Interview & Trailer: Mafia II Trailer Kicks You in the Head

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This trailer shows off lots of the reasons that I’m looking forward to this game. The sweeping cinematic camera movement takes you all around the game’s setting of Empire Bay and shows you key moments that you’ll be experiencing as Vito Scarletta. From getting in with the local wiseguys to car chases with guns blazing to a brutal beatdown of someone who’s late on the vig, the new trailer shows that the 2K Czech dev studio is aiming to deliver the deepest and most intense Mafioso video game yet.

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You’ll be playing as newly-returned GI Vito and the guy who takes you around is Joe Barbaro. Part of making Mafia II feel so authentic is the care being given to the casting and direction of the actors portraying the characters. The guy giving voice to Vito’s best bud is Bobby Costanza, a veteran actor of stage, screen and soundbooth who’s logged in hundreds of hours of voicework in cartoons and movies. 2K’s Director of Creative Production Jack Scalici has overseen the vice acting for some of the company’s most recent games, including the classic BioShock. We talked to both of them about why mafia stories endure, how to establish characters through voice work and why voice acting can be so horrible in other games.

So the first question I wanted to start off with was what do you think the draw with mafia stories continues to be? Do you think like they’re the new mythology, that people like to see the same story told over again in a different way?

Bobby: To call it new, it’s been a phenomenon that’s been going on I guess since the early ‘70s since The Godfather. There were some other movies prior to that, but I think the real wave started with The Godfather, and really has gone on for what now? Going on four decades. It hasn’t lost a whole lot of momentum. I think one of the difficult things is coming up with a new slant. But no matter what you do, I mean, God knows there’s been some horrendous imitators. Talking to a couple of friends of mine who grew up in the suburbs, or are Wasps, they loved the theatricality, the almost operatic feeling of it all. It’s colorful. And it’s so far outside the norm of life. A lot of us I think are living in little confined worlds, and these guys just make their own rules, and that’s appealing even though it’s…well, it is real. But even though it is maybe glamorized sometimes, it’s exciting, and it’s theatrical. The same reason I love Woody Allen movies, because he puts us into a glimpse of a world that we don’t know. He does it so well. I think it’s a lot of those things.

And that’s what I was trying to get at. It’s become this grand sweeping way of talking about human nature, and the way people treat each other, and stuff like that.

Bobby: Yep, I mean the mob guys, I mean, say what you will about them. Puzo obviously in The Godfather mythologized them and made them sort of warm, and in an odd way, very familial, and then the idea about not dealing in drugs which, I mean, supposedly some of the guys…there were guys I know from my old neighborhood that really wouldn’t get involved  in drugs and would, you know, get rid of anybody who did. So there was a certain morality like that. And a lot of these guys are men of their honor, even though they’re doing dishonorable…well I don’t know about dishonorable, but certainly illegal things.

Right, right. You mentioned this idea of honor and stuff. One of the things the game is trying to do is really nail down a certain time period. The way the characters look, the setting, the music. What do you feel as an actor that you can bring to help meet that goal?

Bobby: Oh my God, it’s ingrained in me. And my man Jack Scalici there, who is, I call him an old soul, even though he is a couple decades younger. He has got a similar background. For me personally, this guy is a composite of a little of my uncle Pete, my uncle Carlo, a lot of guys I grew up with. Colorful. Likable. Lethal. All those qualities. So that was all around me. Even though I kind of started studying the method, I usually go outside, into people I know, and try to use them a lot. And I can actually hear their voices, the rhythms of how they speak in so much of what Joe does and says rather, and does.

And Jack, do you just step back and let Bobby do his thing? How much direction are you giving in a typical voice-over session?

Jack: Bobby, he’s kind of a natural for this character. Like the first time we met we went over his dialogue. He instantly got it. He knew who this guy was. Like he said, it was the guys he grew up with. Guys in his family. So the actual delivery of most of it, Bobby understood the dialogue, I really didn’t have to do anything there. What I really focused on with Bobby in particular, was getting him…with stuff like cartoons, with movies, you have a picture on the screen that you’re voicing. Or you leaf through your storyboard or something. We started so early in this process, we didn’t have any of that. So I was just trying to explain to them what we are going for with the game, what it’s going to look like. I showed him a picture of his character. I would explain each and every scene when we got to it. This was kind of like making a 10 hour movie for us.

Bobby: And it was nice because we all worked together. Particularly at the beginning when we got the thing on its feet. We all did it like a little play, almost like a radio play let’s say. So we were able to interact and bounce off each other not only…and bounce off ideas, right Jack? Everybody would come with somewhat of a different slant and it was also great working that way. It was like doing a play rather than isolated in a booth.

Jack: Yeah. That was something that we really tried to focus on. Tried to get the natural flow of the dialogue and just work together. These guys use a lot of slang, a lot of words that most people don’t use. So a lot of it was, Bobby would says something, and go, “Oh, can I say this here?”  We tried looking it up, and say when did this word come into popular use?

Now, Bobby, I know you’ve been doing this for awhile in terms of animation or video games voice work. Were there adjustments you had to make when you first started doing it?

Bobby: I think I had a natural bent for it because, for the most part, a lot of the characters I’ve played are a little theatrical, a little over-the-top maybe. My voice has always been such a strong part. But I did a TV series with a film actor and he never quite got that the sitcom format is different. It’s just as it’s different to be to using only your voice. You have to instinctively maybe know that, learn it a little more, but be willing to do it. Not to just say, I’m going to be internal and do this like I’m doing Lear or Chekov or something. It’s not going to work in a sitcom. The only sense that the audience gets really, well they see the animation but they hear your voice. It’s not your own body. So you have to really incorporate. And you do want to be real. I remember when we did Batman, Andrea Romano does it the same way Jack works. They both like to get it to not to feel cartoony, but to feel real. And yet somewhat theatrical.

That seems like a tough balance to strike…

I mean, that’s just my whole feeling on acting, which is not to say I don’t believe in being real and honest and all…but you need to elevate it a little bit. Make it a little theatrical, otherwise, I’ll watch Eyewitness News. So, in that respect, I think the transition was not that difficult for me. And I learned as I went along. Because Jack says I can blow out the microphone sometimes. We were in the studio in Santa Monica and they can hear me in Fresno. You have to learn how to modulate it a little bit, go off mic. Technical things. One thing is to get the rhythm and the singsong in the voice. We’ll do two or three takes and Jack almost inevitably picks the one that I like. Which says something good about either one of us or something bad about either one of us.

You know, it’s funny you mentioned your Batman work. I’m a huge comic book nerd. And I love the work that you did, particularly as Harvey Bullock.

Bobby: Oh good. Thank you.

In the comics, he’s generally portrayed as a character who is like very morally gray. You are never sure if he’s a good cop who’s going to do bad things or if he’s a bad cop who’s going to do good things. Did you try to like inhabit Harvey in a certain way?

Bobby: Yeah, but not too much. I mean I thought of him as, he thought he was a good cop and he did what he had to do. I think that’s the 11th Commandment, of the cops I’ve talked to and all. With Bullock, I just kind of made him like, “you do what you have to do.” I think there’s a few different colors in there. I think there’s some envy of Batman, some admiration certainly, which he’ll never let him know because he’s not that kind of guy. We never saw his family. But I think he wouldn’t let his wife know she did anything good or anybody. He’s just kind of cutoff that way.

It was a great portrayal on a great show.

Bobby: And really loyal to the great strip, right? The artwork and all. Yeah.

Back to Mafia for a little bit. What’s the relationship like between your character and the player?

Bobby: I think Vito and I just have a camaraderie. Although it’s interesting… It seems like whenever there’s some real heavy duty stuff where we could get like blown away or something, Joe kind of lets Vito go, as in “You do it, you’re the war hero, you do it.” So Joe’s got that way about him. I see  Joe as a con man in a sense that…it’s not that he doesn’t have huge balls himself.    But he figures the kid is young, and he’s kind of earned his role as the sort of graybeard senior citizen, whatever you want to call it. So he lets Vito do some things. But I think ultimately they’re loyal and they back each other up. They are kind of goomba Napolidanza Butch and Sundance if you will.

So, Jack, just a few questions for you because you worked on a ton of 2K games, obviously. And I think by and large, the stuff that you’ve worked on has had really exceptional voice work. I mean, BioShock is a standout in everybody’s mind.

Jack: Thank you.

But, at the same time, lots of video games suffer from terrible voice work. Either they’re horribly overacted or performances lack any kind of energy, any kind of vitality. It sounds like they’re phoning it in. What do you think is happening there?

Jack: Well, in my experience it’s been…in my younger days, not at this company, I worked on a bunch of titles that really didn’t have strong voice acting. I was always so into the story element of it and the characters. And it would just pull me out of the experience. So when I started at 2K, I did the math and everything. This was way back in the day when we used to operated under budgets and all this other stuff, working on licensed titles, and things like that. I did the math, and I figured out it was actually cheaper, faster and better to do it once and do it right even though it’s more expensive than doing it the easy way and then having to do it again because you screwed it up. So the first thing that you got to do is you got to come at it with enough of a budget, it can’t be just an afterthought. You can’t just hire your friends and just let the developers do the voices. You have to hire real actors. And it takes time to find the right actor. Like for the part of Joe, I went through every goomba in New York City and LA before we found Bobby.    So you have to be willing to put in the time and the money to get the casting right. From there, it’s a matter of the performance. You are not going to get the same performance if you record one actor at a time like most games end up doing. That’s why, I called around, I found a studio that had stages enough to accommodate five or six actors, plus the director, plus some of our animators, a film crew, things like that. Like Bobby said, we ended up doing as a radio play. And that just adds to the natural flow of the dialogue. Especially as a nice bonus for us, I think every single one of the main characters knew each other and had worked with the other one before.

Bobby: When we were having a particularly tough time with a piece of dialogue or a part of a scene, we would actually have a guy get out of the booth because we were in separate stalls and look at us almost like off camera close up in a film and just get it right from him, his stuff being off camera. And then you get your stuff. Just playing right off him. Because that  does help. That does help. There’s nothing quite like doing it to someone else. Hopefully, that comes through in the final product.

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