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Tim Blake Nelson -
Britton Hansen
Tim Blake Nelson is a prolific actor, writer, director, and producer who has appeared in a wide variety of films such as Lincoln, Holes, The Incredible Hulk, Meet the Fockers, Minority Report, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. His playwriting credits include The Grey Zone and Eye of God, both of which Nelson adapted and directed for the screen. Other directing credits include O, Leaves of Grass, and Anesthesia. Most recently, Nelson’s play Socrates premiered at The Public Theater in the spring of 2019, and he starred in HBO’s Watchmen, which premiered this fall.
New Orleans Review
First up, which do you think you prefer to do: audition as an actor or pitch as a writer/producer?
Tim Blake Nelson
I really do neither anymore. Back when I did, I loathed them equally. I didn’t like auditioning so much because I felt that usually the process involved reading something once, in a scenario that always felt to me set up to judge, even though now I understand that directors really want you to come in the room and succeed, so it’s actually the opposite. But back when I was auditioning I couldn’t ever really get over the psychological hump of feeling like the auditors or auditior was looking for flaws. In terms of pitching ideas a writer/director, I never really did that, because I’ve always written scripts first, whether they were plays or screenplays. Then I presented them as effectively take it or leave it proposition, but I didn’t much like that process, particularly when it came to playwriting, because I always felt that my work was being rejected for the wrong reasons. In other words, there were very few slots in the theater seasons, in each individual theater, and there was maybe even one opening within that for the type of play that I was writing. I never blamed anyone for that, it was just a process that frustrated me. And now a bit later I got into writing movies, and that’s been a better process. Ultimately I understand the terms of the transaction, which is that if I don’t write something that has the chance of making people money, then it’s not going to get made. I never really blamed people who look at a piece of material that I sent out with actors attached and they look at the math and aren’t confident enough in the project, it’s a business proposition. That has always felt okay with me because I understand the terms and it feels like a transparent process.
NOR
I’m less familiar with the playwriting and play pitching process. Can you walk me through what that looks like?
Nelson
Say a theater has four slots on their main stage. They’re going to want to spread the nature of the material around in terms of what they’re presenting to their audience, almost like admissions process that wants people from all over the country, and of different genders, and of different racial backgrounds, so that the “class” reflects society. Theaters justifiably–and I say this both because of good aesthetic principles of varying what sort of materials you’re putting on the stage, but also they’re not-for-profit, they’re taxpayer funded–they want to serve a lot of different types of writers and attract different communities into their audience.
NOR
Do you think you’ve ever played or written a character that you think an audience has misunderstood?
Nelson
I probably have, but I would never blame the audience. I’d blame myself first, and maybe the other people involved in shaping the narrative second.
NOR
Right, and the way that an audience interprets something isn’t necessarily for the artist to decide, I suppose.
Nelson
Right.
NOR
When you were doing a lot more acting, you played some pretty eccentric, peculiar characters: Delmar O’Donnell, Buster Scruggs more recently to name a couple… do you think that you pursue those kinds of unique roles, or do they seem to find you?
Nelson
It’s half and half. The way I look in terms of my face and size and the shape of my body, it can be a self selective process. In other words, certain kinds of roles aren’t going to come my way, and other roles will. Within that as I’ve gone from an actor who was more in the business of seeking out any role I could for one who doesn’t do that anymore, let’s put it that way so I don’t like a jerk, for one who doesn’t have to do that anymore. I now pick roles that I feel are irresistible. For that to appear irresistible, I want to know that there’s going to be a freedom of expression inside of a role for me that fits with what the director wants, that the director has a unique vision that he or she is going to be able to realize because there’s going to an absence of interference with him or her and because he or she is going to have the resources to realize that vision. So it’s a combination of the roles that now come my way and my trying to get a sense of whether the project is going to have its own individual novelty that is going to come out ultimately in the film. A good example of that in [The True] Don Quixote, which I did in NEw Orleans a few years ago, that was written and directed by Chris Poche in a really inventive way, and he had producers behind him who supported that vision and so it was a great experience and a great process.
NOR
So collaboration between all the different groups of people is really important to you.
Nelson
Yeah.
NOR
A lot of the characters that you’ve played in the past have been country men. I’m sure growing up in Oklahoma influenced that in some sort of way. Can you talk about that?
Nelson
When I could drive, at the age of 16, I started going to little towns and talking to people and recording that, hearing stories. I didn’t really know it at the time, even though I already was imitating people a lot as a kid in the mold of a class clown. By going out and learning about the strangely exotic people inhabiting the small towns of my state, I was starting to learn how to observe and then intuit characters and then ultimately inhabit them, even though I wasn’t really going to start doing that in a serious way until college and then graduate school. I guess because I learned the process of character assimilation when I was younger by being around “Okies,” that ended up being a really deep connection I had that was just more in my bones than a lot of other characters I’ve been asked to play. After I didThin Red Lineand O Brother Where Art Thou, folks just started coming to me with those types of roles. The movie business has a way of deciding who and what you are, and in a lot of respects you have to try and fight that. I try to make each of these characters different and I hope I’ve been successful with that so that you you really can’t accuse me of playing the same characters, like Delmar in Buster Scruggsand that Watchmen, or Just Mercy, projects that are about to come out.
NOR
You haven’t lived in Oklahoma for a while, but do you consider yourself to be an Oklahoma City Thunder fan?
Nelson
I love the Thunder, I always root for the Thunder, I wish they’d held onto James Harden.
NOR
I know, bummer that Russell Westbrook is gone too!
Nelson
Yeah, if they’d hung onto Harden, and Durant, with Westbrook–I think we would’ve had a lot of Western titles.
NOR
Agreed, completely. My boyfriend’s family is from Oklahoma so I’ve been forced to become a basketball fan and I’ve watched a lot of Thunder basketball over the years.
Nelson
And you guys have Zion Williamson there [in New Orleans] now!
NOR
We do, he’s been to the bar near campus a few times, lots of spottings constantly here.
Nelson
Oh, nice!
NOR
Super! Okay, getting back into it–so your filmLeaves of Grasswas set in Oklahoma but filmed in Louisiana. How did that conception work? Do you feel like you had to make compromises in terms of your artistic vision because of that?
Nelson
I didn’t have to make a single compromise with that other than taping a few signs because Shreveport is just a stone’s throw away from Oklahoma. The town in Oklahoma which is called Little Bixby whichLeaves of Grasstakes place is that actual border region.
NOR
Why Louisiana instead of Oklahoma?
Nelson
Because of taxes, your program there.
NOR
Right. Okay, so a lot of roles you’ve taken on as an actor in the past have been either close or loose adaptations of other works, like Holes, O Brother Where Art Thou, even The Incredible Hulk. I assume that since you were a Classics major, you’d read the Odyssey many times before, but before taking on roles that are adaptations do you like to read the source materials?
Nelson
I do and I don’t at times. I had to learn over the years that applying research isn’t about being a good student and doing well on a test. It’s about ultimately indivilating the way you research and selecting from the research in ways that can be applied to the playing of a role without anyone knowing you did any research. An example is I played Anse in As I Lay Dyingand Faulkner describes in the novel constantly how slack-jawed Anse is. I treated that, instead of as an internalized and then ultimately forgotten choice, in terms of the characterization, as something I needed to show constantly and that really hurt the performance because I was just putting it on, almost like I was showing the audience how well I knew the book, how carefully I read it. When I saw the first cut of the movie which I Was lucky enough to do because it was a James Franco movie, he’s very collaborative, I was able to successfully beg him to pull that stuff back because it felt performed and unnatural. That’s an example of overapplying one’s research and so I still find myself learning how to do it. I have a role this year, Just Mercy, that really took a lot of research based on video references of this character named Ralph Meyers, and that’s one of the hardest jobs I’ve had in terms of credibly depicting an extremely eccentric and idiosyncratic character. I look at that performance and I’m generally really happy with it but I still feel like I have a great deal to learn, so I look forward to a few more decades of hopefully being able to refine the process of really doing research in the right way. I think this applies to any artistic or academic or scientific pursuit, because you can waste a lot of time distracting yourself with the need to demonstrate how researched you are when it’s really ultimately not about that, it’s about reaching conclusions, or in the case of artistic representation, reaching a credible, nuanced, and living depiction. Once you become more about your research than that, then it’s ultimately going to be less interesting.
NOR
So your play Socratesis obviously based on Socrates the philosopher. Would you consider that to be a kind of adaptation?
Nelson
Yeah, it’s pointedly biographical depiction that uses the life of Socrates to explore what we’re up to in democracy right now with its source material being the works of Plato and somewhat Xenophon. In a sense it’s an adaptation, but of a lot of different source materials, most of it from Plato.
NOR
Do you have a favorite project that you’ve worked on?
Nelson
I can’t name a favorite simply because I feel like it’s amounting to something that for me, to me is more important than a single project. That’s been both rewarding and instructive for me over a long career because I used to think there would be some single moment in my life that would change everything and convince me that I had largely succeeded, and even when I got O Brother Where Art Thouwhich did change the trajectory of my career in very beneficial ways, I didn’t really change how I went about my day, and how I pursued a creative life. The opportunities associated with O Brotherand that came out of O Brotherwere only deepened an approach that was already laid in and directed in a certain way. It just meant that I could keep doing it perhaps more lastingly, and in a way that’s reflected by a greater degree of choice on my part. The same is true with Buster Scruggsand now Watchmen, I just feel like it’s about accumulation and the joy and challenge of getting to continue in a creative life rather than rejoicing in one particular goal, moment, or incident, or process.
NOR
How do you think your experiences as an actor have informed your playwriting and directing?
Nelson
I write for actors, I start by thinking about actors. I relish in writing roles that I myself couldn’t play but that I could give to others. I trained in drama school on Shakespeare, that was really the lone star of the training at Julliard, and Shakespeare was an actor who was writing for actors. I really have come at the process of writing, at times to a fault, so that I can do projects that indulge what actors can do in really challenging roles inside of challenging situations.
NOR
Do you think that actors tend to be better interpreters of their role when they’re involved in the writing process?
Nelson
That really depends on the actor. I did Leaves of Glasswith Edward Norton and he said to me when he took the role, “Look, I know have this reputation of coming in and wanting to work with the writer on the script, but with your script I don’t want to do any of that. I think it’s perfect the way it is. I just want to play this role.” So he arrived in Shreveport a week early so we could rehearse and play around with some of the scenes together, and during our first rehearsal and the subsequence five rehearsals he never read a single word with me. He just kind of sat there in the room and probed the writing, just asked lots of questions, many of them rhetorical. Just pushing at certain lines and just probing, you know, “What can we make better here,” etcetera, etcetera, and ultimately very little of the script changed, although he did have some good ideas and I did make a few changes here and there, lighter ones. But I came to understand that Edward’s process wasn’t about threatening the writer, or exposing his incredible intelligence, or being argumentative, it was about feeling, even if nothing was changed, a kind of kinship bordering on ownership, an appropriation of the language through some sort of process with the writer. I think that was ultimately really, really good for the movie, for Edward, and for me. When Edward and I work together again, which I hope we will, I’m sure we’ll repeat the process. But with other actors, I would use myself as an example with the Coens, I don’t want to change anything of theirs and I don’t want to talk about the writing simply because it feels like if I’m going to venerate the director, then there has to be a degree in why I choose projects, because I’m very director oriented, then it’s probably a positive for me as an actor, where I can, to endow their process with a level of mystery and inscrutability and use that to deliver to myself the responsibility of coming up with the goods just as they’ve been written. Now if you ask Chris, Poche, who wrote and directed The True Don Quixote, to read what I just said he would say, “Well that wasn’t what we did,” but Chris and I when we met on the phone decided that the role of Don Quixote was going to end up being so particular to the actor who played it that so long as I jived with what Chris ultimately wanted in the language of his movie, that my participation in futsing with the dialogue a little bit and really going through it line by line together and testing out different approaches and styles of vocabulary, that that was going to be good for his process and his movie and my being comfortable inside of a role where, if I was uncomfortable it would ruin his movie. We kind of came to a process together that worked forThe True Don Quixote, where I participated in certain ways in how the guy said what he was going to say, even sometimes what he was going to say, but it was ultimately Chris’ movie, and every decision had to be Chris’. I was just giving everything I could of myself to Chris’ process, and in that case it involved working with him on his writing, but it was always his writing.
NOR
Circling back toLeaves of Grassagain, Edward Norton was playing two different roles, a pair of twins… what was that experience like as a director? What kind of challenges were presented by the same actor playing two roles?
Nelson
Edward made it easy because he’s simply so good, and he was also really dedicated to the process and interested in the process, so he was all in, even when the technical aspects of his frustrated the two of us. We also had a great technical advisor who had done it before on a Miguel Arteta movie, with Michael Cera, I forget the name of it but he had done it before with Micahel Cera playing two roles in the same scene. I just had really good people around me to help with the process. There were three different processes we used: we used just a simple old-time split screen, we used the even simpler poor man’s process of shooting over a double’s shoulder who looked like Edward, and then we used motion control which is repeated computerized camera moves so you can have one actor playing two characters in the same scene with the camera moving which is really tricky. We mapped out a lot of different strategies and used them depending on the scene and I should also mention our director of photography Roberto Schaefer who was also quite instrumental and helpful.
NOR
I didn’t realize it required so many different kinds of techniques, that’s really interesting to me.
Nelson
Yeah, it’s pretty easy if the camera is still, but once you move the camera in a scene with an actor playing two roles in the frame, it’s very, very tricky.
NOR
Who do you think your biggest inspirations are?
Nelson
It would be too long a list, it would include painters, novelists, poets, and then a lot of different film makers. Some of them like the Coen brothers and Steven Speilberg and Pais Malek (what) I’ve worked with, some filmmakers I’ve just watched like Hubrek and Hitchcock and John Ford and Bumwell and many others. There would be a long list of actors, everyone from those long dead like Peter Sellers and John Wayne and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, to guys working right now like Daniel Day Lewis and John C Reilly. I get my influences everywhere. I just read this incredible novel called The Volunteerby Salvatore Scibona, that’s suddenly an influence. Murakami, David Foster Wallace, Flannery O’Connor. I take the Tom Waits approach, which is just, I’ve got antenna in the air and I try to pick up any radio waves I can get. The more of them the better.
NOR
What is it like to see your work premiered at big film festivals like Tribecca and Toronto Film Festival?
Nelson
I love film festivals more and more and I appreciate them more and more and I appreciate the work that goes into them more and more because we seem to be less interested in cinema as an art film to be experienced in big rooms with great sound among strangers. Since film festivals continue to celebrate that, I value them more and more.
Britton Hansen is a recent graduate from Loyola University New Orleans. She is a writer and political organizer from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She plans to pursue an MFA as soon as the country is put back on track in 2020.
