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 Armand
Assante: “American Gangster” to International
Actor
By Bobbie Katz
No matter how you slice it, Armand Assante’s
film career is going great guns.
Whether
playing a drug lord in the mega-hit film “American Gangster”
with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe or a U.S. Marine
captain in “California Dreamin’ (Endless), an
independent movie filmed in Romania that made its U.S. debut
at the 2007 CineVegas Film Festival, what triggers Assante’s
motives as an actor is always the same. That is, he has to
be intrigued by the story in order for him to take a shot
at a role.
“I love a good story,” says Assante. “As
a kid, I used to love the experience of sitting in a movie
theater and becoming engrossed in a particular viewpoint or
problem a character had, but overall, it was really love of
story. What is gratifying to me is that a lot of projects
I’ve done in the last 15 years or more have been independent
projects, the blessing of which gives you a certain amount
of freedom to choose what you want to do. I have to believe
in a story to do a movie and the thing is that I see something
in it that hopefully will resonate with people and give them
something to relate to about the world we’re living
in and its complexities.”
While “American Gangster” has already taken in
$100 million to date, “California Dreamin’ (Endless)”
is touring the world via film festivals, which will hopefully
ultimately afford it distribution, even if it’s in art
houses. This uniquely modern military tale premiered at the
2007 Cannes Film Festival in France, winning the top award
there, and then went on to win the top honor at the Ibizia
Film Festival in Spain. It has been accepted in 80 film festivals
and Assante is hoping that it will have a chance to make its
mark with the general public before the end of the year.
“It’s been a happy, sad experience for all of
us,” Assante acknowledges. “Our extremely talented
young director, Cristian Nemescu, who also wrote a lot of
the movie, was tragically killed in a car accident six weeks
after filming was finished. He was only 27 and this was his
first feature film. Along with him, Romania lost one of its
greatest sound engineers in the crash and the driver of the
car died, too. The movie was very roughly cut when the tragedy
happened and I thought that it would just be dropped because
Cristy was a magician when it came to editing and he had a
particular style. But Cristy’s best friend took over
the editing and finished the movie. The film marks a high
point in modern Romanian cinema. I think it’s Romania’s
turn to be in the spotlight and to vent in films after the
big crisis they went through with the Communists, etc.”
 In
“California Dreamin’ (Endless),” Assante
plays U.S. Marine Captain Jones, who is assigned to escort
a train carrying NATO equipment headed for the former Yugoslavia
during the war in Kosovo. His mission is held back by a man
named Doiaru, apparently a very thorough station master in
a godforsaken village, who halts the train over a paperwork
technicality.
As Doiaru detains the convoy, the villagers take outlandish
measures to welcome the Americans, intending to profit from
their unexpected presence. The troops join the game and Doiaru’s
own daughter has a brief affair with a Marine sergeant. Finally,
Captain Jones has enough of delays and decides to take matters
into his own hands. But as he gets more and more involved
with the locals, he stirs old animosities, revealing that
motivations aren’t always what they appear to be.
“The story itself is really a metaphor
for the world we’re currently living in, in terms of
the fact that we think we’ve solved so many of out communication
problems but we’re all really products of our history,
geography and our racial and cultural heritages and differences,”
Assante explains. “I think that people respond to the
film because they see it as what’s happening in their
own society. Even the title of the movie, taken from the hit
song by the Mamas and Papas, resonates with those of my generation
and thereafter because it represents a time that signals the
end of war, the examination and destruction of all values
and the re-examination of ourselves as a society. The song
has a certain significance in that our naivety is over and
our days of ‘California Dreamin’ have come to
an end. ”
“The movie also depicts how misunderstood
a lot of our military is,” he adds. “They’re
not creating policy and they’re not dictating policy--
they’re basically doing what they’re told to do
when in fact they may have better strategies than what the
politicians come up with. I think it’s kind of an interesting
dilemma to be examined. I’ve always been attracted to
the subject of men who are in positions of authority whose
authority has been eroded by bureaucracy. They are often the
most misunderstood and are often the first ones to say that
there is something terribly wrong.”
Describing himself as a journeyman actor who
has been on the road for 40 years, Assante notes that he doesn’t
have any particular message that he’s trying to express
through the various characters he plays. However, he is always
looking for ways to stretch himself as an actor so that he
doesn’t get bored. He says that the curse of the independent
film industry is that it is incredibly underfunded and that
the belief in these films is lessening because of all the
other distractions we have in our society, such as DVD’s,
computers and informational entertainment that’s not
necessarily story-based.
“I think it’s made it harder for
real actors and real storytellers,” claims Assante,
who loves in the country an hour outside of Manhattan. “A
lot of the films I make are not crowd-pleasers but they are
provocative in their own way.They may be more for university
or art house audiences. However, in that genre, they’re
incredibly respectable and I think they’ll find their
legs. I have another film trying to find distribution called
‘When Niche Wept,’ based on the well-known book.
It’s a small independent film that took a long time
to get going.”
In the life of actor Armand Assante, that’s
just a minor bullet point. More importantly, as always, that’s
his story and he’s sticking to it.
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