No small miracle

WHILE making the semiautobiographical “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” first-time writer-director Dito Montiel learned a few things that might be worth sharing with the group. Like, if you’re going to tell a young actor that his character’s reaction might include throwing a table through a window, it would be prudent to inform the assistant director and possibly the actress standing next to the window. Also a prop window would be nice.

Or, when casting characters based on your parents and friends, you are going to have to let go of the physical details even though this will be extremely difficult. Or that using kids straight off the street in crucial roles may sound like a great, gritty indie idea, but there is such a thing as a schedule and a budget, and actual actors will help you meet both of these. Finally, while it is beneficial to recognize one’s personal saints, it is even more important to trust them.

Fortunately for Montiel, who at 35 has had one of those bicoastal-eclectic careers -- lead singer for Gutterboy, punk rock memoirist, Calvin Klein underwear model -- the saints involved in making this movie proved to be stalwart and well connected.

The film, which lands in theaters today and is based on Montiel’s almost stream-of-consciousness memoir about growing up in Queens and the downtown New York punk scene, has already picked up awards at the Sundance and Venice Film festivals.

“Usually when you hear a story like this,” Montiel said, “you find out the guy’s last name is Murdoch or something. My father was a typewriter mechanic, but I just happened to fall into the hands of Robert Downey Jr., Trudie Styler and Sting.”

Downey, who stars as the adult Dito in “Saints,” met Montiel through composer Jonathan Elias, who, fittingly, did the score for “Saints.”

“Dito was still in Gutterboy, and I’d go down to the studio and you’d walk by the recording booth and there’d be this buff guy wearing nothing but combat boots, screaming,” Downey says. “And Jonathan would say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s Dito, he’s doing vocals, and he can’t seem to keep his clothes on when he does vocals,’ and I’m like, ‘Whoa, I thought I was crazy.’ ”

They kept in touch through good times and bad, and three years ago, when Montiel’s memoir came out, it was Downey who said, “You want to make a movie?”

A few weeks later, Downey had called Styler, another old friend, who has a production company and is married to Sting. The two, friends since the “Chaplin” days, had long talked of working on a project together. Although the book’s experiential form did not lend itself immediately to a screenplay, Styler said she was drawn to the struggle of the main character to leave his family, particularly his father, and his neighborhood.

“I really related to that,” she says. “I wanted to be an actress, which my dad did not understand at all. No one on my street wanted to be an actress; they were all off to work in the factory. I felt like he didn’t see me, so I left in a dark cloud, spent years in the wilderness and came back when their health was bad. It’s a universal story, I think.”

The film follows similar lines -- in coming of age, the young Dito realizes he wants something more from his life than the often-violent streets of Queens can offer him; his father sees this desire as a rejection of him. In returning years later, the adult Dito must come to terms with the aftermath of his departure.

To carve this narrative from the book, Styler had to lock Montiel and Downey in her apartment for a few weeks. Which could not have been easy, since the two men have the nervous energy of espresso-fueled 5-year-olds and a tendency toward syntax that winds on for days. “And occasionally Sting would pass by and say, ‘Why don’t you do it this way?’ ” says Downey. “Which was very helpful.”

Once he got started though, Montiel says, the script came easily, quickly landing him a spot at the Sundance Lab -- although he was such a neophyte, he didn’t even know this was a good thing. “I get this call and I’m like, ‘OK, thanks.’ Then I called Robert and Trudie and asked them, ‘Is this some sort of scam?’ ”

Meanwhile, Montiel had decided he wanted to direct, and Downey seconded it. “I look back and it was such a crazy, disillusioned process,” Montiel says. “But at the time it seemed completely normal. It’s my film, of course I would direct it.”

Aside from one two-minute short, however, he had never directed a film, and, as Styler pointed out, this was a bit of a problem. “Trudie called me and said, ‘So now Mr. Downey thinks you can direct. OK, go make a short film with him and get back to me.’ ”

But even with the short, the Sundance Lab cachet and Downey attached as star and co-producer, scaring up the $2 million they needed wasn’t easy. “I have never had financing fall out so many times,” Styler says. “But in the end I figured it was because we were in bed with the wrong people.”

Finally, her husband said, “Let’s just do it,” and wrote a check himself -- the first time Sting has been the executive producer of a film.

“Who knew the man I’ve been with for years was actually the right guy to get into bed with?” she says with a laugh.

Then began the process of helping Montiel make his movie. Grooming a new talent is not, as it turns out, always easy. “Dito is a glorious nightmare,” says Downey. “Don’t even talk to me about the casting process. If we were going to get into the process by which we cast Monty [Dito’s father] alone, we would have to set up camp and send out for sack lunches.”

Dianne Wiest had always been his first choice for Flori, the mother, but everything else was up for grabs -- literally. Montiel even took out an ad on Craigslist looking for the young actors. Finally, Styler put her foot down.

“Dito’s penchant for using people from Astoria [in Queens] threatened to undo my sanity,” she says in her carefully cadenced British accent. “I had a similar experience on ‘Snatch,’ where Guy [Ritchie] had certain people in mind because he liked how they looked. But I said to him and I said to Dito, ‘That’s all wonderful, but we need to actually make our day. We cannot be shooting for weeks and weeks because someone who looks great can’t learn his lines or stay in frame.’ ”

Now, of course, Montiel admits that every battle he lost was for the best. Chazz Palminteri, for instance, might not look like his father, but he captured the spirit of the character in ways Montiel says he could never imagine. “My father was 5 feet, 4 inches and Nicaraguan. Chazz is like 6-foot and Italian. It’s like having the Empire State Building in the middle of your film, but the things he did. I didn’t know actors could do those sorts of things.”

As it turns out, he says, there were a lot of things he didn’t know about making a movie. On the first day they were shooting a scene in which Monty has a seizure in front of Flori and Antonio, Dito’s best friend. Played by Channing Tatum, Antonio, an abused and angry young man who looks to Monty as his last link to a normal life, is just this side of becoming a sociopath.

“Channing asked me what Antonio’s reaction would be,” says Montiel. “Would he cry, would he freeze? And I said, ‘No, he’d probably get angry, break glass. He’d probably want to kill Flori he was so angry, so maybe you should try to kill Dianne Wiest.’ ”

Then Montiel announced they were doing the scene with no dialogue -- “Chazz gives me this look like, ‘OK, Mr. Sundance, have it your way’ -- and called ‘Action.’ Palminteri hits the floor and Tatum erupts in panic and anger, and obeys his director. “He picks up this table and he throws it through the window, right next to Dianne Wiest. She gets glass all over her, she’s barefoot and her feet are cut up and it’s great, right, I’m thinking everyone is going to just love it.”

When he yelled “Cut!” however, he learned differently. “Everyone is yelling at Channing, saying people were standing behind the window, didn’t he know he was risking people’s lives? Dianne was very nice about it, but the A.D. is pissed because it was a real window, in a real apartment, and now we can’t shoot again using the window. Finally Chazz yelled back saying, ‘Back off, he was just doing what the director told him to do.’ ” Montiel shakes his head. “Crazy, I was crazy. I used to think ‘Just let people go wild and it will turn out fine.’ Which is why people pressed me to cast real actors. I mean, thank God Chazz was there, right?

“Of course,” he adds, as directors will, “it did turn out to be a really great scene.”

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com