They were familiar by reputation only, although they all had a lot in common. Still, apart from real-life couple Hamish Linklater (Midnight Mass) and Lily Rabe (American Horror Story), the actors in the Zoom meet-up tended not know one another personally.
Their onscreen résumés, however, are well-known to all: X-Files and Californication star David Duchovny, NCIS and Blue Bloods actor Jennifer Esposito, Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s scene-stealer Chelsea Peretti, Mad Men’s John Slattery, and George & Tammy and Man of Steel performer Michael Shannon. All of them are actors who have become filmmakers, and each has directed a new movie premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs through June 18 in New York City. By the end of the conversation, they no longer felt like strangers.
“I want to see all your movies,” Duchovny declared as the goodbyes began.
“I know! Same!” Peretti added, while Slattery and Shannon chimed in simultaneously with “Me too.”
“We need a van!” Linklater proposed. “We’ll all get the same van and just drive it to each other’s premieres.”
“I’m in,” Esposito said. “Let’s do it.”
Excerpts from a spirited conversation:
Vanity Fair: All of you have busy careers as actors, but why was this particular story one you felt you had to direct yourself? Let’s start with you, Jennifer, and Fresh Kills—a look at the generations of women in a mob family.
Jennifer Esposito: It was something I saw growing up [on Staten Island.] I grew up around mafia families, and I noticed the daughters who were my age had this incredible rage, and it always haunted me. As much as I’m looking at the female point of view in a mafia world, it’s really more about finding a voice in any world that tells you not to have one. That’s what I’m trying to exorcise in this film.
It’s something that I felt when I started to send around the script. I had a few men that wanted to direct it, and I knew it would’ve been an easier road. A female executive at Netflix said, “Absolutely not. You have to go and do this.” It was very long and very hard. I definitely lost a few years of my life on this journey, but this is more than the mafia genre has shown before from the female perspective.
David, how about you? In Bucky F*cking Dent you also play a grizzled, dying father obsessed with the Red Sox finally winning the World Series.
David Duchovny: I wanted to make an old-fashioned movie where you laugh and you cry. I wrote it as a screenplay more than 10 years ago, and then I couldn’t get it made, so I wrote it as a novel. Then, I re-wrote it as a screenplay from the novel. I’ve been living with the story for a while. In fact, when I wrote it, I had written the son character for myself, and I aged out of it in the years that I’ve been trying to make it. Now I’m playing the father. About four years ago, I was ready to go as the son, and I just said, “It’s not tenable anymore to try to play this guy.” It’s like playing Hamlet at 55. It’s just not going to work. It’s like, “Stop whining already!”
Did you have any conflicted feelings about directing an adaptation of your own book? You sometimes hear novelists say, “I don’t want to be the doctor who does surgery on my own child.”
Duchovny: I did, and I have other novels that I want to make as films, but I wouldn’t adapt them because they started life as novels. I’m not able to address my work in that way to turn it back into the screenplay unless I’m forced to.
Anthony Breznican
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