In an exclusive chat with the ever intense, ever versatile Emile Hirsch, the actor recounts his time working with acclaimed director Ang Lee on Taking Woodstock (opening today). After the jump, Hirsch recalls his conversations Heath Ledger about Lee, explains how he developed his character of Billy by working with real Vietnam vets, defends Speed Racer and discusses his plans to do a rock ‘n’ roll version of Hamlet — with Shakespeare’s original text.
If you’ve ever seen the Academy Award-winning Woodstock, Three Days Of Peace & Music documentary, then, like most everyone else on the planet, you have a pretty good idea of went on during those iconic three days of peace, love and music — a weekend in 1969 that brought the world together for just a moment in time in upstate New York. But what some of us didn’t realize — at least until the publication of Elliot Tiber’s memoir Taking Woodstock, A True Story of A Riot, A Concert and A Life — was that the festival was almost cancelled at the last minute and if it weren’t for some quick thinking on Tiber’s part the cow-grazing fields of White Lake, New York would have remained empty.
Legendary, award-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm) along with producer/writer John Shamus used Tiber’s fascinating tome about what went on behind the scenes of Woodstock as the basis for their new movie, the sexy, funny and incomparable Taking Woodstock. Casting newcomer Demetri Martin in the lead role of Tiber, but gathered together an all-star ensemble cast — Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Dan Fogler, Jonathan Groff to Eugene Levy — to portray everyone from the festival’s promoters, visiting concert-goers and native townsfolk.
For the role of Billy, the seemingly shell-shocked Vietnam soldier who returned home from the war just weeks before Woodstock, Lee called on the intense and versatile actor Emile Hirsch. From his award-winning role as real-life adventurer Chris McCandless in director Sean Penn’s Into The Wild, his SAG-nominated performance in Milk to his critically-praised take on the iconic, animated race driver in Speed Racer, Hirsch has proven he can tackle any role. And, while audiences are accustomed to seeing Hirsch in starring roles, in Taking Woodstock, the emotionally troubled Billy is clearly a supporting player in the massive ensemble cast. Agreeing to a smaller part was just fine with Hirsch. “I didn’t care how big the role was, I just wanted the chance to work with Ang Lee,” Hirsch confesses. “It was like a wish come true for me.”
Hirsch’s desire to work with the Asian filmmaker had taken root many years earlier when his onetime best friend (and costar in Lords Of Dogtown), the late Heath Ledger, talked about Lee’s unique and challenging directing style all the time the Aussie was filming Brokeback Mountain with Ang. “From that point on, the things Heath said made me want to work with Ang so much, that when my agent told me that Ang wanted me for Taking Woodstock, I thought he was joking,” Emile recalls. “But once we talked, and then when we started working together, I knew that everything that Heath had said about Ang was true. They could have given me two lines and I would have been happy.”
What did you find most interesting about the Woodstock era?
“For me, there was always a struggle to understand why Woodstock has taken such an iconic place in the zeitgeist of America, and I guess the whole world. What I think I started to understand a little bit wasn’t that, aside from the extremely catchy name, Woodstock, that’s pretty catchy, I think one of the reasons why it is so kind of remembered, aside from the amazing music, I think it represents a certain utopian fantasy that was the highest form of ‘60s Utopia, that following up with the kind of downfall of that, later in the ’70s, and certainly in the ’80s and ’90s, it was looked at as the high point of a peaceful time. It was like a very idealistic generation where everybody was protesting political things that they didn’t believe in a very grass roots, very visible way where people were considered to be more open-minded, where the psychedelic drug use was probably at one of its peaks. Woodstock is almost like an idea. I think as a kid, it kind of even in front of my nose even then, but I maybe just associated it more with just the music. When I was a kid, if you would have asked me who played at Woodstock, I wouldn’t have really been able to tell you any bands, other than maybe Jimi Hendrix, which I later learned. It would have been more of like a vague idea of like peace and love and everybody getting along, which I think is ultimately why it is remembered. There was Altamont, just a few months later…Altamont is not remembered for the music, one could argue, it wasn’t necessarily about that.”
The Altamont/Rolling Stones concert will always be remembered for the knife-wielding concert-goer who was murdered by the Hell’s Angels and seeing the killing depicted in the Stones tour film Gimme Shelter.
“Yeah, it’ll always be remembered for that horrific event.”
Billy, you character in the film, is not in the Taking Woodstock book. Was Billy, a Vietnam veteran, invented purely for the movie? Is he there to represent that a segment of the Woodstock event was a part of the whole anti-war protest?
“Well, yeah, I would hesitate to say that it is anti-war protest, because I don’t think that the film goes that far to really bother to make a statement on the actual war. I think that part of that is so much our blatant look at the Vietnam War, I almost feel like they didn’t bother, because they just assumed that people were not into the Vietnam War. I don’t think that it is a huge topic of debate anymore, per se. Although it was with a lot of the Vietnam veterans that I talked to who certainly had different feelings about the war. But just from the overall point of view, I feel like that just making a character now who is protesting the war, it’s almost like they didn’t think to do that.”
Why did you think it was necessary to talk to Vietnam vets?
“The flashback sequences, in particular, were something that were very dangerous to approach. If one were to approach them in the wrong way, it would seem very phony and very actory, if you don’t know what the whole process of a flashback is. I talked to Iraq veterans as well as Vietnam veterans and just tried to get the whole lowdown on what their experiences were, and also what this whole flashback business really was. And what was their mental state like when they got back from overseas was, it was something that was really important, me and [director] Ang [Lee] thought, was trying to find this decaying, spaced out quality in this person. Because this was a recurring thing that all these people would talk about, and that the vets would talk about as kind of a spaced out feeling. They would get this decaying look in their eyes. With the flashbacks, these guys would recount for me, in very vivid detail, just how real they where, what they were like and what it all entailed. Having no experience firsthand, I always thought that flashbacks were like scenes in movies. It was weird that a lot of guys on the crew would go, ‘Oh yeah, my buddy did five years in Vietnam, why don’t we drive by and see him?’ There were a lot of Teamsters that knew people who fought in that war. I met this one guy who was in the Gulf War and the second Iraqi War, and he took me out shooting guns at the shooting range, and we did a lot of firing gun kind of activities. We did some traipsing around in the forest and he was teaching me these special drills and the way you move when you are in the military and when you are trying to be stealthy that I used in the scene where I’m kind of creeping and crawling around. This guy kind of acted out what it would actually be like, and he was pretty good, because he really got into it. It was funny, because he kind of turned into an acting coach. He was like, [whispering] ‘Okay, do it! And then you take a drag of your cigarette.’ He was pretty good, I had a good time.”
Did you really take the role in Taking Woodstock because it was a chance for you to work Ang Lee?
“That’s the main reason I took the role. I knew that I would be in the film as soon as my manager said, ‘Ang Lee wants you to do this part.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, yes.’ And it was at a time when I hadn’t worked in five months, and I hadn’t read anything that was going on, and it was kind of a slow minute and it was like, ‘Ang Lee wants you to be in you to be in this film.’ It was like music to my ears. And then I read the script and it was like, ‘Cool, the part isn’t as big as the ones I’ve played recently, but this is a chance to work with Ang.’”
Was taking a smaller role really fine with you?
“It was totally fine with me, because of Ang. I loved every scene. Despite the size of the part, I felt like there was so much that I could explore within every scene. After Brokeback Mountain, I had this great conversation with Heath [Ledger], and he was just going on and on about Ang.”
What did Heath like the most about working with Ang in Brokeback Mountain?
“I think that Ang really challenged Heath and brought Heath out of his comfort zone. I think he was freaked out when he made the film, in a certain sense, by just really being challenged by Ang. I remember I called up Heath after some of the early reviews came out for Brokeback Mountain, and I hadn’t seen it yet, but it was like being hailed as this masterpiece. I called him up, because I had this audition for this goofy movie I wanted to ask him about, and I was like, ‘Dude, congrats on Brokeback Mountain. The reviews are unbelievable,’ and he was like, ‘Well, let me tell you something, Ang is a fucking good director.’ Ever since he said that, and this was years ago, that was so permanently stuck in my mind. Then when I finally saw Heath’s performance in the film, it was unbelievable. So I was dying to work with Ang.”
Could you see what Heath had been talking about with Ang?
“Absolutely. Ang challenged me, but I think me and Ang really hit it off, right away. I think that because we were both so excited about the details, that I think that was the reason that me and Ang hit it off, clicked and got along really, really well. The first time I talked to him, I woke him up at six in the morning in China. He was like ‘Hello,’ and I could tell he had been asleep, and I said, ‘I can call you back if you’re asleep,’ and he said no, and we had this great conversation about Billy’s psyche for literally an hour. This was in the beginning, so I knew that we were going to get along so well. He had such a passion about charting this character, his inner life and his outer life.”
Ang is known to be abrupt to actors and he doesn’t cuddle them. He’s been known to say “That’s terrible, do it again.”
“I think he got as close to coddling me as probably anybody. Just because of this amiable, very excited about the little details relationship that we had. I didn’t find him abrupt, I found him just awesome. But I think that maybe I enjoy that abruptness sometimes. That to me is just a way of working that really helps to bring me into focus, and puts me in the right place. So maybe he had all those qualities but I fed off of that even more.”
As directors, how was working with Sean Penn in Into The Wild and Ang Lee with Taking Woodstock different?
“Well, my experience working with Ang is so much more limited than working with Sean, Because I worked on that film for 105 shooting days. Working on Woodstock was just seven days. It was more of a rounded, kind of overall experience with Sean.”
Did you see a connection between your character in Into the Wild and Taking Woodstock?
“Yeah, but I suppose that’s like comparing the two characters of Chris and Billy. Billy kind of chose society and people and Chris didn’t have time to, or he made the realization but it was too late. I think there is something rewarding, if you were a big Into The Wild fan and then to see a character a little similar to Chris, but different in certain ways, and it be embraced would be kind of cool. It’s like a parallel universe that went a different way.”
Adding Milk to the mix, isn’t Taking Woodstock your third period film?
“Well, if you count Speed Racer as a period film. Although there are definitely aesthetic elements of that show that are very ‘60s driven. It’s like ‘What if we had amazing, 2D technology in the ‘60s and gave Speed Racer Elvis hair.’”
In retrospect, do you like Speed Racer as a motion picture? Do you feel as though it was unfairly crucified by the critics?
“That would be undeniable. I have an affinity for the movie, and for the cartoon. I grew up watching the show, so I will always be really into it. Certainly, the Wachowskis brothers [filmmakers] are people I have a lot of affection for. Their Matrix movies were such a huge part of my life — my early adolescent life.”
Do you usually feel bad or disappointed when a big studio movie like Speed Racer comes out — and there is all this anticipation and expectation for it — and it quickly deflates at the box office?
“There is definitely a sense of, ‘This is a bummer.’ It is inevitable to feel that way because you are not going to shoot the sequels now. We were all excited in a sense, that we thought we were going to go back a year later and do it again for a sequel. Me and John Goodman, Susan Sarandon and Cristina Ricci — we all got along really well, and we still all keep in contact with each other. And I ended up living with John Goodman for a year after that at his house. I was staying in his L.A. house. But that film is like an odd piece of contemporary art. It’s really a unique film, and it’s really hard to put that film into a box. I like it, just for its eccentricities and its strangeness, and I meet a lot of people who are really, really into the film, so I’m excited that despite it not having a big, huge box office record, it still kind of found people. It’s kind of funny, me and Kicker, the actor who plays Sparky, we were just reminiscing about the film and joking about the monkey and we were like, ‘Too bad we won’t shoot a sequel. Oh well, let’s watch TV.’ And Speed Racer was right on the TV at the same time, so it was cool.”
Did you share in the idealism of Woodstock while making the film?
“It was weird, because I was trying to, a little bit, but then again, I was kind of getting sucked in to the kind of vortex of negativity that the character feels. I was reading [army] dispatches. Ang was kind of clear to me, he was like, ‘Billy is not a hippy. He looks at them like they are spoiled kids who don’t know what they are talking about.’ You don’t necessarily want to be negative, but I didn’t drink the Kool Aid, either.”
What’s next for you?
“I’m trying to do Hamlet with (Twilight director) Catherine Hardwicke. We want to do kind of what Baz Lurhman did with Romeo and Juliet. We want to make a really young version of Hamlet, like kind of rock and roll and modern but in Shakespeare verse, but edited a little bit and make it scary. Not so much as campy like the Baz Luhrmann one, we want to make this one more like a thriller. We’ll see if we can get it greenlighted. The script is done. It’s written by the guy who did Philadelphia, and it’s actually really dope, but we’ll see.”
