Last week, I met up with him at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles to talk about Cyrus, tease Kevin, and discuss his ever-shifting attitude toward his own work.
I just saw Tilda Swinton downstairs. Have the two of you wrapped We Need to Talk About Kevin?
Yeah, I just finished that one.
Was it a rough experience? It's pretty dark subject matter -- you play a father whose son commits a mass shooting.
It's sad-making, but it wasn't a rough experience. I had a great time with Tilda Swinton, and Lynne Ramsay is one of the best directors in the world.
I just wish we got more films from her.
Yeah, she took a couple years off. She got caught in a development hellhole for a while there, but she's really going to turn some heads with this movie, I think.
You're well-known for your ability to improvise. Still, was Cyrus a whole new ballpark for you?
I've done a lot of improvisation in a lot of different movies, and usually it's at the front or the tail end of a scene in a comedy where you keep switching out the joke to surprise the other actors. In this one, [the Duplass brothers] really opened the floodgates. There are many instances where the tone of the scene changed from what was in the script, and they said every day, "Look, if the story takes a radical turn one way or the other, we're open to following it wherever it goes." That's really liberating for an actor, and you really feel like anything is possible. There are certain times as an actor when you feel like a puppet, and this was not one of those cases. I felt like I was a co-author of the movie with the filmmakers.
Did you treat the script like a blueprint?
It was a fleshed-out script. The studio was not going to give them this money unless they had a real game plan going in. It's just that once we started to embody these characters, Jay and Mark were more interested in what we were going to do with these characters than what they had already done with the characters in the script, before we even started. That's just the way they like to work.
So how did you shape your character?
They wrote this part with me in mind, they said, and they told me, "If you don't want to do this movie, we're not gonna do it either. We'll just do something else, because it's not just that we wrote this character for you -- we wrote it only for you." So yeah, I was able to influence the character completely, to the point where I couldn't even tell you which pieces of information about the character were my contribution. I was just trying to live and breathe as this guy as we went along, with the encouragement of Mark and Jay.
When they tell you that they wrote this role with you in mind, that can be a nice compliment, but could it also mean that this is the sort of material you've already done before?
First of all, a lot of people say that they write things with you in mind, and they don't. Then they go to the next actor because you passed on it, and you're like, "Oh, I thought you wrote it for me?" [Laughs] But these guys really did, and I could tell what they were after. The qualities that this character had were things that they'd seen in one way or another in other things that I'd done, but it didn't feel repetitive to me. I've played romantic parts before, but not that often. It was interesting. This character's more mature than most other characters I've played before, and he more accurately reflected where I was in my own life in terms of maturity, as opposed to Step Brothers, where you're channeling your inner 12-year-old. I was allowed to be the age that I am.
If you just described the plot alone, though, it could sound like a comedy in the Step Brothers mold.
I think if Jonah and I are left to our own devices, I'm sure we'll do another movie someday like that where it'll be a lot sillier, but having Marisa there was a great balance. She has a really naturalistic style of acting and she helped ground it, and she's also kind of the pivot point for the two characters, you know?
You've improvised with a lot of actors in a lot of other films. What does improvising with Jonah Hill feel like?
He's similar to Will [Ferrell] in that you just have a great partner in the scene who's playful, enthusiastic, open to whatever you're bringing, and quick and capable enough to send it back. There's nothing worse than throwing the ball to someone and you see it hit their chest and fall to the floor. You throw the ball at Jonah, and as fast as you throw it to him, that's as fast as it's coming back to you. Jonah and I became pretty good friends on this movie, and that playfulness that we had off-camera really allowed us to engage in this battle on-camera without ending up with a real enemy at the end of it.
I would imagine actors are always anxious to see the final product, but especially on a film like this when you've given the directors so many different versions of the same scene.
Yeah! I was very curious to see how this one would cut together, because it was a lot of improv and a lot of struggling around for the scene... well, not struggling around, but just meandering within scenes and exploring different points of view. I thought it came together really smoothly, and they did an amazing job editing this movie. That said, the older I get, the less interested I am in seeing my movies when they're done. It kind of becomes more about the experience of making it. I've seen this movie twice -- once in the editing room in a rough cut situation, and once at Sundance -- and I think that's enough for me, you know? You take a lot more from the experience of making it than what the end product is.
Or how it does. Do you worry about box office and distribution very much?
Only as much as I'm required to. I feel bad if people don't make their money back, but that hasn't been the case too often. I think your job is to get as many people to see it as they can, and if they show up, great. If not, they missed a good movie. There are so many ways for a movie to fail that it's a miracle when the movie turns out great and the film itself is something that you love and you're proud of. Then, to have that movie you love get seen by people, that's like a double miracle. What people want to see on a weekend when a movie opens is controlled by a lot of different things -- not just advertising, not just how good the movie is, but what's going on in the zeitgeist. Hopefully, this summer, people will be craving a movie with a little more emotional honesty and real characters instead of just formulaic popcorn movies.