Directing His Trust in Pause and Effect

Few filmmakers are as eloquent about silence, about the spaces between sentences, about delicate character interludes when souls communicate without a word being exchanged, as Stanley Tucci.

“The moments in between the moments, those are the most interesting,” the 39-year-old actor-director says in general and about his graceful and intelligent new film, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” premiering today at the Sundance Film Festival.

“What’s unspoken, the way we talk around things, how our actions are inconsistent with what we’re feeling, how anger and affection manifest themselves in strange ways at inappropriate times. If you can bring that to the screen, it has much more resonance than a lot of films.”

Tucci’s last Sundance appearance was four years ago as the co-director, co-writer and co-star of “Big Night,” which concluded with a classic, unforgettable scene of two Italian restaurateur brothers sharing a completely silent morning-after-disaster breakfast.

“Only if you’ve taken the time to create characters fully,” he says, “only if we know what the characters are thinking, can a scene like that exist. It’s a little slower at the beginning, you have to sit through more than you want to, but it’s worth it because you have the payoff at the end.”

Which is what happened with “Big Night,” which went on to be a critical favorite and indie hit. Now he’s back with “Joe Gould’s Secret,” a marvel of subtlety and restraint set in a carefully re-created 1940s and ‘50s Manhattan. The film is based on the intricate, real-life relationship between New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould, a homeless man with a Harvard degree and a most unusual vocation. Tucci, who directed and co-stars as Mitchell, is once again swimming against the current.

“The tide is coming in very quickly and we’re all going to drown,” he says, a warmly intelligent man with a mission. “People want to be instantly satisfied, they immediately want to know what the plot is, and I want to slow things down. People say, ‘Can’t that scene be shorter?’ If it was, it wouldn’t work the way I want it to work.”

Tucci’s core philosophy is that “you can’t live without characters, they create the plot. The imposition of a plot is not truthful. If you let the characters in a sense guide you, if you don’t worry about trying to tell people and just let it happen, it will.”

“Joe Gould’s Secret” has just such a structure. It’s based on a pair of pieces written by Mitchell, whose collected writings, “Up in the Old Hotel,” had been a Tucci favorite even before this project; he admired Mitchell’s ability to “find all the stuff between what we conventionally think of as dramatic.” The film draws lessons on life, writing and the human condition from the unlooked-for parallels between the courtly, Southern-born Mitchell and his most cantankerous subject.

Wonderfully played by Ian Holm, one of the stars of “Big Night,” Gould is a formidable eccentric, a self-dramatizing street person prone to wild mood swings who has dedicated his life to writing a record of what ordinary people say. Intensely proud of an output he estimates at 1.2 million words, Gould has grandly vowed to complete his “informal history of the shirt-sleeve multitudes, to put it down or perish in the attempt.”

To Mitchell, whose specialty is down-and-out Manhattan characters, a subject like this is at first a godsend. But Gould, consistent with the unmanageable way he lives the rest of his life, refuses to stay in the categories Mitchell wants to keep him in. As Mitchell’s wife, Therese (Hope Davis), puts it, “Stories don’t end because a writer has finished writing,” and this one has no intention of going away quietly.

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Talking about an awkward meeting between Mitchell, Gould and New York publisher Charlie Duell (Steve Martin), Tucci details his passion for “letting the air in a scene exist. It’s in the pauses, in the stillness, we feel the awful uncomfortableness. It’s a fine line; you can go too far and become indulgent, but only if you do that can you create something that has resonance to it. Otherwise, it’s fluff.”

Given that Mitchell’s wife, Therese Mitchell, was a photographer, Tucci (who said the film’s visual look was influenced by “The Street,” a short film collaboration between James Agee and photographer Helen Leavitt) also wanted “Joe Gould’s Secret” to deal with issues of creativity.

“A theme of my films has been the artist as pariah in American society,” Tucci explains. “Therese sees the city, Mitchell hears the city, and Gould talks about the city. That’s three different senses at work, it’s an artistic triad.”

Interestingly enough, Tucci’s career as a writer-director began because he felt that as an Italian American actor his own creativity was being stifled despite being Emmy-nominated for his work on “Murder One.”

“Being an ethnic person, a lot of what I was offered was bad guys. There’s never an excuse for Italians being evil, they’re just innately bad. It’s absurd, insulting, the prejudice is terrible. One reason ‘Big Night’ exists is we wanted to present a different view of Italian immigrants. If I want different roles, I have to write them for myself.”

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Because he counts on acting as his bread and butter, Tucci prefers not to direct unless he can create a film “from the ground up, exactly as I want to make it.”

“Joe Gould’s Secret,” however, did not start that way. One of the film’s executive producers, Michael Lieber, spent six years persuading Mitchell, who has since died, to agree to a film. Howard Rodman, the film’s screenwriter, worked on the script for a year and a half before Tucci came onto the project.

When he did sign on, however, Tucci, who is very precise and painstaking (“it has to be exactly how I want it”) about how he wants his films to sound, worked for months on the script, changing, he estimates, “80% of it.” When the Writers Guild, after both an arbitration and a hearing, refused to give him a shared writing credit, “it broke my heart.”

“It was like the Salem witch trials; they said, ‘Can you prove we did anything wrong?,’ and since everything took place behind closed doors, I couldn’t,” Tucci says. “They said things like, ‘Dialogue doesn’t matter.’ Well, I’ve always found it helpful as an actor.

“I know I have to let it go, I know that because I was both the director and the producer it was harder for me to get credit, but I literally can’t sleep at night thinking about this.”