There’s a life not built for your convenience
And things that happen naturally
That we call experience
—“Look Up” (Thornton/Andrew)
WHEN I FIRST GOT NOMINATED FOR AN ACADEMY AWARD, THE FIRST two people who called me were Elizabeth Taylor and Gregory Peck. I couldn’t believe it, could not believe it.
Though I hadn’t been famous long, my birthday appeared on the news, on the bottom of the crawl, and I got this voice mail:
“I just wanted to call and say happy birthday, hoss. Waylon Jennings. Give me a call back. I love your movies. That Sling Blade, that’s something else, man. You hit a home run there, son. Give me a call, hoss, happy birthday.”
That was on my voice mail. I called him back, and that’s how I got to know Waylon. I loved Waylon. Out of all four of those guys, Willie, Waylon, Cash, and Kris Kristofferson, Waylon was the one I could talk to the easiest. I was always nervous around Cash. I always feel dumb around Kris.
RIGHT AFTER WE’D MADE SLING BLADE, I MET A VERY FAMOUS MOVIE actress and singer at a party with a lot of big stars. That was when I was first getting around big Hollywood people. She was telling me how much she loved Sling Blade—such an interesting world, she said, a world she knew nothing about. She said the movie was beautiful and went on and on about it. But then she said, “So where are you from again?” And I said, “Arkansas.” And she said, “What do you people do down there?” She actually said, “What do you people do down there?”
After years and years of living in California and becoming more sophisticated myself, I’d kind of gotten over a lot of my insecurities and low self-opinion about feeling that I’m some hillbilly who has no business being out here. I mean, I went from being this three-year-old kid running around with a fucking World War I gas mask on, getting his ass beat with a razor strap, pissing in the yard, watching knife fights with my uncle, living among people who nail their wives up in the house and make their kids eat mustard and biscuits, to a guy standing in a major party in Malibu with all these big stars—I remember Mel Gibson was there, and Lionel Richie was playing piano—and there I was, being asked by this very rich, enormously famous singer-actress person, “What do you people do down there?”
After that night I told somebody the story, and they said she was raised kind of normally—she wasn’t like some rich sophisticate—so it was more like the regional thing than it was the money thing. She just didn’t know that world I came from, but to actually have somebody say that to me—it made me think about the different ethnic groups who have had that said to them before. “You people.” I’ll never forget it because it made me feel like, “Oh yeah. I forgot. I’m still just a hillbilly from Arkansas.”
Anyway, I remember afterward going outside and having a smoke by myself on this big veranda. The house was out by a hill and the ocean, and I was kind of just walking around, looking out at Malibu, thinking, Goddamn. You know? It still shows, don’t it?
I’ve never gotten over it. Not her comment—I’m not that fucking thin-skinned—but I’ve never gotten over my belief that I’m not as good as most people. I still have a real low opinion of myself. As I said, my belief in myself—which has gotten me to this point—has a lot to do with ignorance. Sometimes I just don’t know any better. People used to ask, “When you came to California, if it was so fucking hard all those years, why didn’t you go back?” I’d say, “What would I go back to?” It wasn’t like it was any better for me back there. I was broke as shit when I came to California. But if I had known how long it was going to take … I don’t know, I always thought tomorrow was the day. I’ve thought that since I was a little kid. I always thought that tomorrow everything’s going to be all right. I’m still kind of like that. I’m the most pessimistic optimist you’ll ever meet.