SUNDANCE, ‘98. DAY II. 1/16...
[Editor’s note: Eb started out Day 2 in a dither about the Courtney Love situation, regarding her gag on the showing of Nick Broomfield’s doc about her and the late great self-extinguished Cobain. Needless to say, we pick up the thread on more pertinent, less inked issues at the ‘Dance…]
Today was spent sidling up to publicists, arranging interview times and synching up screening schedules to accommodate the personality parade of indie pride present. I got the Sundance Channel to spring for my dinner at Grappa (the poshest of Park City eateries), then slid down Main Street for the party celebrating the over-hyped, truly sucky Tom Di Cillo film, The Real Blond, starring Matthew Modine, Marlo Thomas, Darryl Hannah, Elizabeth Berkeley, Maxwell Caulfield, et al.
It’s no surprise that The Real Blond is real bad. Sundance hasn’t dropped a decent premiere screening since The Usual Suspects bowed in ‘95. Before that they had a decent run with Victor Nunez or Mike Newell films. Then, in 1996, the fest showed it’s corporate stripes by foisting Eric Schaeffer’s If Lucy Fell on appalled audiences. And so began the trend of screening studio product that executives dumped at the ‘Dance, hoping against hope to catch some buzz prior to inevitable box office failure. Now the trend seems to be the proffering of blow jobs to indie favorites of old like Tom Di Cillo. Di Cillo made low-budget history with Living In Oblivion before he was handed too much cash coupled with has-been stars, to make his latest mess of a movie. Advice to Di Cillo: Less is more.
Anyway, I managed to grab a couple of spot interviews between parties. Also, it’s early, but I’m getting close to crowning "the belle of the fest." I’ve narrowed it down to three: Robin Tunney (Montana and Niagara, Niagara), Julia Stiles (Wicked), and Christina Ricci (Buffalo 66). I cornered Buffalo 66 quintuple-threat (producer, director, co-writer, star, composer), Vincent Gallo, at a burger joint. Wearing a white patent leather, fringed cowboy jacket and high-water brown corduroys, he was easy to spot. Up close, his piercing blue eyes are a dead-giveaway. Among other bon mots, here’s what the erstwhile star of Palookaville, The Funeral, and Truth or Consequences, NM had to stay about his female lead, Christina Ricci...
Gallo: Christina is a star, she’s the greatest actor in the whole world. You should follow her around everywhere. Where the f*ck is she, though? No one calls me. My agent’s here, but god-f*cking forbid someone should miss me.
Ebner: You really can’t miss you in that get-up, Vincent.
Gallo: I know, but no one cares. It used to be that everybody wanted to be my friend, and I pushed them away. Like holidays. I don’t celebrate holidays. I would push them away, but they would keep calling, you know? And I would play this game of the martyr. You know, "I don’t need anybody," but I needed them to want me anyway. Now, I don’t even get that. I didn’t get one Christmas card this year. I got no Christmas cards, no Christmas cards, no Christmas cards. I was hurt, man. I sent cards, I called people. No one called me. Christina [Ricci] hasn’t called me, she’s in town. My producer, my agent -- they’re all barbarians. Lauren Hutton called, but they’re all supposed to love me.
Ebner: And you’re the one who is supposed to have the ego here. You wrote Buffalo 66?
Gallo: Yes.
Ebner: Directed it?
Gallo: Yeah.
Ebner: Composed the music?
Gallo: Yeah.
Ebner: Can you tell me about the music you scored?
Gallo: Let’s not forget that I starred in it.
Ebner: Of course not, but those credits alone are a bit overwhelming. It’s just that when I come to Sundance I expect to find you on the other side
Gallo: Well, with the salary you get for those, you have to act in at least a half dozen of them to equal one real film. I’m hoping to narrow it down in the future.
Ebner: Did Buffalo 66 become an exclusive labor of love for you over time, or have you been acting in a bunch of films of late to feed the kitty?
Gallo: No. I produced the film, I directed it -- I did all those things, so it was quite consuming. But there were moments this year that I took other jobs just to -- I’d take three weeks off and do a job to pay some bills. Then I’d go back to editing. But it’s extremely involving to begin a film from the script, then finish it. You know, do the mix and finish it. If you’re a very controlling person, and you don’t trust people, then it’s an extremely, uh, large project, making a film. If you have a support system, and you trust people, I think you could have a bit more of an open agenda; to be available to take a vacation, or do other jobs. But if you’re controlling like me, there isn’t a lot of free time.
Ebner: I haven’t seen the film yet, so, to thumbnail, what can you tell me about Buffalo 66?
Gallo: About the aesthetic of the film, or the story?
Ebner: How about both?
Gallo: The aesthetic is that it’s very much of a modern classic. Visually, it’s a modern classic. The script is a very unusual love story.
Ebner: On the other side of that, in that it was such an all-consuming thing for you, if I was on set trying to write about the "making of" of your film, what would I have observed?
Gallo: You would have seen shocking things. Shocking things.
Ebner: Such as?
Gallo: I’m just extremely controlling and methodical. It was extremely difficult for me to get everything done the way I wanted in the time I needed to get it done, so there was a lot of horror. It was pure chaos, but within this pure chaos, I think that I was a very sensitive person to my cast and crew.
Ebner: Do you think that people who know you solely as an actor would have recognized you?
Gallo: I’m different as a director. As an actor, I don’t trust anybody, and I don’t have tremendous love or respect for anybody that I usually work with because in general I think that there’s a bunch of average personalities in hair and makeup, etc., etc. So, I tend to be difficult. Not because I’m an egomaniac, not because I’m spoiled, not because I’m lazy -- but because I’m trying to perfect something, and I’m confronting very passive personalities all the time. So, I get a little tense. In my movie I brought in people that were not like that, so I wasn’t frustrated in that way.
Ebner: You brought a lot of talent in. Ricci, Angelica Huston... Did you have to pull any teeth to get them on board?
Gallo: I cast the movie, and negotiated all the contracts for the actors.
Ebner: Don’t tell me you edited the film too.
Gallo: I edited the film with a brilliant editor, Curtis Clayton. We co-edited the film, but he’s the editor of credit. He’s been the most influential person on the film other than myself.
Ebner: Tell me about casting and negotiating your cast.
Gallo: Let me give you the Mickey Rourke anecdote. Mickey Rourke is in the film. I’m a big fan of Mickey. I really like him. He’s a brilliant actor. At a certain point, I was reading a six page scene that he wound up playing the character in. I rewrote the scene, and as I was rewriting I thought that Mickey would be good to play an enigma. I know it’s hokey, it sounds stupid, but I told my production people that Mickey was perfect. He has the charisma and the inner life that was perfect for the scene. They were like, "Yeah, you’re gonna get Mickey. Right." So, I call up Mickey’s agent: "Hi. Vincent Gallo here. I want put a pay-or-play offer out to Mickey Rourke on a job. You see, once you say "pay-or-play," they have to bring the offer to him. And, uh, I asked, "What is Mickey’s day-rate for a one day shoot?" And they said an outrageous number. Now, once they say that outrageous number, once they counter offer you -- So, here’s what I did... I lowballed them. I gave them a lower offer. They countered me with a very high offer, and the minute they countered me, Mickey had to do the job. All I had to do now was pay him. So, at that point I got him the script, because now we were in a negotiation. Once Mickey read the script, he came to more reasonable terms. He took the job. But the way I cracked the agent was -- the more I implied that I would pay him an outrageous sum of money, the closer I was to getting him.
Ebner: So, you didn’t have to grovel.
Gallo: No, because when people do that to me I laugh in their face. "I have this really great role, and you’d be really great in it..." There’s no such thing as a great role. There’s the lead, and then there’s nothing. It’s about money, so it was like "What does Mickey get for a day? How much would Mickey want to be in my film?"
Ebner: I can understand the balls in doing that, but how did you have the money to do it to begin with?
Gallo: Because I had the balls to put up my own money in case I couldn’t get him lower than the pay-or-play deal. I could cover the extra hundred thousand if I fucked up, but I knew I wasn’t gonna fuck up. I mean, I paid Mickey well, but I felt I got a good deal.
Ebner: Is the western wear part of a motif celebrating Utah?
Gallo: I wear a lot of cowboy stuff. Yesterday I was wearing fur, so, I’m just kind of rock ‘n roll.