Interview

EV: Well, another idea Howard has turned me on to is that the guys with the power on top never just give it away. They have to be challenged. Which leads us to your investigating this guy, George W. Bush, in order to play him in W.

JB: Do you know how weird it was for me to have done so much research on George W. Bush? There's this churning that goes on when you actually get into somebody's life. W. is not necessarily a political film, but it was sort of a contrasting reality for me to get into George W. Bush as a character because of how I felt about his administration before I started making the film. I'll never forget it, man. Diane and I were up north-we were just kind of vacationing before I started on the film-and I was talking to a lot of people and reading a bunch of books. So one day I was outside with these redwoods around me, and I had just finished this book called The Faith of George W. Bush, and I walked in and looked Diane in the eye, and she goes, "What's the matter?" And I said, "I actually like this guy right now. I don't know why, and I don't know how." What was so fascinating is that George W. Bush is kind of an inspiration for anybody who is off on any sort of drunken, lost tangent. This guy literally just said one day, "This is no good. My life is going nowhere-I'm going to quit drinking." And so he starts to deepen his relationship with Jesus and becomes almost a different person who eventually goes on to become the president of the United States. You can't help but be inspired by somebody with that kind of conviction and steel will. But those demons he was dealing with exist no matter what, and they'll eventually find their way out. They will resurface-it's just a question of how.

EV: Yeah, that's why I'm detoxing this week. It's just to set myself up for next month.

JB: [laughs] Why are you detoxing?

EV: Well it was a long couple of years, and being on the road a lot . . . I'm ready to just clean up my act. I don't know how it's all going to come out-this is, like, four days in. In fact, I don't want to talk about it. But it does feel weird. I'm feeling different.

JB: Are you feeling high yet? I've done what you're doing a few times. After the initial period of feeling like you have the flu come these five or six days
of speediness. Obviously, that hasn't hit you yet.

EV: No. I'm more kind of walking around in a daze, wondering if this is all really happening.

JB: That's perfect for this conversation.

EV: But now, in addition to George W. Bush, you play another sort of intense political figure, Dan White, in Milk. Did you become as forgiving of Dan White as you're saying you did of George W.?

JB: No, and Dan White is ostensibly the more forgivable character. I don't want to insult his family or his kid, whom I met and who was very pleasant. I don't want to insult anybody, but the truth of the matter is that one of the big differences between George W. Bush and Dan White is that George
W. Bush has this conviction in his foresight. At least Bush feels like-and I've heard him say it-"You can't judge me now, because look at Abraham Lincoln. When he was in the middle of that war and 600,000 people died, he was vilified for the Gettysburg Address because they felt it was too short and almost insulting, and now you look back and it's considered one of the great speeches of all time and he's considered one of the great presidents of all time." All that kind of shit. But the thing with Dan White was that he didn't have any foresight at all. They had just created multiple city supervisor [positions]. In San Francisco, it used to be that just one city supervisor dealt with the whole city, and then I think it was broken up into nine different districts, or something like that. Dan White was the Great White Hope because everything was changing. There was the gay and lesbian movement and all that stuff happening. But it just wasn't his time. So somebody who was more politically savvy would have realized: Okay, this is happening now-this is Harvey Milk's time, and then down the road I'll have my time. But he didn't see that. He just kind of wallowed in the fact that he wasn't being noticed, that he wasn't being praised-and this was a guy who was used to being praised in his small district. I think he just got more and more frustrated, and it ended up the way it did. Who knows why? There's that whole Twinkie defense, which was a small part of his defense, but they just held on to it, and it's become a much bigger thing than the reality of what it was. The killings were obviously premeditated. He had the bullets in his vest. I think he was planning on killing four people and then ended up killing just Mayor Moscone and Harvey. Did you ever see Gus Van Sant's film Elephant [2003]? There's a shot of an elephant following the kid going into school, and it lasts forever. It follows him for, like, 10 minutes. When we were doing Milk we realized that when Dan White shot Mayor Moscone, it was on one side of City Hall, so he had to leave that office after he shot Moscone and walk, I don't know, it must have been at least a four-minute walk all the way to the other side of City Hall. It's fascinating to me what he must have been thinking during that walk. Was there a moment when he thought, What am I doing? Was he completely immersed in this kind of momentary psychosis? So I said to Gus, "Remember that shot in Elephant? What if we try to do something like that, just to see what this guy is thinking? Maybe he could go through this myriad of emotions: crying, laughing, smiling, immersed, completely numb, whatever. Let me just try a few things." Anyway, Gus kept some of it, and it works.

EV: So without putting you in a position of having to gush, it seems like the last bunch of films you've made have been directed by people who are among the best filmmakers of our generation: the Coen brothers, Gus Van Sant, Oliver Stone. And this is all within the last three years.

JB: Ridley Scott, too, on American Gangster. He's another amazing guy.

EV: Oh, yeah, yeah. You guys-you actors-move around. We stay in a band, for the most part, and we do our thing. So, to me, what you've been doing is kind of like playing with Jimi Hendrix and then playing with John Coltrane.

JB: I don't know what it's like for you being around people you've appreciated since you were a kid, but there was a point in my life . . . Look, I've never gotten bitter about where I was at in my career. I've always earned enough money to put my kids through school and eat and all that, so I was never one of those guys who said, "Why am I not in this other position? Why am I not that other guy? Why am I me?" When this stuff started to happen . . . I guess it mostly started when Robert Rodriguez cast me in Grindhouse, and then there was some kind of snowball effect from there. I know that, for me, working with people like Robert Rodriguez and Ridley Scott and the Coen brothers and Oliver Stone and Gus Van Sant was so much easier than working with a lot of the people I had worked with before, because with these guys, there's not a lot of ego involved. It's all about the work. It's all about how to make the story better. So at the end of the day, you feel a trust that you usually don't feel-or at least I haven't felt in the past with most people. I'd heard rumors about Oliver Stone before we went to work on W., and I don't get it. To me, he's one of the most sensitive directors. He is just fascinated by why people act in the ways that they do. His movies are an excuse to explore that idea, and he wants to work with people who are as passionate about exploring it as he is. So we got along brilliantly.

EV: So you mentioned earlier seeing Sean speak and how good he was. And now we have Barack Obama-

JB: Who is a great speaker.

EV: Well, if he can just get through the election process without having to cater to the bigger corporate powers and talk about things in a way that gets people to listen . . . It's a difficult thing to do; I certainly couldn't do it. But it seems like Barack is the guy.

JB: Do you trust him?

EV: Absolutely. I've done a bit of research in order to come to that conclusion, but I do. I still think that with any candidate, whoever gets elected, there are going to be certain issues or platforms that those who feel strongly can work with him on. You can't be perfect. You can't be the perfect father. You can't be the perfect singer. You can't be the perfect president. But I've stepped back a few times and had these crazy epiphanies that we are blessed by having him as a candidate at this time in our history. If we were ever to have a man of color become president-and it shouldn't be about that, and it doesn't need to be, because he's qualified on all levels-but if you do think about it, just in terms of that idea of unifying people, it's a huge positive.

JB: I think so too. I was just over in Europe. We are not a liked people over there.

EV: We tour a lot, so I'm aware of that. But maybe a lot of people back in the States aren't really aware of it on a daily basis. They don't realize the huge amount of goodwill that we need to build back up.

JB: Did you watch the RNC [Republican National Convention]? Did you see Sarah Palin's speech?

EV: I did. Yeah.

JB: What did you think?

EV: I thought she was . . . I didn't respond to the kind of sarcastic tone. It felt like some of the speech was written as though it were a Saturday Night Live newscast. Maybe that's because she looks very similar . . . She's got her Tina Fey thing going.

JB: That's what my wife kept saying: Tina Fey.
It just seems to me that from the Republican perspective, there's so much focus on how bad the other side is, as opposed to their running on their own trajectory within the issues.

EV: I would think we have a trajectory of failure on the Republicans' part-a failed strategic direction-except that I think it's been working for them. When you think about how they managed to make John Kerry look bad during the last election for actually serving in Vietnam, and testifying in Congress after he'd gotten medals, and said that he didn't believe in them or that he didn't believe in the war and that it should stop . . . That they could turn that-

JB: Into a negative.