| By Fred Topel
In Theatres March 17
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If you’ve only seen Vin Diesel as a brooding tough guy, even in kiddie comedies like The Pacifier, then Find Me Guilty will be your introduction to the full range of Vin Diesel emotions. Diesel plays Jackie DiNorscio in the story of how the real life gangster represented himself in trial. First a humorous incompetent, it soon becomes apparent that DiNorscio owns the jury on charisma alone, no legal knowledge required.
The real DiNorscio died while Diesel was filming the movie, but he got to meet him before he began the role. “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,” Diesel said. “It wasn’t until 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 paid to his characteristics, the work that I’d put into imitating him, took a backseat to me representing the truth he was trying to fight for.”
Offered a deal if he would give up his friends and family, DiNorscio stood up for loyalty, even towards those who attempted to assassinate him. “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 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.’”
Perhaps even more than the emotional challenge, audiences will notice the physical transformation of buff, bald Diesel into flabby, hairy mob goon DiNorscio. “Sidney and I met in his office and we started reading the script and he felt very good about it. I said, ‘But I don’t look anything like Jackie DiNorscio.’ Little did I know that it was two hours of makeup every morning to look like Jackie DiNorsico. Initially Sidney said if you can’t get that weight thing together, we can put a prosthetic body suit piece on. But I ate ice cream and gained the weight. Sidney Lumet gave me the confidence to look like the character and he was very, very clever in the way he incorporated that look.”
Some of those clever ways involved forcing Diesel to appear in character before all his coworkers in the earliest stages of rehearsal. “While we were doing table readings before we were shooting, he would ask me to come in three hours early for the table readings to get into makeup. I said, ‘I don’t need to do the makeup. For me, it’s not going to do anything for my table readings.’ But I realized it didn’t have to do with me. It had to do with every other actor that he needed to see only Jackie DiNorscio. He didn’t want any other actor in the room to be familiar with Vin in the way they were familiar with me. He was very adamant about everybody getting to know Jackie DiNorscio through this process so much so that when they came to the table reading I’d already been Jackie from the two hours of makeup.”
A New York theater actor, Diesel was excited by the possibility to work with veteran director Sidney Lumet. “I started acting in the New York theatre over 30 years ago, and as a New York actor you dream of being in a Sidney Lumet movie, 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’d already spent years working as an actor and studying to be 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 ten years later when he sees that short movie and becomes adamant that I should play Jackie DiNorscio. So having an opportunity to work with Sidney Lumet was kind of like going into the Masters Program of Filmmaking.”
Ultimately, what Diesel learned was the value of rehearsal. “What’s interesting is it’s 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 NY on the Lower East Side. I had known the place because they had rented it out for parties and I was a teenager going to these parties, but he was renting out this place to do table readings. He’d put tape on the ground and he’d walk me through the scene. He was very extensive with his rehearsal. When I did Strays, I took 2-3 weeks of just rehearsal time and production time on Strays was only 3 weeks. So I met the production time with rehearsal time because of that book. When I finally shot Find Me Guilty, boy was he good at rehearsal. It didn’t say in the book that you had to go through makeup to sit down at a table read.”
See the new side of Vin Diesel in Find Me Guilty, opening March 17. |
