant on New York's Upper West Side, with a violin case balanced against his thigh (he's learning to play for an upcoming role), Tucci is intelligent, exceptionally warm and vastly curious. He offers up a slew of questions even as he's delineating his own thoughts on a given topic. An Italian-American brought up in Ketonah, just outside of Manhattan, Tucci speaks at a rapid, animated clip as he discusses his take on the state of filmmaking today.
"I believe that plot comes from character as opposed to vice versa. Those are the films I'm interested in. If plot exists it always becomes farcical to me," says Tucci, and his movies prove that point. He's much more interested in developing rich characters than in fussing with plot constructs.
Tucci's last Sundance film run was four years ago as the co-writer, costar and co-director (with Campbell Scott) of "Big Night," the story of a pair of Italian restaurateur brothers. Tucci describes the open-ended process of revising this script as "writing and writing for a long, long time."
Then, he says, he met his wife and saw what she was doing: raising two kids by herself and running a day-care center. "I thought, well, my God, if that woman can do all that, you can certainly finish this fucking stupid script." The film went on to be a critical favorite. In 1998 Tucci made "The Impostors," a slapstick ensemble Beckett-fest about two struggling thespians. Though the film was panned by critics, it gathered a hefty base of devotees.
"The three films I've made, they all deal with the same theme; even though they're totally different, the essence of them is the same. In 'Big Night' it's very much about the creative process and the question of how do you remain truthful to your art. And 'The Impostors,' for all its ridiculousness, has exactly that theme running through it. Joe Gould is the same thing, in that his quest is to be true to his art."
"Joe Gould's Secret," set in a painstakingly re-created 1940s and 1950s Manhattan, is based on the complex real-life relationship between legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould, a homeless, Harvard-educated man who claimed to be writing "The Oral History of Our Time." During the course of that relationship, the two men hold fast to a secret that will preserve Gould's honor, becoming shades of one another in the process. Tucci, who costars as the soft-spoken Mitchell in a deliberately understated performance, has once again chosen a subtle aesthetic form that he hopes will challenge mainstream moviegoers.
The film, which debuted at Sundance to mostly positive reviews, was slighted by some critics for not having more of a dramatic arc or climax. "What do they want -- a gunfight, a car chase?" Tucci gibes. "It's just so silly to me. People have become programmed. We're reduced to actors' spreading their legs in front of us and pulling down their pants. I mean, that's how low we've come; that's what we want now. There's no subtlety to it."
"Joe Gould's Secret" has just such a distinct subtle cadence. The narrative structure comes from two pieces published in the New Yorker, written by Mitchell, whose collected writings, "Up in the Old Hotel," had been tempting Tucci for years before he committed to the project in 1997. He was inspired by Mitchell's understated approach to storytelling. "Everybody wants a big story. Mitchell wanted the opposite of a big story. He once said that the most dramatic event he'd ever witnessed was a woodpecker pecking away at a tree down South. The more commonplace something was, the more profound it was. He writes with no judgment and no affectation. He just tells the story as simply and as truthfully as possible. That's what I admire; that to me is what I aspire to as a writer-director."
Through the use of scenes played primarily in wide frame and master shots, the film wistfully and beautifully captures the complicated entanglements of relationships without lapsing into sentimentality. The quiet bleeding over of emotional experience between people of divergent backgrounds finds a framework in the parallels between the courtly, Southern-born Mitchell, who spends his days roaming the streets of the city absorbing the idiosyncratic details of its inhabitants, and his most fascinating and petulant subject, Gould.
Brilliantly played by Ian Holm, who also starred in "Big Night," Gould is portrayed as a formidable, histrionic, eccentric street person who's often defeated by his own wildly mercurial nature. Gould spends his evenings visiting with friends such as Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings and frequenting the famed Raven Poetry Society, charming its patrons into donating to the "Joe Gould Fund." This officiously titled foundation is ostensibly a means for Gould to dedicate his life to writing a record of the vocal meandering of the ordinary folk he encounters in his day-to-day travels. Enormously proud of an output he estimates at 12 million words, Gould has grandly vowed to complete his "informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitudes -- what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, victuals, sprees, scrapes and sorrows -- or I'll perish in the attempt."
