William Hurt

Same here. I’m sorry he thinks I turned Dead Ringers down. He said that in an interview and it wasn’t that. I did have another commitment to some Off-Broadway work. I was devastated to have to say no. It is one of the most amazing performances in film and that’s because of David Cronenberg. David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

It reads that way. The movie leads to it so you know that’s on your shoulders. The thing is David is also aware of everything and it’s not like you’re going somewhere the director is not. Your thought is, “God is he going to let me get away with this?” He offered it so he knows I have it in me but not a lot of people do. He lets you take these huge choices with the physical appearance and then you start to actually do it and he could say no. All he has to do is raise a finger and say, “let’s go talk about this” but he just let me go.

Look at what Maria [Bello] did. That’s a scalding portrayal of a person who’s meeting a side of themselves they never wanted to meet. She comes in as a different person in every scene. That person is just having one layer of skin taken off after another after another, after another. Viggo as well. I don’t know if anybody could do what Viggo did in this film. He’s not being coy with the camera and calling that modesty of character.

There’s a lot of relief in that scene. There’s a lot of watershed in that scene. I spoke to David early on and said, “I do have the afterburners if you want me to turn them on” and he said to go ahead. But normally I wouldn’t use those kinds of muscles. I very much prefer the balance in a scene to standing out and so you have to make a decision. People who have expertise or the luck to have rehearsal time with cameras have it over people who don’t. They can come in and guts it out. They like to shoot from the hip, I don’t. I don’t believe that’s where the great risks are. Great risks come in long term, tremendously assiduous, very courageous study. Heroes to me are guys that sit in libraries. They absorb knowledge and then the risks they take are calculated on the basis of the courage it took to become replete with knowledge. A lot of people are taking those risks on the basis of something so unconsidered that it’s completely capricious. That’s one of the reasons why actors are not respected anymore as actors.

I was 14. It was the moment I learned acting is not acting out. After that light went on, I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make other people realize it.

I want that. I want to prove a point. That point is, actors are artists, not narcissists necessarily. But you’re combating a huge social phenomenon, the masses of people, going to the moving image which titillates some synapses in the brain.

No, you’re always looking for a way to get more. Not to be offensive, not to be capricious, not to be arbitrary, not to be neurotic, not to be an actor outer, you’re just trying to get in and you’re given so little time to get in gently, but it’s always hard. I need six weeks of rehearsal and women need nine months and it took me 15 years to figure that out. I know I didn’t want it to be true because I wanted to go where everyone else was going, lets not cut the corners, lets cut down the building. But sometimes you cut down a building and there’s lots of people in that building, lots of babies and the bathtub’s filled with baby blood. So it’s not right. In other words the growth of an artist, the maturation just gets cut off. They’re famous for what they were famous for when they were found to be famous. We’re going to lock them into that position and we’re not going to let them become anything else or develop a maturity or any other thought. That’s the bauble that attracts the attention, so we’re going to keep them there and we’re going to keep everybody who watches them for that there too. Stasis, inertia.

The thing is, I don’t believe in most of what’s done. The amount of financial and imaginative energy that’s put into mediocrity is just amazing which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.

The key for me was the fact that I arrived way early and David had no problem with that. Also even though it was at the end of the production Viggo still had all this time for me in the evening. We could talk about ideas, we could talk about scenes and the structure of scenes. My character wants nothing more than for him to say, I will be with you again. It’s better late than never, it’s a huge question and when he doesn’t answer correctly that’s his death warrant. With the other men in the scene, it’s all strategic. He’s performing for those guys and we worked hard at trying to insinuate that as much as we could in the scene too.

It just seems like that because I do a lot of independent films that don’t get to the mainstream. I get people that come up to me that say, “Gee, I just saw this movie on video, why didn’t it get distribution in the country?”

Yeah, you can pipe into that. I just want the good work.

Yeah, I’d love to. But the problem is I don’t think they’re going to go with me because I demand paid rehearsal. I demand minimal for paid rehearsal and not always six weeks either. Also I’d have a pool of gross after breakeven for the crew because they’re the ones that make the movies.

I have a film I want to direct. Gena Rowlands was going to do it with me a long time ago. It’s about an older woman who’s running a ranch in the west the old fashioned way. Modernity is growing up around her but she’s really maintaining. This itinerant guy comes in, he used to be a rodeo cowboy and now he just is a fence man there on her south border. She starts to die and he stays with her while she’s dying. It’s very funny with a lot of character. I’ve set it up enough but no one believes I can play a cowboy.

I’ve had a conversation with two people I won’t name them, in Los Angeles and they told me that I’m upper crust, lost establishment, guy from the northeast with the ideas.

I’m working on a De Niro film right now called The Good Shepherd and I’m also working on a film directed by Chad Lowe called Beautiful Ohio. It’s in the New York area which I like a lot.

I’m living here while I do these films. Technically speaking I live in eastern Oregon. I’m way in the desert. My mom was born and bred out there and she was pretty gutsy as a girl. So I needed help from my mom raising my kids. I live five miles from the nearest person.

Yeah I’m friendly. I use it for information I love the bloggers but it’s hard to find the right ones. I listen to XM radio because I can get so many overseas news stations. Also CSPAN is really the great treasure of the media as far as getting information.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck