An award-winning filmmaker blends horror and sci-fi

When it was time to apply to college, Luke Momo took one tip in particular to heart: Don’t major in film. A close, older friend suggested he pick one of the humanities—English, history, philosophy—and instead explore the ways a particular subject intersects with film.

Now, with an award-winning debut feature under his belt and a trove of ideas to pursue, Momo has been reflecting on his time at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in philosophy, dove into filmmaking as a visual arts minor, and forged connections that proved invaluable when it came time to cast his movie, Capsules. 

A Princeton, New Jersey, native, Momo was drawn across the river to the University for its “intellectual rigor,” originally choosing to major in classics. He did veer from his friend’s advice a bit by minoring in visual arts with a concentration in film. But a philosophical ethics class he took with professor Janna van Grunsven, Ph.D., during his sophomore year made him reconsider. 

“After I took that class, I realized that [it was]what I’d want to do my major in [and explore]the intersection between philosophy and film,” he says. The professor “was able to share with me a higher level of some of the things I was interested in at that time—and I still am. She was very supportive in that way.”

Creating a Cinema Community on Campus

Outside of class, Momo founded Fordham’s Filmmaking Club in 2016, a kind of film study group for students interested in viewing and discussing movies, as well as pursuing projects together.

“We could help each other make our films and collaborate,” he says. “We’d have very memorable screenings of all kinds of different movies that you otherwise wouldn’t see, and you could watch them in a group and discuss them afterward.”

The club continues today, with students collaborating on film projects, sharing them, and hosting film festivals. “It seems to be fulfilling its original purpose and also growing—becoming more and encompassing more ideas and progressing,” Momo says.

He also completed two internships, one at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative—an artist-run nonprofit—and one at Le Cinéma Club, a curated streaming platform featuring one free film each week. 

“It was just really cool because week after week, we were researching, writing about, discovering, and highlighting works of film art,” he says, including a number of international films to which he wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed. 

From Campus Collaboration to Award-Winning Feature

Capsules, which Momo wrote with Davis Browne, FCLC ’19, features more than half a dozen Fordham graduates in starring and behind-the-scenes roles. 

The film blends sci-fi and horror, focusing on four chemistry students who experiment with mysterious substances and find themselves struggling with addiction in an unexpected way: They’ll die unless they take more.

“I just basically pursued an emotional feeling … the fear of letting one’s life slip away and a sadness over mistakes,” says Momo, who directed the film. The premise came after the pandemic, when “we had been through so many traumas personally, in our communities, and on a global level. All these things came together, and the idea for Capsules just sort of emerged.”

The film earned the Best Feature award at the 2022 Philip K. Dick Film Festival in New York City. Momo later sold the film to a distributor, and it’s available to watch on Tubi and Vudu.

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

While getting his master’s in media management at Fordham, Andrew Hevia, GABELLI ’15, earned a Fulbright fellowship to visit Hong Kong and make a documentary about the Art Basel fair and its effect on the city. He had previously made Rising Tide, a film documenting the fair’s impact on Miami, which aired in 2012 on a Florida PBS station.

When he arrived in Hong Kong, though, he realized he had underestimated the obstacles: a language barrier; an unfamiliarity with the city, especially compared to his native Miami; and a lack of access to some of the people whose stories he wanted to tell.

“As the bottom kept falling out on the movie I thought I was going to make, I realized the one person I had access to 24/7 was me,” he says. “So instead of making a bad version of the movie I set out to make, I figured I would make a different movie about how I failed to make the movie I set out to make.”

The resulting film, Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window, is a personal travelogue that highlights the senses of disorientation, loneliness, and wonderment that come with being a stranger in a strange land. It premiered in Austin at the South by Southwest film festival in March, and was screened on June 18 as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinemaFest.

In the film, which he shot entirely himself on a digital SLR camera and an iPhone, Hevia navigates Hong Kong—both within the context of Art Basel and outside of it—while grappling with the aftermath of a breakup and the difficulties of getting settled into his new home for 10 months. He winds up living in a space not much bigger than a closet with a loft bed, gets lost in an enormous indoor shopping mall, and seeks out, with varying degrees of success, local artists he can follow through Art Basel. The handheld camerawork and interposed shots of art galleries and street scenes (including footage from a protest in the wake of the city’s 2014 Umbrella Movement) give Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window a frenetic pace that leaves the viewer wanting to know more about everything they see.

Hevia said during a Q&A session following the BAM screening that many of his artistic choices in the film—including not shooting any clips longer than 10 seconds, making 10 months’ worth of footage feel like a compressed length of time, and using a speech-to-text robotic voice to deliver the second-person voiceover narration—were in service of finding a narrative that reflected his unsettled experience.

A text-to-speech robotic, second-person voiceover, for instance, “destabilized the ground, which reinforced the feeling I had in Hong Kong,” he said.

There were practical considerations, too. By not allowing himself to shoot any clips longer than 10 seconds, he not only cut down the amount of footage that he’d need to sort through, but he often appeared to be taking still photographs, giving him more freedom to shoot video in places where such activity is generally prohibited. After returning to the U.S., his editor and co-producer, Carlos David Rivera, helped him find the emotional center of the footage he had shot, acting as “part editor and part therapist,” Hevia said.

While he plans to continue writing and directing his own films—his next project, he says, will be his wedding video, which he hopes “strangers will want to watch on purpose”—Hevia also keeps busy with his work as a producer. He co-produced the Academy Award-winning 2016 feature Moonlight and now works full-time as North American vice president of Fabula, the Chilean production company founded by brothers Juan de Dios and Pablo Larraín.

With both his directing and producing work, Hevia says the Gabelli media management program was instrumental to getting him where he is in his career—not only through the Fulbright fellowship he won with the help of Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships but also through courses on the ever-shifting media landscape.

“Prior to Fordham, I felt like I had a grasp on what it took to make a film and how,” he explains. “What I was missing was a broader understanding of the why. The year I graduated film school [at Florida State University]was also the year YouTube launched, which heralded a seismic shift in content creation. Fordham gave me the tools to understand and engage with the new reality.”

Check the film’s official website for information on future screenings and watch the trailer below.

Street held an artist’s residency at the Navy Yard this past year and used the time to film workers on the docks, in abandoned buildings, and in the flow of the East River. He then mixed the footage with archival images of the once-vital and newly resuscitated complex.

“When it was a navy yard there were 70,000 people working there. Now there’s about 7,000 and the goal is for 22,000 people to be working there by 2030, when they plan to open it up and have a public street that runs through it,” said Street.

With all the waterfront development happening throughout New York, the city seems to have re-embraced its waterways. Just downriver from the Navy Yard, the former Domino Sugar factory has become luxury housing and the massive Brooklyn Bridge Park is now complete. Today, post-Highline New York embraces its industrial past, even going so far as to “fetishize” the old infrastructure, said Street. His film, however, is more a quiet homage to daily activity.

Having documented the Fulton Fish Market’s downtown home before its move to modernized facilities in the South Bronx, Street knows a thing or two about industry that’s adapted to a changing landscape. He focuses his camera on the people, as well as the infrastructure, largely ignoring the high-tech firms that occupy the old warehouse spaces today.

“It’s a place where physical work is still being done in a way that’s being erased in the modern age,” he said. “I wanted to emphasize the tactile, rather than showing a trendy coffee shop or tech firm. I tried to capture grit and use that in the images.”

Street’s own process and choice of media mimic the old and new technologies at work in today’s Navy Yard. He shoots on 16 mm film from a wind-up Bolex camera, as well using Sony’s latest digital SLR. He delved into Navy Yard archives and dug up archival footage of a scuba exploration of a sunken ship nearby. In the film, all of this comes together in a collage that celebrates the imperfections of film processed by hand alongside nearly perfect high resolution from the digital camera.

“I’m in an interesting place generationally,” he said. “People who are older than me don’t know digital and the people who are younger don’t do the film. I’m at home in both worlds.”

Street said he often intentionally veered from digital precision when working on the movie, processing the film in buckets in his basement.

“When I got it home I would unspool it into the bucket: three minutes for development, three-minute wash, and four minutes for the fixer,” he said. “I just plopped it in and played a CD of the Kinks and then took it out when the song was over, because all those songs only lasted about three minutes, which was the standard for radio back then.”

Ultimately, he’d bring the digitized product back to Fordham where students learned from his work in the various media. Most Fordham visual arts students study photography on film, including 16mm, before moving on to digital, he said.

Ultimately, all the media serve as a way to sketch a contemporary portrait, conjuring “ghosts of past technologies and characters,” he said.

“Most of this is shot outside looking at the physical plant, including the shadows of workers from an observational distance,” he said. “It’s a film that’s between the documentary and the experimental. Some may call it avant-garde, and I don’t have a problem with that.”

Brando was not alone in his embrace of method acting, which was popularized at the time by Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, said Keri Walsh, Ph.D., associate professor of English. But his performance in the film had the effect of making it synonymous in the popular imagination with explosive, masculine, working-class characters. Women, it was thought, did not embrace it.

“In fact, the method is a way of constructing and preparing for a performance, and it’s a way of working where you bring your personal life to the role, and you aim for a very naturalistic physicality through exercises,” she said, noting that physicality need not be of the blustery sort perfected by Brando.

“Those things could lead to any kinds of performances, so there were always women at the Actor’s Studio who went to Hollywood and had varying degrees of success.”

Walsh had explored method acting previously, in her latest book Mickey Rourke, (British Film Institute 2014), and was working on a follow up that would explore gender and sexuality and method acting. That lead her to realize that female method actors deserved their own story.

Support from Hollywood

This earned the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which recently named Walsh a 2018 Academy Film Scholar. The award includes a $25,000 grant to conduct research for a monograph be published by Routledge that is tentatively titled Stella’s Claim: Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film.

It’s a big jump for Walsh, who is the founder of Fordham’s annual Irish Women Writers Symposium and editor of the modern editions of James Joyce’s Dubliners (Broadview Press, 2016) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (Columbia University Press, 2010).

“There are fellowships that people know to apply for every year, like the National Endowment for the Humanities, but this one, I just found on my own. I thought I would throw in my hat, and actually was very stunned to receive the award,” she said.

Method acting, which is based on the teachings of the Russian theorist and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, places emphasis on bringing emotional truths and natural physical behavior to roles. Strasberg built on this, Walsh said, by guiding actors through exercises where they revisited a powerful memory from their own past.

“That helps you theoretically connect to some kind of powerful emotion. Then you have to find a way to bring that to the character,” she said.

“It’s this complex thing where you’re creating a relationship between your own emotional experience and the emotional experiences that you read about in the dramatic text that are those of your character.”

The Connection to Feminism

Because the process has some similarities to therapy, it occasionally gets a bad rap as mere navel-gazing. Walsh said these critiques miss the fact its popularity coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism and that actors such as Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, Shelley Winters, Kim Hunter, and Joanne Woodward found it to be extremely valuable to their work.

“When Ellen Burstyn talks about the experiences she had in her family as a woman, in her first marriage, an unexpected pregnancy, and all the experiences of her life that led her to become a feminist, those were experiences that she used in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” said Walsh.

“I argue that the personal basis of method acting was actually a way for women actors to say ‘I’m bringing my personal experiences of injustice and what I’ve noticed in society about being a woman to the role. Method acting invites me to do that and says, even if the script doesn’t currently contain that, you can bring it. You have a right as the actor to show what you know.”

One need only to look at Brando’s Streetcar co-star Kim Hunter, who won an Academy Award for her role as Stella Kowalski, said Walsh. As part of her research, Walsh examined notes that Hunter made to her copy of the film’s screenplay, and compared reviews of the 1947 Broadway production, which she also starred in, to the 1951 film to trace what she calls a “feminist evolution” of Hunter’s performance.

“Even though Elia Kazan, who directed both the Broadway and the film version, did not see her character as having much feminist potential or didn’t care much about her character, Hunter molded her character to be a very informed kind of treatment of domestic violence in the context of men coming home from the second World War,” Walsh said.

“We’ve really written that one performance off as just ‘Oh she’s just the abused wife, so the method must not be good for women.’ But if you actually look at how she approaches the role and changes it from Broadway to Hollywood, it actually is quite a feminist story of trying to take seriously what a woman is going through in that situation.”

A Career Focused on the Performing Arts

Although film is a relatively new area of research for Walsh, she has long explored performance art and theater. In 2016, she organized the New York gathering of Waking the Feminists, a movement that calls attention to the wealth of women’s voices that are excluded from Irish theater.

She said she’s fascinated by the self-transformation that actors undertake for their craft.

“I think of myself as a feminist cultural historian who is trying to listen to the voices of women who have been in the industry, whether it’s in Irish theater or in Hollywood. I try to do the archival work that reminds people that their stories really challenge the dominant paradigms,” she said.

Their stories are especially resonant in the #MeToo era, she said, because actresses who might have kept personal stories involving abuse sequestered to their acting classes have now taken their stories public instead.

“Was it fair to just say ‘We’re going to talk about this in acting class, and then you put it away and use it to fuel your performance?’ Female actors are saying ‘no,’” Walsh said.

“I think Hollywood is ready in some quarters to listen to this. The fact that my project got this award from the Motion Picture Academy; I think they are saying, ‘We want to hear the stories and tell the history now.’”

It’s safe to say this is the first year that a fishman/woman romance flick has been nominated for Tinselstown’s top award. We sat down with assistant professor of Spanish Miguel Garcia, Ph.D., who is an expert in Mexican literature, cinema, and science fiction. Movie buffs beware: Spoilers ahead!

Full transcript below

Patrick Verel: This year, one of the 10 films fighting for the Oscar’s Best Picture Award is The Shape of Water, a film by Mexican Director Guillermo del Toro. And it’s safe to say that it’s probably the most romance flick between a fish man and a mute woman to fight for the top award.

I’m Patrick Verel, and my guest today is professor Miguel García, an expert on both Mexican literature and cinema and Mexican science fiction. Now, a warning for some of you film buffs out there, there may be spoilers in our conversation.

So, what did you think of the film?

Miguel García: I loved the film. I was surprised by the visuals of the film. I was also surprised by the music. Not really a fan of musicals, but I think that the music aspect of it was very well done. For me, that was one of the main reasons why I liked the film, that it was very elegant in the way it resolved different things. This strange relationship between a mute and a creature might be either a great idea for a science fiction film or also, a ridiculous idea.

The structure of the film was very straightforward, but then this relation was very transgressive, the relationship between, well, this inter-species relationship. And to me that was an unexpected way to carry the film, but also, with two characters that don’t speak alike. That was also very interesting, how he was able to connect these two experiences without resorting to language, to verbal language. Because of course there’s communication, but it’s non-verbal.

To me the aspect that struck the most in this movie was the respect that del Toro has for the monster, because even though he’s a monster and he has some human characteristics, he definitely remains a monster throughout the film. When I was waiting for the movie to come out, I was scared that he was going to somehow humanize the monster too much, so the monster would end up being just like a regular human. But he didn’t. I mean, you see when he eats a cat, the creature. That also speaks of that political commentary in the idea of being able to be you even if you are an other.

Patrick Verel: Now, you studied Mexican science fiction. What does distinguishes it from other kinds of science fiction?

Miguel García: One of the things that has been a distinctive feature of Mexican science fiction is the way it combines different genres. You usually have science fiction elements, but you also have horror elements and fantasy elements and comedy elements. So, it’s a strange mix that usually works very well when you watch those movies, especially from the 50s and 60s. And the thing that holds them together, I think, it’s the character of the ‘luchador’ or wrestler. So they would fight aliens but then also, monsters, and then also witches. They would be like the glue that holds everything together.

So now we have this new way of Mexican filmmakers who are doing science fiction. But the difference now is that they’re not using wrestlers. They’re not interested in that imagery of the 50’s and 60’s, because one the criticisms of that period is that they were low budget films.

Patrick Verel: Well, that brings me to the next question is, where do you see this movie within that genre?

Miguel García: I don’t see direct connection to the images or sounds from the Mexican movies. But here what I see is more a connection to his first feature film, which was shot in Mexico and is called Cronos. In that film you have this old man who finds a device that gives him eternal life, but also turns him into a vampire. And in that movie you have his granddaughter who does not speak, and they have this strange bond. Maybe in The Shape of Water, he’s not doing that very explicitly, but I think that he’s drawn from the underlying connections to it, like the combination of genres, as you mention, the go back to comedy, to horror, to fantasy. I think that’s definitely the connection to science fiction.

Patrick Verel: When you think about works that he’s done that really harken back to his heritage…

Miguel García: I would say Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth. And Pan’s Labyrinth, if you remember you also have this very authoritarian figure. You have a general who is also very obsessed with control. As in The Shape of Water you have Strickland. So you have … and also very strong female characters who are rebelling against that power.

I think that he’s very interested in that character, who is usually male. In this you have the added characteristic of being a white middle-class male.

Patrick Verel: I want to talk a little bit about some of the social commentary. There was one particular scene. There’s a rather biting observation from a general who actually says to Colonel Strickland, the main villain, he says … and I quote, “Decency is an export. We sell it because we don’t use it.”

Miguel García: In The Shape of Water you can very clearly see these political commentaries like the one you mentioned, but I’m not as sure that he’s attacking American culture per se. I think that what he is criticizing is the idea of authoritarianism in all of its forms. So I think that in this case, the authority is reflected in this white middle-class male that is very driven. He wants to use the monster to have an edge in the cold war against the Russians. He wants to use the creature. He’s not interested in any other interesting things that the creature might offer. He’s just interested in the utilitarian aspect of it. And I think that that’s what del Toro is criticizing in this movie and in other movies, the utilitarian drive that many people have, the individualistic aspects of culture that do not let us see or form a community. What he wants to point out is that when we do that, when we focus only in that, we tend to exclude other forms that are different from our expectation.

Patrick Verel: One of your research interests is the intersection of eugenics and race in Mexican sci-fi, so you must’ve caught when the villain … again, this is Colonel Strickland who’s white, and says to Octavia Spencer’s character, who is black, that the Lord looks, and I quote, “Just like me or even you. A little like me. More like me, I guess.”

Miguel García: I definitely made that connection, as well. The point of eugenics is to create homogeneity. The interesting thing with Octavia Spencer’s character, but then also with Elisa’s neighbor, who is a gay character, and then with the monster, is that they are different. All these monsters, I think that they disturb the eugenic model by being different, by being anomalist to the system.

In other countries that employed eugenics, one way to deal with difference was to assimilate, to combine it, to create something new with that difference … to make a new race, let’s say. Like in Mexico, you have this idea of a cosmic race, the idea that all races would combine into a more perfect fifth race.

But in the U.S., eugenics dealt with difference by erasing it. So here, the ambition of this character, Strickland, is to kill the monster at the end. He doesn’t want the monster to survive because it’s the evidence that there’s something outside of his frame of reference.

In the movie, you see that with the monster but also with the other characters that also … Eliza is a good example because she’s also an anomaly because she cannot speak. She would be in the eugenic model, one subject that’s does not deserve to live or does not deserve to reproduce. And here, when you see the sexual act with the monster, you see that fear of reproduction. Because, as I was watching that, I was thinking, “Well, what if the film presents at the end that they have a son or a daughter?” I was thinking of that. How would that be presented in the movie? Of course, you don’t see that.

Patrick Verel: I want to come back to something you said before about the music. Del Toro often paired this sort of jaunty upbeat music along with the scenes that were anything but uplifting, particularly in the lab where the River God as del Toro would have, was living. Is this juxtaposition, is this a common technique for him? Or is this something new?

Miguel García: I think this was something new. I was not expecting this. I was watching an interview with del Toro, and he was asked about how he could talk about these very dark subjects but then also remain optimistic. His short answer was, “Well, because I’m Mexican.” And by that he meant that Mexicans, in general, tend to have this very strong connection to death as something that is inevitable, but is not necessarily an end. And I think that the music in The Shape of Water serves that purpose, as well. Serves to underline that there’s something positive in all the darkness.

Patrick Verel: Where you surprised at the very end when you had the big reveal with her neck?

Miguel García: I was surprised, yes, at the end to see this … her scars kind of become gills.

Patrick Verel: Yeah!

Miguel García: … so she’s able to be underwater and kind of … If I remember correctly, they live together, right? They …

Patrick Verel: That’s they live happily ever after, in a way.

Miguel García: I was surprised, again, because I was expecting something really dark as in Pan’s Labyrinth. But then again, I think I forgot that I was in the presence of a river god. But I think that it was an excellent ending for the movie. I think that it would be a terrible thing to finish on a dark note after you had seen all these contrasts.

Patrick Verel: Any predictions for Oscar night?

Miguel García: I think that it’s offering very Oscar-worthy material when he’s engaging with these issues of race or the role of women in the workplace, right? The idea of harassment in the workplace is there. He’s speaking to something very contemporary. I just think that there’s a lot of competition.

Rising juniors Luke Momo and Nevin Kelly-Fair, made the film as part of Campus MovieFest, a festival held at the Rose Hill campus in April. Participants were given six days to create a five-minute film, but Momo and Kelly-Fair went a step further, splitting The Last Playboys into two parts.

The movie follows the romantic and social misadventures of Kelly-Fair and fellow Fordham students Daniel Camou and David Moses over the course of a single evening, as they attempt to blend in at a fashion show. It will be screened Thursday, July 20 at the Princeton Public Library.

Momo, a philosophy and visual arts double major who also has a small role in the film, said the script was inspired by his and Kelly-Fair’s own interactions and friendships at Fordham.

“It all comes down to, ‘How do you approach other people? Are you on the surface or genuine?’ This is kind of a comic extrapolation of that,” he said.

A huge fan of film, Momo also founded the Fordham Filmmaking Club. He said he hopes viewers of The Last Playboys will note the diverse influences of both French director François Truffaut’s Les Mistons and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut in the film.

Part of the fun of making the film, he said, was trying to see how much could be done in an extremely short time frame, almost entirely with Fordham’s resources. The students edited the film on campus roughly 20 feet away from where the fashion show sequence was staged.

“It’s great to see just how much you can do with the space that you have,” he said.

For Kelly-Fair, a double major in philosophy and film and television, shooting three-quarters of the film in six hours proved to be “biting off more than we could chew.” But working with friends made it worth the effort.

“You can make fun stories on very, very small budgets, and people will want to see them and enjoy them. We thought it would be fun at the end of the year to make a big film with lots of friends,” he said.

“We’ve made smaller films before, with small groups of people, and we wanted to expand outward and see how well we could push ourselves.”

Another of Momo and Kelly-Fair’s films, a short dark comedy/thriller called Dead Dog
will also be screened this month, on July 22 at the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival.

This past March, his first feature film, Beware of Mr. Baker, a documentary about drummer Ginger Baker, took the grand jury prize at the South by Southwest film festival.

“I told [Baker] I was a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, which was a total lie,” Bulger confesses in the film. “But that was my in.”

The wild-man drummer of 1960s supergroups Cream and Blind Faith was living on a farm in South Africa, suffering from degenerative arthritis and the effects of long-term heroin use. Bulger spent a couple of months with him, then returned to the States to make his lie true. Rolling Stone published his article in August 2009, and it helped him raise the funds to make the film.

“I’m really good at lying to myself,” Bulger said. “It has its downsides, but without having manipulated myself into thinking it was possible [to make the movie], I would’ve written it off.”

When Bulger returned to South Africa to finish filming, he didn’t always find an easy subject. In the movie’s first scene, a cantankerous Baker smacks Bulger with a cane, breaking his nose.

But images of a bloodied Bulger tend to bring good fortune. In 2002, after a Golden Gloves fight, the Daily News ran a photo of him that caught the eye of a model scout. Soon, Bulger was traveling the world and getting paid handsomely, but he had a hard time taking the job seriously. He used his modeling money to make music videos for local indie bands until fall 2007, when he was diagnosed with basal-cell carcinoma near his left eye. “That was a good exit” from modeling, he said, though he recently made a comeback, posing for Joseph Abboud’s fall collection as an award-winning filmmaker.

“It’s cool now because it’s about being me,” he said. “I’m not just a face.”

As Bulger was contemplating his next film project, he landed a role in Stand Up Guys, a movie due out in January starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, and Alan Arkin.

During filming, Bulger asked Walken for some pointers on the set. “I was like, ‘Hey, so I’ve never really done this, but I was a boxer, does that apply?’ And he was like, ‘Jay, I’ve got a tip for you,’” Bulger said, imitating Walken’s cadence and New York accent. “‘Just pretend like it’s real.’”

For Bulger, that’s tried-and-true advice.