Noah Segan Picks a Pocket or Two

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Noah Segan

Picks a Pocket or Two

by Jay S. Jacobs

The world is full of professions that no longer make sense in the modern world – switchboard operators, tailors, video store clerks, shoe repairmen. It only stands to reason that if legit professions get outdated, so must illicit ones. How much can a pickpocket make when no one carries cash anymore? All of which fascinated Segan – telling a story about someone still doing something after the world has moved on.

“I tried to write a movie about a fax machine, and it wasn't very interesting,” Segan laughed to me on the red carpet at the Philadelphia Film Festival, where it was the opening night film for the 35^th anniversary festival. “So I pivoted to pickpocket.”

Segan was in high spirits before the screening, talking with me and my fellow Philadelphia Film Critics Circle writer Rich Drees of Film Buff Online, joking as he walked up, “Don’t bite me.”

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York was a bit of a tonal shift for Segan. Although Segan has tried on many styles as an actor, his first two directing jobs – a short in the anthology Scare Package and his feature debut Blood Relatives (which also played at the Philadelphia Film Festival a few years ago) – were mostly in the horror genre.

Still, he brought a lot of knowledge to the table, from decades of being on both sides of the camera. He’s learned a lot from his time on sets, much of which he’s now putting to use as a filmmaker.

“Just to run a set that smiles,” Segan said. “It's not enough to have a no jerks policy. You have to have an ‘everybody's having a good time’ policy. People put all of themselves into making a movie, and you have to reciprocate.”

Segan’s new film, unlike his previous horror work, is a sweetly nostalgic, slightly comic, but also melancholy crime story. (That said, Blood Relatives had a lot of funny parts, too.) However, Segan wasn’t specifically looking to change things up.

“I guess I just think everything is genre,” Segan explained. “The filmmakers that I love so much, like the Coens, everything is a genre movie. I started thinking of a character. I didn't start thinking of a genre, but it became fun to consider a genre. Hopefully, the right genre for the story that I wanted to tell.”

So how did that story take shape for Segan?

“Once I discovered this character, this guy Harry that John Turturro plays, I knew it was a guy caught between two worlds,” Segan said. “That's what the movie was about. That's what the character was about. How do you illustrate that?”

It all came back to the idea of a world moving on faster than the people who live in it.

“I got very excited about the idea of pickpocketing because it also seems like it's… I don't want to call it a vocation, but an endeavor caught between two worlds,” he laughed.

The film’s title echoes the wistful cadence of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York,” another story about someone suspended between worlds – though Segan has never explicitly cited the song as inspiration.

However, star Turturro was definitely an inspiration for Segan.

“He's such an icon,” Segan said. “It's impossible not to think of the ideal of John Turturro. When you're starting to talk about New York, you're starting to talk about a performance that requires this level of nuance, he's simply one of the great actors. (chuckles) So I think when a lot of filmmakers are conceptualizing their ideas, they go, ‘Who are the great actors?’ John is very high on that list.”

So how did Turturro come on board to play Harry?

“It was a Faustian bargain. I happily sold my soul,” Segan joked. Then he became serious. “There's no rule that you can't take a big swing. We took a big swing, and we sent him the script. He read it, and he said, ‘Let's have lunch.’ That was our first date. That's how it started.”

However, Segan said that Turturro’s involvement was not the impetus to get the movie the financing to get off the ground. In fact, that part of the process was already in action.

“We had partners that we were working with to finance the movie through our production company T-Street,” Segan explained. “It's a version of the story you don't hear that often, where everybody was on the same page. Everybody was really excited.

“Like I said, you take a big swing at an actor like John to see if they'll be interested in making a movie,” he continued. “People are maybe cautiously optimistic, maybe managing expectations, but we lucked out.”

Lucked out is a bit of an understatement. Beyond Turturro, Segan signed up such heavy-hitting performers as Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tatiana Maslany and former Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz in a cameo role.

However, beyond the talented cast, there is another very important character – so important that it is named in the title – the five boroughs of New York. Segan has said several times that this film was a love letter to his hometown. Therefore, it was vital that the film showed beloved locations, the highbrow and the low class, the pulse of the city that never sleeps.

“It was everything,” Segan enthused. “Being able to scout New York, you're never wanting for anything. You can conjure up whatever's in your mind's eye. If you're a New Yorker – which I am, and a lot of people working the movie were – you find yourself trading your version of New York with someone else's. One block for another. It becomes a real potpourri, which is an interesting word to use for New York. New York is great; it is. It's a lovely town, a beautiful town, and you get to really create a variety when you're working with people.”

As a New Yorker and a film buff, he also saw his movie as part of a long, storied history of Manhattan movies. He hopes that his film will honor some of those films that paved the way for The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.

“It's hard to make a New York movie and not think of New York movies,” Segan admitted. “And I did. Everything from movies that are stylistically very different from ours, like Sweet Smell of Success, to movies that maybe are a little bit closer, like Desperately Seeking Susan. Really ran the gamut. Then there's the movies of the filmmakers you can't ignore, like Spike [Lee] or Sidney Lumet, who really embodied New York filmmaking in a big way.”

Now, here he is, an hour and a half down I-95, introducing his film to a different city. As a repeat Philadelphia Film Festival guest, he is excited to share his work with Philly – and he probably will try to avoid getting into sports arguments.

“It's a dream come true to be the opening night movie here,” Segan said. “I was very proud to be here with my first film, and very proud to serve on the jury, which was very exciting. A very close friend of mine, Michael Lerman, is here at the festival. I have a lot of family in Philadelphia. It feels like home, and it's nice to come back.”