Exclusive Interview: Jason Isaacs on Sweetwater

CraveOnline: In Sweetwater, you are acting in open planes with very few characters in the scene, which seems rare. Did that impact your performance?

Jason Isaacs: It did. When you get to that place and you can see 20, 30 miles in every direction, the village that essentially he owns or dominates felt like kids. It’s very clear there’s no law and order. Law and order is what people choose to kowtow to or not, whoever is the most dominant or forceful person. There is a sense in which the west was wild because you ruled it because people were frightened to come and kill you because you would kill them first. I don’t know if it was so much human decency that kept people in order or the fear of their neighbor.

Certainly when you’re in a landscape that wild, it’s down to you to provide your own security. People can get carried away with that. Certainly Josiah is an egomaniac, such that he feels this is his flock, his people. When he has a thought, he thinks that’s God talking to him. I personally think it’s probably closer to mental illness, but as far as he’s experiencing it, it’s the will of the lord.

 

How far outside the city were you and where was base camp?

Oh, we were in the middle of nowhere. You could see 10s of miles in every direction. You also could see rain and storms coming in and out before they hit you. You’d see them approach across the prairie. It was an amazing place to shoot. Although obviously there were cameras and cell phones that weren’t working, it felt like we’d stepped back in time. Sitting upon a horse and riding out with those clothes on and those churches and barns, actually a great history as well. It felt as much as it’s ever going to feel like you’re in a different time and a different place.

 

How did the costumes in Sweetwater compare to other period costume movies you’ve done?

The thing is we were shooting on location. We were shooting right out in the middle of the desert and there were dust storms that came and it was hot. So it wasn’t so much that the costume was more restricting but it was more restricting. I had fewer fights to do in this. Mostly I’m just bullying people, but it was hot, really hot and sweaty. It gives you an inkling of how uncomfortable [it was]. You wear those clothes and you wear the wigs that I’m wearing and you feel uncomfortable and you start to get grumpy.

The hardest thing of all is to ride with a hat on. I don’t know if these guys used to ride with bobby pins on or what but I watch all these westerns and people ride across the landscape with a hat on but it doesn’t make any sense to me at all because mine blew off every time we tried it. The beard and the wig and the thick costumes, you sweat. There was quite an extended sex sequence which we cut down because it was too disgusting for everybody to watch.

 

That was longer? This is the cut down version?

Well, I’ve got three wives there and one of them is my daughter which is a very common thing which we got from Under the Banner of Heaven, marrying your own children. So there was a moment where my youngest daughter stood up and I said, “Come on, honey. You know daddy saves the best for last” or something. She started to walk towards me and unbutton her dress. Too many people who saw the screenings were just so utterly freaked out by it that it stopped the film dead in their imagination. It became too distracting for the main story. I, of course, loved it. I said, “Why are we trying to preserve any of this man? It’s not like we admire him.” But I think they’re probably right because there’s a certain momentum to the story that you don’t want to be derailed. In terms of trying to create someone was utterly repulsive, I thought that was the cherry on the icing on the cake.

 

Were you saying the wig fell off in the sex scene?

No, no, I’m saying it’s just a joy to get the costumes off. What happens in an extensive sex scene in which there was sex with one wife, then the other wife and then about to do the daughter, we were all very uncomfortable about it obviously, because we’re naked or nearly naked. So I wanted to know what I could do to make the situation as untense as possible and I always have speakers on the set. If people are okay with it, we can play music. I asked the girls what was the silliest song you ever heard of. Somebody came up with the Muppets singing “Mahna Mahna.” So that sequence, we had “Mahna Mahna” playing the entire time and the whole crew joining in singing and dancing, so it was about as untense as you can ever be when you’re naked pretending to have sex with people you’re not married to.

 

So the daughter scene was out before it played Sundance. Had they tested it earlier?

Yes, to friends and family. I don’t think they had a focus group. It just stuck in people’s minds so much, I think it was like a gramophone record playing and screeching off. People stood up and needed to go get a breath of fresh air. She’s still there. You still see she’s in the room and the implication is that I have sex with all of them and she’s clearly my kid. It’s just that they didn’t want to go that far, which is fair enough.

 

I must not have picked up on that but on a second viewing that will certainly deepen my appreciation for the depravity of Prophet Josiah.

Well, the thing is on the one hand, you go, “Well, it’s an outrageously depraved character” and on the other hand, you read a book like Under the Banner of Heaven or you do a search on the internet and you see that there are plenty of cult leaders and self-declared prophets, many communities around the world and in America still today where incest is absolutely standard practice and underage sex is standard practice and there are people who utterly defer every decision including what to do with their children and who to sleep with to somebody who is dominating the entire community. That seems to be the nature of human beings. There are some people who will always want that, want someone else to make decisions for them and there’ll be some people who fill that vacuum. I didn’t feel like we were creating a character who’s not based in reality. It’s jaw-dropping stuff but there are people like that.

 

Your opening speech is intercut with other scenes. Did you deliver the whole speech to camera?

I did do the speech to camera. I remember saying to the boys, “You’re out of your minds” because the speech was originally in the middle of the film and it was to a congregation. We weren’t sure yet whether I had forced my neighbor, January and Eduardo, to come and listen to it. Then they said, “We’ve come up with a fantastic idea. You’re talking to the camera in the middle of the night in the forest.” And I said, “Are you on drugs?” They went, “No, we’re going to intercut and set up the different worlds of the film.” I said, “You’re breaking every single rule.” And they said, “Have you just noticed that? That’s what we set out to do.”

I did it and it felt utterly insane and yet, at the same time, it kind of laid out the store. You might have been drawn to the film because there’s pictures on the poster that look like you’re seeing a western but forget everything you think you know about westerns and forget the traditional narrative structure of westerns and forget the redemption you normally get. Your’e going to watch a bunch of extremely unusual characters and their lives intertwine and story unfolds in an extremely unusual way. That was the case, so all of the normal “if A happens then surely B has to happen afterwards followed by C,” the boys would say, “Forget it. We’re going to start with C and then we’re going straight to G and H.” It’s one of the reasons I wanted to do the film is their refreshingly subversive approach to storytelling.

 

So even if on the surface it seems like a revenge tale for January’s character, do you think she’s ultimately not redeemed?

I think in order to sell a film, you need to be able to tell people, I need to be able to tell people in half a sentence roughly what it is. Half a sentence doesn’t tell this story, so certainly she’s the character who is wronged and tries to get some revenge but it’s up to the audience to decide does she go about it the right way, does she do the right thing, is her life going to be better at the end than it was? I’m pretty sure, but you’ll have to ask Noah and Logan, nothing turns out great for anybody because life is tough. Look, it’s not that it’s realistic because there’s a tremendous amount of relish in everything, in every scene. There’s all kinds of grotesque and outrageous scenarios, but there is this reality to it which is life is ugly and nobody’s looking out for anybody in the old west. When the rules get taken off and you can’t rely on God or law and order, what do you rely on? It’s man’s inhumanity to man.

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