Part 1
DANIEL LANOIS: I always felt that All the Pretty Horses was a daunting task because of the thickness of the book. How do you go about taking such a complex adventure and try and rein that into a digestible cinematic experience, without having an intermission?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: If I had had my way and if you had had your way, it probably would have had an intermission. The original cut of that movie was the one with your score in it and that is the thing I felt we made. That’s the movie we made that I was proudest of. Matt Damon, to this day, still calls it a masterpiece. The people who saw that original cut with your score in it have said the same thing.
I wasn’t the one who had to rein it in. Ted Tally wrote the script and that’s something I’m not good at. I’m not good at adapting other people’s stuff. I never was. I got my bag that I kind of do, and I feel I can do what I do pretty well, but I could never take someone else’s book and write a screenplay based on it. This sounds really shitty maybe but I don’t know that I’d be interested enough to. I have too much stuff I want to say, myself. So I don’t know that I would ever choose to be someone who adapts. Which is ironic because I have an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, based on other material—but it was my own material. It was based on the short film that I wrote as well as the stage stuff I did with that character.
I don’t think I could have reeled in All the Pretty Horses. Directing it was a different thing because I had the script already and I had a clear vision of how to direct that script, but it was Ted Tally’s script so the credit all goes to him in terms of how you pare that book down into a movie. It was still a daunting task to direct something that big.
I was told, and we may as well talk about it because we’ve never done that other than amongst each other, at night, with a bottle of whiskey—I was told by the studio people, without mentioning any names, that a producer had watched the movie with his wife and his wife felt that the music was too sparse. I had a screaming argument with him on the phone. He said that we were going to have a different score. I said, “Honestly”—and I’m not just saying this, I’ve said it to everybody ever since—“that was the best and the most haunting musical score for a movie I’ve ever heard in my lifetime. Ever.” And to this day it is. That’s why I’ll beg you someday because that would be a great thing for us to put in a movie, that score on some movie, and we’ll find the right one where we can make it and the lawyers won’t fuck it up.
Just like taking that score out of the movie, the cut was the same thing. And the big news in the papers, when I had the big argument with the studio, was that I had some four-hour cut that I wanted to put out and that was never the truth. My final cut was two hours and forty-two minutes, which is the exact length of the English Patient, made by the one of the studios that made All the Pretty Horses.
They told me in the beginning that they knew this was an epic movie and it would be a three-hour movie—they told me that up front—and then proceeded to cut it to under two hours (an hour and fifty-nine minutes), and that was just an arbitrary cut to get it down to under two hours because they get more showings in the theaters. It wasn’t done for creative reasons; it was done for length reasons. It was marketed as a love story between Matt and Penélope and that’s not what the story was. If there was a love story there, it was between the two kids, Henry and Matt. The movie was about the end of the west as we know it. It wasn’t a love story between a guy and a girl, but at the time Titanic was popular and I begged the studio, “Please don’t make the poster where Matt and Penélope are all airbrushed and staring at each other like the Titanic poster,” and sure enough, that’s what they put out.
Every step along the way they took the soul out of what it was and that’s why the movie did not do well, because you can’t put something out half-assed. If you put it out as a romantic story like Titanic, which is not what it is, then that audience goes to see it and they don’t like it because they thought they were going to see a love story between the pretty guy and girl. The audience who wants to see a Cormac McCarthy book on film, they don’t get the whole story and then they’re disappointed. That’s why when you make something, you have to put it out the way it was intended. It has to be what it is. If you try to take an apple into an orange, you’re going to lose both sides of the audience—the commercial audience you’re trying to sell it to and the real audience that wants to see it. That’s what happened with All the Pretty Horses. We made a beautiful thing and I’ll love it forever, and people ask me still to this day, why don’t you guys put out your real cut of it?
DANIEL LANOIS: DO you have it? Do you have the film with my score on it?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: I have it in the house; I’ve actually shown it to people before. I have it on VHS tape. I’ve got every tape—I’ve got the dailies, I’ve got every tape all along the way of all the footage, with the score in it, and I’ve got the complete movie with the score. I actually have the whole assembly with your score. The three hours and something. I’ve got that, too.
Years ago, when they talked to me about doing the DVD, at one point the studio actually called me and said they’d give me the opportunity to put your cut out on DVD, but I turned it down because this was back when we were still feeling pretty raw from it. We were feeling a little beat-up and you weren’t real keen on giving them your score to put on the DVD when they didn’t put it in the fucking movie on the big screen. I agreed with you, and said no, I stand with my pal Dan. I won’t do it unless his score is in it. That’s why I never did it. It deserved to be seen and it deserved to have that music, but I have to say, we gave the actors some of the music during the making of the movie and they listened to it as inspiration for their characters. They’ll tell you, any one of them, to this day, that it’s the most haunting music they’ve ever heard.
DANIEL LANOIS: I remember I bumped into Penélope Cruz in France at Cannes. I didn’t know her. I had just met her briefly with you, and she came up to me and she said, “Are you Daniel Lanois?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “That was the most beautiful music that you made for the film and I’m so sorry it didn’t come out.”
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They all felt that way; every one of them felt that way.
DANIEL LANOIS: To not use that piece of music for the train station scene, that’s a crime.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: That is a crime. And the whole process of how it was done, not only the Teatro, but coming down there with Emmylou (Harris) at that big old building down there in Texas and her singing there for the crew and recording it and you guys being the band on the stage—the way everything was going about, it was a great story and a great experience making that movie. We made a classic, and nobody is ever going to see it.
I’ve told a couple of critics before that maybe someday I would show it to them. I told Robert Ebert that I was going to show it to him. I’d like to. I have it all on VHS tape sitting up there at the house. For me, I only played it for a couple of people because I wanted these particular people to see it, but it was hard for me to watch it knowing that, you know—it’s heartbreaking to watch the beauty of what we did at that time. The movie came out, it was a good movie, but it wasn’t what we made. That ranks as my biggest disappointment.
DANIEL LANOIS: I know you put a lot of work into it.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You did too. It was a pretty amazing experience. I still think of some of those guys that played on there that we hung out with at that time, like Vic. Remember Vic, the drummer?
DANIEL LANOIS: Yeah. Great drummer. To this day, great.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: And Russ the Bus.
DANIEL LANOIS: Fish out some of that music sometimes. There’s one track called, uh, … I played it for Keisha [Kalfin] a couple of weeks ago … called Steppin’ Wolf [hums].
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Oh yeah, it was fantastic. That was Vic.
DANIEL LANOIS: That was Vic playing that corrugated kind of agüero-like stick.
BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, there was all that stuff that you did specifically … some of the pieces were things you had around for a while, which we kind of based the original vibe on, and then you started doing the stuff that had the real Spanish flavor, Mexican flavor. The song Raul Malo sang, and then … did we end up using the Red River Valley theme in that? Because it was a great theme. I don’t know if we ever did or not, but it was brought up several times. You went through this whole period where you specifically wrote new things. I have a CD of that stuff, which was quite spectacular. I mean, a lot of it didn’t even make our cut of it, because there was just a lot of it. I’ve got a lot of it. It’s gathered together so you wouldn’t have to look for it. I could just give you a CD of your own stuff that’s right there together. I’ve got all of that music in the drawer at the house.