Jennifer Esposito grew up watching Hollywood masterpieces like “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos,” and while she admired their filmmaking craft, she lamented how the women were left on the sidelines.
So she wrote and directed a mafia film told entirely from the female perspective in “Fresh Kills,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and finally screens in Maryland at the Annapolis Film Festival this Friday where Esposito will hold a Q&A before it opens in movies theaters nationwide June 14.
“It has been a struggle from day one for a female to insert herself into a very masculine genre,” Esposito told WTOP. “We’ve seen the male point of view ad nauseam … but we never see the female’s point of view in that world. I happened to grow up around those women and they had voices, they had lives, dreams, desires and none of it is ever, ever talked about on screen, so it’s been a happy challenge for me to bring this out.”
Not only does she write and direct the movie, Esposito also plays Francine Larusso, the wife of mob boss Joe Larusso (Domenick Lombardozzi, “The Wire”) operating in Staten Island, New York, in the late 80s and 90s.
“In ‘The Sopranos,’ in ‘The Godfather,’ all of these famous mafia tropes, you see the men at the table … then you see a woman’s hand leave a pastry,” Esposito said. “In this film … you see who’s watching that table: the daughter. … We saw [a mafia wife] with Edie Falco, but I’m really looking at the daughters. Meadow Soprano wasn’t depicted, in my opinion from what I saw growing up, correct. Let’s really see what young women go through in a family like this.”
Francine’s two daughters are childhood besties but have opposite personalities as they enter their teenage years. Connie (Odessa A’zion, “Grand Army”) is a cocky firebrand more than willing to look the other way when it comes to her family’s mafia involvement, while Rose (Emily Bader, CW’s “Charmed”) is more mild-mannered and grows increasingly skeptical of her dad.
“Her older sister, Connie, is becoming a product of this society and this violent family, but Rose has a tumultuous mind, living in this constant state of being on the edge and it just doesn’t settle well with her,” Bader told WTOP. “The way she’s always coped with it was through silence, but as she gets older … she’s almost suffocating in her own silence, in her inability to say, ‘I don’t think this is right, this is not the life I want, but do I have a choice?'”
“It’s basically her discovery of who and what her family is really involved in,” Esposito said. “It is in the mafia genre, but it really is so much more than that. It’s more about finding a voice in a world that tells you not to have one. Rose, being born into such a life, asks the question: what choice did I have in this? What say did I have in this?”
Her directorial debuts is a long time coming, as Esposito initially wanted to play Rose and now plays her mother.
“Working with Emily has been an absolute dream,” Esposito said. “I started thinking about this probably 25 years ago and throughout my career, I went back and forth going in writing. In the beginning, of course I wanted to play Rose, then throughout the writing, I cannot think of anyone who is more Rose than Emily, so it was just so wonderful to be able to play with someone that I created and to see it visually come to life in Emily Bader.”
This year also marks the 20th anniversary of Esposito’s role in “Crash” (2004), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10, 2004, and eventually won the Oscar for Best Picture. The mosaic film captured post-9/11 prejudices with an all-star ensemble cast of Don Cheadle, Terence Howard, Thandiwe Newton, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Ludacris, Michael Peña, Ryan Phillippe and Keith David.
“I loved that film,” Esposito said. “Fast and furious. I think my part was filmed in one week and, no joke, I remember getting the script and reading it within maybe 25 minutes because I was inhaling it. … Exactly what you saw on screen was exactly on the page. I remember walking in to meet Paul Haggis and saying, ‘This is going to win an Oscar,’ and he said, ‘From your mouth to God’s ears.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you,’ and sure enough, it won the Oscar.”
Hear our full conversation on the podcast below:
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