When you board the William Hurt Express, it's best not to have a destination in mind. The actor is an interesting person to interview specifically because he resists the normal confines of that sort of prescribed conversation, instead taking his questioner on several passionate detours. All this is to say that although I sat down with Hurt in order to discuss his new film The Yellow Handkerchief and his costars Kristen Stewart and Maria Bello, the interview began with him vividly reading out loud from his new favorite periodical, then blossomed unexpectedly from there.
How are you holding up today?
[Holding up a copy of the McSweeneys magazine The Believer] This is what I'm reading these days.
Do you read that regularly?
Well, I have a subscription.
Have you read a lot of stuff from Dave Eggers?
Not a lot, no. In fact, this is a wonderful revelation given to me by my friend Krista from Australia. She found it, and gave me this. I'm just knocked out! In fact, this woman Rebecca Solnit...ever hear of her?
I don't think so.
She's very, very cool. She is, in her own description, an essayist, because they can't present her any other way. Her quote is, "I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small." [Hurt begins to read out loud from the magazine now] "How to avoid moralizing without rendering yourself totally ineffectual: Humor, self-awareness, the language of persuasion and inclusion." She wrote things like Wanderlust: A History of Walking. She wrote a thing called A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She wrote A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. She's an amazing person.
And The Believer is your introduction to her?
It's a great magazine. From San Francisco, of course. They have this wonderful series of micro-interviews, these imaginary interviews given by an imaginary Ken Burns to the writer Brad Neely. I'll read you one of them. It's so good. What it was is that Ken Burns sent out this questionnaire to schools who'd seen his Civil War thing. It was like the teacher questionnaire, like "What does it mean to you and what is this historically and blah de-blah blah blah?" So Burns asked these schools, "Consider the events leading directly or indirectly to the Civil War. Was slavery the main issue for the war's beginning? What were other contributing factors?"
Then Brad Neely said, "Oh, if only it were the field I imagine. If it were, the entire evil South was this sort of Mordor, with sweaty colonels and fanning Pharaohs. If Lincoln slid into power and right away pulled a Moses on everyone by immediately sending our dashing, malnourished boys in blue to free the esteemed and respected people from chains. It's a seductive perspective that sees the cause of moral epiphany. In my simpler heart, this was our American Iliad, with Grant and Lee as Achilles and Hector reversed. Before the war, kids talented in the violent arts were sent to our national Hogwarts West Point [laughs] and later, when the war had bloomed into its pageant, those ex-bunkmates would square off in battle on either side of the good-and-evil line. Yep, Jefferson Starship Davis led everyone astray with his high, twangy rhetoric, and yes, he dressed up like a woman and rode around in trains. Oh, the personalities." It's just...Burns, eat your heart out. The next time you hand out these questions...
If only we'd seen that version.
If only we'd seen that one. Excuse me for the diversion. It's just that it's tremendous.
I mean, we could talk magazines for the whole time, but the publicist for The Yellow Handkerchief would probably take issue with that. Let me ask you a little bit about the movie.
Yeah.
I thought it was interesting that on this film, both the screenwriter, Erin Dignam, and the cinematographer, Chris Menges, have actually directed you before.
Yes, good for you! Yay, someone finally realized that! Thank you.
Does that give the director an incredible ability to tailor the role to you, or do you think, "I wonder if they're all passing notes about me..."?
I hope they're passing notes about me! They're really talented people and they deserve each other's company. I have never worked with anyone who I hold in higher esteem than Chris Menges. He's an absolute, bona fide, authentic artist. I love both of them profoundly, as people and as artists.
What puts them head and shoulders above the rest, as artists?
They're not fakes. It's not artifice, it's art. They're looking honestly at stuff, and they're not making it nice to make it fashionable or easy to make you like them. They like you -- they're not asking to be liked, but they like you -- and they just want to tell some truth.
When you read a script like this one, obviously you have some idea of how you want to play the character -- and yet, you're well-known for the amount of research you put into developing your role. On this film, for instance, you spent a night in prison to better get to know your character. How much did your conception of the role change, from beginning to end?
The thrill of acting is the discovery part, so it all changes, but it has to change in a way that fits what is written. You can't just wander off and get interested in your own tangent.
Have you ever?
Woody Allen asked me to improv once. I said no. [Laughs] I wasn't sure if it would be a good juxtaposition with the other lines. I wasn't sure if it would be "in tune." But I did it after a while -- he convinced me it was legit. To me, if I was going to call myself devoted in a native way, it would be as an actor to a writer first, then to a director. Well, actually, my fellow actors probably come first, but in terms of serving the wholeness of the piece, I was taught that the words are sacred and you don't change a word of it. And I don't, I don't change a word.
You don't, but Hollywood does all the time. There are few scripts out there that don't get rewritten by other writers.
I think they haven't learned the pleasure of respecting the real talents that they've hired. They haven't surrendered to that talent and had it force them out of their shells, into new shapes. Shapes of discovery, shapes of challenge. I'm not there to tailor the role to me, I'm there to tailor me to the role. That guarantees me something, a precious thing, which is creativity. I'm guaranteed that I will have a creative experience, because I will go to it, not demand that it comes to me.
That's a very interesting thing to hear from an actor. I mean, you'd think it would be a normal thing for an actor to sublimate themselves to a script or a director, and yet...
It would be normal if it was normal. The ethic, the credo became "Sell yourself." I think, "Sell yourself? My God, if you sell yourself, you sell the most precious thing that you've got." You were given yourself and you must share that. You're given this amazing treasure, how dare you even think of ever selling it! My God! So what are you trying to do? You're not trying to be the center of the universe -- you are the center of your universe, but everyone else is too! You've got some company. The great irony is that you and I both have to die. Funnily enough, the thing that's loneliest about life -- which is its terminal nature, its mortality -- is the thing that brings us closer together. Knowing that is the thing that makes us least lonely, if we can accept that. I give you, therefore, credit for the courage it takes me to confront it, because you have to confront it, too. I assume that. Now, we exist.
You say you're not trying to be the center of the universe. Other actors don't know anything but that.
That may be, but I don't know if that's so much their fault as it is the wool that's been pulled over the American eyes. There's been a trick pulled on them! There are a lot of Ponzi schemes going, and not all by Bernie Madoff -- my phrase is "Madoff was no one-off."
Certainly, celebrity has become a completely different thing than it was when you first started.
Yeah.
You began acting in film in your late twenties, and although you became a movie star fairly quickly, you didn't have to deal with a lot of what surrounds that now.
But I was an actor, and I still am an actor. In my book, when I look in the mirror, I see a guy. The accoutrements of my career are not around my house. My children know me as Dad. A guy. I see myself as an actor, actually as a repertory theatre actor.
So what do you make of this three-ring circus that surrounds Kristen Stewart wherever she goes?
I've defended her in public as regularly as I can. I think it's absurd, that they're not giving her a break. I think that she's holding her own, that she's courageous, that she's inventive, and that she's got character oozing out of her, and I say, "Give her a break. Who is she to pander to your idea of what she's supposed to be?" She has every right in the world to express herself exactly as she chooses to, and she's got a lot of surprises up her sleeve. Why won't they give that woman a break?
If you were starting out right now and you were her age, do you think you'd be able to withstand all this pressure?
I couldn't take it. No. My route was categorically different from hers. I have to study something for fifteen years before I take a risk, and then I take a very calculated and big risk, but I really have to work hard before I jump. I do jump, but I look at where it can make the most impact. [Kristen's] route may be different, but the ends might be the same.
You know, we were discussing preparation for a role earlier--
She was one of the ones who prepared the most! Kristen and I worked together great, and so did me and Eddie [Redmayne]. We had two weeks of wonderful rehearsal on this project, and that's why it's a good film. [A publicist enters the room] Excuse us. ["One more question," says the publicist. Hurt raises his voice.] Come on! Give us a break. We're just getting started.
When I spoke to Maria Bello earlier, she said she likes as little preparation as possible.
But when you're in the scene with her, she's home. She's there. So she's doing something.
Is it interesting to reconcile those different approaches, or does it just happen naturally?
It depends, you know. It depends, but to me, there is a common denominator. Maria is a very considerate person. She's not just in flagrante delicto. She obviously has a structured approach to life. She's got a life and integrity, and integrity means there's life and structure and principles. That's what you're working with -- the idea of total spontaneity is total chaos, for God's sake. There's form there. There are things she's trying to convey and questions that she's asking her peers, and there's a real conversation there and I can understand it. She's considerate. Lack of structure? Maybe she doesn't prepare the way I do, but she prepares.
All right, thank you, William. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Yeah, same. Same! I'm sorry you have to go. I feel like there was a connection there.
[Photo Credit: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images]