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Hey kids, what a big day for LMD as she had the great honour to be allowed in the same room with Tom Hagen/The Great Santini/Boo Radley themselves, the actor’s actor, Mr. Robert Duvall.  And because that head explosion failed to impress, Carrie and Loretta Lynn made an appearance in the form of Ms. Sissy Spacek.  Her prom date was that Saturday Night Ghostbuster Wes Anderson really likes, also known as Mr. Bill Murray.  They sat in during the Tribeca Film Festival to chat up their new film, Get Low.

 I love the smell of Oscar winners (& nominees) in the morning.

 Dig it!

 

Get Low

Robert Duvall

 

The Lady Miz Diva:  You’re so revered for being able to inhabit or melt into your characters.  How deeply entrenched do you get when you play someone like Felix and how easy is he to walk away from at the end of the day?

Robert Duvall:  Well, that’s a good question.  It’s playacting, like kids playacting.  Like you play the doctor and I play the king.  It’s playacting, it’s fun.  But it’s you turning away.  You don’t really become something else -- you do, but you only have one set of emotions, one psyche, so you use that, like turning it to make it work for you.  And if it goes well, at the end of the day, you say, “Let’s go out.”  If it doesn’t go well, you say, “Oh my God, I’m worn out.”  If it goes well, there’s an elation process; being elated that you say, “Okay, I feel good,” you know?  But I did a scene one time with a first time producer and it was a very emotional scene, but it went well.  When it was over and he wasn’t watching me, I came over and I said, “You know the best way to cook soft-shell crabs?  I’m from Maryland and the best way to cook crabs is this way….”  He couldn’t get over that you could come out of something that quick, but if it’s real, then you can come out of it, cos by doing something real, and you’re immersed in something, you still have to be relaxed and off-hand and at touch with yourself.  You know what I’m saying?  So it’s not like “Oooohhh, now I’m in character.”  It’s like someone said, you watch some of these actors that come onstage with a big bag of yesterday.  It’s a game and the more you’re in touch with yourself the better.  And know yourself, to be able to call on things without calling on them.  Let it happen.

 

LMD:  Felix is trying to tie up the loose ends of his life before he passes and did playing him make you think about things you’d like to get sorted in your own life?

RD:  Not so much.  This is all a job and you think about whatever’s gonna be at the end or maybe the end is another beginning, who knows?  I think the end may be another beginning or something, but you think about it, you know?  I think about it, yeah.

 

LMD:  You mentioned being relaxed in a character, were you relaxed in Felix?

RD:  Yeah, with this, yeah.  You know, we go to Argentina a lot, my wife’s from Argentina; when I finally said I’d do this, I was sitting in this hotel way up looking at the Andes mountains going over this part just quietly to myself and letting it kind of whatever inside me, and I went from there, you know?  Somebody once said, “Play parts that are closest to you in your daydreams,” and not that I daydreamed about this but the more I worked on it, he became part of my daydreams, this guy.  But as far as what’s to come with me, I don’t know, we’ll see.  I don’t know.  Make it a small gathering, whenever it is.  Ours is an interesting journey from the cradle to the grave.  You try to do that without hurting people and trying to do things as good as you can to help other people if you can, to do that.  So it is a journey from the cradle to the grave, but that was what his was, what mine will be, I don’t know, ultimately what it will be, it’s whatever, I don’t know. 

 

LMD:  If I’m a young filmmaker and I want Robert Duvall in my movie, what does it take to bring you on board?

RD:  The part, if it’s a good part.  If it’s a very unique part like this one, it’s the only way I would consider any film.  Yeah, I like to work with first time directors, why not?

 

LMD:  Well you recently did that with Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart {2009}.

RD:  Yeah, well he hadn’t even directed a high school play. Now he can go direct a high school play! {Laughs} I talked to him this morning and he’s been offered to direct a phenomenal script called The Hatfields and McCoys.  It’s like American Shakespeare.  He flew all the way to Venice to talk to Brad Pitt.  If you know Brad Pitt, tell him to let the thing go and let’s do it!  Cos he has so many options, the guy, Brad Pitt.  But Warner Brothers would do it, they would write the check to do it and Scott Cooper would direct it.  That’s one that’s easy money if Brad Pitt would say yes, and it’s a great, great script by Eric Roth.  I think a great script.

 

LMD:  What is the appeal of Southern stories or stories of the West for you?

RD:  Well, they’re part of our heritage.  I say, let the English play Hamlet and King Lear, I play Augustus McCrae {Lonesome Dove -1989}.  The English have Shakespeare, The French have Molière, the Russians have Chekov, but the Western is ours.  It’s our genre.  But I don’t know if they really tell the story, because they say that the most difficult thing for the cowboy guy, that character in those days was to get a good night’s sleep on the hard ground.  That was the hardest thing.  And you know, after the Civil War three out of five cowboys were black cowboys, and the Southern guys from the Confederate army, a lot of those guys went out West and became cowboys cos there wasn’t anything left of their lands.  But it was part of our heritage.  And people in Europe and all over -- probably Japan too -- they love the concept of the Western, of the frontier, they do, with its pros and cons, yeah.

 

Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek

 

The Lady Miz Diva:  Get Low’s producer, Dean Zanuck, told me he asked your lawyer, “How do you get into the Bill Murray business?”  Apparently, your lawyer said, “You don’t.”

Bill Murray: {Laughs} It’s bad business.

 

LMD:  What does it take then for a young filmmaker to bring you on to a project?

Bill Murray:  Well, what is really the key would be to have a good script.  Sure -- it’s not that hard.  If you have a good script, that’s what gets you involved, you know? People say, “Oh, they can’t find you.”  Well… if you can write a good script, it’s a lot harder than finding someone, you know?  It’s much harder to write a good screenplay than finding someone.  So, you can find someone.  You know, I don’t worry about it.  It’s not my problem.  My problem is having a little peace and quiet, so if they need to find me, that’s really their issue.  I’m not putting out ads or anything, or standing on the street corner.

 

LMD:  Was it the script that brought you both to Get Low?

BM:  Mm-hmm

Sissy Spacek:  I liked the script because I never knew what was gonna happen from one page to the next.  It was not a formula film.  And I thought they were even smarter than I thought they were before when they told me that Bill was gonna play the undertaker, then I got really excited about it because I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re smart enough to know how incredible he would be in then they’ve gotta be smarter than I thought they were in the beginning.  They had the brains to want Bill in that role; they had to be even more clever than I had imagined in the beginning.  Because when I first read it, it was the story of Felix Bush, which is a great story on its own, but then to have Bill Murray play the other character, it just added such an unexpected and refreshing and fabulous element to it, I thought, these guys got it goin’ on.

BM:  Now you know why you gotta be hard to get, you look better.  Sissy is talking about the movie and what it was like and she says really nice things about me, but it’s really nice having Sissy in the movie, too, because you gotta have a girl that’s like dreamy, kinda like the guys would make a fool of themselves for.  Then you’ve gotta imagine a girl that’s dreamy like that and it’s her sister and there’s like a triangle between them, so you go, ‘Wow, her sister must’ve been hot as hell, too.’  So you’ve got this kind of idea, ‘Wow, can you imagine the two of them?’  What that energy must’ve been like to have two girls like that in one house?  So, getting that person that can not just look that way, and evoke that feeling from you, but be able to show the disappointment and the heartbreak of when the truth is revealed and to see the subtle kind of flirtation of this is a man and we had this thing and there it is.  Then to have this truth come and this devastating news, you gotta have real chops, you gotta have real goods to do that, you know?

SS:  My ego was a little wounded after that scene, I have to admit.

BM:  I mean, really, it was powerful stuff to see her go through that because you have to be incredibly vulnerable and open to let it touch you and let it show.  So, it was tough to look at, it was really tough to watch.  As amazing as it was to watch Bob do the scene, with your other eye, you went, ‘God, this is killing her, just killing her.’  And even though it’s acting, you feel it, it’s real.

 

LMD:  Well, Mr. Zanuck also mentioned you keeping a boombox on set and keeping the extras entertained…

BM:  Yeah, on a lighter note!

SS: {Laughs} Let’s lighten the mood!

 

LMD:  Was that a conscious thought for you, to keep the mood light in the middle of all the heavy drama on the set?

BM:  Well, that’s my job.  I feel that’s part of my job because I feel like I’m, I dunno, like a veteran, you know?  That’s what you’re supposed to do; you gotta keep the calm or the peace.  People get nervous, you want people to be relaxed and the music’s there to provide tempo, to keep you going.  If it starts to drag on the set, or you feel like this isn’t a fun experience, people will get down. The energy gets down; you gotta keep the energy up.

SS:  Cos it was so cold, it was freezing!

BM:  It was freezing cold, it was very uncomfortable conditions. Really, really cold.  So you had to keep the mood, up.  You had to keep the tempo up.  You had to keep the feeling up like, ‘Hey, we’re doing something that’s really exciting.  This is fun.  It’s fun being with these people.’  And the more fun you have the better you do it.

SS:  I said to Bill one day, who was always keeping things lively on the set, I said, “Man Bill, you are really funny.” “You oughtta meet my sister.  She’s the funny one”

 

LMD:  Did you feel a responsibility to do that, to be that person on the set keeping things light?

BM:  Well, I feel that pressure in life, you know?  I don’t feel like it’s a pressure, it’s sort of an obligation, not to entertain or be funny, but to have a certain levity, and I don’t mean it just in terms of just being jocular.  I mean, there’s gotta be lightness in your way.  You have to be as light as you can be and not get stuck in your emotions, stuck in your body, stuck in your head.  You just always want to be trying to elevate somehow.

SS:  And that’s what you did in the film, too.  The way you played that character, you elevated the film and gave it buoyancy, I think.

 

LMD:  Ms. Spacek, Mr. Duvall was telling me about “relaxing” into his characters as he did with Felix.  Mattie in many ways is the most heartrending, complicated role in the film.  What was it like to get in and out of her skin?

SS:  She’s a mess!  I don’t take characters home with me, really, but I find it’s like what I’ve heard Bill say, we relate to a character and you find that character within yourself.  So it’s just all parts of me.  I guess I don’t leave characters behind, but I just let them go dormant {Laughs}.  I had a much more fulfilling emotional life than Mattie.  Mattie, I have a feeling that she married someone that wasn’t the man of her dreams and lived a relatively happy life.  I don’t think she had children, maybe she married him later in life, had a good life, but I think that her heart really was with Felix Bush. 

BM:  Right.

SS:  And I think she had to have been a pretty strong person to have endured opening herself up to him again after all those years and finding out that she never was to him was he was to her.  I mean, that was a body blow, and to find out about her sister.  So that’s why I love so much what Bill brought to the film, because Mattie was in the depths of despair and interestingly enough, there was a whole part of the film that didn’t make the final film because it didn’t quite fit in.  It was sort of a little budding relationship between our two characters and I always imagined that they probably ended up together and lived happily ever after upstairs over the funeral parlour.  Or maybe they moved into her house!

 

~ The Lady Miz Diva

April 27th 2010

 

 

 

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Photos

Exclusive photos by LMD

Film stills courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

 

 

 

 

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