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“What’s This Bright Guy Doing in a Pickle Barrel?” Peter Riegert on Crossing Delancey
Amy Irving and Peter Riegert in Crosing Delancey [This is the second of three interviews with key collaborators on Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey. Click here to read the first part, an interview with screenwriter Susan Sandler, and click here to read an interview with co-star Amy Irving.]
Filmmaker: You’d worked with Joan Micklin Silver before, on Chilly Scenes of Winter. What kind of an actor-director relationship did you have?
Riegert: It was very comfortable. She was a very good writer—she wrote Chilly Scenes of Winter—and knew how to take [on] a script that she didn’t write. She knew how to cast. She had a wonderful eye for talent. I had auditioned for Joan in 1976, when she was starting to shoot Between the Lines, and I was doing a play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, by this new writer, David Mamet. She had come to the play, then I got an audition for the movie. I had only been acting for five years, so it was all new to me. And I thought, well, “You just saw me. What do I gotta audition for?” But I didn’t get the job, obviously.
Filmmaker: Do you remember which part it was?
Riegert: I’m guessing it’s the Jeff Goldblum part. Because when I auditioned for Chilly Scenes, I couldn’t get in, and John Heard, who was a good buddy of mine, said, “Why don’t you see Peter? He’d be great for this part.” And [Joan] said, “Well, I see him as a tall character.” John cajoled her into giving me a shot.
Filmmaker: To the extent that you were taking direction from her, were your conversations with her more technical, more about the character, more about the themes of the project?
Riegert: I think she trusted her cast. Only one time I remember [having a conflict], the scene in the elevator where I’ve just had an argument with Izzy and get in the elevator. She wanted me to react to something that Izzy says as the doors are closing. I wouldn’t call it a disagreement, but I said, “I can’t do more. I can’t make a face. My instinct is, the audience is going to take the information of this argument we’ve just had, so let them do the work.” My experience working with Joan was more just conversation. When it’s good, it’s really a conversation you’re having with the script, the actors, the director, costumer and production designer. You’re talking with everybody, at least that’s the way I look at it. It starts when you get the job, it’s an audition or an offer, or maybe you’re meeting somebody over lunch and trying to convince them that way.
Filmmaker: I’m curious if you’re the kind of actor who’s interested in the 10,000-foot view of a film’s themes, or whether you’re just thinking about the character. Maybe we’ll discover that in the course of me asking this question. According to your Wikipedia page, at least, you’re a secular Jewish baby boomer, and observing my dad, who’s a few years younger than you, and his siblings, it seems like a fascinating thing. On the one hand, you’re part of the enormous social upheavals in American culture in the postwar decades, but on the other hand, in the background, there’s this tradition, and memory, maybe, of historical trauma, and a sense of nagging obligation. It seems to me that that’s a conversation that this movie is having, too, and Sam represents one voice in that conversation. So that’s the 10,000-foot view.
Riegert: I was an English major, I had no plans to be an actor. What I learned was how to take material apart, whether it was poems, short stories, plays or novels. So analyzing, dissecting, looking was a big part of my growing up. As an actor, you naturally are taking things apart, but you can’t play-act the theme. People do, but they’re not very good. I don’t like to editorialize the material; your biggest ally is the audience, if you let them. But yes: historically, I have an overview. I used to work on the Lower East Side, at a settlement house called the University Settlement, which I think was established in 1886. So I certainly was aware of the Lower East Side, and what it meant to America. I mean, America without immigrants is not a country.
Filmmaker: What was the settlement house?
Riegert: Well, settlement houses were what they sounded like. They helped the immigrants settle; they taught them English, hygiene, how to get a job, how to become a citizen. The University Settlement was on Eldridge and Rivington, so right in the middle of that Jewish world. If you went down there now, I’m sure it’s largely Chinese, Puerto Rican. It’s a place where new arrivals, people who don’t have a lot of money, go.
I worked for the summer camp. First I was a counselor, then a unit leader for three years in Beacon, New York, then worked at the settlement house running their afterschool program in 1970. My first participation in the camp was 1966, so it was kids from the Lower East Side, Black kids, Puerto Rican kids, Chinese, some middle-class kids who helped defray the costs for the poor kids. Ten kids to a bunk. It was fascinating. I was 19 and they were probably 12—you know, one of the worst years. Horrible. [Laughs]
Filmmaker: I’m curious about making this film on the Lower East Side in ‘88. There’s that riff that Sam has before he gets in the elevator, the gist of which is, “I know you think my world is very provincial.” But by that point the neighborhood was not, by any means, a Jewish village. Did making the movie in the late 80s, feel a little bit like, I don’t know, going back in time?
Riegert: I knew that area 20 years earlier, and it was disappearing in ‘66, but you could feel old Jewish, immigrant New York. It’s all gone now, most of it, but the aromas were still there.
Filmmaker: The other thing your Wikipedia says is that you are the son of a guy who worked in food. Did you know a lot of guys growing up who went into the family business in the way that Sam does? Was that a choice you had seen people face?
Riegert: My father was in the poultry business, and a couple of times he would take me to the plants where they slaughter the chickens, and I would watch people spend eight hours a day cutting necks or breasts. And he would say to me at the end of the trip—I’m paraphrasing—“If you don’t study, that’s where your future is going to be.” [Meaning,] not in chickens, but in piecework. He didn’t use that phrase, but he was trying to say, “There’s a lot more to life, but you have to study for it.” He was a worker since he was 18. He came from Utah, his mother’s father probably landed in Utah in 1895 or something, and set up a haberdashery, the way immigrants did.
Filmmaker: That story, especially because it’s so tactile, is an interesting contrast to the scene where Izzy sees Sam at work at the pickle stand, reaching his hand into the pickle barrel. Sam made the opposite decision. He stayed in that less aspirational, very tactile world.
Riegert: I just let what I’m experiencing be part of the scene. I didn’t have to do research on pickle barrels, if you know what I mean. All I had to do was let myself have the experience of plunging my forearms into these pickle barrels.
Filmmaker: It’s interesting for me, at least watching it, to think about how freighted those pickles are with ideas about ethnic heritage and tradition, whether to look backwards or forwards. But I suppose the movie works because it’s so grounded in the moment.
Riegert: But there is that interesting notion: What is Sam doing? He seems smart enough to have all kinds of interests in his life—in the elevator scene, he says, “I’m not defined by what I do.” But there’s another scene, remember? Amy’s on-again, off-again, friends-with-benefits guy shows up at the apartment when I’m there and says, “I knew your father.” And you see the love Sam has for his father, through this other guy. So, why is Sam not going against tradition? I don’t know the answer to that question, but in a way, it’s kind of seeking a simpler life. People are now asking the same question my generation was asking in the 60s: “What the fuck is going on here?” That’s what’s so interesting about what Crossing Delancey was asking: “What do you want?” That’s what it is, a story of going back. Izzy’s grandmother is pulling her back to rethink everything.
Filmmaker: In interviews, you’ve described Sam as a mensch, a really good guy who’s secure in himself, but some of the things he says to Izzy are quite barbed. When he’s getting into the elevator, he kind of snaps at her. I don’t know whether there isn’t a little bit of smugness there, like, “I like myself, why don’t you like me?” Or a little bit of bitterness in that he feels judged and rejected, self-conscious about how he’s perceived by this woman he’s besotted with. It’s quite prickly, and I’m curious whether you were conscious of feeling a little bit of resentment and insecurity when Sam is with Izzy.
Riegert: No, and I think that’s why it’s well written. It goes back to the earlier question: what’s this bright guy doing in a pickle barrel? Maybe he is angry, maybe he is hurt. That’s what makes good writing, when the audience goes, “I think there’s more here than what seems to be this mensch-y guy.” Because yes, he is prickly. But I don’t remember thinking, “Oh, in this scene, I’ll draw out this color.” I’m really of the moment, and it’s nothing I remember, but thinking back on it, is he really just happy taking care of his father’s business? But that’s the way he presents. He says to her, I’m here, which, that’s how we all do battle in life.
Filmmaker: I think I’m also bringing myself to it, as we all do, because this question of obligation to tradition versus personal aspirations and the opportunity to reinvent yourself is something we all think about. Like you alluded to, if the movie had been made 20 years before or 20 years later, Sam would have been an artisanal pickle maker, catering to either alfalfa-sprout hippies or 21st-century hipsters. He was either born too late or too early to be a really popular pickle guy beloved by very well-educated people. The entire time you watch the movie, the author played by Jeroen Krabbé is the aspirational love interest for Izzy, but if you made this movie today, maybe the guy who works with his hands and has an honest business feeding people might be the aspirational figure for a busy and frazzled career woman.
Riegert: Well, that’s the question. Sam’s certainly a person who’s comfortable with who he is. If he were here and not me—if you were talking to this guy and he was a friend of yours—it would be really an interesting conversation, that he’s chosen to get off the rat race. That’s what I think holds up; this question, of keeping up with the Joneses or setting your own path, is eternal. It’s seductively played out in this relationship.
