![]() ![]() A lot of that is due to Jamie coming in and really having a lot of input into how to develop that relationship. There’s such an interesting contrast between his professional and his personal life. I would have liked to have seen even more in the relationship between the two of them. We get a sense that this is a seriously foreign individual in this world. Other than his wife being his friend and counselor, he’s in this world alone. It also helps to further paint the picture of someone who sees himself as more enlightened than the culture that’s around him. What I liked about it is that it came out of nowhere and revealed an aspect of both characters that we had not been aware of, that fills in some holes very nicely and neatly. MOUNT: We definitely had discussions about it, at the time. Is the real-life component of this something that you knew anything about? Did you do any research into this? It seems like you could easily dive down a rabbit hole that you can’t ever get back out of, with research like this. ![]() That’s one of the things I wanted to do, is to not try to charm my way through this, because he would’ve already figured out that doesn’t work and that the senses of humor are completely different. As a Southerner playing a Northerner, being in the Old South for the first time, was very interesting. Where we take the movie, there needed to be a limited number of safety mechanisms. He needed to be a fish out of water, and he needed to have very few things to hold onto. There’s a reason that the movie is set in the South. MOUNT: He’s a stranger in a strange land. Was all of that on the page? Is that who he was in the script, or is that what you wanted to bring to him? He’s not a guy that’s telling jokes, or going around being funny with people. He’s not somebody who really veers off of that. This is a very dry character, meaning that he’s focused on his work. How do you feel about that? Is it weird that it can take such a long time to get a project out in front of audiences, or does that also feel like part of the industry that you’ve had to get used to? Like is often the case of independent films, you shot this a while ago, and it’s only just now available to audiences. Joe took the hits, and he really adapted, as I would suspect any career military veteran would. As a filmmaker, when it’s your baby, that can be a very difficult reality to bump up against. That’s something that I’ve lived and worked with for a very long time. You can understand, conceptually, that you write one movie, you shoot a different movie, and then you cut together a third movie. It’s a very hard wall to bump up against. MOUNT: Yeah, and we didn’t always agree on everything, but we got through it. The relationship between actor and director must play a large role in something like this because you’re in pretty much every scene, so it really is about that filmmaker’s vision. It was very clear in the script that it was a story about a person who has always negotiated the world cerebrally, making a choice that then sends him down a path where logic has no purchase, and a very physical world, and how he works his way through that, as a repercussion of the decisions he’s made. Clearly, he’s also a very good writer and the dialogue was strong. I asked to meet with Joseph, but it wasn’t until I met him that I realized that his background was in intelligence, and then it all clicked. It was very smart writing, but you could also tell that the writer was speaking with confidence and from a place of authority. ![]() Something that I strive for in my own work is material that is smart enough to know exactly how much information to give the audience, and more importantly, how much information to not give to the audience. I didn’t know (writer/director) Joseph at all, but I really responded to the material. What was it about this project that got you interested? Typically, an actor signs on for something because they’re either interested in or they connect with something in the story, they want to play the character because it’s different from what they’ve done, or they want to work with the filmmaker, and sometimes it’s all of those things combined. ![]()
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