AUDASE

 

Woody Allen Joins John Turturro in ‘Fading Gigolo’

 

By ZACH BARON NY TIMES

Ask John Turturro about his newest project, "Fading Gigolo," and he will excitedly tell you about the streetwalker films, like "The Life of Oharu" or "Midnight Cowboy," that helped inspire the idea; the Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories that helped him settle on a tone for the script; and the filmmakers, like Michael Cimino, Spike Lee and the Coen brothers, who helped him develop his own directorial style.

He’ll tell you it’s a comedy, sort of. And if pressed, Mr. Turturro — who wrote, directed and stars in "Fading Gigolo," opening on Friday — will acknowledge that yes, there was perhaps something funny in his decision to cast himself as the sexual dynamo of the title. And that sure, casting Woody Allen as a pimp — a pimp who goes by the name Dan Bongo, no less — was, you might say, an unconventional choice. And then there is the unavoidable fact that the film’s plot turns on a threesome, one that is proposed in the very first scene.

Sitting in the parlor of his Park Slope brownstone one recent morning, Mr. Turturro, 57, ruefully described the kind of conversations he had while seeking financing for "Fading Gigolo.

"They said, ‘Well, it’s about a ménage à trois.’ I said: ‘Well, that’s sort of the idea. That’s where it starts,’ " Mr. Turturro recalled, laughing.

That is indeed where "Fading Gigolo" starts, but the film, his fifth directorial effort, is hardly pornographic. Instead, it’s an off-kilter romantic comedy, farcical, nostalgic and even a bit innocent. It’s about an odd couple — Mr. Turturro’s Fioravante, an underemployed florist turned paid companion, and Mr. Allen’s Murray (a.k.a. Bongo), a bookseller turned procurer — who join forces to provide (not inexpensive) comfort to lonely women.

Mr. Turturro deliberately cast actors in their 40s and 50s — Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, Liev Schreiber, Vanessa Paradis — and the film’s plot deals with the kind of adult concerns not often depicted on screen: loveless marriages, grieving widows, failing businesses. It’s a modest film, the result of a rare occurrence: the coming together of a bunch of very high-powered people to do a relatively low-powered, idiosyncratic thing.

For Mr. Allen, 78, "Fading Gigolo" presented the opportunity to act in a film not of his own making. "I’ve gotten very, very, very few offers over all of the years I’ve been in the movie business," he confessed.

Could that possibly be true, a reporter wondered — that other directors never call?

"They do not," Mr. Allen said. "They never have, at any point in my life. I’ve taken almost all the ones that I’ve been offered. But I don’t get offered things practically at all."

He went on: "I have a limited range. I mean, I wouldn’t be believable as Al Pacino’s brother in ‘The Godfather’ or something, but this character was a guy who had spent his life running a bookstore, which is completely believable for me, and had gotten involved in procuring for John. It seemed fine." (Mr. Allen spoke on the set before accusations — perhaps uncomfortably resonant now, given his role in the film — that he abused his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, resurfaced this year. He has emphatically denied the allegations.) For Ms. Stone, who plays Dr. Parker, a wealthy woman in an empty marriage whose request for Fioravante’s services sets the plot in motion, "Fading Gigolo" represented a rare opportunity to embody a woman who has lived as much as Ms. Stone has. When Mr. Turturro brought her the script, "he would talk a lot about how he was so much more interested in the performance, the artistic expression of an older woman, than a 22-year-old actress who hadn’t lived anything in life yet," she said. "Not that it’s their fault that they’re vacuous, but that they have so much less to bring to roles than women who have experienced and loved."

Ms. Stone said that there were difficult moments in her not-too-distant past "when I thought that’s it: My career is over, my life is over, my life’s upside down, everything is a disaster." Working on "Fading Gigolo" gave her a chance to reclaim those moments for herself and her character, she said in an interview on the film’s set. "Now when I’m at work I think: ‘Oh these are all wonderful things. That goes here, this goes there, this is like that, oh my God, this is amazing."

John Turturro in "Fading Gigolo," which he also wrote and directed. Although the financial cost of stepping away from his primary career to do a small film was considerable, he said, he views the movie as "a real gift." Credit Jojo Whilden/Millennium Entertainment

Mr. Turturro remains a much-in-demand actor in Hollywood, a recurring player both in blockbusters like Michael Bay’s "Transformers" franchise and independent films like those by his longtime friends the Coen brothers. The financial cost of stepping away from his primary career as a well-compensated actor to write and direct "Fading Gigolo," Mr. Turturro said, was tremendous.

"But on the other end, I think someone my age, right now, I feel still very — not naïve, but I feel very fertile at this. I haven’t given up my initial urges or impulses" to make creative work, he said. "I’ve done some big-budget things, but if you only do that, I think what happens is it becomes more about you. And it becomes more about, ‘Well I’ve got to get a big part.’ And it becomes less about what you are interested in. You don’t really develop. They’re paying you a lot of money, but they’re paying you a lot of money for a reason."

Still, Mr. Turturro had reason to be wary of attempting his own project. His last feature effort as a director, "Romance and Cigarettes" of 2007, a similarly lusty and surreal musical comedy starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, and Kate Winslet, languished in studio limbo for more than two years before receiving a belated and short-lived theatrical release. "I just had bad luck," Mr. Turturro said. The experience was dispiriting, he said: "I had to recover."

Then he made a musical documentary, "Passione," a 2010 tribute to singers and musicians in Naples, Italy, that restored his willingness to experiment. That "kind of brought me back to life," he said. "Because I didn’t know if I wanted to go through that again. So this is a real gift, to do this movie."

"Fading Gigolo," which Mr. Turturro made outside the studio system (he then sold the film’s distribution rights to Millennium Entertainment), began basically as a joke. Mr. Turturro and Mr. Allen share a barber, and one day Mr. Turturro idly suggested while getting his hair cut that he should write a movie in which he played a prostitute and Mr. Allen played his pimp. A few days later, Mr. Turturro received a phone call; his barber had relayed the idea. Mr. Allen liked it and wanted in. And so, between other projects and with Mr. Allen’s encouragement, Mr. Turturro started writing "Fading Gigolo."

The script that emerged was odd, and quickly got odder: What began as a broad comedy gradually grew more detailed and emotional. At Mr. Allen’s suggestion, Mr. Turturro focused on a previously minor character, Avigal, a widowed Hasidic woman from Crown Heights played by Ms. Paradis. "I kept thinking, ‘Well, if it’s a film about sex, it should have religion,’ " Mr. Turturro said. So there are comic sequences set in a Brooklyn Hasidic community — Mr. Schreiber plays a bumbling neighborhood police officer who both loves Avigal and suspects her of breaking local religious laws — and, eventually, a tender interfaith, interborough romance between Avigal and Fioravante. "I think, really, the film is about friendship, or the need for human connection," Mr. Turturro said.

The result is a deeply personal off-kilter look at the city, shot in colors so warm and saturated that New York takes on a fairy tale aspect. That impression only deepened on the set, where one day both Louis C.K. and Bobby Cannavale — who appeared in Mr. Allen’s latest film, "Blue Jasmine" — just happened to walk by as Mr. Turturro was filming on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There are smoky jazz clubs with women singing in French, lusty close-ups of flower arrangements and shots of Mr. Allen casually pitching baseballs in the park.

And that threesome? It’s not really a spoiler to say it kind of happens eventually. (Ms. Vergara gamely provides the third partner.) Ms. Stone remembers watching Mr. Turturro try to play the scene and direct it at the same time.

"I don’t know what was funnier," she recalled, "doing the scene, or him jumping out in his black bikini underwear, jumping on the camera and looking through the lens, going, ‘I’m directing!’