CraveOnline: So what’s coming up for Lorne after the pilot?
Billy Bob Thornton: Wow, that’s a weird thing about this character is it’s hard to talk about because I’m the mysterious stranger in town. Nobody quite knows what I’m up to, so to talk about that particular character gives away so much. I’ll put it this way. It’s throughout very dangerous and always changing and always mysterious and always darkly humorous.
Is that mysterious stranger an archetype you relish to play?
Oh, absolutely. I think actors like to play the sort of enigma. I’m all into it.
Your first film was so acclaimed but you’ve had some bad luck with the cutting of All the Pretty Horses and Daddy and Them didn’t really get released. Even Jayne Mansfield’s Car only came out very limited. Why do you think it’s been rough going as a film director?
Well, I grew up on southern novels. That’s really my experience as a writer and that’s where my imagination goes, where my eye is as as director. So I kind of make books on film really. It’s a visual medium sand I never had a burning desire to be a director anyway. I just wanted to do the ones that I write that I feel like I know the best. The movies I see made about the south are usually pretty surface.
Most of them aren’t the real thing and I’m not sure people are ready for the real thing. I think if I’d made Jayne Mansfield’s Car in 1995 or 1997 it would have probably done as well as Sling Blade or anything else. Daddy and Them didn’t come out because of an argument I was having with the studio at the time. It was just shelved, but those movies do have an audience and if they get out there properly. We were boned by a few bloggers too.
I wasn’t aware of those, but would you consider writing and directing or writing and producing for television?
I don’t know. Like I said, I never had a real burning desire to be a director.
On TV you could create something and hire other directors to keep it going.
Yeah. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to create a show maybe, but I’m still learning about the television business these days so I think I’ll probably want to get a little more educated about it before I do anything like that.
How do you like shooting on location in Calgary?
Oh, it’s great. The people up there are terrific. Other than the weather, it’s perfect and the weather doesn’t even always bother us. We’re getting used to it at this point.
Being a southern guy, what’s your take on this northern midwest atmosphere?
Well, I’ve had a lot of friends from Minnesota and Chicago and different places like that over the years, so I kind of know that culture. They make me laugh because they can talk about the most serious subjects with not much emotion. It’s a very funny thing to me and I just think they’re hysterical, and also usually really great people to hang out with. We made the movie A Simple Plan in 1997 in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and we just loved the locals up there when we were making that movie.
Your costar in that, Bill Paxton, has become quite a director himself.
Yeah, Bill’s great.
Do you have any movies as an actor that are set to come out after “Fargo?”
Yes, I did a movie called Cut Bank up in Edmonton, Alberta. That stars Liam Hemsworth, myself and Bruce Dern, John Malkovich and Teresa Palmer, Oliver Platt. Small independent film. Then I did a movie called The Judge with Robert Downey and Robert Duvall and Vince D’Onofrio, Jeremy Strong and that’s a bigger studio movie, Warner Brothers movie. I’m not sure how they even got it made because it’s a character based movie, but probably Downey.
Then I just finished a movie called London Fields that was shot in London, based on a Martin Amis book and that’s with myself and Amber Heard and Jim Sturges and Theo James. It’s a crazy book and a crazy movie, and it’s one of those that it’s either going to be genius or people won’t quite know what hit ‘em. I’m not quite sure because it’s really, really interesting. A guy named Matt Cullen directed it, who’s a very creative guy. I look forward to it. I know I’m going to love it, but I’ve had a really good time with these last three movies.
What sort of characters do you get to play in each of them?
In London Fields I play a dying novelist who’s gone to London, who feels he’s not a very good writer and he writes a great novel before he dies. He runs into this enigmatic girl, Amber Heard, and sort of becomes obsessed with writing her story, and I run into these other characters in London and become fascinated with their world. It’s a very, very different kind of movie. I guarantee one thing, there won’t be anything else like it out there.
In Cut Bank I play the father of Teresa Palmer. It’s a Coen Brothers-like movie. It’s more along the lines of Blood Simple, that kind of thing, where there’s a crime involved and it’s got dark humor in it. It takes place in Cut Bank, Montana, kind of the same neck of the woods as “Fargo” in a way. In The Judge I play a prosecuting attorney against Downey’s defense attorney. It’s a pretty wide array of characters there.
When you get a role, what sort of work do you do to prep when it’s a movie? And was that very different when it was 10 episodes of a TV show?
Well, the main difference is in a movie you have less time to develop it. I guess it would be the difference between writing a screenplay and writing a song. If you’re writing story songs, you’ve got three or four minutes to get that across. In this series, you have time to let it breathe and more time to develop it so maybe there’s not as much a sense of urgency every day because you know that you have next week. It helps you not push, but really, like I said, this is being done very much like the movies I’ve done. It’s just over a longer period of time.
Have you played music for the crew of “Fargo” yet?
No, no, the other guys in the band all have other jobs when I’m working on movies so they have to go out and make a living. So we’re not all together right now. We’ve been in the studio recording some, but in terms of going out on the road again, probably not until the fall, October.
So you’d need the whole band. It’s not something you could just play for the crew by yourself?
I could sit there around the campfire and we could do that but I’d prefer a rock n’ roll show to me sitting on a stool.
