DITO MONTIEL MIXES UP HIS FRIENDS FOR FILM

(VIDEO) A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints author Dito Montiel had to mix up his friends in the film because it cost too much to show their real stories.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints author Dito Montiel has taken his autobiography of growing up in Astoria Queens and directed it for the big screen. Dito had to make a few changes concerning his buddies because he couldn’t afford to tell the real story of what happened to them in the film so he mixed up their stories instead.

Dito talks about how the idea for calling the book A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints came to him.

“There’s a kid Giuseppe who was deported to Italy for getting arrested too many times that I grew up and we put him in the film he gets killed by getting hit by a train. We had known a kid named Billy who had died riding on the trains but we couldn’t get permission to ride on a train and smash it and all that. So we did that and when we were just at the Venice Film Festival I called Giuseppe up to come over because he’s in Milano and he said, ‘I heard I died.’ He was all excited. He actually liked that he died.”

Before Dito became an author and a director he formed a punk rock band in the eighties called Gutterboy as the lead singer who back then signed an unprecedented deal for a million dollars with Geffen records. Dito says he still keeps in touch with the guys.

“The book was about people I kind of felt lucky to have met, just little stories. I followed the book called The Picture Book of Saints that I have since I’m a kid and there’s a picture of a saint and a story. I had a picture of a guy that I knew and I sort of wrote a little thing about him and then another one. I thought wow this is kind of an easy way to get a book out.”

Dito has another book coming out in February called The Clapper about a guy who claps for TV shows when they can’t get audience members. He’s also been hired by Paramount to write a screenplay called Running. rn

“Danny he actually wrote one of the cues in the film. Johnny is driving me crazy all the time because he wants to know who’s playing him. I’m like nobody, but I see him all the time.”