Vincent Gallo explains how his family inspired ‘Buffalo ’66’
While Vincent Gallo is well-respected for his supporting roles in the likes of Arizona Dream, The House of the Spirits and The Funeral, he is best known for writing and directing a number of indie cinematic hits such as 2003’s The Brown Bunny and 1998’s Buffalo ’66.
The latter film focuses on a young man named Billy Brown (played by Gallo) who kidnaps a young girl (Christina Ricci) and forces her to pretend she is his wife so that he can impress and appease his parents when he returns home from prison. In fact, Gallo used his own childhood experience to inform the themes of the film.
“My mother and father are exactly like the mother and father in the movie,” he once explained. “So I think the film speaks for them. In the movie, they’re more charming and funny because, at this point in my life, they seem more charming and funny. If I had made the film 15 years ago, they probably would have been less funny. It would have been a darker movie”.
Gallo appears to have conflicted feelings about his family. “They’re bizarre,” he said, “But they did the best that they could, and I’m grateful for the things that I learned from them and for the experience that I had with them. He added, “They’re interesting people, both of them. They were just difficult as parents, very difficult as parents. But as an adult, I’m a bit more objective, and they’re interesting people to me.”
Like many of us, Gallo is no different in the fact that much of his adult life had been spent trying to reconcile with the painful difficulties of childhood. “My whole life has been containing my personality with my parents until I left home and then feeling all the insanity of that and gradually moving towards becoming myself again and forgiving my parents for that experience,” he said. “Writing the screenplay helped me a lot.”
Being creative is the ultimate source of that reconciliation, though. Gallo noted that “making the movie was a real catharsis,” he said, adding that “the real beauty of the film is the aesthetic and the sensibility and the concept of the movie.”
He added: “The part of it in the narrative and the writing where I get to the family’s house was really important for me in a personal way to have that catharsis and to go to Buffalo. To make the movie and have my family see the movie was interesting for me.”