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What did Chris Cooper do to get into character since he couldn’t talk to the real Robert Hanssen?
Billy Ray: “Well, that’s Chris. By that I mean he approaches a character totally from the inside out. He reads the script, he looks at the choices that the character makes and he then defines the character based on those choices. He plays it like you are what you do. The result of that is that when he saw the movie for the first time, I looked at him and I said, ‘What did you think?’ He said, ‘I had no idea he was such a dark character.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, how did you not know?’
The reason he didn’t know is, because he’s such an authentic actor, he never stood outside the character and judged the character. He just behaved. And then as a human being, as a citizen, later he watched the movie and said, ‘Oh my God, I put all these pieces of behavior together, that’s a dark guy.’ But he wasn’t playing a dark guy and that’s why the character has such nuance to it, because he was just behaving. I don’t think Hanssen was stepping outside himself saying, ‘I’m evil,’ and so Chris couldn’t play him that way.”
How did Robert Hanssen get by with being a double agent for so many years?
Eric O’Neill: “He’s very smart and he was in the right place. He was working counterintelligence and he was in charge of the analysts who would be trying to find him. Any time they got close, he would drop to the Russians and tell the Russians, ‘Hey, we think this guy is a source.’ Or, ‘I think this guy is a source who could give up some of your people in the U.S.,’ and the Russians would have that person killed. So any time that they got close, he just would terminate that person who could deal with him. He also wasn’t greedy. He took only what he needed and what he could spend without anybody knowing he had a surplus of cash. He had three mortgages on his house.”
Billy Ray: “Everyone at the FBI that I met said to me that prior to the apex of this investigation, if you would have asked me to make a list of a thousand people in the FBI who could have been the mole, Robert Hanssen’s name would not have been on that list. Several people said that to me. And this is one of those things that Chris pulls off. He somehow just disappeared into the shadows of that organization. He found a way to become invisible, and yet everyone knew him. They all thought he was Dr. Death. They called him The Mortician behind his back. They all thought he was creepy, but I don’t think any of them thought that he had the gumption to try something as audacious as this. It never occurred to them he was a candidate.”
Eric O’Neill: “One of the reasons they called him Mortician was he always wore the same suit, a very, very dark navy blue suit. I don’t even know if he had another suit. He’d change his tie and he always wore a white shirt. You come off cheap and you come off broke, and people who are making a million dollars selling secrets to the Russians might at least have two suits. Those kinds of things that just didn’t fit the profile. He also anytime he made a drop, he was selective with information. He made sure that all that information pointed to the CIA, not the FBI.”
Billy Ray: “And he’s also dragging people off to Opus Dei meetings and proselytizing about his religion and talking about how he wanted to help the bureau and modernize the bureau. These are not things you would expect someone to do if they were busy dropping secrets to the Russians.”
Breach isn’t the sort of film audiences are usually treated to in February. We’ve come to expect movies of this caliber to hit theaters closer to the end of the year. Why is Breach being released so early in 2007?
Billy Ray: “I get that question a lot. I do. There are a couple answers. First of all, Silence of the Lambs was released at exactly the same time and won everything, so no one cares.”
But Silence of the Lambs was an exception to the rule.
Billy Ray: “No one cares more about Academy Awards than I do. Nobody in the whole world. I think about them all the time. I want them really bad. But Universal made the decision I think based on 1) most importantly, that President’s Day weekend is a big box office weekend and they believe this movie’s going to make money. So I take it as a great compliment that that’s where they chose to release it. But secondly, they also were releasing The Good Shepherd and I think they thought they shouldn’t have two movies that travel in the same world released in the same quarter.”
Breach and The Good Shepherd are nothing alike.
Billy Ray: “I understand, and I agree with you, but they know more about marketing than I do so I trust their judgment. I think this movie, the most important thing is that the movie finds its audience and if that happens, people will still remember us next year at this time. Here’s one thing I can say for sure, there will not be five better performances than Chris Cooper’s between now and the end of the year. So we’ll be around next February, I’m not worried about it.
There’s a certain lemming mentality to it that I’m actually glad not to be a part of. Having said that, I always thought it would be a fall release but I now see the wisdom of releasing in February and I’m totally comfortable with it.”
