Willem Dafoe in Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso: When in Rome . . .

Abel Ferrara makes movies the way Jack Kerouac writes fiction, in controlled spontaneity. The idea for Tommaso, about a filmmaker living in Rome, came to Ferrara as he was making another film, Siberia, a more challenging work demanding a greater budget for mountaintop scenes in five feet of snow, and forest exteriors. Tommaso is shot in Rome, where both he and his star Willem Dafoe reside in the same neighborhood; with interiors in Ferrara’s home, Tommaso is a take on his own domestic scene. His wife Cristina Chiriac stars as Tommaso’s wife, their daughter Anna Ferrara stars as their daughter. What a daring set up! Your friend playing an aspect of you making love to your wife!

As Dafoe explained the process in an interview on this past week, the actors know the start point of a given scene, but don’t know where they will end up. Dafoe, a great theater actor, handles the improvisation, especially well, partnering with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, but, he says, he finds more freedom in more structured filmmaking. Still, their close relationship helps with an improvisational strategy: Ferrara could tell Dafoe a story, and he, says Dafoe, “tries to inhabit what he’s talking about.”

In one scene, Tommaso screams out at a man making a racket in the street, and finally goes down several flights to make him stop. Dafoe said he never saw the man before in his life, just some homeless Pakistani man with whom Abel had had a similar encounter. Somehow, from a potentially violent moment, the men found common ground. The film’s AA meetings, Tommaso’s yoga practice—Dafoe could act out Ferrara’s experience, noting Ferrara’s spiritual practice: like Kerouac, Catholic imagery abounds in his work though he identifies as a Buddhist.

Tommaso had a lavish opening in Berlin, with a huge party and all, and is now available virtually through Kino Marquee. As Germany is opening up, Siberia is slated for theatrical release there in two weeks. Busy in these disruptive times, Abel Ferrara is completing a documentary about Nick, the owner of New York’s Cinema Village.