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Brolin, Bardem living ‘Country’ life at Cannes
Josh Brolin is a chatting, charming dude, able to spin tales and laugh at himself.
In Cannes for the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men,” he launched into stories about Texas on Sunday while sitting in the restaurant/bar on the beach across from the Noga Hilton.
Just a few samples:
• “My mother was a very loud Texas woman. (His late mother, Jane, was from Corpus Christi.) She had this big pesonality and liked to spend a lot of time with truck drivers and that kind of stuff. We lived in central California, and one time she told me, ‘You’ll never be a man until you’ve eaten a Whataburger.’ So we got in the car, drove all the way to Texas, maybe stopping once, and when we got there, she ordered me this huge hamburger. I didn’t realize it at the time, but now that’s she’s gone, I can say she was very much loved.” (His mother died in a car crash in 1995. She married Josh’s father James after meeting him while working as an assistant casting director in California.)
• “It was a great experience working in Texas. We were in Marfa for a while, and I love that place. It’s so vast and lonely. There are these ranches that are more than 100,000 acres. I remember one time I had to take some dancing lessons for a role, and I took them with Patrick Swayze’s mom, who’s a Texan. She asked me where I was from, and I told her I grew up on a 100-acre ranch in California. She just looked at me and said with disdain, ‘That’s not a ranch! That’s a little farm!” Of course, she grew up on a ranch of 120,000 acres.”
• “When I found out that I got the part in ‘No Country for Old Men,’ I called up Cormac McCarthy. Got his number through my agent. I love his work, his way of writing, the way he deals with all these complicated characters who go through so much and just want to get on to the next day. He can be really expansive about hardships. So I wanted to talk to him. But I got an answering machine, so I left a message. I waited a while, and he never called back. So I called him again and left a [nasty] message. The next day, he called back. I think he liked the message, the fact that I’d do that. We eventually met, and he turned out to be a very happy family man. I think that’s why he’s able to do what he does, writing about such dark things. I guess it’s the old adage that comedians are the most miserable people in the world.”
• Brolin says McCarthy has seen the movie adaptation of his book, and loves it. But he had one problem with it. There’s a scene where Brolin’s character Moss is fleeing Mexican drug-runners and he jumps into a river and tries to swim away. But the drug-runners unleash this big, black pit bull that jumps in and starts swimming quickly toward him with teeth bared. “McCarthy thought the dog was more evil than Chigurh,” Brolin says, referring to the pathological killer who stalks people throughout the movie. In “No Country for Old Men,” Brolin plays Moss, a decent West Texas man who stumbles upon $2.5 million and decides to keep it, unwittingly setting off a series of killings.
During lunch Sunday, he frequently joked around with co-star Javier Bardem, who plays the dreaded Chigurh, and kept swiping food off Bardem’s plate.
Bardem was in a upbeat mood, too, talking about his experiences on the set. In a trademark Coen brothers touch, Bardem sports one of the wildest hairstyles ever on screen. It’s almost like a pompadour, swept up and menacingly stiff. “When I first went into makeup, the hairstylists were experimenting and when they got through they were laughing,” Bardem says. “When I looked in the mirror, I could see why. And I thought, ‘God, I’m going to have to look like this for three months.’ But the hairstyle works. It makes Chigurh all the more frigtening. I guess it’s the idea of the order of things, and the hair is very much in order. It’s part of the character, who has to have everything in place before he reacts. The way Chigurh looked isn’t described in the book, except for the piercing eyes, so that left his looks open to interpretation.”
Bardem says he saw his role as a sort of violent representation of fate. “I am the violence in the movie, and you don’t understand me, and that makes me all the more frightening. I symbolize the idea of never-ending violence.”
But Bardem says he isn’t attracted to violent roles usually. “I wouldn’t have done this movie if the Coen brothers hadn’t been directing. I wouldn’t have wanted to appear in a movie that’s all about the violence, and I knew the Coens would make it something much more.”
At one point in his search for Moss, Chigurh goes to a trailer court where Moss lives and finds an empty residence. So he goes to the offices of the trailer park and asks the female manager (Kathy Lamkin) where Moss might be.
The manager, of course, doesn’t know that she’s talking to a stone-cold killer, although he looks menacing enough. Still, his looks don’t faze her, and you can tell she’s a tough woman. (FYI, she looks like Bertha Bumiller of Greater Tuna, but much meaner.)
At any rate, the manager tells Chigurh that Moss is probably at work. So Chigurh asks where he works. “I can’t give out that kind of information,” the manager says. So Chigurh repeats his question. And the manager just looks up, with a glare in her eyes, and says in a thick Texas accent. “Can you not hear me! I said I can’t give out that kind of information.”
Bardem says it was the funniest scene in the movie to shoot. “We had to shoot it several times because I kept breaking into laughter. Here was this woman in a trailer court who was every bit a match for Chigurh, and she was hilarious.”
Bardem says it was a signature Coen brothers moment. “That’s the kind of stuff that makes you love their movies.”
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