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-destructive—nasty, even.
