Giving a B-Movie an A+ Effort

Actor Bill Paxton is known for his work in big studio films like “Apollo 13” and “Twister,” but his new film, “Traveller,” which opened Friday, suggests he has other tricks up his sleeve. The story of a clan of Irish grifters who prowl the highways of the rural South, the film casts the 42-year-old actor as a con artist who undergoes a redemption. Evocative of “One False Move,” Carl Franklin’s nuanced thriller of 1992 that featured Paxton, “Traveller” was shot last year in Wilmington, N.C., for $5 million.

That Paxton describes the film as “my baby” is understandable--he found the script, did most of the casting, was in charge of the soundtrack, recruited cinematographer Jack Green to direct it and has been tirelessly promoting the film. After seeing “Traveller” safely into port, Paxton heads to Hawaii at the end of May to shoot Ron Underwood’s remake of the 1949 classic “Mighty Joe Young,” which co-stars Charlize Theron. It’s not surprising to learn Paxton, who lives in Ojai with his wife, Louise, and their 3-year-old son, hasn’t even met Theron yet. He’s been busy.

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Question: What made you want to produce? It seems like all the detail work and none of the glamour of filmmaking.

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Answer: When I was 18 I left Texas where I grew up and came to L.A. intending to produce my own movies because I was inspired by people like Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford; they parlayed their acting careers into filmmaking careers, and that’s what I hoped to do. Ever since “One False Move” I’d been looking for a script with a similar texture that I could produce, and when I read “Traveller” I knew it was what I was looking for. I also knew that to get to play this great part I’d have to produce the film myself.

Q: “Traveller” harks back to a genre of American studio films that proliferated in the early ‘70s--things like “Five Easy Pieces,” “Fat City” and “Wise Blood.” It’s hard to imagine studios making such films today; what happened?

A: Those character-driven B-movies are exactly the tradition that produced “Traveller,” which is basically a slice of Southern gothic American regionalism. The studios stopped making these kinds of films because they ceased to be cost-effective. Why? Because of the studio overhead. I was at Paramount last week and as I walked around the lot I thought, “My God, what it must cost just to keep the lights on here!” The studios have to create huge juggernaut movies in order to keep their doors open, so character-driven movies have become the province of independent filmmakers.

Q: “Traveller” is in a venerated tradition in American literature and film that presents outlaws as romanticized antihero. How do you explain the appeal of these characters?

A: It’s true we romanticize outlaws, and maybe we do it because we’re so homogenized as a society, and these characters make strong choices and have a code unto themselves. It might be a morally questionable code but they’re unflinchingly loyal to it, and there’s something admirable in that. I wasn’t interested in making “Traveller” a lovable rogues movie, so we toughened up the original script, and the film takes a dark turn at the end.

Q: Why didn’t you direct the film?

A: I had my hands full! Jack Green was the cinematographer on “Twister,” which is where I met him, and I knew Jack had been Clint Eastwood’s right-hand man for years. Jack shot “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Unforgiven,” which I thought looked great, and I knew he’d get “Traveller” and would shoot it in a very straightforward way. I also told him I had several actors in mind I wanted to cast in the film--people like James Gammon, Luke Askew and Vincent Chase. Part of the reason I made the film was to create opportunities for actors I admired. Luke Askew, for instance, is someone I worked with 10 years ago who just knocked me out as an actor. He had a great career in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but in the ‘80s he was doing guest shots on TV, and by the ‘90s he was lost in obscurity.

Q: Acting is inarguably an unstable profession. Why is it so vulnerable to the shifting sands of public taste?

A: Because it’s not about us as individuals. Many actors get bitter because they fail to understand that we’re merely grist for the celluloid mill and it churns 24 hours a day. If I decided this was my last film and I was gonna spend the rest of my life wandering on a beach, thousands of actors would jump forward to take my place and the town would move on without even a hiccup. So, yes, it’s high-risk work.

Say you’re in a few films that don’t do well and your stock starts to plummet; pretty soon you’re at a bush-league agency, then you don’t even have an agent, and suddenly you’ve been left by the side of the road. The studio system might have been a monopoly and a form of indentured servitude, but at least they groomed their actors and took care of them. Now it’s all up to the actor and whoever represents him.

Q: There’s been considerable debate lately about the dangers of filmmaking, and a name that comes up repeatedly in this context is James Cameron. You’ve done three films with Cameron (“Terminator,” “Aliens” and “True Lies”), and appear in “Titanic,” the Cameron film in production. Kate Winslet said she suffered hypothermia and almost drowned twice. You also appeared in Jan De Bont’s “Twister,” which also saw a number of accidents. Are the studios going too far in their quest for ever bigger visual thrills?

A: James Cameron is one of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived and I defend him. Yes, he’s intensely uncompromising, but the life of a Hollywood filmmaker is so fraught with compromise that the only way to get your vision on screen is to be uncompromising.

Though Kate Winslet’s claim is probably true, the “Titanic” shoot wasn’t arduous for me because my part wasn’t as physical as Leonardo’s [DiCaprio] and Kate’s were. As for “Twister,” we all got bumps and bruises on that movie because Jan likes to put his actors close to the action.

Big effects movies are physically demanding and they can be injurious because you’re doing things that have often never been attempted before. When you’re going up a hill following an 18-wheel flatbed truck with 400-pound blocks of ice going into Diesel-powered grinders that are shooting chipped ice onto you while you’re being filmed--obviously, this is not a precise science and people do get hurt.

But God bless directors like Jim Cameron and Jan; if they hadn’t cast me in those big movies I never would’ve had the opportunity to do “Traveller.”