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Josh Brolin’s Killer Year
"Overnight" success has been more than 20 years in the making
(Page 2)
JB: (Laughs) No. Actually, I felt the opposite. I felt like, this is not pandering; it’s different, the way they take away this protagonist from the audience. That’s what I was really curious about: How is the audience going to react? Are they going to get angry? I wasn’t bothered by it. But I know certain people—well, here in Austin, when I came here to do the Q&A, Harry Knowles told me that a friend of his saw No Country and told him, “Up until about three-quarters of the way through the movie, I thought this was the most brilliant movie I had ever seen.” But then I died and he was so angry that, at the end of the film, he was outside kicking trashcans and screaming, “Fuck the Coens! I hate the Coens!” And I thought, ‘Hey, what a great reaction!’
MM: I have to admit, after the way the Coens suckered me in Miller’s Crossing, I was sure for a long time after your final scene that, somehow, Tommy Lee Jones’ character had faked your character’s death. When it became obvious that that wasn’t what happened, I was amazed and impressed—but also a little disappointed.
JB: But that’s a great compliment. You got so into the character—whether you fell in love with the character or appreciated the character or wanted the character to continue—and then he’s just taken away, and you get upset. But that’s how we experience things like that in real life. My mom died the same way. One day, I talked to her—just hours before she died, I talked to her—and everything was normal, she was talking and laughing. And then, before I knew it, I got a call telling me she hit a tree with her car, and that was it. So for me, it was a very personal parallel when I read the script.
MM: You’ve received a very favorable response, here in Austin and elsewhere, for your short film X. Who would you say are your biggest influences as a film director?
JB: Wim Wenders—definitely, hugely, especially with Paris, Texas. And a lot of his photographs. I think had I done it on 35mm instead of video, I would have shot it a little differently. If I’d chosen to do it with more money, I would have shot it differently. But I was also influenced, at least inspirationally, by Robert Rodriguez, in doing it as cheaply as I could and seeing if I could just rely on story and acting as opposed to quick camera moves and all that.
I was influenced by Sam Shepard’s writing and the Coens, for sure, because I had lived that whole experience and saw how they shot No Country. I think I prepared a lot like they did. In fact, I’d say the majority of the work went into the preparation, because I did 96 set-ups in three days, which is almost impossible to do. Not only were we ahead of schedule filming it, but we were doing 14-hour days where we thought we were going to do 20-hour days.
MM: Any chance you’ll develop X into a feature?
JB: I actually showed it one night to some people in my backyard. I went to Best Buy and bought a huge sound system—which I returned the next day, and I told them, ‘It doesn’t really work for me.’ But I had this really amazing sound system basically for free, for one night. And one of the people I invited was Paul Haggis, who’s been my friend for a long time. The way Paul and I treat each other, there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek involved and a lot of jabbing. But I also know that he’s probably the most honest friend I have and that he’ll really tell me what he feels once he gets serious—which is probably one percent of the time. He came up to me afterwards and said that it was good. And I said, ‘Ah, thanks.’ And I didn’t really believe it. And he said, “No, really, it’s really good. You know, I’ve started this production company and I’d love for you to write it as a full-length feature.” So I don’t know where I’m at with it. I was just doing Milk in San Francisco and I’m getting ready to do W. with Oliver Stone, so I’m kind of consumed with that. But come this summer, if I choose not to work, which is so nice to say…
MM: Hey, enjoy it while you can.
JB: (Laughs) Then I’ll write all summer. I’ll focus on X and we’ll see how it goes. But I’m very happy with the way it turned out as a short. I’m very critical about myself, but I thought my daughter was fantastic. I didn’t expect that. I think as a story, it’s an interesting story. As Ethan Coen told me when he read it, “I don’t think you can fit more into a short. It’s impossible.”
MM: Where did you come up with the idea of an escaped convict father and his estranged young daughter on a road trip?
JB: I have no idea. I’d written a 14-character, very complicated kind of Armageddon script that had special effects in it. And I was going to do it at Robert Rodriguez’s studio—his little garage over there by the airport here in Austin. Robert loved it, he really wanted me to do it, but it just got too complicated. And then I said to myself, ‘You know what? This is my first film. I think I’m sabotaging myself.’ So I just pulled over my truck, and wrote X in about two hours. I thought of my daughter. I thought of my theater partner, Vincent Riverside, who’s also in it. I love that he has real tattoos—we didn’t have to get fake tattoos—and I just loved this idea of exploring nature/nurture. I don’t know where it came from, but I liked the fact that she basically turns into him, because she’s such a hardass. He’s a horrible father, but there’s something about him that’s very loving, and you get to see fluctuations in their personalities. You pigeonhole them when you first see them, and then they turn into something else. The daughter’s not as hard as she seems. But by the end, she’s much harder than how she seemed at the beginning. I like that.
The 400 Blows is one of my favorite movies. And so is Léolo, a French-Canadian film a lot of people haven’t heard of. So anything dealing with parents and kids, parental-child relationships, I love it. I don’t know why, but I love it.
MM: Okay, Josh, you’ve kind of left the barn door open for my next question.
JB: Go for it.
MM: Not to play pop psychologist, but okay: Famous father, whose profession you wound up in. Mom, who was the defining figure in your life at a certain age. Is all of this stuff you find yourself working out in your work?
JB: I don’t work it out, I explore it. I have no interest in working out anything. I don’t think that exists. But exploring it? I’m extremely interested in that. I love it. It’s emotional, it gets me going, and not in a negative sense. I may get into, ‘Oh my god, I hated that,’ but I want to get into that and find out why that was—even though I know there is no finding it out. It’s bringing up those questions, and then writing some drama based on those questions. Yes, that’s a big motivator for me.
MM: Speaking of being the son of a famous father: Why did you want to play the lead role in W., Oliver Stone’s upcoming movie about George W. Bush?
JB: First and foremost, I love the script. I was very against it at first and I told Oliver, ‘Absolutely not. It’s insane.’ I just figured Oliver had a major agenda. But then I read the script, and the script is basically following the fluctuations of this guy’s life. I felt for him and I hated him. I had empathy for him and sympathy for him… and I wanted to squash him. I felt everything you do for characters in any great drama. And I said, ‘This is interesting. People don’t know this.’
It’s not necessarily saying anything, but the fact that this is a guy who basically failed at everything, who was seen as the black sheep of his family and turned around, got his life together and beat—if you can do such a thing—alcoholism. He re-found Christianity on a much deeper level, which gave him a conviction like we haven’t seen in anybody except maybe for dictators in the Far East or the Middle East, and he became President of the United States. Wow. That is a story. The other stuff isn’t a story—the other stuff is redundant. If you did a thing about post-9/11, why he went to war, oil, money—if that were the confines of the story, it’s redundant. Or if you do it tongue in cheek, you can see that on “Saturday Night Live.” To me, it’s following him from 20 years old to 55 years old. Regardless of how you feel about him, it’s a fascinating story.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Kristin Rusher on 7/12/09 at 1:59 am
He was on the Goonies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But he was 17 then..........
_KNR he he Korn
This story was published in the Future of Moviemaking 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
The Year of Josh Brolin
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