Matching comedy with tragedy, Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass is fastened to a palpable and humbling story about revaluating your life in messy and confused times. References to literature and philosophy pervade the story—its dialogue as well as its structure—beginning with a prologue in the very first scene as Classics professor Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton) addresses his Ivy League seminar: “...These people were alive, they thought these things, breathe them into life.” This last idea about renewal and about deep, self-reflective thought is one that anchors the entire narrative, and that is echoed in Nelson’s very own experience while screenwriting. (PHOTO: NELSON AND NORTON ON THE SET OF LEAVES OF GRASS)
With little established, the story jumps directly into action. Bill’s restrained academic life unstitches as his twin brother, Brady (Edward Norton), tricks him into returning home to the backwaters of Oklahoma. Total bedlam ensues: state of the art hydroponics, life threatening debt, unsought family reunions, mistaken identity, and murder. The life to which Bill had hoped never to return, along with the relationship with his freewheeling mother [Susan Sarandon] he hoped never to resolve, strike him like a direct punch to the gut—a welcome he quite literally receives moments after landing. I spoke to Nelson and Norton about making the film:
DURGA CHEW-BOSE: This movie leaps from complete lawlessness to quieter moments and then to abrupt violence. How did you create this shift without it appearing artificial?
TIM BLAKE NELSON: The movie is in one sense about a guy who gets sideswiped. And I think that happens; it’s a truth of life. And so with a movie like this that’s going to set such wide parameters—the pot and the jokes about threesomes on one side, and then references to Heidegger and epistemology, analytic philosophy, and the OED—that swing between these two extravagant performances by one of our greatest actors, how can you not take chance? Again, it’s about getting sideswiped in life. So it’s just a chance–we weren’t not going to take it. I love movies that have tonal ambition and we set out to do it. I think the movie almost can’t do without that moment.
EDWARD NORTON: Also, I think the movie starts with Tim’s voice kind of guiding you into the fact classical literature has these ideas that are still worthwhile. All those plays, all those classical dramas have extreme violence. They cut peoples hearts out and eat them and they murder children, and mothers carry the bodies of their decapitated children. Nowadays, people clean up things in their minds. They forget how violent Shakespeare is, and how those things were intended to shock you. Tim’s written a film about the inevitability of chaos being in the world and you should get jarred by it. The intention is to jar you.
CHEW-BOSE: Yeah, I often felt like I was at the theater, watching a play. It was all very immediate. And much of that had to do with [Edward's] dual performance. It’s entirely believable and your performance does feel like two separate people. Many times a day you would switch back and forth between characters, right?
NORTON: If [Bill and Brady] were ever together in a scene, we had to do it right away. The nature of one of the camera issues meant that you couldn’t walk away from the camera, you know certain things were set on the camera and had to be done a certain way. You couldn’t really wait until the next day.
NELSON: Yeah you know it was always taped off like a...a...
NORTON: Like a crime scene. Once one half was done, nothing could be touched and then you had to do the other half right away. Actually it was better that way because, it was much easier to make decisions, to sort of put the whole scene, both sides, through your head and hold on to it while the rhythm was in you and just do it all at once.
CHEW-BOSE: Was it like playing chess against yourself?
NORTON: It was, but it was more like playing chess when you’ve agreed with the moves you’re going to make. I think it was a lot like what people do every day. I don’t think holding two sides of dialogue in your head is that unusual, I just think that most people don’t say it out loud. All I had to do was lock in a rhythm for the two of them. It was a lot of fun.
CHEW-BOSE: It did look like you were having a lot of fun. It’s a lot of people’s dream to be given the space to be multiple sides of themselves, because we so often only get to be one.
NORTON: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.
CHEW-BOSE: This script was largely biographical and was a huge undertaking. How long has this project been living inside of you?
NELSON: At the risk of pretension...subconsciously yes. But actually, no. Meaning that writing this was the quickest experience I’ve had from first word to finishing the first draft of anything I’ve ever written. And between the first draft and the shooting script, there were few changes. So it was strangely...
NORTON: Until I showed up...
NELSON: Ha Ha! Not true. That said, you know, Edward obviously elevates the material...
NORTON: But you got to say that certainly this is something that’s been incubating in you for a long time, because you know, he’s talked about a professor who was for him what Bill is to those kids in the beginning. You’ve certainly had it in you for a long time the idea of...that these ideas about duality and balance are really living. These classical ideas are really alive; that’s something you’ve had a deep conviction of for a really long time.
NELSON: Yeah. You know my mother once said when I was reading Huck Finn for the first time, my mother said, “I’m so jealous of you because you’re going to get to read Huck Finn and you’ve never read it before.” The real bummer here on this movie is that I kind of used up so much material and so much subject matter, and so many jokes that are dear to me and kind of lifelong. You know, I can’t do this again, because we’ve done that now. It was so much fun to have a Pug Rothbaum character, after having grown up around all these hick Zionists in the Tulsa Jewish community. You know, I can’t do that again. And so I’ll miss that.
NORTON: Did you ever read Vaclav Havel? He wrote this essay called "Second Wind," where he thinks that you know, whenever it happens, at some point you channel out everything that you absorbed from a certain period in your life. In your creative work, at some point you’ve kind of emptied the tank of what you took away from your early experiences, and after that is the true moment crisis in way, where you have to figure out either you recycle that or you can figure out a way to the second phase.
NELSON: Exactly! Fantastic!
Leaves of Grass premieres in theaters April 2.
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