Peter Facinelli Interview with Scene Louisiana

MH: You filmed the first few installments of the Twilight franchise up in the Northwest. Was it a big shift coming down to Louisiana for the final two films?
PF: I actually enjoyed it, you know? I love the scenery there, the food, the culture. I shot a movie in New Orleans a while back and I’ve always loved Louisiana. So getting to go back there was kind of nice. What was really nice about it was it was so warm there. We went up to Canada and it was freezing cold so it was a little bit of a treat to be able to walk on set in a t-shirt or go to dinners.

MH: Did you have the opportunity to make it back to New Orleans?
PF: I did. My family came into town and I took them to New Orleans and we had a good time. I think I tweeted a picture…there was an old photography place where we walked in to like a costume place where you could put on some old New Orleans garb and take a picture like an old time photo. So the kids had a lot of fun with that and I took the kids to Bourbon Street during the day, as they were hosing down the streets, and my little daughter said, “Why do they hose down the streets?” I said, “Because grown-ups throw up on it all night long.” She was like, “Dad, you can’t take me here ever again.”

MH: Yeah, there are a few things in the morning that will make you blush on Bourbon.
PF: They had a good time, a really good time. New Orleans, in that part of town, there’s just so much culture, and the music’s great and the food is great. It was exciting to be there.

MH: You had to spend a lot of time in Baton Rouge. Was there anything that made it a little more comfortable there?
PF: We had apartments [in Perkins Rowe] and I remember my first night, I was so hungry and I went out to the strip mall and I had California Pizza Kitchen and I was like, “I can’t believe I’m eating at California Pizza Kitchen when I’m in Baton Rouge.” It’s pretty ironic but, yeah, we just hit up a lot of cool restaurants. We worked so many hours that most of the time we were inside the studio but whenever we got to go out, we just hit up the restaurants and had some good food.

MH: I really want to talk to you about what you’re doing with Facinelli Films. In particular, can you tell me about Street Soldier?
PF: Yeah, I started this company a little over a year ago. I had three scripts that I had written and every time I’d get some traction on them, I’d go off to do a movie and it would all fall apart. So I hired a guy named Rob DeFranco to kind of oversee my company. But in the first six months, we had two films in production so things got off the bat pretty quickly. One of them was a little movie I sold to the Hallmark channel that my wife starred in and it aired in February to great ratings, so Hallmark was ecstatic. The second one was a little movie called Loosies with Jaimie Alexander from Thor, Michael Madsen and Vincent Gallo and that was a blast. It was about a two million dollar picture that we shot in New York and Rhode Island. And IFC just picked it up so it’ll get a limited release and hopefully grow from there on a platform.

Read the complete interview HERE