sundance's blog

When writer-director Robert Siegel was growing up on Long Island, he used to listen to local sports radio station WFAN under the covers at night. “I would hear these voices, these callers,” he remembers. “I’d get to know their voices and wonder who they were and what their lives were like. And that always just stuck with me.”

After heading off to the University of Michigan for college and spending a decade as an editor at The Onion in Madison, Wisconsin, Siegel started doing what he calls “messing around with screenplays.” Five or six years ago, he wrote Big Fan, a drama about Paul (Patton Oswalt), a parking garage attendant who regularly calls into a sports radio station to sing the praises of the Giants. After being beaten up by their star player at a strip club, Paul’s team loyalty is put to the test.

While Big Fan sat on the shelf, Darren Aronofsky decided to direct another of Siegel’s scripts, The Wrestler, which won the Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Film Festival and earned Mickey Rourke an Oscar nomination yesterday as Best Actor. “The big thing I did while on the set of The Wrestler is that I poached apprentices,” says Siegel. “I’d go to the costume designer and ask if she knew anyone who was good who would work for cheap. My sound guy I got from the sound guy on The Wrestler, and makeup. I started my pre-production [for Big Fan] on The Wrestler set, I guess you could say.”

When it came time to assemble his cast, Siegel also took a cue from The Wrestler and used a mixture of professional and amateur actors. Siegel cast Serafina Fiore, who manages the headquarters of a strip club where the production filmed, as Paul’s sister-in-law. Siegel discovered Queens-born actor Gino Cafarelli, who plays Paul’s brother, by doing a YouTube search using words like “Italian,” “New York,” and “Sopranos.”

Many non-actors also appeared as background players, since the production didn’t have the money to hire extras or shut down businesses for filming. For one scene, Siegel recalls shooting in a sports bar covered in Giants and Jets and Yankees posters. “We had to cover them all with Philadelphia stuff and transform it into a Philadelphia bar, which was very awkward,” he recalls. “And there were no extras, just bar patrons. We couldn’t even shut that place down. We really had to shoot while things were open.”

Although Siegel is a first-time director, he didn’t find taking the helm to be a completely foreign exercise. “It was a throwback to muscles that I used at The Onion in terms of delegating and decision-making and leadership,” he says. “So even though I didn’t really know anything about directing, I had a feel for what made a good director. I worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, but it was thrilling, and it was new. I was just running on adrenaline.”

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