‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’ Returns the NYC Crime Drama to the Actual City Streets

Writer/director Noah Segan’s “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is a love letter to a bygone era of the city he grew up in, as he follows an aging pickpocket (John Turturro) through the rarely filmed working-class neighborhoods of the five boroughs.

“Today, you see a New York movie, it’s New York with a couple of B-camera shots of the city,” said executive producer Rian Johnson when he stopped the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox, ahead the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. “You watch this movie, it’s steeped in New York. It is just drenched in the city.”

Added Segan, who has been friends with Johnson since starring in his first film “Brick” (and who has appeared in all of Johnson’s subsequent films, including the “Knives Out” trilogy), “It was all location shooting. There were days we rode the subway around and just shot the movie.”

Segan, Johnson, and producer Leopold Hughes were joined in the studio by stars Turturro and Giancarlo Esposito, who together have starred in some of the greatest New York films ever, including Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”

“[John and I] are both New Yorkers, and New York has an energy and a feeling, and in a way it’s a character in our film,” said Esposito.

Turturro is also reunited in the film with his old New York acting buddy Steve Buscemi, having co-starred together in various Coen brothers’ films, but until “Picketpocket,” where Buscemi plays Turturro’s character’s longtime pawn broker, have never shared much screen time.

“We were lovers in ‘Miller’s Crossing,’ but you never saw us,” said Turturro of the subtly implied, but never made explicit, relationship between his and Buscemi’s characters in the Coens’ 1990 crime film. “And that was the flaw of the movie, that you never saw a post-coital scene between Bernie [Buscemi] and me.  I always thought that would’ve been really helpful for the audience to understand.”

Watch the complete conversation with the “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” team above.

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