CraveOnline: When you look at how people are looking at your second film…
Scott Cooper: Yeah…
They’re going to be looking for patterns. When you follow a director you try to figure out what they’re all about.
Sure.
In many regards Out of the Furnace seems rather similar to Crazy Heart, and in many regards it seems like an about-face, in terms of sentimentality.
Thank you. Yes, for sure. Crazy Heart had a lot of warmth and humor. A man who searched for redemption and found that, although precariously, and I wanted to make a film that couldn’t feel more different, but also made by the same hand. Tonally and in terms of, not so much performances because I think they’re very emotionally truthful and honest performances in this film, and certainly Jeff [Bridges] and Maggie [Gyllenhaal] and Colin [Farrell] delivered that in Crazy Heart, but I wanted it to feel, my second film… to not have that sentimentality. I don’t know if I achieved that, but…
It’s definitely not as sentimental, that’s for sure.
Uncompromising, yeah.
What is more comfortable for you, sentimentality or…?
This is probably more true to my artistic worldview. You know, my father was an educator and from a very young age, his English teacher for a couple of years was William Faulkner. So from a very age, I was reading the works of Faulkner and then Hemingway, and into the Russians, and into Cormac McCarthy. You’re worldview is shaped by that and by your personal experiences. A lot of pathos and tragedy in my young life. You lose a sibling at a young age, and that affects you, and you see how your parents deal with that. But I also grew up on the music that was in Crazy Heart and always wanted to tell a story about someone like Townes Van Zandt or Waylon Jennings or Merle Haggard, and was able to do that through Jeff’s character. So that also spoke to a very important part of my life and my psyche.
I was a Bobby Bare kid.
I love Bobby Bare. Of course.
He was way more whimsical.
Yeah, but also very… I’m a very positive person by nature. People wonder where this [Out of the Furnace] comes from, and it comes from personal experience. The movie is very personal, things that I’d rather not get into, but ultimately you’re shaped by your experiences. If you look at Scorsese’s early work, certainly Cassavetes, [Terrence] Malick, Ken Loach, the Dardenne Brothers, my favorite filmmakers, those are the people that I respond to.
When you’re writing, is oppressive to focus on the heightened emotion and the melodrama?
It’s cathartic.
Is it really, to let all that out?
It is, and it’s funny, Eddie Vedder said to me once – he’s seen the movie almost as many times as Christian Bale, countless – and Eddie said to me, “You know, Scott, if you don’t write those things down, film them or sing them, they’ll eat you alive.”
I’m being eaten alive right now.
And that’s the truth. You have to find a way to express that.
You wanted to talk about soldiers coming home and the economic crisis…
But all very subtly, I hope.
I’m just saying those are all elements. But you can’t just say, “I’m going to make a story about soldiers coming home and the economic crisis!” You have to create a plot.
Yes.
What you led you to… this?
Really, it also had to do with a man – a very good man – in Russell Baze. Russell Baze is a very good man who is beset on all sides by relentless fate.
Everything’s just there to be taken away from him.
Right, and he’s based on someone very close to me who has endured this kind of loss, and who is one of the most positive people I know, and as I leave Russell Baze in that final shot, sitting at his dining room table that we’ve seen three or four times in the film already, breaking bread at the same place where he’s eaten meals with his deceased father and deceased mother and deceased brother… No, he isn’t in prison, but this is a man who is in prison for the rest of his life, and who is suffering the consequences of violence and dealing with demons and battling his soul. I wanted to be, not so ambiguous, but I wanted people to say what, ultimately, is that? What does that represent? And it’s also a bit of an homage to Michael Corleone, who sits in an easy chair like you’re sitting [in], as Fredo has just been murdered on Lake Tahoe. But I have a very positive but realistic worldview of certainly where we are as Americans right now.
So this is a story about Russell Baze dealing with loss, and the consequences of his actions, and the way that he’s going to deal with – call it what you will – angst, emotions…
That’s exactly right.
What about the people who he killed in the drunk driving accident? Were there ever drafts where he had to deal with their families or the people they left behind.
That’s exactly right. There were, but I thought it was important that we see him as we do, without talking to the parents or whoever is left, laying the flowers at the site of the accident. This is a man that we know has endured a great deal of loss, and we see how that has affected him emotionally. For the people who I know who have suffered a similar situation, they live with that every day. It felt too maudlin or treacly, or perhaps overly sentimental.
I was thinking more that it would provide a context to how people deal with loss. You could see how these people are dealing with it, and then see how Russell does it, his temptation to violence.
That’s exactly what it was, and we shot it, but ultimately felt like this would have been perhaps probably the best way, the most economical way – not in terms of finances or money, but in terms of story – that a man has endured all this loss, and how he does it.
Are you going to keep that footage off the DVD, to keep the story pure?
Yes.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
