Riding a Rising Tide: Q & A with actor Stanley Tucci

by Susan Krawitz

Stanley Tucci may be one of the most ubiquitous faces on screens large and small, but in the leafy green reaches of upper Westchester, he’s just another Hudson Valley local. It could be out of respect for his privacy or because of his ability to blend in, but he seems to get no special attention in the town of Katonah, where we’ve agreed to meet for this interview. But then a woman comes to an abrupt stop on the sidewalk in front of him. “Mr. Tucci, right?” she says. “I watched Shall We Dance last night and you were marvelous!”

Tucci grew up in this town and went to college down the road at SUNY Purchase. After a sojourn in the city, he returned to raise three children with his wife Kate. Hometown connections were instrumental to the start of his acting career; in 1982, high school buddy Campbell Scott’s mother, actress Colleen Dewhurst, helped him get a role in a Broadway play she was starring in, and the rest, as they say, is history.

His career has taken him into nearly every cranny of the acting world: he’s done voices in animated movies and performed in television, film and on the Broadway stage. He has also directed, produced and written films, and he’s done it quite well, most notably with Big Night, a beautifully nuanced and critically acclaimed movie about two Italian immigrant brothers that he produced, starred in, co-directed, and co-wrote (with cousin Joseph Tropiano, another Katonah resident).

The roles he takes on are sometimes leads, but more frequently he’s a story pillar, providing crucial load-bearing support to the entire narrative edifice. Whether he’s giving voice to a cartoon or portraying a TV surgeon, Tucci seems to give each role 100 percent of his trademark intensity. And his reach is wide as well as deep; from Nigel, the razor-tongued fashion editor in The Devil Wears Prada, to the coldly evil Adolph Eichmann in HBO’s Conspiracy, Tucci seems effortlessly able to embody an immensely varied assortment of souls. He is the desperate dastard, the forlornly hopeful average Joe, that brilliant, crazy guy who just needs a chance. But lately, in “real” life, he seems to be playing the guy riding a cresting wave of success.

ROLL: If you could design a perfect working year for yourself what would it be like? Some acting, some directing…

STANLEY TUCCI: This year is shaping up like that. I guess it was Edward G. Robinson who said he did three movies a year: one for money, one for love, and one for location. That’s kind of the best way to do it. I think directing something, then a bit of acting, do a commercial for big bucks, and then, make an independent movie, or something like that.

ROLL: Tell me about Blind Date, the film you just finished working on, and what’s coming up next for you.

STANLEY TUCCI: Theo van Gogh was the filmmaker who was killed a few years ago. He’d wanted to remake three movies of his in English, and it didn’t happen, so the producer Bruce Weiss brought the movies to Steve Buscemi. Steve mentioned to me they were looking for other filmmakers, and I looked at the movies and really loved them. They’re all two - just two-handers, just two people in a room, basically, and mine, Blind Date, takes place in a bar. Tony Shalhoub [who was slated to play a lead role] had to drop out, and Patty [actress Patricia Clarkson] and I talked and decided I should play the role. It was just finished like a month ago, and now I’m in the process of editing. And I just finished doing this other movie—I did a few this year—with Barry Levinson called What Just Happened, with Robert DeNiro, Sean Penn, Bruce Willis and John Turturro. Then I did this American Girl movie, you know those American Girl dolls? It’s called Kit Kittredge, An American Girl Mystery, and I tell you, it was so much fun making this sweet kid’s movie. And now I’m going to do this movie with Kevin Costner called Swing Vote, then I’ll come home and edit again, and then go back out to LA and do some TV stuff, some ER episodes, four more of those.

ROLL: You have a lot going on.

STANLEY TUCCI: Too much going on. I’m supposed to do a movie with Peter Jackson in the fall, but I’m not so sure that’s going to work out. [editorial note: latest word is that Tucci will indeed star in Peter Jackson’s film version of the novel The Lovely Bones, as murderer George Harvey.] Then I’ll do a movie next year with Meryl Streep that Norah Ephron will direct. Meryl will play Julia Child and I’ll play Paul Child. And I’m inches away from getting the financing to put together a production company with Steve Buscemi. We like to make our own movies, and it’s very hard to find the financing on your own.

The other thing I’m very excited about is this project for HBO called Unto the Sons. It’s based on Gay Talese’s book about his family and their immigration to America from southern Italy. It’s a 600-page tome and it explains in great detail about the history of Italy, and also of the Italian immigration, through this family. I’ll turn it into a miniseries for HBO because the story’s never been told. There have been pieces of it; The Godfather or Big Night, or Goodfellas, but the story in its entirety has never been told before.

ROLL: Sounds sort of like an Italian Roots.

STANLEY TUCCI: Right, exactly. There are forty million Italian Americans in this country, and we’re obsessed with Italian Americans and Italy. So to me, it not only has great artistic potential, but commercial potential as well. I always wanted to see the story told properly, and the scope of it is enormous, but I think it will be very, very exciting. I’ll do it in conjunction with Nick Pileggi, who is the
writer of Goodfellas and Casino. He’s a brilliant, brilliant writer, and he and Gay Talese are related, so this story is their family story.

ROLL: Do you get much time off in between projects?

STANLEY TUCCI: The hard part is trying to find the time…Some years are slow, some years are busy; luckily, this has been a busy year. You work when you get the work, because, you know, there’s nothing worse than languishing and thinking, why isn’t the phone ringing? You have to pick up the phone yourself most of the time to get things, because if you wait for the other people it will never happen. Hollywood has a very short memory. It’s been a great—it’s not often that I know so much in advance what it is I’m going to be doing, I have to say. Usually it’s job to job to job. And even after 25 years in show business, it’s job to job and that’s where it gets a little frustrating. But it’s not like that this year, so maybe the tide’s changing.

ROLL: You wear a lot of hats in the filmmaking business. Do you prefer any particular one?

STANLEY TUCCI: No, no, no, I’d rather just mix it up. As soon as I start acting for too long, I get burned out and tired. But it’s actually a great thing to get a break from both because you get perspective. You’re on a movie set and you’re watching people do the job that you’ve done, whether it’s an actor or a director, and you can learnfrom what they do right or what they do wrong.

ROLL: Do you have any favorites among the parts you’ve played?

STANLEY TUCCI: You know how kids always say, what’s your favorite color, what’s your favorite this, or that? My daughter always asks me, but I have no favorites. I have no favorite food, no favorite place, nofavorite anything. I like everything. And I hate everything.

ROLL: I hear you’ve been to the Woodstock Film Festival.

STANLEY TUCCI: I was there four years ago—maybe it was more than that. I was on a panel with Liev Schreiber and Fisher Stevens and Martha Frankel, and it was great. I’m a big proponent of any film festival. They’re wonderful for a community—they employ people, bring in business, and raise cultural awareness. And a lot of times, the only way independent movies will get seen is on the festival circuit. We always joke that you can make one movie and travel
around the world with it for like, ten years. I mean literally. There’s a film festival every five minutes. I was talking to Bingham Ray, he’s head of October films and a great guy, and he said, you should make a movie about a guy who goes on the festival circuit and just travels around the world for free. You eat for free, sleep for free, they fly you….And you never have to make another movie. That’s all I know about the Woodstock Film Festival, but I have a connection with that area because it’s where my sister lives, and I started going up about 17 ago when my friend Aidan Quinn bought a house there. With the exception of this last year, we’ve spent every New Year’s Eve up there.

ROLL: Do you think the independent film movement is still on the rise?

STANLEY TUCCI: I think when we made Big Night independent film was at its peak, because that year at the Academy Awards, there was only one studio movie nominated for best picture. All the rest were independents. It was after that year that studios co-opted, in a sense, the whole idea of independent movies. A lot of independent film companies subsequently disappeared, and now the landscape is very, very tough. And a lot of people are making what they call independent movies and they’re just like cheap versions of studio movies. There’s still a lot of stuff being done, but it’s harder to get money now than it used to be. There’s no question about it.

ROLL: Will you do a project like Big Night again—something so personal?

STANLEY TUCCI: Well they all were personal for me. The other two movies I made, Joe Gould’s Secret, and The Imposters were definitely as personal. Big Night is just more attractive to people because of the food. I only want to tell stories that I have an emotional connection with as a director. And if I can’t invest myself, I’m not really interested.