A gentler Gandolfini. Sopranos star a do-gooder in indie film.LOS ANGELES — Doug Riley is no Tony Soprano.
The bottled-up plumbing contractor James Gandolfini plays in the new indie movie Welcome to the Rileys could hardly be more different from the cable TV crime boss that made the actor famous.
"Kinder, gentler, older, fatter . . ." Gandolfini jokes about his latest appearance on theatre screens in selected cities. But like much of the work he’s done since The Sopranos came to its ambiguous end three years ago — such as In the Loop’s dissident but tentative general, his voice-over for one of Where the Wild Things Are’s volatile beasts or the Tony-nominated performance in the award-winning play God of Carnage — the actor was really drawn to something rich, deep and challenging about Riley.
"It was different," Gandolfini, 49, says. "There was a stillness. And at the time, I’d just come from playing somebody whose every small emotion was, to him, a huge deal. Doug doesn’t think his emotions are that valid."
A quiet man with a southern Indiana drawl — itself quite a change for the New Jersey native — Doug has yet to get over the car-crash death of his teenage daughter.
He hasn’t taken it as bad as his wife Lois (Melissa Leo); she’s never left their home in the years since the tragedy. But Doug needs something, and discovers it in the unlikely person of a teenage stripper he meets while attending a trade show in New Orleans.
No, it’s not that. Kristen Stewart’s Mallory — or whatever her real name is — brings out all of Doug’s stymied paternal instincts. He devotes himself to helping her and trying to nudge her off of the downward path she’s taken.
"When you get to a certain age, you start questioning things," Gandolfini muses. "In my life, I’ve been very lucky, but I think there are people who are unlucky, and not through any fault of their own, really. So I think Doug is contemplating — How did all of this happen? — and he just needed to go somewhere and figure it out. A lot of people would like to do that if they could."
Maybe. But things like spouses tend to disapprove. When Lois gets an ambiguous I’m-not-coming-home call from Doug, she uncharacteristically jumps in the car and heads for the Big Easy. Things take a surprising turn when she learns what’s really going on.
Though deeply emotional, nothing about the production ever felt inappropriate, Gandolfini assures us.
"Not because I’m all that decent a human being, but it never crossed my mind to read anything lecherous into the relationship," he says.
Gandolfini was also greatly impressed by Stewart, who between blockbuster Twilight episodes, has been building quite a gallery of lost-girl portraits in indies like The Yellow Handkerchief, The Runaways and Adventureland.
"She’s a young girl who reads," he marvels. "She’s questioning things and she works very hard to do things that mean a lot to her. I like Kristen a lot and admire her. Especially when I think of myself at that age — which was, y’know, ridiculous."
In his own pursuit of things that matter, Gandolfini has produced and appeared in another military documentary, Wartorn: 1861-2010, for HBO. The Sopranos network played his first such effort, Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, and the new documentary about the history of post-traumatic stress disorder debuts on Veterans Day, Nov. 11.
"I was told that a lot of soldiers watched The Sopranos in Iraq," Gandolfini says of how he got interested in military subjects. "So I went over there and met a lot of them, and I was really impressed by the quality of these kids. I respected their honour and duty, and taking care of what they have to take care of. Whether I am for or against this whole thing that’s happening, I think that we owe them, at least, to pay some attention. We are at war, and the cost to these kids coming back and the cost to their families are some things we need to look at."
While the work is rewarding, Gandolfini was never very comfortable with the fame that came from being TV’s favourite neurotic mobster. After three years, he says, that aspect of success has become more bearable.
"It took a little bit — everybody kisses your a-- a little bit — but it goes away," he notes with a relieved sigh.
"I live in New York City, y’know? Drive a Toyota and walk around. It’s fine; after the show ended, it got much better.
"It’s something you’ve got to get used to. I come from a family where nobody ever did anything like this, so it’s a little odd. And you’ve got to get used to some of the financial things too, to tell you the truth. It’s a different way of living — and that’s the trap! But I’ve stayed near a lot of old friends who certainly aren’t impressed by any of this, so it’s fine."
That said, under the right circumstances Gandolfini would trade in the satisfactions of professional independence for a return to TV stardom.
"Maybe not at the same intensity, but I think I’d go back to a TV series," he reckons.
"It’s great to develop different characters.
"But if you’ve got a group of people that wants you, that’s a bit like having a family. And if you’re doing good things and have got good writing, a series is a nice thing.
"It’s longer hours, but it’s less disruptive on your family and the people around you than the change that happens all the time with film."
‘Not because I’m all that decent a human being, but it never crossed my mind to read anything lecherous into the relationship.’
thechronicleherald
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Jake Scott Talks About Kristen
CS: How did you go about the casting? Did you look for specific roles first and then build around it or did you just send the script out and got responses?
Scott: Again, it's a similar thing. Inevitably, small dramas have a tough time now and the financiers and potential financiers are always wanting you to cast Richard Gere or George Clooney, know what I mean? You always have the battles over casting stars, and that I found really frustrating, and luckily, the financiers we ended up with didn't see it that way. They really trusted my judgment in casting, 'cause to me, those characters had to feel real and authentic and if you started casting... I don't want to mention other names, but there are some fantastic, very fine actors out there who aren't necessarily "People Magazine" famous, and Jim (Gandolfini) to me... what blew me away was that Jim wasn't considered to be a major catch.
CS: And he is actually.
Scott: And he's an incredible actor, and Melissa had just done "Frozen River" so that really helped, and Kristen wasn't known for "Twilight" then. That hadn't happened yet. She had just finished shooting before she came onto our film, so we didn't know that "Twilight" was going to be this major success, so Kristen was, at that time, not a big star, so it was an interesting but very frustrating process to get the film financed but we ended up with the right people who believed totally in what we were doing, and we were all making the same film.
CS: Did one of the three actors get attached earlier than the others?
Scott: Jim and Kristen got attached pretty early, and Jim was 18 months before we started production.
CS: I want to ask about working with the three actors, because one of the things I really liked about the movie is that it is just three characters with a few people floating in and out, but it's really focused on those three. Did all three actors want to develop the characters on their own, did you have to work with each one individually, did you do a lot of rehearsal?
Scott: They all three have a different process, and Jim's preparation is really script-oriented. He's very focused on script and he's really good at it, and he had very strong ideas about the emotional logic of his character's journey. He also comes from a tradition of method acting, and he's rigorous about it, and I'd not really worked with that before, and so, I kind of just had to allow him to do it. His method is his method, so when he comes on set, and he and Melissa have an eminent respect for one another. Melissa is a very thorough actor who prepares in a different way, and she's really into detail of her character, of her physicalities and her behavior. So you have these two amazing actors - let them do their thing! So they'd come on set and we'd rehearse on set. Rather than rehearse before the shoot, we actually just sat down and talked a lot and discussed a lot. They were a bit resistant to rehearsing scenes because I think that a lot of actors find on movies that they can over-rehearse. And Kristen is just complete instinct, everything is instinct. I kept her away from the others, because that was the nature of the relationship, and she kind of met strippers and hung out with some strippers that I introduced her to and kind of got a sense of their world, and it was her first time being independent from her parents on a movie, so she was alone. I think that was quite a big thing for her. She's a young lady, just turned 18 at the time, so she was pretty vulnerable.
So you're dealing with three very distinct types of actor. I'm not that experienced with actors and I just learned to trust them and learned from them and found it not easy but it was the best part of making the film was actually working with them. I looked forward to it. Actors, they have a reputation sometimes of being quite difficult.
CS: How did you deal with Kristen on shooting some of the racier scenes and how to prepare for those?
Scott: Very sensitively. You know, you've got this person who is young, who is having to expose herself, more emotionally than physically, but pretty physically as well, and she had to relate to Jim in this, to Doug Riley, and I think we had to be protective. Jim was really good at that, and that was partly their relationship, the characters Doug and Mallory, that's kind of what their relationship was. He was protective, he's not exploiting her, so it made my life easier in terms of watching out for Kristen, but you did feel like you had to... The irony is that Kristen was fine with dealing with it, she's very courageous. Really put herself and threw herself (into it). There were times where she'd do a take and you'd go, "My God." She'd just blow me away at how far she was willing to push it, and she's always trying something new, it was interesting, really interesting.
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