Back in August, production began on Going Places, a remake of the 1974 French film Les Valseuses, with John Turturro writing and directing, as well as reprising his role as Jesus Quintana from the Coen Brothers’ 1998 classic The Big Lebowski.
Last month we got our first look at Turturro back in character, and now he’s been chatting to Screen Daily about how the project came about, and how Jesus came to be incorporated into the film.
“I was calling [my character in Going Places] JC, and it reminded me of this character I’d done in a play many, many years ago that had inspired Joel and Ethan Coen to write the character of Jesus Quintana,” said Turturro. “So I thought, ‘Wow! We’ve talked about doing something with Jesus Quintana but it was always silly.’ I started playing around with it and I thought we could be on to something with his irony and the irreverence of the character.”
Turturro went on to reveal that he took his idea to the Coens, and showed them a copy of Les Valseuses: “It kind of blew their minds. They thought it was a great idea and told me, ‘We’ve taken a character inspired from a stage play and now you want to put him in a movie which is a French movie, which was inspired by American road movies.’”
John Turturro plays Jesus Quintana in ‘Going Places,’ a film about a trio of misfits whose irreverent, sexually charged dynamic evolves into a surprising love story as their spontaneous and flippant attitude towards the past or future backfires time and again, even as they inadvertently perform good deeds. When they make enemies with a gun-toting hairdresser, their journey becomes one of constant escape from the law, from society and from the hairdresser, all while the bonds of their outsider family strengthen.
Going Places sees Turturro starring alongside Bobby Cannavale, Audrey Tautou and Susan Sarandon. Expect it some time in 2017.
Originally published November 7, 2016. Updated March 2, 2020.
