If you'd like one good reason to see Killing Them Softly in spite of its "F" Cinemascore and anemic opening box-office numbers, I'll give you a great one: Scoot McNairy's portrayal of the tragi-comic hood Frankie in Andrew Dominik's contemporary film noir is the kind of breakthrough performance that will stick with you long after the financials are forgotten.
Killing Them Softly is studded with top-notch acting — Ben Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins also put in memorable turns — but McNairy's emotionally dexterous performance as the in-over-his-head Frankie is something to behold, particularly in the tense bar scene where he first encounters Brad Pitt's mob enforcer character Jackie Cogan.
McNairy talked to Movieline about shooting those pivotal moments with Pitt, his admiration for Dominik (Cinemascore be damned), and his busy work slate. The Texas native can currently be seen in the Ben Affleck-directed Argo, a job that, he says got with the help of Dominik, and also has a few scenes in the Gus Van Sant-directed Promised Land, which opens Dec. 28. Next up, are two films with Michael Fassbender, a trip to Australia to appear in Animal Kingdom director David Michod's The Rover with Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson.
Movieline: Looking through your credits, I noticed that you’ve done quite a bit of producing as well as acting.
Scoot McNairy: Yeah, it’s funny. I got into producing from having done commercials for so long. I was financially stable at the time, and I had so much time on my hands that I just got bored and said I can't be sitting around. I figured that I could at least be putting together projects or looking for material for me to do. I felt like I should just be generating my own work.
Tell me a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and how’d you get into acting?
I was born and raised outside of Dallas. I did some theater when I was a kid. I've always loved movies. I've always been passionate about them. And it wasn't until I was 18 that I moved down to Austin, Texas and, just for a hobby, started to take these classes at the Dougherty Art Center. One day, the director Alex Holdridge came in to one of the classes and said he was casting the lead of his first film, Wrong Numbers. I stuck around after class and read for it. He called me two weeks later and gave me the part.
Nice.
I mean, talk about a shoestring budget. We probably made that movie for $2,000, but it got some attention. The film went to the Austin Film Festival and in 2001 won the Grand Jury prize and the Audience award. Through the process of shooting that movie, I fell in love with cinematography. I really thought that I wanted to be a cameraman. And that's what brought me out to California. I went to film school to be a cinematographer.
Where did you go?
I went to the Art Institute of Los Angeles, but I only did a year of that. Then, for about nine months to a year in L.A., I worked building sets. When I was younger, my trade was carpentry, and I knew a lot about construction. The guy in the warehouse next to where I worked, Jesus Pedroza, was running a floral business. He and I always hung out on our smoke breaks, and one day, he asked me to bartend at his friend John Pierce’s agency Christmas party. It was a really small boutique agency for commercials. It was $100 or $200 for the night. I needed cash. I took the job.
That’s where I met John, who is now my producing partner, my theatrical manager and my personal agent. He said, "Can I send you out?" And I said, "Yeah, sure." He turned to his friend and said, "This kid will never work, but I like him and I'll take him on." I ended up doing about 15 national spots that first year. (Check out McNairy's first commercial, directed by Mike Mills for Levi's.)
Wow.
And that's when he was like, "You should be doing TV and movies." So I got into an acting class and really started to hit it hard. I got back into theater and started doing plays in L.A. Still, it was another four years of just doing commercials, and that’s when I had so much time on my hands that I got into producing. Down the line, that led to In Search of a Midnight Kiss. I’d done a second movie in Austin with Alex, Sexless, in 2003 and then he moved to California and we did Midnight Kiss. I was a producer on that and in 2009 we won the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award.
I think that gave me a little bit of credibility as far as an actor. And then I went on to do Monsters, which gave me a little bit more credibility. And then Andrew cast me in Killing Them Softly. He told me, "I'd never seen you, never heard of you.” He cast me from my audition tape.
Were you auditioning for Frankie?
Yeah. I didn’t think there was chance in hell I would ever get it, which is what spawned the ludicrous accent I use in the movie. I was sick with the flu at the time, and I was complaining to my girlfriend, who’s my wife now, and she said, "Well, why don't you go in and do what you're doing there if you don't think you're going to get it?" And I was like, "You know what? You're right. I'm just going to go in there and throw this against the wall." Andrew just kind of fell in love with it and said, "I want exactly whatever you're doing right now. I don't want you to polish or clean it up." My jaw dropped. I was like, "Are you really giving me this job?"
And then Brad [Pitt] gave approval on me and Harvey [Weinstein] gave approval on me, and we were off and running.
The scene where you meet Brad Pitt’s character at the bar is intense. Your performance reminded me a bit of Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. How did you prepare for that?
I put so much faith into Andrew Dominik's script, you know, and the bar scene spawned from character research and development. Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola) is a father figure to me. He's the only person in that world that means something to me, you know. Frankie doesn't have any friends. He doesn't know anybody. And Jackie is asking me to rat out that person. It’s a big, big struggle for Frankie.
You make it pretty palpable onscreen.
Andrew did hound me. He goes, "I need to see you struggle with that decision. I need to see you make that decision.”
Pitt really works you over psychologically in those moments. Is it intimidating to act against against him.
You know, I've never really gotten star struck. I'm always more intrigued by a person's art, but I guess you could say that I didn't know if I was going to be intimidated or not. The first scene we shot was the bar scene, and I opted to not meet Brad before it. I said, "I don't want to meet him. I don't want to talk to him. I don't want to introduce myself to him. Let's take all this intimidation that occurs in the script and put it into the scene.
Interesting.
So, we didn't speak for the first two or three days of filming and then we both broke character. From there on out, we spoke a lot more and cracked jokes. It's nice to be able to meet him on a personal level as well, but I'm so focused on the work and doing a good job that there really isn't any room for feeling intimidated.
Your scenes with Ben Mendelsohn are also memorable. When I interviewed him, he told me that you two were the first guys on the set and really bonded.
Ben is a character, man. Even sitting in a chair in a hotel room, he's just constant entertainment. I love crazy people, and I just stuck to him like glue right when I met him. But we took the relationship even further. We moved in together for like the last six weeks of the shoot, and the relationship you see on the screen is the relationship that we had at the house. We got in fights. We argued. He'd complain. We'd bitch. We brought everything that was going on at the house to work.
There's been some press about the "F" Cinema Score that Killing Them Softly and its disappointing box office. What do you have to say about that?
I know it got squashed, but Andrew Dominik is one of those directors like Terrence Malick. It doesn’t makter how much his movies make. As an actor, I can tell you that actors fucking love him a a filmmaker. Probably 50 percent of the actors I know would name The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford one of their favorite films. I wish the movie had better for Andrew's sake, but he could call me tomorrow and I would take his movie over a studio movie any day.
You know, I didn't even recognize you in Argo because, I swear, every guy in that movie looks like David Cross. But you shot that after Killing Them Softly, and I hear that Dominik recommended you to Ben Affleck.
Every guy in that movie did look like David Cross, and Andrew Dominik did call Ben Affleck and told him he'd worked with me. They're super close because Ben's brother Casey was in Jesse James and Ben and Andrew are big fans of each other's work.
So what's next for you?
I've got about two or three scenes in Promised Land that just came out. And then a movie called Twelve Years A Slave that Steve McQueen directed. Brad's in it, and Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor. I'm working on this film right now with Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore called Non-Stop. Then I'm off to do this movie called Frank with Domhnall Gleeson and Michael Fassbender. And after that, I work with David Michod, who did Animal Kingdom and is really close friends with Andrew Dominik. It's with Guy Pearce and Rob Pattinson. It's called The Rover.
Is it going to be as intense as Animal Kingdom?
You know, I don't know the direction in which David's taking it, but it's a futuristic western that takes place in the Australian Outback.
Can you talk about the character you play?
I play Rob's brother. If I say anything else about it, it gives it all away.
You've got a lot of work coming up. Have you ever thought about directing?
Storytelling is essentially what has always drawn me to this business. So, yes, absolutely. I've been writing a script for about a year that I'm tweaking and polishing. So, I'm hoping that I can shoot it soon, maybe next December. I want to keep it super low budget, under a million bucks. As a producer, I didn't get to be as creative as I wanted to be, and I realized that directing is where a lot of the storytelling takes place. And so that's definitely I want to explore.
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