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Features
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Making Movies with Lumet
A decade after Vin Diesel took inspiration from Sidney Lumet's how-to book to make a short film, that same short gets him a gig with Lumet.
Thursday, March 16, 2006 at 11:30 AM
By Brett Buckalew
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Diesel at 2006 Spirit Awards
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When The Fast and the Furious became a surprise summer smash five years ago, journalists and popcorn movie fans wasted no time in anointing its star, Vin Diesel, the heir to the action-hero throne that would soon be vacated by Arnold Schwarzenegger. While Diesel is arguably a less distinctive screen presence than the current California governor - his guttural, sandpaper-rough growl of a voice is certainly less fun to impersonate than Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent - his post-Fast career decisions have served to strengthen his status as official replacement of the Terminator star. He made a big-budget sequel (The Chronicles of Riddick) to a low-budget sci-fi flick (Pitch Black), wherein he donned shades and spoke very little, and he even went the Kindergarten Cop route with last year’s action-comedy hit The Pacifier.
But it’s difficult, impossible even, to imagine Schwarzenegger following in the footsteps of master thespians like Henry Fonda, Al Pacino, William Holden, and Paul Newman by taking the lead role in a film from legendary director Sidney Lumet. And yet that’s exactly what Diesel has done, collaborating with the master behind 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The Verdict for the new courtroom drama Find Me Guilty.
In discussing this seemingly bold career step with Film Stew, Diesel explains how it’s actually the inevitable culmination of a journey that began in his struggling-actor days, when he decided to write and direct a semi-autobiographical short film called Multi-Facial.
“I had no idea how to direct a movie,” Diesel recalls. “I went and I bought a book called Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, and that’s where I got the confidence to direct my first short movie. It comes full circle ten years later when he [Sidney] sees that short movie and becomes adamant that I should play Jackie DiNorscio.”
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Still working after last year's Lifetime nod
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DiNorscio is the focus of Find Me Guilty, which dramatizes the true story of the longest criminal trial in U.S. history. A brash New Jersey gangster, DiNorscio chose to act as his own defense when he and the rest of his crime family were faced with 76 different charges. Though DiNorscio’s unorthodox courtroom style, accentuated as it is by dirty jokes and a tendency to bully witnesses, made him stand out as far from a legal expert, the sincerity and showmanship behind it won him many admirers. (Though it would be unfair to come right out and spoil the trial’s - and by extension, the movie’s - outcome, let’s just say Jackie’s fan base included at least some of the jurors.)
To DiNorscio, the courtroom became a stage for his extravagant performances, a metaphor that is certainly not lost on Diesel. And since Lumet filled the shoot’s courtroom set with professional New York actors as extras, Diesel remained aware that his theatrics as DiNorscio had to pass muster with an audience of his peers.
“It was very much like returning to New York stage, to New York theatre,” the NY-born actor relates, “in part because you would have to know 15 pages off-book, ready to do, in one take, and to do it in front of a sea of New York actors. And they were all wondering, ‘All right, now Vin’s comin’ back home. Let’s see where he can go. Mr. Big Bucks comes back to New York. Let’s see what he’s got.’”
Just as daunting for Diesel was playing a real-life figure who he has no physical resemblance to, a stumbling block that he talked to Lumet about well before production. “Sidney and I met in his office, and he started reading the script, and he felt very good about it,” Diesel elaborates. “And I said that I don’t look anything like Jackie DiNorscio. And he said, ‘well, Jackie wants you to play him.’”
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Yari Film Group
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Diesel in Find Me Guilty
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“I said, ‘What movie did he see that he wanted me?’ [He said], ‘The Fast and the Furious.’ I said, ‘What?! What does Domenic Toretto have to do with Jackie DiNorscio?’ And he said, ‘Vin, we have ways of making you look like Jackie DiNorscio.’”
Lumet wasn’t kidding. Diesel’s transformation included two hours daily in the make-up chair to approximate Jackie’s wise guy look, and Lumet insisted that the actor don the make-up even at rehearsals. “He didn’t want any other actor in the room to be familiar with Vin in the way they were familiar with him,” Diesel explains of Lumet’s unconventional preproduction decision. “He was very adamant about everybody getting to know Jackie DiNorscio through this process, so much so that when they came to the table reading, I had already been Jackie through the two hours of make-up.”
Diesel also had to gain enough weight to match DiNorscio’s hefty gut, a challenge he could’ve avoided if he accepted Lumet’s offer to just wear an artificial fat suit. Defending his choice to put on the weight naturally, the actor explains, “I had been working with the details of [Jackie’s] movements so much that I felt if I ever put on this weight suit, I would lose some of the physicality that I had been developing for this character. And I also felt like after Raging Bull, it would be wimping out if I didn’t try to gain all the weight.”
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Warner Home Video
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Diesel in Multi-Facial
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While Diesel had the privilege of meeting with DiNorscio to perfect his performance, there was consequently a feeling of deep sadness that hit the actor when DiNorscio died while the film was in production. “When he passed away, it was a very, very heavy experience, because it was the first time I had ever played a real character, a real person,” Diesel shares. “All the other characters I’ve played were fictitious, and I had the liberty of creating in any way that I wanted to. This was different.”
The star views Find Me Guilty as a reverent tribute to DiNorscio’s irrepressibly generous spirit, which is presumably a rarity in his shady line of work. “After watching the picture,” Diesel remembers, “I realized, ‘This is strange. I haven’t seen a character in a film for a long time that has Jackie’s ability to love. I haven’t seen a character that had the ability to love to this degree that he could love a cousin that shot him and tried to kill him, a character that would be willing…to sacrifice his own life to make a statement about loyalty.”
Clearly, playing a historical figure has affected Diesel, who has chosen to take on another based-on-a-true-story drama for his next project. In Hannibal, he will play the Carthaginian general of the title, who led an attack on Rome in the 3rd century B.C.
While Schwarzenegger has done his share of period war films, there is a vast difference between playing Conan the Barbarian and playing a real person. And it is in that difference that Diesel has finally been able to establish himself as a valid Hollywood original.
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