Thomas Jane, the star of HBO's Hung, also boasts a cinematic career full of vampire slaying, punishing, and mutant chronicling, which sets the perfect stage for his directorial debut. Dark Country, in which Jane also stars, is a brooding thriller created for DVD about a honeymooning couple who hit a man with their car when driving in the desert and their ensuing hell of dealing with his undead body. Jane spoke with Movieline about his directorial inspirations, his wife Patricia Arquette, and Hung's impact on his consummate love of his penis.
Movieline: You filmed Dark Country in 2-D for DVD and 3-D for certain screenings. Does the public fully appreciate 3-D yet?
Thomas Jane: We're just at the very beginning of 3-D, as far as filmmaking goes. 3-D is a new language tool. For instance, there's already editing, and there's color that you can use to tell a story -- assigning colors to certain mood or certain people. Red to a passionate woman, for instance. Or there are audio cues that let you know that the monster's coming, like in Jaws. With 3-D, you have a stereoscopic image that's set in dimensional space, Z-space, we call it. That depth is also a cinematic tool that can be used to tell a story. You can assign depth signatures to elements of your film to further the drama of a movie, and that, I think we're in our infancy. The film uses 3D in a dramatic way, we have not been fully exposed to it yet. It's like a brand new set of tools that filmmaker's can use. But 3-D's gotta go further than that; it has to embed itself into the meat of the story in order for 3D to have a life in cinema and with audiences. That's what filmmakers are striving to do.
Tell us about the strange directorial quirks that give this movie its identity.
I wanted to be able to make that had a visual signature to it that was unique. And I wanted to make a film that was inspiring to people who enjoyed movies that were different. Every movie today seems to be plastered across a cereal box, and they're very much homogenized, created to appeal to the widest base audience. The smaller, quirkier films are being ignored, and those people who like stranger films are being given the short thrift. I want to show people that can shine in a different light. That was the inspiration to direct Dark Country. I'm a big fan of films like Curse of the Demon or Dead of Night. People into horror thrillers, these people will really love it -- and so for they have. We use atonal strange sounds the way Kubrick used Penderecki in The Shining, and some left-of-center ways to tell a story. This is for people who enjoy The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and some of the stranger cult films from the 60s like Carnival of Souls.
Ron Perlman has a distinct cult presence. How was directing him?
I've known him a long time. Ron's an old buddy of mine. We did a movie called Mutant Chronicles together, but I knew him before that. He was doing Hellboy while I did The Punisher, and we kind of became friends while we were doing the whole circuit. I loved Hellboy and thought it was a fantastic comic book adaptation. Ron's got a lot of fans in the comic book world. Perlman is just in that world; people love him in that world. He's got a history in that stuff going all the way back to Beauty and the Beast. He was a natural to step in. He was graceful enough to come out right out of from Hellboy 2, right out of 14 hours of makeup, right on a plane to the U.S., land to New Mexico, get in a car, step into a cop uniform and play with me for a few days.
Wouldn't 3-D filming be perfect for the reveal of Ray Drecker's unit on Hung?
Absolutely. Everything looks bigger in 3D. They should film my penis in 3D. As long as the big reveal is in 3D, I'm down for it.
Would you conjure your Boogie Nights past and use a prosthetic?
The problem with the big reveal in Hung is that everybody has their own interpretation of what "hung" is. Everyone has an ideal about what the perfect male organ is. And that ideal is different from person to person. Some people like fat; some people like long and thin. Some people want 14 inches, and for some people it's eight. You know what I mean? I don't know. It's a platonic -- in the Plato sense of the word -- ideal. And I don't know if we'd ever live up to it. We'd have to individually make a different penis for everyone. "Choose your own penis" might be a great ending.
Is your character's endowment a hit or a help to your ego?
It does a little bit of both. Thank God I'm married. Some of my single friends are envious. Personally I'm very happily married to one of the most beautiful women on the planet, Patricia Arquette. We've been together almost eight years and she still turns me on, and I couldn't be happier. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, to tell you the truth. People stare at my crotch and I have to tell them I'm up here. It becomes something of a "meat" object. Before this Hung thing, I was very comfortable. I love my penis, and I always have. When you strap a label on yourself, you can never really live up to it. I swear to God I feel like I've gotten smaller since then.
Do you get to taunt your wife since your production schedule is easier? Ten episodes of Hung a season as opposed to Medium's 22?
No taunting required! A one-hour drama, 22-episode arc takes nine months out of the year to shoot, and she is the hardest working woman in show business. Anyone who is the lead of a one-hour drama, shooting 22 episodes, has the hardest episode in showbiz. Every weekend I'm the one who gets up early with our kids. I try to give her as much sleep as she can get. I can put up with it because it takes three-and-a-half months to shoot our show. That woman works her ass off, and my hat's off to her everyday.