Written By: Jayme Face
This New York native is not new to the industry. As a longtime actor, writer, producer, director he told us all about his latest films Dream Round and Carolina’s Calling.
Photographer: Jay Curtis
upfrontNY: Can you tell us about Dream Round?
Michael Saquella: Dream Round is a comedy golf movie but a tear-jerker. It’s kind of like the golf version of a Rocky movie. It is about a gentleman who could have been a pro golfer many years ago when he was younger. He decided to get married and have a family. Even when he had his family, he would still win all the local tournaments, and he could have been a pro, but he decided to work and work hard. As he got older, he got so busy at work he kind of forgot about his family. One night on Christmas Eve, his family gives him a kiss on the forehead and says they’re going to go out. He doesn’t even have time to acknowledge they’re there. They get killed in a car crash on Christmas Eve. Fifteen years later, he’s a bum who doesn’t shave, smokes cigars, lives in a trailer out in Arizona. When a ten-year-old little girl, a ghost, comes to him that only he can see. A waitress somehow convinces him to get motivated to get his life back in line, clean up and start practicing golf again. He has to go out and beat his nemesis, the pro golfer on the golf course he’s been practicing. If he beats him he may be able to get into a pre-qualifier and after the pre-qualifier he can get into the open. The guy he has to beat is Richard Grieco (If Looks Could Kill, 21 Jump Street). There’s also a love story. There’s also a cute little bonding of a ten-year-old girl who reminds him of his daughter. Then there’s a great old professional golfer that’s his wife channeling herself through a guy who passed away many years ago. And that’s what it’s about!
upfrontNY: What specifically drew you to this role and how do you connect with the character?
Michael Saquella: I always wanted to be a golfer later in life, and I got pretty good at it. I practiced every day; like football practice, I would go twice a day. So, there I felt like I could make it. As an actor, I felt like I could be a pro golfer because you always hear of pro athletes go into the movie business, but when have you heard of a movie star or an actor going into pro sports. Rare if ever it happens, that was the idea. What if I could make it and do both? So, that motivated me. As far as the character is concerned, he’s an average Joe; he’s not a sex symbol. He’s not Brad Pitt or Burt Reynolds. He’s just a guy. He could be a mechanic. He could be a manager at Walmart. He could be a donut shop guy. He’s just a guy that had some talent that could I could play instead of all these New York gangster guys I play. Just A regular Joe that could play golf that loves to eat, so it was really easy to develop the character and hone into the golf. Then I haven’t had a lot of tragedy in my life, but I’ve been around a lot of tragedy. Splitting up with my ex and her taking my daughter to Chicago and go thousands of miles away from me is a tragedy. To have your daughter, daddy’s little girl, all of a sudden gone is tragic. So, that element with my character has a similarity. And the love of golf, his favorite sport, was easy for me to do and get into it.
upfrontNY: You also directed and wrote Carolinas Calling can you tell us more about that?
Michael Saquella: Carolina’s Calling is a comedy with an alien twist. I’m fascinated with space, mars, and solar systems. I’m nuts about that stuff, even when I was a kid, even before Star Wars came out. I wanted to do something. I’ve written several Science Fiction projects or scripts, but this one was cool because I wrote it for comedy, which I’d never done before. The main character in this is Bob, and he’s an alien. His ship is around our satellites because our signals; not only are they bouncing off our satellites back to earth, but they’re going 4 or 5 or 6 lightyears away. They’re hitting another civilization, an alien civilization, and their brains are getting fried by our rays, microwaves, and radio waves. So, he’s out to seek and destroy our satellites. There are two engineers, one is played by myself (I die in the beginning of the movie.), and the second engineer is played by Antonio Sabato Jr. (the ex -Calvin Klein underwear guy, the soap opera star). He’s an engineer who develops continuous energy and this energy is like the Tesseract in the Avengers movies. Once they get this working, there won’t be any more need for fossil fuels. Once it finally happens, he tries to raise money to start building these little boxes that are called the “Radiotrons,” and they can’t get any money. He keeps getting calls to go to South Carolina in his sleep, he has dreams about it. He finally goes to Carolina, and he meets this alien who’s crashed five years earlier. The alien has been living with a hick by the name of Charlie. So, he’s been in a barn, and he’s been using all the parts from the crashed ship trying to build this teleportation system to send Bob home. When the audience meets Bob, he’s funny who is a redneck. He doesn’t talk in an alien language and doesn’t speak normally. He talks like, “How ya doin? My names Bob, wanna a beer? I love that beer. You know if you spell my name backward you can never get it wrong Bob.”He’s cute as heck and loves drinking beer. The love interest is Stacey Dash (Clueless), a beautiful woman and a great actress. She falls in love with Antonio’s character. Savanah Moss plays Antonio’s daughter, a local actress who has done a great job. She falls in love with the South Carolina boy played by a pretty famous actor named Jacob Hopkins (The Goldbergs and the voice of some great cartoon characters). So there are two love relationships, there’s an alien and Charlie, and it’s a big old happy thing. They’re finally going to use the energy to send him home. It’s called Carolinas Calling, I directed it, and I co-wrote it.
upfrontNY: Since you are interested in aliens, what do you think about the storming of area 51 and the C.I.A. confirming U.F.O. sightings?
Michael Saquella: I believe it; I’m into it. I witnessed the Phoenix Lights. I was doing a live show in Arizona. We took a break during the show (I do a Blues Brothers act). We were out back and we saw the Phoenix Lights. It was strange. I’ve seen a couple of things myself being out in the desert, and I had a cabin up in the mountains. I believe it, and I do think it’s true. A lot of it is a hoax, but I do see things that you’ve got to say to yourself wait a minute. When you look up and you sit outside, smoke a big fat cigar, and you’re out there for hours at a time, and you’re in the middle of the Arizona desert with no pollution from floodlights you can feel it. It feels like you could touch the Milky Way. You see stuff, and I’m like wait a minute, what is that? You can see satellites turning in the sun hitting the solar panels, but every now and then there’s just something weird that you see up there. I’ve seen all those tapes the Navy and Air Force put up showing objects flying by faster than they could ever go. So, yeah, I believe it. I’ve never been to Area 51. I don’t think I’d storm it, but I believe; that someday we’re going to know. Well, I grew up in upstate NY, and that’s what got me fascinated. When I was in my teens on a hot summer night with absolutely no light pollution, I remember seeing stuff up in the sky before there was a ton of satellites up there. Of course, I’m a “Trekkie” I love Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
upfrontNY: What inspired you to start Cactus Blue Entertainment?
Michael Saquella: To produce, direct, and star in my movies, mainly to control it. So, you do finally get a movie funded through Hollywood or New York. You get big companies to say okay, and they put an executive producer on, and they basically tell you what to do. When you’re in the middle of the shoot, and you get to a scene that’s so important they get rip the pages out, and say we’ve got to go on, we’re over budget. They take the script that you believe in, and other people read it and love it, and they make it all commercial because they have to make money on it. They change it or they say they’ll fund your movie, co-produce it with you, but they call the shots. It’s rare to get a deal. You’re directing, or you wrote a movie, and suddenly it’s not your movie anymore. So, I started my own company, and I’ve been doing it since probably 1996 or 1997, and I had Cactus Blue Entertainment in 2006. I’ve been doing projects, and I had complete control. If you can get the funding, then you can do what you want. I’m selling all my movies. They are getting distribution deals. Dream Round coming out on November 10th is in 63 countries around the world. Amazingly, it’ll be on every digital platform for video on demand right now. Then it switches over to Prime and Netflix, and eventually, the movie will end up on Hallmark or Lifetime.
upfrontNY: Is there anything that has surprised you about having your own production company?
Michael Saquella: How hard it was, how difficult it was to get people to believe in you to loan you money or invest in your project or to actually like a script. The surprises were the people who don’t believe how are you going to get the cameras, how are you going to get it together, you’re in the middle of nowhere, why did you do it in Arizona. So, surprises were people were very negative and very jealous. You’ve got to fight the battles. There’s a lot of hurdles. It was frustrating in the beginning, but now I don’t care because now I have a track record!
upfrontNY: Working in all different aspects of the industry for so long do you feel it has evolved in any ways over the years?
Michael Saquella: Oh, absolutely! Writing’s changed, directing’s changed, the films have changed. When I started, the first film I worked on in 1978 was a western, and they were still talking about John Wayne, who had just passed away, and all the great old cowboy actors. I started in a wild west town.
Then Spielberg came out, then Zemeckis came out, Lucas came out, and everything started changing. They started making these bigger budget films, but they had great stories and great cinematography. You enjoyed it. CGI and all the special effects were minimal. Then Back to the Future came out and some other ones where they started doing some cool stuff. They got bigger, but they still were 8mm.
Then it changed, and they started doing all these technical, Science Fiction, aliens everywhere, and people that can lift buildings. Everyone became a Luke Skywalker in all the movies and the storylines were different. It was hard to follow.
I watched the producing change. I watched how they tried to squash the independent movie pictures. In the beginning, there were no independent movie people. They were hard to find. Then there was a gold rush of independent films in the 90s. Everyone was making these action pictures where everyone wanted to be like Stallone. Everybody wanted to be Schwarzenegger. When I go to the American film market, it’s all these action pictures, Kung Fu movies, and boxing movies. Then it went to Science Fiction, and then the superhero movies came out. When was the last time you sat down and saw a good movie? I said to myself I haven’t sat down and watched a movie, not with special effects, but with acting where you laugh and you cry. When I go to a movie, I’m constantly picking it apart. I saw a big budget movie the other night, and I saw the boom mic twice. I saw them stretching the script. I’ve got a little bit of a name, but I’m a movie maker. I have friends who aren’t even in show business and they see it. It’s just to make a buck now a day.
upfrontNY: You have worked alongside some big names have you ever had a star struck moment?
Michael Saquella: No, not really because I started when I was really young. When I was a kid, I got a job at a theatre, and everybody came through from Frank Sinatra to Dean Martin to Shirley MacLaine and Raquel Welch. I was meeting them as a fifteen-year-old busboy. Then I became an assistant backstage manager and got to meet everybody and got to talk to everybody. In Rochester New York, in the seventies, when Elvis Presley came through I was one of the spotlight operators. They gave me a two-hundred-dollar tip. I couldn’t believe how black his hair was. Starstruck, maybe when I was a kid with Elvis, but everybody else other than Burt Reynolds. I met him when I was a kid. I met him maybe back then, but as I got older, I wasn’t tainted. I always respected them. I never asked for autographs I tried to be their friend, try to make them laugh.
upfrontNY: What is something you love to do that is unique to New York?
Michael Saquella: The food! Are you kidding me! The first thing I do is I’ve got to get a slice of pizza pie. I got to fold it in half and eat it like a New Yorker because they don’t do that out here. There’s something in the water here and the dough doesn’t taste as good as it does back there. You know, the food is incredible! The spaghetti, the sauce, linguini, and clams, whatever it is, it’s great. When I get back, the first thing is I’ve got to go to a great Italian restaurant. I have to have a nice dish, that to me is like ‘yeah baby!’ I don’t like the smell of the city, but I like the food.
upfrontNY: Is there anything else you would like to let our readers know?
Michael Saquella: Growing up in New York especially, when you’re in a small town, and you want to be in show business you just don’t know how and they don’t teach you how to get started. They don’t teach you how to make it when you take acting classes. You take drama classes that teach you how to sing, how to act, but you don’t know where to go or what to do. When I was younger, my dream was to come to California as a kid. I used to play beach boy music, and I would look at the blizzard and watch the snow. All I wanted to do was go to California .I saw a Burt Reynolds movie, and I really wanted to meet him, and when I finally went on vacation to California, I met Burt on a set of a movie called Lucky Lady. He was shooting with Liza Minelli and Gene Hackmen. I got to go in because security wasn’t tight then. He thought I wanted an autograph. I asked him how he got started in show business. He asked what I wanted to be. I said, “I want to be like you, an actor.” He thought it was funny that I didn’t ask for an autograph and he told me to reach for the stars. I want to go there, but I didn’t know-how. What he meant, and he told me, was to harness a feeling. The feeling that I harnessed was because of Burt Reynolds. I’m in show business because of what he told me. I told him I’d work with him some day. Then I got to work with him years later. We got to hang out, and we ended up becoming good friends. He was someone I adored when I was a kid. My idol became my friend. It was just really wonderful. A dream I had growing up in New York looking at the blizzard; everything came true. What I wanted to say was that when you look out your window, and it’s snowing or you want to be an actor and live in New York or Pennsylvania or some small-town USA, don’t quit. Don’t give up. Just follow your dreams. Go do it! Harness that feeling and do it no matter what it is, whether you’re going to be an actor, a policeman, a fireman, run for congress, going to be president, whatever it is, go for it. Don’t matter what you look like, don’t matter your shape or size, it doesn’t matter how heavy or skinny you are, it doesn’t matter if your red, white, blue, green, do it!
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