Matt's Movie Reviews Podcast · Matthew Pejkovic

Saturday Conversation - Stelio Savante

February 7, 2026·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

“You’re not going there to book a job”; Stelio says auditions are about connection, not outcomes.

1. Matt’s Movie Reviews Podcast features the Saturday Conversation with Stelio Savante, centered on film, theater, and a career that moved from Cape Town to New York and Hollywood. 2. Matt interviews Stelio Savante as an actor and producer with over 140 credits, and Matt points to Between Borders as his latest film now streaming. 3. The episode asks how a South African-born performer built a 40-year career through hard work, faith, and constant screen discipline. 4. Savante describes 1978 television in Cape Town as SABC programming with a sign-off around 8 p.m. and a diet shaped largely by the BBC. 5. He says his parents went to the cinema, and a close friend of his father owned Betamax and VHS machines that let the family screen films from Europe and the U.S. on a wall sheet. 6. He links that access to apartheid-era limits, saying even Athol Fugard plays were off-limits and that media consumption was tightly controlled. 7. Savante names The Godfather films, Le Samouraï, Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, Burt Reynolds, Alain Delon, Gérard Depardieu, and Michael Caine as formative viewing. 8. He says moving to the University of West Alabama on a tennis scholarship in 1990 opened a new world, even though the first two years felt like a personal void. 9. He says all the women in the theater department pulled his attention toward acting, and early playback sessions taught him how stage gestures translate differently on camera. 10. He recalls falling hard for independent film, foreign film, and character-driven stories, while rejecting the idea that Hollywood’s business side mattered more than craft. 11. He says Bread and Chocolate resonated because his father was an immigrant in South Africa, making the film’s unemployment-line story feel personal. 12. He remembers a West Alabama theater head telling him he had passion and talent, then suggesting New York because that was where his girlfriend lived. 13. Savante says New York in 1992 felt like neighborhoods with distinct pockets, an upper West Side that was starting to gentrify, and a subway-centered city with less crime than today. 14. He says he preferred small theaters to Broadway musicals, loved seeing Eli Wallach in a hole-in-the-wall venue, and joined the Actors Studio orbit through Ed Citrachian. 15. He names Lincoln Plaza as a key place, describing six screens, foreign-film programming, and monthly collectives for Iran, Japan, France, and Italy. 16. He specifically praises Abbas Kiarostami, Akira Kurosawa, French New Wave, and Italian neorealism, and says COVID helped end Lincoln Plaza’s run. 17. In the interview’s conversational game segments, he chooses screen over stage, Al Pacino over Robert De Niro, and popcorn over candy. 18. The tone stays reflective and detailed, with Matt asking long-form questions and Savante answering in career-history mode rather than short promotional beats. 19. Listeners who love acting craft, New York theater history, and film-noir talk will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a fast celebrity promo or short-answer banter may skip this one.

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