That Evening Sun's Hal Holbrook: A Candid, Emotional Movieline Interview

You're from the Northeast -- Connecticut and Ohio, specifically -- but you've always had a professional and personal identification with the South. How does this film play with that identification?

HH: Scott wrote a really wonderful script; the minute you read it, you go, "These are real people. This isn't some guy in Hollywood putting it together with two other guys. This is the real thing." And after you've lived in the South and have been accepted into the South for a while, and you look around, you start to see these people. I've seen Ray McKinnon's character; we had a lot of them building our house. You didn't know if they were going to show up in the morning because they were so drunk the night before. They don't save anything, they fool around with somebody else's wife... you know.

And you see people like my father-in-law, who was in my mind when I was doing this character. He was a real gentleman. He would always wear a tie. My wife insisted I wear a tie today. But he was a country man -- very much a country man. Two gas pumps and one cannon. But he was a man of great principle who knew what he thought about everything. He did not question things like me. There was a very limited amount of things that he and I could talk about. Politics? Forget it. Don't even mention it unless you're going to praise Ronald Reagan to the finish and put him up with George Washington. Otherwise, stay out of the room. It took years to understand... [Long pause] What made this man? What made him was that he had a very strong sense of obligation to his family. The obligation was intense. And he had a very strong set of morals, such as they were. They were morals, and he never deviated from them: He revered his wife. He loved his daughter. He sat at the front of the table. He lived by set rules and related to everybody the same way, always, always.

But over the years... [Holbrook's voice breaks] I could get emotional talking about it. Over the years, I became sort of awed by him. And I developed an affection for him. [Tears well in his eyes, and he pauses again] I'm getting into deep water, but uh... [Weeps briefly] I used to go in and say good night to him when he was unable to move for two years. He couldn't even pick up a spoon. I have taped to the mirror in my bathroom this little piece of paper he wrote when he could hardly write any more, and his hand was so shaky from palsy that he could hardly write. And it said, "To Hal Holbrook, with great love, Halbert." That took a lot for him to write that. It was a real gold star for me, because when you realize that that man respected you, you realize the respect was based on how you behaved over a long period of time. He trusted you.

I think that's what sets That Evening Sun so strikingly apart. It feels like a reaction against Hollywood's sentimental, maudlin or gothic depiction of the South and Southerners.

ST: Well, I grew up outside of Atlanta, and we all longed to see our home represented authentically in whatever art form or stories we're told. In this case it's the cinema. I grew up seeing too many bad representations of the South. Honorable as they were, respectful as they were, they still had lacks of authenticity. Not for lack of trying, but just because if I went to make a movie about South Boston, I'm not from there. I can't tell truth from fiction. You could slip something by me -- an accent that's almost right -- and I might not catch it as a filmmaker not of the place. Not that I can't make those films. But when wanting to represent a culture and a place authentically, I think it requires a native voice. Or at someone [native] who has influence on the construction of the piece. For me, it just came out of a desire to see my homeland reflected in a way that I recognize. That's why I went to Ray McKinnon and Walton Goggins. I wanted them to look over my shoulder and tell me when it wasn't right, when it wasn't true. They were BS detectors for me.

HH: They helped me, too. I had to slow them down at first. I was worried they were taking over your movie, so they stopped and went into a limbo. But I knew they were there every once in a while because Scott is a writer, and when he tells you something it takes him 10 minutes to tell it. [Laughs] Sometimes Raymond when explain it to me in a shorter way and I'd get it. But I was stubborn. They were trying to cut away any attempt to protect the character or to make him too old or anything other than who he was. I'm very, very grateful for that because I learned something very valuable. I hope and pray that I was able to use it in the film. I think I was. We'll see.

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