I Blame Dennis Hopper (30 page)

T
HE
S
CRIPT

Bella Mafia. What does that even mean? Directly translated it means
beautiful
Mafia. Pretty Mafia? I think we might have some disagreement about whether the Mafia is pretty. Maybe it refers to how a network executive back then sold me on the project, absolutely assuring me that it would be a hit because of the key ingredients: “Tits and guns!”

T
HE
W
RITER
: L
YNDA
L
A
P
LANTE

This might be all her fault. She was British, and she was friends with Vanessa Redgrave—also British. Wait a minute. That was it. That was the bait that had got all of us. We all wanted to work with Vanessa Redgrave. They kept saying, “You know we have Vanessa Redgrave. She's committed.” That should have been a sign.

V
ANESSA
R
EDGRAVE

Oh, my god. To work with Academy Award–winning actress Vanessa Redgrave. I had seen every film she was ever in.
Julia,
for which she won an Academy Award, was a film I particularly loved—as well as the television movie
Playing for Time
. She was a genius. Is a genius! Every moment she plays on film, you can't take your eyes off her. When I was in acting school, I saw her in
Orpheus Descending
on Broadway. Life-changing. This was going to be the most thrilling experience of my life. And it was. On the first day, we were shooting a scene, cleaning up after a murder or something, all wearing black slips and displaying lots of inappropriate cleavage. Tits and guns! I was on the floor, scrubbing blood with a brush and crying, when Vanessa whacked me in the face with a bloody towel. I whacked her right back—real Actors Studio stuff. I was so into it. She laughed afterward, saying, “Marvelous! Come back to my room for tequila.”

Vanessa took me under her wing, and I thought, This movie is going to be amazing. I'm going to learn so much. The second day we were shooting a scene, and she started to have a discussion with the director over some piece of business involving luggage tags. Simple enough, right? Now, I had no idea that they had had a “history.” “No, No, No,” she said. “I completely disagree, and so does Illeana. Don't you, Illeana?” I was going to have to decide on the second day whose side I was on. Of course I was going to agree with Vanessa. Who didn't want to have tequila every day? The director never forgave me. I was on his bad, not-hearing-well side for the rest of the production. We were shooting a funeral scene, and Vanessa was wearing a veil. She thought, as true Sicilian widows would, that we should all be wearing veils, but the other actresses didn't want to. Vanessa assessed the situation and said, “But Illeana,
you're
going to wear a veil, right?” Of course, I nodded.

I went to wardrobe and came back with my veil, and the director announced to the entire set, “Now you're holding up the entire production because you wanted a veil!”

Another time we were shooting a dinner scene, and Vanessa insisted the wrong cheese was on the table.

“It would be provolone. Isn't that right, Illeana?”

I nodded, of course. I mean, she was right. We were supposed to be this Mafia family in Palermo eating American cheese? Vanessa said, “I'll be in my trailer, and when you have the right cheese let us know.” I followed her like a little pet. Get it right, props! I will never forget the look on the props director's face. His face said, Where the hell am I going to get provolone in Burbank? He found some, God bless him, and we shot it, and it's in the movie. The props fellow wrote in my autograph book, “It was wonderful working with you. I only wish the um … working conditions could have been a tad less tense. Anyhow. We made it through!”

Underneath the inscription there is a Polaroid of my receiving oxygen on set. I started having fainting spells during shooting.

The pizza strata:

After work, most of the cast, including Vanessa, would come to my house and eat potluck and watch movies and laugh about the day's proceedings. One night I screened the now camp classic film
Valley of the Dolls
. Sort of gallows humor—although I am a huge fan of this absurd soap opera by an unlikely director, Mark Robson. It was on one of those movie nights that I introduced Vanessa to pizza strata—which is dreadful but easy to make. It's kind of a trashy, low-rent, one-dish pizza made of buttered bread, tomato sauce, cheese, and salami. To my great surprise, Vanessa, who had lived in Italy and was with an Italian, loved pizza strata. Later, on set, Vanessa would come up to me with that melodic voice and say, “Illeana, when are you going to make me some more of that marvelous pizza strata?” One of the many things I admired about Vanessa was that despite the friction on set, she never gave up trying to make a scene better. I really admired that. And I learned to ask questions because of her. A lot of questions.

Vanessa wrote in my autograph book, “I really think I would have cracked if it hadn't been for you! I'm still glad we shared a bucket and brush, and a fixed camera together.”

T
HE
D
IRECTOR
: D
AVID
G
REENE

Where do I begin? Wonderful David gets the credit always for some of my favorite things ever said to me or to anyone on a set. Hands down. Such as “You were late to set so lovely Jennifer is now going to say your lines.” Or, when, at the wrap party, after one of the lead actresses gave him a beautiful leatherbound script as a gift, he threw it onto the ground and said, “You were the worst one!” As she ran off in tears, he looked around as if to ask, What did I say?

David was British and looked like a character from a Dr. Seuss story. Wild crazy white hair sticking straight out. Married about six times, bless his heart. He got married for the last time about three days before he passed away. I'm not sure how old he was when he directed
Bella Mafia
—in his late seventies or eighty—but he would not admit that he couldn't hear very well. His favorite expression, which he said so frequently that eventually we all began imitating it, was “What? What? Who said that?” when either no one was talking or when he had his headphones on. After lunch, at about three o'clock, he would stop for “teatime,” and I'll let you interpret what “teatime” means. After that he would fall asleep, only to wake up suddenly and shout, “What? What? Who said that?” It was straight out of a Monty Python sketch.

I couldn't wait to meet David because he had an amazing body of work. He had directed one of my favorite TV movies of all time,
The People Next Door,
starring Eli Wallach, about a family dealing with their daughter's drug addiction. Before he disliked me, which began on day two, we spoke at length about the movie, which was so terrifying that it kept me from ever even experimenting with drugs. He directed
Friendly Fire
, for which he won an Emmy for Outstanding Director, and a little miniseries called
Roots
, which you may have heard of—for which he also won an Emmy. But he had also directed the TV remake of
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
with real-life sisters Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave. That was the “history” he and Vanessa had carried into poor
Bella Mafia
. Apparently they hadn't gotten along on the earlier film, but that hadn't stopped them from working together again. On
Bella Mafia,
David would groan and say, “What is she doing? God, I
hate
this kind of acting” while the scene was going on. As if Vanessa couldn't hear him. As if we all couldn't hear him. David would say things that any other director might of course be
thinking
but never say out loud! Once, in the middle of a scene, with the cameras rolling, he actually said, “God! I'd love a glass of wine!”

Of course, the cast started sharing these tasty bits of gossip. It made you want to show up early not to miss anything! One day, I was walking to the set, and I was very upset about my swiped dress—which I will get to in a minute—and I passed by one of the producers, and he was shaking. He said, “You missed the worst scene in there.”

And I said, “Oh, the scene was bad?”

And he sighed and said, “Well, that, too, but no, the scene between Vanessa and David.”

I doubled over with laughter. One particularly long day on the set, they were going at it, and Jennifer Tilly quipped, “This movie isn't going to end, because she's going to kill him, and then there will be the trial of
Bella Mafia,
and we'll all be shooting that.”

Like I said, a lot of laughing and crying. And David had an obsession with
not
crying. There were all these gruesome murders and torturings and funerals, all things you would cry about, but he would become very upset whenever an actress was crying. We were shooting a scene in which one of the lead actresses loses her baby, and she was preparing for the highly emotional moment.

“Where is she?” David said impatiently.

“She's preparing to cry,” said the first assistant director, very quietly trying to keep the mood.

“I don't want her to cry!” David said.

The actress walked onto the set, and she was sobbing, ready to shoot this very sad scene. Through her tears she said, “Are we ready yet?”

And David said, “We have four minutes to shoot this before lunch; please stop crying!”

She ran off crying—for real. And … what's for lunch?

The problem with all this miscommunication is that by the time we would get to shoot there would be time for only one or two takes. David would look at me and Jennifer and here was his direction: “And you two … act up a storm.”

Was there competition among the five actresses of
Bella Mafia
? Yes! Was it subtle? No! We were shooting a scene welcoming Vanessa back from prison and all the girls were supposed to run outside and embrace her. Well, someone shoved me, because she wanted to embrace Vanessa, and I went flying out of frame and onto the ground. I started laughing, because of course the take was completely unusable, but to my shock, David yelled out:

“Cut. Print. Moving on!”

I said, “David. I fell in the scene.”

“I know,” he said. “Very emotional!”

“No, on the ground, David. I fell on the ground. Someone pushed me!”

“Moving on!” he yelled out.

I have a wonderful Polaroid of David in my autograph book that I snapped when he wasn't looking. I knew I would always want to remember exactly what he looked like. I look at that picture and start to laugh. It's the back of beautiful Nastassja Kinski's head, and David is inches from her ear, giving her direction. You can't see Nastassja's face, you have to imagine it, but I have a feeling her eyes may have been crossed.

If David was dismissive with other members of the cast, sometimes it seemed as if he was overdirecting Nastassja. One day David asked her if she was ready to act the scene. We had been called to rehearse, but David told Nastassja to go through the whole performance. Well somehow, Nastassja thought this meant the camera was rolling, so she proceeded to act out this highly emotional monologue. It was brilliant, but no one was filming it! The cameraman was trying to signal David to ask if he should start rolling, but David was just oblivious, waving him off for having interrupted Nastassja! He was completely engaged in “directing” her, and Nastassja obliged in giving one hell of a performance. We all just stood there watching, not knowing what to do. When she finished, David said to her, “That was beautiful, darling—the perfect amount of emotion. Would you like to put one on film now?”

Nastassja said, “I thought you
were
shooting?” She was, of course, wondering why he or anyone else hadn't stopped her. We all felt terrible. Here we were again, up against lunch, and with little time to shoot the actual scene. We all stood helpless, wanting to help Nastassja but not wanting to interfere with David. She said, “Well, now I can't do it with everyone looking at me,” which she meant figuratively—but David literally instructed us to turn away and not to look at Nastassja. David said, “No one is looking, Nastassja, you may begin!” I was looking at Jennifer like, What is happening? Why are we doing this? We were all turned around waiting for her to start, but now began the discussion of whether or not there was time. “And … that's lunch,” said the first assistant director. I grabbed a Polaroid camera and secretly snapped David and Nastassja's picture to put in my journal.

N
ASTASSJA
K
INSKI

The first time I heard the name
Nastassja Kinski
was when my grandfather Melvyn Douglas recommended a movie to me he had just seen called
Tess
, directed by Roman Polanski. I followed Nastassja's career ever since and was almost starstruck at the notion of meeting her. In
Bella Mafia
, Nastassja played Sophia, one of Vanessa's daughters by marriage. I thought it might be funny to show Nastassja what a big fan I was, so I brought a movie magazine I owned from the 1980s that had her on the cover to show her on the set. It was from around the time she had been in
Cat People
and
Paris, Texas
, a movie I really love. When I asked her if she would autograph it, she looked at me innocently and said, “Are you making fun of me?” I felt terrible. It was not my intention at all. I loved her. But maybe it is inappropriate to ask your costars to sign your movie memorabilia. There were five ladies in
Bella Mafia
, and there was always an ongoing issue with dresses. Who could, would, or should be wearing what? And how low-cut could it be? Every time I wanted to wear something I would see on the rack I would hear, “Sorry, Nastassja is wearing that. No, sorry, Jennifer is wearing the red.”