Award-winning actor John Turturro P’23 joined the class one afternoon in April to talk about the techniques of film acting and directing.

Turturro has appeared in more than sixty movies, alongside such names as Robert Redford, Adam Sandler, Robin Williams, and Robert De Niro. He has worked multiple times with legendary directors like Spike Lee and the Coen brothers and is known for his contributions to the independent film movement. Turturro, however, can also be regularly seen on Hollywood blockbuster movies such as the Transformers franchise and, more recently, The Batman.

The actor hand-picked scenes from a number of films, made between the 1930s and the 1970s, to talk about with the class, each clip depicting the on-screen chemistry between leading couples:

In The Lady Eve (1941), a screwball comedy directed by Preston Sturges, the class observed Barbara Stanwyk’s con artist turn her seductive charms onto an unsuspecting Henry Fonda, who plays the naïve heir to a brewery fortune. “In this scene she’s seducing him in a way he’s unaware of,” said Turturro, “which is what makes it a great scene.”

Like many performers from that era, he explained, Stanwyk was a great mover. “In older movies everyone developed a walk because there weren’t all these closeups.” For example, consider James Cagney, Bette Davis, or John Wayne.