FILM INTERVIEW: ROBERT DUVALL & SCOTT COOPER

Producing Star & Director of 'Crazy Heart' Discuss Memories, Music & Mentorship

By: Izumi Hasegawa

January 4, 2010

Izumi Hasegawa: Robert, T-Bone Burnett just got done calling you the patron-saint of this movie. Will you elaborate how you got involved in this movie? And Scott, would you agree with that comment?

Robert Duvall: I don’t know about that…

Scott Cooper: I would say he’s the godfather of this film.

RD: No, he’s just saying that. He’s a good politician. It’s my company – Butcher’s Run Films is Robbie Carliner, Judy Cairo and Scott Cooper together as a unit, with ICM and Jeff Berg going after this, going after the money — they were like the driving force. I was kind of behind it, okay that’s fine, this and that. I reached out to Jeff [Bridges]. I knew Jeff, sent him a letter, “Would you look at this?” They contacted T-Bone, it took a year to get him. So it took awhile to get all this together. Getting the money is very difficult, but then I got the money, and then I helped wherever I could and played a part in it, and also helped a lot with the casting.

IH: Did you feel like it was going down memory lane with Tender Mercies, doing this film?

RD: This is much more pleasant to do. I won’t go into the difficulties in that — it was not that easy. Certainly people at the top and everything — this was much more harmonious and much more fun to do. But the part, the genre, Horton Foote, great writer, original script…this is from a book that he made a very good adaptation of. Two different guys, two different perceptions, but similar demons. But my character in that had a support group in my wife, my son and a baptism. Here, Jeff’s character has nothing. He blows everything and the woman because of the son — he risks the kid’s life. She dumps him, which she should. A lot of women would not do that — they’d continue in that self-destructive (mode) by staying with a guy like this. There’s another scene that was cut out of the movie that he has with his son. His son, instead of making amends, throws him out, so his only friend is my character in the movie. So he didn’t have a support group under him like I had in Tender Mercies. Similar demons, but that was more like regular country music. This is more of a compilation of Kristofferson and this one and that one…

SC: Country blues.

IH: It makes it a more unique movie too, because we’re so used to saying, “Oh, I’ll take you back, it’s going to be okay.” It’s much more realistic and it’s more effective because…it’s like you said — you shouldn’t take him back.

RD: But a lot of women would take him back, and I admire this woman for not taking him back because she put her son first. A lot of women wouldn’t.

IH: Did you have a debate about that?

RD: No.

IH: Scott, I liked the way you have the Tommy Sweet character never forget where he came from – the mentoring aspect of that. Could you tell me how that developed? Was that the keystone to it — then the student becomes the teacher or the support…?

SC: One of them. What I wanted to do in the structure of the piece was for the audience to think this guy, Tommy Sweet, is gonna be really arrogant. He’s gonna be a guy who, when we finally meet him, we aren’t going to like him, when in fact it’s just the opposite. And really it’s through Bad Blake’s perception that this is happening, and Colin [Farrell] is such a wonderful actor that he was able to play that type of gratitude without pushing it, in the scenes between him and Jeff. It really is about mentoring, and I looked to Mr. Duvall as a complete filmmaker…

IH: I’m sure you had a long list of people who you’ve mentored as a performer. Who mentored you as a producer?

RD: I don’t know. You just kind of find your own way, really.  And going back to Colin, that was the one part that was the most difficult to cast. You couldn’t find anybody, and you couldn’t start until you found someone.

SC: Yeah, because not a lot of actors can sing. Some can very well. Jeff obviously can. Bobby sings beautifully, and Colin sings wonderfully. But sometimes you don’t want too big of a star. Maybe you don’t want someone who’s going to throw off the balance and not be believable in that role, but because country music comes from a Scots-Irish heritage, and one of our biggest contemporary country stars in the world today is Keith Urban, who’s Australian. So it seemed a natural progression to have someone like Colin, who looks like a movie star but he’s really a character actor, which is always the best combination.