Steve Buscemi
INTERVIEW BY STEVE RAMOS
Tom Hanks made one. So did Al Pacino. And Mel Gibson walked away with a Best Picture Oscar for directing last year's epic film Braveheart. So why shouldn't Steve Buscemi, one of Hollywood's hardest-working character actors and the king of independent cinema, join the pack of actors-turned-directors with his own try at the movie-making game?
It's certainly the popular thing to do. Any actor with a worthwhile agent looks to get a green light for the project of his or her choice. And Buscemi has carved a reputation for balancing studio work with a string of eclectic roles in independent films like In the Soup, Living in Oblivion and Reservoir Dogs.
Buscemi says that he has one simple criteria for choosing projects, especially a film that he'll direct: It has to have a good story.
Steve Buscemi
"I don't want to direct just for the sake of directing," says Buscemi, 38, earlier this year at the Toronto Film Festival. "I wanted to write something that was personal."
Nothing could be more personal than Buscemi's directorial-debut Trees Lounge. Set in his hometown of Valley Stream, N.Y., Buscemi also stars in the film as Tommy Basilio, an out-of-work auto mechanic who whiles away his time at a local neighborhood tavern called Trees Lounge.
Buscemi grew up in Valley Stream, hung out every night at a bar called the Walk-In and even worked as an ice cream truck driver just like his character, Tommy, which qualifies Trees Lounge as a work of autobiographical cinema verité.
Wanting to pursue a career in acting since he was young, Buscemi found life in his Long Island hometown smothering. Friends didn't take his acting classes seriously and Buscemi says that if he had not moved to Manhattan, he'd probably still be hanging out at a bar like Trees Lounge.
But a lot has happened since he left Valley Stream for good. Or at least enough to let him come back and make a movie about his barfly days with little emotional baggage.
"For me, one of the problems with suburbia is that it doesn't nurture creativity," Buscemi says. "There's not that much exposure to the arts. My culture was television and movies that came through town, but there was no theater that I knew about. Art? Forget it. Painting? Forget it. It's not looked upon as something that you should seriously do. Other people do that but who are these other people? They have to come from somewhere."
People like Buscemi himself. A career as a firefighter was cut short when theater and film work began to come his way. Buscemi wrote parts in the Trees Lounge for longtime stage colleagues Mark Boone Junior and Elizabeth Bracco. Buscemi says that he wanted to offer them the types of lead roles that larger studio films never do.
Finding the perfect mix between well-paying studio projects like Escape from LA, the upcoming action blockbuster Con Air and creatively challenging independent films like Mystery Train is a constant goal for Buscemi. The way he sees things: You can't do one without doing the other.
"I'm having a good time doing Con Air but if I only did those kinds of films, I don't think I'd be happy as an actor," Buscemi says. "All along, it has been doing commercial work that has allowed me to do the low budget films. I did Billy Bathgate for four months and although I did not have a big presence in that film and nobody came away from that film thinking about my character, it allowed me to take the next six months off and do films like In the Soup and Reservoir Dogs, which if I only did those types of films I couldn't make a living."
Nor could he make a living as a director of small films like Trees Lounge. If Buscemi has learned one thing about the movie business, it's to keep every option open.
"I don't have any other scripts that I have written," Buscemi says. "Hopefully, I will. But if I don't it's not the worse thing in the world. I have acting to fall back on."©
CityBeat, Issue 3, Vol. 5; Dec. 12-18, 1996