On Tuesday, August 2nd we attended the NYC Premiere for The Brooklyn Banker at the SVA Theater in Manhattan and caught up with director Federico Castelluccio and writer Michael Ricigliano Jr. about their latest film.
The excitement extended past the electric smiles on the red carpet for the premiere of The Brooklyn Banker starring Troy Garity and David Proval. The movie which started as a short film written by Michael Ricigliano Jr. and directed Federico Castelluccio has been garnering a lot of attention not just for its star power, but also for its gripping plot. The film features Garity in lead role as Santo, a banker with a gift for memorizing numbers who gets caught up in a mobster’s bid for power by his senseless father in law. Castelluccio, who is also a talented painted, had his directing virtuosity on full display in the film and was on hand with Ricigliano Jr. to answer a few questions.
Q: How do you feel The Brooklyn Banker sets itself apart from other Mob Crime Dramas?
CASTELLUCCIO: Very simple, it’s not really a mob centric film. It revolves around the banker, its centered around the banker. The Mob is an element in the story but it’s not all about the mob in this particular film.
RICIGLIANO: I don’t believe the Brooklyn Banker is a glorification of the mob. In Brooklyn in the ‘70s organized crime was just a factor that was in life, it happened to be there. So it’s not a mob movie per say, it’s about a guy who’s a straight-laced guy who gets mixed up in organized crime on the outside. So he’s a straight-laced guy but he’s got loyalty to his loyalty to his family and he’s really in a box. It’s really a guy having to do the right thing, but it’s a very difficult decision sometimes when you have family and loyalty.
Q: How did you avoid the classic tropes of the genre?
RICIGLIANO: I think the film the film is very realistic to the Italian way of life, to Brooklyn in the ‘70s because growing up my whole family was from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The whole story, a lot of everything I took, the characters, and the way the sets were made are all from stories that I heard about growing up. So I think it’s a very authentic movie about what is what like, there aren’t characters of people, it’s real people, real Italians from that time frame.
Q: Some of the themes I picked up on were family, loyalty, tradition, what do those things mean to you?
RICIGLIANO: The movie takes place around a feast, The Feast of Our Lady of Blessed Sorrow which in Brooklyn we have the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and it’s a very religious feast and it it’s a very tight knit community so the feast itself is almost apart of the film, it takes place during the feast and you see a lot of what the ideals were at that time reflected through the feast itself.
Q: How did your time on The Sopranos influence your approach to telling this story?
CASTELLUCCIO: My time on The Sopranos I spent as an actor, but as an actor you always observe and what I was observing were some of the directors that worked on the Sopranos, including Tim Van Patten who was sort of an inspiration for me because he was first director when I first came on the scene on The Sopranos. And I always watched what he did and some of the other directors as well and it became an inspiration down the road when I decided to direct my first short film, which was Tracks of Color in 2006.
Q: What were the challenges of bringing this script to life?
CASTELLUCCIO: Once you read a script you either get an emotion from it or not. If I start visualizing from the first couple of pages and it’s a page-turner then I know it’s something that is exciting and I’m gonna want to work with and this is what this script had for me. It originally started in 2010 as a script by the name of Lily of the Feast, which I produced, directed and acted in the lead as well. But that was a vehicle for us to wind up making it into a feature, so now that the script was fully realized as the Brooklyn Banker it was just a phenomenal script and it takes you throw a roller-coaster of emotions and that’s what I loved about it and that’s what attracted me to it.
Q: What was your favorite scene that you shot?
CASTELLUCCIO: One of the very last scenes is one of my favorite scenes, obviously I can’t give it away, there’s a twist, but I love Paul Sorvino’s scenes when he sings to the little children that was a heart-warming scene. There were just so many different things you know, working on the streets of Brooklyn in Williamsburg and bringing that authenticity is what really speaks to me as well.
RICIGLIANO: I have two favorite scenes and they’re both very important to the film. One is where Paul Sorvino sings to his grandchildren and it’s a beautiful scene but you see that Paul is two different people and then we have another scene where Manny ‘The Hand” who was the head wise guy in the area, played by David Proval sings to his grandchild a nursery rhyme that my father use to sing to me and his father, Manny’s father in the film is there and has Alzheimer’s and he hears it and he starts to sing it as well and David Proval get very emotional and I actually got very emotional on set when that happened and it just shows that Manny is not all of what you think he might be, so those two scenes to me are very important.
Q: Was there anything that you wanted from the actors just as far as character to bring the emotion out?
CASTELLUCCIO: Being an actor and a director I understand what an actor needs and so I’m very sympathetic to what they need in order to get where they need to get in that scene, I guess you can say I’m an actors director. If hiring an actor I have to be confident enough as a director to understand that they’re smart enough to bring what I need to the table in order to get the film on the right track and get those scenes on the right track.
Q: Emotionally, what do you want people to take away from your film?
CASTELLUCCIO: I would love for them to look beyond the mob aspect and criminal aspect and look at the family aspect of the film because it speaks to a wider audience in the respect. The love and the loyalty you have with family and friends and if somebody comes away saying “You know what that’s a great movie, I love what I felt in that movie and I’d love to tweet it out and get it out to more people”
The Brooklyn Banker hits theaters August 5th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKioyYVZGGE
