Interview: Dito Montiel


Dito Montiel grew up in Astoria, Queens, the son of a Nicaraguan immigrant father and Irish mother. His talents span music, writing, and now filmmaking, and with each he tells stories that resonate universally. Montiel's debut feature, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, achieves a level of risk-taking that only comes from having the courage — or naοvete — to ask, "Why not?" His unique vision was guided and gilded by the presence of much more experienced collaborators including actors Robert Downey, Jr., Chazz Palminteri, and Dianne Wiest; DP Eric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries); editor Chris Tellefsen (Capote); and producer Trudie Styler (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels).The finished product is out of sequence, occasionally features no sound, and leaves you unable to anticipate what's coming from one second to the next while leading you to an end that leaves you crying for more. Through this work, Montiel proves that memory — for all our attempts to chronicle it via autobiography or documentary — has no continuity. What it does have, inarguably, is passion.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is based, however loosely, on Montiel's book of the same name, published in 2003. The memoir is a series of tales about the individuals who surrounded Montiel during his youth in Queens and coming-of-age in Manhattan, which began in the late 80s when Montiel's punk band Gutterboy was signed to Geffen Records for an insane advance of $1 million. His music notoriety launched him into a certain echelon of celebrity (described with hilarious detail in his book); as such, Montiel is not exactly without connections or resources, but that is not the point. By drawing from truth of experience to tell his own stories unapologetically, he’s sticking to a principle no storyteller should forget: to talk about what you know.

For his efforts, Montiel won the Dramatic Directing Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival while the film's young cast — comprised mostly of actors who had never appeared in a movie before — was lauded with a Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Performance.

Speaking with him while he strolls through his old neighborhood, Montiel got to the bottom of how art is all about recognizing the tales of heroes around you in everyday life and how the power of an art like cinema means those stories can reach anyone anywhere.

How difficult was it to make a movie based on your own memories?

When we started talking about making it, the first thing I said was, "Listen, nobody cares about an autobiography." And I didn't write a book that was an autobiography — it was just stories about other people, you know? The intent always was, I hope and believe, that a kid in Ames, Iowa, knows these feelings that we're trying to get across. You know, I understood Brokeback Mountain and I'm not a gay cowboy. So it was never, at least during the process of making it, it never felt like particularly personal. It was really like, "Oh, there's Channing Tatum playing Antonio" and it was his way of doing it, so it was always a
bit of a disconnect. Now that it's over, it's funny because now I get to watch and it's like, "Oh, we made that?" (Laughs)

Even though the story isn't strictly autobiographical, there are names of real people in it, including yours. Why did you decide to do that?

I'd never really written screenplays before...so when I was writing the movie, I used all names of people I know, even though it wasn't particularly personal, because for me it's less hard. I'd say to myself, "If I change his name from Giuseppe, he wouldn't sound the same to me, so I'll leave that." And then all of a sudden the movie's getting made and I said, "Wait, I gotta take these names out!" but they said, "No, it works!" and I said, "Really? It's going to be really weird..." And it certainly is weird.

But all these lines that you're blurring, the lack of strict categorization or genre, is another reason why the film is so fascinating.

(Laughs) That's cool. When you say the categories, that was my biggest obstacle doing this whole thing initially. Way back when somebody had talked to me about making my book a movie, I said, "Wow, that sounds great — go ahead!" But my book is nuts and it doesn't really have any beginning, middle, and end — it's a miracle that it's a book and it's really nice of them that they put it out and I like it a lot but it's not a story; it's just stories. So somebody made a treatment and it was this horrible New York joke, like,
"Yo, Vinnie!" and the mafia came into it, and I said, "Where did they get that from?" That's when all of a sudden I got the idea, "Well, maybe I should think about doing this myself..." It's so easy to do that kind of thing; it's like if someone says to me, 'Write a movie about surfing," I might just write, "Hang loose!" (Laughs) It could very well be a disaster.

So the first thing we did about this movie was say, "Who cares it's in New York. Who cares that my name is in it. Who cares that the real Antonio is five-foot-five with curly hair and a mangled face." You throw all that stuff in the garbage can and hopefully it looks nice when it comes out.

A point that comes out in your interviews and in the film's production notes is an assertion that art is about feeling and what you're trying to get across is that art is about the connection to the viewer, not any sense of objective accuracy. It's not photojournalism.

Oh, yeah — that's so true. It was a learning experience for me because even though I was saying I didn't care it wasn't all personal, it's tough when Channing Tatum walks in as Antonio. You have the Bruce Weber model show up and I say, "Oh, god, no! Antonio is a kid that you don't love because of his looks!" But you learn all the time making a movie if you're lucky.

One of the big things happened during one of the early scenes we shot. It's just a dumb little scene at the beginning of the movie where Antonio's walking down the street, grabs this guy, and throws him on the floor, then he keeps walking. Antonio was my friend — of course, it's a combination of twenty different people in the movie — but he's a legend in the neighborhood I grew up in because he was just insane. And this older guy that I know was hanging out on the corner while we were filming and he walked over to Channing and said, "Let me tell you something: If the real Antonio was here, he would've kicked that guy's ass, thrown him over the car, spit in his face, and laughed all the way home!" I tell you about critics, you know? (Laughs)

Channing comes over to me and is like, "Am I doing this right?" I thought, "That guy didn't really know Antonio — he knew the legend. I was Antonio's friend. Maybe that's what legends say about Antonio, street talk, but I knew Antonio and I knew that he was a human being and as a human being you wonder why did he do these things and how did he really
feel, because me and him had a strange connection as friends." So I said to Channing, "That's the way he thought Antonio was. You're doing it a lot more correct, more interesting — you're making him a human being, not Walking Tall Buford Puser walking down the street."

The characters really do come across as people, not just stereotypes. They weren't two-dimensional cardboard cutouts of your typical New York street kid or your typical passionate artist.

Yeah, yeah! It's funny how you can sympathize with people in some movies that I like, like Happiness — it's like, "How am I caring about these people?" (Laughs)

Considering the craziness you were surrounded by growing up and the friends who ended up succumbing to drugs or prison or death, do you feel like art for you — whether it was music at first and then the writing of the book and now the film — was a salvation? Take these artistic projects that you keep engaging in and tell me what it all means to you.

You know, the word "art" has always been a tough word for me because of my growing up. It was always like a joke. "Why art?" It was some people's curse, you know? But I got to go through the Sundance labs, which is a really incredible experience — you're with all these people, you get to hang out with Stephen Gyllenhaal and Ed Harris and Walter Mosley are giving you notes, it's amazing! At one point Stephen said, "You gotta get over this. You're an artist!" And it's the hardest thing in the world to ever say, for me at least, because it just seems so corny. But of course art saved my life! It's a really beautiful thing when it actually works, when it touches you in ways and it's like, "Oh my God, this could be something special!" It's always been my salvation, of course, but I also had a lot of great people along the way.

Reading your bio and hearing you talk about your life, it's like you just wandered into these amazing scenarios — the band, the book, the movie. It really contrasts with many people who might read this interview, people who are so driven and say, "I know absolutely that this what I want to do and I'm putting all my focus into it." Is it really that you just happened upon music and then thought, "Maybe I'll write a book," and the same for the film? Tell me how these things really came about.

It's like the way a kid accidentally wanders into a place and they end up doing life in prison because they wandered into a bank robbery. We were kind of heading that way; it was kind of the wrong place at the wrong time...but we were looking for that, you know? But I had a lot of luck in life, incredible amounts of luck, and I had a loving family — a crazy one — but a loving family is huge. What you see in the movie was probably the best portrayal I could do, but during the Sundance lab Walter Mosley read the part of the father and said, "Oh my God, this guy's a psychopath!" And I said, "What? No!"

It’s funny: there's the head that says, "You can't live without schooling," and then there's the head that says, "Schooling will ruin you." I've always been a student of whatever I could get my hands on. I would love to have gone to film school; how could it possibly make you worse?
At the end of the day, it's like drumming. You're not gonna learn to drum. You can go to drum school to get better if you've got it in you; you might even become a really great drummer. But you're not going to be a drummer if you're not a drummer.

So I always felt like I wandered into places because I was just interested. I always was fascinated: "What's going on up there? Why is there a red light in that window?" (Laughs)
So it's been a curiosity trip. There's nothing wrong with being driven and I imagine it'll never hurt you. I sure have been, unfortunately or fortunately, driven in 50 different ways. I get asked, "What are you gonna do now?" I don't know — I'll figure it out! I sure like making movies. Of course it's always a lot of hard work, but you gotta love it. I understand the question that you're saying but at the same time I'm terrible at answering questions. (Laughs)

I remember an interview with the great writer, Fran Leibowitz. Someone asked her, "Is it harder for a black person to make it in society than a white person?" and she said, "That’s the dumbest question I've ever heard. That's like when a very famous person's son becomes a very famous person, and they say, 'Well, it just got me in the door but then my talent kept it shining.'" But it's like, what, your talent kept you on Family Ties? That's 80% of the trip, getting through that door! It's a freakin' impossibility to get through, you know? So you gotta keep doing whatever you're doing because you love it or else you'll just go crazy — and you really would go insane, I understand.

When the film played at Sundance, during the Q&A's people would ask questions like, "How do I make it?" It's such a crazy question and at first I laughed it off but then Robert Downey would say to me, "Drop this humble trip — answer the question." He was really right about that because I thought, "Boy, I would have liked to know the answer too — I'd still like to know it!" And they would say nice things, like Robert and Chazz and Dianne or whoever was there would say, "Well, we read the script and it just spoke to us and we had to make it." I thought, "Wow, that's very courteous of you, but I don't know how true it is, because I'm sure there's a lot of great scripts in garbage cans."

It's a crazy trip trying to get anything made; you've gotta really be driven and lucky and just know what you want. Luckily I had Robert Downey and Trudie Styler, two people that are crazy enough, cool enough, and also they have the means to say, "We're gonna make a movie with a first-time director." Every independent producer can't do that, even if they're cool and they believe and everything. At the end of the day it's like, "Listen, we can't get this made." Luckily I had these people.

But also, luckily, they connected with the material, because as you were saying, there are a lot of great scripts that these wonderful actors or producers come across but just don’t connect with — they're not the right fit. Give me a little back story: How did you decide to write the book in the first place?

At first, I was always in bands so I'd write songs a lot. I never like kept any kind of diary or anything like that. But I had a book called The Book of Saints, which is like a picture of a saint and then a page about them, so I started messing around with that idea; I said, "Boy, this is about as easy a way to write a book because I don't have to think long-term." That was originally kind of the idea and it just kept going and I was like, "Boy, this is getting big...this could be a book!" I gave it to a friend of mine who I used to work at Tower Records with; now he works at Avalon Publishing and he got them to say they'd put it out.

It seems there's a continual theme to your work, which is that you always had a knack or desire or both to tell the stories around you. So it's all been practice for this particular project. It's interesting that at first Robert was going to the movie himself. When did he let that notion go and how did it fall into your lap to become your directorial debut?

It was a wild course of events. I knew Robert through the years; it was kind of impossible to not run into one of us and certainly impossible for us to not run into each other over the years in New York and Los Angeles. We had a mutual friend, Jonathan Elias, who first started talking to me about making the book into a movie. My friend had a camera that he bought at a thrift store so I shot some shorts for fun and Jake, my friend who cut the movie, started cutting them they came out really good.

Then one day Jonathan brought Robert down and Robert's like, "Let's do this!” That was the craziness of Robert Downey. I was like, "Really? Ok!" So then we started talking and he said, "I'll direct it." I said, "Oh, my God, this is going to be incredible!"

I made this little sound thing that I thought would be a nice flavor of the movie; I found these recordings of Laurie — a girl I wrote about — when we were kids talking and this little recording of Antonio from prison and different things. Me and Jake put it together with music and I played it to Robert and he said, "This is really cool! Have you done anything about it like visuals?" And I said, "Yeah, we did this short," and I showed it to him, and he said, "Ok, you're the director!" (Laughs) It was like that easy.

But Trudie had just come into the picture and she calls me up and says, "So now Mr. Downey thinks you can direct this." (Laughs) I said, "Listen, if he can talk you into it, I'll do it." And she said, "Well, he hasn't talked me into it yet, but he said there's a short I need to see," so I sent her over the short and she really liked it. But one reason she's a good producer - she's like a queen and you've gotta deal with the queen when you deal with Trudie — is that then she said, "I like the short but you've never worked with a movie star like Robert Downey before, so you have a week to make a short with him and if it's good you can do the movie." So I called Robert up and said, "I'm gonna film you tomorrow," and he said, "Doing what?" and I said, "I dunno — doing something." My friend has a music rehearsal studio in Los Angeles, Swinghouse Music, and we went over there and I filmed Robert doing this talking thing. It really came out beautiful — God, he was good that day! And I got any friend I could together out there to hold a DAT player and the whole way you do it — you know, borrowed some film and put it together.

Then I said to Trudie, "I'm coming to New York; can I have one more day?" So I went to New York and I got some kids from my old neighborhood — actually right down the block from where I am now — and I filmed them, six kids that were just unbelievable. So we made the short and I showed it to Trudie and she said, "Okay, you can do it." It was that nutty and bizarre. But it's not as easy as I just said it; once it became like, "This is actually going to happen," I'm sure there was so much temptation for them to sell me out. I mean, I understand why people are so weird about a first-time director — I get it, it's terrifying! If I had a million dollars, I'd be freaked out to give all that money to somebody who never did anything before! (Laughs) But luckily — and I don't even know about half the times that they were offered to take it out of my hands — I know that they never even winced at it and that was really a great thing.

And it goes back to what you were saying before, the drummer analogy — obviously they saw that you had "it". It's not like they just decided to go for it on a wing and a prayer; they made you cough up the goods first.

Yeah. I think they said, "We're gonna do something special." And you know what's funny is I tell Robert, "Wherever I go, when I say your name, the first thing people say is, 'He's such a great actor.' There are great actors out there who got one DUI and that's all they're known for — you couldn't have done more things to make the first thing people say about you not that you're a great actor! But they still say and it there's a reason." I really think that he believes in the art, honestly — he's one of these guys that probably jokes about it a lot, but I know deep down he truly believes in the art and that's why he's still around through what he's been through. So that was one of the things. He said, "Look — maybe this movie will be a big seller or maybe not, but it'll be interesting. I wanna go along for the interesting ride." That's probably why they stuck by me.

And he and Trudie worked hard with you on the script itself, right?

Oh, yeah — they tortured me, man. This guy Alex Francis who works with Trudie is just the dream for any writer to have because he asks you all the dumb questions that really mean things, like, "Well, why do I care about her?" You say, "What? Who cares?" Then you go home and you say, "God, maybe he's right..."(Laughs) They're good questions. Originally, I had written it so it was just about the kids. Then Robert said, "I want something happening at the same time...two stories colliding." So they were really good like that and I really liked the process with them because I think rewriting is one of the most important things in the world. There are some writers that don't believe in rewriting; I think you should rewrite something 5,000 times. It's like schooling — you really think you're gonna get worse because you went to school? It doesn't make any sense. If I play the guitar and someone's gonna sit down and teach me, I'm not gonna all of a sudden suck. So they were fun like that where they just hit you up with things: "Either make me care about this kid or get rid of him."

And it's important — they made you get to the story. It wasn't about the real people or the actual memories; it was about the story you were telling in the film. How did you get the rest of the creative team together, like Eric Gautier as DP? Also, the music is amazing; I wanted more of it, it just hit the nail on the head.

Oh, excellent! It was Jonathan Elias — please put that in and that I said to put that in exactly! (Laughs) Because the whole time he was like, "I don't know about this music..." I said, "Listen, you are nailing it, I'm telling you!" Me and Jake, the editor, we used to work for him — he does commercials and movies — so it was really funny because all of a sudden I'm not the guy in the dub room for him anymore. All of a sudden, I'm bugging him for things.

As for Eric Gautier...for a minute, Dante Spinotti was gonna shoot it.

Wow!

I know! That's the world of Trudie Styler — it's the world of the bizarre. (Laughs) So I got to meet Dante — he actually came to Astoria with me. He's great but as money comes and goes, money came and went, and he went on to another film. I really love Ellen Kuras and I'd been speaking to her a lot but she wasn't available at the time. And there was a guy in New York I liked who'd never done a film before; his name is Igor Martinovic and he's so talented, but it's tough—first-time director, how do you get another first-time anybody else?

Then I heard Eric Gautier was going to be in New York. He'd only been here one time before for like a day doing a commercial or something. Somebody told me, "Eric Gautier's coming to New York to meet about another movie," and I said, "You gotta let me meet him!" Honestly, I never saw one of his films; at the time I had only seen pieces of Motorcycle Diaries but it looked beautiful; it just made you sad when you watched it and it felt like a bunch of paintings. And I like that he wasn't from New York or even America; I totally needed someone to put a fresh perspective on it.

So I got to meet him for a minute and luckily he's the nicest guy; he's the perfect guy for me to work with because he came literally three days before we filmed and we had no time to prepare. They brought up something about marks on the ground and he goes, "What? I don't care about that!" I said, "I don't even know what they're talking about!" (Laughs) And he has enough experience that he made everybody comfortable. He was like a dream come true.

Right — that combination of experience but also creativity without being jaded.

He's open to anything, you know? He likes it new.

I think he lent a perfect objectivity to it — you can see it in the shots. He's never too close at inappropriate moments and he's never moving around too much. He's just letting you see what's going on.

Oh, yeah. We didn't get to plan at all, really, but we got to talk, and I was like, "I don't like it when I see a movie and a hypodermic needle comes out and the camera zooms in on it."

Right, like, "PAY ATTENTION TO THIS!"

Right, right. Right away he was like, "No, no, no!" I told him, "I know what I want, but I certainly don't know how to get it." So it made me so happy to never have to even think about the camera.

On the set, what were you worrying about? What was your role during production as a first-time director?

Literally, we threw the script in the garbage can as we started filming and we had no rehearsal time — and I really mean no rehearsal time, you know - the actors met on set, but everyone was ready, which was nice. And I really was learning while we were doing it but my job, what I cared about, was just that people were truthful. "As long as I believe you, ok!" The hardest part was me dropping all the preconceived notions about everything: "This is what Antonio looks like, this is the way he coughs, this is the way he says things..." And also making sure that the actors took themselves out of it, too. It's nice to bring a certain amount of yourself into every role, which I think a lot of them did, but then you gotta drop a certain amount. So my role was sort of like a truth detective, a bouncer. (Laughs) Like my job was just to make sure that everything was as honest as it can be. I love Spike Lee; I really like directors like that where I really believe their characters.

They're messy and sometimes boring and sometimes really great but they're very real, like people around you every day.

Yeah! As long as I can go, "I believe that guy!" It's sort of staying out of the way and being a pain in the neck at the same time. (Laughs)

It's interesting that you say you threw the script out the window after such a struggle to get the structure in place, then going through the Sundance labs with it. Then you further seemed to break down structure in the editing room, chopping up the narrative more and making certain decisions about what not to use as well as the order of what you did use. How did you make those decisions and how did you decide you needed two editors to do it?

It was a really wild process, I'll tell you. We didn't have an editor doing rough assembly during the film, which now I know is pretty crazy. One of the first scenes we filmed was when Chazz has like a seizure in the house and the whole place erupts. And that dictated everything, from the way to direct it to the way to shoot it to the way to edit it. It couldn't have been a better schedule worsely planned. (Laughs)

It was the first day and we're filming this heavy scene. No one knows each other, everyone's a bit intimated. I'm in there with two-time Academy Award winner Dianne Wiest and Chazz Paliminteri's been nominated... Channing has never really done anything; most of the kids had never been in any movies. So we're in this scene and it was kind of planned, but it goes back and forth because everything when you talk about movies is like talking about black holes. It's craziness because in the end it's like, "...or not!" (Laughs) Just say that!

But when I say we threw the script and everything in the garbage, there was a real plan to this and sometimes I feel like I undermine my actors when I say that because they weren't improvising — these guys were really ready for me.

So we start doing that scene and the only person I didn't care about what he did was Channing, who played Antonio. But this goes right to the editing because I said to Channing, "We're doing this scene," and he says, "What can I do?" I said, "You could do whatever you want." The plan with Eric Gautier at the time was based on this: I was watching on a TV show somewhere that said when they shot The French Connection they didn't tell the DP where the bank robber was. They just said, "Somebody's gonna come out of this bank and they robbed it. I don't know which one it is — find him." So when we started filming I said to Channing, "Everyone else knows what they're doing but you could do anything." He goes, "What would I do" I said, "All's I know is if I was this kid and I saw a person that was the whole world to me having a seizure, a seizure's an ugly thing — I would think he"s dying." He goes, "Would I be crying?" I said, "The last thing I would do is cry! I wouldn't know what to do with myself — I might kill somebody! I might kill Dianne Wiest! I might really freak out. You can't freak out enough!" So he was like The French Connection guy — he could do whatever he wants. So we start shooting it but we did it with no sound.

Which is all the more powerful, I think.

Yeah, yeah! And the editing was so great in that scene. So what happened was I said, "I'm gonna read the script out loud and you guys just mime it. I know that sounds corny and weird but let's just do it." Chazz is great — he's looking at me like, "There's that Sundance thing...ok, kid, you're a little wacky!" (Laughs) I said, "Don't worry, it might be fun." So we start doing it and it was fun because all the actors start talking to me while we’re filming it: "I'm over here! I’m over here!” You know? It sort of freed everybody up.