Abel Ferrara has made a very strange film with Go Go Tales. That incredibly non-descriptive phrase is about the best I can do sum this one up, a tragic-comedy with a perfect comedy setup that nonetheless takes its rambling way through the story. It’s an uneven film, with bright spots and utterly inexplicable ones, and will likely be hard to find outside of a film festival (where I caught it).
Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe) is the owner of Ray Ruby’s Paradise Lounge, a strip club in New York City. He’s not exactly the brightest financial brain, so he and his compatriot (Roy Dotrice) decide to play the lotto to pull themselves away from ruin. And, wonder of wonders, they hit it big! The ticket is hidden somewhere in the club… behind the bar? In the cash box? Ah, there’s the rub. In the meantime the strippers are threatening to go on strike, led by newcomer Monroe (Asia Argento), and the landlady (Sylvia Miles) is sitting at the bar, yammering on and on about selling the building to Bed, Bath and Beyond. Oh, and Matthew Modine shows up as Ray’s hairdresser brother, who eventually gives a piano performance with his constant companion, a tiny dog.
The fluid camera, overlapping dialogue and multitude of characters easily evoke Altman, and Ferrara similarly refuses to cast judgment or wrap up a happy ending for his strip club denizens. But parts of the story are so unlikely—the lottery is about as plausible as it gets—and it takes so long in the telling, that it’s easy to lose interest in whether or not Ray finds the damn ticket. Dafoe gives a great performance as Ray, as do the rest of the supporting cast (Lord, can Sylvia Miles yell!), but they all kind of bounce around the film, looking for an anchor.
One thing’s for certain, though: the convivial atmosphere evoked on screen was real, as evidenced by the good-natured jabs and constant conversation between Ferrara and the cast member who appeared for the press conference following the film’s screening. Dafoe and Miles were there, along with Frankie Cee, who played one of the club’s managers, and Shanyn Leigh, who was one of the dancers.
Could you talk about what inspired you to write the screenplay?
Abel Ferrara: You have to be very careful what you say in this day and age. It’s a very litigious society. You start talking about your inspirations and end up in the courtroom. So, somewhere in a city to be nameless, on a street that will remain nameless between 19th and 21st, there was a place. It was more or less like this. Not to name drop or bust anybody, but—Leonardo DiCaprio. I knew the people who had the place. There was actually a Luigi. Frankie is not Luigi—Luigi’s my cousin. He’s not too happy that Frankie Cee. played Luigi. Anyway, you walked in and it was like the neighborhood bar for me, which meant I got drinks for free. You’d walk in and DiCaprio—this was before he was DiCaprio DiCaprio—he’d be under like two or three tall, beautiful women. He got the lap-sitting privileges. You’d walk in and he’d say ‘Hi, Mr. Ferrara!’ The thing is, there’s something magical about it. We wanted to do the film not the way that life is, because it’s a very difficult life. We tried to take a very harsh reality and find a comic movie. Like we say, this is our first intentional comedy.
Willem, have you ever known Ray Ruby?
Willem Dafoe: No. And also, Abel started to spin in this direction, but I don’t think this place existed. It feels true, there’s a taste of something there, but it’s a totally invented place. One of the pleasures of doing it—basically it was a one-set movie, and it was filmed under very harsh conditions. We were like Ray Ruby. We were scrambling. Abel gave me a lot of freedom and trusted me a lot. He set me up to really take that space to be Ray Ruby at the center of this place that was struggling to stay open, and that was this movie that was struggling to be made. So, very early, we selected the girls, they came from all different kinds of places, there was nothing normal or necessarily professional about it. It was done on passion and sense of fun and adventure. I remember looking at Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Broadway Danny Rose, and those were the two poles. Ray Ruby lives somewhere between those two places.
Watching the film, you get a sense of what a communal effort it was. Can you talk about working in that very tight ensemble?
Sylvia Miles: In order to do this kind of a part, you sort of have to become the character before you get there, no matter what happens. You don’t really know when you’re in the scene or not in the scene. With that many cameras going at one time, you have to have a life of your own going. I’m talking for my role especially, because I was sitting on the barstool. The barstool was smaller than my behind, so I said to the set designer, could you get me a little pillow, so I can feel like a frog sitting on a lily pad? I’m going to keep sitting on this thing and I don’t want to fall off of it. Well, I was knocked off that thing 15 times. But I was the character, so no matter whatever happened, it didn’t much matter.All through the day of all the things that I said, there was never one thing that wasn’t part of what was happening. The idea of this thing, which I thought was very interesting, this was sort of in real time. It got to be actually like a home. I felt like I was in a tacky hotel with all my friends.
AF: And you were the boss. You had the keys.
SM: I felt like, little did they know, if it was really up to me I would close this fucking place in a minute. I was really that person. I know it sounds corny, I don’t mean it that way, but that was the only way that I could deal with it. What a lot of them didn’t know was I was dealing with them as this other person who was really vulgar and hideous. It was fun. Do they know that this was at Cinecitta? To me, when I saw it today, it looked like it was in the meat market downtown. It really looked like New York.
Shanyn Leigh: Well the girls rehearsed for two weeks before we actually started shooting. They all connected with each other, we’re all artists, ballerinas, musicians, so we all have that connection. A lot of us came from different places. We were rehearsing in Fellini’s studio, which was like entering another dimension. It was a great experience.
Frankie Cee: May I mention that Abel used the set from Gangs of New York. Doing the movie with Sylvia, with Willem, with Bob Hoskins, it was really like a family. To be honest, if Abel says to me ‘Do the film for free, we’re going to do it again,’ I would gladly do it.
SM: Don’t say that, because he’s going to ask you to do it for free
FC: I was working with Sylvia, and Sylvia is just magnificent. And she did say ‘Fuck you!’ and I’d say ‘OK, when!’ It was just great, the whole cast was fantastic.
How did you do the sound design? How much of it was in post?
AF: I’m not really big on post-production. We had two live cameras, and a lot of cameras that were hidden. In a club like that they would have the surveillance cameras. We just did the basic—two booms. We had a really good sound man.
How did you get the ensemble to work together as a director, with such a loose and fast film?
AF: This was written 5 or 6 years ago. We had a reading with [Harvey] Keitel, and Sylvia gave this performance.
SM: It was good that we did that, because it gelled in your mind.
AF: The script was there. Doing comedy is funny. I remember when I told Scorsese we were doing a comedy, he started laughing so hard. Life Aquatic was another film in that groove that I knew we wanted to try and make. These are actors, they spend a lot of time rehearsing, and in the place and in the set—we used actors that know how to create it alone, and know how to put it together. You keep pushing for loose and fast, you’re working, especially with the girls. Most of them didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Italian. We used a lot of non-actors in this situation.
WD: It was a strong script, but I think the situations were more that were strong. Abel’s idea of what the world was, was strong. There was a lot of looseness in the script, but a lot of what’s up there is invented. But it didn’t feel invented, it didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, OK, now we’re going to improvise.’ It was about bridging gaps through practical things we had to do in the story. Because the relationships were set and strong and the world was complete, it was fairly clear, it didn’t feel like you were inventing things. You were taking on that role from a very practical standpoint.
AF: We built the club. We used to take a long time, weeks and weeks of shooting. Somewhere along the line I realized that the time we spent shooting is really rehearsal. If you really want to get a crew pissed off, start rehearsing in front of them. We started working in rehearsals. Every moment of every day, the film took 21 days of shooting, but the set was built on the Kubrick model. The lighting is in the set, in the design. It’s totally practical. We had the best club in town. We could stay open any hours we wanted, and we didn’t need a liquor license. A dream of mine, and maybe still is, was to do a Sopranos or Sex and the City-type series with this.
How many times did you do takes, and how did that affect the editing?
WD: This wasn’t shot conventionally, the camera was very fluid. Who’s counting?
SM: It’s not improvisation. If something is happening right next to you and you’re a character, you react to it as the character. There’s no improvisation; there’s just behavior. Improvisation is not the right word.
AF: We had this conversation the last time I was here, like 85 years ago. We were doing a press conference, and we were asked about improvisation. Chris was saying ‘You can’t answer that question. You’re not going to tell them where the rabbit came out of the hat.’
