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Character actor Dennis Christopher’s career has managed to stretch into five decades, with numerous stints in movies (Chariots of Fire), television (HBO’s western Deadwood) and stage (with Elizabeth Taylor in a 1981 revival of The Little Foxes). And if you’re unfamiliar with his resume, well, you’re certainly not Quentin Tarantino: The popular filmmaker, who has long wanted to work with the performer, got his wish by casting Christopher as lawyer Leonide Moguy in the current slavery melodrama/spaghetti-western salute Django Unchained along with such estimable co-stars as Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson.
“If he loves an actor, he wants to work with them because he wants the audience to rediscover why that is a wonderful person,” Christopher says. “Because he can have anybody, and sometimes in the most important parts he casts people who haven’t worked in years, or people who have a certain reputation from television or the theater, like finding Christoph Waltz {for Inglorious Basterds} and giving him the opportunity, or Robert Forster {with Jackie Brown}. He loves working with Michael Parks {Kill Bill, Grindhouse}, who is a fantastic actor who has maybe not been able to commercially achieve what people thought he was capable of. And me, the fact that he brought me in and said, ‘I have loved your work for years. I’ve been wanting to work with you for a while.’ Me? Really? There couldn’t be anybody less hot in the business right now than me!”
Forever known as the would-be Italian teen bicyclist in director Peter Yates’ 1979 crowd-pleaser Breaking Away, a box-office sleeper that recouped its $2.4 million cost in the first four weeks of release, Christopher has survived the rigors of show biz. And since Christopher has worked for auteurs such as Federico Fellini and Robert Altman, he’s also got plenty of stories to share.
In 1980, for instance, he was acting alongside Farrah Fawcett in the play Butterflies Are Free for the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater operation in Jupiter, Fla. Back then the actress was supposedly washed up following her post-Charlie’s Angels career moves, so, as Christopher tells it, she actually flew Broadway theater people to Jupiter to catch her performance, which helped re-establish her acting credentials and, in turn, led to her casting in the controversial 1982 rape drama Extremities.
The Manhattan-based Christopher was in town last October
for the annual Syracuse International Film Festival, which cast him as
“a roamin’ judge” during the weekend’s events; he was also cajoled to
instruct an acting class with students of Syracuse University’s College
of Visual & Performing Arts program. He also brought with him a
recently rescued dog that he named Moguy, after his character from Django.
The diminutive canine, who seems to be “kind of a Chihuahua mix,”
occasionally growled throughout the interview, as if protecting his
master. Maybe the bowwow knew more about the movie’s themes than anyone
realized.
Q: How did you get lassoed into participating in the 2012 film festival?
A: My publicists have a relationship with {festival guru} Owen Shapiro, so they asked me if I’d be interested in teaching a class and attending the festival. And I said “yeah” because I love the idea of teaching. I mean, who knew that I was going to fall into that so easily. Working with young people—directing them, coaching them, giving them feedback about their scenes—is something that I really, really like to do.
And to be doing it in an academic setting is so much different from how I get to do it in New York City or Los Angeles, where it’s more of a one-on-one sort of thing in a workshop or someone’s apartment. I think the idea of teaching the class was really important, to have somebody in the business as an actor talking one-on-one with these students and critiquing their work. Plus I wanted to check out this festival and Syracuse has an amazing film department with some incredible alumni, so all I had to do was say yes.
Q: You were in the industry at a young age, so you could probably identify with these students. What were you trying to impart to them?
A: In Los Angeles I work with people that already have their auditions or they’re doing a scene for an agent, so I’m not really comfortable with the idea of teaching someone to act. But once someone has made that decision and is pursuing that, that’s when I work with them. I don’t want to teach them the nuts and bolts of acting because sometimes you see really wonderfully raw talent and sometimes you hit the wall of delusion, and it’s not my job to tell someone that they’ve maybe chosen the wrong thing.
I think when you are deciding that you’re interested in theater or film or television, you’re interested in being a storyteller. And all that you see on the screen are the actors; you don’t realize that there are hundreds of other jobs involved in telling that story, and you have to enter the business somewhere and somehow. Hopefully, if you’re not cut out to be an actor, maybe there’s something else that you realize you can do, whether it’s writing or lighting or costumes or production design or whatever. I’m not interested in commenting on people’s life choices; if they’re faced with an opportunity, I’d rather give them tools to seize that opportunity that has already been presented to them. And that’s what I’m pretty good at.
Quentin Tarantino still acts; he takes roles in his movies, and he’s actually quite good, but as we all know, his strength lies somewhere else. Until you get in that world, you don’t know where your strengths lie. But you know, it’s a business that can support a lot of delusion.
Q: You were born Dennis Carelli. Are you as Italian as you can get?
A: I’m half-Italian, half-Irish.
Q: So you didn’t have much of a problem doing an Italian accent in Breaking Away.
A: They didn’t know any of that because I became an emancipated minor when I was 17. I was so determined to create my own reality and my own personality from a very, very strict, sort of stifling upbringing, so I got emancipated, changed my name and became an actor. And I don’t think very many people realized that I was Italian or that I had indeed lived in Italy and worked with Federico Fellini before Breaking Away. I was older than the age of the character in Breaking Away, so you play to your strengths, and one of my strengths early on in the business was the fact that I looked younger. So internally I had the maturity and an understanding of the business but I appeared younger, so teachers and chaperones weren’t necessary to have on the set for me, so I could play the underage character without being underage. So I never really cleared that up; I thought, “The more mystery, the better, more of a clean slate.”
It’s just the opposite now. It seems like some people approach acting through the cult of celebrity, and it’s not something that I ever felt comfortable with. I’m from a different generation, and the whole idea of being a chameleon, and not being yourself and being these other people, playing other characters, is what I was more interested in. It’s funny because I just got done saying that I wanted to construct myself away from my family, to make up my own life, but the life that I made up was that of an artist, as opposed to somebody that was attracted to celebrity. So in order to be the kind of artist that I wanted to be, I thought, “I can draw from myself but I don’t have to talk about myself.” It’s why I’ve always shied away from celebrity and public relations, because I wanted that distance and that privacy.
But I see now that people are willing to sell any part of their life to be celebrated, and oftentimes the opportunities go to people who have somehow branded themselves. {Sighs} I hate to sound high-falutin’, but I used to think of it as an art form rather than a profit-making enterprise. That’s where I’m most comfortable and that’s who I am, and if that doesn’t bring me the fame and fortune that other performers have, so be it. I’m not wanting for anything as far as work is concerned, and I think my work speaks for itself.
Q: Tell me about working with some of the great movie directors.
A: I’ve worked with a lot of really good ones: Fellini; Jim Bridges, who did The China Syndrome and The Paper Chase; Peter Yates; two with Bob Altman; Boris Sagal; Joan Micklin Silver. David Milch on Deadwood was fantastic to work with, Quentin was amazing to work with. Then the stage directors that I worked with, which is another part of my life that film people don’t really know about. I’ve done three Broadway shows and I’ve done off-Broadway and I do a lot of theater in Los Angeles when I’m there as well. So it has kept me very satisfied, very happy and very challenged, but it doesn’t appear on my film resume.
Q: How did you manage to get cast for Fellini’s Roma (1972)?
A: I was very young, it was my first night in Rome after hitchhiking from Strasbourg, and I’d gone to Europe because I was in love with hippies. At the time I was under the spell of a certain girl and I followed her to Europe buying a one-way ticket with a secret in the back of my head that I wanted to work for Fellini, never telling anybody about this outlandish dream of mine. And the first night in Italy, I broke away from these people I was hitchhiking to Rome with, this girl being one of them, and walked directly onto a movie set while a scene was being shot. The whole setup looked sort of cheesy to me but it turned out to be a Fellini movie. It was a fairly involved shot, with whores hanging out the windows, a big, roasted pig that was stuffed with cooked little birds and a procession coming down the street. And I walk into the middle of this, thinking, “What the hell is this, a festival or something?” As I said, it was my first night in Rome.
I had angered him so much by ruining his shot that he had these goons take me aside and put me in this cul-de-sac that I couldn’t escape from. So he wanted to know what was so important that I had to ruin his movie, and like a little kid in front of the principal, my voice went up about four octaves and I said {imitating a high-pitched squeal}, “Mr. Fellini, I’m so sorry. It’s just that I had a dream about you!” Well, apparently I said the magic word because Roma was a reconstruction of his childhood through his dreams, and he accessed his story by writing them down and filming them, and we only shot at night. And when I said the word “dream,” that was it, and he took over from there and started talking for 20 minutes about stones and colors and clowns and dreams.
And at the end of it he asked “Are you an actor?” And I knew it was a really important question, and his eyes narrowed when he asked me, and I lied, like any actor would, and I said, “No.” And he said {in a gruff voice}, “Good! You come to work for me. Be here at the same piazza the next night when the sun goes down. And make sure you wear the same clothes,” because I already established myself in one of the scenes {laughs}.
So I came back the next night and worked for over a month with him. He had a troupe of actors that he called the Dream People who had to be there every night whether we worked or not. We were stationed in a roped-off area around the director’s chair, and it was people that he drew on for visual inspiration, and they were incredibly beautiful and incredibly grotesque, they were young and old, male and female and god knows what else. We got along very, very well, he and I, and he took me under his wing.
Q: Was the Robert Altman experience really like the free-form movie party that you see on screen?
A: I did a small bit on 3 Women (1977), which was fairly scripted. But when I did A Wedding (1978) each one of us got a folder and an outline. Bob explained to us that there were 37 main characters and the outline said who we were at the wedding, who we were related to, who we knew that we didn’t know. In my case, there was a small paragraph that said “scene that shows the love between you and your sister, who happens to be the bride.” It was your responsibility to work up a scene, talk it through with the writers, and if they thought it was a worthy idea, they would present it to Bob and he would say yea or nay. If you came up with something that wasn’t any good, you just had a smaller part in the movie. And it was great to see the people work so hard to justify their characters and make them part of the movie.
You’d go up to Bob and present him with an idea and he’d say, “That’s great! We’re gonna shoot that tomorrow.” Then we’d see it at the dailies—everybody was invited to the dailies, in fact it was almost mandatory—and he’d say, “See that scene? So-and-so suggested that scene. That’s all theirs from beginning to end.” He was really great about giving credit to everybody, which made you feel more invested in the film, more collaborative, even though Bob was the master puppeteer of us all.
Or you’d go up and present him with an idea and he’d say, “That’s crap!” and he’d walk away from you. {Laughs} Now usually you’d be destroyed if a director of that import said that, but the next day you’d come up with another new idea, and the rejection or accepting of your idea would be just like that {snaps fingers}. And the next day you had the chance all over again to impress him or not impress him. He was just a great guy and he created the kind of atmosphere where you could soar creatively.
And in a funny sort of way, Quentin is similar because you always hear what a “character” he is. Django Unchained was 11 months of shooting and I worked four of those months, he’s got hundreds of people waiting on his every word and he would walk in every day with such enthusiasm, such joy to be there, such love of filmmaking, and such love for all the people he put together, all the puzzle pieces that he found to help him make his masterpiece. It’s very ennobling to be chosen like that and it’s very infectious to be around someone who is not only at the top of their game, a master of what they do, but also someone who loves being there and loves that you’re there, and just infects you with his energy and joy and focus every single day at work. You could hear his laughter ring out from the set all day long.
Q: I’m guessing that Altman probably had a gigantic rough cut for A Wedding and Tarantino probably has a huge cut for Django.
A: Well, now you know why Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 makes so much sense. What actually happened with Bob was that A Wedding was coming off Nashville (1975), which was a huge success for him, and they {20th Century Fox} promised him a road show with an intermission, and he shot it thinking that was what he was going to have. And then the studio somehow legally was able to take the movie away from him and re-edited it the way they wanted. They cut it down because it was about the time when commercialism really started strangling filmmaking and people became restricted, and there were so many showings that you had to have in a day for it to be profitable for the movie theater showing the film, so people didn’t want to book a film that had an intermission because it would cut in half the amount of viewings in a day. So he had a lot of really great footage that he wasn’t able to use.
A lot of Django wasn’t improvisational. He would throw a line to you here or there but you quickly learned that the line he was throwing you when he would say {affects Tarantino’s voice}, “Maybe you might want to consider trying to say something kind of like this. . .” and then he would say something, so with all the qualifications, you’d think that you had to say something kind of like what he said. But really he wanted you to say exactly what he said. So in that way, it seems like there’s an improvisational quality to his movies, but he has indeed written every word. And after a while you know that’s how he works—and that he’s always right. I mean that sincerely because he’s the one creating these cinematic masterpieces; after a while you realize “I play this color, I’m this point in the great canvas,” like a Pointillism painting, and you’re the red dots or the yellow dots or the pink dots. And the movie, he has it all in his mind already.
It was very invigorating, a real joy for me to connect with him at this point in my career. It was all his idea; he had to rewrite this part for me because originally the role was supposed to be the same age as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, and he wanted me, he’s apparently been watching my work for years and liking it, unbeknownst to me; I’ve never met the man. I was dying to say, “What took you so long?” {laughs} but I was just happy to be there. It’s rare that you’re thrown into such a strong ensemble with a strong leader who is unrestrained by time and financial concerns, his movies make so much money worldwide, he’s so embraced by the public that the producers want to give him everything he needs to do what he does.
Q: Would you mind chatting about Peter Yates, the late director of Breaking Away?
A: Oh yeah, he was wonderful. He had seen me in a rough cut of A Wedding, because Bob Altman and he had the same agent, Sam Cohen, and apparently Peter and screenwriter Steve Tesich saw this cut and said, “Well, there’s our Cyril,” meaning me. I had never met those guys before in my life. I was still at that stage of my career where I had to audition for every part I got, just to fight to get in the room, and I was called up and asked to come in {to read for the part of Cyril}. One of the guys was late to audition for Dave, which is the part I eventually played, and they said, “Would you do us a favor and read both parts?” And when the Italian part came in {for Dave}, I just had fun with it; they didn’t know I was Italian, or that I had lived in Italy or worked with Fellini.
Then they decided to give me the role of Dave {Daniel Stern eventually was cast as Cyril} but I was working on another movie at the time with Richard Harris called The Last Word and there were a lot of delays in that production. {For Breaking Away} I had missed two weeks of rehearsal and three weeks of shooting and they shot everything they possibly could shoot without me, and the studio kept saying, “Hire the next guy or we’re gonna pull the plug on the movie.” Peter, in cahoots with my agent, kept lying about my availability to the studio and they finally got me there, they put me on a red eye and I flew all night long, then they threw me into hair and makeup and we worked that very day to get some footage back to the studio.
It’s funny, what we started out with that character of Dave is not how we ended because they had envisioned him in a completely different way. They gave me my costume, which was all very tight clothes, skintight pants and a Banlon shirt unbuttoned down to here, with gold chains and pointed-toe shoes, like I was a Saturday Night Fever reject living in the Midwest. And I had a completely different idea. I thought he was more of a traditional Italian wanna-be, somebody who wanted to live in a big family, who wanted his parents to love each other, who wanted that kind of exuberance in an Italian life, not somebody who was pretending to be an Italian just so he could screw the girl. It seemed a little sleazy to me. But they {studio chiefs} were very concerned: “What’s going to happen in the big reveal when you give up this persona and you tell the girl who you really are?” And I said, “Well, I act it, is what I do,” so actress Robyn Douglass {who played the girl} and I improvised a scene—she was dynamite in the scene—and they just loved what we did, and they scripted it up and we shot it.
So I really think I had some sort of impact on the movie because I was able to really change that Italian character from a cliché to something a little bit more endearing, and I think it worked much better for the movie. There were strange things in that original script, which was called Bambino: There was a folding bike, pot smoking in the back of a VW van, all this clichéd Italian stuff going on, and thank god it evolved past that, and we got to that point even though I missed those rehearsals against my will.
Q: What was it like working on a Quentin Tarantino feature?
A: On the set, there a checkpoint before you’re allowed to get anywhere near where you’re going to shoot, whether you’re on location or you’re in the studio, and you have to check every device at the door. No cameras, no cell phones, no iPads, no laptops, no radios, no anything. Even {movie mogul} Harvey Weinstein had to give over his Blackberry.
Another thing about Quentin that’s amazing: You’ll never see any CGI {computer-generated imagery} in his movies. It has to happen in the shots; he won’t fudge anything.
He also has names for everyone in the movie, even the horses! My character’s name is Leonide Moguy. So I Googled the name before I went in to meet him, and I found out that he was a Russian film director who had made two American films, most of his work was done in Russia, and he discovered Ava Gardner! So I went in and I knew everything about this particular filmmaker who my character was named after, and he was very, very impressed. And I told him some things about this guy that he did not know, and he loved that. If you do pay that kind of attention to his details, you will be rewarded because there is something there. Nothing is arbitrary; everything is thought out.
They came to my dressing room one day on the set and the prop person said, “We’re waiting on the scene. You have to do it right away and you have to sign these things,” and there were these little cards, my character’s calling cards. {In the movie} there’s a private club where these rich Southern men can go have an evening of pleasure with dark-skinned women, a high-class whorehouse, and you can’t get in unless you present this card. And, of course, the prop person had these cards made up and were signed by Leonide Moguy. Well, there was a big commotion because the cards weren’t signed by me. There’s never a shot of the card in the movie, so it doesn’t matter that I didn’t sign the card, but it mattered to Quentin that the character signs it with my own handwriting.
We would work all week long and on the weekends he arranged screenings of either spaghetti westerns or kung-fu movies. One weekend he showed Breaking Away, which was very thoughtful. The fact that he can keep the morale on the set so high, so happy, so joyous, in the middle of working really long, hard hours, there’s no prima donna about it, he’s hitting you on the head with a joystick all the time. Every tiny brushstroke is made by him. I love handmade films and there’s nobody who makes handmade films, in my experience, like Quentin Tarantino.
