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Barry Pepper's work in "Saving Private Ryan" and "61" impressed director Spike Lee. The two had never worked together before, but Lee thought Pepper would fit well as 'Francis Slaughtery' in "25th Hour."

Pepper recalls his initial meeting with Spike Lee as one of the most unusual meetings of his career. "I was in New York doing a press junket and I heard that Spike wanted to meet with me. He took me to Madison Square Garden – right on the floor – to watch the Knicks play the Raptors, but really, to talk about ‘25th Hour.’ I had never had a meeting with a director like that before."

BARRY PEPPER ('Francis')

How would you describe your experience working with Spike Lee?
People have said to me that Spike's changed. I don't have a history with him. He's just become so much more of a beautiful person. He's still very much a hard-charger. But I think that people just found he was angry, and he's just changed. He's just really blossomed into a much more peaceful person, I think.

It seems like Edward Norton's character Monty knows how your character feels about him, and gives you a gift by allowing you to beat him up.
It was a gift that he was forced to give him. There they are, emotionally stripped naked in front of each other to analyze the dynamics of their friendship and how much they love each other. It's brutal to watch but it's also, at the same moment, I think you feel this compassion for them and the love that they share as friends. [You feel] how difficult it is for them. It's about this favor that [Monty] needs. It definitely is a gift between the two. That is what it is, and yes, he does know.

What is physically difficult to film that fight scene?
It was 12 hours of the most excruciating emotions that I've ever had to portray in a scene before. We shot that entire moment for like 12 hours one day, at that level. It was a very difficult day but Edward works at a very professional level. At one point, his nose was actually bloody - for real - in the scene. We were shooting in such a fast and furious style, we didn't have an opportunity to choreograph a certain punch. It was like, “Go, go, go…” and he got clipped. I saw my entire career flash before my eyes (laughing). But he was just such a professional and a gentleman about it. He came and hugged me and said, “It's not your fault and let's move on.” It was sort of his 'Brando' moment - his very 'method' moment. He just absorbed it and continued on.

It's funny because everyone came up to me. Philip (Seymour Hoffman) said, “I broke an actor's arm in a fight scene.” Then the stunt coordinator, who was feeling very bad that he hadn't been more involved in the scene, said, “Yeah, I busted Sylvester Stallone's nose in a fight scene.” Everybody was coming up to me with these sorts of experiences that they'd had, which didn't make me feel any better (laughing). It was a very emotionally charged day and that just only added to it. At first, not in a very positive way. I was very devastated.

How do you approach a character who could really come across as just a jerk if you're not careful?
It's true there was an opportunity to play totally linear and formula. But I think that we all worked those kinks out in the first 2 weeks of rehearsal. Spike is probably one of the very few directors that I've worked that insists on 2 weeks of intensive rehearsal where you focus on backstory and character development, analyzing exactly why these people are saying what they are saying, and why they are existing in the world that they are.

[Spike] also brought me to the city a month early to shadow a stockbroker friend of his who was actually the ultimate template for the character. He was the unlikely success story on Wall Street, the $20 million a year whiz kid. [He had] a garage full of exotic cars. I just spent a month with this guy, shadowing him. He was the perfect template. A lot of those subtleties and layers and unanswered questions of character were because of this guy.

What makes it possible that Monty, a drug dealer, can be seen as anything other than a scumbag by the audience?
That's something that exists very strongly in the backstory of the book, that isn't in the film. It's almost just sort of for us, as performers, it's our backstory. When we were childhood friends and going to private school together, Monty was always the guy with the 'sway.' He was always the cool one. He didn't quite fit in to the rest of the group only because he was so much more on the edge, mature and cool, than the rest of the kids in the private school. They came to him for a taste of the darker side, if you will. Kids were paying like three times the price for a joint from the white-collar kids while he was a blue-collar kid from Brooklyn. He was an Irish kid from Brooklyn. He's like, “I can get you grass from some guy I know in my neighborhood for a third of that.” Then all of a sudden, through that innocent early development, it blossoms.

He ended up taking that road because he realized through trial and error, that's what he was good at. That's all he ever saw himself as because he was from the streets, he had connections, he had this sort of sway, this cool about him that was infectious to the other kids. They all kind of gravitated toward him in that vein and it ended up just empowering him along the wrong journey.

I have a very good friend of mine who has led a very similar sort of life. It's because of the 'absent mother-lost son' sort of syndrome. Monty looses his mother early on and so did my friend. My friend actually ended up practically destroying his life because of those thoughts and feelings and emotions that he could never really identify with, or deal with. He just became a drug user and lived on the streets in a low-rent sort of ghetto neighborhood in the city we grew up. He eventually got himself out of it. I see Monty in that same way. He's about to have this awakening and make some serious decisions about his life. He wants to get out of it but he's just seconds too late.

You are not supposed to cry, you are not supposed to shed any tears for him. I think what Spike asks you to do is have a look at this young man's journey. You are not supposed to lionize him or see him as the hero, but he is the lead actor and you follow him because the camera does. His journey is an innocent one. He starts off thinking this is a very cool interesting path in life: "It's easy, it's what I do best, and then all of a sudden I'm a man and now it's not just grass, or getting somebody a case of beer. Now I'm like dealing cocaine or heroin. How did my life get to this place? I need out; I want out." He's not able to. He has to face the consequences, as my friend did. We all make those kinds of mistakes in life. Maybe not in that area or in that extreme but in other areas I think we all experience those poor decisions, or the thoughts and emotions that course through your mind in that sort of venomous rant that he experiences.

I think that Spike really asks you to be really aware of the subtleties in the film - like all of us getting out of the fancy limo, walking all along that long line of people in line for the most popular club in town, giving 5s to the bouncer, and we are in the most elite VIP section getting champagne on the house. This is the lifestyle that he has provided all of us. We are all a part of it and we are all not really identifying with it or saying anything to him like, “Where is this coming from? How did we bypass this line?” We are all enjoying those fringe benefits. I think it's subtle. You kind of have to be aware of little moments in the film like that to pick up on the fact that they are all involved, and the character is not meant to be lionized.