Matt Dillon's been acting all his life. But now it's time to step up to the plate, he tells Michael Dwyer
THEY say life begins at 40, although in terms of Matt Dillon's life as an actor, it would be more accurate to say it has experienced a new beginning since he turned 40 last year. Always a reliable actor with an easy screen presence, Dillon has been striking out in adventurous new directions and revealing a greater dramatic depth and range than before in the new movies Crash and Factotum.
When we first met over lunch in Greenwich Village back in 1984, Dillon was 20 and already had eight starring roles under his belt, including The Outsiders, Rumble Fish and The Flamingo Kid. He went on move comfortably between genres, most memorably in Drugstore Cowboy, Singles, To Die For, Wild Things and, in a hilariously sleazy turn, There's Something About Mary.
"I've been acting all my life, man," Dillon says when we meet again at the recent Galway Film Fleadh. His portrayal of a racist LA cop in Crash recalls the younger Nick Nolte in its power and intensity, but unlike Nolte and many of Dillon's own contemporaries, Dillon does not look at all ravaged by all his years in the movie business.
He's as affable and chatty as ever, asking about the escalating murder rate in Ireland since he made Frankie Starlight in Dublin 10 years ago, and openly disappointed that his directing debut, City of Ghosts, which had its belated Irish premiere in Galway, was consigned directly to DVD here and in Britain.
Dillon scripted the movie, a twisting tale of corruption and duplicity set in Cambodia, with Barry Gifford, the writer of David Lynch's Wild at Heart and Lost Highway. He cites several inspirations for the film. "I travelled to Cambodia and Thailand in the early 1990s and I met quite a few expats along the way, and some of them were definitely running away from things - very dark things in their lives, in some cases. That interested me, and Cambodia struck me as a place where you could disappear.
"Then I read a short article in the Herald Tribune, and I cut it out and taped it to the lampshade in the little office I have in my apartment. Interpol had released a statement saying some of the world's most wanted criminals were hiding out in Cambodia and taking advantage of the lack of extradition treaties there. There were thousands of them. Later on, I found out that the Interpol office in Phnom Penh had just two staff and a fax machine that didn't work.
"I wanted to create a world and an atmosphere that were malevolent yet seductive. I've always had an interest in the darker side of human nature, although I'm not a nihilistic person and I do believe in redemption." Dillon is justifiably pleased to have attracted a strong, eclectic cast to join him in the movie, including James Caan, Gérard Depardieu, Stellan Skarsgård and Natascha McElhone.
"There's a scene in a karaoke bar with me, Stellan and Jimmy Caan, and Jimmy gets up, closes his eyes and sings in fluent Khmer. I remember writing that before casting Jimmy, and it's much easier to write than getting it done. I told him he didn't have to do it in Khmer if he wasn't comfortable with it, and he said, 'Matt, why do you think I took the fucking job?'"
To prepare himself for directing his first feature, Dillon directed an episode of the tough TV prison series, Oz. "That was pretty good for me," he says. "When you direct a TV show, it's like boot camp. You have to shoot so many scenes every day. It was a very good opportunity for me to get experience as a director. I decided to write and direct a movie because I was getting sent a lot of scripts which just weren't that interesting, and I felt that maybe I had to step up to the plate."
He showed no hesitation when he was offered the role of a racist cop in Paul Haggis's riveting drama, Crash, which follows a spiralling series of events that intersects the lives of disparate characters in Los Angeles over the course of 36 hours. The ensemble cast also includes Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton, Ryan Phillippe, Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock.
"I don't think any of the actors had more than five scenes in the film, but each character has this enormous arc and they're so well defined," Dillon says. "Paul Haggis is really smart, a fine writer and someone who really knows about structure. He's very intense. For me as an actor, if I'm on the set and the director is pulling out his hair, I know I'm in the right place and that this guy is really focussed. Directing a film is not a popularity contest. At the same time you want to stay positive and you need your energy."
In a startlingscene, Dillon's character pulls over a wealthy black couple and subjects them to humiliating treatment. "I've never shied away from doing controversial material or playing unlikeable people," he says. "At the same time, when I was sitting in the theatre watching that scene, I found it hard to watch because it's not who I am. Yet, when you're doing it you're in the character, and then you see it and it's still you to a certain extent, in that you're playing the character.
"Even if I wasn't it, I would have been uncomfortable with that scene. My first response to the script and to playing that character was that this is truthful to the aggressive tactics of the LAPD. They have a reputation for this and I thought it was worth getting it out there and showing it.
"LA is such a huge, spread-out city that people can go for days and days without ever interacting with each other. In New York, where I live, people are forced to deal with each other, and that's a sign of a really great city.
"What really put it over the edge for me, and what really made me want to do the film, was that it explored the personal nature of this character. It really makes you re-examine the way you feel about him, and that's something the film does about several characters. I think it's an important movie. It asks questions, and I wasn't sure how people would react to it. I wondered how African-Americans would respond to seeing me on the street after they saw the movie. But everybody reacted favourably."
Critics at Cannes this summer responded favourably indeed to Dillon's portrayal of Charles Bukowski in Factotum, a picaresque picture drama from Bukowski's novel of the same name. Lili Taylor costars as his wife in the film, directed by Bent Hamer, the Norwegian film-maker of Kitchen Stories.
"Some people don't know what a factotum is," Dillon says. "It's someone who does a whole lot of things, in this case a kind of a functionary who goes from one dead-end job to another that nobody else wants to do, just so he can drink and write these poems and short stories that nobody wants to buy.
"The film, to me, is really about that spirit Bukowski had - to not compromise and to live the way he wants to live. At the end of the film we use a poem by Bukowski, Roll the Dice, in which he says if you're going to try, go all the way. And that was what he did, and he made great sacrifices to live that way."
Dillon gives a rich, deeply immersed performance, precisely catching the speech patterns and body language of a drunk - without, of course, getting sozzled on the set every day. He believes there are many misconceptions about Bukowski.
"He wasn't interested in beauty or the material world. Linda Bukowski made the point to me that in a lot of adaptations he's depicted as a slob and a bum. He may have lived in squalor and led a dysfunctional lifestyle, but he himself was very neat and I think he was quite elegant. I found a dignity in that, and it was important for me not to play into the stereotype of the drunken bum. He was a voice for all those guys who are in dead-end jobs and spend a few hours in a bar at night as a reprieve from their miserable world.
"I read a lot of interviews he did when he was younger, and in pictures he looked so different from the grizzled, white-haired image people have of him. He was actually quite a good-looking guy. The nice thing was that when Linda saw the film, she was very moved and she said she didn't know how I did it, but I managed to capture his spirit. To me, that meant so much.
"Working with Lili Taylor was good. She's a heavyweight actress and we had to do some tough scenes together - scenes we haven't seen in movies before, like the one where Hank's got crabs. When they first approached me about doing the film, I asked them, 'Are you sure you've got the right guy?' It's very rare when they think outside the box."
For something completely different, Dillon followed Crash and Factotum with Disney's latest spin on the Love Bug franchise, Herbie: Fully Loaded.
"When my agent approached me about it, it was another surprise," Dillon says. "My immediate response was 'I don't think so. I don't think this is what I want to do.' Then I read the script and I definitely said no because the character hadn't been fleshed out. They said they were working on that. When I read the re-write, I just laughed out loud and thought I should do it.
"I play Trip Murphy, the bad boy of Nascar - a conceited, arrogant, self-serving driver - and it's totally tongue-in-cheek. Finally I've made a film that my nephews and nieces can go and see, which is cool, and that's one of the reasons I did it, although actually my dad loved it."
Dillon is back in New York now, collaborating with Monster screenwriter Patti Jenkins on his next, as-yet-untitled project as writer-director. "It's an ambitious true crime story about this Irish-American criminal in the 1970s and '80s." he says
"I'm working on a rewrite of that with Patti. She's a good friend of mine, but she's not the kind of person who would take a job just for the sake of it. She read a long draft I did and she put some notes on it, and now she's working with me on it. I'm planning to direct it. I hope they release it in cinemas in Ireland this time."
City of Ghosts is now available on DVD; Herbie: Fully Loaded opens next Friday; Crash opens on August 12th; Factotum will be released in November
