In your career, you have played any number of real-life people, including Lyndon Johnson ("R.F.K"), George H.W. Bush ("W."), Prince Philip ("The Queen") and noted pornography expert Charles Keating ("The People vs. Larry Flynt"), and "Still Mine" is offers you another role along those lines. As an actor, what do you feel your responsibilities are in regards to playing a real person, especially in the case of a role like this one where the person in question is not a public figure in the sense that someone like George Bush or Prince Philip is?
I have never really felt any sort of particular responsibility. It is different for different characters. For example, I could not be Craig because I couldn't build anything like he built—my father and I built a shed once and when we finished, there wasn't a right angle in the whole thing—and being dyslexic, I don't measure very well. I don't tend to mimic or ape the characters that I play. I know that when Susan Sarandon did "Dead Man Walking," she must have had exchanges and conversations with Sister Prejean because it is very important to know how Prejean responded to things. With this story, I basically know the story—I am a father with grown children, I have built something even though it was wretched and I have a relationship in which I understand tangentially what it is like to lose one's temper and to feel loss and to resist authority.
When I did "W.," which was a film by Oliver Stone about Shrub, I would go home and search on the Internet for anything that I could find on the Bush family. I would go in and tell Oliver "Do you know what that family has done?" and would reel things off. He said "Jamie, if you have this much judgement about this character, you are never going to be able to play him" I've heard that before and said nah, I will be able to play him but actually, as I developed the character, I went more towards caricature because I had a negative. My opinion of the elder Bush is that because his father was an alcoholic who beat him and the family lied about his father because he was a powerful man in Washington, he learned to lie about the most important things early on and to push his feelings down to the point where his voice kind of catches in his throat. When he breaks, he is completely out of control as when he broke at the Florida legislature—even when Jeb won, he couldn't talk. Oliver, knowing that was not who the man was or the story that he wanted to tell, kept pushing me to be louder and to get angry. I said "I don't have to be loud—this is my house and my son is drunk. I just have to tell him that this isn't going to work." He pushed me into a relationship with my son that I very well understood and I was then pretty much playing me.
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