Following in the footsteps of the likes of Billy Bob Thornton, Ethan Hawke, and Tim Blake Nelson, comedian, actor, and filmmaker Danny McBride took home this year’s Flannery O’Connor Award over the weekend at the Rome International Film Festival.
McBride is known for his roles in films such as “Hot Rod,” “Pineapple Express,” and “Tropic Thunder.” He also co-created and starred in the television shows “Eastbound & Down” and “Vice Principals,” and created and starred in the show “The Righteous Gemstones.” He frequently collaborates with filmmakers Jody Hill and David Gordon Green.
Last year’s winner, Jerusha Hess, helped select McBride for the award, which recognizes artists whose work “embodies the bold, distinctive and enduring spirit of Southern storytelling,” according to a press release. McBride was raised in Virginia but born in Statesboro, GA. He now lives in Charleston, SC.
In addition to being a filmmaker, McBride has recently added short story writer to his repertoire – something he shares in common with O’Connor. His debut collection of short stories, “Thrilling Tales of Modern Men,” published earlier this year.
Ahead of receiving the award this weekend, I spoke with McBride about his career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’re here for the Flannery O’Connor Award. I’m curious, what is your relationship to her, or did you have a relationship to her before this?
Danny McBride: You know, I’m pretty well-read. I don’t wanna toot my own horn – but I was attracted to her stories from a pretty young age. I think I read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in high school. I always appreciated her tone and her sensibilities, her sense of humor. In something like “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the idea that it can be funny, and that it can turn on a dime and be a little shocking too – that’s the type of storytelling I usually gravitate towards. I like to try to incorporate [those] same methods in some of the stuff I do. It’s awesome to get that honor. Growing up in the South, and to be put into the same world as her – it’s such an honor. It’s really cool.
You’ve written your own collection of short stories now. I read that you started writing on breaks during “Vice Principals,” I think it was?
McBride: Yeah. You know, I’ve always written. Ever since I was even a kid, I would always write stories. But I started writing short stories as just a way to kind of clear my brain in between these seasons of writing TV. Writing for television – 30-minute TV, especially – your brain gets trained into a certain way of creating. You’ve got to think of stories in terms of 30 minutes, and how they pay off, and how they connect to something larger.
The idea of writing a short story was kind of appealing. It’s like, oh – I can just create something that can be as long as I want it to be. It doesn’t have to connect to anything else. It can have a beginning, middle, and end, that all just happens in one reading. That just kind of felt fun, and it was an antidote to what I was doing. But then the more I compiled, the more invested I kind of got in these stories. I was really apprehensive about putting myself out there in that way, but I shared them with a few friends that I trusted who would shoot me straight, and they were like, yeah, I think you should keep working on these. So that’s what I did. I just kind of kept at it, and put this collection together.
Why were you apprehensive? What’s the difference between sharing that and sharing television or films?
McBride: It’s such a different format. With TV, for instance, you’re writing with a group of people. You’re creating by committee, and that gives you a sense of confidence in what you have. Because if you’re in there with all people whose voices you trust, you think, between all of us, we think we’re in the right zone. But also, when you write a script, it’s just a blueprint for how to tell the story. That script is then given to actors, and set designers, and musicians to do the score, and custumers – there’s all these other artists who are going to come in and expand upon what you’ve written to hopefully tell the story even better. So this was new, because you don’t have those collaborations. It’s really 100 percent on you. You’re telling the story. Your sensibilities are driving it, and there is no next phase where other artists come in to help you tell the story better. It all is up to you. So that was daunting, to wonder if I could do that.
You brought up creating by committee, and I know you’ve worked with a lot of the same people since college. I read an interview where you said something kind of interesting – you went to film school and were prepping to just be a filmmaker. Obviously, you’ve done that, but you’re also a performer. How did you find your way to performing from that initial goal?
McBride: It really just came from friends. Our way into this world was through independent cinema, and we didn’t have real connections to Los Angeles, or to the outside world in that way. And so, just like we would turn to each other to crew our movies, we would turn to each other to act in each other’s movies too. And I guess that some of my friends just saw me as being slightly better than some of my other friends, [laughs] so I was pushed to the front.
In some cases, you are writing for people you know, and you’re writing for yourself at times. What are the differences? When you know you’re writing for yourself, how does that affect you?
McBride: Even when I write, I kind of don’t think about that. I don’t think about, like, oh I’m doing this and someone else is doing that. Maybe it’s to a fault sometimes, but to write it, I have to look at all the characters as if they’re the main character, and make sure that there’s enough depth there for everyone. Sometimes, I probably think about the other characters honestly more than what I think about for myself. Especially with TV – you put together this cast of characters and you see what everyone’s capable of doing. To me, every season, I want to make sure that I give these people a chance to do something, and meat to chew on. That’s one of my big goals when I write, is just making sure that I’m going to create something that’s worth their time. And then I’ll kind of think of myself last a lot of times [laughs].
I was watching your Criterion Closet visit, and you selected “Five Easy Pieces.” You were talking about unlikeable characters, and gravitating towards them. I think there’s been an interesting turn lately towards likeability, and having that necessarily be something for a main character to have. I would love it if you could share your thoughts on that, and why you’re drawn to unlikable protagonists.
McBride: I think a little bit of it is just that, you know, in this day and age, the audience has access to every movie that’s ever been made, to every TV show that’s ever been made, to every audio book that’s ever been made. The average audience has access to so many stories, and they’re savvy. They can see things coming a mile away. They understand tropes, and they can see cliches. I just started kind of figuring out that a way to create a story that would surprise me, and hopefully surprise the audience, would be just changing the fundamental building blocks of how you’re telling the story. So, instead of choosing a traditional protagonist that might have a moral code that is universally respected and all this – when you start to change that, you start to change the fundamentals of what kind of protagonist you tell stories about, it enabled the story to hit moments or beats that might be a little bit more unexpected, and, as a writer, would keep me on my toes about how to navigate the likability and the investment the audience will have in this character. I think a lot of it comes from a standpoint of the challenge of it, of taking somebody who’s broken, or damaged, or unconventional, and figuring out how to get the audience invested in their journey of self-discovery.
I think as a viewer, at least for me, if I identify with someone that I don’t like, I’m gonna sit up a little straighter.
McBride: I think that’s an important part of storytelling. I think that’s what’s great about movies and fiction – everything – is the idea that you get to look at the world through somebody else’s eyes and somebody else’s shoes for a while. Because I think we’re all so inherently empathetic, you know? Even if it doesn’t seem that way. And I think that, even on the surface, you might see someone that you think, I don’t like a person like that. But then when you start to see how people tic, you could also see, but maybe I understand a little bit more of why they’re acting that way, or who they are. It doesn’t justify anybody, or it’s not really trying to [tell] the audience, you need to like people like this. But I think it just shows that nothing is really cut and dry in the world. People are complicated, and people can be both things. They can be terrible, and they can be beautiful.
