Many years later, when I was finally able to make a living solely by acting and no longer needed to work in restaurants or paint apartments to survive, I began to mull over these experiences and decided to put them down in a form that vaguely resembled a screenplay. After a few years of getting nowhere fast, I asked my first cousin and one of my best friends, Joseph Tropiano, who loved cinema as much as I, to partner up. Over a period of the next five years or so, we eventually ended up with something that we were happy with. It was a screenplay that dramatized the struggle between commerce and art, portrayed the Italian immigrant as someone unconnected with the Mafia （a very unusual depiction in American cinema）， showed the importance of food in Italian culture and how it is often used to express emotions, and did not have a happy ending. Little did we know we were making something that would be so well received or would become a “food film” cult classic. If we had known any of that, we certainly would have negotiated a better back end.
* * *
I first met Isabella Rossellini through the codirector of Big Night, Campbell Scott. Isabella had committed to doing the film while we shopped the script around to every producer in Christendom. I mentioned to Isabella that I would like to spend some time observing a chef at work and she introduced me to Pino Luongo, a restaurateur in New York City. After explaining what I was looking for, Pino suggested I go to Le Madri, unfortunately now defunct, one of his restaurants on Seventeenth and Seventh Avenue, where Gianni Scappin was the head chef.
Gianni Scappin comes from the tiny village of Mason Vicentino in the Veneto region of Northern Italy, where his family owned a small restaurant. After a brief stint in a seminary school as a young boy, Gianni realized he was not destined for the priesthood, and at the age of fourteen he began a four-year course at the Recoaro Terme Culinary Institute, which expanded his knowledge of Italian regional dishes. At the age of eighteen he moved to England and honed classic cooking skills in the French-influenced kitchen of the Dorset Hotel in Bournemouth. After a two-year obligatory stint in the Italian army in an Alpine skiing regiment, where he also cooked for his commanding officers （enlist me now）， he worked at the famed Hotel Excelsior on the Lido in Venice. In the early 1980s he became the head chef at the very successful Castellano in New York for a few years until moving to New York’s Bice （where he trained the late, great Anthony Bourdain） and finally to Le Madri. He eventually stepped away from the kitchen to oversee Pino Luongo’s five New York restaurants. He left the city in 2000 to open his own restaurants in upstate New York and taught at the Colavita Center for Italian Food and Wine at the CIA （that’s the Culinary Institute of America, not the governmental spy organization）。
Gianni could not have been more welcoming, and even though I had the option of visiting some of Pino’s other kitchens, after meeting Gianni, I never left Le Madri. Over the next couple of years, as we searched for funding for the film, whenever I wasn’t working I would spend time in Gianni’s kitchen, learning everything I could from the staff and picking Gianni’s brain. One of the things I asked Gianni to teach me was how to make a frittata because at the end of the film my character, Secondo, makes a frittata, which he shares with his brother, Primo, and the busboy/waiter, Cristiano. Our rather bold plan was to shoot the scene in one continuous take with no coverage. This meant that there would be no possibility of editing it down, and therefore every element would have to work perfectly, so I needed to be very adept at making it. Also, with the exception of a couple of lines at the beginning, there is no dialogue, so it almost felt like a scene from a silent film. Shooting the scene in a single wide master shot meant that I would have to cook the frittata in real time. If something went wrong, I would have to cut, reset, and begin another take.
We rehearsed a number of times to solidify the blocking of the actors and the basic timing of everything. During rehearsal I was using a pan that I had chosen from the prop master. Like all the props, it was or resembled a pan of the period, late 1950s, which meant there was no hope of slipping in a Teflon-coated pan to make my job a little easier. Needless to say, the frittata kept sticking to the pan, and I started to panic, because if it didn’t work seamlessly we would have to shoot coverage and end up editing the scene. Instinctively we all felt this would compromise the emotional integrity of the scene and rob it of its tension. So I grabbed a large aluminum pan and gave that a try, and luckily it worked perfectly every time. We ended up doing seven takes, two of which we had to abort partway through for reasons I can’t remember, but the other five were “keepers,” as they say. I don’t know which take we finally chose to use, but the entire scene is a single shot that lasts about five and a half minutes. I am so glad we were able to successfully shoot it as one continuous wide shot from beginning to end, as I believe it’s what makes the scene so compelling. I still make frittatas all the time but they often end up sticking, no matter what pan I use, and I kick myself for not slipping that perfect pan into my bag on the last day of filming.