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Jack Goes Boating Unfolds NYC’s Working Class
A conversation with John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman
Photo: Overture Films
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(More information can be found in Encore‘s September issue)
It’s difficult to get to know the “real” New York through film. Despite the hard realism that flourishes in this city, both in fiction and in day-to-day life, the New York of film tends to play into our fantasies. It isn’t that the Italian gangsters, newspaper moguls, private eyes, boxers, miracles on 34th street and Woody Allen don’t exist; it’s more so that most filmgoers don’t often encounter these archetypes of New York cinema as they go about their daily lives. This is why the fresh realism of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s directorial debut, Jack Goes Boating, is so refreshing.
Jack Goes Boating explores an element of New York life that is extremely accessible if you live here, but is not often seen in the movies– the non-heroic existence of four working class New Yorkers. For someone who lives in a small railroad apartment in the outer boroughs, such as myself, many of the scenes in this film extend beyond the borders of the screen and into real life. The sets look like places you may exist in and the characters remind you of people you interact with on a daily basis. The struggle of love happening in the lives of those with meager means feels like a second-person narrative of a living reality.
In a lot of ways Jack Goes Boating is as real feeling as Spike Lee’s tribute to life in Brooklyn during the late 80’s, Do the Right Thing, and this is not a statement I treat lightly. Like Do the Right Thing, the narrative of Jack Goes Boating and the story behind the filmmakers who made the film, address issues about class and race in the city that are contemporary to the film. These aspects are so important to the reality of living in the city, and no filmmaker could make New York look, sound, or feel real without understanding and including these aspects. Hoffman and company don’t address issues of race and class in a way that is intensely visceral as Lee – Jack Goes Boating is subtle and emotionally esoteric, which speaks to the time, and the personal relationship Hoffman has to the city. However, the two films share some element of New York reality that sits hard in your stomach and forces the film into the reality that exists outside the theatre.
The organic affect of Jack Goes Boating is very much indebted to the fact that it grew naturally from the underground of New York culture. Actors John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Amy Ryan all grew up in New York, and Hoffman studied acting at NYU. The story originated as a play produced by the LAByrynth theatre company, a New York based company that Rubin-Vega, and Hoffman are members of, and Ortiz helped found in 1992. The characters act as excitable, solitary and anxiety stricken as any New Yorker struggling to make ends meet.
I had the pleasure of speaking on the phone with John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman about the film, and about life in New York. John and Phil met working on a production of The Merchant of Venice in 1994 and shortly after Hoffman joined Ortiz’s LAByrth theatre company—a company that he initially described to Hoffman as “not so much a theatre company, but something closer to the Little Rascal’s theatre gang.” This magnetic duo relate a history of the city that offers humor and wisdom to anyone trying to make it here today.
Encore: Can you each tell me a little about your individual relationship to the city? John you grew up in Brooklyn, Right?
John Ortiz: Yeah, and I still live in Brooklyn. It’s a huge part of who I am, and my history and my family. We’re Puerto Rican, but we call ourselves nuyorican. There’s a specificity to being from here, that you don’t really feel from anywhere else. And when it came to doing theatre, and acting, and on a larger scale, art, I never really saw it out there the way I experienced it. With all due respect, it wasn’t Lost in Yonkers New York for me. It was something different, it was something that wasn’t that sweet. That was important to me, to take on that kind of energy and applying the kind of work that I was interested in doing.
Philip Seymour Hoffman: New York was like another Universe. I grew up outside of Rochester in a pretty rural/suburban, on the school bus passing the farm on the way to high-school, kind of world. When I realized that theatre was something that I wanted to be a part of I went to NYU. I remember coming to the city to do the audition and it was a whole other universe it was a playground that I wanted to play in. It scared the hell out of me…but that kind of exciting scared. It was a city that I definitely wanted to let swallow me up. My relationship to New York is still as an outsider, and I like that. I like viewing New York through people like John and my friends who grew up here, and knowing that I have a different perspective of it. It’s still the very special place to me that it was when I came here when I was eighteen. There’s something about New York that keeps unfolding for you, it’s not something you ever experience completely. I’m still an outsider looking in, perceiving the city as someone who is not from here, which I think has helped me. I can, hopefully, at certain times, add something to the pot that somebody who grew up here would not be able to.
Encore: As I was watching the film, I kept wondering where Jack lives, what borough? I know that he lives in his uncle’s basement, but is that a Manhattan basement or a basement in a different borough?
PSH: No that’s not Manhattan, that’s Queens. Jack is somebody who grew up here and still probably lives in the neighborhood he was born in. Whereas opposed to Clyde and Lucy, who possibly came from another borough or grew up in another borough, but have made the move to Manhattan, you know that kind of move that people might have to do for some reason, that relates to who Clyde and Lucy are.
Encore: So Clyde and Lucy’s place is in Hell’s Kitchen, was that part of the original story?
PSH: No that was something I think that we added in the film. The idea that one or both of them tried to get a place in Manhattan, there’s just something about that that I found interesting in pertaining to who those people actually are. That together the may think that moving into Manhattan is the thing to do. I do think that it’s me trying to say something about class. There is also this certain part of Hell’s Kitchen and that area that still has a working class vibe, it’s still very old New York, so it still fit in my mind.
JO: Specifically speaking, the apartments in that area, they can’t really change the apartments in some radius there, because of the building zone. Just physically, those buildings are still the same as they were in the 80’s. We had talked about whether or not they (Clyde and Lucy), say, got that lease before the got married and were in possession of a much sought after rent stabilized lease. A lot of families still do—a lot Cuban families and Puerto Ricans families from the old West Side Story days, and even some Irish before that—they have these leases that are six, seven hundred dollars a month. Their place in society in terms of economics, feeds into Lucy and Clyde’s good stuff, but also their current conflict that they both have.
Encore: I’d like to talk about Clyde and Lucy’s apartment for a moment. I live in a railroad apt in Bushwick and when I was watching the film, for several moments I actually felt like I was at home. It was very realistic. As actors and a director how do you develop this feeling of being at home?
JO: Phil was really generous in terms of wanting our input with the apartment, and really making it specific to Jack and Clyde, but also Me and Daphne (Rubin-Vega) in terms of having that homey feel, and that comfortable because it would be an apartment that when people saw it, it would be a very much lived in apartment. We brought a lot of stuff from our personal lives into the set.
PSH: Some part of Clyde and Lucy would like to move up the scale, but they are still part of the working class, and that went in the apartment. And anyone who lives here a long time knows that apartment very well, where the front door is in the kitchen, and the bathroom’s right there. It’s something that New Yorkers know how to do probably better than most people, how to take a certain space and make it as homey as possible.
Encore: The pool scenes, they are really gorgeous. What does going to the pool mean for a lower-income New Yorker?
PSH: That was always really important – where is this pool what kind of pool is it. I remember going to the Y when I first came here, and I knew I wanted to get a vibe like that. A very New York thing, I think, is that sometimes a place you go isn’t in your neighborhood, because your looking for the thing you want and it might be somewhere else. The idea that they would go to this pool, that’s in Harlem, and it would be a public place, and it would be for people of a lower economic class and it would be beautiful, which I think is also New York. Everything about it was kind of the New York that I knew from when you didn’t have any money and you’re searching for the thing you wanted and when you found it, you found it was more beautiful than the thing you could have imagined.
Encore: I found those scenes very relieving, because, you know, the weather is hot and I love to be by the water so it was really satisfying to watch the underwater scenes. Can you relate to that, John, growing up in the city and going through the hot summers?
JO: Yeah, big time. Not only an escape from concrete jungle, but real relief just in terms of the heat. I grew up in Bed-Stuy and my pool was McCarren park in Williamsburg, when it is a pool and not a hip concert venue. I actually remember going the day after the black-out in ’77, and we just needed to get to the pool and the traffic lights weren’t working but the water was still there. It’s such a strong and important thing that New Yorkers have and for all intents and purposes, free. I still go to the pools with my son…It’s great you kind of forget you’re in the heat and in the city, it’s like being in the country.
The only people that could have possibly made this film are people that have experienced this type of life with their own senses, which makes the film forever unique and an achievement for independent filmmaking in New York. Jack Goes Boating is a local film, at a time when thinking locally has become a mantra for some. If you’re interested in peering into some unfolded corner of this local culture, the film opens September 17.