Joe Mantegna has played no shortage of tough guys. From The Godfather, Part III’s Joey Zaza to The Rat Pack’s Dean Martin, Mantegna’s been the snap-brimmed heavy, a guy who rarely needs to resort to violence because the threat of it is in his every motion. He’s best-known, though, for his long-standing collaboration with playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet, whom Mantegna’s known for nearly 30 years. First rising to national prominence in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (Al Pacino played the role on film), Mantegna followed Mamet to the screen, playing starring roles in each of Mamet’s first three films: House of Games, Things Change and Homicide. Given Mamet’s reputation for crafting sharp-tongued, foul-mouthed small-time cons, you’d figure the basis of their artistic relationship would be easy to explain. And so, says Mantegna, it is. It comes down to one simple thing: iambic pentameter.

Most folks, he admits on the phone from his Los Angeles home, wouldn’t associate Mamet’s vulgar, brusque cadences with the rhythms of Shakespeare. (Briefly, the term denotes a ten-syllable line with stress falling on every second syllable.) But, says Mantegna, "that is the thing that, as an actor, I respond to. It’s tangible; it affects everything. Believe me, with a lot of guys who do Mamet and have done his stuff for a long time, it’s not like we were schooled in iambic pentameter. But his material has a certain inherent rhythm and style and structure, the way Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams does."

In Lakeboat, Mantegna’s latest film collaboration with Mamet, you won’t see him in front of the camera; the adaptation of Mamet’s 1975 play marks Mantegna’s first foray into directing. (To be entirely accurate, he does show up for a wordless cameo.) Based on a 1994 stage production which Mantegna also directed, Lakeboat was masterminded by yet another Mamet: David’s younger brother, Tony, who produced the film and stars as Dale, a graduate student who signs on for a summer aboard a freighter shipping steel from Chicago to Canada. Aboard, he meets a handful of weathered lifers who spew forth wisdom and bullshit in equal measure. In many ways a cruder version of Mamet’s later plays, the film comes alive most vividly in the brutal but affectionate bickering between Mamet regulars J.J. Johnston and Jack Wallace, and features a startling, soulful performance from Robert Forster as a middle-aged sailor who’s run out of hope for the future.

With a production schedule as tight as Lakeboat’s 24 days, casting was crucial: "It’s like the chariot-race scene in Ben-Hur," Mantegna explains. "You get the right horses, and then at least you know if you let them loose, you’ve got a good chance they’re going to run around the course faster than anybody." Retaining Wallace and Johnston from the stage production — an idea Mantegna credits to Tony Mamet — the film avoids an "all stars" approach to casting, one which would have resulted, Mantegna feels, in a movie made sooner but not as well.

Despite all the care put into casting, though, the film’s most intense performance came about almost by accident. With a week to go before shooting, the actor set to play Forster’s part dropped out; Mantegna made the decision to offer Forster the part "the night before" a decision had to be finalized.

Like most of Lakeboat’s cast, Forster is significantly older than the stage directions in the play indicate; instead of a 23-year-old grad student passing the time with men in their 30s and 40s, here Dale ships out with a crew (also including Charles Durning, George Wendt and Peter Falk) in their 50s and 60s. The shift in the cast’s age was a conscious decision on Mantegna’s part, and was key to bringing the 25-year-old play into the present day. "In a way," he explains, "it became not so much a story about new guys doing this job, but the same guys Dave wrote about then, and where they’re at today. Because of the dialogue he wrote, the things they said, it had to come from those same mouths. Certainly in the United States, it’s become more politically correct, and younger people wouldn’t say the same things. In a way that makes them dinosaurs; these are guys of another era. And it was perfect to keep Dale as the young guy, because he looks at them wide-eyed. He’s taking his trip to Jurassic Park."

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