How Sebastian Maniscalco’s Passion Project Gave His Father a Moment ‘He’s Been Living 77 Years For’ (Video)
12.06.2023 - 18:55
/ thewrap.com
“Write what you know,” is the sage advice usually attributed to Mark Twain. And comedian extraordinaire, Sebastian Maniscalco, has made a very successful career taking it literally. Although his standup act has brought him fame, his latest project, the autobiographical film “About My Father,” is the passion project he says his father has “been living 77 years for.”Although many of the story details of the comedy film that Maniscalco both stars in and co-wrote are fictional – but what is hit-the-nail-on-the-head true is his relationship with his father, played in the movie by Robert De Niro.“My relationship with my father’s pretty accurate.
My father’s, you know, stubborn, hardheaded, judgmental, you know, that seems to be true to form,” Maniscalco told TheWrap, not in a “curse that man!” way but rather in an “I love the old guy” kinda way.“I was just writing about what I know, and I just know that Italian and Italian culture, we’re very opinionated. We never really shy away from speaking our true feelings. And there’s generally no filter,” he said.
“I know that to be a fact that with my father, just how he communicates with me is extremely honest and sometimes a little bit harsh. I don’t know any other way. It’s like growing up, we were either laughing or crying.
It just seemed to be how we communicated with one another.”That relationship is something that Maniscalco “exploits” in his standup, but wanted to give more context to it in a longer form. “I thought, hey, I want to exploit my father’s relationship and my relationship. I do it in my standup, but in a film, you could give it more of a runway, a ramp and kind of see both sides of the coin. And then I thought it would be great to kind of have those two cultures –
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