Ray Romano (‘Somewhere in Queens’) talks ‘semi-autobiographical’ directorial debut, reveals his ‘first heartbreak’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“The big fear, when I agreed to direct, was that I didn’t really know technically a lot about what a director should know about lenses and apertures,” admits Ray Romano about his initial trepidation about stepping behind the camera on his film “Somewhere in Queens.” The multi-hyphenate talent directed, co-wrote, produced, and starred in the film, but the decision to direct it himself came very late in the development process. What ultimately persuaded him was his sense that he was an expert in “the story and the soul of the story and every character’s motivation.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Penned with Mark Stegemann, “Somewhere in Queens” does draw heavily on Romano’s life experience. The film centers on the relationship between father Leo Russo, played by Romano, and his son Matthew, nicknamed “Sticks” (Jacob Ward), who is the star player on his high school basketball team. Leo enjoys the attention that the other parents give him as the father of the team’s best player and encourages Sticks to pursue a college scholarship, even if it means meddling in his son’s relationship with his new girlfriend Dani (Sadie Stanley). As the writer admits, “It was semi-autobiographical, for sure, but we were still creating a character.”
Romano admits that the film is “semi-autobiographical, for sure,” because it was inspired by Romano’s connection to his youngest son Joe, who was also an excellent high school basketball player, and by his wife Anna’s Italian American family in Queens. Even so, the co-writer emphasizes how much work it took to make Leo a unique individual. “I wanted to make sure that this was a specific guy, a character. I wanted to give him certain qualities,” reflects the star. He says that over the course of the years that he and Stegemann worked on the screenplay, he wasn’t completely happy with the character until he “pinpointed someone in [his] life that [he] wanted to base the soul of the character on.”
Although predominantly known as a television actor from his Emmy-winning comedy “Everybody Loves Raymond,” dramatic projects “Men of a Certain Age,” “Parenthood,” and “Vinyl,” and dramedies “Get Shorty” and “Made for Love,” Romano has built an incredibly impressive film career as well, starring in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated “The Irishman” opposite film legends Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci, and the acclaimed “The Big Sick.” While the first-time director confesses to his anxiety about taking on the responsibility of shooting the film, he drew on lessons he learned from Scorsese and others. “In my experience with these other directors… what worked best was when it felt like a collaboration,” he recalls, continuing, “Scorsese, as brilliant as he is, he allows you to bring stuff to it, and he wants you to participate.”
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One of the cinematic influences on “Somewhere in Queens” is Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky,” which the movie references numerous times. Romano says that the classic film was his and his older brother’s “life back then.” He recalls watching the 49th Academy Awards in 1977 with his sibling and says it was “breaking our hearts” when it lost so many of its 10 nominations. “I remember exactly when it was for Best Picture at the end of the night, and my brother — we were watching the screen — and my brother just turned to me and said, ‘If he doesn’t win, I’m not going to school tomorrow if ‘Rocky’ doesn’t win,’ and thank God ‘Rocky’ won,” shares the actor with a chuckle. He adds that Rocky served as a “model” for his character Leo to live by.
Romano describes the two scenes in the film that he’s most proud of as a first-time director. The one that immediately comes to mind unfortunately did not make the final cut. He reveals that after the final scene between Sticks and Dani, in which the two bid a final farewell to one another, the director “had a crane shot of him walking out of the diner after he had this moment with her. The sense is that she gave him something, she gave him this little strength, this little doorway into the rest of his life… So we had a shot where he goes, he walks, he gets into this car, he backs up, and he goes out… the crane picks up and as he goes down Cross Bay Boulevard, he goes under the ‘el’ train.” The filmmakers “were all excited and jazzed” about the shot but chose to omit it because “we had too many endings in the movie.”
Of the scenes that did make the final cut, Romano pulls out the memorable dinner scene in which Dani meets Sticks’ extended family for the first time, butts heads a bit with his grandfather (Tony Lo Bianco), and then wins over the entire room. The extended family conversation around the dinner table will be instantly recognizable for Italian American families everywhere, a dynamic which the writer says, “I’m happy of the way we captured that.” He notes it was a very difficult scene to shoot and edit, both “fun” and “tedious.” On the day of the shoot, he says, “You get it as best you can there and you do it over and over, you don’t want to do it too much… and then you hope you’ve covered your bases, and then you get to the edit room and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”
As so much of the film revolves around the first love between Sticks and Dani and, subsequently, Sticks’ heartbreak when Dani breaks up with him, Romano tapped into his own life experience from his 20s. He remembers receiving a diary from his mother as a gift on his twentieth birthday and says that then the “next week, my first love of my life broke up with me.” “I still go back to that diary nostalgically,” confesses the writer, sharing, “For the first six months, it’s nothing but heartache on every page.” He observes, “We can all identify with that moment where you get your heart broken… It was not an easy thing to write, but we didn’t have to do research. We just had to reach back into our own past to know the feelings.”
“Somewhere in Queens” is currently streaming on Hulu.
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