Tim Blake Nelson on Playing an Aging Boxer in ‘Bang Bang,’ Marvel and Why He Loves Oldenburg
Tim Blake Nelson, the character actors’ character actor, has spent a career adding to a “rogues gallery of dysfunctional weirdos” on film and TV, from the singing convict in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the singing gunslinger in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs — both from the Coen Brothers — to Wade Tillman, a paranoid cop with incredible interrogation skills and a severe case of PTSD in HBO’s Emmy-winning TV series Watchmen, to the supervillain Samuel Sterns, aka The Leader, in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, a role Nelson will reprise, 16 years later, in the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World.
Along the way, Nelson has also gone behind the camera, directing film versions of his plays Eye of God (1997) and The Grey Zone (2001), adapting Shakespeare’s Othello, setting it in a modern-day high school with O (2001), and shooting two of his original screenplays: Kansas (1998) and Leaves of Grass (2009).
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In his latest acting job, in Vincent Grashaw’s Bang Bang, Nelson plays ‘Bang Bang’ Rozyski, a retired boxer in run-down Detroit — the dilapidated city a metaphor for Bang Bang’s own fall from grace — who is obsessed with rectifying the sins of his past. Bang Bang, which premiered at Tribeca, is currently on its European festival tour. After touching down in Locarno and Deauville, it screens at Germany’s Oldenburg Film Festival on Wednesday, Sept. 11.
Nelson has a long history, and a deep connection, with Oldenburg, going back to 2004 when the festival honored his work, screening The Grey Zone and naming the actor president of the competition jury.
“It’s the jewel box of the European festivals,” says Nelson. “It doesn’t have the grandeur and the reputation of Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastian, Locarno, or even Rotterdam, but its curation, its location, and its dedication make it stand out as a specialty festival.”
Nelson spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in a wide-ranging discussion about acting, arthouse cinema and the MCU on the eve of the 31st Oldenburg Film Festival.
Do you see any parallels between the life and career of a journeyman boxer and that of a character actor?
I guess sports movies in general fit a certain paradigm in that they’re generally about a character or characters who are striving to win. Sometimes that means victory in the sport, sometimes it means some other sort of victory, by meeting the challenges of the sport in question. So it’s very easy to extrapolate from there and find a philosophical message in sports movies. In the subgenre of boxing movies, you have the individual man or woman, finding redemption, or meeting the challenges in the ring of life. I love that about sports movies and boxing movies in particular. So with Bang Bang, the twist is we also examine the costs of victory, which, if you extrapolate it philosophically, shows that victory is only transitory, and mostly you’re left with the residual damage that came from the struggle to have that moment of victory.
So getting back to your question, how does that relate to the life of an actor? It’s a pretty good comparison because mostly what we deal with [as actors] is rejection and each of us wants as much success as we can have as actors within the constraints of what we’re willing to do morally to get there. I’ve always wanted success as an actor, which is in part defined by the number of people interested in seeing me act, because the greater that number, the greater my choices are going to be in terms of what I get to do next. So I have always seen the the challenges of living the life of a freelance artist as an actor, as related to getting to a point where I can have more and more latitude in terms of what I do, and the type of projects that are going to be interested in bringing me along. Now, metaphorically, in how that relates to a movie like Bang Bang, I’d have to ask: ‘What has it cost me?’
You’re not going to hear from me that I have suffered terribly for my art. I have a wife who really supports it. We’ve been married for 30 years. We met in drama school. I was terrified to marry an actor for all sorts of superficial reasons, and I’m incredibly grateful to have wed someone and to still be with someone who understands that it’s a peripatetic life with ups and downs and that it’s a far-flung life. She looks at it all as a great adventure. And we’ve gotten to travel the world. She never complains about it, and she is there by my side when it’s going well and when it’s not going well. We’ve raised three children who, perhaps because they were raised by artists, also embrace this life. So I’ve I haven’t had the struggles that a guy like Bang Bang has had. I’ve certainly had a lot of rejection. And every actor from George Clooney to the to the most obscure and unknown actor deals with rejection. I’ve had a lot of that and before the Coen Brothers put me in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? I was one of those completely unknown actors toiling Off-Broadway for 10 years, but I was always doing plays and really enjoying that.
You see how I answered my own question and then got around to answering yours?
Very well done. Picking up on what you said, about wanting success, and as many people as possible watching you act, if I can stretch the boxing metaphor, is making a movie in the MCU then the equivalent of being in the title fight at Madison Square Garden?
I learned from the actress Lois Smith, at a really good time in my career, that for character actors — and I am decidedly a character actor, and proudly a character actor — that it ultimately isn’t about one movie or achieving one particular accomplishment. It’s more about the accumulation of characters, what I like to call my rogues gallery of dysfunctional weirdos that I’ve been allowed to play. The movies need those people to make the leading actors look good, and I’m happy to play that role. They’re often the most interesting characters in a movie. Being brought back into the MCU by [Marvel producers] Kevin [Feige] and Nate [Moore] and Kyana [F. Davidson] to be a villain alongside Giancarlo [Esposito] against Anthony Mackey has been a great honor. It’s been a really interesting adventure. I was heartbroken when it seemed I wasn’t going to come back as The Leader, but now I’m glad it took 16 years because it’s made the character more interesting. And I’ve gotten to do a lot of other great stuff during those 16 years that maybe wouldn’t have come my way if I had played the lead villain character in a Hulk sequel two years after Edward Norton’s Hulk. I loved working with Edward and got to direct Edward in a movie right after that [2009’s Leaves of Grass], so not to take a panglossian attitude toward all this, I still do think it all happened in the best possible way, even though there was a lot of despair associated with the intervening years.
What do you think those 16 years in between, all the interesting indie films that you made in between, allowed you to bring to the role now?
Well, we’re done. I’ve shot it. I’ve actually shot it twice because I did it originally a year ago, and then we came back and redid a lot of it at the beginning of it this summer. Every single movie I do hopefully makes me better. I’ve probably done about 60 movies in between Hulk and Captain America: Brave New World, so there are dozens of increments of improvement. I hope so anyway. There are the movies I did with James Franco, where he would have a budget of about $400,000 – $500,000 and we just go and make a movie with James directing. Usually with the same group of actors and the same crew, everybody working for $100 a day in weird locations in Virginia, L.A., or Mississippi. Louisiana, Ohio, these remote areas. Everyone going back to the absolute basics of storytelling with no frills whatsoever, probably breaking every IATSE and SAG rule you can imagine in terms of hours and onset protocols but nobody complaining. Everyone just focused on telling interesting stories. Sometimes the movies worked beautifully, and sometimes they didn’t. A few of them nobody will ever see. So those really helped, and I think I did about a dozen of those.
Then working with Daniel Day Lewis [on Lincoln] was another extreme, and how he was able to commit not only himself, but the entire production to a work ethic and to esthetic principles in terms of the process that just heightened, not only what he was up to, but what everyone around him was up to as well. Just the fact that on Lincoln, nobody was allowed to wear T-shirts with logos on them. There were never any anachronisms on set. You couldn’t have a paper coffee cup. You had to have something that was made of materials that would have been available in the late 19th century. So no shorts. No sneakers. Steven [Spielberg] wore a blazer every day to direct, and a button-down shirt. No iPhones, did I mention that? It just brought everything up a level. And then of course all the stuff everyone knows about him: That he stays in character, that he could only be addressed as Lincoln. And that he accomplished this in a way that somehow didn’t annoy anyone — it certainly didn’t annoy me — and it made the set a more disciplined place in a really good way. Which I think shows in the film.
Now when I direct, do I make similar demands? No, I wouldn’t dare. But I would if an actor wanted that and it felt reasonable and doable. But I loved the process. I loved being a part of that. And it just made me better. It made me take what I do more seriously. Every movie I’ve done has some version of that. I’m here In Hungary right now [on a Mona Fastvold film] and the privation and the seriousness of the crew and the gratitude of the crew here, that the production is here instead of somewhere else, the language barrier, all of it makes for it’s own unique agglutination of approaches and forces that we bring to telling our story.
Do you feel a different responsibility in a film like Bang Bang, where you play the lead, where you have to carry the film and are in virtually every scene, than in one of your supporting roles, one of your dysfunctional weirdo parts?
I’m starting to play leads now at my ripe age, in my late 50s. Actually, now I’m 60. Yes, it does feel different but it’s also an opportunity because you can set a tone as an actor that is salutary for the production and, most importantly, for the director. And I love that. I love being able to lead a corp of actors in service of a director’s vision, to give myself wholly over to that, and help a director get everything he or she wants. I’m solidly of the opinion, I’m obsessed by the conviction, that film is a director’s medium, and the best thing you can do once you sign on to a project is give everything of yourself over to making sure the leader gets everything he or she wants and needs. It’s a very difficult position to be in, directing a movie. You’ve got everything coming at you at once, and you’re the person who’s got to make it all cohere, visually, and sonically. Rhythmically, spiritually, philosophically. The actors are part of the paint and the visual component of that, and they’re part of the music in the aural part of it and of the meter and the rhythm of the movie. The philosophy and the spirit of a movie is usually tied up in the human element, and that’s the actors as well. So as one of those people, and particularly as the lead in a film, you have the opportunity to really empower the director, and that’s incredibly exciting to me. (Check out a clip for Bang Bang below).
You’ve gone behind the camera multiple times yourself. Will you be returning to directing soon?
I certainly want to keep directing, and it looks like I’m going to be doing that next year. I have a movie where we’re in the papering stages of getting it financed. So I’m optimistic that I’ll be directing a movie next year.
What is your connection to the Oldenburg Film Festival, a festival devoted to the kind of indie cinema you’ve spent most of your career championing?
I think it was 2002 and they showed my movie, The Gray Zone. I love the Oldenburg Film Festival. It’s a beautifully-run festival in an extraordinary city. I would say — how do I want to put it? — it’s the jewel box of the European festivals. It doesn’t have the grandeur and the reputation of Cannes Venice, Berlin, San Sebastian, Locarno or even Rotterdam, but it’s curation, its location, and its dedication make it stand out as a specialty festival. Much in the way that the Camerimage festival does with cinematography. The Oldenburg folks have got it really right with their curation of indie cinema. Having served on the jury there, when I showed The Gray Zone, this was really underscored. I loved the films that I saw and and we had a difficult time in choosing the winner, because they were so good. As much as any festival I’ve been to in the world, Oldenburg just shows a thorough appreciation of cinema as both a democratizing force and a force of high art. The movies they choose, and their reach is worldwide, the movies are chosen with an attention to directors who understand how to use the medium in exquisite ways.
Do you think the sort of independent cinema that Oldenburg celebrates is under threat at the moment? Has the space for independent cinema, the market, the distribution opportunities, the audience for them, gotten smaller?
I feel like I’m a jazz musician who started in the 50s and who’s still playing and is watching the venues shrink and disappear and seeing the audience flee to other shinier things. I feel like that scene in Bird when Charlie Parker is there, it was who played him?
Forest Whitaker, right?
Yeah Whitaker. And Keith David plays this character [Buster Franklin] who plays the sax and is now playing rock and roll and just doing sort of pentatonic scale stuff and blasting out on his saxophone in ways that are very impressive for the rock and roll audience, but are just sort of ludicrously rudimentary for a jazz musician. Keith David is basically saying: What do you want me to do? I’m playing out here to these huge audiences, and you go do your jazz and obscure clubs, but that’s dead. And sometimes I look around, having done independent cinema in the 90s, during its heyday, when Sundance really meant something, when these movies were seen in movie theaters, and you had to wait to see them on video, and buyers were interested in art films. And now it’s just not that way. There are a lot of reasons for that, and some of them have actually been good for storytelling. One of those is that TV is much better now. And so what used to be indie cinema fare you can now experience on a show like The Wire or The Bear or Succession and you get stories deeply told with interesting camera angles and lighting and no commercials and with really good acting and really good writing.
And given the choice, people will stay home and watch that instead of going to see an art film, they’ll get caught up in eight to 20 hours of a story being told instead of two hours, and that can be more rewarding. It’s more Dickensian in scope, so I can’t argue against that. And some really interesting storytellers and their collaborators are getting compensated by these companies to put that on television. So all power to them. That’s great.
Some of the less constructive aspects of it have to do with the explosion of cable channels and streaming services and platforms, which initially were so hungry for content that it was great, and we all just took advantage of that and got to make films and get enough money and enough compensation to get some Interesting stuff made. But then we flooded these markets, and because there was so much, and because there were so many platforms with competitive material, all the resources got sprayed out and the returns were minimal, and when the returns are minimal, investors don’t come back and they don’t want to invest in your demented art-house stories that you want to tell. So it’s tougher to get these movies made because investors feel they’re not going to make any money off them. So what was when our boon became something very destructive. When you go out to try to get a movie made, what you hear now is: ‘It’s the genre movies that are making money.’ So you can make a horror movie, but there’s just not much room for art-house faire anymore unless it’s got some trick or angle.
And this gets back to why film festivals are so great. Those of us who make these sorts of movies don’t make them for home movie screens or home television screens. We want them projected in movie theaters for groups of strangers in the dark with great sound and a big image, and there are fewer and fewer of those places around the world now. You can’t blame the theater owners for closing their doors. It’s not volunteer work. They need to make money.
A film festival like Oldenburg celebrates showing movies in movie theaters. Most of the people who will see Bang Bang in theaters will see it at film festivals. The rest will largely see it on home TV screens because it’ll run in theaters, but only for a week or two in the major cities.
Do you see a way back to the golden age of indie cinema?
I don’t know how we get back, except for the emergence of specialty houses that really curate well in a peculiar way, and also have some adjunct allure to them. An example in New York City is the Metrograph, which has a commissary upstairs with really good food and a really good atmosphere. The movies they choose and show are just fantastic. It’s really smart curation. The Film Forum has always done that, and what Tim League did with Alamo Drafthouse was really smart. So I think that the future lies somewhere in this combination of making the movie-going experience a far better one than staying at home in ways that are additive to the movies themselves.
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