THERE WERE TWO CHARACTERS THAT I’VE PLAYED WHO I NEVER wanted to stop playing—where when the movie was over I wanted to stay in that character. One was the character in The Man Who Wasn’t There, the other was my character in A Simple Plan. If you put the character from A Simple Plan and the character from The Man Who Wasn’t There together, it’s pretty much who I am in real life.
In A Simple Plan, I got to be with my old buddy Bill Paxton, who I came up with out here in California; Bridget Fonda, who’s terrific; and Brent Briscoe, who I introduced to the film’s director, Sam Raimi. “You ought to look at my buddy Brent,” I said. “He had a part in Sling Blade, and I’ve known him from the days when we worked on Evening Shade.” Brent Briscoe from Moberly, Missouri.
A Simple Plan was filmed up in Ashland, Wisconsin, and Delano, Minnesota. The cast and crew stayed at a haunted hotel in Wisconsin, and it was very, very cold. The wind-chill factor one night was sixty below zero, and Paxton and I were looking at each other, we were shooting outside, and I said, “Bill, what are we going to do? The sound cart is even frozen up. Can we stay out here all night without dying?” Paxton says, “Dude, I don’t know, I’m not sure.” But we got through it.
We loved playing those characters. I loved playing Jacob so much, I went a little too far losing weight for the role and later ended up kind of sick and in the hospital. But Sam Raimi directed a beautiful movie, and I got nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor. Still, I thought that movie didn’t get its due like it should have.
Part II
DANIEL LANOIS: I was quite taken by A Simple Plan. Just the most regular people can suddenly get caught up in this fever. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: A Simple Plan was based on a book, and the book was brilliant. The great thing about that movie is that they hired Scott Smith, who wrote the book, to write the script. I think they should do that more often instead of hiring whoever the screenwriter of the day is, because if you have a book that’s five hundred or six hundred pages long and you’re asked to pare that down to a hundred-and-ten-page movie screenplay, the writer of that book is going to know better than anybody how to do that, how to edit that book. I’d say give a novelist the first crack at making his book into a movie; Scott Smith did and he wrote a brilliant script. The director on that movie—there had been a few—they tried to make that movie several times and it never came together. Different people were attached to it over the years. When I was asked, when they finally got it on its feet and were actually going to make it over at Paramount, John Boorman was the director. John is a classic British director; he directed Deliverance, Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, Excalibur—he’s a terrific director and one of my favorites, and a guy that I’d always wanted to work with. I was thrilled and I went out to meet him at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to talk about being in the movie. He said, “I want to ask you, I really want you to do this movie.” He said, “There’s just one thing I want to run by you. You may not like this but I’m hoping you will because I’m telling you, I know in my heart this is the way to do it.” They were set to shoot in Minnesota. They were already looking into locations because they needed snow.
I said, “Well, before you ask me, can I guess?” And he said, “Sure, go ahead.” I said, “You don’t want me to play the lead, you want me to play the brother, the second lead, right?” He said, “Exactly.” I said, “I was going to ask you if that was okay by you because I want to play that part.” And then I suggested Bill Paxton to play the brother and Bill was terrific in it.
As it turns out, though, John Boorman and the studio had some type of falling-out and he didn’t do the movie. I was hugely disappointed, but then they got Sam Raimi, who I knew some, and I loved Sam. I thought, If anybody can pull this off, it’s Sam, so I said I’d love to do it with Sam. We went up there and they didn’t have any snow in Minnesota in January/February. The little town that they already scouted didn’t have any snow and so we had to move over to a town called Ashland, Wisconsin, up where Michigan and Wisconsin come together on Lake Superior by Canada and, believe me, in January and February there’s always some snow.
So here we were, in Wisconsin and Minnesota in January, February, and March. I wanted to be really, really skinny for this movie Pushing Tin that we shot in Toronto where you visited me a couple of times. Pushing Tin was to start right after A Simple Plan. I had already started to get a little bony. I ate one thing every day, the same thing every day, during the making of A Simple Plan. I ate a can of tuna and a package of Twizzlers, you know, the red candies?
DANIEL LANOIS: The licorice candy?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: They’re like a licorice. I ate that every day for three months and I ended up weighing 135 pounds. I shouldn’t have done it. I got a little sick from it. Just like I gained a lot of weight for movies early on—I’ll never do that again. That was not fun. It’s really hard to lose the weight, and it makes you sick. When I did Pushing Tin, I weighed 135 pounds. I think I actually got down to 130 at one point. I was a stick. I only weigh 145 now and people say “hey, you need to put some weight on,” but back then it was like ridiculous. What I wasn’t thinking was I had started losing the weight for A Simple Plan and the character in the book was a huge fat guy. It didn’t matter, I played him as that kind of character anyway, but I packed on a lot of clothes for the movie so I didn’t look as skinny as I really was. I hadn’t thought about how when you’re skinny you’re just freezing your ass off every minute.
DANIEL LANOIS: You said it got down to sixty below zero. How did you deal with that kind of extreme cold?
BILLY BOB THORNTON: You just have to numb yourself out. After a while you had to get into your character so much you just forgot about it. It was miserable. Sam is a great director. He’s a very planned guy. He and the storyboard artist would have dinner together every night and come up with new ways to shoot things so it makes it easier for actors because you always know the camera is going to be in the right place and you can ignore it. Particularly when you’re a director yourself, you may want to look over the guy’s shoulder and say, “Really, are you sure you want to shoot it that way?” With a guy like Sam Raimi or the Coen brothers, you don’t ever think about that.