  Steve Buscemi stars in "Saint John of Las Vegas," which has begun to open in Canadian theatres. |
NEW YORK — Steve Buscemi front and centre? At 52 years old, the supporting actor extraordinaire has found himself with a rare leading role in Saint John of Las Vegas. It’s an independent flick inspired by Dante’s Inferno, compulsive gambling and the hidden side of Sin City.
Buscemi has played offbeat and wormy support characters for years, in both Big-budget hits such as Armageddon and Con-Air, and in smaller but highly praised movies such as Reservoir Dogs, The Big Lebowski and Fargo.
A former IT engineer, first-time director Hue Rhodes got into the movie-making business in his late 30s after leaving the software business to study theatre at New York University. It gave him the opportunity to learn under Spike Lee, who would also help him with this movie.
Buscemi accepted the role with the new director without hesitation, and even co-produced the film through his company, Olive Productions.
“Having directed myself (Interview in 2007, and recent episodes of 30 Rock and Nurse Jackie) I have sympathy for new directors,” said the actor, in a grey shirt, black jacket and coiffed hair. “I like to see the excitement in their eyes, the sense of discovering something they had waited for a long time. I try to be accommodating as an actor.”
Said Rhodes: “When I finally met with Steve, the first thing he told me was,‘You know what I like about this guy? He gets things done.’ Steve was up for everything. We had this scene to shoot in the desert. All night it was raining, we were freezing our butts off, but he worked so hard. I should have called the movie Saint Steve of Las Vegas.”
The movie was inspired by a trip to Sin City.
“I went to Las Vegas in the winter for a bachelor party,” Rhodes said at a Manhattan hotel. “The casino was far from the strip. From a distance, the strip looked so cold, a total contrast with the hot and sultry stereotype of Vegas. It reminded me of Dante coming to the bottom of Hell to find it cold and frozen.”
So Rhodes reread Dante’s Inferno and used it as a guide for his “road movie”.
He imagined a film showing a cold, no-man’s-land type of scenario, inspired by William Eggleston photographs.
Buscemi plays John, a compulsive gambler and lottery-ticket lover who leaves Vegas to try to make himself a normal life in Albuquerque, N.M. He finds work at an automobile insurance company, a neon-light-lit office where the employees are nothing but numbers.
John’s world is shaken when his boss asks him to head to Vegas to investigate a possible fraud tied to a car accident. He teams with the shady and mean Virgil (Romany Malco, from The 40-year-old Virgin, Blades of Glory and The Love Guru).
Along the way, the duo runs into a variety of odd people: a stripper in a wheelchair (Emmanuelle Chriqui), nudist war veterans, and a human torch held prisoner by his own flames at a fair. All surreal scenes that almost make you think of Salvador Dali’s work.
“I liked this character right away,” Buscemi said. “There is something very endearing about this guy wanting to start over.”
Buscemi was born in Brooklyn. He has always refused to move to Los Angeles, preferring the Big Apple. He can regularly be seen riding the subways in New York, a city he is very attached to.
During the 1980s, Buscemi was a firefighter at an East Village fire house, the same one he returned to in 2001 to help his former colleagues search for survivors in the rubble of the World Trade Center. He did so in total anonymity, refusing all photos ops and interviews on the topic.
So one has to wonder, does Steve Buscemi have any faults?
“Hmmmm, I don’t at all!” he said. “Well, maybe work. I’m kind of a workaholic. I love to work.”
MJ.parent@sunmedia.ca
More Artists
