“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good …. Greed clarifies. Greed works.“
Thus spake Gordon Gekko in the original “Wall Street,” a 1987 drama that earned its director and co-writer, Oliver Stone, a slew of Oscar nominations and its star, Michael Douglas, a statuette as best actor for playing Gekko. Although the character meant that phrase unironically — as part of the gospel of Ronald Reagan-era capitalism — Stone’s movie viewed it with an arched eyebrow; it was a prelude to the seduction and corruption of the film’s hero, Bud Fox, played by a then-baby-faced Charlie Sheen. But although the film was a hit, Stone’s larger message about the moral perils of materialism did not sink in. The characters in “Boiler Room,” a 2000 cautionary tale about greed, even quoted Gekko with a straight face, like football players reciting the wisdom of Vince Lombardi.
Stone is a half-Catholic, half-Jewish, Episcopalian-raised, Yale-educated son of a Wall Street banker, and a decorated Vietnam veteran. He was just 40 when he directed the original “Wall Street” — a muckraker and hellraiser emboldened by the back-to-back success of two 1986 movies, the Central American thriller “Salvador” and the Oscar-winning “Platoon.”
The now-63-year-old Stone has finally directed a “Wall Street” sequel titled “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” opening Friday. Except for Gekko, who returns to the financial scene after a prison stint for insider trading, the sequel’s cast of characters is mostly new. Shia LaBeouf stars as a young trader trying to make money in green energy and avenge a grave wrong committed against a mentor. Josh Brolin plays a partner at a rival bank who engineers the destruction of the hero’s firm. Carey Mulligan plays Gekko’s daughter, Winnie, who was supposed to stake Gekko’s return to Wall Street with a hidden stash, but reneged because she blames Gekko’s rotten fathering for her brother’s suicide.
We spoke to Stone last week in New York City about the two “Wall Street” movies, the evolution of the U.S. and world economy, and the flap over his comments about Hitler, Israel and Jewish influence over the U.S. media and government.
One of the things that surprised me about this movie is how different it felt in energy and tone from the first “Wall Street.” The first film had a lot of critical things to say about the mentalities that you just described, but it was also a movie that made the making of money, and the deals themselves, exciting.
Because it was new. There was a crisp business moving. Now you’ve had CNBC for 20 years, you’ve had books, you’ve had magazines –
Well, but beyond that, there are two movies going on simultaneously here, and they’re intertwined. One of them is that “Are-they-going-to-make-the-deal-or-not?” movie. But it’s contrasted with these surprisingly tender domestic scenes that are about a husband and a wife, or a father and a daughter. And the message of those scenes is, “Money is what gets in the way of this stuff.“
Trust is an issue, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t the movie at a fundamental level like the old movies? It’s the same story. It’s about love and trust, greed and betrayal. In the first movie, Charlie Sheen betrays his dad — that’s the crux of the movie — and he betrays his father’s labor union, which he grew up with, in order to advance himself, and to advance Gordon Gekko. And he realizes what he’s done at the end. And he reforms — he faces the consequences.
This new movie is no different. I mean, everyone is tested. Shia LaBeouf, good kid, idealistic — he’s trying to start an alternative energy, clean energy company, he brings the Chinese in, all that stuff. He’s trying to help the world.
And make money.
Yeah. And he’s twisted. Doesn’t he start up false rumors, malicious rumors, against Josh Brolin’s character? He does, because he wants to get revenge. That’s completely illegal! Then he actually does not tell the truth to his fiancée twice. He betrays her. And she doesn’t tell him the secrets of her own stash.
The hero is an honorable man, but only when it suits him.
And so was Charlie Sheen in the first movie. So I’m saying there’s a tension between what money makes you do against your own … Wasn’t there a line in the original movie where the old man, the Martin Sheen character, says, “Money makes you do things you don’t want to do?” Something of that nature?
Yes.
And he also said, “Money is something you need to have in case you don’t die tomorrow.”
Watching Frank Langella, who plays Louis Zabel, the hero’s mentor, I thought, “This is very possibly the most affectionate portrait of a lifelong, dedicated capitalist that I’ve seen in an Oliver Stone film.”
[Laughs]
And I’m looking at this and I’m wondering, “Were you thinking about your own dad in those scenes?” They were really rather sweet. And “sweet” is not an adjective I would normally attach to your movies.
I think [Langella's character] was a much tougher guy than my dad. My dad was not as big of a big shot. This guy was a big shot … He was a guy who ran money. He was tops in the day. But he’s lost touch. He says early in the film, “They say a loss is a profit. I don’t understand that shit.” He comes from the day when at Lehman Brothers, the four partners would sit in the same office to make sure nobody would steal the goddamn money. That was where he came from. So he was out of touch. And Brolin says, “The guy knew how to run money, but you don’t kill yourself.” You know, that was an astute observation on Brolin’s part.
No, the Langella character is not my dad. He’s a tough guy … I don’t see him as necessarily a good guy. He could have been a pig, but he was good to Shia because the kid was his caddy once. But they’re arrogant. All these guys are arrogant. When you get to the top, you’re generally arrogant.
I think Gordon Gekko is closer to my dad, because Gekko to me is more torn, truly torn. I think the key scene in this film is when he comes out of prison and his daughter’s not there. There’s nobody there, he’s looking around. That says a lot. Gekko references that later when he gets pissed in London at the kid. He says, “She wasn’t there. I have a right to do what I’m doing. She wouldn’t stake me. She promised me she would be there. It was my dough. She said she’d be there.”
When people are on their deathbeds, they never think, “Gee, I wish I had spent more time at the office.”
Gekko’s torn that way, isn’t he? He is pissed at her, he hates her for this. At the same time, he’s on the steps of the museum begging her, convinced he needs her back in his life. So I don’t think it’s very simple for him. I think he’s torn by money, torn by ego, by desire to get back in the game, to be respected, because he’s an outsider looking in. He’s writing a book, he’s kvetching about the system.
He’s been superseded by the next generation.
So he gets back in London and he gets the beat again, and he gets the hedge fund, and the hedge fund can accelerate very fast in that period, because he’s buying low. And I checked that, I know hedge funders that can do that. He gets a billion bucks … Big deal. It’s not a big deal to him. But he wants a grandson. That’s part of an ego thing going on, too. He wants to have a male heir, I guess.
So Gekko to me is a very nuanced, torn creature in the sequel, unlike in the first film, in which he was one-note. I loved him in the first movie, but he was a superficial son-of-a-bitch reptile. In this picture, which way’s he going to go? I kind of like that.
If you put both the films together, they’re over four hours’ worth of running time, and the only scenes in either of the movies where Gekko is always on the defensive are the scenes with his daughter in the sequel. He’s hat-in-hand. Suddenly he’s a beggar. That was something I didn’t expect.
Michael does reflect that. He’s lived a life, Douglas. He’s been through his son’s thing. You know, life does that to you. Life makes you humble. It makes you learn.
The scenes where the Gekko character talks about the suicide of his son, which was obviously the most important event of his personal life — to what extent did various drafts of the script draw on Michael Douglas’ own personal problems? Specifically his son’s drug problems?
His son was busted right before we were shooting. No, we committed to the storyline [before the bust]. If anything, I thought Michael might want to change some things. He didn’t. He went right with it.
There was an intensity, there was a rawness, to the scenes where that material was discussed that felt like it kind of went beyond acting.
Perhaps. We probably did more than one take. I don’t know if Michael may have been pushing it, but certainly he felt it. He was relating to those scenes deeply, yeah. Sometimes that’s not good. I have to watch it, because I don’t want to go overboard. Carey Mulligan, who plays Gekko’s daughter, Winnie, is very good too, in that scene. She anchors the scene, because basically it’s a job of convincing. He has to persuade her. And he does, so that at a certain point it’s all about her reaction shots. That’s a scene where if you cut it another way, it doesn’t work … It’s about persuasion. Seduction, too.
Based on what’s up there on the screen, I get the feeling the man who directed the second “Wall Street” film is measurably, temperamentally different from the man who made the first “Wall Street.”
It’s been 23 years. I’ve been through two divorces and more life. I think I was a hungry young man. It was my first studio film, “Wall Street,” so I was excited. It was glamorous. I’m shooting in New York with studio money. I’d done low-budget: “Salvador,” “Platoon.” It was my first studio movie, I remember being very proud of that. I’m [portraying] a ruthless, exotic world. Nobody had really done that kind of movie. So it was all fresh and new. I loved the story. It was “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” It was a young man corrupted by the world, and I loved it. But it wasn’t as deep as this movie, because this one has more ambivalence.
There’s a deep skepticism about ideas of material success in this film, which was not as much of a factor in the first one.
Oh, but I think it was. The father is, to me, a good guy — and by “father,” I mean the Hal Holbrook character as well as Martin Sheen, the hero’s actual father. They’re both counterweights to Charlie’s materialism. I think my dad was in Hal Holbrook too, because I know I wrote some of those lines — the abyss and all that. Those were my feelings at the time.
I’ve always felt, if you look back at my work, that there is a spiritual side. Even going back to “Platoon” — there were mystical concepts in it. I’ve always felt materialism has its limits. That feeling has only deepened with time, frankly. It hasn’t changed, it’s deepened, the awareness that money is so tricky, what money can do to people. Even to daughters and their mothers. Susan Sarandon’s character [the hero's mother in "Money Never Sleeps"] is just an ordinary nurse until she goes into the real estate business. She represents, I suppose, something close to the middle class.
But there is really no middle class in this movie.
No, there isn’t. That’s a big change. In the 23 years that have elapsed between the first film and this one, what else has changed in the culture of business, as you perceive it? And how did those changes inform your approach to this sequel?
[In the late 1980s), the Gordon Gekkos were the raiders. They were the buccaneers. I wouldn't even say pirates, because they were on the edge of legality, like [Henry] Morgan in the Caribbean. They were the raiders. They came in, they cannibalized the companies, often for self-profit. Gekko masked what he did with a “greed is good” kind of revolutionary spirit, a change and modernization act. But basically they raped the place. And they created new wealth. The concept of $100 million for a company wasn’t outrageous anymore. $100 million was an enormous amount of money. Now think back to the 2008 period, when a billion dollars gets you into the game to buy a company. The trick is to overvalue, to hype, and that’s what [the buccaneers] did.
But now there are no longer any buccaneers. They’re gone. They were absorbed by the hedge-funders. And the hedge-funders in the ’90s did what Gekko did. And more power to [the Gekkos], I have no beef with them, because you know what you’re getting into. It’s a risky business. But they made so much money and were so successful in that deregulated market of Reagan and Thatcher that the banks, which are the central institutions in our country, operating with the public’s trust and with licenses from the government, started to play the hedge fund game, which was playing the Gekko game.
Josh Brolin’s character [the nemesis and "bad dad" of Shia LaBeouf's character in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"] is like the grandson of Gordon Gekko. But he’s legal. He’s at the center of the system, whereas Gekko was a bad guy on the bad side of the system.
As you’re laying this all out for me, it reminds me of some of the narration at the end of Martin Scorsese’s “Casino,” contrasting the mob guys that used to run Las Vegas with the international corporations that run it now. It sounds like you’re describing an escalation of scale.
The illegitimate became legitimate. But, frankly, it was [also] on the edge of illegitimate, what [the 21st century Gekkos] were doing. They were selling junk to the public. They were selling subprimes and primes, the mortgage market, they were selling debt to the public. Which is really a form of junk bonds, from Mike Milken back in the ’80s. So they were selling this to the public, they were selling it to the pension funds, to people like your parents, who got hurt. These pension funds bought this shit, and their value plummeted. Endowments got hurt, everybody got hurt. Everybody, across the board. Not only [in the United States] but around the world, Iceland, Greece, every country. And these are bankers. These are bankers!
But the government regulations were still in place. You can’t just blame [the bankers]. You have to say the government regulators fell apart, because of the Bush era, because of Clinton, because of people like Robert Rubin [who served as secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, from 1995-99].
Actually, that was striking to me — the point in the movie, which is set in 2008, where Gekko says to the hero, in effect, don’t make it seem as though this disaster happened under the current administration alone — the current administration being George W. Bush’s.
It’s like Gekko is telling the hero, and the audience, that Bill Clinton deserves some of the blame for what’s happening to the economy, too.
A lot. But I would say Ronald Reagan started the whole thing, [moving America] away from the New Deal. Look, under Clinton we had the Commodity Futures Regulation Act [of 2000] — they always use “modernization” as the great word. It’s bullshit. Then they repealed a lot of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was crucial. [Reagan-era Chairman of Federal Reserve] Paul Volcker has criticized [the repeal] openly.
Robert Rubin was right there. As secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, he stands with special distinction for having enriched himself more than any other person after leaving office. [Stone has said elsewhere that the shady speculator played by Brolin in the second "Wall Street" was partly modeled on Rubin.] At least Hank Paulson, no matter what you think of him — and I like the guy in a way — went back to Idaho or Indiana or wherever he’s from, and he did live a modest life. He didn’t enrich himself like Rubin did.
These guys are slick, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, his wife [Wendy Lee Gramm] … They’re all part of that horrible moment in time when they just felt, “Hey, liquidity can grow, just grow and grow and grow.”
With India and China and all the world economies kicking in, the true economic activity of the world doubled from 2000 to 2008. It’s almost like these populations come into being. India didn’t used to be a player. All of a sudden India was a player. And China.
Not too long ago India and China were on the cover of the Economist with the headline, “Contest of the Century.” The article asked which of those countries was going to run the world.
I don’t know where it’s going to go. The volatility of the world has changed enormously. In my dad’s age, I could have had a safe deposit account and know I could have made 3 percent. If you weren’t too greedy, 3 percent would have been fine back then. But now you can’t do that … As an older person, you have no security. And having to live with that in your life, the knowledge that there is no security, would drive anybody crazy.
The labor unions are gone now. They don’t mean anything economically. The concept of a labor union striking in this country does not strike fear in anybody’s heart.
No, it doesn’t.
It doesn’t work. In France, they still have strong unions. [But in the United States] the sort of worker represented by Charlie Sheen’s father in “Wall Street” is gone. They’re not a factor anymore.
I met with the head of the AFL-CIO. He said to me very clearly that since 1974, American wages have flattened completely per capita — what a working man can make, union men. Whereas the productivity of the United States has gone way up. The extra money has gone in the pockets of the stockholders, the CEOs, the bankers. That’s where the money’s gone. The corporate profits are 41, 42 percent [attributable to] financial companies. That’s outrageous. It used to be that in 1973, it was about 16 percent. In the ’60s, it was probably below 10 percent.
You know what that’s saying? The business of America is now purely finance.
And that builds upon one of the motifs in the first “Wall Street,” the worry that we’re not making anything anymore except money. I remember at the time thinking, “Oh, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.” But maybe it was just a little bit ahead.
So was “Natural Born Killers,” by the way. But I think since it came out, TV has gotten worse than that.
I didn’t care for “Natural Born Killers” when it first came out, not at all. But I revisited it recently and had to concede that you were probably ahead of the curve there, too, in your description of what TV had turned into, and how it was affecting people’s minds.
I loved that movie. I thought that was the beginning of the end of this concept of truth. Larry Tisch [the former boss of CBS], you know that whole thing that happened in the 1980s? He took the news and made it for-profit.
The news-as-profit-center example was actually set earlier, by “60 Minutes,” which starting in the ’70s was one of the most profitable shows on network television, despite being a news program. And network executives looked at that and said, “Oh my God, we can make as much profit on this as we do on ‘Hawaii 5-0′ or ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ Why don’t we remodel all of the news on this?”
Well, same thing with the movie business. If “Jaws” can make that, we can do it this way.
I don’t want to get sidetracked into talking about your Hugo Chavez documentary “South of the Border” too much, but I do want to ask you about the New York Times piece by Larry Rohter about the film, and your very detailed written response to it. Watching the whole thing unfold, I realized this has been going on for a long time — the guns-blazing attack on any film you make that’s about history or that’s somehow based on fact, and your response, which comes across almost as though you’ve got a rapid response team, as if there’s some guy down in a boiler room working a LexisNexis account.
In this case it’s true, because I wasn’t the co-author of the script. I worked with Tariq Ali in London and Mark Weisbrot, who’s a very smart economist and intellectual at the Center of Policy and Economic Research.
I just want to set this up for the reader. This was a case where this article in the New York Times enumerated a number of what it called inaccuracies and distortions in the Chavez documentary, and you responded. And Rohter responded to your response.
It was a back-and-forth.
Yeah, but I’m talking specifically about the response published on Common Dreams and other sites that was attempting to refute the charges in Rohter’s original New York Times piece, with evidence. I remember you started doing that kind of thing when “JFK” came out. The two-part question I have is, first, why do you think it is you, among all filmmakers who make films based on real life, that is subjected to this level of scrutiny every time you make that kind of movie? And second, why have you felt it necessary to reply just as aggressively and with just as much detail to that kind of coverage, rather than just saying, “Screw it, let them say what they want to say”?
I’ve done that, too. I’ve done that, too.
I think on “Nixon” there were some attacks. I remember Newsweek, Evan Thomas — there were so many. But I was tired. Sometimes you don’t fight back.
In the case of “JFK,” that was a monster for me, because we did publish a damn book and nobody referenced it. And the book was not completely accurate, but it was pretty much [accurate] … We had a lot of footnotes in there, and we covered a lot of bases. [Detractors] kept saying we made it up. I don’t know, we put a book out, we documented all our footnotes, we weren’t hiding anything. [But] because we turned 26 characters into three [in the screenplay], all the sudden everything had to be thrown out the window.
Well, you can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We are trying to stick to the spirit of the truth. But it’s a dramatist’s role, and the dramatist’s role is very hard to understand. And I made a comment somewhere that the dramatists came before the historians in Greek history, and when you think about it, maybe the dramatists do know something. Homer may not have been a great historian, I don’t know. But he certainly made the Trojan War have a meaning to us. That, perhaps, was a smaller war. Perhaps [its significance] has been exaggerated. But the concept of overreach is very much in Homer. And I think a dramatist can do the same thing in Vietnam or Afghanistan or wherever.
So, listen, on Chavez, this is an old story. Very depressing thing. The New York Times, I respect it. They try very hard, they’re good people, a good newspaper. But they have certain blind spots. One of them was the JFK assassination. They didn’t cover it. They didn’t do any real uncovering. They never have. Never reviewed one book positively, other than the Oswald-did-it-alone scenario.
The Gerald Posner book “Case Closed,” you mean.
Among others. There’s one other, too. There’s that guy, that prosecuting attorney, that nut case, the Manson trial –
Vincent Bugliosi [who wrote the 2007 book "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy"]?
It’s reached a level of ridiculousness. You can respect a paper — but anyway, when it comes to South America, it’s a real blind spot. And you can go back 100 years and check out the newspaper stories about Panama, about the hundred interventions in those countries, and [U.S. newspapers] will always take the line of the U.S. corporations and the government. It’s a government line. And this goes back to Chile, by the way, it goes back to Brazil. It goes back to the Dirty War. They don’t have a good record. And Central America is even worse.
There’s this refrain that things have gone downhill, we’ve lost our innocence, the bad guys are in control, the corporations run everything. And there are times when I read this sort of lament and think, “When was that not true?” Do you think things are measurably worse here, or in the world generally, right now, as opposed to 20 years ago, or 100 years ago? Or is the problem that we have to, as a race, just keep relearning the same damn lessons over and over?
I think it’s a very valid question. I think we go through periods and cycles of reform. There seems to be natural reform in the air. The bad guys don’t always win. They win most of the time, it seems, yes. We’ve had a mismanagement increase since World War II, I think, and that’s part of what [Stone's forthcoming Showtime documentary series] “The Secret History of America” is about.
The mismanagement of the country is enormous at this point and our policies are really askew. The white man will continue to intervene in foreign countries. The bigger issue is that after the Soviet Union fell, we just lost all control of ourselves, it seems. We can be the unilateral force in the world, the lone policeman.
The lone superpower.
That’s what we discussed. Yeah, I think this is a huge, huge misconception. I had an interesting conversation with Katie Couric — it will never make the air — yesterday, about this very issue. She was shocked. She said, “Is it a bad thing to be a lone superpower?” And I said, “Yes it is, because we’ve lost all moral restraint. We’ve lost all seriousness and gravity of the concepts that Roosevelt meant after World War II. And I think he was a hero who was serious about the United Nations.” And [Couric] said, “The U.N.’s a joke.”
Well, it’s only a joke because [we] made it into a joke. Whenever we wanted what we wanted, we never obeyed what [the U.N.] did. And we never gave them power. We always used the U.N. as a forum, as a game.
Anyway, look, the point is we’re on a death trip. We’ve overreached. This is empire. The Athenian Empire, the British Empire –
Well, I was just about to ask you if you think we are, in fact, the modern version of empire. And if so, are we in decline?
Of course we are. It’s evident, self-evident. Self-evident because we can’t keep this up. The dollar is at the stretching point. I mean, it’s an interesting con game that we have with the world, because they’re still buying the U.S. treasuries and they believe in the dollar. They will for awhile, because something will happen eventually. Because we’re completely borrowing, on borrowed time. We don’t have any ability to control our own spending and our own deficits. So where do we go from here? Do we have an education system that can create a good base? We are a hardworking people. We have much manufacturing, contrary to what the myth is. We do a lot of things. We have a great economy. But if we have 47 percent of our corporate profits going to finance companies, something is definitely wrong.
So I don’t know that it can be reversed. If there was a Roosevelt, you could argue yeah, you have a Depression. You could reverse course.
What role does the media play in all of this?
Blinding. They don’t help. The problem with media is they’re trying to make money. And I don’t blame them. They’re trying to make a profit. But they simply think about today.
It’s the tyranny of now. Any long-term point of view is very difficult to get across.
The flap over the Hitler comments: Do you think that was an example of the tyranny of now?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I did say something inappropriate. I regret it, and I apologized for it … I was in a discussion with the London Times [about "The Secret History"], and I was talking about a larger subject, which was the Israeli influence with U.S. policy, not only in the Middle East, but in the world. I said the wrong thing. And I was also talking about Hitler, whose point of view, the range of atrocities from World War II — it’s important to keep that in perspective, what Hitler’s ultimate plan was.
Right –
That’s been lost to history. I’m told it’s there, it’s factual. But, unfortunately, my comments were blown up into this storm. It hurt me deeply, because I’m not that way. I’m not a provocateur.
You’re often described that way, though. And as a conspiracy theorist. Or as “the left-wing filmmaker Oliver Stone.” There are all sorts of adjectival phrases that get attached to you.
Yeah. In “Wall Street” you see a guy who’s a dramatist. You don’t see a left-wing or right-wing. I think people from Wall Street can watch that movie and enjoy it.
Yeah.
Hey, how about “W”? I was not Michael Moore. I love Michael Moore, but I wasn’t doing –
No, and in fact, your affection for two of the most despised two-term Republican presidents in the history of the country is also a little bit weird.
“Nixon.” What about “Nixon“? Who could like Nixon?
You like Nixon!
I identified with him in some ways. Yeah.
I didn’t expect that. And I definitely didn’t expect you to go out of your way to try to see the world as George W. Bush might have seen it. Or, actually, maybe I did.
I wanted to understand. [In "W"], when Dick Cheney gives that speech in the Situation Room about him against Powell, I loved that. And you see Bush, this great debate is going on, what’s his answer to it? “Well, keep it under wraps here.” He doesn’t think.
I love George W. Bush. He’s a 2-D character. He doesn’t have any depth at all, and he’s quite happy that way.
He’s like a redneck, presentable Scarface. I remember Al Pacino saying that he played Tony Montana as having only two dimensions. That was his conscious choice.
I think Josh Brolin saw that was George Bush’s choice of life. I think there’s a place you know that you don’t want to go beyond. Some people are very smart that way. It’s about survival. Josh did a great job.
Anyway, so look, I never thought I would make a movie about policeman either, or cops, and I ended up doing “World Trade Center” because I cared about that story. It was very emotional to me. The transit authority police there, I got into their world. There are a hundred policeman in that movie that I got to know. I never thought I would be doing a cop movie ever in my life, right? And I ended up doing one right in the heart of the rubble.
I want to go back just briefly to something you talked about earlier, the idea of there being a spiritual aspect to your movies. That’s something I definitely sensed the last time I watched “Born on the Fourth of July.” All of a sudden it hit me. This is not just an anti-Vietnam movie or an antiwar movie. This is about a guy who discovers that he’s the person he thought he was, and then tries to figure out who made me this way. Who gave me this false self? What are the forces, and what do I do about it?
So many of your movies fit that description as well, whether it’s Bud Fox in the first “Wall Street,” or the title character in “Nixon,” who is engaged in a fruitless search to discover himself but keeps going down the wrong alleys, I think. “W” even fits the bill, in kind of an inverse way. That character doesn’t have any curiosity about his beginnings, and that’s the tragedy for him.
I love his conversion.
Are you a spiritual person? Are you religious person? Do you even think about it?
Spiritual, I think. Religious is a word that implies organized religion. I suppose I’m spiritual. I’ve always been spiritually inclined, because it’s the meaning of life to ask, do we go on in any way? Does our mind have a projection beyond its very self?
“The Doors” and “Natural Born Killers” get into this — the idea of there being a reality beyond the one we can sense.
I think very much so. I was very much influenced by Carlos Castaneda as a young man, among others. Even in school, we learned about religion, we learned philosophers, [George] Santayana, Alfred Whitehead, of course Socrates — although I didn’t understand it, Plato’s version of Socrates.
But the Greek idea was very close to me. The idea of a soul. Of a soul, that’s the best word for it. Yeah, I think it’s there. Perhaps that’s what’s lacking in our lives. We’re very secular on the Western side. It’s very secular.
Do you think that’s why we’re not a humble country?
Yes.
Bobcat Goldthwait is something like the id underbelly of Michael Moore, with every pretense of journalistic objectivity and reasonableness stripped away. While Moore has a background as a reporter and editor, Goldthwait has always been an entertainer, who began doing stand-up comedy as a teenager in the late 1970s. Both guys present as rumpled, middle-aged heartland Americans with blue-collar roots — Goldthwait is from Syracuse, N.Y., where his dad was a sheet-metal worker — who are angry about the debasement of political life and public dialogue in their beloved country.
But I feel pretty confident that even Moore would not make a movie about a laid-off worker who hits the road with a runaway teenage girl and goes on a killing spree aimed at right-wing talk-show hosts, obnoxious reality-TV subjects and people who talk on the phone in movie theaters. “God Bless America” is Goldthwait’s fourth film as a writer-director — I’m going clear back to “Shakes the Clown” in 1991, often described as the “‘Citizen Kane’ of alcoholic-clown movies” — and it’s definitely his most coherent and most consistently hilarious, perhaps because its canvas is so large and the world it depicts so insane. It plays a little like “Network” mixed with Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” mixed with “Natural Born Killers,” and in the very first scene its main character, the depressed, divorced and soon-to-be unemployed Frank (Joel Murray), does something completely unforgivable.
That first scene turns out to be a dream sequence, thankfully, but it’s not like the stuff Frank will actually do in the waking world “God Bless America” is so much better. After losing his job and getting some really bad medical news, Frank decides to seek violent retribution against the evil, stupidity and cruelty he sees streaming out of the TV every day. (He could, after all, just turn it off instead; I think that’s part of Goldthwait’s point.) While hunting down an ultra-spoiled Southern teenager and her stupid-rich parents — the subjects of an especially insulting reality show — he meets Roxy (the wonderful Tara Lynne Barr), a precocious high-school girl who says she’s fleeing an abusive home life and whose appetite for destruction beggars his own. Roxy’s delighted to waste vapid cheerleaders and reactionary creeps, but wants to up the ante: People who high-five! People who say things are “punk rock”! Adult women who call their breasts “girls”! Diablo Cody (described herein as “the only stripper with too much self-esteem”)!
Yeah, OK, that’s all pretty funny. But what about 50-year-old guys who go on cross-country road trips with cute underage girls, without asking themselves too many hard questions? Somewhat less funny, right? On one level, “God Bless America” is grossly inflated, over-the-top satire, but on another, it possesses its own kind of moral subtlety. Goldthwait doesn’t so much want us to root for Frank and Roxy without question, or to excuse actions that can’t be excused. Rather, he wants us to acknowledge that the idiotic and insulting state of public discourse in our country has made us all a little crazy. And this critique isn’t coming from some avant-garde outsider or media-studies professor, by the way. Goldthwait is a lifelong showbiz professional, who spent four years as the principal director of his friend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show.
I met Goldthwait last week in his Manhattan hotel room, where he was joined by Joel Murray, who plays ultra-violent anti-cruelty crusader Frank in “God Bless America.” You may know Murray from his recurring role as Freddy Rumsen on “Mad Men,” or before that for extended runs in “Still Standing” and “Dharma & Greg.”
So — another work of subtle and delicate social satire from the mind of Bobcat Goldthwait.
Bobcat Goldthwait: Well, in these not very subtle times, this is what’s called for.
You’re just about the right age to have seen “Network,” growing up, and I couldn’t help thinking there’s a lot of that movie in here.
Oh, I actually went back and watched it when I was writing the movie. You know, this movie’s influences are like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Network,” a movie I love. I went back to movies where obviously comparisons were going to be drawn and watched those too. You know, like “Falling Down.” Which, by the way, is a terrible movie.
Yes, absolutely terrible.
Some people absolutely love it. I’m like, I don’t know. I could never get into the movie. When Michael Douglas finally kills somebody, they make the guy a closet Nazi. So you don’t have to feel bad, you know — Michael Douglas’ character isn’t a bad guy. And he really just wants to get home. It’s also a very racist movie.
I mean, I didn’t want this to be a vigilante movie where everybody that Frank kills — not only do they talk in the movie theater, but they also happen to be Nazis or they kill a puppy in the parking lot. Because it isn’t OK to shoot people that text in the movie theater! I was just trying to make it clear to people that text in the movie theater that there’s a lot of people that really don’t like them. It’s funny with some of the comments I’ve gotten: “Oh so — what? I’m not supposed to be using my phone in the movie theater?” I can’t even comprehend that someone might be upset by that.
Here’s one scene I found upsetting and challenging. When Frank kills the sleazy contractor dude who has challenged him about his relationship with the girl, I think that gets at something very essential in the movie. Because that guy hasn’t actually done anything except make a disturbing comment. It’s like he’s spoken a dangerous version of the truth, and Frank doesn’t want to hear it.
Joel Murray: It’s a moment in the film where I realize I brought this girl along for the ride and that was a complete lie. I was doing a thing in the movie about the pain in my head — when it was relieved by killing, suddenly the pain would go away. In that scene, I’m slamming that steering wheel in that Camaro as hard as I can, and the pain in my head was really bad. Because suddenly everything was wrong, and I had to kill someone right about then.
B.G.: To me, what’s happened is that guy represents Frank. You know, Frank is flawed because he’s a human being. He has these really strict ideas about how people should live and then he can’t live up to them. He’s not killing that guy because that guy’s a scumbag. He’s killing that guy because he represents a side of himself he did not expect to encounter. He’s been fooling himself: Yeah, I could go home more often, I could have a life to go home to.
J.M.: Yeah, maybe we really can move to France and get some goats! It’s pretty nice dancing with you and touching you and … [growls]
It’s like for the whole movie Frank has been aware of the danger of being around this teenage girl, and trying to reassure himself that he’s not that kind of guy.
B.G.: That he’s not a creep. You know, for the first two-thirds of the movie the girl just supplies Joel’s character with this family he doesn’t have. And then the wheels fall off.
Bobcat, there’s a lot of material in this movie that feels somewhat like your comedy routines, so I’m tempted to see a lot of it as the author speaking through the characters. Is that misleading?
You know, it’s funny, and I haven’t said this in any other interview or anything. But I’ve seen reviews where they say, “It’s clearly Bobcat saying this and that.” But I’m like — well, Bobcat has access to a medium where he gets to say everything he wants and rant for an hour on Showtime. So it’s a character. Clearly I agree with about 90 percent of the things Frank says, but it’s not a showcase for me. I wanted to make a movie that explores our appetite for distractions. Like I said, I do agree with almost everything Frank says, outside of killing people. But I didn’t feel like as a human being I was being ignored and I needed to make a movie because I was pissed off no one was listening to me.
Well, one of the things Frank is pissed off about — or you’re pissed off about, I guess — is the cruelty and sadism we see in popular media, reality shows and talk TV. Frank talks about how that’s a symptom of a dying empire. But do you think that cruelty is specific to the media, or is it a larger social phenomenon?
It’s our appetite for the cruelty. I didn’t want to make a movie that blamed the media because I thought that was really lazy. Both the right and the left blame the media constantly. It’s either bashing Fox News or bashing the “lamestream media.” As soon as I see a post or comment where someone uses the word “Hollyweird” or “elitist” I go, oh, your opinions are already formed for you. You don’t make your own ideas. I’m not interested in what you have to say. But I didn’t want to make a movie that blamed the media because that’s too easy. I didn’t want to kill the messenger. I think the media takes a beating. You know those guys who are trying to give you the truth? We hate them. [Laughter.]
I’m talking about the public’s willingness to be spoon-fed their opinion and not even discuss the different sides. Just: This is my team, I root for this news. This is what I think. I’m jumping off the cliff. I like this radio personality because they’ll make all my decisions for me and I don’t have to. I’m going to sit around for hours talking about Charlie Sheen instead of my own life.
This isn’t in your movie, but I’ve been working in the media for 25 years, and while watching this I couldn’t help thinking about all the tools we have now and the changes they have wrought. It used to be that TV had the Nielsen ratings and the newspapers had circulation numbers. You did marketing surveys or whatever, but that was about it. These days we can tell precisely what people are watching or reading at any given moment. If I publish an article on our site, I can find out, in real time, exactly how many people are looking at it.
So later on, editorial policies — wow, I didn’t even think about that — will be dictated by that.
Sure. Back when I worked at an old-school alternative newspaper, we could decide to run an article about some avant-garde dance performance that nobody else was interested in, just because we thought it was cool and because it was the sort of thing we were supposed to cover.
And you were forcing people to expose themselves to it. My wife is younger than myself — she’s not Roxie’s age, she’s actually age-appropriate. Which is, whatever, new. [Laughter.] But, you know, newspapers seem weird to her: “Why would you hold those dirty things?” Well, because before I rush to the entertainment section, I have: Oh, what are we doing in Syria? On the Web you just click to your site and just keep clicking, like a mouse who has something that stimulates his pleasure zone. I think it’s very cocainey.
Well, that depiction of the workplace in your movie, where people only talk about what they saw last night on TV or what they just heard on the drive-time radio shows. It’s obviously exaggerated for effect, but there might be a kernel of truth there. And it’s very much like mice responding to stimulus.
My exposure to that world is when I go to comedy clubs and do the morning shows and I’m up against this talking that’s all about non-information. Now, I don’t think everything should be the heavies, but very little of it is about our own selves. I’d be more interested if someone tells me something about themselves, versus posting something about their political opinions or whatever. It’s like, I’m about to say that I’m an atheist who owns a gun and is a vegetarian — is he still going to like me? Instead I go: They’re going to take our guns away!
I wanted to talk about the violence in the movie. There’s a fair amount of it! Let’s just say that. And one of the things about contemporary society is that there’s all this cruel and angry discourse you’re talking about, and there’s a national fixation on crime and violence, yet we’re living in a time of relatively low violence. The three of us can all remember the ’70s, when crime rates were double or triple what they are today.
B.G.: Yeah, maybe people are getting it out? I think it’s like, most people don’t even know or feel that, because we’re just constantly told how violent the world is.
J.M.: And how you can’t even let your kids walk to the corner. “What are you thinking?” And it’s less dangerous than it was in the ’70s.
B.G.: We must be comfortable in fear. It must be rewarding for some reason that we want to live in it so much. What I’m learning is that there are a lot of extreme right-wing websites that are really going after me. But what I realize now is that it really doesn’t matter. It’s so funny how little it affects my life in any way at all. They’re saying I’m the worst thing ever.
Because of your movie?
Yeah. I guess I’m really naive about how much anti-Semitism there is. When I ego-surf the comments under the trailer there’s so much stuff about what a dirty kike I am. And I’m not Jewish.
I was gonna say: Wikipedia definitely conveys the fact that you were raised Catholic. They’re just making the incorrect assumption because your name has “Gold” in it?
Yeah. I’m willing to become a Jew, but it’s just really funny.
J.M.: Right when the trailer first came out they were calling us dirty Jew bastards. My first name is Joel, OK, that’s Hebrew. But Murray is 100 percent Irish. I got a sister that’s a nun. I went to Catholic school growing up. Do some research before you start, you know, posting this stuff!
B.G.: You know what’s also funny is that this really isn’t the world I live in, this movie. This is just a theme I wanted to explore. I’m actually fairly happy. I was the one up on the bar last night at Blazing Saddles, dancing with a couple of hot young dudes. They were aping my moves! Aping the moves of a 50-year-old.
J.M.: He’s a shrinking violet.
B.G.: I was like, look, man, carpe diem. How many times am I going to have that kind of access? Can I get on the bar?
There are some truly delicious rants in this movie, both from Frank and Roxy. I love the rhythm of those, because you’ll start out with something almost everybody hates, like texting in the movie theater or whatever, and then it becomes completely absurd. Let’s kill everybody who high-fives! Let’s kill everybody who says “punk rock”! Which spoke to my personal animus, by the way.
J.M.: Right. I try to call her on it when she says we should kill NASCAR fans. What?
Yeah. That’s, like, 40 percent of the United States population.
B.G.: I think the “punk rock” thing is about doing a lot of radio. I’ll be on what they call an alternative rock station and this guy is giving me attitude and I want to say, “Dude, I opened for Nirvana and actually roadied for the Ramones when they were in central New York, the original Ramones. Don’t talk to me about punk rock, you fucking prick.”
I sympathize, it’s the diminishment of discourse. Terms stop meaning anything, you know? You didn’t even bring up the word “hipster.” Let’s shoot everyone who uses that word, positively or negatively.
It means nothing. It’s like the new version of yuppie. In the ’80s, everyone, including me, was always bashing yuppies, and now it’s hipsters that everyone’s decided they don’t like.
Some people think it’s just me writing a list of what I like and what I don’t like. Today, people find a bond because they hate the same things. Or like all of us, because somebody’s listening to them. But Frank has a moral code, which is that he wants to kill people who are mean to him. It sounds trivial but that was the point.
J.M.: I could definitely relate to Frank and the people he had problems with. And then Roxy enters and brings this whole Pandora’s box of people she wants to kill. It was a great contrast of her, with all the energy, and me being very low-key. I tried to become paternal, to say, “No, you can’t do that. People who really deserve to die and not just anybody.”
I’m glad that you pulled her back on her plan to kill Diablo Cody. I don’t know that you’re going to be on her Christmas list this year. Maybe she has enough of a sense of humor, I’m not sure. You know that people are going to say that Roxy seems like a Diablo Cody character, right? That’s part of the joke?
B.G.: Of course. Another movie that’s often brought up, and it’s not a movie that I’m a fan of, is “Heathers.” So when I wrote “World’s Greatest Dad” someone said, “This script is like ‘Heathers,’” so then I just named the Goth girl Heather. I just ran into it. Someone else said it’s a little bit like Wes Anderson, so the principal is W. Anderson. So, clearly, Roxy speaks like a Diablo Cody character. I thought that was funny. It was originally one line, because my daughter is really funny and people say, “You’re like Juno,” and she said, “Dad, whenever people say that I want to stab them right in the fucking throat.” And then, when it was pointed out that I should remove that line, I went back and added an entire page of dialogue about it. Whatever you tell me to do, I don’t do it.
I have to admit that I don’t watch the kind of TV shows you parody here, so it’s impossible for me to gauge how far you went.
Oh, I didn’t parody it at all, I just refilmed it.
That’s all real stuff? The girls throwing used tampons at each other?
Yeah, and a lot of the stuff the political pundits are saying are really paraphrased or not even paraphrased. My first exposure to Glenn Beck was when I was flipping around the channels and he had Obama with a Hitler mustache next to Stalin, and I was like, what is this guy? All those shows are real and I just reshot the footage. Even the ringtone commercial with a pig that comes out and farts. OK, it’s an elephant, not a pig. But the animation is exactly the same animation. I took it really personally, it really hurt my feelings. The elephant sticks his ass to the camera and makes a farting noise, and it’s the funniest ringtone.
Were you consciously thinking about the question of audience sympathy for Joel’s character, and how complicated that gets? Because Frank seems like a likable guy. He’s not a creep, and he’s going through a hard time, and then he starts doing stuff that from any standard is not defensible. And, as an audience member, you’re sort of stuck with him.
I like the idea that you empathize with this guy and he’s doing these horrible things. So then hopefully, if it’s working for the movie, you’re uncomfortable with the fact that you’re empathizing with this guy who is doing horrible things. That’s the point. I didn’t want to make this vigilante movie where you cheered along with the guy. That’s not the movie, and that’s not what I had any interest in doing. What’s cool about Joel is he’s a fabulous actor but he’s great at playing people who you empathize with, who you care for, but he’s not pathetic. I don’t like that. That would have been bad; the wrong actor would have screwed it up and made a gross movie.
We have to quit, but I wanted to ask you about maybe the most hilarious and painful thing in the movie. That’s the character named Steven Clark, who performs “Theme From ‘Mahogany’” on a show called “American Superstar” and becomes a kind of celebrity for being talentless and terrible. I assume that was based on a really similar case in real life, right?
Right. It’s loosely based on my dealings with William Hung when I was directing the Jimmy Kimmel show. This other director was shooting a piece with him and said, “He’s such a pain in the ass!” I go, “Come on!” And I go down there and his mother’s saying, “We don’t want William saying that.” And William Hung is like, “This is bullshit. I’m William Hung!”
Even William Hung turned out to be a diva after all.
Well, I realized that everybody gets corrupted. No one is mentally ready for fame, including myself.
“God Bless America” opens this week in Chicago, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Northampton, Mass., Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Francisco; May 18 in Atlanta, Boston, New Orleans, Portland, Ore., and Salem, Mass.; May 25 in Austin, Texas, Charlotte, N.C., Columbus, Ohio, Dallas, Gloucester, Mass., Mobile, Ala., Palm Springs, Calif., Peoria, Ill., and Pittsburgh, with more cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand through many cable and satellite providers.
Like so many performers whose professional lives are spent expending immense amounts of energy and making people laugh, Jack Black is rather subdued when he’s out of the limelight. I met the voice of “Kung Fu Panda” and hard-rocking leader of the band Tenacious D a few days ago in a dark and austere corner of a midtown Manhattan luxury hotel, where we both struggled to read the fine print on a package of DayQuil. (Black was battling a cold.) Meeting journalists one after the other in a neutral and featureless setting, I suggested, might not be the most fun part of a movie actor’s job.
“This is what they pay you for, really,” Black responded. “But then, on these little independent films, they don’t really pay you. So why am I even doing this?”
He was kidding, sort of, and the movie he’s talking about isn’t all that little, really. It’s called “Bernie,” and it offers the latest cockeyed look at small-town life in Texas from Richard Linklater, the director of “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused.” An odd and delicate balance between Coen brothers-style farce and documentary-style realism, “Bernie” is based on a real-life murder case chronicled by Texas Monthly reporter Skip Hollandsworth, who co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater. Black gives a masterful performance as the mysterious Bernie Tiede, a beloved funeral director in the east Texas town of Carthage who romanced the community’s richest and most evil-tempered widow — before shooting her four times in the back with a hunting rifle.
Although Bernie’s maybe-sorta-platonic paramour is played by 78-year-old screen legend Shirley MacLaine, and the camera-hog district attorney who sets out to convict him is played by Matthew McConaughey, both of those roles are close to being cameos. The movie really belongs to Black, with his unctuous Southern accent, groomed mustache and high-waisted slacks, playing a character who seems flamboyantly queeny in a world where people would rather not think about that kind of thing. (It also belongs to the delightful ensemble of character actors Linklater assembles around the edges, who act as a sort of Greek chorus in talking-head interviews.) While the question of Bernie’s sexuality comes up only briefly in the movie, it might be the real subject of the drama and at least a partial explanation of the murder. To fit in so well in east Texas and become a widely loved community leader, Bernie Tiede had to pretend — to the level of convincing himself, perhaps — to be something he was not.
This role isn’t Black’s “dramatic breakthrough” for various reasons. One of them is “Bernie” sits right on the edge between drama and comedy anyway, and another is that Black has done dramatic roles before, most notably in Noah Baumbach’s “Margot at the Wedding.” Furthermore, as he observed in our interview, Black is under no illusions that his career is suddenly taking a dark new direction. But “Bernie” does demonstrate that the 42-year-old Black — a Southern California native whose parents, quite literally, were rocket scientists — is an actor of considerable breadth and staying power, who can go well beyond playing a butt-kicking panda bear. (And I’m not saying that’s not the role of a lifetime, in its own way.)
I think this is a really great performance, Jack. It’s very impressive. You know what I really noticed? When you’re doing the community theater stuff as Bernie — like when we see you do “76 Trombones” from “The Music Man” — on one level it’s totally hilarious and then on another it’s also just really good. I mean, it’s not funny to Bernie. It’s really important to him, and you are actually bringing it. That was hard work, right?
Yeah, I was working hard on that choreography.
Like, if you ever reach that point in your career as a performer where you have to be the third guy to play Mr. Cellophane in “Chicago” or something, you could pull that off!
Wait, why would I be the third guy? Oh, because they’ve already done it twice – I thought you mean the third understudy. I was like: No, I will not! But yeah, I know what you’re saying. Or, why not “The Music Man”? I could do “76 Trombones”! Shirley has a harebrained scheme that we should do a short run of this, a musical version of “Bernie” on Broadway, and I think that’s a funny idea. But it’s so long! The process of workshopping plays for Broadway, we could be doing that for years.
Yeah, and you get tied up somewhere. You’re in, like, Indianapolis for six months fine-tuning it.
So be it! But that’s an awful lot of work for a limited run. You want the six-month commitment when you go through all of the rigmarole.
But you haven’t done a whole lot of theater, right? It was just impressive mastery of the form.
Well, thank you. But I have done my fair share of theater. I’m not known for it. But in high school that was my bread and butter – my first introduction into acting was the theater. I played the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.” Which is a small role, but integral. Very important. And, uh, I was Pippin, in high school. So I was no stranger to the boards, as they say. I know my way around the stage: [Gesturing] Upstage, over there. Downstage, over there. Left, the opposite of what you’d think.
And you have some hoofer skills as well.
Yeah, li’l bit, li’l bit. I move well – that’s what it says on my résumé. Doesn’t say I dance …
I felt like the theater numbers were almost a metaphor for how you were playing Bernie. This guy’s this eccentric character, bigger than life, and you’re going right to the edge of parody or shtick, and then pulling back.
Yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. I think that I’m playing him really real. It’s just that I lean toward going over the top so much that it probably seems like I’m doing that on purpose. But really I was showing great restraint.
And of course you’ve met the real Bernie Tiede and I haven’t. We see that at the very end of the film, which is fascinating. What was that like?
It was a surreal experience because the prison is a pretty intimidating place to be. There’s a lot of rough customers, violent criminals, there. And then the crowds clear and you see Bernie and he’s just this gentle soul. Just a very soft-spoken sweet man. Lovely couple hours we had walking around the grounds with him, as he showed us around his cell, which was very well appointed and customized to make it as nice as he could within the guidelines of the prison rules. He fashioned sort of a little bit of a – what do you call that when you have a place to get your stuff together and look at yourself? A vanity! I don’t want to make him sound crazy, but he’s doing it. He’s so very clean and tidy, I can see why everybody in Carthage loved him. He really was the most popular guy in town. Especially amongst the old ladies. And he’s also very well liked in the prison.
He gets along OK with the other inmates?
Yeah, he’s got friends there. He’s allowed slightly more leeway than the average prisoner in the population there, because he’s a model prisoner.
I guess the guards are pretty sure he’s not going to shank them.
Right. When you’re a model prisoner you’re allowed to go to the workroom and build some arts and crafts and limited things like that. He’d go in there and make little lovely crocheted pieces for people he knew back in Carthage who had recently passed away. So his work continues – he’s teaching classes in there. It was a reassurance that we were on the right track.
Did he feel OK about you playing him?
He was a little trepidatious. Which is understandable because someone’s gonna tell your life story. I wouldn’t want people digging up all my nooks and crannies to tell my intimate details in a story. But that’s also why we wanted to reassure him that we didn’t want to smear him, we just wanted to tell it as truthfully as possible and also, yeah, just to get his blessing and also to get some helpful hints on how to portray him.
It must have been harder for Shirley, I guess. Obviously the lady she plays isn’t around anymore.
And there’s no videotapes of her. Bernie, there’s lots of videotapes of Bernie – on vacations and so on, and giving sermons, that I was able to study. But Shirley just had what the gossips had to say about Margie to go on.
You guys stayed away from complex psychological explanations, which was probably wise. But everybody that watches the movie is going to wonder, “Why? Why did this happen?” Was it your aim to answer that question without answering it directly, if you know what I mean?
Yeah, that is the tough thing about the script, that it doesn’t answer all the questions. And that’s what sets it apart too. It’s not one of those explainy movies that gives you all the answers in an easy way. And that’s always the question when you’re asking: Why didn’t he just leave? The relationship got so toxic and you were in hell, Why didn’t you just leave? That’s what they always say to the domestic couple when one of them gets killed. It’s like, “You’re so stupid, you should have just left!” But that’s not the way it works.
People get stuck in these codependent relationships. And he was taking care of her and taking care of her every need and she was taking care of him, with all the money. They were traveling and experiencing some fun things together. And also he was able to give money to people, and feel really good about that. So money had a corrosive force on that situation.
But also he was getting something else, I think. This is my theory – we didn’t put it in the script because, you know, it’s sort of conjecture — but his parents died when he was very young. He even said to me that he didn’t have a mommy. He was probably looking for that in all the old ladies that he was helping and taking care of. And so she was getting something and he was getting something too. And he couldn’t leave. He was a pleaser, that’s the thing. Everybody loved him for a reason cause he made it his life’s mission to be loved by everybody. And he would rather stay in hell than leave and risk her being angry at him.
That makes a lot of sense. It’s probably unfair to ask you to head-shrink a character you spent so long with, but Bernie reminded me of a college roommate I had, decades ago. I firmly believed the guy was gay but for various reasons hadn’t figured it out yet and didn’t even know himself. And I wondered – that really struck me as a possibility with Bernie.
Well, yeah. We never say it outright cause he never said it. He wasn’t openly gay. But it seems clear that he was, after meeting him. But never, you know, said anything and I never asked him, because it just didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to – it’s not my business. But I guess I should have asked. But that’s not my strength, I’m not a probing reporter. But he definitely seemed more at ease with his sexuality and with himself in prison than he was in the videotapes that I’d watched. In the videotapes there’s little hints and cues, but in person it was like: Oh, OK.
I felt like maybe that was part of it. In that part of the country, east Texas, you’re not going to find a lot of openly gay people. It’s a very conservative part of the country, and if you’re going to live like that with a secret, you get good at compartmentalizing things. You say, “I’m going to take one part of myself, put that over here, and go on as if everything is fine.” In a weird way, that feels like how he was able to literally take this dead woman, put her in a freezer, put it over there, and go on with his life like everything was fine. He’d done that his whole life.
That’s very convincing. You’ve been doing some thinking about this!
I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
Tell me about working with Shirley MacLaine. That had to be a little bit intimidating, at least at first.
It’s intimidating because she’s Shirley MacLaine and I’ve loved her work for so many years. She’s up there with the greats of all time. So there’s a reverence. And as soon as Rick said Shirley MacLaine, it was like, “Bling!” and I got really excited about it. Luckily, she was able to deactivate my nervousness with kindness. She laughed at all my stupid jokes. She seemed to get a real kick out of me, and that melted away all my fears. She knew how to play me like a fiddle. Our relationship on the set was somewhat similar to the relationship of Margie and Bernie in the movie.
Meaning she bossed you around all the time?
Not so much, but I did take care of her every need. I would anticipate if she needed something to be comfortable, I would try to take care of those things.
It’s such a stereotypical journalist thing to ask if you want to play dramatic roles, but I’m going to do it anyway. It’s hard to say whether this is a comic or dramatic role, actually. But it must be fun to play such a complicated and rich character. It’s very different from “Kung Fu Panda.”
It was a great experience. You know, I don’t imagine that my career is going to become a bunch of darker dramas. I think this is the anomaly, probably. But it’s been a thrill.
You’ve done a lot of work in movies and TV shows for kids, and you seem to take that every bit as seriously as your adult-oriented roles. What’s the difference for you in performing for children? Are there any special traps or challenges?
I don’t distinguish. The big difference is the subject matter, but I approach it with the same type of zeal. I really put my all into those little things. I’m very critical when I see people doing kids’ stuff and I think they’re phoning it in because it’s for kids. I’m like, “Don’t slack it. The kids can tell!” Obviously you want to keep it clean when you’re playing for the kids, but you need to bring the energy, bring the goods.
To some extent, you’re dealing with less patience in the audience, aren’t you?
Right — shorter attention spans, so you’ve got to keep the balls moving. You have to cut to the roller coaster.
You have two sons of your own now. Has having kids changed how you perform for kids?
It doesn’t. I keep it pretty separated. I don’t even want my boys seeing my stuff. I think it’s a weird head-trip for them to see their dad on the big screen. I took Tommy, my littlest one, to see “The Muppets,” and I think it was a mistake. He did not like it when my head shrunk down all tiny. He was very disturbed. I had to be like, “It’s OK, it was just magic! Movie magic.”
You know, my 8-year-old son will be very excited when I tell him that I got to meet Po the Kung Fu Panda. But he’s going to be even more excited when I tell him that I got to meet somebody whose mom worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.
That’s true! What a great thing to have worked on, too, because the fruits of the Hubble continue to roll in long after they anticipated it to. I think by now they thought there would be Hubble 5, taking much deeper pictures. But the way things worked out, this is the premiere telescope camera for the world. And there’s such a backlog of scientists and astronomers who want to look at their little piece of sky!
“Bernie” opens this week in most major metropolitan markets.
“Eastbound & Down,” which wraps up its third and most likely final season this Sunday, tells the tragic story of Kenny Powers, once the most feared and exalted reliever in Major League Baseball. In his quest to make it back to the big leagues over the past three seasons, Kenny has been duped, gotten engaged, run off to Mexico, found his father, fathered a child of his own, and finally got back to the minor leagues pitching for the Myrtle Beach (S.C.) Pelicans. In the past season, he pill-popped, drugged and boogie-boarded his way through a portrayal of the contemporary South that is both endearing and disturbing. In a sense, Powers is heir to the bigoted and poetic characters from “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
The brainchild of actor-writer Danny McBride, directors David Gordon Green and Jody Hill, and producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, “Eastbound & Down” has been the most consistently bizarre, hilarious and unique show on television. McBride’s portrayal is nuanced, absurd and deadly serious. In an episode two weeks ago, he emerged from the gutter of a bowling alley to deliver one of the most moving and honest speeches about parenthood and responsibility you are likely to see in American media. That it was delivered to his outrageous mother, Lily Tomlin, in concert with his scumbag father, Don Johnson, underlines the sheer talent and inventiveness that go into each episode.
Salon caught up with McBride over the phone on the eve of the show’s swan song. He discussed the genesis of Kenny Powers, the current election, and the weirdness of stoner and Confederate iconography.
Season 3 has been this odd mix of sentimental and truly weird moments. There was the moment when Kenny’s assistant, Stevie, was forced by the evil, racist car dealership owner Ashley Schaffer (Will Ferrell) to perform as a geisha in front of visiting representatives from Kia. How do you balance the two tones of the show, the emotional journey of this character and his almost being killed in front of visiting Koreans?
You know, I feel like it’s an idea that kind of came up without us really realizing what it was. In the first season we had Jody Hill, David Green and Adam McKay – three different directors with three different styles – working with the same material. Each one of those guys brought their own style, and in each episode, you can distinctly tell the difference in tone. I think that was kind of the kernel of what was exciting about it. To see this character go on this journey, but not stick yourself inside of the confines of what’s to be expected. It’s nice to work with material that pushes the boundary of what the tone can hold, and if it was just an hour-and-a-half movie, you wouldn’t be able to do that.
The shift in tone is something that we kind of do on purpose, and the trick is to figure out how far you can push it but still keep people rooted in what you’re doing.
It seems like, by placing it in Myrtle Beach, kind of the seedy side of the South, you and Jody and David have been working through some serious Southern baggage. Does it feel that way?
I think it all has to do with where it’s set. When we did the first season, we set it in a small town because we all grew up in a small town. We were pulling from what we had grown up seeing. When we set the second season in Mexico, none of us had spent a considerable amount of time in Mexico, so there were less things for us to pull from that we had known. When we did the third season, by going to a place like Myrtle Beach, a place that hasn’t really been captured on film before, it just was a place where we all had been, all been familiar with, and we could sort of imagine what this crazy monster Kenny Powers would do with this place. Just as much as Myrtle Beach is Chevy’s and big tits, and a place where Kenny does all this seedy, dark shit, that’s not all the city offers you. There are golf courses, there are old retired people, there are all sorts of people there.
Where do you find the T-shirts for your character? Are they sold at stands in Myrtle Beach? Did you get to keep your pot leaf/Confederate flag boogie board?
We found a lot of them in Myrtle Beach. There are these things called surf shops, though they’re really tourist shops, that are literally on every corner in Myrtle Beach and a lot of other beach towns in the South. Every single one of them will have signs that they’re going out of business or that “everything must go” and “50% off,” but you’ll come back a year later and the place will still be there with the same sign in the window. And it’s wall to wall of these kinds of T-shirts. Jody and I would go in there and be like, “He’d wear that one, he’d wear that one,” almost half of their inventory.
We were in an arcade in Carolina Beach, and there were these wall hangings that you could win if you won enough tickets on skee ball. There was a Bob Marley one, there was a Sublime one, and then there was this one that was a Confederate flag with a pot leaf on it, and we couldn’t stop laughing. We were like, “What the fuck does that even mean? What is that symbol even celebrating? That you’re racist and you smoke weed?” It just felt like such a stupid symbol for someone to wave, so what better place to put that than on a boogie board.
Do you have that boogie board?
Well, I don’t want to ruin anything, but that board might not survive this season.
Now I’m imagining Kenny swimming out into the sunset … It’s funny that some friends of mine who I think would find the show insensitive end up really, really enjoying it. There are so many moments where I cringe and say, Oh God, this is so weird and racist, but it somehow works. Do you ever worry about our sympathies for the character getting confused with sympathy for his bigotry?
Kenny is never rewarded for his horrible [behavior]. His narrow stand on things constantly puts him on his ass, constantly makes his life a steaming pile of shit. For us, instead of making a big deal about how racist he is, we’re like, “Yeah, he’s obviously racist, he fucking sucks, but let’s go beyond that. On a human level, how could someone get past that narrow view?” We’ve always thought from the get-go that this show would be super offensive to a lot of people. It’s not like me or Jody are misogynists, or racists, or even rednecks. For us it’s always been an extension of this character. For us it’s just taking this guy and getting an audience to see past the behavior that everyone in the world knows is bad.
You do end up rooting for this guy, and you can’t believe you are.
It’s odd. I don’t know what that says about us as human beings. You’ve got to put it from a standpoint where at the end of the day, Kenny is a very damaged human being. There’s no way around that, and I think that deep down, you want him to succeed. And he thinks that love is going to do it. On a human level, people want to see someone succeed who wants to change. That’s how you get around rooting for this guy, because even though he’s a bigot and a misogynist, everyone in this world wants to be accepted and respected, and they want to find love. So maybe that’s the truth that’s in the character.
Kenny Powers is this great American anti-hero. How was he conceived? Was it one part John Rocker and two parts some people you knew growing up?
Even to this day, when we talk about creating the show, I don’t know when it was that we decided he should be a baseball player. When we shot the “Foot-Fist Way,” it was a script that we spit out really quickly. It was the first time we’d ever written something from the point of view of an anti-hero. We didn’t want to make another movie, because we felt it would just be a rehash of the last movie we made. We wanted to do a longer story, and the concept started with that.
At the time I was substitute teaching, back in my hometown. So we just started coming up with ideas – this was a guy, he was a big deal at some point, and he comes back to his hometown, but he’s pissed everyone off somehow. We started building this character, like, what if he was an Olympic athlete, or whatever he was good at? Why would there be reasons that people would be ashamed of him when he once was a hero? We built it from that place. Jody and myself didn’t know much about baseball. It wasn’t a sport we really followed. And I think our choice to go with it was like, all right, this guy was the center of attention. He was the rock star who came in to clean up the fucking mess. He’s in the center of the field and everyone is screaming for him. Now, he’s teaching kids in the middle of a gymnasium. That image seemed like the biggest kind of fall that somebody could have. A lot of our education about baseball was John Rocker and other fallen sports figures who we learned about as we were making the first season. We didn’t base him on actual people.
It seems like every great character has come back for a reprise. When you cast guest stars, do you have them in mind when you write the part, like, obviously, Lily Tomlin as his mother. Or do you just cross your fingers?
We were big fans of Lily Tomlin. We looked up people from the past, people that we dug as kids. When we found Don Johnson, that was such a coup. That’s exactly the kind of cast we wanted for the show. And then we were like, where are we going to go with the mom? We didn’t want the mom to be just a cartoon character. We wanted the mom to be more like our moms, to be authentic. We wanted it to be Lily Tomlin because she is just so awesome, from everything from “9 to 5″ to “Nashville.” We sent her the DVDs, and she watched the show and was like, “I really like what you guys are doing. It should be a lot of fun.” When we were on set, there would be these bits she would go on where David Russell would look at me between takes and be like, “Holy crap, we’re getting a Lily Tomlin performance.” We couldn’t be happier.
David Gordon Green and Jody Hill have this ability to portray the most embarrassing, disgusting things so beautifully. The montage of April and Kenny on the boardwalk in the premiere was just amazing. I feel like each episode starts with a low point, where you do the freeze frame and the theme song, and it slowly builds to some beautiful moment. Is it designed this way?
It’s just like a recipe. It’s all about movement and having a place to go in each episode. When we end an episode in the middle of the season, people will go, “Oh, it’s so dark right now.” Well, of course it’s dark. You need to have darkness before there’s a triumph. You’re not going to be given it every single episode. To us it’s all about the tone.
It’s been a year since “Your Highness” was released, and it’s yet to garner the cult following I feel it deserves. Do you think it’ll become required stoner watching in the future? Are you going to be celebrating 4/20 by watching it?
[Laughs] I think at the end of the day, David and I would be super happy if that’s what it becomes, just required stoner viewing. We were trying to make one of those movies that we would just trip out to at the end of a late night during college. Even “Eastbound,” I don’t ever watch the movies I’m in. Once I’m done with the editing, I’m like, “Well, done with that.”
Kenny has become a father this season, and we want him to succeed so badly, because at the end of the day, he could be a really, really good dad. Do you think he would be? Does he want to be? Will he have to give up baseball to do that?
I became a father six months ago, and I think that every human being has an instinctual element when you have a baby to nurture, to take care of. But Kenny doesn’t have that. He’s still stuck in the mind of a teenager. He hasn’t evolved to see that his role might be to protect and nurture. For a lot of the research we did with how Kenny would deal with fatherhood, we literally just watched “Teen Mom” all the time. We just looked at the teenage dads who wanted nothing to do with it at all. The show has been all about Kenny looking for some sort of peace, and that will be either as a father or a celebrity.
Who will Kenny Powers vote for, if he does vote?
Kenny doesn’t vote. But he’ll talk mad shit about whoever does get elected.
You have always said there will be three seasons of the show. Is this the end of his journey? Will there be a fourth?
When we started the show, we always thought that if we got to three seasons, we would be able to tell a big story with an arc, and we can take the show to the outer limits of our wildest imagination. And I feel like we’ve accomplished that. We’ve told the story that we set out to tell. As far as more of Kenny Powers, I wouldn’t rule that out. But for now, I feel like we have seen the tale of Kenny Powers.
"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" director Oliver Stone, left, and star Michael Douglas. 
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Credit: Reuters/Mark Blinch) 
Bobcat Goldthwait (Credit: AP/Matt Sayles) 
Jason Segel in "The Five-Year Engagement" 
Jack Black in "Bernie" 
Danny McBride (Credit: HBO/Fred Norris) 
