Veteran character actor and filmmaker John Turturro delighted an audience at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Wednesday with a masterclass about his extensive and eclectic career spanning film, television and theatre. Speaking to a packed theater at the Bosnian Cultural Center, the Brooklyn native gave insights into his most reputable acting work ranging from Do the Right Thing to The Big Lebowski to Barton Fink to the Transformers franchise as well has his directorial work for films such as Romance and Cigarettes and Mac .
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After the iconic Jesus Quintana bowling scene in The Big Lebowski was played to the audience (which was met with rapturous applause), Turturro said that Joel and Ethan Coen had seen him in the play La Puta Vida by Reinaldo Povod, where Turturro plays a homosexual pedophile. It was that role that would inspire them to cast him in The Big Lebowski as Jesus, a bowling rival to the main characters played by Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi.
In the classic scene, which sees Turturro’s character lick a bowling ball before rolling a strike and goading his competitors, Turturro admitted that he “was just trying to make his friends laugh” and didn’t know the takes that the Coen Brothers used in the scene were actually going to be used for the film.
“They were sort of inspired by this play that I did by Reinaldo Povod and then I said, ‘Hey, I have some ideas.’ So, they said ‘Ok, we’re going to give you some extra time.’”, said Turturro. “And so, I did a lot of those things with the bowling alley really just for their play – I didn’t really think that they were going to put that in the film. It was more a first-grade type of thing where you try to make your friends laugh. I didn’t know they were going to use The Gypsy Kings and stuff like that. I was thinking of what Mohammed Ali would do with the dancing.”
He added: “Now, I really understand The Big Lebowski, but I didn’t at the time.”
Turturro, who is also in town to receive an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award and will present a screening of the Coen brothers’ acclaimed film Barton Fink , spoke at length about his work on both sides of the camera. He noted that it was his role as an unhinged convict in the 1987 indie Five Corners that brought him to the attention of Spike Lee, who ultimately cast him as a racist Italian American in his cultural satire Do the Right Thing .
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“It was a really great experience doing that film,” Turturro said. “And it was very collaborative.”
He added that Lee was “a very dear friend” of his and when the director cast him in his project Jungle Fever , where he played a very different character from his role in Do the Right Thing , “it was important for me to do that.”
A frequent collaborator of the Coen brothers, having played in films such as Barton Fink , Miller’s Crossing and O Brother, Where Art Thou , Turturro, who went to school with Joel Coen’s wife Frances McDormand, recalls the writing-directing duo attending a lot of his plays in the 1980s.
“They told me they were going to write a role for me for Miller’s Crossing, but I guess they had writer’s block in the middle of that and they couldn’t finish it,” he said. “And they wrote Barton Fink in the middle of it and so after I did Miller’s Crossing , they said they had this other film.”
That film, which starred Turturro in the titular role, would become one of the Coen brothers’ early masterpieces. “They are very good friends, and I’ve worked with them a bunch of times…we always have a really good collaboration and I think when you do have that, that’s a big advantage. You have a shorthand and you develop and you can push it and you can try things even if they’re wrong.”
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