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 Chazz Palminteri
Interview By: Jason Zencka
"The kid just wouldn't start crying." Perhaps you've never had this problem. For Chazz Palminteri, however, a Bronx-born, Hollywood vet who has worked under the directorial aegis of Woody Allen, Robert De Niro, Bryan Singer, and as of this year, Sundance-spawned screen-memoirist Dito Montiel, this was a scene where dry eyes just wouldn't cut it. Palminteri doesn't tell the press which film, exactly he was shooting, when his young co-star was having trouble mustering the pathos to squeeze out a few well-timed tears, but he does tell us how he mentored the boy into the director's good graces. "A smack," he says, "a five-fingered smack." Sure enough, he says, affecting the hoarse squeak of a teenage boy's sob, the kid started to cry, and sure enough, he is careful to mention, "that was the take we used." Talk about being taken under the wing of a dragon. This week, Dito Montiel's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints comes out in New York, and again Mr. Palminteri is placed opposite more than a few snively teenagers. Sure enough, Palminteri, who plays an aging, ursine father to a troubled boy with a nascent sense of wanderlust, ends up being privy to one or two filial sob sessions. This, time, he assures us, no corporeal motivation was needed. He simply took LeBeouf aside between takes and whispered things the young man's own father would say to him during a moment of emotional turbulence. Smack or no, Palminteri is evidently an actor who doesn't pull any punches. Despite his questionable teaching methods, Palminteri remains a charming presence. Having been decorated with an Academy Award nomination, A Los Angeles Dramalogue Award for acting, and a Leadership in Entertainment Award from the Coalition of Italo-American Associaton, Inc., Palminteri has comfortably grown into the role of a Hollywood elder statesman. For the last few years, he has even served as the National Spokesperson for the Cooley's Anemia Foundation. And, despite the opening anecdote, he assures the press he knows "how to smack someone without hurting them." I'll take his word for it. The character of Monty from A Guide…, a neighborhood pater famlias who has trouble articulating his fierce love for his own son, draws upon Palminteri's trademark intensity. After reading the script, Palminteri jumped the at the chance of working with Montiel, even to the point of paying out-of-pocket the expense of putting off filming for his film The Dukes, which he is producing as welling as starring in, and which is scheduled to be released later this year. "I had to do it. Sometimes in life you got to do it." Palminteri joined such names as Robert Downey Jr., Dianne Wiest, and Rosario Dawson in bringing to the screen Ditto Montiel's Queens-set memoir of the same name. It seems to have been an easy project to get behind. Discussing his reaction to the script, Palminteri says, "it was just a really honest portrayal of a young boy…trying to get out of the neighborhood." In real life, of course, A Guide… director Montiel had something of a meteoric ascent into fame, taking jobs as a Calvin Klein underwear ... |
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