IS THAT WHO I THINK IT IS?
Michael Clayton and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, two major players in this year's awards season that are either at your local theaters or will be soon, share more in common than both being Warner Brothers releases and starring one of the two biggest movie stars in the world (George Clooney in Clayton and Brad Pitt in James, respectively)... they also both feature standout performances by non-actors.
In Clayton, director Sydney Pollack (Tootsie, Out of Africa) steals every scene he's in a substantial part as the head of the law firm that employs Clooney, and in James, political strategist/Gollum look-alike James Carville is well-cast in the smaller but no less flashy role of Thomas Crittenden, the fiery governor of Missouri. Since seeing both films in Toronto, I have thought a lot about the interesting choice to cast non-actors in these parts, and have come across a few pieces that begin to explain the decisions.
Clayton director Tony Gilroy told one reporter, "Sydney is a producer on the movie, but I would have come after him as an actor anyway. And it goes back to trying to make George uncomfortable. Sydney plays George's boss and I wanted him to do everything he could to take every scene away from George. And he does. I wanted an actor who wouldn't be afraid to go toe-to-toe with George in some pretty intense scenes and Sydney isn't afraid of anything."
James director Andrew Dominik was somewhat less generous when he insisted he'd never work with the 'Ragin' Cajun' again: "I didn't want to hire him in the first place. He came unprepared. He couldn't get his lines out right. It's like he has ADD. It took us three hours to shoot that one small scene." Never one to back down from a fight, Carville, who has previously made cameos in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) and Man of the Year (2006), retorted: "Hey, someone called me and asked if I wanted to be in the movie. I flew out to Calgary. I'd come from four other things. Did I nail it the first time? No, it took a little while. Casey Affleck helped out a lot. But I think we had fun. No one is going to confuse me with Laurence Olivier, but who cares how the sausage is made? It's how it tastes!"
On a related note: former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, who is now suing 'the Tiffany Network', recently made a cameo on ABC television's Dirty Sexy Money. You can watch a clip of his scene here, but let's just say he makes Carville look like an old pro--not that Billy Baldwin, his professional co-star, is much better.
