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VIN DIESEL on 'FIND ME GUILTY'
Contributed by Michael J. Lee, Executive Editor
for Radio Free Entertainment
March 7, 2006
In Find Me Guilty, Vin Diesel goes the method route in his portrayal of Jackie DiNorscio, a man who is offered a shorter prison sentence in exchange for testimony against his cohorts in the New Jersey Lucchese crime family. Unwilling to sell out his closest friends, Jackie instead becomes his own attorney and defends himself in court. With no formal training in the law, he resorts to cracking jokes and telling stories, using his charisma to win over the jury and disrupt the legal proceedings.
Find Me Guilty is based on the true life story of Jackie DiNorscio and is directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men). The film also features Peter Dinklage, Ron Silver, and Annabella Sciorra. In this interview, Vin Diesel talks about the making of the movie.
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The Interview
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MEDIA: Did it drive you crazy to gain all that weight for this character and not exercise?
This is going to sound perverse: I enjoyed it. I enjoyed putting on the weight. I enjoyed departing from the normal characters that I play that incorporate that physicality. I enjoyed playing Jackie DiNorscio and everything that came along with it.
Is there a certain food you gorged yourself on?
Ice cream. A quart a day, ice cream. That's the secret.
Did you try to physically mimic Jackie, or just capture his spirit?
Both. Initially, I spent all the time, prior to meeting him, working on the attributes and mannerisms and characteristics and physicalities that Jackie possessed in an attempt to just be him, just to match the footage that I saw. It wasn't till I met him, until he actually came to the set, until he had a heart-to-heart with me, that I understood, or began to understand, what the whole trial meant for him, and what, at the core, he was fighting for. When I met him, all of the attention that I had paid to his characteristics, or the work that I had put into imitating him, took a backseat to me representing the truth he was trying to fight for. So it was very, very, very helpful for me and a blessing for me to have met him before starting the filming. Consequently, 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. All the other characters I've played were fictitious, and I had the liberty of creating it any way that I wanted to. This was different. I had to represent a man whose characteristics represented the trial, and whose truth represented the outcome.
So what does he mean to you now?
I think...I walk out of that movie...When I was shooting the movie, I had the luxury of being directed by Sidney Lumet, which allowed me to go full force in becoming this character. And...so I had never...I didn't think about how the character would come off as a whole, after watching the whole picture. And after watching the picture, I realized, "This is strange. I haven't seen a character in 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 the degree that he could love a cousin that shot him and tried to kill him--a character that would be willing, for the sake of loyalty, for that virtue, for that dying virtue, be willing to sacrifice his own life to make a statement about loyalty.
Would you describe this film as a comedy or a drama?
Another good question. I don't know. [laughs] I know that while I was shooting the movie, I was very in tune with the drama of the character to the point where when I saw the movie...We were in Berlin, and I saw the movie with Sidney Lumet, who had been there 50 years earlier to receive an award for 12 Angry Men. And I said to Sidney, "I wasn't trying to be funny." [laughs] And he said, "By committing to the character the way that you did, you took on the attributes that Jackie had, and one of them was being funny in that courtroom, and being an entertainer in that courtroom." So I don't know. I guess you would call it a dramedy.
How do you think Jackie gave himself such a good defense when he had such a limited education?
I think it was real simple at the end of the day. He was in a trial where the objective by the prosecutors was to expose how inhumane they all are, and all he really did was expose how human they all are. He was revealing the humanity of everyone through humor, through his own experiences, through anecdotes that the jury could relate to in one way or another. So that's how.
Was working with Sidney a big reason for your doing the film?
A huge, huge, huge, huge reason for me doing this movie was Sidney Lumet. I started acting in New York theatre over 30 years ago, and as a New York actor, you dream of being in a Sidney Lumet movie, or one of our few New York directors. He was such a role model for us New Yorkers, for everybody, really, that when I went off to direct my short film Multi-Facial, and I had spent years learning how to write at Hunter College, and I had already spent years working as an actor and studying and being a student of the craft for so long, I had no idea how to direct a movie. 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 10 years later, when he sees that short movie and becomes adamant that I should play Jackie DiNorscio. So going back, or having the opportunity to work with Sidney Lumet was kind of like going into the masters program of filmmaking. And I was scheduled to go off and start Hannibal, so it was a great experience for all types of reasons, one of them learning from the great master of directors.
Did being a stage actor help you with the size and scope of the courtroom scene?
Very interesting. I...Yes. It was one of the things that I loved that Sidney did. Because at first, we were supposed to go to Canada, and Sidney said, "I have to shoot this here in New York." Of course, that meant, "Vin, you gotta do the movie for free." [laughs] That's what it always means, by the way! But I had to do this movie in New York. And I said, "Huh..." And he said, "Yeah." He said, "Because I want to handpick every single one of the extras." So you've got a director committed to the emotional truth of everybody in that room to the point that he hand selects and auditions all these actors just to be in the jury or to be in that courtroom. It was very much like returning to New York stage, to New York theatre, 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 that are all wondering, "All right. Now Vin's coming back home. Let's see what he can do! Mr. Big Bucks comes back to New York, let's see what he's got!"
Is your character really similar to Jackie, or is it just the "mob guy" stereotype?
No, it was very Jackie. One of my chief concerns in the beginning...Sidney and I met in his office and we started reading the script, and he felt very good about it. And I said, "But I don't look anything like Jackie DiNorscio." And he said, "Well, Jackie wants you to play him." I said, "What movie did he see that he wants [that]?" "Fast and the Furious." I said, "What?!" What did Dominic Toretto have to do with Jackie DiNorscio? And he said, "Vin, we have ways of making you look like Jackie DiNorscio." Little did I know it was two hours of makeup every morning to look like Jackie DiNorscio. The weight I gained...because initially, Sidney said, "You know, if you can't get that weight thing together, we can put a prosthetic bodysuit piece on." But I had been working with the details of his movement so much that I felt if I ever put on this suit, this weight suit, I would lose some of the physicality that I had been developing for this character. So...And I also felt like after Raging Bull, it'd be wimping out if I didn't try to gain real weight. [laughs] So I ate ice cream, and I gained the weight. But Sidney Lumet was the one that gave me the confidence to look like the character. And he was very, very clever in the way in which he incorporated that look, because he wasted no time. While we were doing table readings, before ever shooting, before ever thinking about when we were going to set, while we were doing the table readings, he would ask me to come in three hours early for the table read to go through makeup. And I would say to Sidney, I said, "Why?" I said, "I don't need to do the makeup for me. It's not going to help...and it's not going to do anything for my table read." And what I realized is it had nothing to do with me. It had to do with every other actor, that he needed to see only Jackie DiNorscio. That he didn't want to be...He didn't want any other actor in the room to be familiar with Vin in the way they were familiar with Vin. He was very adamant about everybody getting to know Jackie DiNorscio through this process, so much so that when they came to the table read, I had already been Jackie from the two hours in makeup.
What would you say was the most helpful piece of directing advice in that book?
What's interesting is it was pretty much in that book. The thing that was the most helpful was he, in the book, described a place called the Ukraine Center in New York. The lower east side. I had known the place because they rented the place out for parties, and I was a teenager going to these parties. But he would rent the place out to do table reads. And he'd put tape on the ground and he'd walk you through the scene, and he was very extensive with his rehearsal. When I did Strays, I took two weeks, three weeks of just rehearsal time, and the production time on Strays was only three weeks. So I matched the production time with rehearsal time because of that book. When I finally shot Find Me Guilty...Boy, was he into that rehearsal period. Because it didn't say in the book that you had to go through makeup to sit down at a table read. [laughs]
What was the interaction like between you and Peter Dinklage?
Incredible. Peter Dinklage came to the project, like me, because of Sidney Lumet. But he just came from doing a stage performance...And he was a real blessing for the project, and really, really brought something special to the role of Klandis. You want actors that are that committed in a picture like this, because if one person's off, it can throw off the whole scene. And a few scenes that are thrown off throw off a whole movie. When Peter Dinklage came on, he immediately grabbed that character, and then our relationship started building in a very cool way.
Did your character and Peter's have a stronger relationship that wasn't portrayed in the movie?
I think Sidney wanted it to be very subtle. He didn't want to make it look so obvious that the judge was secretly rooting for him, that Klandis was secretly rooting for him. He didn't want to alleviate the pressure. So he didn't play those things up as much as someone else could have, I suppose, which I thought was cool--keeping it concise, because it's a tricky relationship between Jackie and the other lawyers. How are the lawyers supposed to respect this man impersonating a lawyer? How are they supposed to commit to their occupation or to their task with somebody that's not a lawyer, part of the whole process?
Thanks for your time.
Thank you, guys.
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