A CHAT WITH JOHN C. REILLY by Shane Buettner

About the Interview : John C. Reilly is one of those actors whose face you immediately recognize, even if you don't know him by name. When you see the list of directors he's worked with, it's no surprise that his face is a familiar one: Brian De Palma, Terrence Malick, Taylor Hackford, Curtis Hanson, and Neil Jordan among others. His impressive resume includes films across all genres, and he seems to effortlessly divide his time between big-budget studio projects like For Love Of the Game, The River Wild and Never Been Kissed and smaller-scale independent films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and Nightwatch, to name but two.

But perhaps his greatest notoriety has come from his association with wunderkind writer and director P.T. Anderson in such films as Hard Eight and Boogie Nights. In fact, we had originally intended this interview to appear coincident with Hard Eight's appearance on DVD in early October, but perhaps it's fitting that this interview is appearing now upon the release of Magnolia, his latest collaboration with P.T. Anderson. John was kind enough to talk to us after a hard day on the set of Wolfgang Petersen's The Perfect Storm, and action thriller set for release in Summer of 2000. So here in it's entirety is our chat with John C. Reilly...

	Actor John C. Reilly. Notice any resemblance to Han Solo?

DVDFILE: So I understand you're on the set of Wolfgang Petersen's The Perfect Storm?

John C. Reilly: Not right now, but yes, I'm working out there every day.

DF: How's that going?

JCF: It's going good. Sort of action work, no acting most days.

DF: Oh, really, do you do your own stunts and the like?

JCF: M-hum.

DF: As you can imagine, being sort of coincident with the DVD release of Hard Eight, I've got a series of questions prepared on that, and your work with P.T. Anderson on Hard Eight and Boogie Nights. One thing that I was amazed by is the natural fit of P.T. Anderson's dialog and characters with you as an actor. Yet, listening to the commentary tracks and reading some things, he's commented often about how you need to grab dialog and make it your own and improvise on that a little bit ...

JCF: I improvise a lot, in almost everything I do, but especially with Paul because he just lets me go crazy. There are whole sections of both of those movies that were improvised on the spot with Paul's encouragement and direction. In Hard Eight the whole section about how to get around the Hotel's pay-per-view system, we were just staying in that hotel and I was telling Paul how to do it, and he was like "Wait a minute, we have to do this tomorrow. Let's shoot this tomorrow." So I ended up doing it again for him on film. When I first met Paul at the Sundance Filmmakers Workshop, we improvised a lot then too, which he incorporated into the script.

DF: That's exactly what I was curious about. I don't know if you've seen the DVD release of Hard Eight, but...

JCF: I haven't, but I don't have a DVD player, so...

DF: Okay. Well, there are two of the scenes that you did at the Sundance Filmmakers Institute Film Lab...

JCF: Right, live improvising on there, and then he added what we came up with there.

DF: It's amazing to me to find out that you improvised so much of it. It always seems so in character and so natural with the character, which is really just astounding.

JCF: Yeah, well that's the only time I improvise things. I think that's what separates good improvisation from bad improvisation in movies. It has to be totally organic and it has to come out of your immersion in the character. If it's just some idea you had, or something you thought would be funny, it usually doesn't work, you know.

DF: In the case of Hard Eight, how much of that do you think came from the fact that you were able to work with Paul Thomas Anderson and Phillip Baker Hall so much at Sundance before you actually took the movie in front of the cameras?

JCF: That definitely had an effect. But also, Paul and Philip and I all became friends. Paul and I just developed a short hand with each other, you know? The best directors always trust the actors, and the best directors I've worked with always allow you to improvise or if something just happens that's good they let you keep it. The worst directors really try to control and say "Don't say that," or "Why'd you say that? That's not the line." You know, and stuff like that.

DF: How much of that actually gets ironed out in casting too?

JCF: Well, at this point, most people know about me that, that it's kind of the sort of stuff I do. It depends on the movie and the script and stuff. These days I don't read as much as I used to in meetings with directors. Sometimes I just meet them and they know my work already. Although I like reading for people, I think it's a good way to get to know each other and know how each other works and stuff. They usually get the feeling that I'm gonna fill stuff out from the get-go.

DF: P.T. Anderson mentioned a couple of times on the Boogie Nights commentary that he would often set up and let you guys roll for another ten minutes on a given scene in an improvisational manner and just see what was happening. Do you really feel like that really gets your creative juices flowing?

JCF: Oh, yeah. Some of my favorite parts of the movie, like almost all of the recording studio stuff was all improvised. All the stuff I'm saying to the guy at the door about the magic on those tapes and all, that's all just me going off. Paul's just saying, like, "Get the tapes from this guy, all right, action" you know?

DF: Right.

JCF: It's harder when you're first starting out in a movie and you're still just finding your way with a character, you don't want to just start going off, but it gets easier as you get more into it.

DF: Let me ask you this, too. Your career has been a pretty interesting mix of major Hollywood productions and smaller more independent-type projects, like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights and things like that. Which allows you more of that kind of freedom to improvise?

JCF: It actually takes a pretty daring person to luxuriate in improvisation on smaller movies. A lot of people don't realize that smaller movies are a lot more stringent in many ways than larger movies just in terms of casting and time and resources. A lot of times the little movies can't afford it. They're even more beholden to get some big movie star to sell to European Distributors than bigger movies are. You know, a big studio movie, if the director wants you and they already have some huge star in place, well it doesn't matter, they just pick you.

But in the smaller movies, sometimes in every single part the investors are like, "No it has to mean something in Germany, you know?" So, that's kind of a fallacy about independent movies, they're actually a little more hard core than some studio movies. It just depends on the director. You know, everyone has a different style. I'm doing this movie The Perfect Storm right now, and some of the dialog...well, I'm kind of talking out of school, but I've been doing the same thing that I usually do with dialogue, which is make it my own or fill it out if I feel that it's not clear what I'm saying.

I find some way to put it in the voice of the character so it comes out clearer and Wolfgang has been totally open to it. I had to talk to him a little bit before hand about it, but a lot of times he doesn't wear head phones when we're shooting, he's just watching the shot, you know? He's more concerned with the emotion that's coming across in the shot rather than the actual words, but he's been really cool about letting me do stuff. And I did this movie The Settlement but we only had about 25 days to shoot it and it just wasn't feasible to start going off, you know?

DF: Right. I realize that some of those are tight, but on the other hand I've read stories too about a smaller movie with a smaller crew sometimes having more of a luxury with time with respect to doing more takes and doing whatever you think you need to get a scene and things like that.

JCF: I don't know if I agree with that. It's up to the director, if the director is strong and can make it. But even with Boogie Nights there were whole days that weren't used that we improvised. Whenever we start improvising they always say, "This can't be another karate day." You see, there was a whole day where we were just in karate outfits and doing karate moves, and learning from Don Cheadle's character how to do karate. But that was just one day of many, many other brilliant improvisation days that are in the movie. But everyone always remembers, "Oh, God, we can't have another karate day."

DF: Right. Some of the deleted scenes from that movie are just so great in themselves.

JCF: Yeah, looking up through the glass table is one of them.

DF: Right, that was amazing. Talk about stream of consciousness, that was just great!

JCF: There's something about playing a coke addict too, you find yourself just jabbering away.

DF: But the piece that you did with Ricky Jay where you were doing the magic tricks was hysterical as well...

JCF: That was the only time when Ricky broke in the entire shooting of the movie.

DF: That was so funny.

JCF: As far as I know, one of the only times he's ever broke, period, and I pride myself on that. When people start to crack up and start to lose their shit to laugh, it makes me focus even more. I'm less likely to laugh the more someone else is laughing. There's something so absurd about that, me doing magic for Ricky Jay, you know?

DF: That was just great. Does that style sometimes also create issues with the other acting talent involved? I understand some actors are sort of put off when all of a sudden the other actor throws out a line that they don't recognize and all of a sudden they feel like they're a little lost.

JCF: Well, people who are good don't mind it if it's in the spirit of what you're doing. It's like I said, it goes back to being organic or not organic. If you're just coming up with some thing, I don't like that myself when people do that. A lot of times you're just shooting something and something different happens, someone drops something. It's all about who's paying attention to what's happening in that moment, and if it's grounded like that, I think most people don't mind.

DF: Do you think it's tougher for some of the actors who didn't come up through a theater background as you did?

JCF: Well, Mark (Wahlberg) took right to it. Mark was right in there and Mark never did theater. He was right in there. I couldn't believe it, because when Paul told me he wanted to cast Mark, I was like, "Oh, I don't know man" because I didn't know any of his work. I went to see Fear with Paul and we both liked it and liked Mark in it. But Mark, fell right in. He got the sense humor immediately and got the desperation of these characters and he really understood it. I suppose it helps you (having a theater background) but I know plenty of theater actors who can't handle improv.

Sometimes I like to say exactly what's written, too, if it's clear and concise and gets the job done. It's a big responsibility to improvise and sometimes I really feel put-upon. Not with Paul, because I'm just out to crack Paul up all the time. So I don't ever mind doing it with Paul. But sometimes you get into these big Hollywood movies and like, "This line doesn't work, why don't you say something that works," and I'm like, "Well, are you going to pay me as a screen writer now?" That's a big responsibility and it's a lot harder than just saying the line. Most of the time I don't mind doing it, it's just play, so I don't mind playing.

DF: Now, again, with Hard Eight, how much advantage do you think you got from the fact that you and Phillip Baker Hall and P.T. Anderson were all allowed to work on it for so long before you actually got in front of the camera to actually shoot it?

JCF: We were forced to work on it for so long, it wasn't exactly allowed. We were allowed to work on it because no one was giving us money to make the movie, so Paul was insisting on keeping us on the cast and not selling out to some big Hollywood name, but finally people started to get interested after the script became known.

DF: Right. But did living with and thinking about the character for so long help the final result?

JCF: Oh, yeah, by the time we got to shooting the movie, we were like, "It's game time." We had rehearsed it, but you know, that script needed rehearsal. That scene in the motel room was such a long scene and it was like a play, so you really had to rehearse it like a play. It was a tough scene to shoot. It took a long time to shoot it and it was very demanding emotionally.

DF: Is there an opposite end of that spectrum, where more rehearsal can be harmful?

JCF: Sometimes rehearsal can be bad for the film.

DF: That's what I was wondering, if sometimes you go to the opposite end of the spectrum and things just aren't as fresh.

JCF: A lot of times that's fine because then you can get back to something new and fresh, but if you don't have that much time to shoot it and you rehearse a lot, you can sometimes take the life out of it.

DF: You mentioned the word trust earlier. Phillip Baker Hall, on the commentary for Hard Eight, mentions trust several times relating to his work with P.T. Anderson. He talks about working with someone who is not only going to guide him to his best performance, but who also knows what's best for the movie and things like that. Do you have any comments on that, regarding how you feel about working with Paul Thomas Anderson among others?

JCF: I knew this right from the beginning, as soon as I got the script from Paul (for Hard Eight, then called Sydney) and read it. I was like, "Paul, do you have an agent?" And he said "No." He didn't have an agent and there was nothing going on other than that he'd made this one short film that he got some notice at Sundance for. But other than that, nothing. I couldn't believe this writing talent was sitting there and no one knew about it. I was like, "Man, wait until people get a hold of you, people are gonna go nuts."

So, I immediately had such trust in his writing. If you read the first draft of Sidney, you'd feel the same. It just comes right off the page, it's so easy to read. I don't know if you read very many scripts, but a lot of times lazy screenwriters, what they'll do in order to get your attention going in the direction they want, they'll do all this expository writing in between the dialog that's really unnecessary. It's necessary if you haven't written a good script, but it's really tiresome to read and Paul has none of that. In fact, it's almost all dialog when you're reading it. There's very little establishing where you are and no adjectives or adverbs describing how things are being said or anything. He just has such an economy of means. The way he pulls it off makes it look so effortless. That immediately instills trust.

And you know, I just believed. I've always believed in Paul's vision as a filmmaker. Have you spoken to Paul? We went through a titanic battle over the movie Sidney or Hard Eight. This guy Keith Samples at Rysher Entertainment single-handedly tried to destroy Paul before the movie even came out, before we even finished it. Total guerrilla tactics. Paul circumvented that guy and his whole company and paid for the movie, and got his vision to the screen, which is incredible. But I always believed in him and that's why I fought with him through all of that time with the company and everything. He wrote it, he knows what it's meant to be, and I think it's almost true in almost every movie I do.

The director is the one guiding the whole thing. Film is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. The director is the King and if everyone believes in him and commits to the direction he's heading in, then the best stuff comes out of it. I've always known that about Paul and he's proved it over and over again. Even Boogie Nights. Its so many pieces, and with such a big story that a lot of time, I was like, "Man, I don't even quite understand where this is going, but Paul must know." And sure enough he does.

DF: Boogie Nights, with all those intertwining characters, was such a huge leap from a smaller character driven piece like Hard Eight where there are really 3 main characters.

JCF: The leap from Hard Eight to Boogie Nights is tiny compared to the leap from Boogie Nights to Magnolia.

DF: Really?

JCF: Yeah, it's unbelievable. It's really like the ultimate fusion of Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, it's the inevitable third film.

DF: That sounds awesome.

JCF: Yeah, it's really true. It has some of the emotional depth that Hard Eight but the kind of epic structure of Boogie Nights and a huge cast of characters, and I really like that.

DF: That's interesting, I really liked Boogie Nights a lot, in fact, I loved that film. But there's something about Hard Eight that hit with me. I really found myself responding to that movie emotionally. Hard Eight just really, really grabbed me.

JCF: There's a difference. The characters in Boogie Nights are not...you can relate to them, but they're not that heroic. You don't really root for them too much. A lot of them are just misguided dreamers, so they're really just more funny. But you really want everything to work out for everybody in Hard Eight.

DF: Even though Boogie Nights takes place in the porn industry, it's still kind of a movie about movies, whereas Hard Eight was really about people. I felt when I looked at those people that those were the faces that I've seen when I've been in casinos, when I see somebody who looks like they just lost their last dollar in the world. That's the first thing I thought of in the opening shot of Hard Eight when you're sitting outside that coffee shop.

JCF: It was almost like destiny that Paul and I met. He already knew all of my movies, he had already been following my career and everything. And it was at a time when people within the industry, some casting directors and stuff like that knew who I was. To Joe Fan I wasn't really on the radar yet, and I was so impressed that he knew all my work already. Then as we started to work on the script and I got involved with Hard Eight, I was just blown away by how much I already related to the character.

I mean, my best friend is a much older guy, he's almost 60 years old. During the time of the Sundance Workshop my dad got really sick and died by the end of that summer, so I'd lost my father and just all these things were really similar to the character, and I was just like, "Paul has ESP or something." I think Paul knew Reno too and he met Phillip Baker Hall when Phillip was up there doing some TV movie and Paul was a PA up there in Reno. I'm not sure exactly where it came from, where the story, I think he just wanted to write a movie for Phillip.

DF: Yeah, he mentioned that that in the Hard Eight commentary. Phillip Baker Hall was one of his favorite actors, and when he was a PA in that TV movie he walked up and told Phillip that he was going to make him a star. Is that similar to what he said to you when he gave you the script for Sidney?

JCF: No, he never said "I'm going to make you a star." He stood by me when lots of people were saying, "Oh, if you could only cast one movie star in this."

DF: I loved seeing the work you did in the Sundance Filmmaker's Institute lab scenes on the Hard Eight DVD.

JCF: Which I didn't want on the DVD by the way.

DF: You didn't? How come?

JCF: It's just that I didn't feel that was the original intent of what we did. It was... I don't know. I just thought it was best left the way it was, which was purely a kind of experiment. I felt like it was a little bit like you being caught with your pants down. This was not what I intended to show to the public, this was something that Paul and I were working on to get this thing going. But you know, I trusted Paul.

DF: It comes off wonderfully.

JCF: It's a unique look behind the scenes of the making of a movie.

DF: Oh, yeah, definitely. And aside from that, it really brings home the strength of that movie and the strength of Boogie Nights. The phone conversation scene, I mean, there are no production values, there's nothing. There's just a shot of you in a phone booth and a shot of Phillip Baker Hall in a hotel room talking on the phone. It's so well written and so well acted that even without context, the scene really brings you to tears.

JCF: There's one trick I taught Paul that I learned from Sean Penn, which is always have someone on the other end of the phone, most preferably the other actor reading the dialog. So that's what we did when we shot...

DF: So you were actually speaking to someone on that phone?

JCF: Yeah, Phillip was on the phone with me. Paul has used that again and again. In Magnolia there was people on the phone all the time, and then there were people on the phone in Boogie Nights too. I can't remember offhand, but it's a great technique, because a lot of times in films you can tell that the actor's not talking to anybody. And then when we shot the movie we did the same thing. Phillip was in a van on a cell phone while I was in a phone booth, and then when we shot his scene I was in another hotel room talking to him.

DF: As part of the audience I wouldn't have known one way or the other, but it obviously gives you something as an actor...

JCF: Paul's talent, I mean, that's why I always tell people you can tell right from the beginning he's truly a natural film maker. That's what he was naturally born to do. He studied movies a lot. He's seen almost every movie you can imagine, so he's worked hard at understanding movies. From the very beginning, as soon as he started on Hard Eight, I walked onto the set for the first day and I said, "Paul, do you know that you're 20 years younger than most of the people here and you're the boss?" And he's like, "I know, I know, can you believe it?" I mean, both of us felt like, man, we were really pulling one over...

DF: I've heard that the buy-in of the crew can be important for a young filmmaker, that the veterans on the crew respect the guy in charge and believe he knows what he's doing. Did the crew buy into P.T. Anderson on Hard Eight?

JCF: Well, we had a great line producer on that, Daniel Lupe, and he already had a whole crack crew of people who he worked with. And Paul is, if you ever meet him, he's incredible. His enthusiasm is really contagious. So, he had so much energy and exuberance, people could tell it was something special.

DF: Do you have as much fun on those sets as it seems?

JCF: Oh, yeah. Magnolia was a different story because it was much more emotional, and was not such a circus as Boogie Nights, but Boogie Nights was more fun even than it appeared in the movie. It was a great time. It was just such a crazy summer, it was so liberating to play a porn star. It was a great time.

DF: What do you think it was about playing a porn star that was so liberating?

JCF: You know, you put on the sexy polyester slacks, playing a porn star, being a sexual outlaw...you're no longer bound by the rules of everyday society, it's like running off to join the circus, except it's a porn star.

DF: People always say, how great the performances are P.T. Anderson's films, and how well he directs the actors. But he's said he likes to take pride and he feels that his best direction for the actors occurs when he's actually writing for them and writing the script. What are your feelings about that?

JCF: That's true, but he doesn't give himself enough credit. He's a great director for actors. He makes you feel like he's really listening, and for me that is all you have to do as a director really, at this point. Maybe when I was younger and I was finding my way as an actor I needed a little more coaxing. You know, film sets are confusing. There's a million people, everyone is worrying about their own little corner of the sky, the grips are just worrying about whether the lights focused, makeup people wondering whether you look sweaty enough, whatever. And you have to have just one person watching your performance and being an audience, and Paul is a great audience.

I don't even understand quite where our friendship came from, that's why I say it almost felt like destiny that we met because we just really get each other. If I do some little thing, he doesn't miss a trick. A lot of directors, you throw some little thing in there and the script supervisor has to tell him he did this in there, and he'll say, "Oh, I was just worrying about the frame," or whatever. Paul never misses a trick. He always appreciates the weird little subtleties that I throw in there.

DF: How much do you think of that comes from the fact that the movies you've worked on with him are also pieces that he wrote?

JCF: That's intrinsic in this whole thing. My experience has been that that's always the best when the director feels that he has the authority and understanding of the story, and that works best when they've written it. Although I did a movie with Lasse Halstrom, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and he let us improvise like crazy.

DF: That was a wonderful movie as well.

JCF: All those cafe scenes were improvised. When Johnny Depp and Crispin Glover and I were sitting around discussing what was going on in the movie, he'd just load a 12 minute mag and say, okay well, get to this point and this point, how you get there or what you say is up to you.

DF: Which is obviously something that you thrive on.

JCF: Yeah. He's another one who's a really good audience. Really engaged in work.

DF: How was that improvising with Crispin Glover?

JCF: Crispin was concerned, you know. He said "I don't really like to improvise, I don't do it very much, and it's not something I'm particularly fond of." I think he was a little worried about it at first, and his way of dealing with that was to do a ton of research on morticians and all that stuff, and all the political things he's saying in those cafe scenes are all just based on the research that he did.

DF: Where does research fit in for you? Is heavy research an approach you usually take?

JCF: I do enough research, I do research until I feel like I'm not a fraud. My friend Jennifer Jason Leigh does so much research, she could take that as a second career, a researcher. She does exhaustive, totally intricate, complicated research, and it works great for her. I don't know if I'm lazy or what, but if I get it, ya know what I mean, most of my work is on the page, most of my work is the script. Yeah, that's the best way to say it. I do it until I feel like I have the authority to play the character.

DF: Now, how does that work when you play someone who is so much different than yourself? How often does that happen?

JCF: I don't take parts that are too different from myself. There are a lot of sides to my personality, by the same token, so I usually think of it as looking for that one little splinter of my personality that's like that character, and then I magnify that splinter until it becomes my whole personality.

DF: So, for instance, when you're playing a police officer, what little part of your personality is it that you grab a hold of that allows you to become a police officer?

JCF: Well, its less about the police officer than about who that guy is in the movie.

DF: I guess it's just one of those jobs that I think of the job being the person.

JCF: If you spent a lot of time with a cop, you'd realize how individual each of their approaches to the job is. It's pretty incredible actually, really humanizing. I'd recommend it. Ride around with a cop, it's really startling. You won't be afraid of the police anymore if you are. I used to be paranoid about cops because because most of the times, my plates were always expired, and I was just constantly thinking, "Oh, they're waiting to get me." But I spent some time in the cop car and they're not out to get me. There's a million cars going by, they're just hoping that someone's not going to shoot at them.

And the other thing I realized is that nine times out of ten, when you see a cop going by, they're on their way to the next call, even if they don't have their siren on. It's like a taxi cab. In L.A. you can't really hail a cab because they're always on their way somewhere. The same with the cops. Every cop I rolled with was always on his way somewhere, he wasn't even looking at the other cars. When you're inside the cop car, it doesn't feel like you're in a cop car, other than the machinery, the computer and stuff. It's an impressive image from outside, but when you're in there you just feel like you're driving around in a car. The first call I went on, I thought I was going to start crying as soon as we walked into the apartment, I thought, oh, man, I cannot handle this every night.

DF: Was it some kind of domestic dispute?

JCF: Yeah, this girl was accused of hitting her baby and she got in a fist fight with the mother, you know, the girl was 14 years old and she had a baby, and it's like, the minute I walked in there, I though, "Oh God."

DF: Yeah, if I were a cop I don't know how I could come home and leave that at the office or the locker room or wherever.

JCF: That's why so many cops commit suicide and get divorced. It takes its toll. Imagine like that's your day, every single day.

DF: Yeah.

JCF: Like my character in Magnolia says, "It's always bad news, it's never good news. Always bad news."

DF: Has there ever been a character that you've portrayed that you did have a difficult time getting a handle on it for some reason?

JCF: You know, it's my job to figure out the character. I have to say, doing that baseball movie was pretty hard. I don't really give a shit about baseball. You know, and it's like, I had to give a shit, I had to learn how to give a shit. It was physically really demanding. It took me a while.

DF: I do have one last question. Do people still tell you look like Han Solo?

JCF: No one has ever told me that I look like Han Solo. It's Reed Rothchild's sad delusion.

DF: John, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.

JCF: No problem.
 

For a look at some of John C. Reilly's work available on DVD, check out titles such as Hard Eight, The Thin Red Line, Never Been Kissed, The River Wild, Boogie Nights, Days of Thunder and Dolores Claiborne. Photo by Mike Ruiz, courtesy of Visages.

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