EH: What was fun about making this movie, what’s interesting about it, is it’s not a film that’s made to please an audience. It’s not a film that’s made to make a million bucks. It’s a film that is some kind of personal expression of Pawel’s, so it feels a little bit like going and helping somebody make a painting or something. It certainly changed because it was me. It certainly would have been a different movie with a different actor, because he so clearly wants to use his actors. That’s how he works. He feeds off you, and he encouraged me to write dialogue and come up with backstory and all this—and some of it he would use, and some of it he wouldn’t. [Laughs.] I knew the movie would be intensely stylized and surreal, but I tried to play it all as naturalistically as possible. I can’t stand it when people are in a kind of surreal movie, acting surreally. I find that cake-on-cake. And I wanted to get inside this guy, and understand the world from his point of view, and try not to care too much about what the audience knew and didn’t know, because I didn’t think it was valuable to me.
AVC: In this case, the audience’s experience is aligned with your character’s, in the sense that they’re both on unstable ground, and the world of the film is being revealed from your character’s fairly skewed perspective.
EH: Yeah. What I think is fun about the movie is that it takes you a little while before you realize how unreliable your narrator is. I enjoy that aspect.
AVC: When you’re in a movie like this and you’re in every scene, does that make you more invested in other aspects of the production than you would be otherwise?
EH: I think so, yeah. When you’re the lead of a movie, you become intimately involved in it in a way that you just don’t as a supporting actor in a piece. You know you’ve become a part of the camera work in a strange way, because you’re so intimately involved in the telling of the story. I really enjoy that, actually.
AVC: Is there a burden to having that kind of responsibility?
EH: It’s no burden at all. When you’re working with people you respect, it’s a privilege. Not to be corny, but it really is. Of course, when you’re in the opposite situation, it sucks. [Laughs.] It’s tough if—a lot of actors spend the bulk of their career selling crap. You know? Ninety percent of the stuff you see on television is just actors shucking and jiving, trying to make you not notice how bad the writing is. But in my situation, I’m working with a guy who has a lot to teach me. Working with [Pawlikowski] I felt like… I never met Milan Kundera or anybody like that, but I felt like that’s who Pawel reminds me of. He’s a really substantive person, and it was fun to be on his set. In the U.S., you spend so much time with people who want to be a big shot, and want to make big, important movies with a capital ‘I,’ and it was fun to work with somebody who was really interested in cinema as an artistic medium. It’s a medium that’s been almost entirely usurped by big business. I’m not the first person to say that.
AVC: This movie is so much about the life of the mind, and it has a very literary quality. Does that become a challenge to bring that across to the audience, material that is so internal?
EH: It is. That’s the hugest challenge. God knows. I’m sure for a lot of people, it’s not successful. It’s very difficult to do that. Like I said, if you’re trying to make a movie about depression, that’s a hard thing to do. Because it’s all about perspective and point of view, and there’s inherently something totally selfish about any kind of depression. A myopia. I have to get across my character’s inability to see outside himself, basically. And that’s very hard. We can’t fully empathize with a character like that, or understand where he’s coming from. You can relate to this guy who wants to love his daughter and be a better father, but in other ways, he’s a very difficult character to relate to.
AVC: One of the interesting things about the movie is that it explores a seamier side of Paris than people are used to seeing onscreen, one that feels almost Eastern European.
EH: Yeah. I’m repeating myself, so you’ll have to forgive me, but one of Pawel’s points was that when you’re in the throes of a very serious depression, it doesn’t matter where you are. You could be in the City Of Lights, the most beautiful city in the world, and completely miss it. You could be at the beach and just miss the ocean. I think that’s the kind of thing Tom is going through. He’s there in Paris, and all he can see is the dust on the wall, or whatever it is. He’s missing the larger picture. Does that make sense? There are a couple of moments where you notice that, like, the Eiffel Tower is actually in the shot, but it’s just cropped a little strangely, so you can’t even tell it’s really there. And that’s Pawel for you. He’s just trying to make you look at it from a different angle.
AVC: It’s a fascinating contrast with Before Sunset, which does open itself up to things that tourists do.
EH: Yeah. Exactly. You ride around in the Seine, and it’s like the equivalent of going up on top of the Empire State Building or something.
AVC: Do you feel like you’ve changed as an actor over the years? Do age and experience account for it, or has your process changed over time?
EH: I don’t know if it’s me or time or some version of both. I’ve definitely in the last 10 years turned into the character actor I always wanted to be. When I was younger, all anybody wanted me to do was, you know, look as pretty as possible and be as guileless as possible. [Laughs.] And it’s been really fun getting older and getting to play more complicated people. And it’s always what I dreamt of doing, so it doesn’t feel like I’ve changed that much, but my opportunities have changed.
AVC: Do you feel like you’re exerting more control now over what you do than in the past? Do you feel like you have more of a handle on your career?
EH: I don’t know. “Career” is a funny word, because the business is so strange, and changes so fast. What I have a handle on is what I want from acting. And one of the funny things about being young is, I didn’t really know what I wanted from acting. I knew I loved it, but my relationship to it has changed over the years. I don’t even know how to phrase it without sounding ridiculous. It’s just a very personal thing to me. Movies like Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead or Brooklyn’s Finest or this film are movies I would have dreamt that I would have gotten to do when I was in my early 20s. But I couldn’t get those opportunities to play those kind of complex people. So I don’t know if I’ve just become more complex, or whether time has done that. I’ve dedicated a large part of the last 10 years of my life to theater, and I have to admit, it’s not only brought me a lot of joy, it’s also taught me a lot about acting. And I’ve gotten to work with a lot of people who are really good at it.
AVC: Many actors profess a love for the theater, but claim to be scared off by the time commitment. That’s obviously not the case for you. Why is that, and what keeps you coming back?
EH: You know, when they say “time commitment,” what they really mean is “opportunities to make money.” If you spend nine months of the year doing a play, that’s leaving you a very short amount of your fiscal year to make your income. Because no matter how much a play pays you, it’s not competitive with the salary of film or television. I just try to use whatever success I’ve been fortunate enough to have to give me more freedom. And if I’ve got an opportunity to do a nine-hour Tom Stoppard play at Lincoln Center [The Coast Of Utopia], I want to do it. It’s always strange to me when these incredibly wealthy people talk about how they have to do that terrible movie because they need the money. I’m always like, “Well, what are you doing with the money?” [Laughs.]
I think because I started so young, I’ve made longevity my No. 1 priority. And when you get a lot of success out of the gate, like with Dead Poets Society and Reality Bites and stuff like that, it can be dangerous. I really love this profession, and I really wanted to be doing it 20 and 40 and 50 years later. And I have always been leery of the “first one now will later be last” philosophy—you don’t want to run too far ahead, because you get lost in the woods. The theater is much harder. It’s much more humbling. It forces you to learn a lot more. In general, you work with exponentially better writing. You just do. And so that pushes you. When you come to work with writing that isn’t as good, you have a set of tools to help make it better.
[Sighs.] I always get seduced into talking about this stuff because I love it, but the more you talk about it, the more pretentious you sound. It’s just my job, you know? It’s my job, and I try to do it as well as I can. And I try to believe in it in the same way I did when I was younger, and not let it turn into a profession.
AVC: With stage acting, there’s the appeal of having the continuity of the performance, of not having it broken up into days and nights.
EH: Exactly. It’s the difference between being a studio musician and a live performer. When you get to play your own song and you’re in charge of the rhythm and the timing and the pace and the energy, there’s just a lot more artistry involved. When you just kind of play your track and let somebody else lay it down, and they decide how you fit in the whole thing, and what sections to cut out and which sections to put in, there’s just less artistry involved. That’s all. It’s a funny thing. If you go watch a bunch of movies, it’s very rare that you see someone be terrible. But if you go see five or six plays, invariably, you’ll see like 20 terrible performances. It’s really hard to be good onstage. And it’s not that hard to be okay at a movie. It’s hard to be great in a movie, to be Jack Nicholson, Denzel Washington, or Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s hard to be great in a film. Really hard. But it’s also hard to be terrible. It’s easy to be terrible onstage.
AVC: You can’t cut around that.
EH: You can’t. People can see you twitching your foot, they can see how awkwardly you stand, and how lousy your voice is, how you didn’t mean it. When you have the world’s best cinematographers lighting you and framing out the bad parts and then cutting to the best scene, and they play music underneath it, it’s pretty hard to suck shit.
AVC: You’ve been in more than 40 films. Is there one experience that you consider your favorite?
EH: [Pauses.] For me, my experience on Dead Poets Society… I’m not saying the movie is great, or this, that, or the other thing. I have no idea. But as an experience, it remains a high-water mark, just because I made a lot of friends. For a lot of people, your first experience can be your worst or your best. And that movie taught me what to expect from movies—that directors should be prepared, and have an idea of what to say, and what kind of film they want to make. And actors should do the same. It was a great, great first experience, and it’s helped me throughout my life.
