"Tanned and Toned Once Again..."

Peter Facinelli is best known to audiences as the slick, blond-haired vampire caretaker Dr. Carlisle Cullen in The Twilight Saga and as Dr. Fitch Cooper on the Showtime TV series Nurse Jackie. However, the 38 year-old shows he’s much more than meets the golden eyes of Carlisle as pickpocket Bobby in Loosies.

Not only does Facinelli star in the film, but wrote it as well. He talks about how he first came up with Loosies.

“Wow, it was so long ago,” Peter recalls, “I wrote the movie in three years and it took me like seven years to get it made. So I don’t even remember where it originated from, I think it was just kind of riding the subways in Manhattan. I got the idea of the pickpocket and I thought, well, what’s that guy’s world like? What’s his life like? And I kept fantasizing about his life and what journey he would go on and it got to a point where I had the whole story in my head and I kind of sat down and wrote it on paper.

“I lived with it so long in my head that it just kind of poured out of me,” he continues, “Some people do note cards and they kind of structure a plot structure and it was like, I kind of sat down and let it take me for a ride. I knew the beginning, I knew the middle, and I knew the end and I saw certain scenes in my head and then, the rest of it kind of got filled in. It was kind of fun writing that way because it took me on a journey and sometimes, I’d be like, oh, wow, it’s going this way and it kind of wrote itself that way.”

Loosies was produced by Peter’s own production company Facinelli Films and he says getting the movie made is one of the major reasons the company was created in the first place.

“The

"Tanned and Toned Once Again..."

problem with trying to make it for seven years is that I would get pieces of financing, I’d have casts attached, then I’d go off and do a movie,” he says, “Then, when I finish the movie, I’d find out the financier got antsy and he would put his money in some other movie or a cast member would fall out because they wanted to do something and the whole thing would fall apart and I would have to start all over. Then, I’d put it in a drawer for a year and then I’d start all over again giving it out to people.”

“When this film came to fruition, instead of just me handling it, I hired a producing partner to keep all the wheels moving,” Facinelli adds, “He helped get this film made, so when I went off and did Twilight and there’s Nurse Jackie, he kept the train running. And since then, we’ve had four other films in development now, so it’s exciting.”

We asked Facinelli if he saw himself as the head of his own production company when he started out as an actor.

“I don’t know if where I was younger, I had thought, this is where I want to be, but I’m ready to be at that stage now in my life,” Peter says, “I think I started writing out of frustration because as an actor, you’re getting scripts and some of them are good and some of them are bad, but you’re kind of looking at a needle through a haystack. And I got tired of wading through other people’s material, so I started thinking about, well, what do I want? What stories inspire me? And what stories I can tell? And I love 70s movies, so I kind of wanted to do a movie that was a throwback to a 70s movie that was very character-driven, had an antihero at its core and its anchor that was flawed, but you

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still kind of root for. It’s a kind of movie that I thought if Paul Newman or [Steve] McQueen was younger, he would want to play.”

“And so, I created that character Bobby and still, as an actor, you do your part and then leave and someone else puts it together and the director has the vision for it,” he continues, “And so, you’re giving up a lot of control, as a writer who creates the story, then as a producer who’s seeing it all the way through, then I get to decide who I want to work with, then you’re giving jobs to people as opposed to going out and getting a job. And that’s exciting to me at this point in my career, to be able to be on set working with all these people on something that was a thought at one point in my head. It’s kind of surreal.”

Peter talks about how he learned how to pickpocket in order to effectively play Bobby in the film.

“I worked with a magician who specialized in pickpocket, that was his act,” Facinelli says, “So he taught me a lot. Some of it is movie magic, some of it is me. There was a scene where I actually pickpocketed one of the actors. We were shooting on the streets of Manhattan. We had such a small crew and the camera was so far away that somebody did not know that I was an actor and they ran over the guy. They said, ‘Hey, you just got pickpocketed. He’s standing right over there,’ really funny.”

We asked Facinelli if his attachment to The Twilight Saga made filming even a low-key project like Loosies difficult.

“There were times,” he replies, “There was one time and we were shooting in Grand Central Station and we had a very small crew and the camera was off to the side and there’s this scene in the montage where I’m asking these people.”

“They’re asking

"Tanned and Toned Once Again..."

me for directions,” Peter continues, “And I’m going around and I’m picking their purses and stuff and this girl walked right into the scene and asked me for my autograph in the middle of a take. It’s like, ‘I’m filming right now and you’re actually in the shot and you’re in my movie, but when you’re done, I’ll give you one.’”

Peter says that despite the intrusiveness that his place in The Twilight Saga has given him, at the end of the day, he takes all the attention in stride.

“At that point, I was a little annoyed because the take was going really well,” Facinelli says, “But I’m happy that people enjoy my work, that they take the opportunity and the time to come and ask me for an autograph or take a picture, it just means that I’m doing something right. If they stop asking for autographs and pictures, then I’m doing something wrong.”

Facinelli also puts his increased visibility as a result of The Twilight Saga in perspective with where it has brought him currently in his career with this film.

“I’ve done a bunch of movies before Twilight,” Peter says, “And in the last couple of years, I’ve lived in that bubble because we’ve shot five movies in three or four years, so it’s been constantly filming that movie. But I also got to do Nurse Jackie on the side, so that was a nice break to be able to do that, and I squeezed this in, too, so it was nice to play a different character. It wasn’t a doctor for a minute.”

Peter continued by talking about what he would be doing in his career if he hadn’t become an actor.

“I don’t think I would have made a very good doctor,” Facinelli believes, “ I’m very squeamish when it comes to blood actually, but I actually studied pre-law in college my first year, but I’ve never played a lawyer. I’ve played a juror,

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a witness, but I’ve never played a lawyer. Hopefully, I’ll play a lawyer one day.”

We asked Facinelli if doing projects based on true stories interest him the most.

“I love documentaries, so what happens is I end up watching documentaries,” he says, “And I’m like, wow, that would make a good movie. And there’s nothing more interesting to me than real life. So I guess that’s where it stems from. There are a few stories that I have in development that are based on true stories. There is a couple that aren’t. And what about my production company is we’re not like, oh, I’m not doing all horror and I’m not doing all romantic comedies or we’re doing all action.”

“I’m just interested in telling good stories, so we have a mixture of everything,” Peter adds, “I have a movie that I wrote that is kind of in the vein of a modern-day Scarface, kind of an epic gangster movie. Then, we have a movie that’s a documentary that’s more in the horror genre. So it’s more about telling good stories and it really doesn’t matter the genre that it’s in.”

We asked Peter how he feels about Bobby’s character as the father of three daughters himself.

“I like Bobby actually,” he answers, “He’s flawed, but he doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong, which is why when he’s questioned by it, he’s kind of thrown. He’s like, well, the people that he steals from, he thinks, they are not going to go home and miss a couple of dollars, so I’m not really doing anything wrong.”

“But he kind of manipulates the situation to make himself feel good and then he starts to realize is, OK, what I am doing is wrong and he starts to change,” Facinelli continues, “He might be doing the wrong things, but he thinks he’s doing them for the right reasons, and it’s a movie where he grows and learns and he comes out a

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different person than when you first meet him, but that was what was fun for me to play as an actor, but also to write.”

Also asked was whether Facinelli would report Bobby if he ever encountered him.

“If he’s still pickpocketing, yes, but if he’s on the up and up, he’s actually a pretty good guy.”

Facinelli also talks about his co-stars he got to work with on Loosies.

“I got to work with some icons in this movie,” Peter says, “Michael Madsen, to me, is an icon. Joey Patoliano, the guy’s in everything and he’s an icon to me. Vincent Gallo is like an actor’s dream to work with. It’s like taking an actor’s workshop. Being in scenes with this guy s so intense. I remember my first scene with him. It was the scene where I come into the house for the first time and you meet Jax, and he’s not happy with me because I keep bringing him more cell phones and he doesn’t want more junky cell phones. And after that take, the sound guy said, ‘We have to go again. There’s a thumping noise.’ And we were trying to figure out what the thumping noise is.”

“That was my heart,” Peter says, “My heart was like beating so loud and his eyes were like looking into the abyss, so when you’re working with him, it scared the crap out of me. And I was like, OK, I got to relax a little bit, but I got to work with these really talented actors that lent their talent to my movie and that in itself is an honor for them to say hey, I like your story, I like your script, I want to be a part of it. It’s like a huge thing for me. And then, we got Jamie Alexander, which was a hard role to cast, we cast a lot of people for that and I think it was tough because we

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were looking for a girl who had this tough exterior, but also that could play vulnerable and that’s a hard mix to find. Usually, you can find people that can play really sweet or vulnerable or these people that are really tough, but to have both these qualities is a tough mix and Jamie walked in and it was like I wrote it for her, she was perfect.”

Having the dual role of being an actor and producer, Peter says, is not without the struggle to be taken seriously.

“I think every time I walk into a room, it’s like, here’s an actor with another idea,” Facinelli says, “But once they hear the idea or read the scripts, then they’re a little more impressed because they’re hopefully good or more original ideas, and they get excited by that.”

“But I do find that when I walk through a door, it’s at first a courtesy move, like, oh, I got to meet with this guy at 12:00 because he’s in the franchise, the big franchise, and they don’t want to insult me,” he continues, “And it’s like, once we get into the project and they start to see what I’m doing and what I’ve already accomplished in my production company, they’re usually generally impressed.”

Finally, Peter talks about wrapping up The Twilight Saga once and for all with Breaking Dawn Part 2, which comes out this November.

“I’m just excited that we’ll finally presenting the last film to the audience,” Facinelli says, “I think it’s going to be a big film because it has a huge ensemble cast, you get a whole new set of fresh faces, which should be exciting, and it’s quite a story. Part 2 is very different from Part 1.”

“What I liked about the last two movies is that it’s based on one book, but Part 1 is its own succinct movie, you have a beginning, middle, and end, so it doesn’t feel all of a

"Tanned and Toned Once Again..."

sudden like an incomplete film and there’s this other part to fill in the gaps,” he adds, “It really felt like it’s own film and Part 2 is going to feel like it’s own film with a beginning, middle, and end.”