The Daily Beast interview in promotion of Beast of Burden. Imperium is also mentioned.
Did you view Beast of Burden as an acting challenge, in a sense? It’s mostly you trapped in the cockpit of a plane juggling multiple conversations, sort of like an airborne Locke.
Yeah,
definitely. We shot it in sixteen days, and before we started Jesper
sent me a text like, “Are you good with learning lines?” and I said, “I
think so! But now that you’ve sent me this question I’m doubting that
I’m good enough for whatever you’re planning!” But it was great. It was
the closest thing to doing a play I’d done on film, in a weird way.
Because I’m on the phones for so much of the film, and because we had so
little time to shoot, we’d do twenty pages [of script] in one go and
half-hour-long takes. We’d do that three or four times during the
morning, then we’d change the camera position and run another section
three or four times in the same way and block-shoot parts of it. All of
the stuff in the plane was the first eight days of the shoot and the
rest was outside.
Was it tough to act—to keep your composure—in that rattling cockpit for eight days?
[Laughs] It very quickly became my home. I was
spending so much time in there and quite kind of came to enjoy it. I
took two flying lessons before I did the film so I had a vague sense of
how to do things or how to move things, but at the same time it was a
limited amount. There was a certain amount of me pressing buttons inside
the cockpit so it was like, okay, I’m going to find an internal logic
in these eight days to where, when Jesper would tell me to do this, I’d
go to push that button. It made sense to me, but I’m just hoping no
pilots are watching and going, “What the fuck is he doing?!”
Oh,
I thought it looked pretty convincing. There’s a combat drone trailing
you—and really, haunting you—throughout much of the film. Did you view
that as a subtle commentary on the horrors of drone warfare?
I don’t know that he’s making any kind of overarching political point with it. It wasn’t like Eye in the Sky.
It’s more of a case of, OK, we’ve got this guy in the air, how much
shit can we throw at him? It’s a film about going from A to B, and how
much awfulness can we put this guy through along the way.
I
found it to be a commentary on drone warfare, given how the drone is
being controlled by a governmental agency—the DEA—and redirecting the
sense of paranoia that people in other parts of the world must feel with
combat drones flying over them onto an American.
It’s
something that we associate with not being directed at white people
normally. That’s true. That’s interesting. Another thing is, with all
the stuff that’s going on about “The Wall” at the moment, we made the
film about a guy who’s literally flying [drugs] over the border. We
loosely based it on an article, and in it, with people who are flying
drugs over the border, the plane I fly in the film is basically a
jetliner compared to some of these things, which are like hang-gliders
with engines on them and crazy dangerous. It’s a one-time-use thing, and
they just fly them over and dump the drugs. We were making this before
any of this [wall] stuff kicked into high gear, but it was definitely
something that occurred to us when we were doing it.
Your character, Sean Haggerty, sees himself as a failure.
It’s almost like this one (last?) crazy mission, he feels, is penance
for his sins.
With all the choices he’s made in his
life, he sees himself as a complete failure and someone who’s actively
screwed up situations in his life. He’s trying to make everything right
by doing the only thing he thinks he can do—and the only thing he knows
how to do—but it’s something that has never brought the best result for
him. It’s an addict’s mentality: to do something over and over again and
think something different will come of it when you’re really just
grinding yourself down. He’s trying to do this for a good reason, but
his lack of being able to be honest with himself—and then be honest with
his wife—about what he’s actually doing means that he’s endangered
everybody he loves, as well as himself, and dragged them to a much
darker place than they would be otherwise.
I enjoyed your performance as an FBI agent who infiltrates a gang of white supremacists in Imperium.
It must seem pretty surreal to you to see these white supremacists in
America coming out of the woodwork. You filmed it in rural Virginia in
September 2015, well before the neo-Nazi march on Charlottesville.
It’s been disturbing. When we were filming the KKK rally scenes in that film, we did have some people think we were a real
rally. There were some rightly pissed off African-American people, and
we’d all rush over to them and be like, “No, no! It’s only a film!” and
were the most apologetic group of fake skinheads in the world at that
moment. But we also had people drive by in trucks and honk their horns
thinking we were a real rally, and it was appalling.
Yikes.
It
was a really weird thing to experience because we were making a film
about white supremacy so we didn’t think it had all gone away, but when
it was that sort of casual, that was the thing that has been shocking.
When we were making the film, we thought, “This is way more prevalent
than people think but it’s still on the fringes,” and then to watch it
become treated as a “legitimate” political point of view in some quarters because of how elevated some of its voices have become, it’s crazy.
It is indeed crazy. And it’s not just happening in America.
Yeah,
a version of this is happening in a lot of places around the world. We
all obviously focus on what’s going on in America because what’s going
on in America affects everyone everywhere, but some version of it is
happening everywhere. I, like most people, am particularly spellbound by
what’s going on in the U.S. It’s sad, and it makes me worried. This
level of division is not just going to go away when Trump goes. It’s
something frighteningly, deeply ingrained. I hope it can just dissipate,
but I don’t know. Any exposure to Twitter and YouTube comments and you
go, “Oh my god!” It’s so hard to see these people feel less strongly
about these things than they feel right now.
It’s not a good time to have a Jewish last name on Twitter. I know from experience.
Oh god. Best of luck to you with that.
I wanted to
talk to you about your LGBTQ advocacy work. One of the things I’ve
admired about you is that you spoke out against homophobia at a young
age, and have been a strong supporter of The Trevor Project,
which focuses on suicide prevention for LGBTQ youths. I’m curious how
you feel Hollywood is doing as far as providing a platform for LGBTQ
actors goes, as well as its overall acceptance of those who identify as
LGBTQ?
It is definitely getting better. I think
there’s a lot more effort being made to tell stories about different
people—and about different groups of people. That’s something that can
always improve, but it is something that is happening, though not as
quickly as people would like. I think people are starting to think
differently, when you’re writing a TV show or a film, about the
perspectives that you’re choosing to right from, who you’re choosing to
include in that, and handling that with care, versus just being like,
“Oh, I’m a middle-aged white guy, I can easily capture the voices of
these young, diverse people.” I’m explaining this badly, but I do feel
like it’s getting better and we’re a good industry for that.
The
thing that made me want to get involved [in LGBTQ advocacy] was less
specific to the film industry and more the amount of young kids that are
killing themselves around the country, and having my attention drawn to
that. I’m from a family of actors and I grew up around a lot of gay
people and it was never even explained to me, I don’t think—or if it
was, it was in passing. It was never explained to me as being something
different. It was just, “Oh, this is my parent’s friend Mark, and Mark
has a boyfriend.” When you’re a kid, you’re not going to question that
unless somebody tells you to question it, so I didn’t. And then I got to
school, and that’s where you hear homophobic slurs being thrown around
as kids experiment with swearing when they’re nine or ten, and then you
get a sense of homophobia, and how prevalent it is.
Right. All too prevalent.
Very.
I’m from a fairly secular upbringing and am totally in support of
anybody being religious or having religion in their life, and that’s
great, but if your religion tramples on the feet and the lives of the
people around you, that was something that I felt is an issue. It’s an
issue in the middle of this country—in super-religious areas in the
middle of America, it’s very, very hard to be young and gay. If I as
Harry Potter or somebody they have watched or whatever saying “don’t
worry about who you are” made any difference to anybody, then that seems
like a very small thing to do on my part. The thing about The Trevor
Project is that the people that man the phones and do all that on a
daily basis at The Trevor Project are the people who are on the
frontlines of actually saving lives. It’s something that people do
mention to me occasionally as having been important to them, and
whenever they do I feel incredibly honored to have been able to help in
some tiny way.
Speaking of Harry Potter, you recently addressed Johnny Depp’s involvement in the Potter spinoff franchise Fantastic Beasts.
What do you feel the level of responsibility should be for particularly
men in Hollywood with power when it comes to casting people who have
been credibly accused of things like abusive behavior toward women? It
seems men, as allies, can do a lot better when it comes to standing up
for the women in the industry.
There’s something
happening which I think is really, really good, where people and
audiences are caring about the people who make these things, and what
ethical or moral code they live by. I don’t know if it’s happening
because of social media, or because we know so much more about everyone
now, but I do think people are going to have to start thinking about
that, and hopefully it will make people think about their behavior. The
meaty thing is about sexual harassment, as it should be, and that should
be stamped out and wiped out of our industry—from the awful Harvey
Weinstein stuff to the low-key, on-set weirdness—all of that is just
crazy, and needs to go, and there’s no place for it. But there’s no
place for a lot of the behavior of people in my industry.
I can only speak for my industry, but particularly with actors, actors operate with a kind of freedom on set because it’s very hard
to replace them during a production if you’ve already started
filming—it’s just very hard to shoot them out. If half the crewmembers
acted in the way some actors act, they would be kicked off and replaced
immediately. The only reason that doesn’t happen is because you’ve
already shot half the movie and you’re gonna have to finish. There’s not
enough incentive to stop people from behaving badly, so hopefully the
general knowledge that you can’t be a shit and get away with it will
make people act differently.
source: thedailybeast.com
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