And it led, very indirectly, to Romance & Cigarettes. “When I did Barton Fink, I figured it would make sense if they filmed me actually writing,” Turturro says. “Not something they gave me to type, but writing my own stuff. I thought it would be good, as John, to be actually working on something that meant something to me. So I wrote a lot of ideas down on camera and off camera.” He says he never wanted to make a musical.

“But, after I did Mac, I started reading [Charles] Bukowski and started thinking about what would happen if Bukowski collaborated with, like, Bruce Springsteen. They write about the same people. Maybe Bukowski’s are a little poorer, but they write about the same milieu, and I thought that would be kind of cool, if you just pushed it a little bit.

People use music to express how they feel to help them get through the day.” Before I can really figure out how the Barton Fink experience segues to Bukowski and Springsteen, he brings in a third thread – the Engelbert Humperdinck song “A Man Without Love,” which becomes the basis for the movie’s first production number. “That song would always make me laugh, because it’s kind of pop, operatic, romantic, cheesy, schmaltzy … . I thought about music. I grew up in a smaller house.

We didn’t travel a lot, and music was emotional transportation … to whatever world you wanted to go to. When people ask me why I wanted to become an actor, I think I can associate that with the experience of putting on 45s in the basement and dancing around, fantasizing, just imagining you could be whoever you wanted to be.” All these elements combined to form Romance & Cigarettes. “There are things you grow up around and look at.