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.And he s shorter than me.is tough and belligerent, but he s still a really introverted, inhibitedperson.The more inhibited the better.Seeing how extroverted and hyped-up I can be, you might thinkI d never be a good actor.But I was extremely inhibited in my earlyyears, too.I had to get over it, because I wanted to do comedy.Youcan t be inhibited and really funny.Sometimes I m still extremelyshy, and sometimes extremely outgoing.I guess that makes meextremely schizophrenic.Like my work some serious and heavy,some wacky and wild.Call it selective bipolarism.Yeah, I can turn it on and off atwill, yo.I was glad Pacino s short.We short guys have radar.I swear he sPimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends 127*like five foot six, shorter than me even.But we have big heads.Itmakes us look taller.Anyway, Carlito s like this cool Nuyorican tragic figure.It s funny,he s a lot like Pacino s Michael Corleone in The Godfather III.Justwhen he thinks he s out of the dope business, they pull him back in.Benny was a small part, and so skimpily written that Brian let meimprovise and I improvised like mad.Brian s one of those directorswho understands that actors are like beards just let them grow andget shaggy, you can always trim  em in the editing room.I impro-vised almost every line in the movie.Including my favorite:  You playpussy, you gonna get fucked. Can I write or what?I love Benny s big confrontation scene with Carlito.Even if I doget my ass kicked at the end of it.When Benny says,  Maybe youdon t remember me, Carlito cuts him off with,  Maybe I don t givea shit.Maybe I don t remember the last time I blew my nose either.Classic!When Benny catches up with Carlito in the train station at thevery end of the movie, I say the immortal line,  Hey, remember me?Benny Blanco from the Bronx. And put three slugs in him.Then,when Luis Guzmán says,  Let s get out of here, Benny turns to himand says (thank you, thank you),  Nah, you stay here. And shootshim too.De Palma s fun to work with.I mean, he s not like a regular Joewho likes to hang out.He s pretty aloof, but not in an antagonisticway.He s got a warped sense of humor, which is important for meto get along with somebody.And he s not destructive, he s not out todestroy you or hurt you.Sometimes directors are too controlling, orthey don t know what the fuck they re doing, and it can turn nasty.Sometimes they have their personal demons they haven t dealt with,and then you gotta deal with them on the set and it can get rough.128 JOHN LEGUIZAMO*This was the first time a director let me improvise to my heart scontent.I was like,  Wow, I like this.I like film acting. I even got todrag a bunch of my friends into it.Scenes where Benny is hangingwith his crew, that s me hanging with my real friends.After Carlito s Way, you can t get me to shut up in a movie.I malways improvising and ad-libbing like mad.De Palma gets it.He s very meticulous about the visuals, and hehas an idea for the characters, but he let me play.I ad-libbed like amotherfucker.And he let me do crazy amounts of takes, too.He letme do twelve, fifteen takes sometimes.That s a lot, but he had thetime and the budget.When you do small films, you get to do maybetwo or three takes, four at the most.People start getting impatientwith you if you re taking up much more time.But Brian could affordit, and he was digging what I was trying.De Palma showed me how to look at the video monitor betweentakes, to watch what I just did.Then I could change my performancefor the next take.You kind of direct yourself.It s fantastic.I do it allthe time since then.It s very different from looking at the dailies.Dailies are all the rough footage shot in a day.It s a great tool forsome directors Chaplin directed himself that way.But I can t standto watch dailies, because you can t change anything.It s too late,you re stuck with what you did, so you start looking at your defectsand your limitations.How you suck is magnified.It still throws meoff.I don t know how actors can watch dailies.I tried it in Romeo +Juliet, and I was depressed for days.But I love looking at the monitor.You can fix your performance, you can do things with it.It s like clay.You can mold yourself.* * *here was this beautiful Latin nymphette on the set of Carlito sTWay.Evelyn.She was an extra, and boy was she extra.She worePimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends 129*dresses so tight even I couldn t breathe.And pretty soon she was han-gin with the homeboy.I know.I should ve learned my lesson from the Cathy days.I maynot be dumb, but I m stupid.Women should come with pull-downmenus and two years of online help.Evelyn and I became an item.Just what I needed.Another actressin my life.An actress with the thickest Puerto Rican accent you everheard, and a voice like Spanish Harlem on helium.I know I should ve run away.I blame my ghetto roots.Screwed upmy natural instincts.In nature, when you see an animal that looksdangerous, an instinct kicks in they call  fight or flight. But in Latinghetto nature, it s fight or fuck.And then if you hook up, it s fightand fuck.Fight and fuck, fight and fuck, just like we saw our parentsdo.If we re fighting it must be love, right?Evelyn was one twisted, self-hating Latin hottie. John, tell me all about myself, she d sigh, gazing lovingly at her-self in the mirror. You know, I was the one who was gonna make itin my family.I was gonna be a lawyeress or a doctoress, right? Butyou know what I got on my SATs? I got nail polish.But someday, I mgonna make it big as an actor.That s why I m thinking of changingmy name to something white-sounding [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]