Garret Dillahunt in Winter's Bone Photo: Roadside Attractions
I got a chance to speak to Garret Dillahunt today about many things including his new film Winter's Bone which has opened in Chicago and is now opening wide throughout the country. He is one of our finest actors around, doing great work in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, No Country for Old Men, Deadwood, and The Last House on the Left. He was a very nice guy. Here is the transcript of the interview.
Josh Youngerman: Thanks so much for speaking with us at examiner.com. You play Sherrif Baskin in Winter's Bone. What attracted you to the part and how did you get involved?
Garret Dillahunt: I love doing films based on books that I've read or authors that I really love. I had actually had Daniel Woodrell's book in my little kindel before the movie came out; it's just my kind of thing. I had read the book before the movie came out. I am a big Cormac McCarthy fan obviously, and Ron Hansen, I thought I'd make that movie [The Assassination of Jesse James]. I thought I'd discovered that book. So it was right in keeping with that whole philosophy. I think I was doing [Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles] at the time and I didn't have a lot of time. They called me about Sherriff Baskin and I was a little ambivalent about it because I wanted to play Teardrop but than I heard that John Hawkes was doing it and I wanted to work with him again. It was a good book, a good script, I wanted to work with John, and it fit into my schedule.
JY: What was it like filming in the Ozarks? Most films set in the Missouri area actually don't film in Missouri. I am two hours away from the Ozarks.
Dillahunt: Is that so?
JY: Yeah, I am in Columbia, Missouri right now.
Dillahunt: Wow. Well, they put us up in Branson. I was kind of excited about it but it was winter. Branson's pretty much shut down. I kind of wanted to go see some shows. I am sure it's like the statue of liberty if you're a New Yorker. You don't really go to it if you're a New Yorker. I wanted to see some shows but it was really a ghost town. It was very important to film there. She talked about the scouting for the thing and how they had come to the Ozarks to prepare. They had a local guy named Richard Michael who was looking for a family living in a setting like the one in the book and they had to work very hard to find that a family that would let them use their house, their clothes, and their personal stuff. It was very important to her [Debra] to film in Missouri and to shoot in a real authentic home, and they found a family that let them do that. I think it's important that it was actually there.
It's dicey to film in the south. I don't know if you have roots in the south or you just go to school there but my roots are southern, you know, Georgia and North Carolina, not Missouri, but you know the word hillbilly.
JY: Yeah.
Dillahunt: You can't really use that word though. It describes things like fluting and bootlegging. She was very concerned about making a very specific story about a very specific part of Missouri, not in anyway trying to suggest, “this is what Missouri is like you know, everyone is chewing meth. You know that’s just not true.
JY: How much research did you do for the part?
Dillahunt: Other than reading the book, I didn’t do too much before I got there. There was a great local law enforcement there. They were really helpful. He let me have a spare badge. He brought an old car for me to drive. And he talked a lot about the incredible square mileage that each law enforcement officer has to cover in Missouri, which just seems impossible. You can sort of see how Baskin lost track of Ree’s father and may have not been as protective of him as he should have been.
JY: What was it like working with Jennifer Lawrence.
Dillahunt: She’s something else. It is always kind of annoying to me when I work with young people that are so together. You know. I mean you’re a young guy, you’re sitting here going to college and it’s just an amazing thing. I just start thinking, what was my problem when I was 19, 20 or whatever the hell she is. She also was an English major and she would get very angry if you ended sentences is prepositions or something like that, which is kind of refreshing in this era of text spelling or text speak. She was really smart and really humble. She was really not afraid to get her hands dirty. Or skin a squirrel.
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