NEW YORK - Like many actors waxing rhapsodic about the director of whatever film they're currently promoting, James Gandolfini and Kate Winslet are eager to share their memories of what John Turturro gave them on the set of his film "Romance & Cigarettes," which opens here today. But they're not just discussing intangibles like support and encouragement. They're talking about a bucket of really greasy fried chicken.
"Romance & Cigarettes" gives us Gandolfini as a blue-collar guy in Queens who's cheating on his wife (Susan Sarandon, so you know he's nuts) with Winslet's lusty, trash-talking lingerie clerk. In one scene, the lovers wind up in a crummy, rundown motel for a midday assignation - a scene that Turturro chose to shoot, naturally enough, in a crummy, rundown motel.
"So we go into the motel for that scene," Turturro says, and in the hallway "there was a couple there to - well, to shack up. And they had a bucket of fried chicken. And I thought, 'Oh, that's great! Let's get a big bucket of chicken.' And once I gave it to [Winslet], she was so proud of herself, really chowing down, licking her fingers, picking her teeth, everything."
Winslet cackles. "I hate it when I see actors onscreen and this is what they do," she says. She grabs a fork from the platter of fresh fruit and pastries, a required but generally ignored prop in all publicity-tour interviews, and spears a piece of melon. She attacks it with a knife, raises it to her lips, then pauses just before taking a bite and launches into an improvised scene.
"I don't know what you mean!" she exclaims, with all the mane-tossing intensity you'd expect of a multiple Oscar nominee. The fork goes down again. "I mean, I just don't feel supported when you -" dramatic pause, as she raises fork and knife to wave them for emphasis, still without touching the food - "I hate that! Eat the [expletive] thing!"
Across the table, Gandolfini laughs. "I remember the first scene I did with Nancy Marchand," who memorably played the vicious mother of his Tony Soprano. "She just [expletive] put a thing of spaghetti in her mouth. And from that moment on, everybody ate. It was like - We're Italian! We eat! And Kate did something like that. She really ate it."
Winslet nods triumphantly. "That's why I go to the movies. Sometimes you can watch just one thing in a movie. It's the details."
For all of us who love the details, Turturro has made a movie so full of them it's hard to know where to look - starting with the first lovely, loopy moment when Gandolfini's character walks out of his house and bursts into song, soon to be joined by a chorus of garbagemen.
Maybe that's why the film's journey from his brain to your screen has taken several years, a couple of changes of distributor, and apparently infinite persistence both from Turturro and from his bigfoot supporters, Joel and Ethan Coen.
"Romance & Cigarettes" began, back when sopranos were just opera singers, as something for Turturro to do while he was acting in the Coen brothers' "Barton Fink." Since he was playing a screenwriter in that weird 1991 dream of black-and-white Hollywood, he decided, he should actually be writing a screenplay whenever he sat down at the vintage typewriter on the set. So he did, and he ended up with his film's first scene and a few ideas about the rest.
Those ideas, apparently, struck a chord with the Coens. Watching it, it's easy to see why: "Romance & Cigarettes" has the same air of everyday absurdity that radiates addictively from the best Coen brothers pictures. Unlike "Fargo" or "Raising Arizona," however, it doesn't yell at you to notice how weird it is; it's just weird.
It's also a hilarious, touching, and (except for a dip into melodrama near the end) skillful blend of subtle emotional depths and a dazzlingly playful surface. And then there's the music - not just the dancing garbagemen, but several other moments when the hardworking characters, pushed to their limits of verbal expression, burst into lip-synching song, accompanied by the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck.
Gee, there's just no figuring why the major studios didn't snap it up.
In fact, Turturro (who had previously directed "Illuminata" and "Mac") did have a deal with
For Turturro, clearly, this is the fulfillment of a long-held dream. The film is infused with his own memories of growing up in working-class New York, and it also embodies his passionate belief that movies can - and should - reinvent themselves in the same way that modern literature and art have done.
"The original Greek plays had a chorus, music, poetry, and the Aristotelian laws of drama," he says. "There's no reason why something has to be just one thing. You want to surprise people."
Among those surprised, apparently, were the actors - and they loved it.
"We wouldn't really know what we were going to shoot next, where we were going to be standing, what we were going to be reading," Winslet says. "My first day was not meant to be my first day." She was in her trailer when Turturro walked in, asked her to "just quickly throw on something sexy - dark glasses!" and filmed an improvised scene of her walking by a large, never-explained pile of sand.
"It was so different, so rare, so kind of wild," Winslet says.
"It was a unique experience making this film," Gandolfini agrees. "John pretty much let us do whatever we felt like doing. He would always say, 'Try it, try it, try it.' You're having such a great time that you want to contribute to his work, where we're usually just, you know, a gun for hire."
Turturro's own experience as an actor undoubtedly contributes to his collaborative directing style. "I've had directors say, 'You know what you did in this film, can you do that again?' And I always want to say, 'Can we start this conversation over again?' One of the best things about acting is just the chance to play. And so rarely do you get that.
"This film, from start to finish," Turturro says, "it was all about playing."
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
