Actor Armand Assante. ARMAND ASSANTE:
RENAISSANCE GANGSTER
By
Alex Simon
A veteran of over 80 film and television productions, Armand Assante first made a splash in the pop cultural lexicon with Sylvester Stallone’s post-Rocky directing debut Paradise Alley, in 1978. After making the ladies’ hearts beat a bit faster with turns in films like Little Darlings and the now-classic Private Benjamin (both 1980), it was his turn in the latter, as the suave French gynecologist who wins Goldie Hawn’s heart with what became every Jewish man’s fantasy deal-closing line that had Hollywood buzzing with statements like: “Who is this amazing, sexy French guy?” and “ He’s heir apparent to the throne of Alain Delon!” The answer was simple: the “French guy” was born and raised in Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood of Washington Heights, and bowed on the world stage October 4, 1949, to an Italian father and Irish mother, the second of three children.
Growing up in an artistic household, young Armand Assante, Jr. was exposed to the theater early by his parents, and initially fell in love with music. At 17, Armand entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts where he was the recipient of the Jehlinger Award for Best Actor in 1969, making his professional theatre debut the same year opposite Imogene Coca in “Why I Went Crazy,” under the direction of Joshua Logan. He spent years in the theatre before his film debut in 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush, remaining a devoted student of Mira Rostova in New York for more than 20 years.
Armand won an Emmy as Best Actor for his mesmerizing turn as mob boss John Gotti in the 1996 HBO production, Gotti. 2007 has been a significant year for Armand’s career, as well: California Dreamin’, a Romanian film in which he stars, won the coveted Un Certain Regard category at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Armand also does a riveting turn as gangster Dominic Cattano in Ridley Scott’s crime epic American Gangster, going toe-to-toe with Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas, the most notorious drug dealer of the 1970s.
Armand, who lives far from the limelight on a farm in upstate New York, sat down with us recently in the booth of a busy Beverly Hills eatery to reflect, ponder and digest a buffet of topics. Here’s a taste of that meal:
American Gangster marks the second time you’ve worked with Ridley Scott. Tell us about his process.
Armand Assante: Ridley, even when you watch his earliest films he did as a kid, is one of the greatest shooters of all time, but he is also one of the best filmmakers of all time. He hires an actor based on what that actor can bring to that specific role. He puts a tremendous amount of faith in the talent he surrounds himself with. What I love about what Ridley did on American Gangster is that he was tough on himself, as a director.
How so?
It’s all story, no indulgence. It cuts to the bone. What I really appreciated is that Ridley didn’t indulge anyone or anything in that movie. It’s just a masterful piece of direction.
I think it’s his best film.
(laughs) I’m glad you said that, because I was afraid to, but I agree. I think it’s his best film. It’s his most powerful, hard-hitting film and what I appreciate about it the most is that it didn’t soft-sell or romanticize the tragedy of heroin or the gargantuan effect it had on our society, from the top to the bottom.
What I really appreciated was how invisible he was as a director. I didn’t notice one bit of his direction the first time I saw it. That’s the mark of a great director to me.
Totally. It was all story.
Yeah, and I think someone like Sidney Lumet is the master of that. You never notice how well-directed his pictures are until the second or third time you see them.
Lumet said something interesting to me, which has since become my golden rule, and that is that 80% of a film is pre-production. And Ridley really drove this home the same way.
I also appreciated that this film, which is set in the ‘70s is very much a ‘70s film: it’s completely morally ambiguous on every level. There’s no black and white, except for maybe Josh Brolin’s crooked cop, who’s a flat-out villain. Your character and Denzel’s are far more honorable men than his character is.
That’s right. In many ways, it’s about the dangers of corporate enterprise.
I love the speech your character has about how if you’re successful, you’re going to have enemies. If you want friends, you have to be mediocre.
(laughs) Yeah, wasn’t that amazing, and true? Great screenplay by Steve Zallian. He’s sort of a throwback to the Steve Shagan generation of writers. It’s a very provocative screenplay. I remember being a kid, and actually hearing about the Vietnam-heroin connection. My father was in the Marine Corps, and he talked me out of going to Vietnam. I remember reading about how the Vietnam war was a continuation of the opium wars in China.
And who knows what’s being smuggled back in the coffins from Iraq and especially Afghanistan, which I think has more poppy fields per capita than anywhere else in the world.
I’m sure they’ll turn a blind eye to that, too. I was working in Bulgaria last year, and all the truck drivers on my floor had just come back from Iraq, and they said it was hell on Earth. They were terrified, every minute.
What was it like sharing the screen with Denzel?
He’s as big a star as you can get, and he’s that big a person, as well. He’s a tremendous actor, and I always thought the world of him, but I didn’t quite know what to expect. It turns out he’s an incredibly generous, giving person, and a generous, giving acting. That’s the soul, the magnamity of his work. It’s interesting, I heard that recently he was at a veteran’s hospital in Maryland or Washington and he said to one of the foreman, they told him a number and Denzel just wrote them a check. I could expect that from him. Very generous man, and I think his performance in this is worthy of an Oscar. It’s a very compelling performance. And Russell, as well. Beautiful work. When you see work like that, you know what goes into. They’re not only walking the line, but they’re carrying it on their shoulders.
You’re a native New Yorker, right?
Yeah, born and raised in Washington Heights.
Both your parents are artists, as well?
My father’s a painter and he supported us with advertising. My mother was a concert pianist, piano teacher, and she’s a writer. I have an elder and a younger sister, as well.
Did either of them go into the arts?
My older sister was an actress and signer for years, primarily a singer. She never recorded, but she still sings in cabarets and things.
When did you know you were an actor?
I was introduced to the theater when I was four years-old. I was smitten with the magic of theater when my parents took me to see Mary Martin in Peter Pan at The Winter Garden, in 1954. They took me to musical theater all through my childhood. I went into the theater when I was 16, and in between working in the theater and studying professionally, I’d been in the theater ten years before I made my first film. I worked almost theater on the East Coast. I did phenomenal material. I was lucky. I’ve always been a journeyman actor. Acting never came easy to me at all. Music came easily to me. As a kid, I was a professional drummer and singer. I was on the road for years as an actor, honing my craft, and even in film, I found my process was just too slow.
How so?
Just in terms of the time I felt I needed to prepare. It only comes with experience that you learn to hustle. It’s still for me an arduous task. You think a lot about what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s hard to make great material, and I’ll fight for it too, if I have to. I’ll go to bat for a producer, or director. I’ll do everything I can to help them. But it’s tough. I think the industry is tougher than it’s ever been right now. It’s hard to get independent films made, and it’s hard to get good stories made. In many ways, the digital age has changed the geography of filmmaking in that it’s made things cheaper, but it’s also made things faster. And I don’t know if that’s always fair to the creative person. It’s an interesting time, but I think that the over-informationalized and computerization of society has taken the focus away from what it is that I love, which is just stories, and storytelling. I find it a harder world to work in because of that because people are now thinking at that speed and in those terms, too.
It’s the super-processor mentality.
Yeah, and that’s not what actors, writers and artists are supposed to be about. So the pressure is greater and the expectations are greater, when in fact sometimes less may be more. Interesting time.
Also, the studios don’t seem to care if a picture is good anymore. They only care if it makes money. It takes someone like Steven Spielberg to do a Schindler’s List or a Ridley Scott to do American Gangster, which I know has been floating around Hollywood for years.
Yeah, there’s literally a handful of filmmakers left who have the juice to make the films they want to make. And the age-old phenomenon about this industry is how they chew people up and spit them out, like what they did to guys like John Frankenheimer. It’s just brutal. If you’ve ever tried to develop something yourself, you see how hard it is. You also see a lot of grift. When you see that level of corruption coming into your industry, you just want to say ‘Wait a minute, this ain’t the street!’
The first movie I saw you in was Paradise Alley. Did you meet Stallone when you made your debut in The Lords of Flatbush?
I met Sly on Lords, but didn’t get to know him. For some reason, he had me in mind when he wrote Paradise Alley. I happened to be in L.A. doing an episode of Kojack, my first job in L.A. ever, and I ran into Sly and he invited me into his office. He said “I’m doing this film, and I’d love you to play this part.” Boom! Just like that. It was a wonderful entrance for me into the business and a fabulous role. He looked out for me and was very good to me. I’ve never forgotten that. Sly’s one of the most unique men in the business. When you get to know Sly, you realize how tremendously talented he is, which most people don’t understand. He’s a very misunderstood figure, and a very hard, hard working guy.
Then the movie that really established you was Private Benjamin.
Yeah, I was very lucky to work with Goldie and Howard Zieff and Harvey Miller, Nancy Meyers and Charlie (Shyer). That was an amazing amalgam of talent that went into making that picture. It was really my first introduction to Hollywood and that first understanding of how tough it was.
Why was that?
There was a lot of skepticism about the release of Private Benjamin, and much to everyone’s surprise right out of the gate, it was an overwhelming hit, from the first screening in Westwood. I vividly remember Goldie, Charlie, Harvey, Nancy and Charlie sitting at the premiere in Westwood, and still editing in their heads, and you don’t see that kind of teamwork often. I’ve only been on a handful of projects that really made an impression, but what I continually tell people who want to make films, and somehow most of them don’t get the message, is that in truth, if you want to make a project work, stay working on it about three years after it’s released. Because if you don’t have the passion going in, it’s the passion that you have after to sustain what you held in the process true that keeps it going. Any project I did that worked, did so because the team from the inception, never let it go. I never underestimated the passion of that team for that reason. And other projects I’ve done since then that have really kicked it out of the park had that some kind of passion and commitment behind it.
What were some of those?
Stuff like Gotti, The Mambo Kings, Belizare the Cajun…it’s just about having a team that’s relentless. And I have the same feeling about American Gangster. There’s a relentlessness there, a tenacity. Sly has that. So does Goldie. So does Ridley. That tenacity continues to make an invaluable impression on me, and that’s what it takes to get anything done in this business, and you just don’t see it very often. If you’re not ready to do that, you’re in trouble, because it simply takes too much time, too much energy and too many brain cells.
You’ve always chosen to live in New York. Why?
When I tried to live here I always found L.A. to be a community of an overwhelming amount of information, 95% of which was false. It’s very easy for creative people to become addicted to that flow of information, and they stop paying attention to what their initiative is, or what their drive is. You forget what your taste is and you become addicted to the taste of others. “Well, I should really be doing this, instead of what I want to do,” that sort of thing. That’s not what you’re supposed to be about. The hardest thing about being in L.A. is being able to hold onto what you are, because it’s very easy to get swept up into what’s popular, marketable, cool, and so on.
It’s a town of conformists and if you’re an artist, by definition, you’re a non-conformist.
Yeah, and it’s very easy for actors especially to conform, because sometimes it’s just about paying bills, about getting through the week.
The same goes for writers. You might write 12 Angry Men, but your agent says that what’s selling now is comedies about 16 year-olds farting and trying to get laid.
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And how do you keep your integrity in that situation, but also pay your bills? That’s the dichotomy.
You got to work with the great John Frankenheimer on Prophecy.
John asked me to do that film, and I thought it was impossible to make an animatronic bear work. David Selzer’s script was prescient, dealing with environmental issues, and how genetic structure of animals can be mutated. So I loved the script but in ’78, I just didn’t think the technology existed to bring it off. I turned the film down four times, but John just hammered at me to do the movie. And I’m glad I did it. He was one of the great directors. The film was not well-received at all, but John was a fascinating guy, a very complicated guy. I hammered him every day because I knew that this was an opportunity for me to learn from a master. He came out of a pool of directing giants that I knew growing up watching live television.
Since he had a stage background, how did John work with actors?
John was unforgettable with actors. He lived in the moment and wanted the moment captured on film. He was really in an actor’s face. He believed in bringing an actor right in front of the camera. He not only told me things he’d done in the past, but he’d do things to get a certain look in your eye…once, without telling me or any of the other actors, he blew off a shotgun about four feet away from us, and he got the look that he wanted. He wanted everything very pliable and spontaneous, and he got it. When I look back at some of the people I’ve gotten to work with, I’ve really been blessed. I got to work with a lot of the guys who came out of live TV when I did films in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Who were some of those?
Fielder Cook, Ralph Nelson, Buzz Kulik, Edgar Scherick and you look at those projects those guys did on television, and they stand up to anything. Story, story, story. That’s what they were about. They were a tremendous education for me. You learn by osmosis. One thing I’ll remember the rest of my life, I had the same exact experience both with Fiedler Cook and with Sidney Lumet. There was a time with each of them when I was on the set, and I said ‘I’m sorry. I’m totally lost. I don’t get where my character is. I don’t get where this scene is going or why it’s not working, so I’m asking you what should I do?’ They both said the same thing to me: “Lean forward six inches.” And the fuckin’ scenes came alive like that! That’s powerful. That’s knowledge.
You did Q & A with Lumet. Tell us more about him and his process.
It was a phenomenal book which Sidney synthesized into a great screenplay that actually could have worked beautifully on the stage. It was that hammered out. Sidney’s one of those directors who believes in a tremendous amount of preparation for everyone, actors and crew. He walks everyone through everything before he does a single shot. I doubt, maybe there’s a handful of directors in the world today, who would give an actor a screenplay in May, and say we’re going to shoot in September, and have almost three weeks of rehearsal prior to it. It doesn’t happen. But Sidney is that kind of person. I thought he deserved the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy when we did Q & A, and he just got it what, a couple years ago? If you look at his body of work up to 1990, it’s a phenomenal body of work. He’s one of the all-time great storytellers certainly of his generation, and perhaps of the 20th century because he’s carrying on an ancient tradition which is that of the real Hebraic storyteller. His father was a star of the Yiddish theater. His uncle was Jacob Adler. It was passed onto Sidney, who took it to a whole new level. The guys who originally came to Hollywood, the Jews who built the business, were about that. The western was a metaphor for Biblical stories. They were morality plays. And men like Lumet and Arthur Miller, they were and are about morality plays. They were looking for that in their work constantly.
The Mambo Kings allowed a fusion of your two greatest loves: music and acting.
It was the passionate obsession of Arne Glimcher that really put all that together, and brought all that talent together. Arne is the one who saw Oscar Hijuelos’ book, bought it, and put his love of that music, that era, and those people into the film. To think we had people like Tito Puente, Mario Bauza, who is really the father of Latin jazz, he was in his 80s then. He came in and consulted on it. All the giants of the era were there consulting for us. Antonio Banderas and I were really blessed to be in that kind of environment. It was a year before the film started to come together, so again, Arne was relentless.
In that film, as well as so many of your other films, you’ve proven yourself to have a gift for accents. Where does that come from?
Well, I grew up in an Italian household and in that era of Washington Heights, when I was a boy, I was in a building that was literally a melting pot of the world: Russian, Italian, Irish, Scottish, Puerto Rican, Jewish, French…you heard all this stuff every day in the street and it was osmosis. You just picked it up. Growing up on the streets of Washington Heights in that time was like growing up in a city in Europe. It had everything from rabbis, to hawkers, to coal being delivered by horse-drawn wagons. By around ’57 or so, that was all gone and became more homogenized. But that’s how I developed my ear for rhythm. I credit my childhood with that. That’s how I also became obsessed with jazz, and musical styles of writing. Mamet is very much like reading jazz.
Yeah, and John Cassavetes is like watching jazz on film.
Yeah, absolutely. I loved Cassavetes growing up. Minnie & Moskowitz is one of my favorite films of all time, Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands. I love them. They were a breed unto themselves.
Let’s talk about Gotti. How did you get into his skin, because he was such an enigmatic figure.
I studied every transcript I could find on Gotti, and the funny thing at the time was, HBO didn’t want to get into any of the legal issues, so I went to Gotti’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, because I think four of the guys in the story were actually on parole, so it was very dangerous to talk about. So the legal issues were a little nerve-wracking to deal with, but once Cutler saw we were serious about addressing them, he was very cooperative, to a degree, and it all came together. We cast it all out of New York, and all the guys on it went on to be regulars on The Sopranos. It was one of those roles that’s a rare opportunity. I put on 50 pounds for the role, and I listened to guys who grew up with him in Howard Beach, and guys who knew him. I could never get around Gotti himself. You start to listen to the rhythm of the way they communicate and their lingo, and I heard a recording of his voice, the rhythm of his voice, and all that put together really put me in a different zone, which was very removed. He was living an ethos of a guy from the ‘40s, of another time. That was kind of an interesting thing to work with. (Writer) Steve Shagan picked up on that in the writing. In some of the transcripts of things he’d said, I come across these amazing things, things a Mexican revolutionary would have said in the 19th century, that were almost like poetry, and we interjected them into the film. He said something about the poor to the effect of “You think I was put on this earth to make them rich and me poor,” things like that, that would have been more fitting coming from Pancho Villa or Che Guevara than a mob boss from New York. But the fact that he tried to conduct his operation like it was in another time was both what made him unique, and was also his undoing, because that time was over.
In his own way, did you see him as an honorable man?
To me, he’s honorable in the fact that he maintained his honor and held a tremendous dignity in the face of something that was almost a delusion. His ethos was something that was decades removed from what the mob was about in that time. For me, the movie isn’t even really about Gotti. It’s about how the media or the government, and sometimes even I get confused about which is which, controls our perceptions. Is this democracy, or is this the media’s version of what a democracy is? What Gotti was about, and I think why it struck a chord with people to such a degree, is that the media can inflate something to much that the entity being inflated can start to believe its own ethos and the ethos being projected upon them. And if you allow yourself to reach that high a profile, the government can pull the rug right out from under you.
Frank Lucas talked about that in American Gangster, about the importance of keeping a low profile, as did Ben Kingsley as Meyer Lansky in Bugsy. Remember when he said to Warren Beatty? “Famous for George Raft is good, Ben. Famous for you is not good.”
Yes, exactly. And that’s one of the greatest gangster films ever made, by the way. I love Bugsy. Warren Beatty just nailed that. He was phenomenal. And James Toback’s script was amazing. I did a film with Jimmy called Love and Money. He’s a fascinating character, absolutely brilliant. He understood the system at a very young age. But I think that’s why Gotti struck such a chord: we’ve come to depend on the media so much that we’ve become deluded by it. Iraq is a classic example of that.
Remember the final line of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When legend replaces truth, print the legend.”
Exactly. And John Ford called that back in 1962.
You’ve done a lot of work in Eastern Europe recently. Tell us about some of your impressions.
It’s one of the most exciting places in the world to work for the simple reason that you’re working with unobserved talent. They’re not conforming, they’re not even noticed, so they’re very pure in their reactions. The one film I did, California Dreamin’, with a young director named Christian Nemescu, who was killed in a car accident right after the film wrapped. 27 years-old. It won Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category. Christian, to me, was like a neo-realist from Italy. Those films were like reflex reactions to what is happening in society. That was his talent. He was a very gifted young man, so it was very sad on so many levels. But Eastern Europe is now what I imagine Italy was like right after WW II, because it’s being rebuilt and there’s a feeling that anything is possible. They’re just beginning to find themselves after going through generations of repression and corruption. It’s “You know what? This is who the fuck we are in the face of these Fascist bastards!” And anything that comes from the heart like that on film, is very exciting.
We’re coming out of what I think will be recorded as the darkest period in our country’s history.. We’re just now seeing films like In the Valley of Elah that are dealing with what’s been happening. Do you think that, as in Eastern Europe, there will be a sort of artistic renaissance here?
There’d better be. One of the great things about this country is that you can speak out, but you have to make a point of it. It has to become your obligation as a writer, actor or filmmaker. You can’t hide under a rock. That’s what I’ve always respected about the people of this country and certain people in the Hollywood community: they’re harbingers of things to come.
