In the dramatic movie A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Chazz Palminteri plays a tough, uncompromising father who lacks the ability to communicate with his son.
Playing a Character Based on the Writer/Director’s Own Father: “I didn’t read the book; I didn’t want to read the book. I just said, ‘No, no, nobody knows who Dito’s father was and how he acted so I don’t want to hear that.’ All I wanted to know was what Dito’s father felt, how he was, and what he had a hard time saying, what didn’t he have a hard time saying. I took all that and just made it my own.”
Getting into this character wasn’t that tough a task. “I embody these guys. I grew up with them. I just knew this father. I knew this man. I knew that he had a rage in him, but he couldn’t express the love for his son.”
Working with Dito Montiel and Sticking to the Script: Palminteri says that writer/director Montiel allowed the actors a lot of freedom with the dialogue. “…He gave us freedom as actors, I think, just to talk. Real talk is you step on people’s lines. People don’t go, ‘You talk, I talk, you talk.’ Talking, especially in a family like that, in a household where everybody’s talking, some people are listening, some people are not even listening. That gives us a sense of almost a documentary.”
The Only Father Figure in the Film: Not only did Palminteri play a father in the movie, he also treated his young co-star Channing Tatum like a father/mentor during breaks in shooting. “I like sometimes to embrace that. Obviously, I was the father figure on screen to him but also off screen. I saw he was very receptive and he wanted to learn. He wanted to hear things that I had to say and when I see that, I give more.
First of all, I could see that he was extremely talented and I say that very honestly because I would say something to him and he would do it immediately. And then I would forget about it and he would do it again later. I knew right away. I said, ‘Oh, okay, he gets it. He really, truly understands and he gets it.’ Sometimes, some actors don’t want to hear anything. He was smart enough to understand, ‘Okay, let me learn.’ When I was a young actor, I learned from the older actors at the actor’s studio. I would listen and I was like a sponge."
Palminteri added, “Just one quick thing: what happened was we did this one scene with the seizure. [Tatum] went crazy and he did all this improvisational stuff and wrecked the whole place. A few people were yelling at him and I saw that. I don’t like anybody treating anyone bad, but he’s a young actor and he’s not sure of things and I just said, ‘Hey, don’t f**kin’ yell at the kid.’ I just got up as me, I said, ‘Don’t yell at him. Don’t f**kin’ yell at him. You want to yell at somebody, yell at me.’ And then everything calmed down and we were fine again. Dito [Montiel, the writer/director] brought that up to me. I don’t even remember I did that, but Dito remembers it.” Tatum remembers it and is thankful Palminteri stepped in.
Palminteri acted as a father figure on the set in a number of other ways. “It was little things,” said Palminteri. “We had no air conditioning. They asked for air conditioning, they didn’t get it. When I kept hearing that, I said after two days, ‘Look, I want an air conditioner tomorrow. We gotta have it and if I don’t have it, I’m going to really be an a**hole. I don’t want to be an a**ole because I’m a nice guy, but you’re going to turn me into an a**hole if there’s not an air conditioner tomorrow.’ And the next day there was an air conditioner.”
The Experience of Working on A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints: “It was just like one of those magical things, lightning in a bottle. It was a great story with a first time director who was really free and collaborative with a perfect cast, a really perfect cast and it just gelled.
It’s like when you meet somebody in life, you either like them or you don’t like them. People have auras around them that they develop over the years. [Channing Tatum] has 26 years of an aura. I have 53 years of an aura. When you meet somebody, you go, ‘Whoa, I like this person. Oh, I don’t like this person.’ It was one of those things where we all just kind of liked each other. We were all there for the same reason: to make the work good. It wasn’t about me, it wasn’t about him, it wasn’t about I want to show off, egos… It was about can we do this? Can we get this better? ‘Come on, guys. Holding hands, all right, ready? Let’s do this.’ That’s what it’s about because in the end, that’s all you have is the work. That will follow you for the rest of your life. And to me, that’s all that’s important.”
