For a seasoned Hollywood vet like Mark Ruffalo, you’d think his directorial debut would be a cinch.

“My first day I came to my trailer, walked through the door, and literally had a panic attack,” he said of his start on Sympathy for Delicious, out on DVD and Blu-ray Disc Aug. 23rd. “Who did I think I was? I told myself to just act like I knew what I was doing.”

It may have been an understandable reaction considering the subject material. Based on the real-life experiences of Christopher Thornton (Welcome to California, Pretty Persuasion), living as a paraplegic in the world of faith healing, Sympathy follows Thornton as a DJ who’s gifted with the power to heal — everyone but himself.

“No matter how depressing it got, which it did many times, there was something worth staying for,” Ruffalo said.

Thornton, who considers Ruffalo his best friend, gave Ruffalo’s work a big thumbs up, especially considering the amount of challenges involved with the shoot.

“What was very difficult was we had to shoot the film in 23 days,” he said. “The exhaustion was the hardest part.”

Thornton said Ruffalo handled the religious undertones of the film well, treating it respectfully.

“He’s a brilliant director in that sense,” said Thornton, who also wrote the script. “It’s not a religious movie, it just has religious people in it. I wanted it to be as truthful as it could be.”

Ruffalo would like to test his directing chops again, but “not both [acting and directing] at the same time,” he said smiling.

The film also stars Ruffalo, Juliette Lewis, Orlando Bloom and Laura Linney, and for the home entertainment release Maya includes a behind-the-story featurette with Ruffalo and Thornton, an audio commentary with Bloom and Ruffalo, and deleted scenes. The Blu-ray also includes a photo gallery. (Source)

Here’s an interview done by ComingSoon.net with Sympathy for Delicious cast:

Sympathy for Delicious is beloved actor Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut, the offbeat tale of a paralyzed rock DJ faith healer, written by and starring his lifelong friend Christopher Thornton. Mark, Chris and fellow cast members Orlando Bloom and Laura Linney were kind enough to subject themselves to probing questions at the lovely and eclectically decorated Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo earlier this afternoon.

MARK RUFFALO

(on casting Laura) — I said, “Well, don’t you want to read it first?” She said, “No, Ruffie, I’m doing it.”

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“Life’s bulls – - t! There’s no way out!”

So declares a paralyzed and homeless deejay, played by Christopher Thornton in “Sympathy for Delicious,” upon finding that everything he owns has been stolen from the car he’s been sleeping in.

“There is a way out,” says the local skid-row priest, played by Mark Ruffalo, “but you’re gonna have to find it.”

As it happens, Ruffalo — who makes his directorial debut with the film, out Friday — understands the challenge of transcending life’s most trying situations as much as anyone.

In December 2008, while “Sympathy for Delicious” was in pre-production, Scott Ruffalo, the beloved little brother that Mark built many a treehouse with while growing up in Kenosha, Wis., was shot to death in his Beverly Hills condo. (Acquaintances on the scene claimed he died playing Russian roulette. The police consider it an unsolved homicide.)

His brother’s death at 39 made directing the film, which is dedicated to Scott, a surreal and devastating experience. Ruffalo says he was “in a state of shock” while making most of the movie. Yet as horrific as his brother’s death was, it was only the latest in a series of tragedies in Ruffalo’s life.

In 1994, his longtime best friend Michael, then 26, killed himself. Ruffalo later credited this for teaching him “the value of life,” and said it strengthened his resolve to carry on as an actor.

Ruffalo came to prominence with the 2000 family drama “You Can Count on Me,” and married a beautiful French actress named Sunrise Coigney that same year. Their son, Keen, was born in 2001. Several weeks after this joyous event, Ruffalo’s world came crashing down.

“I had a bad dream, and woke up in tears,” he told Parade Magazine. “In the dream, I knew I had a brain tumor.”

The dream seemed so real that he visited a doctor and learned he really did have a tumor, an acoustic neuroma that turned out to be benign. Still, Ruffalo endured a 10-hour operation that left his face partially paralyzed for most of the next year.

He was sure his career was over.

Read the full article at NY Post

I just added some promotional stills and official on set pictures of Sympathy for Delicious to the gallery. Plus a new photoshoot taken for the article posted in the previous post.

Gallery Links
Photoshoots > Session 083
Film Portfolio > (2010) Sympathy for Delicious > Promotional Photos

SOON after Mark Ruffalo and Christopher Thornton met as acting students at the Stella Adler Conservatory in Los Angeles, they were cast in a school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Twenty years later both men still argue about Mr. Ruffalo’s performance one night.

“Ask Mark about lighting his shoelaces on fire,” Mr. Thornton suggested recently. “Onstage, during someone else’s monologue — my monologue. He’ll deny it up and down.”

He doesn’t quite. A few days later Mr. Ruffalo is digging into seafood stew in a cafe on Main Street of this upper Delaware River hamlet, where he has long owned property and, for the past several years, lived full time with his wife, Sunrise Coigney, and their three children.

While Mark Ruffalo was busy discussing nuclear energy with the news staff here at Metro, we did manage to pull him aside to chat about his directorial debut, “Sympathy for Delicious” which opens Friday, April 29th and his upcoming role as Bruce Banner (and the Hulk) in “The Avengers,” (which he tells us starts shooting on April 29th as well).

It’s a good thing he’s already signed on to do more acting work, because after sitting in the director’s chair, Ruffalo doesn’t want to get out of it again.

“After I was done, I was like, I’m not acting anymore. All I’m going to do now is direct,” he says enthusiastically. “This is my favorite thing in the world. When they kick someone’s ass, it’s the director’s ass usually, but you know, that’s okay. I don’t mind getting my ass kicked.”