As an actor, John Turturro grabbed attention in the ’90s in films by Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Clockers, He Got Game, Girl 6, Summer of Sam, She Hate Me, and Miracle at St. Anna) and the Coen Brothers (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou).

(Meanwhile, to a newer generation he may be best known for his appearances in the Transformers movies.)

However, Turturro has also always written and directed films of his own, including Mac (1992), Illuminata (1998), Romance & Cigarettes, and the documentary about Italian music, Passione (2010). His latest project as writer, director, and actor is Fading Gigolo, a warm and gentle grown-up romantic comedy that also happens to be both mildly raunchy and profoundly humanistic.

In the R-rated Fading Gigolo, Turturro plays Fioravante, a quietly charming single man in Brooklyn who’s roped by his friend Murray (Woody Allen) into becoming a paid lover who’s clients include Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, and Vanessa Paradis as Avigal, a shy and lonely, widowed Orthodox Jewish woman. (Liev Schrieber plays a neighborhood Shomrim safety patrol officer who’s jealously over-protective of Avigal.)

I sat down one-on-one with Turturro a few weeks ago in Chicago to talk about finding the film’s comedic tone, balancing the demands of the director with the needs of actors, and “artisanal” lovemaking.

Fading Gigolo opens today in select theaters.

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Despite it’s obviously adult themes, the film has such a nice, gentle tone.

John Turtrurro: It’s hard to make a delicate comedy. When someone say to me as an actor, “This is the tone I want,” I’m deaf to that. You can’t apply tone. It’s like a painting on a wall: You have all these different colors, one on top of the other, and something emerges because of someone’s aesthetic.

It always had a gentleness to it. However, my initial idea wasn’t as delicate as it became–but you start discovering things, finding that less can be more. You can do a comedy that is sweet with human elements, and then it turns out to have other ramifications about religion and sex, without me ever saying, “This is what this is,” and going into a lot of Freudian explanations. That all emerges from the combination of people you bring together.

I knew I didn’t want to exploit the sordid side of it too much. I could have made it dirtier and made it more satirical, but then it’s harder for the audience to care about the characters. I’ve done some crazy stuff in films before, but you don’t have to stick to the same set of colors for everything. I was listening to Gene Ammons songs when I was writing, and “Canadian Sunset” gave that feeling of moving forward, traveling music, life goes on for everybody. You can hit a pothole when you’re 17 or 18 or 35 or 50, and you pick yourself up and ask, “What am I gonna do?”

It’s certainly a very character-rich film.

Turtrurro: Yeah, Woody’s character does the talking, while my character quietly does the work.

Once I saw Woody and myself working together and saw Vanessa, then I saw the heart of the movie starting to happen. Then I realized the other characters would have to fit in around that. The tone came out of the specificity of the people.

I try to make something that I would like to see and that people I know would like to see. You’re never sure of that, but I could knock ideas around with Woody. He didn’t tell me what to do, but he encouraged me to dig deep with it.

There were times when things in the movie were a little bit bigger, but I clipped them out—we didn’t need it. It can be more effective when it’s implied. My first draft was really broad—I showed it to Woody, and he didn’t like it. It’s always a little disappointing, but then I showed it to other people, and they had similar reactions. Both my oldest son and Woody pointed toward the character of Avigal and said, “That person is interesting.”

I like women, and I’m interested in women. In so many films, women characters are so inconsequential—they’re like eye candy, that’s it. A lot of times women are just imitating things that men do in movies.

It’s R-rated, but it never feels offensively so. Instead, the film is much more interested in the idea of what is love and romance.

Turtrurro: It’s that unceasing need that people have for human contact and intimacy. It never ends. People are looking for that bed to share in the darkness, a bare shoulder to grab on to. All of us are hungry; we want warmth, sex, love, and friendship. Those are things we all need. That doesn’t stop at any age. Life isn’t over.

I thought if I took these characters who had a lot of life experience and put them in situations that were brand new for them, that would be interesting. That’s what the film turned out to be about—a comedy about people who are lonely.

As an actor, are you an “actor’s director” on the set?

Turtrurro: Not necessarily. I think the look of the film is very important; the music is important. You can do great acting and then put terrible music over it and it ruins the important. I love being involved in every aspect of the film. If the lighting is right, it can help the acting. A bad wig can kill a movie.

The more you direct, the better you become at orchestrating things, moving the pace along. It can be hard for actors, I know for myself, to keep doing it faster, faster, faster, because you really have to know the material well, and sometimes on a movie you don’t. As a director, that can sink you—you wind up saying, “Okay, that scene’s really good, but it needs to get on with it.” I’m getting better at that.

I try to cast the right people and create an environment that’s helpful for them, not dictatorial. I try to help people find the emotion of a scene. I think I can do that because many times in movies I’ve acted in, I’ve been left to my own devices as an actor. So I think I can help actors with that.

My agent introduced me to Vanessa and encouraged me to think about her for this. At first I was a little hesitant, but she came and did research, and she far exceeded my hope for the character—she took it much further.

With Woody it was a process of writing and working in the theater, so that by the time we did the movie, I’d gotten to know him. Some of our relationship in the film is like me and him in imaginary circumstances. I thought we could have chemistry, and then once we got into the film, I could feel right away that we did.

As the star, this role is very different from most of your previous on-screen roles; much quieter, and lower key.

Turtrurro: What am I supposed to do? The same thing every time? I’m not known for one thing. My job is to hold your attention, so it’s better if I can surprise you a little.

Was this a very personal film for you?

Turtrurro: It didn’t start out personal. I like films about prostitution, I like films about religion. It just started out as an idea, but it became more personal to me as I worked on the script and the characters start to come to life. And you realize this is about something you understand and it resonates.

The film also examines a wide mix of cultures alongside one another.

Turtrurro: I have a friend who, like Woody’s character of Murray, had a rare book store, and he was an older Jewish man, and he had a black girlfriend with a lot of kids. I thought that was perfect—I hired him to help me do some religious research.

So you take things from life and then start to rub the sticks together, and maybe a little fire gets going. If you’re gonna do a movie that takes place in the city, you want to draw on what’s actually there, not some fabricated version. At least that’s what interests me. I feel comfortable in a multicultural setting.

There’s also a strong sense in the film of the appreciation of older, more hand-crafted, traditional things.

Turtrurro: Those things are cyclical. Now days you have kids dressed like Woodie Guthrie hanging out in farmers’ markets. Artisanal crafts are suddenly “hip,” but this has always been around and appealing.

It’s about appreciating things that really exist. I don’t wanna be nostalgic about it, but I wanted to say “This still exists, these people are still here.”

I love that stuff. Anything is interesting when you take it apart. I feel comfortable in that world, and I don’t think it’s been explored much in film. When you look at professions on screen, it’s always a cop or lawyer. There are rarely movies about people who are builders, who build something rather than destroy something. I wanted to have that as an element that forms the relationships in the film.

Your character almost approaches lovemaking as an artisanal craft.

In my opinion, it is. It can be sloppy, but in its higher form, you have to read the other person and be aware of them. It’s like playing an instrument.