Tim Blake Nelson has been gracing our screens for decades.
One of the signature character actors of his generation, Nelson will be the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award at this year’s Rome International Film Festival, which runs this weekend from Oct. 31 to Nov. 3. Nelson’s new film “Bang Bang” will screen at the festival, but his work in front of the camera isn’t the whole story.
Nelson has worked with some of the best of the best, taking on roles in the likes of “Lincoln” and “The Thin Red Line,” but is probably best known for his work with Joel and Ethan Coen – he played one of the three hapless escaped convicts in “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” and the titular singing cowboy in “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” As much as he’s an actor, though, he’s also a prolific writer and director. Nelson has also written numerous plays, many of which have been turned into films that he then directed – movies like “Eye of God” and “The Grey Zone.”
In the lead up to the festival, I got the opportunity to speak with Nelson over Zoom one afternoon, where we talked about his career. He evokes a certain intelligence when he speaks, choosing his words very intentionally, pausing when he needs to think, or consider his next sentence. We spoke about everything from the role of an actor in supporting a director’s vision, to the influence of someone like Flannery O’Connor on Nelson’s sensibilities as a storyteller.
You can read that conversation below. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I was at the Rome International Film Festival last year, and I know that you were too. Was that your first time? How did it strike you as a smaller festival?
Tim Blake Nelson: I guess I’d have to say, it’s my favorite truly boutique festival in the country. Because it resolutely holds on to its intimate size, even while presenting films in a venue that can accommodate a large audience. I love the people of Rome and the way that Rome truly supports that festival. It really feels like an event. And also just topographically, architecturally, I think Rome, very quietly, is one of the most interesting cities in the South.
It’s definitely an interesting kind of conflux of things, right? You’ve got the arts scene, you’ve got the college right there, and a lot of really great natural scenery around.
Nelson: And those hills … You have beautifully maintained and restored architecture. There’s a husband and wife that are – they can’t be much into their 40s – who host this party that I will never forget. They just opened their house up to the community. Ever since they called to say they wanted me to come down again, I’ve been looking forward, hoping that party is gonna happen again, because I had such a great time.
You talked about getting the call to come back. What was your reaction to being selected for this award?
Nelson: I couldn’t think of a greater honor than to get an award associated in any way with the legacy of Flannery O’Connor. So fervent is my admiration of her and my appreciation of her influence over me as a storyteller, that I had the boorish audacity to inform [RIFF Creative Director] Seth Ingram last year that should they ever offer me the award, I would take it [laughs].
Well it all worked out, apparently.
Nelson: A bit coercive.
What is your relationship to her work? How has she influenced you as a writer, or storyteller?
Nelson: She was the first short story writer I read with whom I could really connect. I’d read Salinger, and I’d read Hemingway, and I’d read one act plays by Tennessee Williams. But it was Flannery O’Connor who described the South in a way that I saw in my own surroundings in Oklahoma – in mining the darker aspects of it, the beauty, and the grotesqueness. The gorgeous truths along with the ugliness. There’s something so macabre in almost every one of her stories. She was, in a sense, my real introduction to subjectivity. And part of that’s because I read her at the right time. I’ve grown into an ability to understand what it was she was up to.
Your new film “Bang Bang” is going to be playing at the festival. Could you talk a little about that movie and how you came on board?
Nelson: I read the script, [got] asked if I wanted to play the part, offered also the opportunity to help produce it. Which to me, means supporting the director and protecting the director. I got along great with [director] Vincent Grashaw and Will Janowitz, the screenwriter. So once I was assured I’d be given the time and resources and room to prepare for the role, which was its own wonderful challenge I said I’m in.
Yeah, I was reading some interviews with you talking about the physical nature of the film – I know the character is a boxer. I was looking through your IMDB, and I didn’t see that you’d really done anything that required that amount of physical training before. How much of a challenge was that?
Nelson: You know, “Buster Scruggs,” I had to learn how to play the guitar, and work with the pistols. So every role – hopefully anyway, because these are the only roles that interest me – every role brings its own set of challenges. I don’t know where it is [begins looking for something]. I’m learning this right now [brings out a mandolin].
Oh wow! That’s nice.
Nelson: The mandolin.
Any particular reason?
Nelson: [Strums a bit] I’m learning it for a Western I’m doing, now in January. It was supposed to be in December, but that’s another story. But the boxing was not just challenging physically. The other issue was finding the mentality of a guy like that. I’m not a particularly confrontational person, so part of the training – which was pretty rigorous – was about getting my mind in the right space to play an irritable, bitter guy trying to redeem certain aspects of his life, and right some wrongs that had been done to him early on. And to do that in a way that was confrontational in ways that I’m not.
Do you find it harder to dig into a character when they’re so different from you? Or do you relish the challenge?
Nelson: It’s both. I relish the challenge – it’s kind of why I want to keep doing this. To be able to keep evolving and expanding and exploring at the age of 60, which is how old I am now, is – if you proposed when I was 25, that I would still be able to do that at age 60, that would have constituted an ideal life, how I imagined it back then. So it’s great to get to be living it.
I feel like with your career where it is now, you’ve gotten more of an opportunity to play leading roles than you did early on. I was reading an interview with you where you were talking about – and you’ve even mentioned during this conversation – the role of a good character actor, which is to support the movie stars, support the director, the production at large. I wondered if having the chance to step into leading roles in things like “Old Henry,” or even something like “Watchmen,” has that brought on a new sense of responsibility for you?
Nelson: Even with a movie like “There Will Be Blood,” or “Lincoln,” both of which are so dominated by the performance of one of the best actors who has ever lived [Daniel Day-Lewis], those were still ultimately Paul [Thomas Anderson]’s movie and Steven [Spielberg]’s movie – directors’ films, promoting a director’s vision. That’s why I go to movies. I certainly go to watch great performances and great photography and hear a great score. But ultimately, what I really want is to see all that put together in a coherent vision of a director. No matter what size of a role I have, I still ultimately feel like I’m serving somebody else as they share a take on the world through the moving image. So in that sense, it really doesn’t matter whether I’m the lead or I have just a couple of scenes. I want to be involved with something exciting, visionary, whatever word you want to choose. The main difference is that when you’re the lead in a movie in service of a director’s vision, you can set a tone with the actors, and just help make life easier for the director. Because people are going to be less inclined to be bratty and difficult if you’re easy. You’re the lead!
But you know, I kind of go back to the fact that I just want to be a part of interesting projects. Right now, I’m kind of in the middle of a very small role in this movie directed by Mona Fastvold. I just wanna be in her movie. She’s not so well known at this moment, but I think she’s already a top director, and potentially will soon be recognized as one of the living greats. I’m just playing a little more than a cameo in her movie, but it’s because it’s an exciting project.
You’ve directed and written things too. I wondered if being an actor, and having experience on the other side of the camera, affects how you approach directing?
Nelson: I write most of the movies I direct. I try to write exciting roles for actors, and usually, they’re roles that I could never play. [That’s] even more exciting, because I get to be around an actor doing things that are outside of my space. It’s why I like writing really good female roles, because I’m not going to be able to play those [laughs]. But also with the male roles, I like to write parts that are going to be exciting for actors. So I do lead with that. And I would suppose what I need most of all to develop and why I want to keep doing it, is to have that, but then get outside of that space and cover scenes in more interesting ways than just how do I most feature the performance. If you look at directors who are working today like Brady Corbet, and Ari Aster, Mona Fastvold, Maggie Gyllenhaal, I think is pretty exciting, the Safdies – in addition to these great performances at the center of their movies, they’re shot and staged in really interesting ways that are quintessentially cinematic and camera-oriented, rather than scenes dominated by close-ups and proscenium staging that’s sort of obvious and clumsy, and flat-footed. Things of which I’ve been guilty [laughs].
You’ve directed most of the things you’ve written, for the screen at least. I know a lot of them started out as plays, but when you’re writing a play, or you’re writing a screenplay, are you simultaneously thinking about how it’s going to be staged or shot? Or does that come later?
Nelson: A little bit. More in film. You know, a play is something that should be able to be read and imagined. Yes, it’s meant to be staged – that’s why you write it, and you want productions of it. But even in terms of the staging of it, at least when I write a play, I’m doing it so that somebody else can bring their vision of how it’ll be realized on the stage to the fore.
A movie is a different animal. A screenplay is not something you write so that people can read it as a retail proposition. It’s for professionals to take, mainly the director, and use as a blueprint, the way that you would take the blueprint and build a house. And the house is the movie. You’ve got all these people coming in. Cabinet makers, flooring experts, and roofers – you’ve got this whole crew in, and you build the house under the direction of the architect, if it’s a writer/director. And writer/directors, to me, that’s where it’s at. I love working for writer/directors. I love writing and directing, I love writing the films I direct. But in that paradigm, you’re absolutely writing for the way it should be filmed.
A couple of days ago, I watched the movie that your son Henry Nelson directed that you starred in, “Asleep in My Palm.”
Nelson: Oh, great!
I really enjoyed it. We’ve talked a lot about working with different directors and supporting their vision, and all that good stuff. What was it like working with your son in that way?
Nelson: Henry and I have been envisioning a collaboration that will last through any number of projects since he was 12 years old. That’s not a joke, I mean it’s true. I showed him “Fight Club” when he was 11, and he said, “Okay. I’ve never seen anything so exciting.” He was jolted by it. Within a year, he was saying, can we do this together? I want to do this with you. And he’s always been going to sets with me, and he watches me live this life, and it was pretty exciting to him. He’s also an accomplished musician and songwriter, and he’s got a burgeoning music career. I like to call him a creative Vesuvius.
I love collaborating with him, and being directed by him was a joy. I treated him as I would any director. He brought me the script. I knew that he could direct – he was young, it was his first time. As his producer, I stood next to him and counseled him, but the movie was always and remains his vision, his take on the world, what he was seeing around him at Oberlin College when he was there, which is where the movie is set. Because I was signed on as his lead actor, part of that contract is that you trust the person. It doesn’t matter that you’re his father. You have to leave that relationship at the door when you’re being directed, and you have to do what the person wants. Because you’ve signed on. There was never any direction he gave that was any problem for me. Any sort of impulse to resist the song directing the father was never really tested.
