NewzNEW YORK (AP) — John Turturro grew up in Hollis, Queens, and has lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, since 1988. Though his life as a New Yorker, his most reliable reservoir of inspiration has been the sidewalks and subway cars around him. “You see the variety and diversity,” Turturro says.
When I’m on the train, there are so many different kinds of people. I get a lot of things from the 7 train.” Turturro’s Pino, the racist pizzeria worker of “Do The Right Thing,” came from guys Turturro grew up around. His Brooklyn-born trash-talking bowler Jesus Quintana from “The Big Lebowski” was based on a Lower East Side man Turturro met just after the man got out of jail.
“I interview a lot of people and I take things from them. They know I’m going to,” Turturro says. “Sometimes I keep in touch with certain people, but sometimes you feel kind of bad about that.
Like a thief in the night.” Sitting outside at a cafe around the corner from his Park Slope brownstone, Turturro chuckles. The symmetry with his latest New York character is almost too perfect. In “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” Turturro stars as Harry Lehman, an aging pickpocket in an increasingly cashless and digital New York.
The film, which Sony Pictures Classics releases in select theaters Friday, is a fitting capstone for the 69-year-old Turturro, a shape-shifting character actor who has always worked best when you don’t see him working. “The whole skill of it is that the person doesn’t know,” Turturro says of pickpockets. “I used to make a list of everything I had in common and everything I didn’t have in common with a character.
People don’t look at you anymore.” “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” written and directed by Noah Segan, is an elegiac ode not just to a bygone, analog New York but to a rich generation of New York actors. Steve Buscemi co-stars as a pawnshop owner and Giancarlo Esposito plays a police detective. A lot of the movie’s joy is seeing such archetypal New York performers on their home turf.
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