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2008-12-15

by John Esther

Interview: William Hurt

Summary

Noted actor plays an ex-convict in The Yellow Handkerchief. Article

William Hurt stood six-foot two-inches under a press tent at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. We had just finished a press conference after the world premiere of his latest film, The Yellow Handkerchief, which is out this Friday.

During that conference Hurt made it clear he does not suffer fools gladly. More than once he drew aim and pulled at a reporter when she or he posed an inane question to him regarding his role in the film as a recently-released convict contemplating lost chances while he haphazardly sojourns through the back roads of post-Katrina Louisiana with two teenagers (Kristen Stewart and Eddie Redmayne).

For the role, Hurt spent a night in Louisiana’s notorious Angola Penitentiary (“The Farm”). So when a journalist said, “just acting,” he cut her short; or when journalists wanted to talk about what kind of offstage camaraderie the actors had instead of addressing racism and poverty vis-à-vis Angola, Hurt seemed eager to see the slumbering press conference quickly conclude. The reclusive Democrat and father of four who lives in Crane, Oregon and outside of Paris, France, did not have time for small talk.

Hurt was born in Washington, D.C. on March 20, 1950 to Alfred McCord Hurt and Claire Isabel (née McGill). His father worked for the U.S. State Department while his mother worked for Time, Inc. When his parents divorced, Hurt moved up north after his mother married Henry Luce III, the son of the founder of Time Magazine and writer Claire Boothe Luce.

Hurt attended the prestigious Middlesex School in Concord, MA, where he was Vice President of the Dramatics Club, before studying at Tufts University in Medford, Ma. While at Tufts, Hurt left to study at the Julliard Drama School. (In 2005 Tufts awarded Hurt with an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts.)

Hurt first earned serious cinematic recognition with his role as Professor Eddie Jessup in the Ken Russell/Paddy Chayevsky’s Altered States. A politically-mishmash message film, Hurt followed Altered States with three consecutive blatantly right-wing theatrical movies – the anti-media The Eyewitness, the misogynistic Body Heat, and Lawrence Kasdan’s pro-Reaganite The Big Chill, in which Hurt plays a cocaine-snorting idealist holding onto the dreams and demands of the 1960s.

For his next role, 1985’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Hurt’s talent was able to transcend the Academy’s typical homophobia and land him an Oscar for Best Actor. Since then Hurt has done dozens of films of various political merit, picking up two more best actor nominations for his performances in Children of a Lesser God (1986) and Broadcast News (1987). In 2005 Hurt received a nomination for Best Actor in Supporting Role for his less ten-minute performance in A History of Violence.

In addition to The Yellow Handkerchief, this year Hurt also appeared in the summer blockbuster hit, The Incredible Hulk and played a United States President in Vantage Point.

I spoke with Hurt about The Yellow Handkerchief, Hollywood’s demographics, George Clooney, politics and new models.

Los Angeles Journal: During the press conference you mentioned a “base of reality.” What reality of yours did you see in your character? Do you have something in common with him?
William Hurt: If you’re asking me about my personal life I’m not going to tell you because it’s not important. I could get just as much if I had a perfectly happy Tom Hanks life. Going and spending one night in Angola would give me more fuel for lost chances. How many people in one day told me, “I was in the wrong place in the wrong time” or “I was drunk.” Most of the guys in the yard said that by the time they get into prison they’ve woken up. Not during the trial while they’re still drying up. Aren’t we going to look at that? This film isn’t about that so what are you going to do to help people toward understanding that? You’re going to submerge the iceberg and play this sentimental tale -- not on the basis of what you want people to feel about it, but where you’re character is coming from. You just think about that. You don’t think about what you want other people to feel. You think about what the character is living.

LAJ: It was also mentioned that many of the people in Angola are poor and black. In light of Hurricane Katrina and the images Americans faced in late August 2005 – poverty and racism are alive and malignant in America – in what way were you conscious about this film being about white people?
WH: A lot. I thought the presence of the black community should be much stronger and I fought like crazy for that. There were big scenes and I don’t know what the fuck happened to them. We had a whole series of scenes that were written about when the three lead characters arrived in the black community where they get confronted. All of it masterful and it should have been in the movie. There was a lot of friction between [indecipherable].

LAJ: There was friction between whom?
WH: I can’t tell you about it. I really can’t. But there were scenes that were cut out of the film that would have answered your question completely. Not only were they cut in the writing, what was shot was so bad! It was so superficial you couldn’t leave it in the film and compare it to the authenticity of the relationships.

LAJ: Would that have to do with a concern for pleasing American audiences?
WH: No. If it had been done well you could’ve pleased anybody because it would have been truth. You don’t want to please somebody with falseness. You don’t want to trick somebody into liking it. You want them to like it for good reasons. The fact that they left it white was very problematic to me. There were reasons for that and they were reasons completely out of my hands. I fought for a black guy to be on the flight deck of Lost in Space, too. He was originally cast as a black guy and when he was changed I went, “What are you talking about? You promised us there was going to be a black guy. We were going to diversify. You’re going to have multi-ethnicity up here.” It was going to be one good thing about the movie -- the only good thing in it, maybe [laughs]? They took it out because of the demographics. But that was after I got cast. That happens a lot.

LAJ: This would be a reach for the truth.
WH: An actor doesn’t have control over editing or which scenes get shot. He only has control over the scenes he’s given to authenticate.

LAJ: Are you suggesting there has been a shift in priorities for acting?
WH: Well, George Clooney gave me a hug when he won the Academy [for Best Performance in a Supporting Role for the film in 2005 when Hurt was nominated for A History of Violence]. There’s a shift there. What he and I do as actors is very, very different in what we concentrate on. Right now what he’s doing is more important, frankly. The entirety around him is more in control and better expressed in terms of our time in history. Being the actor I am, the foundation I come from, I want films with formats as wide as complete as his are. Within that individual characterization I might be, I would like to flush that out. That’s my thing. That’s what I do: flush out the guy. So I’m not a producer [Hurt has one co-producer credit for the 2006 film, The Legend of Sasquatch]. I decided a long time ago not to wear more than one hat. I really wanted to sink my teeth into the one hat and hope everyone was being as attentive to theirs. I still believe in that dynamic, but right now that’s the shift I see, and they can’t afford it. They can’t afford to let me be fully accomplished in my one role because there’s been a paradigm shift that’s been placed in the model of society which could more or less be presented in some TV show like The West Wing where everybody’s talking at the same time and we’re also trying to figure out what it’s about. New corporate. New reality. New global economy thing. What’s that doing to society? Cultural shock. Cultural shift. Immigration and migration patterns. You’ll always pick up your phone before you’ll finish your conversation with me. You walk into a store. You’re on your phone. The cashier is no the phone. In the taxi. We’re all on the phone. We all prefer the phone. We’re all connected to the same things going on at the same time because of technology. It’s changed who I am as an artist. It has changed my format completely. I’m trying to stay up. I doing pretty good for a fellow my age, but it’s not easy.

LAJ: You play the President of the U.S. in the upcoming film, Vantage Point? WH::
I didn’t know his name or where he was from. Politically he’s something like a libertarian, maybe a Ron Paul.

LAJ: It also comes out during election year. How important is that to you?
WH: I stay informed. Like other liberals like myself, Paul is interesting to me but he’ll never be president. You know what he’s thinking and it’s not conducive to the party machinery.

LAJ: What about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton?
WH: I like Obama, but can he really be elected? Hillary is playing it very safe and she is as much a part of that political machine as anyone. That machine has America with its $500 billion military budget, not including Iraq. We need to take a much harder look at that. But it’s exciting to see that the candidate will be something new.

LAJ: Lastly, what do you think about these interviews where you discuss your work? Do they serve the work? Does it serve your film?
WH: It’s always been a problem. I’ve been at this for a long time. I’m always going, “No I am not the character I play. No, I am not the person I play.” Get off of it. I’m not acting out. That’s a little bit old hat. We’re living in the age of technology and terrorism now. We have a real subject to talk about rather than staring at our navels and me fighting that fight. I was fighting that fight to get you out of your navel and head toward character [Laughs], and not your own egocentric personality, your own narcissism. I despised narcissism as the hero of America and I still despise it. I always thought that if America was going to go to the movies looking for images in which to measure some authentic notion of self that it was doing the wrong damn thing. Really. That was my battle. Now I want to be part of the next battle and that’s to be techno savvy. I’m not bad but it’s a new model [sighs]. The model has definitely shifted.

The Yellow Handkerchief opens this Wednesday in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino. For more information log onto www.laemmle.com