ONE of the most agreeable developments in international film over the past 10
years has been the growth of epicurean cinema through a number of accomplished movies in which the cameras were allowed to linger and drool over the preparation and consumption of mouth-watering cuisine. There was Babette's Feast which celebrated classical French cooking - even though the movie was set on a bleak peninsula in Jutland - and some memorable slavering over Japanese food in Tampopo, Chinese in Eat Drink Man Woman and Mexican in Like Water For Chocolate.
Now, with the release of Big Night, it's the turn of Italian cooking. Set in the late 1950s in a small New Jersey town, the movie's bittersweet scenario involves immigrant Bolognese brothers who, in a nod to Italian menus, are named Primo and Secondo. At their struggling restaurant, Paradise, they dare to serve authentic Italian food while a rival establishment across the road successfully targets the ill-educated palates which choose spaghetti and meatballs over risotto and radicchio.
"To eat good food is to be close to God," declares Primo, the temperamental master chef who cooks up a storm in the movie's memorable set-piece, a banquet lovingly caressed by the cameras. Even the fate of the Paradise restaurant is overshadowed by the anticipation surrounding the meal's heralded centrepiece, Primo's timpano, a Calabrian dish filled with multiple layers of pasta, meat, cheese and eggs, and covered in a pastry crust. Yum!
Made for $4 million, Big Night has taken more than three times that sum at the US box-office, says its co-director and cast member, Campbell Scott. "The reviews were great," he says, "but even better was the word of mouth." No pun intended, surely. When I met Scott over lunch in Dublin lately, the setting was not, sadly, one of the city's better Italian restaurants, but the trailer he was using during the shooting of John Schlesinger's Sweeney Todd.
I had to be content with mineral water while Scott wolfed down mouthfuls of smoked salmon salad during the rare pauses in his animated conversation. The son of actors George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, Campbell - named after his father's middle name has featured in movies such as Longtime Companion, The Sheltering Sky, Dying Young. Singles and Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle.
Big Night is his first movie as a director and he shares the credit with fellow actor Stanley Tucci, who plays Secondo in the film and will be remembered by aficionados of the television series Murder One as the sinister villain, Richard Cross.
"Stan and I have been good friends since our high school days in Cross River, north of New York City in Westchester county," says Campbell Scott. "We were both raised there. Down the years we talked about doing different things together, and then he wrote this script with his cousin, Joe Tropiano - Big Night. He wanted to play the lead and I think he was smart enough to know that it might have been a little too much to direct it as well. So I read it and I loved it and offered to help. He asked me to be the other director and we worked out famously.
"I had nothing to prove, so all I had to do was help him out. I said `action' and `cut' when he was acting, and when I was acting he said action and `cut'. We discussed everything. We're from the theatre, so we rehearsed for two weeks, although we didn't have much money or much time - $4 million is great for a first movie, but no big budget for something in period. We had no idea what we were doing beyond what we learned as actors - as an actor you sit around so much that you observe a lot and you have the distance to see what works and what doesn't work."
Filming the banquet sequence was "complete madness", he says, and it was shot in just three nights. The cuisine was prepared by the New York cook and broadcaster, Deborah Di Sabatino, who receives a credit as the movie's food stylist. "She had a bigger crew than our camera crew," says Scott. She had five people cooking. It was exhausting to do that whole sequence. We just brought out the food and let the actors go nuts.
"At one point we had two cameras on dollies being pushed around the table. So as soon as I knew I was out of a shot I'd go behind the camera and direct people and scream at them to do things, and as soon as it was my turn to be in shot again I'd sit down. It was crazy, but God, did we laugh! Stan wanted more and more shots of people eating. He said there is nothing better in the world than watching people eating good food. It's like sex."
NOW 35, Campbell Scott says despite his family background, he bad no desire to act until he was 20. "If my parents encouraged me, I would say it was by osmosis. Obviously, it was a theatrical kind of family, though my father disappeared when I was 13, when they divorced. In my teens acting couldn't have been further from my mind. I went to school to be a teacher, a history teacher, although truthfully I went to school get drunk like everybody else. Then I did a few plays in college and I got booked."
Scott's first film was a Z-movie which was shot in to days. "It was originally titled Evil Valley USA," he says. "Can you believe it? Now it's called No Way Back or something like that. It was terrible, a horror thing, and all the money went on the blood. They didn't pay me."
His "real" first film, as he puts it, was the late Norman Rene's moving drama, Longtime Companion, a ground-breaking film in its depiction of close gay friends living under the threat of AIDS. "Every pause in the film was rehearsed," Scott says. "We were all theatre actors except Bruce Davison. The strength of the movie was its script and its characters. Ten years on homosexuality is still a big problem for Hollywood, though lesbianism is getting kinda chic now, it seems."
For all the movies he has made in the 10 years since Longtime Companion, Campbell Scott says that the stage is his true home. "Oh, I'm a real theatre boy - the ideal career would be to act in theatre and direct films." Most recently, he has played Hamlet on stage for the second time, and he adapted, directed and starred in Miss Julie.
He returned to the cinema for The Spanish Prisoner, directed by David Mamet from his own original screenplay. "There's a mind that never stops," he says. "It's amazing just to listen to Mamet. This is one of his `everyone's a conman, but you don't know who' stories and it's set in the world of big business. Steve Martin is in it, too, in a very serious role."
Next stop was Dublin for two months working on Sweeney Todd, which co-stars Ben Kingsley (in the title role) and Joanna Lumley. "It's all slightly over the top and we knew that, so it was kinda fun," he says. "It's not deep or anything. It's opera almost. Joanna and I had a big showdown where we're attacking each other with knives and things, and we really enjoyed that."
Now he is planning his first film as a solo director, Over The Top, adapted by Joan Ackerman from her own play. "I hired her to write it. We worked on the script for a year and now it's ready," he says. "Now I just need four million bucks! It's a very simple story about a family in New Mexico in 1970, and it centres on their young daughter." Will he act in it? "No way," he says. Finally, given his father's famous refusal of the 1970 best actor Oscar for Patton, would Campbell Scott turn down an Oscar if it were offered? "Oh, Michael, did your editor tell you to ask me that?" he shrieks in mock horror, although he clearly would have preferred not to have been asked. "I was a kid at the time, so I didn't know what was going on.
Does he have any views on it now? "No not particularly. No, I don't. I think it made perfect sense for him. It was exactly how he felt and he's nothing if not honest. Maybe I romanticised it as a kid, but those awards seemed a lot more exciting back then. Nowadays it just feels like a circus. Personally, I'd rather stay home although I did go to the New York Critics Circle awards this year, I must admit. They gave Big Night their award for best first film and I went because I'm really f"**ing proud of the film. I love it! So I thought, `why not?'."