“You’re the guy that threw your mother out of the window,” director Spike Lee said to actor John Turturro when they first met. He had recognised Turturro from his 1987 breakthrough film Five Corners, in which he played a psychopath just out of prison and back in the Bronx. Turturro, who has by now been in more than sixty features and wrote and directed a number of others, is probably best-known and beloved for the unhinged eccentrics he has brought to life in iconic American movies that include Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), and Barton Fink (1991) and The Big Lebowski (1998) by Ethan and Joel Coen. Turturro’s lively wit charmed audiences at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where he gave a masterclass peppered with anecdotes and quips on his career and approach to the craft of storytelling. He is the recipient of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award of the festival for his contribution to the film industry.
“As you can see, I’m a very inhibited actor,” Turturro joked, as clips were shown that revisited the wild energy of some of his performances.
Turturro, speaking of his earliest beginnings, said that he had watched American movie classics a lot with his parents, whose reaction was always “very visceral.” Their animated responses later extended to his own premieres, where his father, seated among celebrities, had been known to smoke in the theatre and shout at the screen.
As a youngster, Turturro had “always fantasised” about being an actor. He didn’t think it was possible without classic star looks until he saw Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (1969). “I thought, that guy could have been someone in my family. It really blew my mind,” he said.
But, being a “dark, ethnic actor” meant typecasting, and Turturro was typically offered roles as villains and maniacs, though some of those offered complexity and substance, like his role in Five Corners, he said. “If it’s a good character, it’s different than playing a run-of-the-mill psychopathic bad guy. There’a sensitivity to John [Patrick Shanley]’s writing.” Not that audiences minded seeing him as a murderer. “People were more upset that I killed a penguin than my mother in that,” he laughed.
A degree of industry attention enabled him to connect with directors he had a real affinity with, and a wider range of roles opened up to him — though weirdos have remained a joy to play.
He shared comparable origins with Spike Lee, who directed him in Do the Right Thing not long after Five Corners. “I grew up in a black neighbourhood in Queens, he grew up in an Italian neighbourhood, and we were almost the same age,” he said of their fortuitous meeting. It was with the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, who he met through fellow Yale Drama School student Frances McDormand, that Turturro forged his most prolific and fruitful collaborative relationship.
He described an atmosphere of freedom and fun on the Coens’ sets, where his comedic experimentation enjoyed free rein, leading to some of his most famous scenes, like the dance of perverted bowler Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski. “It was more of a first grade kind of thing where you’re trying to make your friends laugh, I didn’t think they’d put it in the film,” he said.
Turturro described dipping into blockbuster roles in more recent years with the Transformers franchise: “I enjoyed it. I call it my electrical job. Normally what I do is plumbing. There’s more of a sketchlike approach, than a detailed painting, but it’s like playing with your kids.” He wound up director Michael Bay by not taking them seriously enough, as they are “based on a toy,” he laughed.
Turturro, when asked about the television series Monk, where he played a man with agoraphobia, spoke of the need for cinematic stories that depict, with humanity, the reality of life with mental health struggles — a subject he is familiar with in his own family.
“I was the guardian of my older brother, who was schizophrenic and was very smart and perceptive,” he said. “Movies about mental health usually talk about the exception, when people get better, not the journey of how people have to navigate the labyrinth of the mental health system, and the cost it has. I know how difficult and lonely it is. Those are the stories that are harder to tell, but actually point to people on the street.”
“A person who has problems is a full, complex human being. They have desire, lust, ambition, cruelty, they can be really funny, and full of surprise, and it’s a bear to get your hands around. John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence is a film I really love, because it still has love in the film, even though the husband is telling his wife to just act normal,” he said.
“Once my brother told me, you get a lot of material from me. He isn’t wrong,” he added.
Asked for advice for young actors, he spoke of the emotional flexibility the profession requires. “You have to have a thick skin and a thin skin, that’s the problem,” he said.
