As writing mentors go, you probably couldn’t do much better than Woody Allen.

“He just gave me, as he says, his ‘merciless feedback’,” says John Turturro, with a laugh, discussing his working relationship with the Wood-man on Fading Gigolo. As he perused each evolving draft of Turturro’s screenplay for the lyrical, New York–set film, Allen would tell him: “I don’t tell you what to do, I just tell you what I hate.” The actor, famed for his work with Spike Lee and the Coen brothers among others, remains grateful for the advice.

“You can’t be afraid to try to figure out who you are in the course of writing it, and Woody encouraged me to make it as nuanced as possible,” he continues, talking to the Straight from Manhattan. “And then I wound up, I was like, ‘Oh my God, look at that, I’m in the most delicate territory I’ve ever been in.’ ” The results find Turturro—who also directs—playing a taciturn florist, Fioravante, who stumbles into the business of “servicing” an array of prosperous clients, including a dermatologist and the widow of a Hasidic rabbi (played by Sharon Stone and Vanessa Paradis, respectively). Allen takes one of his rare acting roles as Fioravante’s pimp, Murray, although he’s really just an antiquarian bookseller who sees a way of making some extra cash with his friend.

If it all sounds a little unlikely—it is. Except that Turturro drew a lot of his ideas from reality. “I think life is right in front of you, and life is so much more diverse and absurd than movies are,” he says. Murray, for instance, is based on a friend, a rare rare-book dealer who, like Allen’s character, happens to live in a house full of kids with his much younger African-American partner.

“I didn’t invent it completely, but is it unusual? Yes! And did I think this would be interesting seeing Woody in this situation, because there’s very few black people in his movies?” Turturro laughs again: “I thought—yeah!” As for Fioravante, also based in some ways on somebody Turturro knows, he’s summed up by another of the actor’s costars. “I guess it’s a Latin saying Sofia Vergara was telling me: ‘Like a man not too pretty,’ ” he says. “But I was thinking about men who are unambitious and who are very competent, who can do anything with their hands. If the car breaks down, plumbing… I thought that would be interesting to represent a man like that who exists.”

Fioravante’s appeal, which Murray recognizes, is his quiet strength and attentiveness. Turturro reports that the female side of the audience has responded “in a very, very strong way” as Fading Gigolo has made the rounds. Ditto for at least one other acclaimed scribe. “Paul Auster saw the film early on, and he said, ‘Oh, he’s like a cowboy,’ ” Turturro recalls. “I said I always thought of him as a samurai. But he was just a samurai with flowers, you know?”

Georgia Straight, May 2014