Q. With this and The Woodsman, you’re obviously going through a phase in your career where the roles are tough and intense, from the outside they seem to be difficult roles. Is this the sort of role you like to get your teeth into?
Yeah, I think it’s a lot easier to play a character that’s been written with some depth than it is to try and make something out of nothing. There’s been times when you read something and they expect you to fill in the blanks.
I like to be as collaborative as possible and explore as many aspects of a character’s life as I can. But I’m not a writer so if something is meaty it’s easier.
Q. Although this does come from a novel, there are presumably all sorts of things you could have researched whilst still maintaining the fictional characters?
Sure, I looked at a lot of comedy duos through the years, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, I looked at quite a lot of stuff about the genesis of that duo thing which is Vaudeville, the act they would take around. Obviously Martin and Lewis. I spent a lot of time looking at the Rat Pack in general because there was this element of Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford and you kind of felt they were having the party before you got there and the party was going to continue after you left and you were just getting a chance to hang out with them for a while and that was the kind of thing we were trying to evoke.
It was important to us. There was a lot more Martin and Lewis in the book but Atom wanted to depart from that and as far as I know there was no Fifties musical comedy act that had a British guy and an American guy but what we wanted to do was make it feel like it could’ve existed, even if it didn’t. So there was a lot of research I did around that.
Like any other character if there is a book or source material that’s great because you can read it and fill in some of the blanks: who he is and where he comes from that the script doesn’t have the time to explain and whatever’s not there I just did myself. Like writing an autobiography, I start with my childhood and do the big strokes questions; what kind of relationship with the parents and what religion and those kind of things and then get into the more detailed stuff that may or may not inform the character. The thing about research is that you don’t know if it’s going to have an impact. You don’t even know when you’re playing it. It helps to have looked, but I just do it because you might as well do it as not.
Q. I read a quote that you’d one day like to play the hero who saves the day and gets the girl, I wondered whether you were saying that in a jokey way or you mean it?
No, I’m not joking at all. The thing about the dark characters is that those are the ones that recently they’ve been seen. I’ve always done them from the time I was a young guy playing all the unusual characters is something I’ve always been drawn to. I’ve always thought of myself as a character actor but I think that just in the way that JFK turned things around for me and made it possible to do something other than the Footloose kind of guy and keep doing things that are unexpected. It’s good for me and it’s good for the audience and it’s good for my career so I think what’s kind of unexpected now is the hero, do a film that’s not quite so heavy. And I love those kinds of films, I like to watch them, they’re just as interesting to me.
I’ll give you an example I was up for a film recently and the character was going to be a nice guy who ends up being a killer and I didn’t get the movie because the director said “if we put Kevin in everyone’s going to know he’s the killer!” [laughs] so that’s changed a lot from the days when people said “wow, I can’t believe you played the killer” I was in a movie with Gary Oldman and I played the sociopath and Gary played the heroic lawyer and “wow that was such a shock to us”. Times have changed now and I feel it’s maybe time to turn it around the other way.
Q. Do you have any Rupert Holmes in your record collection?
The Pina Colada guy? No, I don’t have any of his albums. When I read the script and saw it was from a book by Rupert Holmes I thought – that’s not the Pina Colada guy, there’s no way – but he was quite a renaissance man, novelist, Broadway shows, record producer and songwriter and recording artist, he’s really an unusual cat. I like him a lot he came to visit and we had the chance to go to a couple of film festivals together.
Q. Did you jam together?
No, we didn’t jam together [laughter]
Q. There’s a bond of trust between comedy partnerships. How did you build that up with Colin?
Which one’s Colin? [laughter] I hear he’s a big deal over here! One of the challenges as an actor is to create something in a very short amount of time. We had admired each others work and I had a friend who said to me a number of times, you really should work with this guy, I think you’d really like him, but that’s the thing you walk into a situation and it’s how you doin? And within the course of a week or a week and a half you have to feel like you’ve been gigging together forever and it’s like a marriage for these guys, sharing women, sharing drugs, sharing the excitement and building this act. I think that Atom had left a lot of open questions in terms of what the actors were going to be, a lot of the comedy is not really written, musically, pretty much up to a few weeks before, we hadn’t picked the songs. His character originally was an American. I kept asking – “are we getting a choreographer?”, “Are we getting a comic writer to write this?”, “Are you getting a musical director?” and he [Atom] was like “I think you can work it out, you can work with the band” you know. We were all working on the musical side of it together and how we’re going to arrange the songs, I was coming up with ideas, just the comedy part of it, and Atom’s writing stuff and we’re emailing back and forth and Colin came in one day and did that crazy rant he did as he’s coming off stage and that was complete improv on his part then we put it in the movie. It felt quite frightening this telethon and it’s got to look like it’s real but that, in a way gave us a lot of pressure to try and come together which was helpful in a way.
Q. Was there ever any suggestion that you and Colin take the opposite roles? And what’s the nearest you’ve ever come to doing stand-up, was it something you contemplated early on?
No. I didn’t know when I met with Atom that Colin was doing the movie so I was told that I was meeting for either part and I assumed he probably saw me more as Vince. It had been a while since I’d done anything with that kind of razzamatazz, goof ball kind of quality so I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, when he said no I want you to play the Lanny role. I went back and re-read the script really thinking about Lanny and how I could inhabit that guy and it seemed somehow more of a challenge for me at this point to do that.
I don’t think I’ve ever really done any comedy but I do have a band so I’m very used to playing music live in front of people, I’ve done hundreds of live gigs, I’ve never done a musical per se and I’m definitely not a song and dance man, any of that dance and whatever is just stuff that I made up on the spot really.
Q. Would you like to do a musical?
Yeah, I would. I think my voice tends to not be a musical voice I’ve much more of rock kind of voice. I’ve tried to work in that, it’s great, and it’s a challenge but. yeah, I would enjoy doing that.
Q. The role of Lanny is to some extent about a celebrity, how they appear publicly and the pitfalls of that sort of lifestyle. Are there any aspects of your own lifestyle that you can bring into the role?
Yeah, definitely. The movie deals with that, that’s one of the things that interested me about the role is the way some of the things that the journalist asks what it’s like to relinquish his anonymity and his response to that is that he feels what he is at the core. You still feel like that kid getting beat up, you don’t feel like ‘Lanny Morris’. Defining yourself by your fame, being afraid that your fame is going to slip away, all that stuff is very, very true. As I said I have rarely if ever had a chance to play a celebrity so it’s interesting to tap into that side.
Q. Do you think that having a stable relationship for so long has helped you?
I think that there’s a lot more that’s good about being famous than bad. I’d like to make that clear [laughter] people are very nice to you and you get a chance to live a very interesting and exciting life. You become an actor and it’s one of the things you’re looking for. You don’t go into a room alone and act, you do it to be watched and have people love you. That’s really at its core. I think that eventually in your life, as I have learned, you have to find something outside of that, some work that’s going to give you strength and peace and is going to make you feel whole because the work and celebrity will eventually let you down, eventually it will become not enough and you look at a character like Lanny Morris – that scene as he’s a young man he says, “we felt like gods”, he can go from woman, to woman, to woman and he can have a great time and do the drugs and perform and get that love back from the audience and give it back out and live that kind of life but tragically when you see him later on, all that has waned a bit, it’s not like he’s unsuccessful, neither of these guys are who they were in the fifties, they don’t have that same kind of adulation. Yes he’s flying first class and he’s probably got a lot of money he’s been able to parlay his stardom into producing, directing, Morris Productions kind of thing but he hasn’t found anything else in his life and he’s lonely and they’re both kind of pathetic characters and you have to eventually get something else, if it’s yoga or needle point – I don’t know but it’s never going to be enough, it’s never going to fill you up.
Q. Like a narcotic in that sense, if all you pursue is fame it’s ultimately destructive?
I think so, I think so but it’s also like a narcotic in that if you don’t get it and it seems like someone’s about to take it away from you you’ll do anything to get it back. I’ve seen a lot of people, I’ve been an actor a long time, and I’ve seen these rises and falls and sometimes you’ve seen these people who will make their way back into the papers in a really kind of objectionable way but whether they’re conscious of it or not they’re still reaching for the headlines and that’s because you need it, it’s like a drug unless you have something else.
Q. You’ve got an incredible body of work, it’s incredibly prolific.
I thought you were going to say body! [Laughter]
Q. When you were starting out did you have a game plan? You never seem to stop working what governs those choices, is it fear being out of work? Kids to support perhaps?
It’s all those things. Even with the job that I’m in I still have a kind of very protestant work ethic, I’ve always thought about doing an honest days work so I can bring home my pay and support my family. It’s always been important to me from the time I became an actor. One of the reasons that it seems like I work all the time is that I’m not only doing movies where I’m in the lead. I’ll do smaller things, I’ll go someplace for a couple of weeks if I think the part is interesting and has some value or something I want to explore so when you make those kind of choices you end up with a very long IMDb! [Laughter].
I think there was a time in my life, not unlike the character, when I was wandering from movie to movie because this was where I felt at home and these were the most important kind of relationships to me. That kind of relationship is very seductive, you go onto a movie set and you feel like a family and you meet these people and they feel like lovers, or best friends, or father figures and mother figures it’s like you feel like that’s your home. One of the things I realised over the years is that if you really make that kind of commitment to everyone every time then when it ends there’s something sad about that because you realise you don’t stay friends forever, you can’t stay friends forever with everyone you meet on every single set and every single crew forever. Nobody has that amount of time!
You think, I thought that guy was my best friend! And now he’s not! That filled me with a lot of self doubt so now I don’t work all the time. I haven’t worked since I made Where the Truth Lies , I’ve been doing stuff with the band but I haven’t acted in that long. I try to find things outside that give me pleasure.
Q. Your directing career, is directing something you’re doing more of? We haven’t seen Loverboy.?
That’s out in May or June in the states and here soon after that. It’s the second thing that I’ve directed. I really enjoyed it; it’s a real natural kind of progression for an actor or actress. You spend so much time on a set and you spend so much time putting yourself in someone else’s hands and there’s an element of being an actor, I don’t care how big a star you are, you are kind of a puppet you’re giving yourself over for someone else to pull the strings, which you can do in the editing room or in marketing, or music or with the way you move the camera and there’s something that is emasculating about that. I’ve always said acting is kind of a young man’s gig, at some point you grow out of people touching your hair, pulling things off your clothes, putting on makeup, you want to. If you’re a carpenter, by the time you’re my age hopefully you’ve got your own business and there’s other people working for you and you’re telling them how to hammer the nails but if you’re successful a lot of times in acting it doesn’t really work that way. That being said I think you’ve got to find a story you want to tell and I’m always looking for stories and books and scripts that I will look at and start to think directorially about them and if you hear the music and see the cast and if you start to see the shots then you start too see it as a director but it does take a lot more time than directing and you have to really be willing to commit to at least a year, pre-production and then shooting, post-production, marketing. All that kind of stuff.
Q. The two films you’ve made have been small budget I wonder whether you’d like to up your budget?
I’d love to do something, the thing with directing is that I wanted to start at a really low budget level and my second film was about $200k more than my first and I hope I can kind of move up from there. That being said I like the artistic constraint that the lack of money gives you in a way because it makes you think creatively in a way. I admire that in those kind of filmmakers.
Q. You said you’ve never played a celebrity but you have played yourself on TV, I wonder how difficult that was?
In Will & Grace I played myself, a funny take on who I am and it was fun. I’d love to do it again, I don’t know if they’d ask me back but I think it’d be fun.
Q. I wondered what your reaction was when you discovered your film was being given an NC-17 certificate and whether you feel that your nation’s guardians thought this was necessary because there was more than just heterosexual content involved?
Could be, the problem with the ratings people is that they don’t actually tell you why they’re giving you an NC-17. the only thing I can say is that in the other scenes Atom did as much cutting as he could and they still gave him the NC-17, in the final scene there was really no way to cut it. I think there’s a fairly kind of puritan wind that’s blowing in the states.
Q. Do you think it gives the wrong message to the audience about the film?
Absolutely, the movie’s not a sex movie and if you’re apprehensive about not wanting to see something that has over the top sexuality then an NC-17 is definitely going to keep you at home and if you go to the movie hoping that it’s going to be soft core porn you’re going to be disappointed because there’s not enough to merit that. I’m thinking either way is probably not a good thing.
Q. To what extent has marriage to Kyra [Sedgwick] dictated your choices because she’s also in the business, do you work completely autonomously?
We work autonomously except when we work together! I’ve directed her, she’s produced things I’ve acted in and I’ve directed her twice but I’ve been married to her for seventeen years and that’s only a handful of projects that we’ve actually done together so more often than not we work separately, we tend on a pure scheduling matter to not work simultaneously in terms of raising the children it makes more sense for one person to be the support and one person to go out and then flip flop that, it doesn’t always work out, we overlap a little bit and because she’s on a series now there’s a much longer time commitment for her so I think we’re eventually going to have to work at the same time. And in terms of our choices I’ve never taken a part without her reading it and I don’t think she’s ever done anything without me reading it. She’s very clear about offering her opinions about projects and there have been a handful of times when I have done something that she has not been too enthusiastic about and she is inevitably right so I’m learning that! One of these days I’ll learn my lesson. [Laughter]
Q. I’ve read about your voracious love of reading – what have you got on the bedside table or desk at the moment and if you really had a wish list of something you’d like to film what would it be?
I read a kind of interesting book called The Wrecking Crew , a true story about a bunch of ne’er do well ex-rock musician, ex-junkie, a bunch of real fringe characters living in Los Angeles, around my age and they put together a baseball team and it’s sort of like Bad News Bears for burned out old guys like me and of course you see an article in the paper about something and of course as soon as it’s there the rights are gone so I read the book and it already has a producer on it and I called him up and we talked about it and maybe it’s something down the line. My passion right now is a movie based on a Japanese novel called Audition that they made into a brilliant Japanese film and I think, not to jump on the bandwagon of making American films out of Japanese films, this is something that is a perfect part for me to do at this point in my life and so I’m working on trying to get a screenplay out of that.
I’m definitely not going to make an NC-17, I can tell you that right now! I’ve learned my lesson! [Laughter]
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