. As such, I was slightly apprehensive about meeting Lucas. I know he is acting, but even so I felt slightly trepidatious about the interview. I walked into Lucas' hotel suite and was immediately greeted by him in such a warm and gregarious fashion that I burst out laughing. This is the reason that our conversation starts out with me talking about his complete lack of facial hair.If there were a way for Lucas to have been nicer or more pleasant during our interview, I can't think of it. Before we parted ways, Lucas mentioned that I hadn't asked him a single question during our interview about what it was like for him to work with Reese Witherspoon and asked if that was an oversight on my part; if it was, he told me I could call him and we could discuss things further. I appreciated Lucas' question--he wanted to make sure I got what I needed out of the conversation--but it wasn't an oversight. He nodded at this, smiled and informed me that I was the first person he'd spoken to in "days and days" who hadn't grilled him about his co-star. "So, thanks," he laughed. Lucas is, unquestionably, one of the three friendliest people I have ever interviewed (actress Debra Winger and director Dana Brown would probably fill out the ranks). | Read the article.
CHRIS NEUMER: I saw you in this film and you didn't have any unusual facial hair, you weren't threatening people, nor did you attempt to murder anyone. It really threw me off.
JOSH LUCAS: [Laughter] Nothing totally weird or odd.
CHRIS NEUMER: No. That was sort of interesting because most of the time you see people who do lots of big studio stuff and they never get small. They never do these crafty little characters. Here it was really different. You’ve got these really fine-tuned, off-the-wall nut jobs that you’ve got going to a tee. It was kind of interesting to see you taking a very mainstream turn like this playing someone like Jake. I was curious to know what kind of different approach did you take… or did you?
JOSH LUCAS: Completely. This was a different approach because this is honestly harder for me in the sense that this is the closest that I’ve ever played to something that is like myself; someone who has been through a lot of shit in their life, has come from really humble roots and struggled for a long time. I didn’t necessarily find any financial success, even to this day, honestly, but I was really in love with what I did, really in love with it and trying to do it the best I possibly could. Jake is someone who found, not that I necessarily have, found his voice as a man. So I really related to him across the board. Like the time I first read the script, that opening scene, the two of them running along the beach. I grew up in South Carolina where that was pretty common just to run around naked.
CHRIS NEUMER: Where in South Carolina?
JOSH LUCAS: Isle of Palm, Sullivan’s Island, off the coast of Charleston. So it was a genuine character that I related to. Also, it was time. I’ll tell you an interesting thing that I think… I was having directors of really interesting, really cool independent films say to me, ‘I can’t work with you and I really want to because you can’t finance my movie, because you haven’t done something like Sweet Home Alabama. It takes a Sweet Home Alabama to be able to go back and get the kind of financial backing from a studio or even from an independent producer to make…
CHRIS NEUMER: So this was like a safe picture?
JOSH LUCAS: A safe picture, I wouldn’t say, by any means, because I actually really loved it and it was interesting because I don’t really like romantic comedies but I really liked the Southern flair of it.
CHRIS NEUMER: You’ve done another one, Coastlines, too. I haven’t seen that one.
JOSH LUCAS: It’s awful.
CHRIS NEUMER: I looked at the plot synopses and I thought there was more than just one similarity between the two. But back to this character being similar to you. Wouldn’t that actually make it easier for you to play it?
JOSH LUCAS: It didn’t for me, because that’s the thing. I think I’ve spent so much time playing characters that are so far away from me and learning how to technically build and how to technically put something on top of you. Then it became about having to strip things away and strip those levels of techniques and levels of instinct and levels of different things I had learned over years and years of doing it, to the point where I was, ‘I can’t do that on this movie.’ And all sorts of comedy, which I have no experience in whatsoever, and I really felt that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I waited on a day-by-day basis to get fired because this isn’t what I do and I don’t know how to do it very well. I respect [Reese Witherspoon] tremendously. She’s a really, really seriously sharp actress who knows precisely what she’s doing and she’s very, very dedicated. I just felt if she knows how to do this, I want to know how to do this, I want to learn how to do this, so it wasn’t by any means safe. If anything, it was substantially more of a risk than doing something like The Hulk, which is another bad guy. Granted, he’s a very different version of the bad guy than I’ve played, but that’s a safer picture for me in a weird way. Intellectually, instinctually, creatively, that’s a safer picture.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m not disagreeing with you. It’s just interesting in all the people I’ve interviewed you have this big romantic comedy with Reese Witherspoon. That’s the biggest leap they’ve taken…
JOSH LUCAS: Sure, sure. It was genuinely harder than the stuff I’ve done and I think it was because I felt so much of a relationship to the character. I was so worried about making sure that he was truly honest and deep and had an intelligence and was genuine within the truth of being Southern. All these different responsibilities I put on myself that I don’t normally do because I am playing someone who is so far away from me that I can do whatever.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was the final version of the script very similar to the original one you had read?
JOSH LUCAS: Pieces of it. The script is pretty tight. The only difference is there’s a lot more character development of other characters that they cut out. I think for whatever reason it was probably too long or there are other characters that had substantially more or bigger parts. They culled it way down in that sense.
CHRIS NEUMER: It seemed there were a lot of pieces to this movie that were… Bob Balaban had a great quote when he said, ‘It’s less risky for people to do formula. The tough part is making the formula non-formulaic.’ It just seemed there were parts in here that could have gone either way. I wondered what the appeal of this particular genre was for you…
JOSH LUCAS: The appeal was that I hadn’t done this at all. I really liked [Reese’s] work and in what could be considered a formulaic, Hollywood, simple, romantic comedy, genuinely felt that I liked these people. I felt it was quite a bit smarter and quite a bit more honest than the usual romantic comedy. You have a miscarriage, you have the fact that I was an alcoholic and that my dream had died. There are all these different things and they are subtly dropped in. My dream had died — my dream of football.
CHRIS NEUMER: When you were mentioning it I was thinking…
JOSH LUCAS: They were really quietly dropped in. He was talking about being wasted at his… This guy was dark for a period of time. Enough so that the woman whom he loved left him. He had to somehow fight himself to… and that’s how I approached this movie. I never really saw it just being something where I was going to do a light movie, hopefully make some money, and maybe get your TVQ up. I never thought about it that way. In terms of promoting this movie, I did. I was like, ‘You need to promote this movie, because not only do you like this movie, but you need to put yourself into a position where you can financially be in a position to … Like, The Deep End can’t be made without
Goran Visnjic because of ER? It can’t be made. There are often better-suited actors for certain parts than the ones who are put in it, because they don’t have the TVQ. Whatever those number ratios, they are just high. Then you put yourself into a position where I want to be able to make those movies and this is absolutely going to help me do that. I fuckin’ love this movie. Everyone I know who has seen it, so far, of my friends who are Southern, say it’s a really sweet, good movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was there anything about this particular cast and director that kind of engendered… that allowed you to put forth this other kind of role?
JOSH LUCAS: Totally Andy, completely Andy. But you also must understand that no one wanted me to do this movie except the director. The studio was like, ‘Who is this guy? He’s done nothing and he’s not financially viable. His movies are weird and dark and his characters are always bad, basically, so what makes you think that he can play light romantic comedy and leading man playful?’ For whatever reason [Andy] fully committed to making that happen and fought the studio the whole time. Then, when it came down to getting on set, then he was the one whose ass was on the line in a sense. He really had to genuinely help me find a lighter element of my acting technique than I had ever had to find before. It was tremendously beneficial to me because it was taking myself quite a bit less seriously and finding moments that were much more playful and easy and kind of just rolled off the cuff.
CHRIS NEUMER: Can you give a specific example of something like that where he was helping you?
JOSH LUCAS: Yeah, in the first moment of the movie where I walk out. We shot it the first thing we did in the whole movie. I walk out, Reese is sitting there, she walks out, comes in the door and says, ‘You shoot me.’ I, in typical Josh fashion, come and play it like a psychopath. [Laughter] Andy was like, ‘What are you doing? The character is a really sweet, lovely guy and you’re coming out of the door like you are pissed off. You don’t like her?’
CHRIS NEUMER: Weren’t you pissed off?
JOSH LUCAS: Yeah, but still, there’s a big difference between a lovely nature and a dark nature. I always go to the dark first. He said, ‘No, man, you go to the light. Sure you can still be pissed off and edgy, but it has to come from a much more gentle place. Be much more respectful because you totally love this woman. You’ve been waiting for this moment for seven years.’ He was constantly having to talk to me and say, ‘Come on. Stop being the psycho, the serial killer.’ We always played the game. I got one Ralph Fiennes take. And then we did it the rest of the movie. It was always in those Ralph Fiennes and they’re not in the movie once. There’s the scene where I come up to [Patrick] and I say, ‘You and I are in love with two different women.’ I remember when I did that scene; I did it like I wanted to rip his head off. Andy said, ‘No, no. Come on, Josh. You don’t dislike this guy. He is not the bad guy.’
CHRIS NEUMER: Patrick, he was a very, very pathetic character.
JOSH LUCAS: But I wasn’t playing it that way. I was playing it as if I wanted to kill him and he was a threat and I was jealous. So I had to constantly do that with him.
CHRIS NEUMER: So we have to look forward to the scenes on outtakes?
JOSH LUCAS: That would be funny if Andy did that, if Andy did the Ralph Fiennes version of Jake. It’s definitely there.
CHRIS NEUMER: It would certainly make for some interesting special features. Why do you always go to the dark situation like that? Just experience?
JOSH LUCAS: I think because it always feels the most dramatic, the most wildly interesting. And oftentimes it’s not necessarily the most truthful. I think life is often quite a bit more… I think there are moments in life where… violence and pulses of rage, and all these things that happen in life, are actually really, really rare, really built-up moments. If there is a moment of violence, it is usually built up over a tremendous amount of time. But in terms of theatrical and movie violence it’s just ‘boom.’
CHRIS NEUMER: With this light romantic comedy under your belt, is your toolbox more complete now with this?
JOSH LUCAS: Yeah, but I hope I keep filling it up all the time. I have to go immediately to The Hulk to do something deep, absolutely the opposite of Jake, a totally different kind of director; a totally different kind of production. Now I’m in the beginning process of searching for the thing that will be the opposite of The Hulk and different from Jake and different from Sweet Home. Do you know Michael Winterbottom, the guy who did Celebration? He’s doing an amazing movie that I’d love to be a part of. It’s a rather beautiful study of an alcoholic and a man who’s quite a lovely man, a man to me who seems fascinating. Not that I’m doing it at all but it’s a complete shift from someone who is totally charismatic and maniacal, like the character in The Hulk, which is a total shift from that lovely sweetness of Jake.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is there any research you did for Andy of other characters of projects?
JOSH LUCAS: For Sweet Home? Tremendous. First of all, it all came down in the late forties and early fifties. Romantic comedies we really wanted to recreate. He was very specific from the beginning; it’s Hepburn and Tracy. It’s like The Philadelphia Story. It’s an older style of movies. You’re talking about a whole different generation. We didn’t want the acting to be necessarily from that style, but we did want the cadence, pacing and rhythm of the dialogue to come from that space. I had a bitch of a time getting back my accent. I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard. I ended up spending a lot of time with a dialogue coach and spending a lot of time, a ton of time, studying romantic comedies, which I think usually suck. Just finding ones that were good and why they worked and what worked about certain actors within them and not actors within other ones. I forced myself to have Comedy Central on 24 hours a day when I was in a hotel room because I needed to reverse what I knew. They are not the movies that I love. I love Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. Do you know that one; the title translates to Lovers on the Bridge? If you haven’t seen it, you’re a film fanatic, that is one of the greatest films ever made. Martin Scorsese released it about a year ago in this country. Juliette Binoche is in it. It’s one of the most expensive French films ever made. It’s a dark, powerful, beautiful movie. That’s how I would spend my day, but Andy was, ‘No, you can’t do that now. You’ve got to skip that now and put it on Comedy Central and watch Saturday Night Live all the time. You have to watch people be playful and joyous.
