Vincent Gallo is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being Film Freak Central has ever known. After a second screening, a lot of juggling, and a little soul-searching, and with a little less than two hours to research and prepare, I agreed to do it. I'd never met Vincent Gallo before, but his reputation for combativeness bordering on cruelty preceded him; and though I took his side in private in his blow-up with Roger Ebert after last year's disastrous Cannes Film Festival screening of a workprint of his picture, I confess that I've never been more nervous to interview someone.
It's not the hostility of a few of the comments he's made in the press about the press that unnerved me, it was that element of the complete unknown. It's sticking your hand in that mound-thing in Flash Gordon : on the one hand, he seems the agent provocateur by design; on the other, he demonstrates moments of extreme kindness and grace. Then there's his resume: gifted musician whose album When is probably the best thing I've heard in five years; gifted artist who was hailed by many to be the finest painter to emerge from a New York Bohemian underground scene that included Jean-Michel Basquiat with whom he started a band called Gray , Julian Schnabel, and Andy Warhol; producer of some of P.
Harvey's extraordinary work; I'm-assuming-one-time lover of the brilliant Chan Marshall a. Cat Power , who dedicated a song, "Mr. Burroughs; and one of the enduring figures in the Calvin Klein campaign shot by Richard Avedon. Lest we forget his contributions to the cinema: his directorial debut Buffalo '66 , one of the best films of ; Abel Ferrara's The Funeral in which he had a small but integral role , one of the best films of the '90s; and Trouble Every Day , the very best picture of Vincent Gallo is also the man whose sharp, mordant, dry wit led him to respond to a report that his Buffalo '66 star Christina Ricci had gotten drunk and pissed on a carpet with "What, again?
Was she eating a slice of pizza? Vincent Gallo straddles a line. On one side of it he's Svengali-charming, a consummate storyteller, a master politician with a level of charisma that is, frankly, scary. On the flipside of it, he's dark, self-destructiveβnasty, even. But he's always whip-smart, always brutally incisive. Always, despite glaring continuity problems, genuinely passionate.
He's not burning the candle at both ends; he's thrown the candle into the fire. Gallo, but mostly for being audacious enough to offend both Ebert and A. It's another victim of the strange sanctimony that made Janet Jackson's forty-year-old tit the poster-appendage for America's decline into immorality. It's ironic that much of the right-wing ideology that Gallo defends so fervently and so eloquently has contributed to the pre-condemnation of a picture that few people in the United States have even seen.
