John Turturro's 'Passione' for Naples

John Turturro is in previews on Broadway right now, directing "Relatively Speaking" -- three one-act plays by Woody Allen, Elaine May and Ethan Coen. (They couldn't agree on who the director should be, the actor said, "so I guess I was the sacrificial choice.") His heart, however, may still be in Naples -- the scene and subject of "Passione," his celebration of Neapolitan music and feeling, which is playing at Huntington's Cinema Arts Centre and will feature a Skype interview with the director tonight after the 7:30 screening.

After starring in yet another "Transformers" movie, what prompted you to do a documentary about Neapolitan music?

I was invited. I had done a play, "Ghosts of Naples," in New York and then in Naples, and my movie "Romance and Cigarettes" had done very well there, so the distributors asked me. They originally wanted to do a "Buena Vista Social Club" kind of thing, but that was about a specific band. I said maybe it would be good to do a story about the city itself, but through its music.

One of the things that strikes you -- and makes you re-examine a lot of what else passes for popular music -- is the naked emotion of the performances in "Passione."

These people, when they sing these songs, are really planted in the ground. There's a real need to express and communicate their experience. This one woman, Monica Pinto, sings this song "Vesuvius" -- she lives on the volcano. But when she sings it, the hair on your arm gets raised. It's not something you're used to. It gets you in touch with the impulse that we all have and that sometimes gets covered up.

You let the performances and the songs play out -- there are no distractions and seemingly no fear that the singers will lose their audience. What led you to that?

Those people could sustain it. They're revealing themselves, moment by moment, so I just sort of went with it. Also, when you have limited means, you start to find different ways of doing things. We discovered the movie as we made it.

You use some archival footage, but the heart and soul of the film are the singers. But they're not just singers, are they?

No, they're actors, too. They really are under the lyrics; they're telling you a story. And that was something I was constantly surprised by.