[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
If and when you run into model/boxer/punk/memoirist/New Yorker/first-time filmmaker Dito Montiel around Park City, then here is my advice to you: Just let him do the talking. Especially about the teeming, steaming city portrayed in his high-profile Sundance breakthrough, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.
“The biggest thing was, I’m from Astoria, Queens, and I definitely wanted to make (Saints) here, because, you know, it would just be fun,” Montiel told The Reeler. “The idea of trying to make the movie anywhere else and fake it is impossible. I see movies (shot) in Canada all the time, and it takes about five minutes before it feels like Westworld–something feels sterile, you know? You know what I mean? It’s too clean, something’s not right, and then it’s like that’s what it is. It’s not New York. So it was really important to make it in New York, and particularly in Astoria, Queens, because that’s where the story takes place.
“As far as it being a story about New York, I never felt like that,” he continued. “I just happened to be in New York and it was nice to make it here because I knew the street names. I never wanted it to be this ‘yo Vinny’ New York movie. It was just about some kids who, I’m sure, if you’re from Ames, Iowa, you knew in your version of it. I read the oneliner things about the film, where it’s quintessential New York movie. I certainly didn’t set out to do that. I love New York, but to me it’s not a New York story. It’s just a story about a bunch of kids and they live in New York. That was a really important for me to stay away from that sort of thing.”
I could (and probably should) go on all day with Montiel, whose spellbinding intensity fueled the coming-of-age memoir on which Saints is based, which in turn earned him the high-profile fan club that encouraged his screen adaptation. He had exactly zero filmmaking experience, but that represented something of a plus for admirers like Robert Downey Jr., Trudie Styler (aka Mrs. Sting), Chazz Palminteri and others.
Montiel wound up at the 2004 Sundance Screenwriters and Filmmakers Labs, where he developed Saints from its wiry, kinetic source into its wiry, kinetic script. It was the latest facet of many that shaped its author’s renaissance-man reputation: from a kid expelled from high school for fighting to an amateur boxing career; from a male model to a punk rocker who famously scored a $1 million record deal for his hardcore band Gutterboy; from running with Allen Ginsberg to directing Rosario Dawson; from so on to so forth.
It was all mildly unbelievable and, for Montiel, totally fucking insane. “I was just talking to my friend Jake (Pushinski), who’s editing with me,” Montiel said. “He’s never edited a film before, ever. He learned Avid while we were making the movie. The luck of it was that I had producers with guts–Trudie Styler and Robert Downey. But the guts to literally let someone…” He takes a breath. “I’m not saying this for press or because it sounds good, but I had no idea what I was doing. For real.”
In addition to writing and directing, Moniel also played casting director for the kids who populate his film. “My goal, really, was to get a bunch of kids off the street,” he told me. “I did five auditions. I put fliers up at Coney Island and did an open call there. I put fliers up in Astoria, Queens, and did an open call in a music rehearsal studio. I just literally walked the streets of New York to find kids that just looked interesting and had something special, and the movie’s full of them–kids roaming around past their bedtimes.”
But for better or worse, what catches eyes at Sundance are the names: An A-lister here, an Oscar-winner (Dianne Wiest) there. Montiel said he was initially against casting stars, but he eventually acquiesced once he knew he had found the “right famous people.” “Life gets a little easier when you have them around,” he acknowledged. “It was going to get made regardless, but two things were a blessing–one, that they were famous enough to make me care, and two, they were good enough to make me better.”

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