Edward R. Murrow did things that broadcast journalists today would never dream of--like smoke cigarettes on the air.
As for Murrow's progressive political ideas and fervent belief in free speech and objective reporting, Strathairn, an admitted liberal, had no problem adopting those aspects of his character. Nor do audiences, apparently: from a standing ovation at the Venice festival to a screening for students at Tufts University that was held just the night before this interview, the overwhelming majority of viewers have been enthusiastic.
"In Italy it was great. They all thought it was about Berlusconi. And at Tufts they were really excited about it. It felt like a rally at the school, a rallying cry for journalists and educators. How do we get it back, how do we make the media better? Sort of like a brainstorming group all inspired by this film. It was exciting."
"I have no answers for that, except try and apply Murrow's standards and professionalism, his integrity, bravery, and perseverance, and his humanity. His belief that we are as good as what we know."
Which, these days, is very problematic, especially when a lot of what people know about the world comes from movies, celebrities, or journalists who are celebrities. Does Strathairn have problems with actors spouting off like politicians, or with journalism entangled with entertainment?
"That's a slippery slope. George [Clooney] is a citizen, artists are citizens, journalists are citizens. Just because they are movie stars doesn't mean they can't speak out like anybody else. Some people willy-nilly dismiss Sean Penn or George or attack Angelina Jolie for what she probably felt deeply about the children’s plight when she was making that film [Beyond Borders]. On the other hand, you have Warren Beatty who might be up against Schwarzenegger. Bulworth will be up against the Terminator as the governor of California. I mean, that's insane."
How about himself? Does he see a potential campaign (other than for an Oscar, which many consider a distinct possibility) in the future?
"It feels like you make a movie like this and all of a sudden you are politicized. No, I don't think so..."
At least he can say with all honesty that he didn't inhale.
Edward R. Murrow was the greatest newsman of his day. He spoke to America during the dawn of the television age and set the standard for integrity in journalism. In 1953, during the height of McCarthyism and 'The Red Scare', Murrow took on Senator Joseph McCarthy and challenged his tactics in front of the entire country. Good Night, Good Luck, was Murrow's trademark denouement. The film is based on this particular event. It shows, quite brilliantly, the dangerous line Murrow and his colleagues walked in their defense of American ideals. David Strathairn, one of Hollywood's venerable character actors, steps into the lead to portray Murrow. Strathairn perfectly captures Murrow's acerbic wit and hard-nosed delivery. It is an exceptional performance that's sure to be recognized at award time.
"There are certain things in his life that I was glad to become aware of, to try and get a sense of where the integrity was grounded, where the courage came from, where his sense of professionalism came from. How did he come to speak that way having come from North Carolina to the lumber fields in the Northwest to England? It was a vast amount of stuff. It would have been much, more difficult to honor him as responsibly as this picture did. Essentially it was an ensemble piece and he's inside this event and a biopic would have put him outside of everything, although I think he merits that kind of respect."
"He wrote as an essayist almost as a historian would. Unlike the copy today which is so quick, you could almost say his sentence structure was Faulknarian in a way compared to how terse and quick--I don't know the exact grammatical term to describe it--but it's not nearly as fluid or involved. Sentences aren't as long as they were. He was very literate. He was a speech and drama major at Washington State University so I think he carried that education with him.
"I might be speaking out of school here, but public speaking and that kind of writing do not go hand and hand today. Rarely do you hear an anchor newsman who, let alone given the time to speak like that, will sound like that. Lou Anderson, who was his speech teacher at Washington State University, recognized something in him and she always said he was her masterpiece. He always remembered her as one of the most important women in his life. She honed something.
"I'm sure it was an innate ability to tell a long story, which he learned in the lumber fields in the Northwest and coming from a great tradition probably of storytellers in North Carolina in the tobacco fields. That's how people [got] their information. He probably enjoyed a nice long-winded story, and he could apply his intellect to his profession thereafter.
"That's the wonderful thing about the film. You hear the way these people talked much faster, with a different rhythm and vernacular structure to their sentences. He read all his copy. He had written it down; he was the one typing it out so his relationship with the camera was kind of perfunctory. But he always wanted to make sure he said exactly what he meant to say, so it was there so he could read it. He was a radio man, I think, all the way to the end."
"I don't think differently about journalists [now]. It makes me more aware of the rocky, rocky road that is out there, and the bravery of many and the timidity of many. It's a great perspective to go from that place, whatever you call it, this thing, this phenomenon of journalism, at least in broadcast journalism, when it was in its infancy to today. It's a great thing that this movie can give a perspective on that."
"Today he might go, 'Yeah, go, Anderson Cooper,' to get in somebody's face and call them on the carpet on national news. Or he may also say, 'What are you doing standing where you could be killed by a hurricane? What is that all about? Oh well, I did that in London when I was on top of the da-da-da-da, and the bombs were coming. I understand that lust for the hard news.'
"I think he would probably just go out and have a very long scotch and a pack of cigarettes when he sees some of these talk radio shows. The divisiveness, I think, would make him feel dark inside; the fact that it's so fractured.
"Every year at Christmas he would bring all the foreign correspondents to New York. They would sit around this huge table under the map of the world and they would talk about issues that had happened that year. They could bring up whatever was important to them. And these were like Howard K. Smith and...Hugh Downs and many, many more foreign journalists, not just Americans. You can’t even get Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric in the same room together. What's that all about? I think that would make him break out in hives."
"I experimented with all kinds of alternatives--straight regular cigarettes to the mildest possible to herbal cigarettes. I came up with pipe tobacco, which was the most crew-friendly as far as the aroma. It didn't get in your clothes like regular cigarettes do and it wasn’t as harsh and didn't burn your throat out. When I put out that last cigarette, which was the last day of shooting was the last scene in the film when he says the box of lights and wires speech...I put out that cigarette. I had to have one since just to see what that was like. I put it right out."
"Because I could wear suits like (Edward R. Murrow) wore his suits: Beautifully," Strathairn told the Track.
As you are so aware by now, Clooney co-wrote, directed and acted in this vintage black-and-white flick about Sen. Joe McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt and Murrow, the muckraker, who took him on.
"It was tough to be downstage from that character," Murrow's movie alter ego said of McCarthy. "He holds all the attention. Such a loud mouth."
"I think that will quickly be re-thought," he said. "Come on. Can you picture me with Regis (Philbin)? You know--I don't say anything controversial. They'll want George."
"Nothing was arbitrary about the guy," he said during a recent visit to his hometown. "The photos, the archival footage, the biographies, all said that he was stoic, elegant and composed. But inside something else altogether was happening, and that's what the camera caught. That could only be achieved by the eyes."
Besides its brilliant casting, Clooney achieved this unusual and special film through several methods. First, rather than an actor, it uses footage of the real McCarthy. The new footage was shot in gorgeous black-and-white to match the older news footage.
"George wanted to make it as if a journalist made it, so every event in the film is fact-based and double-sourced," Strathairn says.
The film also adopts a musical tone, aware of crescendos and silences, and uses jazz singer Dianne Reeves for several musical interludes.
"I think he inherited that musical awareness from his aunt [Rosemary Clooney]. The songs in there are her arrangements, and the band are the guys that played with her," Strathairn says.
Best of all, the film uses many of Murrow's original transcripts, with their beautifully constructed language.
The actor says he didn't know many details about Murrow before he began the project, but now has a special appreciation for the journalist's achievements, and especially his personality, which somehow won over the many Americans who watched him on television each week.
Never one to shy away from expressing a strong stance on issues ranging from the current government to the War in Iraq, George Clooney took advantage of Wednesday’s press conference for his second film as director Good Night and Good Luck to call into question the role of contemporary television journalism. Asked if he had decided the time was ripe to raise the debate about television reporting in light of recent domestic and political events, he responded: "I think that certainly we saw some real teeth in the journalism that we saw in the last two weeks that has been missing at times... There is a lot of good journalism going on. But there certainly was a pause taken. I am the son of a journalist. My father was an anchorman for thirty years and there are always the same sort of fights: there are the dangers of being called unpatriotic if you ask difficult questions during difficult times... As my father says--not just as a journalist but also as an American citizen--...it is not just your right, it is your duty to question authority. Always. No matter who is in charge. Because we all know that authority unchecked and unchallenged always corrupts." When the packed audience breaks out into loud supportive applause, he quips with self-deprecation: "That was more family members by the way."
The press conference was attended by George Clooney, who writes and directs as well as plays the role of television journalist Fred Friendly, by writer and producer Grant Heslov, by Patricia Clarkson who is Shirley Wershba in the film and by David Straithairn who took on the daunting task of representing the well-known figure of Murrow.
...on how the project came together.
"There was a Murrow project, a movie of the week, that I had worked on with a writer named Walon Green for CBS and we fictionalized a lot the characters. And it was probably exactly the wrong thing to do. Thank God CBS didn't make it. And then Grant (Heslov) and I started working on this about three years ago and we felt like it was a good time to talk about some of the issues again. I thought it was a good time to re-invest in the questions about the responsibility of the Fourth Estate. I thought it was a good time to talk and raise the debate. (To) not answer questions but at least (to) raise questions about using fear to erode away civil liberties. And I thought it was good time to show it in a historical context rather than to try and preach to anybody. I thought it was a great story and I thought it was time to do it.
This morning. But we are going to colorize it (Laughs). From the very beginning we knew that we were going to use McCarthy in his own words. First(ly) because that was what Murrow did and secondly because if you had an actor play him, you wouldn't believe it. He did a perfect job. You would say no-one could really actually have been like that. Knowing that we were going to use that footage and restore that footage, we knew that we would have to then shoot the rest of the film in black-and-white.
The expense of some of it was prohibitive. Believe it or not, all of the McCarthy army stuff was the stuff that was the most expensive. NBC had it and that was the stuff what made it hard to get. But we are wealthy, wealthy people so we got it.
The one thing that we did through the whole film because is there is this sort of revisionist history now. Some people want to come out and say that McCarthy was right and Murrow was wrong. I talked to my father about it before we started and Grant and I decided along with my Dad in a way that the secret, the way to do this was to double-source every scene that we were doing. Every one. So that the scenes happened; the actual dialogue a lot of times happened because there were recorders and they kept great notes. We used references; not just Joe and Shirely Wershba not just Milo Radulovich or Don Hewitt. We used the (David) Halberstam book, we used (Fred) Friendly's book. We cross-referenced; we tried to double-source everything. The conversations between Friendly and Murrow are accurate in this sense...
Because we wanted to be able to say that we picked up all the sides in this. But there is documentation on each one of the scenes. In fact, a lot of times it is written in several of the books.
(He) has such big shoulders for me to lean on. We have been very close friends for about 25 years. He loaned me $100 in 1982 to get heads shots for Joanie Loves Chachi that he got and I didn't. (And I am still paying him back for that. I’m still using those heads shots by the way.) But, it was a difficult time physically for me to do this film and this group (of) Patty and David, you know actors that you can stick a camera on and not move the camera for five minutes and just stay on their faces, you've got really good actors. And Grant single-handedly as a producer would literally pick me up off of a board and go: "Let's go and get this shot." He was the guy whose shoulders I most relied on and he really made the difference in this film. It was great to have one of my oldest and dearest friends be a part of helping us get through this. I didn't really mean it. (Pause). I just had to say it because his Mom is here.
Because Murrow (was)n't in his attacks. The reason it worked and the reason it is timeless is because it is constitutional. He never once got into it. And the beauty of it is that he never once defended any one for being or not being a Communist. It was important. Because if you read Ann Coulter's book, for instance, and she talks about how Annie Moss actually is a Communist and Murrow got it wrong and Murrow was a traitor. Murrow ...says: "You will note that neither the Senator nor this reporter knows. We simply demand that she has the right to face her accuser." I was a young man in 1982 when Fred Friendly—and those of you who know Fred and some of you have worked with him before—gave me a tiny version of the constitution. If you stick to constitutional issues, you are not going to lose. It is timeless. Those speeches hold water today for any issues. You could change the word "Communism" to anything, to "Muslim". You could change it to almost anything and say you cannot do that. "Terrorist", whatever. The foundation and the structure of it was constitutional.
I think that we get overwhelmed at times by things on television seeming like that is the end all and be all and it represents so much more than it does. My father as an anchorman always tried to show perspective. There would be skinheads protesting on Fountain Square, (but) there were (just) six kids. And they were yelling everything bad that they could yell. And you have got to go public because it is news in Cincinnati, Ohio and there is five thousand people out there yelling at them. And he says the important thing was he took the camera back about a quarter of a mile and he turned around and he shot it from there. And he said, "Now this is how six people look in this perspective." And this is the real perspective here. This is what matters. We are going to cover it because they are yelling: "Doodie!" But we are going to show perspective. And I think that is something that lacks at time in reporting, sometimes in television; it's not good guys or bad guys. It is just mistakes that get made. So I am not necessarily sure that is always required to have the majority to have the leadership along they way. And I think that anybody who has the opportunity to speak on what it is they believe in has the right to speak. That is why we left King George. So...
We brought in Allen Sviridoff who was my Aunt Rosemary's manager and a lot of the band guys on a bunch of her albums. And started pulling out songs that we thought would fit. And then we recorded everything live. There is no lip synching to it. So all the music you see is done livemndash; even those long shots from the elevator, all the way into the room, it's all done live. There is an energy to it. Even if it messes up, it feels right. It reminds me of live television when I was growing up. We also liked the idea that she was sort of a touchstone that you could come back to and sort of like Joel Grey was in Cabaret in a way. A place to land it. Also, having grown up in a newsroom where they would push the newsroom aside and bring in the three thirty Money Movie backdrop and then they would pull that up and lift up the floor and there was a bowling alley underneath it for "Bowling for Dollars". And then they would put it back down for the eleven o’clock news. I like the idea of watching The Shower of Stars, which was a real show, sort of pushing off the See It Now set and then pushing it back in because that to us always felt very familiar with the constant battles of entertainment pushing news off the air. So we thought that it was an interesting way of landing it. I don't know whether it landed like that but it was something that we considered when we were doing it.
There were a lot of camera tests first. Gavin and I went through a whole series: we started with (Jean Luc-)Godard films and we thought we were going to start with Super Sixteen. We even tried to get a hold of those lenses where they sort of leak the light. And then we began to realize that the words were so important that we were going to focus more on Penebaker documentaries and crisis and documentaries. The first film I directed I made the character in the film, purposefully made it. And this one was one were the camera actually needed not to be involved. It really needed to happen to catch people at the right time and I thought importantly (to) catch them at the wrong time: to stay on too long, to be on the wrong person, a lot of that stuff. But for us Robert Elswit was just a beautiful cimematographer and after we came to terms with not trying to match film stock with kinescopes which was inmpossible. Then all of us had a responsibility to find the simplest, a simplicity. Because that is the secret to it. It is why silences are sort of interesting in this film. Silences you don't see any more. I think there are the most tense things. It is the same thing here. Walls don’t have anything on them, not pictures to fill up the frame. But we stuck mostly to the format of trying to use it as if it were a Penebaker documentary in a way. But that was also Robert who is such a beautiful shooter.
We all did a lot of smoking. (David Straithairn) doesn't smoke--which was the amazing thing to me. He doesn't smoke and he was smoking four packs a day. It was insane.
...on the challenges in preparing for the role of Edward R. Murrow.
Well, you mentioned how much there is accessible information and image and sound of him, the challenge is--in this one in particular--in weeding through all of that information and to figure out what apropos for the moment in the film. I mean we weren't making a biopic about his time in the fields in the North West or his Washington State University time or even in London (Murrow is remembered for his broadcasts from the British capital during the Second World War). So, part of the challenge was selecting moments about him, information about him that I could apply to the film. And trying to replicate respectfully the image that people have of him and also to objectively present a person who a lot of people have know idea who he was. And to weave that into our ensemble so that it is part of the story and not is something that would derail an audience's appreciation of the film...
(There is) this phenomenon of the artist in society and an artist as a voice and even more specifically as an artist to whom people go for certain kinds of support, political people in particular. The artist was the most revered voice in the Greek society. That is where they found out about their Gods. And the artist is somewhat culled from the herd in many ways positively and negatively by what they do vis-a-vis popular culture. Do we represent it? Are we a conduit for it? Are we a shill for it? Or are we an illuminator for it. All of those exist in our culture. It is up to every individual artist to choose which thing they want to do. I personally believe in that, as this film does; it is the artist's responsibility if they pick up the gauntlet of being a voice for their world. It is their responsibility to be as objective as possible. That's with this film. Now people are going to take runs at this film. But that is just their own particular agenda. People may look at Guernica and say this is (just) a black-and-white mish-mash. Or they may look at Goya or they may listen to Phillip Glass...or they may watch reality TV. It all depends on what the culture we are talking about wants. So there is a double-edged responsibility. You get what you deserve. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the artist should cater to one particular thing. I think it is our responsibility to honor an age-old notion that we are somehow conduits for what is happening around us. That is why it is sad that you don’t see films like this. But it is because we are not asking for films like this. For the most part. And it takes intelligence, it takes bravery, it takes money, it takes accessibility, and it takes a sense of history--all of which George brings to this film--to actualize it. I don't know. Artists are citizens first. They just choose to be artists. And it's a fine line. And to be maligned for saying, "Look at this and think about this." I mean, Murrow was an artist. He was a poet, he was an amazingly articulate man, and he was professional and at bottom he was a common, common man, very much a product of the American way. There is a lot in there.
...on meeting Shirley Wershba.
Well, I actually did get to meet her, Shirley Wershba. And it was quite informative and a real treat just to meet her. The real thing. I found it very helpful and very exciting. Fortunately, women's place in the news has drastically changed. You know, back then they were very much kept to the side and behind the scenes. But they did do real work. People relied on them for facts and they had real jobs. It's just that you rarely saw them. And now that's of course very different.
I think that in terms of an artist's role in popular culture, I think we may be the messenger but I think that we somehow have to be aligned with the message and I do try my darndest to do films that are important to me and that reflect my values, my thoughts, my wishes. And I am broke because of it... I think we are responsible and I think we do have to take the hit, take the praise, take whatever comes at us for what we do. I mean, obviously it was why I wanted to be part of this film and I just wish and hope there is demand for this. I always hope when I do some art film that there is some demand out there. I think it is growing. I do think it is changing.
I really do need this because I think I made $800 shooting your film.
...on the jazz songs by Diana Reeves.
It was in the script. Particularly in the scene when (Don) Hollenbeck kills himself. That was a song that George wanted in from the very beginning--it is one that his aunt (Rosemary Clooney) actually sang. And from that Diane Reeves actually sent us a tape of herselfmdash;she wanted to do it. We heard it and we were floored by it.
There are umpteen books on the subject and they all talk about that. They would record conversations and Fred often would write notes and stuff during the broadcast and flash them to him.
No, we knew the footage that we wanted. We had looked through a lot of footage. We looked through a year and a half of footage and then when we finally decided on what we wanted and went after it, we were able to get everything. Some of it wasn't in the condition that we wanted and that took a lot of work. We found everything we wanted. The problem was that there was so much great footage that (the problem was deciding) what to actually use.
Weight of the World: Digging deep for his characters is David Strathairn's strength and inspiration
Backstage West
September 28, 2005
By Jamie Painter YoungDavid Strathairn fights off a guilty grin when asked the question: Do you frustrate your agents? With proud defiance he answers, "I suspect I've frustrated them," then after a brief pause, adds, "a lot." When asked for details, he shares a few conversations his agents have had about or with him: "'Oh, my God, he's going to do another John Sayles movie? No commission there.' 'Why can't he go do pilot season? Just once.' 'Come on, it's only five years out of your life, and then you can do what you want.'" Then there's his insistence on consistently returning to the stage (his credits include The Three Sisters with Billy Crudup and Marcia Gay Harden, Dance of Death with Sir Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, and Salome with Al Pacino), which, like the low-budget films he periodically signs on to do, doesn't exactly excite his representation.
"So it's an ongoing dialogue," the actor diplomatically describes of his occasionally trying relationship with his reps. "You try to educate them as to who you are, and they try to do the same for you or to you."
Just as his agents sometimes scratch their heads in bewilderment, many members of the public do the same, at least when Strathairn's name is mentioned. His face, however, gets much more recognition, and Hollywood is well-aware of his talents. From the well-mannered pimp in L.A. Confidential to the gentle Cajun swamp guide in Sayles' Passion Fish to Meryl Streep's husband in The River Wild to the blind sound expert in the caper Sneakers, Strathairn has built a steady list of strong credits which, fortunately for him and perhaps unfortunately for his agents, don't add up to the industry typing him as doing any particular kind of role best. One thing adds up, though: He is one of America's best actors working today.
Strathairn says he's tried to make deliberate career choices along the way so he would remain able to be considered for any role. "You have to weigh the fact that you want to work against the fact that you don't want to be pigeonholed," he explains. He also believes that actors, at any career level, have the power to make important choices that will affect their work and their lives. "It's probably going to be a never-ending conundrum, that you have to maximize your opportunities, but I think we do have control over our lives," he says. "We have to have control over our lives, and everything is a choice, really. But in this business it may be risky to take yourself out of the mix because you want to wait for something else that people don't think of you as. That takes a certain amount of bravery and confidence that it will happen."
Just mention the word "career" out loud to Strathairn, however, and you can see his face react as if it were about to cringe. "I love the word 'career' because it's the base of 'careening,'" he then says with a laugh.
Choice Role
Strathairn's careful approach to his work recently paid off with his most high-profile role to date, as television newsman Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, directed and co-written by George Clooney. It marks a rare leading role for Strathairn, who, outside of his stage work and exceptions such as Sayles' film Limbo and Karen Moncrieff's strong debut feature Blue Car, has been mostly cast in supporting or ensemble parts.
Good Night, and Good Luck depicts the 1950s showdown between Murrow, then anchor of CBS' news documentary program See It Now, and Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch-hunt against American citizens. One could say that making this film took a certain amount of bravery on the part of Clooney, who chose one of the most pivotal--and largely forgotten--incidents in American history to portray onscreen: when a lone TV news journalist publicly went up against--and defeated--one of the most feared men in Washington. Clooney's father, a TV news anchor, idolized Murrow and passed that reverence on to his son, who has been trying to make a film or TV project about Murrow for years. Clooney also bravely insisted on shooting the film in black-and-white to incorporate real-life news footage of McCarthy and hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Clooney, likewise, took a chance on Strathairn, who, while perfect for this part, is not a big box-office draw. At one point Clooney had considered playing Murrow himself but changed his mind once he and producer–co-writer Grant Heslov (who also plays newsman Don Hewitt in the film) met with Strathairn. Even after casting him, Clooney and Heslov weren't positive their lead actor would pull it off until the camera started rolling. Heslov has said, "We knew he was a great actor, but you still can't tell, particularly when it's playing somebody as iconic as Murrow. However, the second he was in front of the camera and started doing some of those huge speeches, he was transformed. I've been with a lot of great actors, and I'd never seen anybody as transformed to the point where I'd look up and forget that it wasn't Murrow. It was uncanny, but he's brilliant."
Clooney, who eventually settled on playing the supporting role of Murrow's right-hand man, producer Fred Friendly, in the film, also believes Strathairn nailed the part. "The one thing you knew about Murrow is that he always felt like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders," Clooney has said. "David is the kind of actor that always feels like he has the weight of world on his shoulders, so the minute we realized how much he can look like him, just by looking at old pictures and the gravitas and sadness he can carry, it was perfect to cast this guy. We got on the set and started rehearsing, and it seemed fine. He had long hair and a beard, but then he shaved and slicked his hair back and started talking. We all just sat there with our mouths open."
Clooney, however, was not asking Strathairn to imitate Murrow. "George had said, 'This isn't an impersonation. We're not doing a replication,'" says Strathairn. "What was more important was to not slip in respecting the image of the man that still lingers in many people's eyes and minds who are still alive, who knew him. But also to give people who don't know him and have never heard of him a just image to deal with and one that's not irresponsible to who he was."
As with any role Strathairn prepares for, he researched the era in which Murrow's story took place, and, as this was a true story, the actor learned background about the man he was to play. What fascinated Strathairn most about his subject? "That he came from Polecat, N.C., from a Quaker family in tobacco country... Then he goes to the lumber fields in the Northwest where his dad moved the family... He ends up in London, where bombs are being dropped around him--it was the Blitz--and he becomes an accepted peer of upper-class London society. In the next step he takes on Joseph R. McCarthy in one of the most important moments in political history. And then he fades away. In the minds of many people he fades away, except for journalists and historians and people who remember the importance of that. There were so many moments in his life that I learned about--just an amazing trajectory."
That immersion into unfamiliar and often fascinating territory, whether real or fictional, keeps Strathairn passionate about acting. He says, "I've been introduced, educated, and made aware of so many things by working on, say, a Chekhov play. Boom. That opens up Russia in 1906. This opened up American history in 1954."
Strathairn is also a master of bringing subtle layers to a character, as many would agree is the case with his portrayal of Murrow. Sayles told Back Stage West last year of his recurring leading men, "Joe Morton, David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, they're guys who you feel like there's something else going on. They may be asking one question on the surface, but you know that they've got a whole other agenda going on beneath that. And that very often makes for a much more interesting performance."
Subtext is also a quality that Strathairn would use to describe Murrow. "Subtext is a perfect word for him because he was very quiet," he says. "He was a very still person, and he walked around the studios of CBS, as I've read, and people said sometimes he was curt and dismissive, dark. So there was something subtextual going on in him all the time. I truly believe that. He was editing the environment of the news and the world around, putting it through all his filtration, and I hope there's evidence of that in the film--all the stuff [underneath] that's going on. At the same time [I wanted] to show his courage--not conscious courage, just innate courage and willfulness--and his sense of the moment. I hope that comes across."
Circus Days
Strathairn has no formal training as an actor. His acting education has been on the job, beginning with summer stock in New Hampshire, which is how he met Sayles, who cast the actor in his directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7, and subsequently tapped him for six other features. Sayles is known for providing his actors with detailed biographies on their characters. Although Strathairn found those bios to be helpful tools, he says he did not learn to create a backstory because of Sayles, instead learning from his work in theatre. "You build a backstory so that you can access information about your character in any given moment," he notes. "You want to have that in your head, and then you can learn about where they are at a particular time in history and what that time in history meant and what the community was and what was happening in the world, and it sort of mushrooms out into learning a lot based on your character. I think it's important to do that, and I've always done that. It would be scary to go out there with just knowing your lines and not why you're saying them."
Still, Strathairn says he has no tried-and-true technique that he applies to his work. "It depends on the character," he says of his approach. "It depends on the story. It depends on what is being asked of the character and what piece of the puzzle that character is... For me, it's dependent on what the story requires, so you don't waste your energy. Like, if all I did was study about Murrow's time at Washington State University or how he learned to smoke and drink in the lumber fields, that would have been irresponsible; it would have been wrong. I needed to know what he was like in 1954. So there are certain predicates in the script, in the author's pen, that indicate what you need to work on."
David Strathairn's roots as a performer began in clown school, a seven-week program at Ringling Bros. Circus College that he enrolled in after graduating from Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. He recalls of the clown lessons, "It was like taking the world you know and compressing it into a sausage, maybe the size you could get your arm around, and then slicing it in half and being able to see a microcosm of the world through a very bizarre lens, which the circus is. But it was a lot of fun. It was eye-opening every day. It was the most complex world that I'd ever seen."
His time in clown school also taught him to be aware of "the physical nature of performance" and that there are "so many ways to indicate what's going on in the frame." Sayles has said of the actor, "He's very versatile. He's very inventive. I can just say, 'Do something interesting, David,' and when I go to see the dailies or edit it later, he does something interesting but appropriate for the scene. He's a very good physical actor, and I've often used him for parts where the character does something physically; that's a lot of how he expresses himself. So whether it was the mud boat guy he played in Passion Fish or Eddie Cicotte, who had to throw a real curve ball [in Eight Men Out], or the crazy street guy in City of Hope, physicality is an important part of his acting."
The best lesson Strathairn took from his clown days on to every stage and film set was that there's always something that can potentially trip you up. "You're always aware that there's a banana peel out there for everybody, and if you're trying to be as comprehensive in your characterizations, you've got to bring a banana peel along with you, because there's always a place where you're going to fall, literally and figuratively. And to be able to laugh about it, I think, is quite a forgiving thing," he explains.
There were many potential "banana peels" lurking on the set of Good Night, and Good Luck, according to the actor. "Where I could have slipped up--and it remains to be seen whether I have or not, because at this point it hasn't been seen--but a big serious slip-up would be a presentation of this man that would detract from the story. That would be a huge gaffe on my part. To not have been able to weave this person in this event, that would have made me quit doing this."
Good Night, and Good Luck opens Oct. 14, with a limited release Oct. 7.
Strathairn's chance to shine
The New York Post
September 22, 2005
By V.A. Musetto
David Strathairn says there would still be a place in television news today for Edward R. Murrow and his high journalistic standards.
David Strathairn doesn't smoke, which didn't make it easy to por tray chain-smoking news legend Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck.
"It was difficult," the prolific actor tells The Post. "But then you sign off and say you've got to do this. We found that we could use pipe tobacco as opposed to actual cigarettes, and it was a lot more crew-friendly aromatically, and it didn't burn as harshly as regular tobacco.
"The prop guys must have rolled 3,000 or 4,000 cigarettes in the five or six weeks we shot the movie."
Fifty-six-year-old Strathairn is too young to have firsthand memories of Murrow, who died of lung cancer in 1965, at age 57.
But he studied the newsman's legendary CBS-TV show, See It Now, as well as his live radio reports during the World War II Battle of Britain.
"Murrow was the first live on-the-spot guy, on the top of the buildings with the bombs coming. He set that precedent for all the guys who are in the field now," Strathairn says.
"I wanted to achieve at least an indication of who this man was, with his signature cigarette and gesture, and at least a little bit of the cadence of his voice."
Strathairn--whose portrayal of Murrow won him the top actor prize in Venice--is best known for the films he made with John Sayles, including Return of the Secaucus Seven (the actor's screen debut) and The Brother From Another Planet, playing a bounty hunter from outer space.
Strathairn grew up in the San Francisco area and met Sayles while attending Williams College in Massachusetts.
"They have completely different energy," the actor says of Clooney and Sayles as directors.
"One similarity is they create a world of atmosphere that has an integrity to it that allows you as an actor to enter into it and feel completely supported and surrounded by everything you need to be in that particular world."
How would Murrow fare if he were a TV newsman in the 21st century?
"I think a place would be carved out for a man of his intellect and his professionalness and his humanness and his sense of high standards of journalism," Strathairn says.
"He might not carry as much weight as he did in the 1950s, when there were only three networks. But he'd be looked up to and respected as much today as he was then."
[ Link to article ]
Anchors Away
Variety
April 7, 2005
By Army Archerd
[ Excerpt from article: ]
While it is David Strathairn who magnificently carbons Murrow, it is McCarthy himself who is on screen. "We couldn't have an actor play McCarthy, he was just too sinister," Clooney said as we watched. Strathairn, who played atomic bomb co-creator J. Robert Oppenheimer in Day One on CBS in 1989, told me he'd had "sleepless nights after playing that role--and I know I will after this one, too."
[ Link to full article (Word Document) ]
Going to a dark, dingy place: Blue Car portrays awkward student-teacher affair
San Francisco Chronicle
April 27, 2003
By Edward Guthmann
It's one of the most disturbing scenes in a film this year, and potentially one of the most exploitive. A high school teacher has taken a shine to an 18-year-old student, and during a weekend trip to a poetry conference, he lures her to a dingy motel room for her sexual initiation.
The girl, Meg, played by a dazzling newcomer named Agnes Bruckner, comes from a broken home and longs for a father figure. The instructor, Auster, played by the always fine (and under-acknowledged) David Strathairn, sees in her the kind of gleaming potential he once had.
It's an awkward moment, horribly so, but director Karen Moncrieff refuses to demonize Auster or portray him as a predator. Instead, we see the man's confusion: the tangle of desire, guilt and caring; the wish to be transformed and made young again.
"I don't know any other actor who would be brave enough to take on the role, " says Moncrieff, 39, whose film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was picked up by Miramax Films. "So many actors are primarily concerned with how sympathetic they are (onscreen).
"But David loved the script and allowed himself to play a supporting role to a 16-year-old actress because he thought the story deserved to be told."
The sexual encounter was shot in a seedy motel in Dayton, Ohio--knotty-pine paneling, dingy sheets--and fell near the end of the film's 28-day shoot. "It was really grungy and brutally hot," Strathairn, 54, says in a San Francisco cafe, one month after Moncrieff spoke at the Sundance festival. "We were all creeped out going in there."
Moncrieff, who started as a soap-opera actress, went over the script at length with Strathairn and Bruckner, "making sure they were both comfortable with the beats in the scene, making sure they both understood how I intended to shoot it and what the blocking would be. I think they were both really courageous in doing it."
"We had the luck of the draw because Agnes liked me and I liked her," says Strathairn. "So I felt there was a certain amount of trust already. And Karen was always there to be a conduit for Agnes."
In fact, Bruckner, whose older brother was her on-set guardian, didn't need a lot of protection. "She was stronger than me," Strathairn says. "I mean, who knows (what happened) when she went home that night. ...If she was freaking out, she was being quite gracious not to say so."
For Strathairn, Blue Car wasn't completely new terrain. He played an abusive husband in Dolores Claiborne and a priest accused of molestation in the 1990 TV movie Judgment--but says he didn't feel any less concerned approaching the motel scene.
"You get to a point of 'Oh God, you gotta do it,' " he says. "You've got to enter that dark, odd place. You sort of drop out of yourself a little bit and you become the character as much as possible, and you put your trust in the director and cinematographer."
The scene is "awkward and awful," Moncrieff says, "and that's what it's meant to be. So often in movies everything is perfected, especially sex scenes. Everything looks so glossy and choreographed and arty."
In Strathairn's eye, Auster's "gears have slipped" when he takes Meg off for a rendezvous. "We're all fallible to our passions. ...And I wanted to show that desperate grasping for an affirmation of his manhood--as well as this odd, twisted, romantic notion of wanting to teach this girl something."
"They're both desperate to connect with someone who will see them and love them," Moncrieff says.
Moncrieff had admired Strathairn for years, and pictured him from the moment she started writing Blue Car. She was so fixated on him, she says, that she named the character Auster simply because she saw a photo of author Paul Auster, and thought he resembled Strathairn.
A Bay Area native, Strathairn was born in San Francisco, graduated from Redwood High in Corte Madera in 1966 and went to Williams College in Massachusetts. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and has two sons: a jazz pianist, 22, and a high school sophomore, 17.
Best known for his work in a string of John Sayles movies--Return of the Secaucus Seven, Passion Fish and Limbo--he's the kind of low-key character actor who takes risks, doesn't fret over career "positioning" and isn't afraid to play unpleasant people.
"Maybe that's why he's in some ways been overlooked," Moncrieff says, "because he doesn't seek out the limelight. He just comes in and applies himself to the work."
Stardom, says Strathairn, is "a double-edged sword. You can get trapped into being a star who works in the movies. There are always a few more banana peels out there for someone who's expected to be who they were in their last movie."
[ Link to article ]
Strong in Weakness
Backstage West
April 25, 2003
By Jamie Painter Young
Like some of the best and busiest character actors, David Strathairn is someone many audience members don't recognize by name but whose face is immediately familiar and whose work is consistently excellent, never showy, and wholly supports the story and the filmmaker's or playwright's vision. In other words, a lot of us take this terrific actor for granted, enjoying his contributions but rarely acknowledging them.
I first took notice of Strathairn in 1992, when he gave three distinct, impressive screen performances: as a blind sound expert in the crime caper Sneakers, as a sympathetic promotions man in the Penny Marshall-directed A League of Our Own, and, my favorite, as a gentle Cajun swamp guide in John Sayles' Passion Fish. Since then, I've always looked forward to his upcoming projects and have realized that he never disappoints and often surprises me with his versatility and range.
He again struck a chord with me with his latest performance in Karen Moncrieff's directorial debut, Blue Car (see related story below), in which he plays a high school teacher who inspires a troubled teenager to express her pain through writing poetry and, along the way, crosses the line of good judgment, revealing his weaknesses. Strathairn has always gravitated toward strong stories, such as Blue Car, no matter the morality of his character.
As he told me, it's not his job to judge his characters, simply to bring them to life within the context of the story. "I'd done Dolores Claiborne and Dominick and Eugene--some rather unpleasant people and dangerous parts where you have to explore behavior that doesn't sit well with you after the fact," he said. "For the sake of the story, you take on those kinds of challenges. If that means doing, yet again, a questionable person who is sort of the underbelly and the seamy side, if it's important enough to do--if I like the story or connect with it enough and I'm given the chance to do it--then the part just is what it is."
Moncrieff praised Strathairn for being willing to portray himself in such a risky light for her first film. Said the filmmaker, "He makes it all about the work and not about him. He's such a generous and courageous actor. I can't think of another actor of his caliber who would take on a part like this, because most of them would say the character was too unsympathetic and wouldn't let themselves be seen in some of the lights David is seen in. There are scenes were he's very dashing and scenes where he's almost pathetic, and David allows himself to reveal parts of himself most actors would never reveal."
No Typing Necessary
As good as Strathairn is at playing such questionable men (including the high-class gangster in L.A. Confidential and the father of an abandoned baby in the little-seen but excellent A Good Baby), the veteran actor has avoided being pigeonholed by such roles, which partly explains why he remains so anonymous to the public. As the actor explained, he's made a conscious effort to not become known for playing any one type.
He said, "You can either cash in on what you do really well--if it's one or two things that you feel most confident about--and thereby build a career around that, or consciously choose to make sure you're re-educating the casting people, producing people, and directors that there's more to your choices than just those things. I have turned down a lot of things because, first of all, I don't know that I'd enjoy being part of that story, and sometimes because there are slots which are easy to be put into and you try to avoid those so that you can continue to grow and explore other realms of acting."
Strathairn, who is based on the East Coast, also decided long ago not to rely on film acting to solely satisfy his creative needs. It's rare, after all, that he gets the opportunity to play a lead role in a movie. Like many great actors, the stage is where he finds the most satisfaction. He began acting in theatre after college and has continued to work consistently in theatre since entering the moviemaking arena 23 years ago in Sayles' directorial debut, The Return of the Secaucus 7. Strathairn's many notable stage credits include productions of Caryl Churchill's Fen, Louise Page's Salonika, and Vaclav Havel's Temptation at the Public Theater, Pinter's Ashes to Ashes and Chekhov's The Three Sisters at the Roundabout Theatre, Tom Stoppard's Hapgood at Lincoln Center, and with Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren in Strindberg's The Dance of Death at the Broadhurst Theatre. Currently, Strathairn is co-starring with Al Pacino, Dianne Wiest, and Marisa Tomei in Salome by Oscar Wilde: A Reading on Broadway.
Explained Strathairn of his preference for stage acting, "If you're lucky enough to get a lead role in a film, then you're close to doing this experience in the same way that you're doing a play: You're [acting] every day. But nothing really compares to the rehearsal process and every night exploring the same thing over and over and seeing how the material itself has a life of its own. You become like a stone in the water of this stream of this production, in that you will be shaped by it as much as you are shaping it. It's kind of an ethereal thing, but actors who are in the theatre and love it will always return there, because the molecules sort of bounce around in the room much differently than in a film. Theatre, I find, is a really wonderful place to continue to grow."
Clowning Around
Strathairn grew up in San Francisco and had no formal training as an actor. The closest he's come to studying performance for any length of time is when he took a seven-week course with the Ringling Bros. Circus College after graduating from Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Rather than joining the circus, he decided to pursue a life as a stage actor.
"I ended up doing children's theatre for three years and then summer stock for another six or seven years until I got my Equity card in 1980. Then the snowball started to roll down the hill a little bit faster," he said.
Strathairn met Sayles while doing summer stock in New Hampshire. Since then they've collaborated on seven features; their last film was 1999's Limbo, in which Strathairn played the romantic lead--a rarity for the actor, who otherwise plays supporting roles in Sayles' projects.
Said Sayles of Strathairn, "He's very versatile. He's very inventive. I can just say, 'Do something interesting, David,' and when I go to see the dailies or edit it later, he does something interesting, but appropriate for the scene. He's a very good physical actor, and I've often used him for parts where the character does something physically; that's a lot of how he expresses himself. So whether it was the mud boat guy he played in Passion Fish or Eddie Cecock, who had to throw a real curve ball [in Eight Men Out], or the crazy street guy in City of Hope, physicality is an important part of his acting."
Strathairn first learned the importance of using his physicality at the Ringling Bros. school, followed by years of stage work.
"Clown college was all about learning to be very broad, expansive, and expressive in gesture," he shared. "I've always found, through watching a lot of silent pictures, that those great clowns were also great actors. They had to indicate so much just with their physicality. And when you're onstage your entire being is involved, and that includes how you're sitting or standing or walking or gesturing. All that is part of the picture to paint."
Sayles said he recasts the actor so often in his projects because Strathairn is able to go beneath the surface of his scripts and always dig deeper. "Like a lot of the actors I work with again and again," said Sayles," David's able to play a text and a subtext at the same time. That ability to play something underneath--I've used Chris Cooper for that ability, I've used Joe Morton for that ability. You can give them one thing, but you can just tell there's something else going on."
Strathairn's skills in uncovering the many layers of his characters and the depth of a text stem, not surprisingly, from his years spent in theatre. Although there often is less time for prep work on a film shoot, he does whatever he can to fill in his character before arriving on the set.
"I tend to get as much information, in as many different ways, as I can," the actor said. "If it's a play, it's often about the historical contact and the social things going on at the time--what kind of art, what kind of clothes, the whole gestalt of where, when, and why with a play. I find any and all information about a person, place, and thing can't help but give you a fuller awareness and references to your avail and use."
Sayles has made a habit of providing Strathairn with character notes in which Sayles gives additional information not noted in his screenplays. When it came time to do Blue Car Strathairn asked Moncrieff to do the same. As Strathairn explained, "When you have the opportunity to work with the writer who is the director, you've got the source right there, and that's most important when it comes down to the nuts and bolts--trying to access their imagination."
Experience Not Necessary
In addition to his recurring work with Sayles, Strathairn particularly enjoys collaborating with first-time writer/directors. Most recently he was cast in a lead role in newcomer Brendan Murphy's Speakeasy.
Of being a part of someone's first movie, he said, "They've been brave enough to pick up the gauntlet and do it all by themselves--not really all by themselves, but in Karen's case and Katherine Dieckmann's case [A Good Baby] and especially John's, these are writer/directors. The writer lives in a world of hope and wish. Given the opportunity to direct, the air probably feels very thin. You're out on a limb, and you have all these people looking to you to lead them and guide them through your imagination--your own particular idea about your story. It's sort of special to be chosen to be part of that first-time experience with someone.
"In the case of Blue Car, it was really the story that brought me to it, and meeting Karen and [seeing] her passion and her grace under fire. She was truly the helmsperson that held this thing together. She could have derailed with all the banana peels that are out there that you can't help but step on. But on the set, off the set, in preparation, and in post, she just had a wonderful humanity about her, as well as a real strong commitment to her vision. Being around that is really energizing. You feel that it really means something."
Likewise, he found working on Blue Car with his less experienced young co-star, Agnes Bruckner, to be invigorating. Strathairn doesn't believe that age or time in the business has any bearing on how good a performance can be.
He said, "I have always found that no matter how many miles someone else has got--whether it's more or less than you--the nature of the game comes down to just being there and being focused and responsible for the work. An inexperienced person can sometimes have so much more passion and focus. The only thing that experience helps you with is that you know the ropes a little bit better. You realize that today may not have gone well, but tomorrow's going to be OK, and you try to do your best at this moment. You're just as inexperienced as anybody else when you come to a new scene and a new character and a new play. You're both discovering it at the same time. If you're both willing to explore, then experience can fall by the wayside."
Strathairn is also not the kind of actor who necessarily prefers the luxuries of big-budget filmmaking. The actor has a certain fondness for low-budget productions, where the energy and passion for the project is palpable.
"I've done several small-budget films, and they all feel very familial, communal, and rough-edged. There's a wide range of expertise and naivete, and yet everyone is really excited and knows that they've got to dig down, get what they can, and make the best of each moment," said the actor, who was not above moving sandbags to help break down a location to get to the next one on the money-strapped Blue Car, according to Moncrieff.
That sense of community, which he so often finds in the theatre, is what helps keep him going as an actor.
Said Strathairn, "Being in a community of artists who have come together to commit time and energy to the creation of something potentially illuminating, heartening, beautiful, and dangerous for the good of either simple entertainment or, let's hope, for perpetuation of a greater good is my motivation."
FAST CHAT: David Strathairn
Newsday
January 31, 2003
By Blake Green
No statistics exist revealing how many times a Shakespearean king has appeared wearing a bow tie. But, for sure, one: David Strathairn, starring as Leontes, the suddenly gone-mad king of Sicilia--the bow becomes untied as he becomes unhinged--in the Classic Stage Company's current production of The Winter's Tale. If the modern, slightly off-beat costumes bring the 17th century tale into the present, so does the play's title: It is a bitter, late January day when Strathairn nips across the street from the Off-Broadway theater to a nearby restaurant for an espresso ("with honey"), a biscotti and a chat. Long ago a California boy, he's dressed in a heavy olive sweater that compliments his eyes, his thick salt-and-pepper hair tossled by the wind and his gestures. The actor, 52, is amiable but hardly loquacious. He tells Newsday's Blake Green that he'd much prefer to discuss his current project rather than his personal life (Poughkeepsie, a longtime wife and their sons, 22 and 16) or even his career--which contains such quirks as a stint as a professional clown and a resume that includes eight movies directed by fellow Williams College alum John Sayles. As another of the Bard's crazy royals observes, "the play's the thing."
Leontes starts off an adoring husband and father, suddenly goes berserk, accuses his pregnant wife of infidelity and orders his best friend to be assassinated. What do you chalk this up to--midlife crisis?
Leontes suddenly believes he's been cuckolded, but Shakespeare really doesn't explain why. Barry [Edelstein, the play's director] says the inspiration for doing the play now is it's plot: how out of the blue your life can change violently and then what ripples out from such moments. What happens when your life turns to jello and you seem to lose all footing? In this case, it's an absolute monarch going mad and what it does to the community.
When Sept. 11 occurred, you were working on a project on Broadway that also had significant implications.
Yes, Dance of Death, Strinberg's play about psychological cruelty. It opened on Sept. 18, and Helen [Mirren] had a line, "I wish the tower would fall" that we didn't see how it could be said. But the experience was regenerative in a very odd way. It was a huge challenge. I was dancin' on my toes for that one.
Was that your first Broadway show?
The first was Einstein and the Polar Bear; I played a gas station attendant. It closed after four performances. It was right after Return of the Secaucus 7 [Sayles' 1980 film]. Somebody had seen I could do a New England accent.
How did the connection with Sayles begin?
Another friend from college, Gordon Clapp [now an NYPD Blue regular], was working in a summer theater in his home town in New Hampshire and I joined him for several summers. During one of them, John directed and acted, and when he did Return... he used people in the company. That Fall we said, "Hey, we've been in a movie, let's go to New York."
You've switched back and forth between the theater and film ever since, so when did the clown bit come in?
It was a whimiscal moment. I found myself in Venice, Fla., with a friend who'd been accepted into Ringling Brothers' clown college. So I signed up, too. I really had no thoughts of being a clown and can't say I became one. Basically, I was someone who dressed up in funny clothes to distract people. I found out I'd been hired because I was the same size as one of the costumes they had.
What happened?
I learned how to fall down. I traveled with them for eight or nine months. This was the early '70s. I'd let my hair grow long, began changing the makeup I'd been hired to wear. They told me to change my face or take a walk. I decided $90 a week wasn't worth the hassle. It was after that that I found my way to the summer theater.
Had you grown up planning to be an actor?
No, I sort of fell into it. The theater building at Williams was open all the time and the technical director let us hang out, help build sets. It was a men's college then, so what it boiled down to was power tools and girls [in the productions] and a place you could hang out--which happened to be a theater.
The Winter's Tale has some pretty tragic stuff in it but is lumped with Shakespeare's comedies. Do you think of it that way?
Well, a lot of Leontes' behavior is laughable--or should be scoffed at.
But you're pretty tortured. And in many of your roles--including Dance of
Death and the film Harrison's Flowers you've been basically an unhappy, unsympathetic person. Do you feel you've been stereotyped?
Am I the angst actor? I don't know. In this business you can get pigeon-holed. The last thing I did: an early Tom Stoppard, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor in Philadelphia, is lighthearted but a bit angst-ridden. I played a madman in it, too.
Man of character: Stage work and character roles keep Strathairn busy
Creative Loafing
March 20, 2002
By Bert Osborne
At 53, David Strathairn is among Hollywood's most consistently employed character actors. And though he's less likely to be cast as the stalwart action hero or romantic lead, just consider the star-studded line-up of first-string actresses opposite whom Strathairn has played sundry husbands and love interests: Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Sigourney Weaver, Kathy Bates, Debra Winger, Holly Hunter.
Critically regarded for his ongoing association with indie writer/director John Sayles (they've collaborated on eight films) and for two decades of work on the New York stage (he most recently co-starred with Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren in The Dance of Death), Strathairn is currently on screen supporting Andie MacDowell in Harrison's Flowers. This time, he plays a husband and photojournalist missing in action on assignment in war-torn Croatia, and she's the intrepid wife determined to bring him home alive.
Filmed more than two years ago (with Prague substituting for both battle-scarred Croatia and affluent upstate New York), that Harrison's Flowers is just now being released--in the wake of the tragic murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl--is "admittedly unsettling," as Strathairn puts it. "On the one hand, even making the comparison at all sort of trivializes the very real tragedy of Daniel Pearl's death, because this is just a movie, after all," he says. "It's essentially a love story as opposed to an in-depth examination of photojournalism, but if it can offer a little bit of insight into what these journalists are up against, and how they're putting themselves in the line of fire for such an honorable pursuit, then I think that's great."
Creative Loafing: Is it true you went to Ringling Bros. Clown College?
David Strathairn: It is. It was one of those early '70s sorts of adventures, traveling down to Florida with a friend of mine who'd been accepted in the college. It seems bizarre to call it a college, though. It was more like a seven-week college course, compared to the way the Russian clowns do it, training for six or seven years. Anyway, I figured as long as I was there hanging out with this friend, I might as well throw my hat in the ring. So I did. I took the course, and I got a year-long stint with the circus after graduation.
How did your collaboration with John Sayles begin?
We'd met at school [Williams College], and we both got jobs at the same theater up in New Hampshire one summer. I guess it was a case of my being in the right place at the right time when he got around to making his first film [1980's The Return of the Secaucus 7], and to my extreme good fortune, he's been keeping me involved with his work ever since.
You've always maintained a balance between your film and theater work.
I happen to prefer theater. I like the immediacy of it and the opportunity of portraying the arc of a character from point A to point B every night. What's nice about the movies is you sometimes get to travel to some pretty amazing places. Going to Alaska for Limbo was really special, and it was wonderful making Harrison's Flowers in Prague, too. Now, if we could've taken Dance of Death on that kind of a road tour, that would've been just about my ideal.
Which of your performances mean the most to you?
It's hard to say, because I'm not a very objective judge of my own work. I mean, for me, if I managed to depict somebody in [Eight Men Out] who could throw a convincing 80-mile-per-hour knuckleball, then that's a great performance.
[ Link to article ]
The Invisible Man: Fame Eludes Strathairn Despite Strong Resume
Hartford Courant
March 17, 2002
By Ron Dicker
The soft-spoken Strathairn is one of the busiest actors in the movies but has failed to achieve the fame that many, including his longtime buddy, writer/director John Sayles, say is due him.
David Strathairn emerged from the tide of commuters at Grand Central Terminal on a recent morning. In a flannel shirt and windbreaker, he looked like he was off to fix a heater in a skyscraper.
Nobody noticed him. He has built a busy career over two decades in theater and film, but his name always seems to be on the tips of tongues without spilling off.
And on this day he would not receive any special recognition from his industry either. Two auditions awaited him. No promises. "That's the way the game is played 90 percent of the time," he said.
The 53-year-old Strathairn spoke as if he were a recent refugee of one of the acting schools in Hell's Kitchen. He has carved out a slice of visibility by acting in eight movies directed by his Williams College buddy John Sayles, including Eight Men Out (1988), a dramatization of the "Black Sox" scandal in which Chicago White Sox players accepted bribes to lose the 1919 World Series. He has played "the husband" in a number of star vehicles for leading ladies, notably 1994's The River Wild with Meryl Streep and Losing Isaiah with Jessica Lange and Dolores Claiborne with Kathy Bates, both in 1995.
Sayles has said Strathairn could have been more famous if he were pushier. "Pushiness is not going to get you anywhere, except maybe two places in line," Strathairn said, sitting unnoticed in a Grand Central coffee shop.
Age has softened Strathairn's gaunt good looks, and gray hair sprouts from the sides of his head. His eyes appear hazel, yet darkness emanates from them. That makes him a casting director's dream to play tortured, frightened or frightening people.
In Harrison's Flowers, which opened Friday, he's a hotshot photographer left for dead while covering the Bosnian war. The only person who has not written him off is his wife (Andie MacDowell), who thinks she sees him in a CNN clip of prisoners being marched away. She braves snipers, tanks and starvation to rescue her man.
Strathairn is concerned that Harrison's Flowers could get lost in the glut of combat movies--Hart's War, Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers. He hoped the love story would distinguish it. "It's an important revisiting of that age-old tragedy of what war does to families," he said.
Harrison's Flowers also addresses an issue that gained resonance with the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Last year, 47 journalists were killed while covering wars, Strathairn said. While making the movie, "we were aware that we were dealing with a situation that has been relevant for as long as conflagrations like that go on."
He is not sound-bite oriented. He chugs along on verbal fuel like a diesel engine until what he needs to say just happens to come out. He is gentle and serious--an unlikely graduate of clown college. Strathairn attended Ringling Bros.' seven-week course after his university studies. "And what did it come down to?" he asked. "Whether you can fit into the costume that's been vacated from the year before."
Strathairn, the son of a surgeon, was raised in the San Francisco Bay area but stayed in the East after college to pursue acting. He got his start when Sayles asked him to play a Vietnam protester in 1980's Return of the Secaucus 7, a reunion movie often cited as the inspiration for the more commercial The Big Chill. Sayles and Strathairn would later collaborate on other small-budget fare: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983), The Brother From Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), City of Hope (1991), Passion Fish (1992) and Limbo (1999).
"He gave me a chance to experiment without much pressure because there wasn't the overriding financial pressure on him," Strathairn said.
Strathairn reached a high-water mark in 1992-93 as a promoter in A League of Their Own, as a sound expert in Sneakers and as Tom Cruise's jailbird brother in The Firm. The thriller, based on John Grisham's novel, grossed nearly $160 million, the most of any movie with which Strathairn has been associated.
Strathairn has two films awaiting distribution this year--the Sundance Film Festival hit Blue Car, in which he plays a teacher who falls for a poetically gifted student, and Ball in the House, a look at family dysfunction. (Harrison's Flowers took a while to get into U.S. theaters. It had its premiere at the 2000 San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain.)
Onstage he is perhaps best known here for starring in the 1989 American premiere of Vaclav Havel's Faustian Temptation at the Public Theater. Last month on Broadway he finished a stint as a long-lost cousin who walks in on the festering marriage of Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren in Dance of Death. At least for now he does not have to make the 1 1/2-hour commute from his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., so often. He has lived upstate with his wife, Logan, and two sons for several years.
"It's one of those things. You end up where you are and wonder how you end up there," he said.
Actors rarely discuss auditions, but Strathairn didn't hesitate to express his desire to land a part in Cold Mountain, an adaptation of Charles Frazier's bestselling Civil War novel being directed by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient). "I've been tracking that for a long time," Strathairn said.
Is he nervous?
"A little," he said. "It's one of those instantaneous chemical equations."
Co-Stars Rave as 'Brilliant' Strathairn Leaps Into Spotlight
New York Post
October 7, 2001
By Barbara Hoffman
Dance of Death may seem like a duet, but Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen insist it's a tango for three--thanks to David Strathairn.
As Kurt, the unwitting witness to the marriage from hell, Strathairn is "absolutely extraordinary, brilliant!" Mirren raves.
"He's very alert as to what's comical and physically adept," says McKellen. "In fact, he showed me how to slide down a banister."
The object of their acclaim is hardly a household name, though he's worked in film and theater steadily for 20 years.
He played Ron, the snowmobile enthusiast, in John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)--a kind of indie Big Chill--and has appeared in nearly every Sayles film since.
He also played Meryl Streep's mild-mannered husband in The River Wild--and the slick pimp in L.A. Confidential, starring Russell Crowe.
"Everyone asks about what it was like working with Russell Crowe," Strathairn sighs. "But really, it was a one-day scene."
Unlike Crowe, Strathairn's managed to keep his name out of the papers. Now 51, he rarely gives interviews and lives a very un-Hollywood-like life with his wife and two sons near Poughkeepsie, in upstate Dutchess County.
"I loathe to do interviews because people don't want to talk about the project," he tells The Post. "It should be about the work."
The work began at Williams College, where he was drawn to theater because "the building was open all night, and you could play with power tools and girls were there."
After graduating, he headed off to Florida and Ringling Bros. Clown College. That led to a stint wearing a rubber nose under the Big Top, where he was one-half of a Siamese-twin act.
Since then he's acted in plays by Chekhov, Pinter, Ibsen, Shakespeare and Shepard. Recently he was in Ohio, shooting the indie Blue Car, and the local paper reported that he'd signed over his pay every day to buy food for the crew.
Mirren wonders how he's "managed to stay so nice so long."
Strathairn laughs, embarrassed.
"I can't think of one project I haven't enjoyed... I count my blessings every day."
WHAT A CHARACTER!
iF Magazine
May 11, 2001
By Pamela Harland
[ Excerpt from article: ]
Did you see this man in 1995's DOLORES CLAIBORNE? David Strathairn has played the most vile and disgusting characters ever written. Hopefully--I've yet to meet the man--this does not reflect his real life personality but only the magnificent presence he conveys on screen.
In DOMINICK AND EUGENE he was a wife beater and in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL he ran a shady escort service. Either Strathairn is one of the most believable and amazingly authentic actors of late or he carries secrets we have yet to reveal. Most recently the 52-year-old took a break from the dark side and starred opposite Sigourney Weaver in the heavy drama A MAP OF THE WORLD, where he was just a down and out husband and father trying to free his wrongly accused wife from prison.
[ Link to full article ]
No "Stranger" to the Stage
Back Stage
October 13, 2000
By Simi Horwitz
Actor David Strathairn makes it clear that, despite the intensity of the role (and therefore its appeal to an actor), he might not have played Hush in Stranger by Craig Lucas. "If the play had been skewed in the direction of 'Let's look at crazy people,' instead of a serious investigation into schizophrenia, a pervasive condition today, I wouldn't have done it. This is no tabloid story. It's a love story, however twisted and bizarre."
The play in question, slated to open Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre on Oct. 17, examines the evolving relationship between two deeply troubled individuals (Strathairn and Kyra Sedgwick), awash in demons, who meet on an airplane and end up in her backwoods cabin.
Without giving too much of the story away--there is an element of mystery--the two engage in some kinky S & M games that bring to the surface the thorny issues surrounding choice, victimization, and abuse. Who's doing what to whom?
Strathairn plays a schizophrenic ex-con--yes, he has the improbable name of "Hush"--who has just been released from prison after serving a 15-year sentence for kidnapping. In his schizophrenic state, he previously heard voices in his head. Not just any voices (no, no), but God battling the Devil. And the latter won.
Now on medication and thus functioning (within parameters), Hush finds God on the winning side. Put simply, religion coupled with a mood-altering drug--a Seratoninuptake inhibitor, we assume--have brought him a degree of peace and stability. Paradoxically, Strathairn's Hush, demented to the core, is actually rather endearing. He is totally convincing in his role.
"This man is dangerous, but you can't play him 'crazy,' on the one hand, or a charming sicko, on the other," asserts Strathairn, a good-looking 50-ish San Francisco native, who is conducting the interview over the phone. "Our challenge is not to be making any blanket statements. People who are schizophrenic represent a range of personalities."
Strathairn boned up for his role, he notes, by interviewing psychiatrists, read
