Smoldering Auteur With a Short Fuse
CAN a director be too independent for independent film? In an arena increasingly seen as an annex of the major studios and where one of Hollywood’s contributions has been the acceptance of compromise, the career of the writer and director Tom DiCillo would suggest it’s true.
Mr. DiCillo has directed six features, all of which have have had their premieres at the Sundance Film Festival and all of which have been distributed by the different companies. Outside of “Living in Oblivion,” which remains the signature independent film about the making of an independent film, his movies have not been terribly successful. But each has arguably carried an auteur’s signature, a personal vision. The qualities, in other words, that indie cinema was supposed to represent.
“Look at the movies people are watching,” he said, sitting in his Upper West Side apartment and shaking his head. “They’re about nothing. You invest nothing.” Mr. DiCillo blames, in part, the events of September 2001. “People can’t invest real emotion because it’s too terrifying.”
So, like the hero of “Sullivan’s Travels” by Preston Sturges — a writer-director with whom Mr. DiCillo shares a penchant for the offhand, satirical bon mot — he finds salvation in comedy, the latest of which, “Delirious,” stars Steve Buscemi, Michael Pitt and Gina Gershon.
Mr. DiCillo doesn’t fit the cliché of the struggling artist, intractable in his vision and creating obscure, inaccessible cinema that requires annotation. But each film has been a struggle, not made any easier by his short fuse when it comes to dealing with the machinery of making movies.
“Delirious” reunites Mr. DiCillo, 53, with Mr. Buscemi, the star of “Living in Oblivion.” In the new film, which opens this week, Mr. Buscemi plays Les Galantine, a paparazzo who hires (for no pay) a dreamy homeless kid named Toby (Mr. Pitt). Les introduces his Billy Buddish gofer to the seamy world of entertainment journalism, and sets the apparently guileless Toby on his own path to stardom.
“Delirious” is a critique of celebrity machinery, the vacuousness of actors and the tastes of American audiences. Coming from Mr. DiCillo, none of this is a surprise. “Living in Oblivion” was perceived (Mr. DiCillo has always said wrongly) as a satire about working with the young Brad Pitt, who starred in Mr. DiCillo’s directorial debut, “Johnny Suede.” And an appearance on a local public television program in New York a few years ago featured Mr. DiCillo along a street near his home, denouncing virtually everyone involved in independent filmmaking.
“He’s passionate,” said Mr. Buscemi, who also appeared in Mr. DiCillo’s 1997 feature “The Real Blonde.” “He’s not always tactful. And he gets angry. He does. Sometimes his anger gets the best of him. But it’s for a good cause. It’s not unreasonable. He cares about what he does.”
Mr. DiCillo said he sees it as his responsibility to speak out about how his films are handled because “a distributor can make mistakes that prevent you from ever making another film.” This frankness, not surprisingly, is not always welcome. And it carries a cost. “My wife, Jane, always says if there’s another Holocaust, I’ll be the first one executed. But my so-called irascibility is just about trying to be honest.”
Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which distributed “Living in Oblivion” and made money with it because of its DVD success, called Mr. DiCillo “meticulous.” But although Mr. Bernard said he liked “Delirious” and thought there was an audience for it, Sony Pictures Classics passed on the film. It was merely a question, he said, of how much was being asked for the film. (Peace Arch Films is releasing the film.)
“He’s not a guy we avoid,” Mr. Bernard added. “I would tell you if he were. We cater to the needs of our directors, people like Pedro Almódovar, Jim Jarmusch, directors who have certain things they need to maintain the integrity of their films and reputations. Tom’s one of those guys.”
Inside the apartment he has shared for 30 years with his wife, Jane Gill, a horticulturist and landscape gardener, Mr. DiCillo talked about the depression and desperation that his brand of filmmaking entails. “You wake up in the morning and say, ‘How am I ever going to make this movie?’ ” he said.
He made this one, he said, by subtraction.
“Originally,” he said, “the budget was five million, and I spent four and a half years trying to raise that money. Ultimately I realized I was in a holding pattern that wasn’t going to be broken until I broke it. You know how I broke it? I cut the script that I had worked on for five years. I said, ‘I need to cut two million out of this budget,’ and so I cut scenes, locations.” One of the severed scenes involved the shooting of a “gigantic” TV commercial in Central Park for something called Nola Cola, a number requiring a “cast of thousands.” “I wanted to open big, and it would have set a tone,” Mr. DiCillo said.
While it may be premature to apply the word mellow to Mr. DiCillo, he is showing signs of acceptance of a system he constitutionally can’t quite abide. “I used to get annoyed, whenever something would come up that I felt wasn’t part of directing,” he said. “But then I realized, with this movie, that the only way it was going to get made was if I allowed myself to embrace all that. And it was O.K.” He’s even displaying a sense of humor about it all. During a recent press day for “Interview,” the current feature directed by Mr. Buscemi, Mr. DiCillo barged in with a video crew, asking Mr. Buscemi tongue-in-cheek questions and creating a good-natured scene. And he seems to take things less personally, especially things he has no chance of changing.
“Have you ever noticed,” he asked, “that the entertainment business is the only one where there has never been somebody picking up a machine gun and going berserk? A guy in a post office in Cincinnati will bring an AK-47 into his place of business because somebody used his coffee cup. Nothing like that has ever happened in the film business and never will. Never will. You know why? The stakes are too high. It’s life and death. No one is ever going to jeopardize their place in the food chain.
“I’m not suggesting they do,” he said with a smile, “but it’s a brutal business
Da The New York Times, 12 Agosto 2007
