FILMMAKER:

So what got you interested in making movies?

GALLO:

I went to L.A. from NewYork City for the first time in '78 when I was 16 years old-I had taken one of those messenger jobs where they pay you $50 to go on a plane and deliver a package. I had $50, this one-way ticket to L.A. and the connection to go back. I had a blue mohawk that was a little grown out, and I had an antique bathing suit from the '20s, the one- piece kind with the top. I took a bus all the way to Muscle Beach because I heard it was cool, but I couldn't find it,so I got off in Malibu. I went swimming. I came out of the water, and my shoes, my keys, my clothes and my money were missing. And a bunch of surfer jerks were standing there smirking. I have the ruthless, vindictive evil of 100 men in me, but these were big surfer jerks, so I got in a wicked fight, and these five Malibu blonds stomped me after I took a couple of swipes at them. The next thing I know I was kicked back onto the Pacific Coast Highway with no shoes, no money, nothing, wearing my bathing suit. It took me about eight hours to hitchhike home. I went back to the hotel, and there was this groovy, cute, weird chick there who sympathized with me, bought me lunch and took me to the movies that night where I saw Pasolini's Solo at a place that was kind of an erotic gay theater. They were showing it with a soft-core gay porn film, but this girl was hip enough to know that the Pasolini part of the bill was special. And it changed my life. It was such a heavy experience, I can't explain. It's a very good film.

FILMMAKER:

What specifically about it blew you away?

GALLO:

There were three things. First of all, it was the first time I had gone to see a European film. I'm from Buffalo. They're hard to see there. And it was the first time that I understood that there were these whole other cultures around the world that had their own insights, points of views, and sensibilities that could transcend America. I'm 16, it's a funny age, I'm still a little naive, but I was blown out that these Italians-and you know my mother and father are Sicilians-had a cinema language that was completely separate from anything I had seen before. I can't tell you how shocking that thought is at that time in your life. And the other thing was, there was violence in the movie that was not presented in a titillating way. Instead, it was disturbing. Really disturbing. There's a scene where one of the fascist queers is in a room, and the room is dead silent; you can't hear the horror of the torture outside this room, but you can see it. One of the cast members is looking out the window at the torture of these young boys and girls. He can only see it, he can't hear it. We could see these horrific things, but we were aware that we were seeing them through glass, that we were separated, that someone was in a beautiful study observing this horror. And something about this detached point of view disturbed me. My brain left my body. It refused to see what I was seeing. It shut down. My mind went blank for ten seconds. The third thing that happened was that since I have an unusual face, in Buffalo I was certainly not regarded as good looking. But seeing Pasolini's film made me feel better. When I was a kid, I wondered why I wasn't on "The Partridge Family:' I was a really good looking kid. When I turned about 11 or 12 and got ugly, I realized I could never be in movies as an actor. I'd have to fix cars. I remember once I went to one class at Stella Adler I could only go once because I couldn't come up with the tuition.-thank God. I went back to Buffalo for Christmas before that first class. It was a really bad moment with my parents - I had just moved out - and my mother asked me what I was doing in New York. If she only knew. I said, "Oh, I got accepted in this school, Stella Adler, and she taught Marlon Brando." And my father slammed on the brakes of the car. He pulled me from the back seat by my ear and smashed my face on the rearview mirror, opening a big cut on my mouth, and he said, "Look at your face! Look at your face! Do you look like Robert Redford? Do you look like Paul Newman? You look like an asshole, all right! So let's stop with this fantasy about acting bullshit. Get a simple job, all right, and be happy with that!" And I knew he was absolutely right there was no way that I was going to wind up in motion pictures the way I looked then. But when I saw Solo, I got the same feeling I used to feel about "The Partridge Family." I thought, why wasn't I in a Pasolini film!

FILMMAKER:

Going back to that detached point of view comment, one thing that is really interesting about your film is that your directorial point of view towards your character is so detached. Throughout the movie you keep cutting from tighter shots back to wide-shots or long-shots.

GALLO:

My instincts to pull back and reveal my character from far away were very strong. Why they were so strong is very complex and difficult to explain.

FILMMAKER:

Well this visual style has a weird resonance with the character, because he in some sense doesn't want to be looked at closely by the other characters in the movie.

GALLO:

No, he doesn't want to be looked at, especially up close. That character, Billy Brown, does not want to be touched. The worst thing that could happen to Billy Brown would be for him to be face down on a bed nude and for Layla to see him. That would be a pain beyond anything.

FILMMAKER:

Why would that be for this character?

GALLO:

Somewhere in that character, there's a lot of shame. So to be looked at, knowing that somebody is identifying the billions of imperfections in his skin and hair and his dirty ear, just the thought of that is overwhelming. The Layla character is so sweet because she, in a very exaggerated way, tells him how much she likes him. She really does like him, and Billy can tell that, even though he pushes her away all the time. No one ever liked him like that before. Certainly not his mother and father.

FILMMAKER:

That character trait of Billy's is reflected in the filmmaking in key points. The most obvious is when Billy gives this monologue about going to the parents' house that sets up the main storyline - you cover practically the whole speech with a close-up of Christina.

GALLO:

It was a conceptual idea I had about the scene for a long time - to film my character's five-page monologue only on the girl. However, when we filmed it, everybody freaked out on set - my script supervisor, my producer, Christina, my cameraman, even my agent. It's the only time making the movie that I caved in to the sophomoric pressures of the monkeys around me. I filmed my angle just to throw them a banana. When we tried it, I couldn't act, couldn't say the words. I knew the camera shouldn't be on me. I can't even look at the dailies of my angle of that scene. Only my genius editor, Curtiss Clayton understood.

FILMMAKER:

Well, that shot is the first real tip off as to some of the unconscious motivations of the movie. In most movies about people who are shy or reclusive or awkward, the filmmaking is tremendously sympathetic to them. The actors play them sympathetically, you like them, and you end up staring at them a lot. And here you have a film where at this key moment, the film language is duplicating what this guy is feeling.

GALLO:

Right, because if the film language and sensibility are not integrated somewhere in the narrative, then they are inconsequential, separate. And if you have one point of view, one aesthetic, one sensibility throughout everything you do, and you don't let people sway you away from that, especially your cinematographer, then the film develops a soul.

FILMMAKER:

For me, these kind of choices work on almost a structuralist film level. Avoiding continuity editing at moments like these makes you step back and think about what the film is trying to say in a broader sense.

GALLO:

[At the end of the scene], instead of going from her back to me, I go from her to an outside shot of the car. And you see that out in this banal suburb there are a few parked cars. But inside this car, there is this microcosm of a universe, there's this whole complex world. However, I want to be careful the world is permeated by the romantic age where everybody's so unique and special. They're only unique and special if you examine them that way, but if you pull back, they're just ordinary. It's only we who have zoomed in on the microscope in this century and have examined one another as these complex, unique, complicated individuals without putting ourselves back in the context of the universe. It's just a car parked in the suburbs, and this funny thing is happening inside.

FILMMAKER:

What about the other moment of radical coverage, the dinner scene? You do a very long scene featuring four people at a table with no masters or singles.

GALLO:

Again, I'm a very structured person. I've acted in 17 movies now, and when I go on a set, the director lets you rehearse the scene, they do this stupid thing called the walk-through. The cinematographer pushes the director into some wanker idea he has, the actors push the director into some wanker idea that they have, and the director kind of gets wanked around and comes up with his own wanker version of the scene, and it's a kind of "spontaneous" and "risky." To me it never seems to have a singular point of view. It all seems so easily manipulated. When I went on my set, would go with the first a.c. and a set of primes [lenses] and look through the lenses. No one was allowed to say anything-I didn't give a shit what anybody's ideas were. I didn't want to go one step further until I had a concept A concept might be simple, like shooting my five-page monologue and never seeing me, or let's shoot the entire Denny's sequence, seven pages, in two shots. Or let's shoot the Goon character and never let him get out of bed so when he stands up once, the camera doesn't move. It almost knows he's going to sit back down immediately on the bed. Or shooting Mickey Rourke's character as an enigma. I figured out a camera move where we never see him enter or exit the scene. When you have concepts that clear and simple, it becomes really obvious how to photograph the scene. The concept gives you problem and then you solve that problem in a way consistent with what you've been doing all along. Then at that point, I can pretend that I'm listening to everybody's ideas. When we went to storyboard the dinner scene at the family's house, Lance was running around with the First A.C. and he was giving me the same shot sequence that I had just done in five dinner table scenes in five other movies. I started screaming, "What the fuck is the concept, man! How many shots have you seen in your fucking life where they go over the fucking shoulder. This sucks." My concept was Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" where we only see three sides of the table. Then I realized that there's four people at the table, but there's never actually any point in the script where all four people are listening, looking or talking to one another. The only way this family operates is in these kind of triumvirates or duets of conversations. One person is constantly disappearing in the scene. So there I had this concept of how to shoot the scene. However, that concept was not easy to execute. It drove me nuts and the other three actors in the scene seemed stunned at first.

FILMMAKER:

This idea of always looking for a concept-could you elaborate on that because a lot of these concepts seem to be about constructing complex problems to solve. For example, shooting reversal stock. That's a concept, but at the beginning of the shoot it also must have posed a huge problem.

GALLO:

The print of the movie is not done yet, and it's still a problem.

FILMMAKER:

So are problems part of your process? A lot of directors try to make things easier, whereas it seems to me that you'll go into a situation and say, "OK., how do we reach for something beyond what we can realistically do?"

GALLO:

First of all, I can do anything. Eventually. I've always been seduced by my aesthetic instincts. I've paid a heavy price in aggravation and cash to invent my aesthetic world. For example, it would be nice to have a big puffy down comforter on my bed. They're so goddamned warm. And my NewYork apartment is so goddamned cold. However, they're too fucking puffy. I made a beautiful iron bed frame. It has tiny pink roses painted on it. It's very subtle, utilitarian. It requires a very flat, thin, gray, Amish blanket to have its full effect. So I freeze all night, but when I look at the bed during the day, it's perfect.

FILMMAKER:

But let's say you could have predicted the future. At the start of pre-production, you knew every problem you were going to encounter and could plan ways to prevent them. You worked it out so you had enough days to shoot, enough film, enough money. You shoot 12-hour days every day and the film turns out the way you wanted it to. Would you have been happy with that kind of filmmaking process?

GALLO:

No. I would have looked to find chaos because I'm stupid. However, in chaos, I become an even better problem solver. Chaos finds me wherever I go like a brown magnet. When I was making the film though, I wanted all my problems to go away. A film is like a zillion opportunities to satisfy your sensibilities. And each time that you succeed it's fantastic, but even one tiny failure is unbearable. Filmmaking is like running from the cops and if you even slow down, they'll catch you. So you run until you die. And while you're running, you have these problems, these obstacles, these mediocre people who can make it difficult to make the film that you want to make, and you just fight, fight, fight until the end, until you have to threaten somebody's life, until you have to pay for it yourself, until you have to hurt somebody, push somebody, trick somebody, cheat somebody, fuck somebody, but there's a zillion of these wars all the time. And it became impossible for me to lose any of them. It was horrible. Actually, it was. I wished I never started the film.

FILMMAKER:

Did you ever feel that you created a problem that was simply too difficult to solve in the End?

GALLO:

Shooting reversal film created a very difficult processing problem with the interneg. We never did any tests or anything. After that first Brit queen Dick Pope quit because he's a frightened fairy who tried to talk me out of reversal film, I told my second cinematographer that I would kill him if he even mentioned once that there might be a problem. I put myself in a vulnerable position.

FILMMAKER:

What was the initial motivation for shooting reversal?

GALLO:

The first movie I ever saw as a kid in a theater was Superbowl III, which was a documentary that I saw at father-and-son night. Of course, I didn't go with my father-I went with my friend's father. I fell in love with Johnny Unitas and the conservative right-wing politics of the Baltimore Colts. I became very against the self-centered, cocky, independent, drug-addicted womanizing of Joe Namath and the New York Jets. I immediately became a loyal devotee of the Colts and cried relentlessly for days after seeing the Colts lose in this documentary and was thrilled when, two years later, they beat Dallas and won Superbowl V. When I went back and looked at this footage, I realized that they shot old sporting events with reversal film. You know, I collect old HiFi equipment and guitars. I have always been attracted to a kind of 20th century technology before things develop to the point where they are homogenized and easy to use. Before that point, maybe things are difficult to use, but they have soul. The solid state circuit was invented to make things smaller and easier, but it was never an aesthetic choice. It never made things sound better. Well, reversal film was always incredible looking, but if you look at all the modem stocks, they are trying to generalize things in a way so that you can, in processing, do all sorts of fake manipulations to get all sorts of fake things. If reversal film had the kind of look I wanted, that kind of saturation and contrast that make things appear to have a soul, a sense of timelessness, then I was not going to be talked into faking that effect with some Fuji film by that prick Dick Pope or my twisted line producer. I had no clue technically what I was talking about, I only knew aesthetically what I was talking about. I had to learn. Talking to the people at Kodak, I discovered that based on my description of my aesthetic point of view, reversal film was what I was looking for. I didn't even know what the word "reversal" meant. I had never had a camera in my life. So I decided to shoot reversal. The people at Kodak said, "Well, first of all, it doesn't really exist, and we don't have it in 1000-foot rolls, and we don't have it doubleperfed, and you can't process it, and you can't print from it." But there was just no way I was going to take no for an answer. Kodak, the giant billionaire company in Rochester, you know-my film is not even a speckle in their evolution ~ on a weekend, cut 70,000 feet in 1,000-foot, double-perf rolls of 35mm film so that I could be ready to shoot on that Monday. Thank you Mr. Kodak.

FILMMAKER:

Did YOU have dailies on this movie?

GALLO:

No, I didn't see a foot of film until months after we wrapped.

FILMMAKER:

Not even on video?

GALLO:

Months after we wrapped. It took three weeks for them to even begin to build the machine that could process the film.

FILMMAKER:

So the whole experiment, the whole thing could have failed actually.

GALLO:

Well, I have that kind of luck. You know, the print still isn't made. I have the Vinny Gallo jinx, the Buffalo jinx. Scott Norwood can still miss the field goal by two feet. It's never over. But nothing good has ever happened in my life, so we'll see, Scott.

FILMMAKER:

The producers must have freaked that you were doing this radical processing and they wouldn't really know anything about the film until months afterward.

GALLO:

What happened was, I sort of insisted on this reversal film and got them to make it before the bond company or the financiers really knew what it meant. The whole time I was thinking, This movie is never really going to happen. I'm not really directing the film. Once I felt I was making a good movie, I got very nervous. I thought, Great, I make a fucking good film and then like an asshole I have to film it on a stock you can't print. I thought, Classic Gallo! I can't just fucking make a film. I blew it! There were months there after filming where I was figuring out ways to raise money to make the movie all over again. I'm not kidding. When we went to look at the first optical prints of the film, it was so bad it was unwatchable because the contrast was so high up. The guy tells me, "I don't know why you shot this stock. I think you made a big mistake." Everybody says the same fucking thing my whole fucking life, "CD's sound better than records." Chicks say, "Can't you get a down comforter?" The guy at Pearl Paint says, "Don't use oil-based paint, use latex. It does the same thing." Yeah, suck my dick! So this guy tells me I have two choices: I can do these flashing and matting techniques which will cost a billion dollars or I can high definition digitally output it, which will cost two billion dollars. So here's how he ends the conversation: "Look at this film as a learning experience and next time you make a movie, make a movie that can get released and shown."

FILMMAKER:

So what's the happy ending?

GALLO:

The happy ending is that John Alien Film Arts in New Jersey was able to do some flashing techniques within our budget, get the movie looking pretty good. He's the greatest guy in the whole world. And Deluxe, which is doing the fucking Titanic now, treated my movie with the same care as they treated Titanic. And Ron Gonzales at Pac Title did all the opticals, and that guy was amazing. And let's not forget the amazing Joe Bone, my goomba, who figured out how to process the stock in the first place.

FILMMAKER:

Tell me about how you cast Christina Ricci in the movie, because that was another bold stroke. She's seemingly too young for your character yet she brings a real maturing to the role.

GALLO:

I was dating this chick in New York where I live, though I like to go to hotels with girls sometimes. So one night we slept at the Plaza. We check out of the hotel. We decide to screw again in the Plaza movie theater. The film is The Addams Family. Suddenly Christina Ricci comes on the screen and I don't pay attention to my girlfriend for the rest of the film. I'm so mesmerized and in love with Christina Ricci, her performance, her face. When Buffalo 66 finally went into production, Christina was always my first choice, but I thought she was too young for the role. When I found out she had just had her 17th birthday, I put out an offer to her, and that was it. She's the best girl I've known in my whole life. She's so bright and sweet, and I was horrible to her when we made the film because we really had the Billy/Layla relationship. She stayed out too late at night, and I yelled at her. I was really mean to her the whole time. I felt that she had gone against me. I was living Billy's paranoia. But there's this scene that we filmed, one of the last days, it's the bed scene at the motel where I kiss her, and at the time I'm hating her so bad I can't even tell you. But in the way that Billy hates her-he doesn't really hate her. And we do the scene, and at this point I'm walking around the set thinking, I'm not going to kiss this girl, I can't stand her. Let me rewrite the film where we don't kiss, or I'11 get a body double, or I'll just do a close-up of two lips of somebody else. And the next thing we know, we're in the bed, and we're doing the scene, and we're looking at each other, and we did only one take of it, and we come close, and we kiss one another. And wow. We have just a little kiss, but it was fantastic. She's the sweetest girl in the world.

FILMMAKER:

Talk for a second about your use of progressive rock songs, because it's a consistent musical motif throughout the movie.

GALLO:

I've only had three idols in my life. Johnny Unitas, the quarterback for the Colts, Richard Nixon, and Chris Squire, the bass player for Yes-Squire being my number one. My love, fascination and devotion for Chris Squire is deep. The pain of my whole childhood was sedated by listening to Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis records. And now here I am, 25 years later, and my Yes obsession is the only thing I haven't outgrown. As I was doing the script, the first thing I wrote was a tap dancing scene with Christina set to King; Crimson's "Moonchild." We shot the scene and from then on, I felt that progressive rock worked for this movie. I'm not trivializing that music, I'm acknowledging that that music is classic and timeless.

FILMMAKER:

You've worked with an amazing list of directors - Emir Kusturica, Claire Denis, Abel Ferrara, Alan Taylor, Billie August. How did working with these directors affect your own directing?

GALLO:

First of all, the only part of working as an actor that I can remember is negotiating my contract, figuring out exactly how much I was going to make, including meal penalties, overtimes, forced calls and per diems minus the vultures. I don't feel like I've being influenced by anyone in my filmmaking. I want to be a leader.

FILMMAKER:

But you're not making Eddie Murphy movies or Chevy Chase comedies. You're not doing obvious paycheck jobs, you're working with real auteurs. You're obviously choosing one sort of film over another.

GALLO:

Well, it was easy for me to have relationships and contacts with those filmmakers without actually having to go audition and things like that. I didn't say to myself, I'm only going to work with interesting directors. It just worked out that way because those are the only people that I felt like I could put up with for several weeks on a movie set and the only people stupid enough to put me in their films. I'd say to myself, "Claire Denis is cool, I like Paris a little bit, I know some cute chicks there, and I'll get to make $25,000 cash!" You see, I'm really a small-time Charlie like that. But you know, the way they tax you and commission you, there's really no way to do film just for money because in the end you don't get anything anyway. You'd be better off doing other things.