“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)

MARK RUFFALO

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

(on his first few acting gigs) — I booked a Clearasil commercial. I had terrible skin. I had cystic acne and they gave me a Clearasil commercial.

When we were raising the money, there was a foreign sales company that told me, “You’re a first-time director. That’s a negative. But you have a name as an actor. That’s a positive. So if you both direct and act in the movie, you’ll be at zero. You’ll cancel yourself out.” It was veiled blackmail.

I was running around back and forth in the production office and Laura had just flown in. She pulled me aside and said, “Ruffie, do you know what you’re doing?” I said, “Yeah, of course I do. I mean, it’s the first time I’m directing, but — ” and she said, “No, not directing, acting. Have you been able to work on your part?” I said, “…No. I haven’t had time.” She said, “Why don’t you come over this weekend and we’ll go through all the scenes together.”

(on his Oscar nom) — When I’m watching trailers and it says, “Academy Award nominee Mark Ruffalo,” that’s new. I’ve always not been that. It certainly hasn’t changed the parts I’ve been getting yet. I remember asking Michelle Williams, “Hey, so has this changed anything for you?” and she goes, “No.”

You make a movie three times. You make it in the script. You make it when you shoot. You make it when you edit. And you’re remaking it each time. But at some point, the story takes a life of its own and demands its own things. As a director, you hope that you’ll tune your ear to the story in such a way that it begins to guide you. And in a way, to service the material is to keep reducing, reducing, reducing down to the essential.

(on directing again) — Honestly, it’s really all I wanted to do after we finished shooting. I really wasn’t savoring going back into acting. It actually comes a lot easier to me than acting. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it does feel a lot easier and I really enjoyed it. I’m hoping I’m afforded the opportunity to keep doing it.

You can read the whole article here at the source. Sympathy for Delicious opens in NY and LA this Friday, April 29, 2011.

“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

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“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.

“Chris and I used to have a very strong competition with each other,” Mr. Ruffalo, now 43, recalled. “I had to find a way to upstage him during one of his monologues, so I may have lit my shoelaces on fire during the course of a scene. I just would never admit it to him.”

Pyrotechnic pranks aside, the two men became close friends, were roommates for a time, and this week will finally see the culmination of a decade-long struggle to make a film together when “Sympathy for Delicious” opens in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. With Mr. Ruffalo making his directorial debut and Mr. Thornton taking on screenwriting duties and acting in the leading role, the small-budget feature is set at the unlikely intersection of skid row, faith healing and rock ’n’ roll. It tells the story of a D.J., Delicious Dean O’Dwyer, who is left a paraplegic after a motorcycle accident. Depressed and homeless, eating his meals at a soup kitchen run by an idealistic priest (played by Mr. Ruffalo), the character becomes possessed with the ability to cure any affliction, except his own. It is a fantastical tale, one that sprung from harsh reality.

In the early 1990s Mr. Ruffalo and Mr. Thornton were trying to break in as actors, sharing a struggling actors’ flophouse in the Hollywood Hills, running a small theater company, taking auditions and working restaurant jobs. One day Mr. Thornton fell while rock climbing and fractured two vertebrae, leaving him a paraplegic. “Mark played a big part in my recovery,” Mr. Thornton, now 44, said. “About six months after the injury he came to me and said, ‘We’re going to do another play.’

“I told him, ‘I can’t do a play. I can’t even walk.’ But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. We ended up doing ‘Waiting for Godot.’ And it was a big hit and won awards. It kept me going.”

After years of theater work and small movie roles, Mr. Ruffalo appeared in the 2000 Kenneth Lonergan film “You Can Count on Me” opposite Laura Linney; Mr. Ruffalo’s film career blossomed. He quickly became known for inhabiting a range of roles, from a dark and sexually menacing detective in Jane Campion’s “In the Cut,” to a goofy pothead in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Meanwhile, Mr. Thornton was getting some work acting in a wheelchair, but he soon realized that if he wanted a substantial film role he’d have to write it for himself. When Mr. Thornton came up with the film idea, Mr. Ruffalo promised that he would direct. That began the 10-year process.

Finally, in 2009, after dozens of rewrites and Mr. Ruffalo’s surgery for a benign brain tumor that left him with temporary facial paralysis, a start-up independent studio named Corner Store added the final piece of financing. “Sympathy for Delicious” was scheduled to begin production with a budget of just over $3 million and a 23-day shooting schedule.

But there was another delay, prompting two stars to abandon the project. One was James Franco, who was to play an egomaniacal lead singer who enlists Delicious to join his band and exploits his faith-healing gift on a concert tour. The other was the actress who was to play the band’s amoral manager, a cynical promoter who christens the tour Healapalooza.

Mr. Ruffalo enlisted Ms. Linney for the band manager role. For the over-the-top singer, he found Orlando Bloom. “Orlando came to me,” Mr. Ruffalo said, “and he told me: ‘I really need to have this experience right now. I don’t feel like an actor anymore. I’m broken.’ I told him, ‘You’ll fit right in. Get to the back of the line. There’s a whole line of broken people here.’ ”

In late 2008 Mr. Ruffalo’s younger brother, Scott, a hairstylist, was found shot in the head in his Beverly Hills apartment. He later died. The coroner ruled the case a homicide, but there have been no arrests.

“I was grieving about my brother,” Mr. Ruffalo said. “I didn’t think I wanted to act anymore, honestly. After ‘Sympathy’ I realized I really loved directing. I thought, I’m going to scale my life way back, I’m sick of being on the road all the time, living in L.A., just trying to make ends meet there. I was ready to get the hell out. So we sold everything. I parted ways with my representation. Came here. I was going to start a new career.”

During his break from acting, Mr. Ruffalo didn’t exactly fall out of sight. He found a new role as an environmental advocate and lobbyist, lending his celebrity to groups trying to stop natural gas drilling from moving into upstate New York.

“This is not some pet project for me,” he said. “I don’t plan on going anywhere. This is my home.”

But while the movie star tried to settle into small-town life, gardening and driving in his children’s school car pool, he was pulled back into the media glare after being nominated for an Academy Award for his role in “The Kids Are All Right,” his last part before a two-year hiatus. Recently he decided he was ready to act again, and accepted Joss Whedon’s offer to play David Banner, the Hulk, in “The Avengers.” Mark Ruffalo the director will have little time to celebrate the opening of his first film because Mark Ruffalo the actor is committed to rehearsals as the Hulk.

Still, the tug toward directing is strong. David Fincher, who directed the actor in “Zodiac,” loaned Mr. Ruffalo his editing facilities to cut “Sympathy for Delicious,” and the two men went through the film in a five-hour session that Mr. Ruffalo called a “master class.”

“Mark was up against it,” Mr. Fincher said. “He was trying to do something with an unbelievably small amount of money while acting and directing, having never been in that chair before. So he didn’t have practiced technique to fall back on. I was shocked at how generous he was able to be with his actors. He’s just innately good.”

Whatever his natural talents, his directing career is off to a somewhat bumpy start. He was surprised and stung by negative reviews of “Delicious” after screenings at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded a special jury prize.

“Is it the perfect movie?” Mr. Ruffalo asked. “No. Does it have its shortcomings? Yes. But I’m really proud of it for what it is — sincere and not cynical. We were going for the humor. Tonally, this film is like theater, which often makes you laugh when you’re uncomfortable — purposefully.

“My whole acting and now directing style is to have one foot on a banana peel and another foot in the grave.” And these days, no flaming shoelaces.

Source: NY Times

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.”

Ruffalo’s first directing project was a personal one, given that it stars his longtime friend Christopher Thornton who also wrote the script. The two met 23 years ago in acting class. Six years later, Thornton was tragically paralyzed from the waist down from a climbing accident. You can see facts within the fiction of “Sympathy for Delicious” in which he plays a paralyzed man slash rocker, who embarks on faith healing in the hopes of walking again, which Ruffalo says that Thornton himself sought out at one time.

“He wanted to quit acting and I refused to let him,” Ruffalo says of the first months after Thornton’s injury. “He started to write and he came up with this crazy idea.”

Ten years later, both actors find themselves transformed — Thornton into a mainstream actor and Ruffalo a director

“I like working with all the different mediums and art forms — set design , musical elements, visual elements, costumes,” he explains “It’s really my own [version of] being a glutton. You either get to eat one piece of the pie or you get to devour the whole pie. And I like to eat the whole pie.”

The New Hulk

Ruffalo gave us the dirt on his new role playing The Hulk and seems to have a sense of humor about the revolving stream of Hulks over the years.

“I’m playing the great doctor Bruce Banner and I’m walking in the footsteps of a lot of great actors. We like to joke about it as our generation’s Hamlet. We’re all going to get a shot at it. Believe me, I won’t be the last one.”

Source

The film had all the hallmarks of a potentially strong pic with a script by real-life paraplegic and star of the film Christopher Thornton; a stellar supporting cast featuring Ruffalo, Orlando Bloom, Juliette Lewis, Noah Emmerich, John Carroll Lynch and Laura Linney; musical contributions by The Besnard Lakes, Shiny Toy Guns and Cedric Bixler-Zavala of The Mars Volta fame; and direction by an intelligent, well-spoken thespian going behind the camera for the first time. Suffice to say, we were fairly excited for it.

But if reviews from Sundance are to be trusted what plays out on screen, according to one review, “suffers from consistent tonal problems,” is “unable to draw much blood in its attacks on the inanity of the music business or on people’s blind devotion to self-proclaimed prophets” and boasts a script that “lacks the sophistication necessary for such lofty goals [in] merging black comedy with sincere questions about the importance of faith.”

Either way, we’re still keen to see what Ruffalo has created here which looks closer to happening, with Maya acquiring North American distribution rights in a seven-figure deal. They now plan to release the film next spring with the deal also seeing One Way Out Media‘s Tom Ortenberg come on board as marketing consultant, joining producers Scott Prisand, Matt Weaver, Andrea Sperling, Ruffalo himself and Thornton.

“This film has been a very personal project for me,” Ruffalo said in the announcement, “And I know Maya will be a wonderful partner to have in our corner. I learned a lot making [‘Sympathy’],” Ruffalo admitted at the time. “I made every mistake you can possibly make.”

Source

You would think going to a fledgling film festival in Atherton wouldn’t seem to have much appeal for a star like Mark Ruffalo, whose first try at directing, “Sympathy for Delicious,” won a special jury prize at Sundance in January.

But there you would be wrong.

“These people showed a lot of support for this film at Sundance, so I thought it would be nice to return their support by supporting their little film festival out there,” said Ruffalo on the phone from New York.

Ruffalo will present “Sympathy for Delicious” in person tonight at the inaugural Windrider Bay Area Film Festival, which runs through Saturday at the Center for Performing Arts at Menlo-Atherton High School. It stars Christopher Thornton, a longtime friend of Ruffalo’s who has been in a wheelchair since a climbing accident some years ago and who co-wrote the screenplay, as a homeless DJ with healing powers who wants to be a rock musician. It also stars Orlando Bloom as an egotistical rocker, Juliette Lewis as a drugged-out bass player and Ruffalo as the priest who helps and struggles to understand the homeless healer.

“It’s about rediscovering faith – the faith one needs to get by in the world, which has so much strife, anger and hateful behavior,” said Ruffalo, who came to relate to Thornton’s disability when he had a brain tumor removed about a decade ago. “The movie is linked to the faith in the decency of mankind, ultimately. That’s what I was going for. … I definitely know what it’s like to look into the future and see it as bleak and hopeless. You have to rediscover your faith in yourself, your faith in other people.”

Ruffalo, known for his roles in “You Can Count on Me,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Shutter Island,” said he was surprised to find he enjoyed the entire directing process, including immersing himself in the business side of things – instead of leaving it all up to his producers, he’s been active in meeting with potential distributors.

“I liken it to eating,” he said. “An actor gets a slice of pie. As a director, I got to eat the whole pie. I definitely satisfied some desires.”

For more information, visit www.windriderbayarea.org.

Source

• “Please Give” premiere at Tribeca Festival
• News pictures added
• Ruffalo Join Amnesty International