Interview

EV: When their guy, George W. Bush, never even went to Vietnam. Do you cover that at all in W.?

JB: The fact that he didn't go? No. We don't deal with that. But we do deal with a lot of other milestones. We're following him from approximately the ages of 21 to 57, so from 1967 to after the U.S. goes to war with Iraq in 2003. A lot of what has happened springboarded from his relationship with his dad, and a lot of it is in reaction to what he was like when he was younger, before he made the decision-at 40 years old-to take whatever puzzle there was to his life and make the pieces fit together. I don't know how people are going to react to the film, -because I think what the movie really does is bring back the idea of "Why did we vote for this guy?" Because regardless of whether there was ballot manipulation or not, you still have 50 million people who voted for George W. Bush [in the 2000 election]. And why? Because he's fallible? Because he reminds you of us? So the movie really gets into that idea of "Don't forget that we are empowered to hire these people. That's what we do. We are hiring these people. They don't hire themselves." It's irresponsible to disregard this guy as some bumbling, blathering idiot who has no intelligence whatsoever, because I don't think we'd be in the predicament that we are in right now if that was the case. W. is really about a guy who was completely flailing who becomes the president of the United States. And that's a compelling story.

EV: The interesting thing is that it seems like George W. Bush would have been happy being the president of anything. He could have been president of Major League Baseball.

JB: That would have been great.

EV: Less people killed. It wouldn't have affected the world on a planetary level. Sure, there would have been little things. There would have been scandals and kind of numbskull things here and there . . .

JB: But on a very minute level.

EV: And he would have been happy and the family would have been happy and his dad would have been happy. The Republicans initially sort of saw him as a blank canvas, didn't they?

JB: Completely.

EV: It seems like they interviewed him when he was governor of Texas to see what kind of candidate he could be. Then they were like, "Oh, yeah-"

JB: "This is the guy." Because they thought he would be easy to control. Yet none of that was what happened. I mean, for the first months of his
administration, there wasn't much to do because 9/11 hadn't happened yet. George W. Bush brought a lot of minorities into his administration, which was a positive thing, and they had some issues that they wanted to press, but 9/11 really gave them direction. It gave them a purpose. I do think, from the other side, that W. was somewhat of an innocent in his thinking about what Ronald Reagan did during the Cold War and by bringing democracy to Eastern Europe. I think he believed that he could do the same thing by bringing democracy-or Midland, Texas, really-to the Middle East. I truly think he felt it was possible. "I want to do for the Middle East what Reagan did for the Soviet Union."

EV: That would be a hard thing to believe in. I'm not a college graduate, but I don't know how he could have truly believed that the flower of democracy was going to blossom in that part of the world-at least in part because the governments there are so tied to religion . . . This kind of talk really makes me want to have a smoke! Remember that Pixies song "I've Been Tired," where Frank Black sings, "Politics go so good with beer"?

JB: There's something very true about that.

EV: You said everything started for you with Grindhouse, but you've been making films for a long time. I remember Flirting With Disaster [1996]-of course, that was seven or eight years ago.

JB: No, 12. Did you see it?

EV: I saw it when it came out, and I've seen it again recently. The first time we met, I didn't realize that you had been in the film until you reminded me of the conversation you have in the back of the car about-

JB: Right. The blow job conversation. Humming.

EV: Then at the end of the movie, with your head in Patricia Arquette's-

JB: Armpit. Did I tell you that story?

EV: No.

JB: Okay, so Patricia and I, we had known each other sort of loosely before. Anyway, we were doing this scene the way the scene was written: We kissed and then Ben Stiller's character walks into the room and says, "What are you doing? How are you doing this?" But we saw it and it was boring. So I said, "Well, what if my character had a foot fetish? What if he was sucking on her big toe? He could be talking about her big toe and how beautiful big toes are and how beautiful feet are." But the director, David O. Russell, was like, "Uh . . . I don't know." So then Patricia said, "What about the armpit?" And David says, "Yeah, yeah, that's great." But I was like, "I don't know, man," because I'm thinking, I've got to lick the armpit. And Patricia goes, "Yeah, you could just lick my armpit," and she lifted her arm and, I guess because that's how she saw the character, she had grown out all her underarm hair. Then I had, like, a severe reaction. I said, "No! I don't like that idea. I really like the foot idea. Or maybe we could go with the small of her back. But the underarm thing, I don't think it's proper. It seems a little disgusting to me." Anyway, they were already on it, that it was working. So we shot it and I had to lick her armpit with the hair.

EV: This is really great for me, man. This is going to keep me from eating for days.

JB: It's the disgusting truth of my profession. Anyway, we saw the footage, and it was so disgusting that David said, "We can't have the hair. Patricia has to shave the hair." So what you see in the film is the third attempt at making that scene playable.

EV: Well, the scene worked like it was written. [Brolin laughs] Anyhow, I think it's great that films like W. and Milk can be made.

JB: We'll see how they're received. So let me ask you this: What did you think when you heard that I was going to do this role as George W. Bush?

EV: I thought about how weird it was that Diane was going to have to make out with a Republican.