Co-stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jeff Bridges
Crazy Heart is the portrait of a country music singer who's lived hard, fast and recklessly, and although he's become a broken down man who's had too many marriages, too many years on the road and too many drinks, he continues to seek redemption.
Four-time Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges stars as the richly comic, semi-tragic yet still romantic Bad Blake, who finds hope in Wayne (Robert Duvall), his only real friend, and Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a journalist who discovers the human being behind the heart of a musician.
In our Q&A below, the cast discusses the making of Crazy Heart, Bridges gives a preview of Tron: Legacy, and Duvall flashes back to Tender Mercies.
Q: What did it take to get you to sing in this film?
Jeff Bridges: When I first got the script, there wasn't any music attached to it, so I took a passer on it. Then, when I found out my good buddy T-Bone Burnett was going to do it if I was going to do it, that filled in the empty, missing piece. So when he got involved, I knew the music was going to be top notch, and that got me to the party really quick.
Q: How did you first meet Jeff?
Maggie Gyllenhaal: Well, I met him at the premiere for Mona Lisa Smile when I was like a baby. He was there because his nephew was in the movie. I sort of went up to him after I'd had a couple glasses of champagne and said, "I love your movies." I was like, "This is my premiere; I can talk to whoever I want." He said, "We're going to work together one day." And my entire week was made. But then it happened. And I'm glad that it happened however many years later when I had a better sense of myself as an artist.
Q: Is the life of an actor just as hard as the life of a musician on the road?
Bridges: Yeah. My wife told me that we've been apart 11 months this year. That's tough. That's the hardest part for me. But we've been married 33 years and we've done this a lot together, so we know the routine and how much we depend on each other. It's great to have a partner like that. But there is a similarity [between] acting and singing.
Q: What draws a woman to a man like Bad Blake in spite of all the flashing danger signs? What moves her to take so many risks?
Gyllenhaal: I think Jean accepts a lot of these things in Bad because she herself is kind of drunk on love for him. I also think there's a part of her that loves how it feels to be bad. But, she's a really emotional person and there are parts of Bad that are so wonderful, the way he cares for her son Buddy, which really moves her, the way he's so loving with her, even when he's drunk. She just doesn't want to acknowledge that there's this gaping hole that will ultimately make it impossible for them to be together.
Q: What was it like to work and sing with Colin Farrell?
Bridges: He was great to work with. With movies, you only have a certain time to pull it all together. For this one, we just had 24 days to do it, so you're really looking for comrades that can get the fire going as quickly as possible. I think Colin worked maybe four or five days, but we hit it off, right off the bat. We approached the work in a similar way and got along great. It was a joy working with him.
The first time I saw him was in Tigerland, and I've been keeping up with his career. I loved In Bruges. I thought that was a great movie. And then, singing together is a great way to strike up a relationship with your fellow actors, when you harmonize. That all fell into place really well.
Q: In this film, your character Bad Blake is a mentor to Colin Farrell's character Tommy Sweet. Who have been your mentors?
Bridges: Well, my dad was my mentor. Unlike a lot of actors, he really encouraged all of his kids to go into show business. He loved it so much. When I was a little kid, he came up to me and said, "Hey, you wanna be in 'Sea Hunt'? There's a little part." That was a TV series my dad had in the '60s, and I said, "I don't know." And he said, "Well, you get to get out of school. You can make some money and buy some toys."
I remember a big turning point in my career was doing a movie version of The Iceman Cometh. I got to work with all these masters like Robert Ryan, Fredric March and Lee Marvin. Most of my scenes were with Robert Ryan and I learned a lot from working with him about fear and insecurity. I remember doing a scene with him across the table in a bar, and we were waiting for the [filming to begin]. He took his hands off the table and there were two big puddles of sweat on the table and I said, "Bob, gee, after all these years, you're still frightened, nervous and scared?" And he said, "Oh, yeah. I'd be really scared if I wasn't scared." That let me know that fear is always going to be with you. It's how you deal with that. It's hopeless to think you're going to get rid of that.
Q: Robert, we know you've been mentored and have mentored others, but as a producer, who mentored you?
Robert Duvall: As a producer? I don't know. I don't know. You just kind of find your own way really. Going back to Colin, that was the one part that was the most difficult to cast. You couldn't find anybody and you couldn't start until you found someone.
Duvall, who costars and produces the film, says the film honors "a great American tradition, country music, a world I know very well and am happy to be returning to after many years. The story reminded me of Tender Mercies, only Horton Foote took a more delicate approach."
Tender Mercies garnered Duvall an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1984. Both Mercies and Heart depict a broken down, middle-aged country singer trying to put his troubled life back together.
Q: Did you feel like you were going down memory lane with Tender Mercies doing this film?
Duvall: Much more pleasant. This is much more pleasant to do. I won't go into the difficulties in that. It was not that easy…This was much more harmonious and much more fun to do. But that part, the genre, Horton Foote, a great writer, an original script…[these are] two different guys, two different perceptions, but with similar demons. But my character in [Mercies] had a support group in my wife, my son and a baptism.
Here, Jeff's character has nothing. He blows everything because of the son. He risks the kid's life, and [Jean] dumps him, which she should. A lot of women would not do that. They'd continue in that self-destructive [mode] by staying with a guy like this. [Blake] doesn't have a support group under him like I had in Tender Mercies.
Q: Maggie, how much of your own experience as a mother came into play creating the character?
Gyllenhaal: When I look at the movie now, I kind of see what Jean is really going through. I don't know if that's just part of the movie inherently or I put it there, but I think for Jean it's like she's got this four year old who, at least for a big chunk of time, she's been raising alone. She's just been trying to do good, trying to be good, trying to manage and I think she just finally says, "I need something for me. I need something that feels good to me and I don't care if it's bad for me. It's better if it's bad for me." I think she really falls in love with [Bad Blake] but you know, I think that's a line every mother walks and I think if you're a mother, you know what I mean. Balancing what you need in order to be alive and what you have to sacrifice for your kids.
Q: Jeff, for the upcoming Tron: Legacy, what was it like to play Kevin Flynn again since the last time you played that character was 1982?
Bridges: Wow, it was great. Getting back with my old buddy, Steven Lisberger, and Bruce Boxleitner. I guess the same thing appealed to me about the sequel that appealed to me about the original, which was this idea that there's a kid aspect to what I do, pretending and all that stuff. I used to love to pretend when I was a kid, and here's a movie where I get to play a guy who gets sucked inside a computer and gets to use all the modern technology that's available today.
The same goes with the sequel, except that all the technology that we're using in [it] makes the old one look like an old black and white TV show or something. Gosh, it's amazing what they've got going on this. I can't wait to see it all pasted together.
Q: That teaser you shot was wonderful. When you actually shot the movie, how much had changed from that whole concept?
Bridges: That teaser was something they do kind of often with movies, and I think it's a good idea. The Coen brothers told me they did it when making Blood Simple. Before they even shoot the movie at all, they shoot the trailer of the movie as if it was already made, and then they use that to entice the financiers.
So, even though it was a Disney property, Disney wanted them to shoot this pretty expensive trailer…all that technology that we were going to use in the movie itself is used in the trailer. It wasn't as highly polished as the movie is going to be, but it gives you a little peak into what you might find.
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