Roger Durling with Actors Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart on December 9, 2012
Roger Durling: Garret, you’ve been involved with this project from the get-go, how many years has it been?
Garrett Hedlund: Since 2007.
Durling: And I read that you gave up other opportunities with other
films to be in this project. What was it that made you so adamant about
being a part of it?
Hedlund: You’d be crazy not to, you know when Walter gave me this role, I
thought it was one of the most incredible things that had ever happened
to me. And also, you know, I was a big fan of the book. I read it for
the first time, I was seventeen, and a lot of the other writers from the
beats and just literature in general had such a huge influence on me. I
felt that to be involved with something as iconic as this was an
opportunity of a lifetime, really. And I could go as deep as I could in
terms of research, I mean, we had time. The film wasn’t greenlit at the
point when I signed on, so there was years of meeting the family members
of the characters in the book. You know, Dean Moriarity was the alter
ego of Neal Cassady, so I spent a lot of time with John Cassady, his
son. I got to go to San Francisco and meet with some of the other beat
writers and sit down with them. I spent a lot of time reading Kerouac
and Cassady and all the letters, I read all of the writers that inspired
them – Proust, and Nietzche and Wolfe. So it was, you know, really
incredible.
Durling: And Kristen, you’ve also been involved with this project for a very long time, since, Into The Wild with Sean Penn?
Kristen Stewart: It was a little after that. I think it was in 2007, I was seventeen.
Durling: What was it that attracted you to this role?
Stewart: On The Road was my first favorite book. I read it as a
freshman in high school. And then when I heard Walter was directing it I
would have done anything to be involved. I would have been his
assistant on it. I would have done craft service. The reason you love
something, it’s so clear. I don’t even really remember the details of
the initial conversation; I think I just drove away shaking. I mean I
was fairly certain. Not necessarily that I would get the part, because
it could have been decades and we still would have had to wait fifty
years for it to begin, but that I wanted to commit to something like
that. Which is obviously, at least the way I remember, so irresponsible
of me. I wasn’t ready for that part yet, at all. I got involved when
Garrett did, and if fifty years had gone by and we’d missed out then it
would have been a really painful experience.
Durling: I had a question for Walter, and maybe you can answer this.
Why did it take so long? I don’t know if everyone knows the history, but
Francis Ford Coppola had the rights, correct?
Hedlund: Since 1979.
Durling: Did Walter share with you why it took so long to get the project going?
Hedlund: I mean it definitely wasn’t the natural arc that most films are
made in. I think it was a struggle to formulate a script that captured
the spontaneous style that these guys were living in. But there’s
something extra all throughout you know, with the crazy cats,
conversations, and crazy experiences. Godard was going to do it at one
point. And obviously Francis Ford Coppola was going to direct it. Lots
of others, I think Gus Van Sant at one point. And Francis had drafted a
script all the way back in 79 or 80, and I think it was a big struggle
for him to capture the internal rhythm that fueled these guys’ journey.
Anyone that was going to direct this journey had to find out for
themselves which subject matter was to be the most important in the
production of the story. And that’s not to say, you know, you can read
through the book and almost every moment stands out and we shot every
scene and we always joked that the DVD was going to be very rich. Lots
of cutting room floor material. Walter was initially approached at
Sundance when he was there for The Motorcycle Diaries. Someone from
Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s company, approached him with On The
Road. He felt that as a Brazilian filmmaker, this wasn’t his territory
whatsoever. While he’d read the book in 1974 and it inspired him so
much, and helped make him want to be a filmmaker, it inspired him about
the lands of America that had this sense of yearning and freedom. He was
never going to agree to the film because he felt that for him it would
be necessary to do a cross-country journey; retracing the steps of
Kerouac and Neal and the other literary figures that were around. So he
did a cross-country journey for four years, before we even shot the film
and created, “The Search for ‘On The Road’”. In doing the documentary
he took up so much passion for the people the book and the journey that
he found it irresistible.
Durling: Kristen, in the book the women, especially Mary Lou, are
shall I say, underwritten. Were you involved in the process of expanding
the character of Mary Lou?
Stewart: Yeah, she’s definitely on the periphery of the story. I
think some of the people behind the characters thought it would be
easier to not change the story necessarily and never add anything
really. It was always just sort of felt. I think a really common idea in
the book is that the women are treated as sort of playthings like
they’re ambience or sexy wild things.
Durling: Which seems like misogyny to some people.
Stewart: Yeah, which is interesting to me because I always hear
men say that like, “So hey, don’t you think there’s a chauvinist feeling
to the use of women in the story?” and I think that’s a kind of
simplistic way of looking at it. They’re not on the forefront of the
story so you don’t know where their hearts or where their minds are. But
at the same time, getting to know Luanne especially, I don’t think
anyone could have taken from her. She was so generous and giving and
what she was getting in return was not leaving her empty. The same goes
for Dean. She was an incredibly formidable partner and talk about a girl
who doesn’t know fear. She was just a teenager and it’s not a very
typical quality for a teenager to have. That like, really hungry and
unselfconscious and self-aware thing. It’s not common. As soon as I met
her daughter, she went into great detail; she’s got a killer memory as
well, and everything just made sense. I think we were able to feel them
instead of having to have to illustrate it. It sort of just came across
as we got to know them and how we loved the people.
Hedlund: She’s wise beyond her years, this character. I mean, she’s the
one who left me in New York at the beginning. I just thought Dean and
MaryLou were so parallel because she was wise beyond her years, he was
as well, and they were kind of just great travelling companions. She was
kind of the mirror image of him in a way, because just like that she
left him to go back to Denver when she reveals that she has a husband to
return to.
Stewart: They kind of helped to raise each other.
Durling: You talked about the research you did for the roles. I read
somewhere that Walter did a “Beat Camp” for you guys. Can you describe
it? Was that sort of rehearsals or improvisation before?
Hedlund: All of the above. On this film, it went kind of fast. We only
had six weeks of pre-production before going on the road for six months
to shoot. And four of those weeks we spent in Montreal. We started in
the middle of the summer and kind of camped out in this apartment where
Sam Riley, Kristen, Walter, and I would all go to and we would have the
family members come. John Cassady, Anne-Marie Santos (LouAnne’s
daughter), and Gerald Nicosia who wrote Memory Babe, a Jack Kerouac
biography, who also shared with us hundreds of hours of audiotape of
MaryLou speaking of Jack and Neal, which was incredibly powerful. We
watched old films that Walter would share with us, Shadows, John
Cassavettes, and a film that just saw the light of day, The Exiles,
which had been in archival footage for up until maybe five years ago,
and it was shot in the fifties. All of the walls surrounding were filled
with photos of the characters, the locations of the houses, the
locations where we were gonna go, what it looked like then, what it’s
going to look like now. Jazz was constantly playing. Dexter Gordon,
Slim, Jack McQueen, Miles – playing all day along. And all the reading
that we had to do. There was hundreds and hundreds of letters that all
of these characters wrote to each other. More particularly, Neal Cassady
wrote to Jack. They’re very personal and uncensored, and from then we
got to sort of realize the thought processes and what made everyone
tick.
Durling: Kristen, the Hudson is another character in the movie and
you obviously spent a lot of time inside this car. What was that
experience like, it seemed awfully claustrophobic.
Stewart: Really?
Hedlund: Remember Argentina?
Stewart: Yeah, that got old.
Hedlund: After Montreal we needed snow in August. So we went all the way
down to Patagonia in Chile and shot for three days. I remember there
was a banana on the backseat floor and that’s how you could tell how
long the day was by the current state of the banana. Obviously the
banana was getting squished on the backseat floor, and whoever was in
the backseat would be you know…
Stewart: Making disgusting jokes about the state of the banana that don’t need to be repeated here.
Hedlund: They only made the Hudson for about six years; I think the last
Hudson was made in ‘54. It’s a wonderful, wonderful car. I bought a ‘53
Hudson before we started shooting and this was a ‘49 Hudson but I just
wanted to get used to the three on the tree and driving it. All these
shots where everybody’s in the car, you had to know how to handle this
thing. Like when we were shooting the blizzard scenes with my head out
the window I was actually driving the car. The camera’s just out there,
nobody’s around so we just did the scene driving down a blizzard road.
Walter would be walking and say, “There’s a snowplow coming! Do you see
the snowplow?” It was like, “I can’t fucking see anything just tell him
to watch out for me.”
Durling: You know, you mentioned Argentina. A lot of these landscapes
have disappeared in the United States because of the commercial sprawl
and so you had to travel to other parts of the world. Can you tell us
about that?
Hedlund: Yeah, after we started in Montreal for about three weeks, went
down to Argentina. Flew over to Chile; shot there for three days. Flew
up to New Orleans; shot for two weeks. Flew over to Arizona; shot for
two weeks. Down to Mexico City, for another three weeks, and after we
finished that they said, “We’re halfway!” Then there was Calgary for
three weeks, Montreal for another month, and then we finished in San
Francisco for the last four days of shooting, which were mostly either
the interiors with Dean and Camille or driving through Russian Hill.
Then, Walter and I went on a three week journey with a five man crew
where we took the Hudson from New York to Los Angeles, because with the
principal photography we couldn’t possibly get all the lands of America
throughout the schedule we had. So Walter and I shot the Harlem rooftop
scenes there then went out to the Adirondacks to get more snow shots,
broke down in Utica, drove through a blizzard to Erie, Pennsylvania,
with my head out the window. We didn’t have a speedometer or windshield
wipers, and our gas can was in the trunk of the car so obviously there
was some gasoline high going on as well. We drove with no brakes from
Cincinnati to Lexington, Kentucky, then over to Nashville where we tried
to find brakes on a Sunday in the Bible belt. We were driving only on
back roads too, so it took us eight hours to get to Memphis where it
would have taken two hours by freeway. Broke down in Texarkana,
Arkansas. Broke down in Lubbock, Texas. Broke down in Las Vegas, New
Mexico for three days. Then up through Arizona, down to Phoenix and then
where it would have taken five hours by freeway, it took us eighteen
hours to get from Phoenix to Los Angeles and that’s where we found that
railroad that you see in the end credits between California and Arizona.
We just stopped to take a photograph and we saw this wonderful railroad
track over there. And if anybody knows Neal Cassady or his life, he had
died, or was found dead walking from Temple Town, New Mexico on the
railroad tracks. And was found between towns where he had gone to
revisit the ties that him and Kerouac had had in the city when he was
down there for a wedding. So, it was very special that we at least got
to have that footage. I didn’t even know it had made the cut.
Durling: Kristen, you mentioned MaryLou’s daughter…Has the family seen the film? And what was their reaction?
Stewart: Yeah, I think Anne Marie saw it a few weeks ago, we were
in San Francisco and she attended a screening with her husband and
daughter. I think she’s really happy with it. The thing that Luanne
always did with her daughter, and probably with many other aspects of
her life as well, was that she really kept things separate. Which is why
I got a really interesting perspective through her daughter. Her
values, and desires, and ideals were pretty varying. And yet she was
able to provide herself with the life she wanted to live. I mean
afterwards, she was just smiling a lot. Her mother had just passed away
right before we were about to get this thing going. Out of a lot of
characters in the book, she would have been one of the ones that would
have been really enthusiastic and into it and would have loved to talk
to us, and it’s too bad that it was timed badly. But yeah, I think she’s
happy with it. She said that she’s always really shocked and surprised
by that aspect of her mom’s life because she came right after. She would
tell us stories about people coming back to the house and her mom would
never explain to her who they were, so one day she was sitting there,
she was sixteen years old and she answered the door to Neal Cassady. He
looked at her and–he could always never accept the fact that she wasn’t
his daughter. So he was always like, “Oh look! She’s got my eyes!” when
she was a little baby, and Luanne would be like, “Uh, no, she doesn’t.”
Which is crazy, it’s always insane to me that they never had a child
together after all that. But anyway, Neal looked at her and said, “Oh,
you’re not as pretty as Jack said you were. Where’s your mom?” and she
was like, “Who are you?” Then she found out years later who he was, and
he had shown up on the bus actually.
Hedlund: Oh yeah, the bus from the Electric Kool-Aid Acid test days. But
it’s also special, Anne Marie the other night had given each of us a
vinyl from her mom’s personal collection. Her mom, appreciated her vinyl
so much that all of these had her initials on the back in the top right
corner so…
Stewart: Yeah, there’s a little “Lu” and it’s really cute.
Durling: So the jazz, I wanted to ask Walter about the music but one
of my favorite moments in the movie is your dance sequence. Was that
choreographed, or could you explain how that scene was shot?
Hedlund: Yeah, it was maybe choreographed in the way of memorizing your
lines and knowing what to say but having the freedom to improvise.
Because at that point, and I know that later we found out that Luanne’s
favorite dance was the jitterbug but that would have been a little too
cliché for this moment, and at that period we couldn’t find any
reference of dance because they were coming out of swing and moving into
be-bop. So we just interpreted that and learned a few interesting steps
and what to do, and it was much more on the seductive side. Really we
just learned a few steps and Walter would film ten minutes without
calling cut. So of course we had to use a song that was cut to ten
minutes so those were some of the most exhausting days of the shoot. We
were just being maniacal on the dance floor and a big sort of bash was
going on but after ten minutes, cut. Then we’d run outside to catch our
breath.
Stewart: There was no air in the room either. It was totally like a vacuum. It was hot.
Durling: Well it was a really enjoyable moment. Garrett, this is not a
very likeable character. Was it difficult to inhabit for such a long
period? I mean he’s very seductive and attractive and you’re a good
looking guy, but he’s ultimately despicable.
Hedlund: I think the energy was the most exhausting thing. You know when
I first read the book, I always empathized with the Kerouac character,
Sal Paradise, because at that time, I was doubling up on credits to move
out to Los Angeles and literature was a big thing. I was going through
Creative Writing and World Lit at the same time, so seeing his kind of
spontaneous prose and his never ending riff on people and places and all
aspects of life. Just anything he observed and not being the
attraction, but writing about what’s attractive and writing about the
beautiful imperfections of life. And then when I met with Walter I was
so nervous, because reading the book you’re so attracted to this
energetic nut who had this genius mind that goes on and on and on about
how Twain said this and Proust said this because he really wanted to be a
writer and he wanted to go to Columbia like Kerouac. So, I remember
trying to put these words in my mouth for the first time and it was
nerve-wracking, but I had a lot of coffee.
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