A: Yeah, forever. I first met Joel in 1994 when I did a cable TV movie with his wife Fran down in West Texas. So I had met Joel in West Texas 16 years ago and it took them that long to offer me a job! (laughs). But I was dying to work with them and any actor you talk to would say the same thing. If you ask for a short list of directors, they would be right there.
Q: Why is that? What is it about them that makes them so vital?
A: Well their films - the body of work really speaks for itself. It’s not even a personal thing – you just have to look at their work and the quality of acting in their movies and it’s obviously something that they care very much about. And then you start to talk to other actors and they will tell you the same thing. I have a lot of friends who have worked with them – George (Clooney), Brad (Pitt), Billy Bob (Thornton). I was on the set of The Man Who Wasn’t There – I went to visit Billy a few times and you talk to crew members, guys like Roger (Deakins, director of photography, True Grit), Andy Harris, and all the guys say ‘you really should work with Joel and Ethan, you would love them..’ So it’s something everybody knows and everybody is always trying to get a job (with them).Q: Did they live up to expectations?
A: Completely and for a whole host of reasons besides being genuinely nice people. Each phase of the process was a real pleasure. For a start it was a wonderful screenplay – it’s a great adaptation of the book. And then they sent us all storyboards where we could literally open this giant book and look at the shot design of the film. It was basically like looking at the movie in cartoon form before you go and make it. So you got all of this information before you even enter into the process of production, and then within production, they have an incredible flexibility in terms of being available to good ideas that happen in the moment. And so it’s just that kind of combination, which really means that they’ve got total mastery of the process of directing. And then obviously there’s the whole post-production part, which we actors aren’t a part of, but that’s a whole other phase that they are obviously just at the very highest level. They are pretty great directors. But it’s all set up that way - they knew how they were going to edit the scene pretty much when they were writing it.
Q: Was it fun building that character?
A: He’s a great character and it was a lot of fun. I worked with Tommy Lee Jones in 1994 when he directed The Good Old Boys, which Fran (Frances McDormand) and I did with him and that’s when I first met Joel and Ethan. And Joel and Ethan subsequently worked with Tommy to incredible effect in No Country For Old Men and Tommy gave a remarkable performance in that. And actually, I had Tommy as a frame of reference (for True Grit) because he’s from West Texas. And he’s also somebody who is really fun to listen to, he knows a lot about a lot, and there’s something of the English teacher in him - you can ask him an obscure question and he enjoys knowing what he knows (laughs). And so we kind of riffed on that. It’s not exact but it’s a similar way of presentation. My character in True Grit is supposed to be a windbag – it’s like he comes over as a man who knows everything but actually doesn’t know very much at all! Not that Tommy’s like that, but Tommy is a great storyteller. And that was where we started to build the guy.Q: And the lovely irony is that this guy – a windbag as you call him – gets his tongue badly bitten. How did you play those scenes?
A: Actually that idea isn’t in the novel – it’s pure Joel and Ethan. But you take the idea of this guy who won’t shut up to the extreme, where he actually severs his tongue and still keeps talking. And I figured out how to do it a few months before. I took one of my daughter’s hair bands and wrapped it around my tongue to kind of give myself that handicap and then tried to speak normally and it just worked really well. I had dinner in New York with Joel and Fran (McDormand) here in New York a few months before we started shooting and said ‘let me show you..’ And I pulled the hair band out, wrapped it around my tongue and he liked it and so we stuck with that.Q: Would you say it’s a very faithful adaptation of the book?
A: Yes, I would. I’d say it is a very faithful adaptation of the book, and obviously there are some corners you need to cut to tell a story in two hours but I think this is a pretty faithful rendering of the book.
Q: Did you watch the original True Grit movie? What was your attitude to that film?
A: I actually still haven’t seen the other film, because when I had talked to Ethan and Joel about this one, they said ‘we are just going to the original source material, we are not seeing it as a remake, we’re seeing it as an adaptation of the Charles Portis novel…’ So they gave me the novel. And I went out and I did buy a copy of the movie, but I still haven’t cracked it yet and that has more to do with four young kids at home (laughs) and I haven’t a lot of time.
Q: Did you take your children on to the set for True Grit?
A: I took Gia on set and she was totally cool. She wasn’t quite two years old at the time and for her it was all about the horses. I wasn’t working so much that day – they were doing the scene where Rooster says ‘fill your hands, you son of a bitch…’ So I wasn’t needed for a few hours as Barry (Pepper, who plays Lucky Ned Pepper) and Jeff were doing their thing. Barry’s horse was called Topper and Gia was initially a little afraid – so she went from being scared to interested to fascinated and then suddenly, she was sitting on Topper’s back. And literally, for months afterwards every horse she saw was Topper. It was really cool.Q: And now she wants one of her own…
A: (Laughs) Yes and I have to explain that living in New York it doesn’t quite work. It’s like ‘sorry, honey, we can’t quite fit Topper into the apartment…’
Q: Are you a fan of the western genre?
A: Yeah, very much so and in fact, it’s hard to find material that feels like it’s not just a retread of something. But this is a western that deserved to be made. I think Clint (Eastwood) did it to great effect 15 years ago but I read everything and I hadn’t come across a script that was this good, with directors of this calibre and a role like this. It was a very easy decision for me.
Q: Are you still hoping to make the Liberace biopic with Michael Douglas?
A: We are hoping to go this summer (2011) – that’s the plan. There are fewer movies being made than there were even three years ago because of the economic situation. I’m encountering something that I didn’t encounter four or five years ago which is I can’t get a lot of movies made just on my name. And I’ve talked to a lot of directors who say ‘we tried to get this or that off the ground, but it didn’t happen..’ But with Liberace we’re planning on doing it, Michael is planning on it – everything is going great with him, which is fantastic – it’s just that the money is not in the bank yet. But we’ll get it.
Q: Were there any surprises?
A: Well, there were scenes that were shot when I wasn’t there so they were really a lot of fun to see. I had seen the story boards that Joel and Ethan do to plan out the movie so I knew what was coming. I have to say, I was really moved at the end when Jeff is riding with Hailee on the horse – when he gets to that cabin and the last thing he says in the movie is, ‘I have grown old..’ when he collapses on the ground and he shoots his gun into the air. I love that line ‘time just gets away from us..’
