He’s one of a kind. He’s not a child actor, he’s as good an actor as Michael Caine or Chris Walken or Josh Lucas or any of us had ever, ever, ever worked with. He’s as good as anybody. And he was without question the fastest and the easiest of the actors on my movie. All of that was one or two takes. He’s a natural.
I never gave him the script. I would teach him the lines in rote…and I would let him play with it. But I would never give him the script or let any of his teachers or family members work with him on the lines. He was just a natural and just understood intuitively what acting was – acting truthfully. He gets it.
All of the performances in this movie are terrific.
I think when you write something that’s truthful, you’re going to get better performances. You just can’t manufacture that. Again, the script is what the script is. It doesn’t attempt to do more or less than what it attempts to do. I wrote it enough times that what it attempted to do, I believe it did. It examined this relationship between strangers and what it would be like for them to spend a few days together. It examined that relationship in a truthful and authentic way, and that provoked good acting. And because the script was intact, I was able to concentrate just on the acting.
I’d done the sketches so I knew what the camera was going to look at, I knew what the frame was going to look like. I could just concentrate on making sure that someone outside these wonderful, talented men was paying attention that every moment was honest. As an actor, I didn’t have any other way to do that than to sit right next to the camera – or stand right next to the camera – and look at them and wait until I felt what I wanted to feel when they said what they said. And it was a peculiar decision for a couple of the guys. They didn’t like it because most directors don’t stand by the camera anymore. I mean no disrespect when I say it, but I can’t imagine directing from a monitor, which is what most directors do these days. They stand at a monitor anywhere from 15 to 50’ away from the camera and the actors, and they decide when they get what they want. It was like I was blind. I looked at that thing and I couldn’t see anything.
That would seem to put an emotional detachment between you and the actors.
To me there was. But obviously some wonderful films are made that way. I just didn’t know how to make mine that way so I stood by that camera no matter what they said. Eventually everybody got quite comfortable with it. I just waited until I felt what I wanted to feel, and then we moved on. When I look at my movie and I see the level of emotional authenticity I think, “You know what? That’s what I’ll do next time.” It worked. Unless I blow it next time, that’s what I’ll keep doing.
Originally the road trip was going to be from New York to California. You changed that to a trip to New Mexico. Did that change the tone of the film?
I think so. There are a bunch of reasons, one is economic. It’s too expensive to shoot a movie and suggest you went from New York to L.A. because you have to shoot in a variety of landscapes that we couldn’t afford to shoot in, so that was for starters. Beyond that, because the film is sort of a very subtly – the inner relationship is played out as sort of an archaeological family dig. One of the characters, Michael Caine’s character, is an archaeologist. They are on this journey that is essentially a dig and I felt it would be important to place that dig in an environment where digs took place, which is the Southwest. We don’t really have a rich archaeological tradition in this country outside the Southwest.
On a slightly less serious note – you use a couple of dogs in this movie. Do you have a big connection to dogs in real life?
No, and I’d never use them in a film again. It was crazy. A film of this budget with this schedule, the dogs were a real pain in the butt. Dogs are dogs. They don’t take direction. They don’t do what you want them to do. We had, I guess, good trainers and I suppose professional dogs, but they didn’t do ever what I wanted them to do. We escaped by the skin of our teeth.
I think, again, there’s a few elements of intentional, hopefully not heavy-handed, iconography tossed into this film. I made a film about men, man’s best friend is supposedly the dog, and I wanted the dog in there. I had taken women away from them as a conscious decision. I just wanted it to be a masculine world. I live in a misogynist culture and it’s almost borderline criminal to make a film and extract the women in the way in which I did. But the purpose of this film was to explore masculine emotion and, you know, it’s a very different emotional realm. And I wanted to do that in the absence of feminine interference, with the exception of the extraordinary performance of Glenne Headly. She’s funny and delicious and wonderful.
