Fatherhood Quote by Steve Buscemi

Buscemi lands the joke with a shrug and a side-eye, the way his best characters do: deadpan enough to sound like candor, sharp enough to expose the weird family theater that happens when art gets too close to home. "Trees Lounge is based on my own life" is an invitation to read the film as confession, but he immediately undercuts the solemnity. The pivot to his parents' approval turns autobiography into a social situation: when you fictionalize your mess, you also audition it for the people who raised you.

The line "Both my parents like the movie" sounds like relief, even luck. Then comes the knife twist: "My father, of course, thinks it's a masterpiece". "Of course" is doing all the work. It signals affectionate skepticism and a recognition of paternal bias, but it also hints at something tender: a dad trying to dignify a son's bruised, barroom vulnerability by calling it art. The subtext is that family pride doesn't require accuracy; it requires ownership. If your kid made it, it's canon.

Context matters here. Trees Lounge is a small, unsparing 90s indie about addiction and stasis, and Buscemi's persona has always been the patron saint of sidelined strugglers. By framing the film's raw material as family-approved, he makes the autobiographical claim feel less like exploitation and more like shared mythmaking. The humor keeps him from sounding self-mythologizing, while still letting him admit: yes, this came from somewhere real, and yes, the people closest to that reality are watching.