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August 24- August 31,2003 |
The Splendor of Paul Giamatti
American-Italian actor plays rewnowned cartoonist Harvey Pekar in hybrid movie
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2003-08-17
As one of the most talented, versatile and consistently reliable actors working today, Paul Giamatti has become a familiar face in movies both big and small. The son of renowned Italian-American Yale professor Bartlett Giamatti, Paul has proven himself as a character actor on stage (The Iceman Cometh), on television (Winchell, NYPD Blue, Homicide) and in films (Private Parts, Storytelling, The Negotiator, Man on the Moon, Saving Private Ryan, Donnie Darko).
For the first time in his career 36-year-old Giamatti is headlining a picture, this time portraying real-life comic-book artist Harvey Pekar in Shari Berman and Bob Pulcini's American Splendor. This hybrid documentary/live-action/animated movie centres on the struggling writer and self-described "flunky file clerk" for a Cleveland VA hospital, who began publishing the homegrown autobiographical comic book series American Splendor in 1976. The stories follow his modest, eccentric life as a cranky, working-class intellectual and obsessive-compulsive jazz collector, and illustrates how a seemingly mundane world can contain universal truths.
The film combines adaptation, biopic, animation and documentary elements into the hybrid. In essence, Giamatti plays narrative Harvey; in the documentary format Pekar plays the real Harvey; and then there's an animated Harvey.
Tandem talked to Paul Giamatti from his home in Los Angeles.
Were you familiar with the American Splendor comic books?
"Yeah, a little bit. In college I had a friend who read some of them so I knew them a little. And I was familiar with him [Pekar], I remember seeing him on Letterman when I was in college too."
So how did the part come about?
"Just the sort of standard way with an actor. I mean, they must have had some interest in me because my agents got the script and they read it and they sent it to me and I read it. I had to go in and meet the directors and then I went back and I had to audition for it and I got the part. It was a pretty standard part."
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