IT’S only fitting that the film that made history at the fledgling Tribeca Film Festival, which wraps up tomorrow, should be a Gotham-set production by a native New Yorker.
David Duchovny’s directing debut, “House of D” – in which the former “X-Files” actor stars with his wife, Téa Leoni, and Robin Williams – became the first film ever to be sold during the festival’s run when Lions Gate Films snapped it up last week.
Duchovny told The Post it “made sense” to make Tribeca the stage for the world premiere of his “urban fairy tale,” which lists festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal as a producer.
“Being a New York film, and me being a New Yorker, it all seemed to be leading that way,” says Duchovny, who was joined at the red-carpet screening last night by Billy Crystal, Julianne Moore and Williams who, Duchovny quips, agreed to star in his low-budget film because “I had pictures of him with a farm animal.”
“House of D” is a ’70s-era coming-of-age tale set in downtown Manhattan, which makes it “geographically autobiographical,” says the actor; that’s where he grew up.
Much of the film is told in flashback, as the grown-up Tommy (Duchovny) looks back on his life and past relationships with the people who made him who he is, including a mentally disabled janitor (Williams) and a female prison inmate (Erykah Badu) who, according to Duchovny, sports “the largest Afro in captivity.”
The “house of detention” of the title is based on a real women’s jail that occupied the corner of 10th Street and Sixth Avenue until it was torn down in 1973 and replaced by a garden.
“I just thought what an interesting thing, to have a prison in the biggest city in the world. It’s such a surreal, Fellini-esque thing,” he says.
Budget constraints nearly moved the production to Toronto, but, Duchovny says, sanity prevailed and the film was shot in New York.
“I know the city and I know what I want it to look like, and I know what is real and what looks like bulls—,” says Duchovny, who has wanted to write and direct his own film since leaving “The X-Files” in 2002.
“I think David hit a home run with this film,” says Lions Gate president Tom Ortenberg, who fell in love with the script when he first read it 18 months ago.
“He shows great sensitivity as a director; the film is poignant and emotional, yet very funny and uplifting as well.”
It’s the unabashed emotion in the story that is giving Duchovny the jitters ahead of the movie’s fall release.
“I feel very vulnerable,” the 43-year-old actor admits, noting that his inspirations were films that embraced the “heart-on-your-sleeve sentimentality of childhood” such as “Cinema Paradiso” and “Stand By Me.”
“But, look, you put it out there. Part of surviving in this game is hardening yourself to the criticism and inuring yourself to the praise.”