In Touch With Their Inner Cavemen

Nick Nolte and James Coburn--sounds like a match made in macho-movie heaven. They are two of the screen’s favorite tough guys, albeit from slightly different generations. They’re both big men, still ruggedly handsome and imposing.

In his wide-ranging career, the 57-year-old Nolte has been an aging football player in “North Dallas Forty,” a drug runner in “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” a combat photographer in “Under Fire,” a world-weary cop in “48 HRS.,” and a bum in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.” He’s also currently appearing in a lead role in Terrence Malick’s World War II film, “The Thin Red Line.”

For Coburn, 70, “Affliction” is a significant departure from the kind of action roles that made him famous, from “The Magnificent Seven” and “Our Man Flint” to “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” and “Hard Times.” He recently completed a role in the upcoming NBC miniseries “Noah’s Ark.”

The two of them are paired for the first time as father and son in Paul Schrader’s “Affliction,” which opened Wednesday. The film is generating Oscar buzz despite its downbeat tone and disturbing theme: domestic violence and its ugly legacy, often passed on from one generation to the next.

Nolte, a previous Academy Award nominee for “The Prince of Tides,” has already won best actor honors from the New York Film Critics and a Golden Globe nomination as best actor for his work in “Affliction.” Coburn’s performance also has been widely lauded.

Based on a novel by Russell Banks (“The Sweet Hereafter”), “Affliction” casts Nolte as Wade Whitehouse, a small-town New Hampshire cop whose messy personal life complicates his investigation into a shooting that may or may not be a hunting accident. Coburn plays Pop Whitehouse, his alcoholic father who--as we learn in shocking flashbacks--regularly beat his sons.

Also factoring in the story, set during the freezing winter months of New England, are the sour relationship Wade has with his ex-wife (Mary Beth Hurt) and the deteriorating one he has with their daughter; a promising dalliance with a local waitress (Sissy Spacek), and his strangely distant brother (Willem Dafoe).

Nolte and Coburn recently sat down at Nolte’s Malibu home to discuss their roles in “Affliction,” violence (on- and off-screen) and playing such difficult and often unsympathetic characters.

Question: Have either of you encountered people like Wade and Pop Whitehouse?

Nolte: I know versions of Wade. I know degrees of this violence. I see it all around me. I see it in myself. Once you dig into it, it’s real easy to find. It’s not necessarily what you would like to admit, that that’s who you are. You spend more time denying this kind of rage than you do accepting it. And that’s the problem.

Q: How do you find that level of rage we see on the screen?

Coburn: It was all there in the script. You’ve just got to go down inside. To get to that place you simply have to peel away niceness, culture, all of the layers and layers of personality, learning and all of that, and just become that naked ape.

Q: (to Nolte): It’s been eight years since Paul Schrader called you with this script. Why has this taken so long to get off the ground?

Nolte: I felt that I needed a little more time with this character, age-wise. Not physical age, but maturity. The violence is such that there are layers to it. You’ve really got to understand the depth of the thing. I could understand it from the environmental situation of the father beating his sons, but I didn’t really quite understand the whole period that Russell Banks talks about, from Cro-Magnon man down through generations and generations. What is this violence about? I finally realized that when you look at humanity, violence is humanity. It is who we are. It’s in us. It’s not “those kids down on the South Side,” it’s in all of us. So once I got to that level of seeing it, then I felt right and ready to do it.

Q: (to Coburn): Did you have any qualms about taking on such an unsympathetic role?

Coburn: Oh, hell, no. It’s a great character; Pop Whitehouse is unique. You never have a chance to play a character like this. I’ve had maybe three really good characters [to play] in my life: the guy with the knife in “The Magnificent Seven,” Pat Garrett in “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid,” maybe the German soldier in “Cross of Iron,” and this one. I mean, the rest of them have all been kind of marking time while finding something else to do.

But no, you see, we’re actors. It’s not a question of surviving a personality problem. It’s a chance to really work.

Q: The film depicts a kind of alcohol-soaked small-town subculture. How big a factor is that in the violence we see played out?

Nolte: There’s no question, alcohol exacerbates the problem. But I’ve always looked at that as just a small element of a larger picture. Within a small town there is this class-consciousness, racism, all of this stuff that goes on. That’s where Wade Whitehouse is.

But you’re right about this small-town drinking. I come from a small town, and I remember when we didn’t have anything to do. Out of boredom we were always in the lounge. We used to sit all winter long in Minnesota and look out the window at Lake Minnetonka, waiting for this damn car to fall through the ice, because it signaled spring. [Coburn interrupts with raucous laughter.] When that car fell through the ice, we went outside, whether it was 20 below or not, it was spring. It was so pathetic.

Q: You shot “Affliction” in Montreal in the winter of ’97. How important was the cold weather that seems such an integral part of the story?

Coburn: That atmosphere of the cold, Wade having to drive that grader, shivering out there on that ice pack. . . . That wonderful snow would just be falling, just beautiful there. But it was cold. Especially those night shootings. It was absolutely necessary to give it that bleakness. There’s no sunshine, no brightness, only this bleak, bleak atmosphere.

Q: Do you agree with the film’s thesis, that this kind of violence is passed on from generation to generation?

Nolte: I think it’s not only passed on culturally, I think it’s passed on biologically. It’s a genetic potential that’s in the human at all times. Something you have to learn to deal with is your own rage. You’ll see anger and rage in a baby if it doesn’t get what it wants. So it’s an emotion that’s in us, that’s part of us, and it can serve good functions. It gets us up, gets us moving; it causes us to survive at certain times, and you need that kind of rage. But when it’s abused or ignored or denied, or the culture says, “We don’t have that in our culture,” then it breaks out in little, sick ways.

Q: Are you concerned that a film about this dark a subject may have trouble finding an audience?

Nolte: My personal opinion is that you don’t make a film for an audience. I know that’s not conventional thinking. You make a story because you want to tell that story and you want to find the truth out about it. You can’t be concerned if it’s going to make a whole gob of money. There is an audience for this kind of film. It’s a small group in America, but that audience is there. Do you expect to it appeal to the 14-to-24 [age] group? No. But any man who has gotten to the age of 35 will understand exactly what this film is about.

Coburn: If it has a decent release and they spend enough on publicity to whet the appetite for something unique, dark and disturbing, then it’s possible that it will gain a little bit. And Schrader has a kind of following. [To Nolte:] You have a following, I have a bit of a following. It has a unique kind of appeal. I don’t think there will be any lines around the block.

Nolte: The value of this film is its shelf life. This is a film you’ll be pulling down five, six, 10 years from now, just as you go back to “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver.” Those films stand. The other thing is, you don’t put it in a category with these films that have to generate huge hunks of money. We’ve only got to make back a $6-million nut.