The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  Just like taking that score out of the movie, the cut was the same thing. And the big news in the papers, when I had the big argument with the studio, was that I had some four-hour cut that I wanted to put out and that was never the truth. My final cut was two hours and forty-two minutes, which is the exact length of the English Patient, made by the one of the studios that made All the Pretty Horses.

  They told me in the beginning that they knew this was an epic movie and it would be a three-hour movie—they told me that up front—and then proceeded to cut it to under two hours (an hour and fifty-nine minutes), and that was just an arbitrary cut to get it down to under two hours because they get more showings in the theaters. It wasn’t done for creative reasons; it was done for length reasons. It was marketed as a love story between Matt and Penélope and that’s not what the story was. If there was a love story there, it was between the two kids, Henry and Matt. The movie was about the end of the west as we know it. It wasn’t a love story between a guy and a girl, but at the time Titanic was popular and I begged the studio, “Please don’t make the poster where Matt and Penélope are all airbrushed and staring at each other like the Titanic poster,” and sure enough, that’s what they put out.

  Every step along the way they took the soul out of what it was and that’s why the movie did not do well, because you can’t put something out half-assed. If you put it out as a romantic story like Titanic, which is not what it is, then that audience goes to see it and they don’t like it because they thought they were going to see a love story between the pretty guy and girl. The audience who wants to see a Cormac McCarthy book on film, they don’t get the whole story and then they’re disappointed. That’s why when you make something, you have to put it out the way it was intended. It has to be what it is. If you try to take an apple into an orange, you’re going to lose both sides of the audience—the commercial audience you’re trying to sell it to and the real audience that wants to see it. That’s what happened with All the Pretty Horses. We made a beautiful thing and I’ll love it forever, and people ask me still to this day, why don’t you guys put out your real cut of it?

  DANIEL LANOIS: DO you have it? Do you have the film with my score on it?

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: I have it in the house; I’ve actually shown it to people before. I have it on VHS tape. I’ve got every tape—I’ve got the dailies, I’ve got every tape all along the way of all the footage, with the score in it, and I’ve got the complete movie with the score. I actually have the whole assembly with your score. The three hours and something. I’ve got that, too.

  Years ago, when they talked to me about doing the DVD, at one point the studio actually called me and said they’d give me the opportunity to put your cut out on DVD, but I turned it down because this was back when we were still feeling pretty raw from it. We were feeling a little beat-up and you weren’t real keen on giving them your score to put on the DVD when they didn’t put it in the fucking movie on the big screen. I agreed with you, and said no, I stand with my pal Dan. I won’t do it unless his score is in it. That’s why I never did it. It deserved to be seen and it deserved to have that music, but I have to say, we gave the actors some of the music during the making of the movie and they listened to it as inspiration for their characters. They’ll tell you, any one of them, to this day, that it’s the most haunting music they’ve ever heard.

  DANIEL LANOIS: I remember I bumped into Penélope Cruz in France at Cannes. I didn’t know her. I had just met her briefly with you, and she came up to me and she said, “Are you Daniel Lanois?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “That was the most beautiful music that you made for the film and I’m so sorry it didn’t come out.”

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: They all felt that way; every one of them felt that way.

  DANIEL LANOIS: To not use that piece of music for the train station scene, that’s a crime.

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: That is a crime. And the whole process of how it was done, not only the Teatro, but coming down there with Emmylou (Harris) at that big old building down there in Texas and her singing there for the crew and recording it and you guys being the band on the stage—the way everything was going about, it was a great story and a great experience making that movie. We made a classic, and nobody is ever going to see it.

  I’ve told a couple of critics before that maybe someday I would show it to them. I told Robert Ebert that I was going to show it to him. I’d like to. I have it all on VHS tape sitting up there at the house. For me, I only played it for a couple of people because I wanted these particular people to see it, but it was hard for me to watch it knowing that, you know—it’s heartbreaking to watch the beauty of what we did at that time. The movie came out, it was a good movie, but it wasn’t what we made. That ranks as my biggest disappointment.

  DANIEL LANOIS: I know you put a lot of work into it.

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: You did too. It was a pretty amazing experience. I still think of some of those guys that played on there that we hung out with at that time, like Vic. Remember Vic, the drummer?

  DANIEL LANOIS: Yeah. Great drummer. To this day, great.

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: And Russ the Bus.

  DANIEL LANOIS: Fish out some of that music sometimes. There’s one track called, uh, … I played it for Keisha [Kalfin] a couple of weeks ago … called Steppin’ Wolf [hums].

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh yeah, it was fantastic. That was Vic.

  DANIEL LANOIS: That was Vic playing that corrugated kind of agüero-like stick.

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, there was all that stuff that you did specifically … some of the pieces were things you had around for a while, which we kind of based the original vibe on, and then you started doing the stuff that had the real Spanish flavor, Mexican flavor. The song Raul Malo sang, and then … did we end up using the Red River Valley theme in that? Because it was a great theme. I don’t know if we ever did or not, but it was brought up several times. You went through this whole period where you specifically wrote new things. I have a CD of that stuff, which was quite spectacular. I mean, a lot of it didn’t even make our cut of it, because there was just a lot of it. I’ve got a lot of it. It’s gathered together so you wouldn’t have to look for it. I could just give you a CD of your own stuff that’s right there together. I’ve got all of that music in the drawer at the house.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  A Simple Plan

  THERE WERE TWO CHARACTERS THAT I’VE PLAYED WHO I NEVER wanted to stop playing—where when the movie was over I wanted to stay in that character. One was the character in The Man Who Wasn’t There, the other was my character in A Simple Plan. If you put the character from A Simple Plan and the character from The Man Who Wasn’t There together, it’s pretty much who I am in real life.

  In A Simple Plan, I got to be with my old buddy Bill Paxton, who I came up with out here in California; Bridget Fonda, who’s terrific; and Brent Briscoe, who I introduced to the film’s director, Sam Raimi. “You ought to look at my buddy Brent,” I said. “He had a part in Sling Blade, and I’ve known him from the days when we worked on Evening Shade.” Brent Briscoe from Moberly, Missouri.

  A Simple Plan was filmed up in Ashland, Wisconsin, and Delano, Minnesota. The cast and crew stayed at a haunted hotel in Wisconsin, and it was very, very cold. The wind-chill factor one night was sixty below zero, and Paxton and I were looking at each other, we were shooting outside, and I said, “Bill, what are we going to do? The sound cart is even frozen up. Can we stay out here all night without dying?” Paxton says, “Dude, I don’t know, I’m not sure.” But we got through it.

  We loved playing those characters. I loved playing Jacob so much, I went a little too far losing weight for the role and later ended up kind of sick and in the hospital. But Sam Raimi directed a beautiful movie, and I got nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor. Still, I thought that movie didn’t get its due like it should have.

  ON THE FRONT PORTCH: CONVERSATIONS WITH DANIEL LANOIS

  Part II
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br />   DANIEL LANOIS: I was quite taken by A Simple Plan. Just the most regular people can suddenly get caught up in this fever. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: A Simple Plan was based on a book, and the book was brilliant. The great thing about that movie is that they hired Scott Smith, who wrote the book, to write the script. I think they should do that more often instead of hiring whoever the screenwriter of the day is, because if you have a book that’s five hundred or six hundred pages long and you’re asked to pare that down to a hundred-and-ten-page movie screenplay, the writer of that book is going to know better than anybody how to do that, how to edit that book. I’d say give a novelist the first crack at making his book into a movie; Scott Smith did and he wrote a brilliant script. The director on that movie—there had been a few—they tried to make that movie several times and it never came together. Different people were attached to it over the years. When I was asked, when they finally got it on its feet and were actually going to make it over at Paramount, John Boorman was the director. John is a classic British director; he directed Deliverance, Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, Excalibur—he’s a terrific director and one of my favorites, and a guy that I’d always wanted to work with. I was thrilled and I went out to meet him at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to talk about being in the movie. He said, “I want to ask you, I really want you to do this movie.” He said, “There’s just one thing I want to run by you. You may not like this but I’m hoping you will because I’m telling you, I know in my heart this is the way to do it.” They were set to shoot in Minnesota. They were already looking into locations because they needed snow.

  I said, “Well, before you ask me, can I guess?” And he said, “Sure, go ahead.” I said, “You don’t want me to play the lead, you want me to play the brother, the second lead, right?” He said, “Exactly.” I said, “I was going to ask you if that was okay by you because I want to play that part.” And then I suggested Bill Paxton to play the brother and Bill was terrific in it.

  As it turns out, though, John Boorman and the studio had some type of falling-out and he didn’t do the movie. I was hugely disappointed, but then they got Sam Raimi, who I knew some, and I loved Sam. I thought, If anybody can pull this off, it’s Sam, so I said I’d love to do it with Sam. We went up there and they didn’t have any snow in Minnesota in January/February. The little town that they already scouted didn’t have any snow and so we had to move over to a town called Ashland, Wisconsin, up where Michigan and Wisconsin come together on Lake Superior by Canada and, believe me, in January and February there’s always some snow.

  So here we were, in Wisconsin and Minnesota in January, February, and March. I wanted to be really, really skinny for this movie Pushing Tin that we shot in Toronto where you visited me a couple of times. Pushing Tin was to start right after A Simple Plan. I had already started to get a little bony. I ate one thing every day, the same thing every day, during the making of A Simple Plan. I ate a can of tuna and a package of Twizzlers, you know, the red candies?

  DANIEL LANOIS: The licorice candy?

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: They’re like a licorice. I ate that every day for three months and I ended up weighing 135 pounds. I shouldn’t have done it. I got a little sick from it. Just like I gained a lot of weight for movies early on—I’ll never do that again. That was not fun. It’s really hard to lose the weight, and it makes you sick. When I did Pushing Tin, I weighed 135 pounds. I think I actually got down to 130 at one point. I was a stick. I only weigh 145 now and people say “hey, you need to put some weight on,” but back then it was like ridiculous. What I wasn’t thinking was I had started losing the weight for A Simple Plan and the character in the book was a huge fat guy. It didn’t matter, I played him as that kind of character anyway, but I packed on a lot of clothes for the movie so I didn’t look as skinny as I really was. I hadn’t thought about how when you’re skinny you’re just freezing your ass off every minute.

  DANIEL LANOIS: You said it got down to sixty below zero. How did you deal with that kind of extreme cold?

  BILLY BOB THORNTON: You just have to numb yourself out. After a while you had to get into your character so much you just forgot about it. It was miserable. Sam is a great director. He’s a very planned guy. He and the storyboard artist would have dinner together every night and come up with new ways to shoot things so it makes it easier for actors because you always know the camera is going to be in the right place and you can ignore it. Particularly when you’re a director yourself, you may want to look over the guy’s shoulder and say, “Really, are you sure you want to shoot it that way?” With a guy like Sam Raimi or the Coen brothers, you don’t ever think about that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Pushing Tin

  I MADE A SIMPLE PLAN AND PUSHING TIN BACK TO BACK. IN FACT, I only had like a week off in between those movies, so I kind of pair those movies together in terms of that period of my life. Pushing Tin is where Angie and I first really got to know each other. It was also the first time I worked with John Cusack, who’s just great to work with, and with whom I also later did The Ice Harvest. And then, of course, there was the great Cate Blanchett. Pushing Tin didn’t do great. I think it was three-quarters of a great movie and the last twenty minutes or so, not so much—like some of the critics said, it took off but it didn’t land. But I loved the experience and think the part of the movie that was good was terrific. John and I even went to air traffic control school for the film up there in Toronto, where we filmed. We had to, because you can’t spout all that stuff out if you haven’t been to school for it. We had a great instructor who was really good to us and took us out on the floor to watch real air traffic controllers. Just so you know, if you’re ever going to Newark, New Jersey, and something happens to the controller, I can land the plane.

  THE GREATEST THING IS WHEN YOU’RE DOING A MOVIE AND YOU’RE IN a different town, especially a place like Toronto where they’re probably making ten movies at one time, and some of your pals are up there too. In this one hotel it was me and the gang from our movie—John Cusack, Cate Blanchett, Angie, and Mike Newell, the director. Ritter was there because he was doing a TV movie with Nicollette Sheridan. Neil Jordan, the British director who did The Crying Game, was there. Robbie Robertson was there. Chuck Leavell was there. All the Rolling Stones were there too, because they rehearse up there before they go out on tour. I would go hang out at the bar with Cusack, Ritter, Angie, Nicollette Sheridan, Ronnie Wood, Chuck Leavell, Neil Jordan, and Robbie Robertson. That kind of gang, hanging out at the bar every night, it gets pretty interesting. And then Mick Jagger, who was in the room up above me, he knew I was going through some weird shit in my life at the time, and he would call me up to his room and we’d just sit there and talk about shit for hours. He would drink wine and sometimes play the piano.

  This song of mine called “Angelina” that I did on my first album and that we redid for the Boxmasters is about the first day Angie and I got to Toronto. When we were in the elevator.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Bandits

  OUTSIDE OF JAYNE MANSFIELD’S CAR, WHICH WE’RE CURRENTLY filming, probably the best experience I’ve had on a movie in terms of the locations, a cast that got along, and just having a great time was Bandits. Barry Levinson was a real entertaining director. He used to keep us rolling. And it was real fun hanging out with Bruce Willis and Cate Blanchett, both of whom were already friends. And the locations were incredible. We started in Portland, Oregon, and worked our way all the way down to L.A., shooting in Salinas, Santa Rosa, Bodega Bay, Half Moon Bay, up in Oregon, Klamath Falls and Oregon City, out at the Columbia River Gorge. Just all these amazing places for the locations. We had the best time on that movie.

  At that time I was having a big fight with the studios about All the Pretty Horses, and I was under so much stress that my gums were bleeding real bad on set. My makeup artist would have to come up and blot my gums with a tissue between takes. On top of everything else, Ban
dits came out a week after 9/11, when Bush was telling people not to go to the malls and all this kind of stuff, so not many people went to see it. The cast loved everything about the film, and audiences loved it when it came out on DVD—where it’s become huge—but the country was in such turmoil. Movies can be very important, and I think they’re great for our culture, but at the time we were so disoriented, like the rest of the world, we barely remembered that we had even made a movie. It was just a very, very dark time for several months there.

  Making Bandits, though, was just an amazing experience. Other than the bleeding gums and the stress. I loved being with Bruce, Cate, and Troy Garity, who’s Jane Fonda’s son and plays the fourth member. And Bruce did something for me that I’ll never forget.

  I had just come back from England, where I had been visiting Angie on the first Tomb Raider, and I had to go to New York and hang out with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz to do some press. Then I went to Chicago and did The Oprah Winfrey Show with Matt. I think I had just recently finished The Man Who Wasn’t There and was about to go into Bandits, but when I got back to L.A. I had horrible pain, just like I did in ’84, and ended up in the hospital with God knows what and weighing nothing. I had no electrolytes, no potassium, just like I did in 1984. I was in the hospital for about ten days, and the movie company just wanted to move on and find somebody else, but Bruce wanted me for his partner in Bandits to start with, so he told those guys he was not making the movie without me. When they asked, “Well, how long do we wait for him?” Bruce just said, “However long it takes.” I’ll never forget him for that.

  I don’t hang out with actors a lot, but let me tell you something, there have been guys—real friends who happen to be in the entertainment business—who have stood up for me. People who I’ll never forget.