OUTSIDE OF JAYNE MANSFIELD’S CAR, WHICH WE’RE CURRENTLY filming, probably the best experience I’ve had on a movie in terms of the locations, a cast that got along, and just having a great time was Bandits. Barry Levinson was a real entertaining director. He used to keep us rolling. And it was real fun hanging out with Bruce Willis and Cate Blanchett, both of whom were already friends. And the locations were incredible. We started in Portland, Oregon, and worked our way all the way down to L.A., shooting in Salinas, Santa Rosa, Bodega Bay, Half Moon Bay, up in Oregon, Klamath Falls and Oregon City, out at the Columbia River Gorge. Just all these amazing places for the locations. We had the best time on that movie.
At that time I was having a big fight with the studios about All the Pretty Horses, and I was under so much stress that my gums were bleeding real bad on set. My makeup artist would have to come up and blot my gums with a tissue between takes. On top of everything else, Bandits came out a week after 9/11, when Bush was telling people not to go to the malls and all this kind of stuff, so not many people went to see it. The cast loved everything about the film, and audiences loved it when it came out on DVD—where it’s become huge—but the country was in such turmoil. Movies can be very important, and I think they’re great for our culture, but at the time we were so disoriented, like the rest of the world, we barely remembered that we had even made a movie. It was just a very, very dark time for several months there.
Making Bandits, though, was just an amazing experience. Other than the bleeding gums and the stress. I loved being with Bruce, Cate, and Troy Garity, who’s Jane Fonda’s son and plays the fourth member. And Bruce did something for me that I’ll never forget.
I had just come back from England, where I had been visiting Angie on the first Tomb Raider, and I had to go to New York and hang out with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz to do some press. Then I went to Chicago and did The Oprah Winfrey Show with Matt. I think I had just recently finished The Man Who Wasn’t There and was about to go into Bandits, but when I got back to L.A. I had horrible pain, just like I did in ’84, and ended up in the hospital with God knows what and weighing nothing. I had no electrolytes, no potassium, just like I did in 1984. I was in the hospital for about ten days, and the movie company just wanted to move on and find somebody else, but Bruce wanted me for his partner in Bandits to start with, so he told those guys he was not making the movie without me. When they asked, “Well, how long do we wait for him?” Bruce just said, “However long it takes.” I’ll never forget him for that.
I don’t hang out with actors a lot, but let me tell you something, there have been guys—real friends who happen to be in the entertainment business—who have stood up for me. People who I’ll never forget.
MY SON WILLIE WAS FOUR MONTHS OLD WHEN OUR HOUSE IN LOS Flores Canyon—the first real house I ever had, I hadn’t bought it yet, we were just leasing it, but I was thinking about buying it—burned to the ground in the big Malibu fire of ’93. We lost everything we had. Pietra—Willie’s and my son Harry’s mom—and I went over to my studio, to the dressing room at CBS, and slept in there for the first night. It was the only place we had to go. The next day we went to the Sheraton Universal Hotel, one of the hotels giving cut rates to victims of the fire. We literally watched our house burning on the news. Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason—who were the producers of Evening Shade and Hearts Afire, the TV shows I was on—gave us some money, put us up in an apartment, and went with Pietra with a credit card to the clothing store to get clothes for her and Willie. We named Harry, who wasn’t born yet, Harry James, for Harry Thomason. James is for my brother Jimmy.
Anyway, other people who have been golden—and this is probably supposed to be part of the acknowledgments page or an awards speech, but I don’t care—are John Ritter, Robert Duvall, Bruce Willis, Dennis Quaid, Penélope Cruz, Cate Blanchett, and John Cusack. There’s Bruce Dern, with whom I got to do a couple of scenes in The Astronaut Farmer and who I consider to be a real legend and a hero of mine. Angie, above all. And I would absolutely be remiss if I didn’t mention one of my best friends in the world, Dwight Yoakam, who I think is one of the few people who keeps true to what he does. He’s doing the same thing now as he was doing when he first started. I admire that. Dwight and I have had amazing times over the years. Dwight is a great actor, a great songwriter, a great musician, a great singer, and a great friend. I couldn’t even go into all the times we’ve had. Just know that Dwight and I have many stories to tell. I hope he writes a book one day, because he’s not lazy like me and he’ll probably tell you the whole thing. And he was amazing in Sling Blade. So were Jimmy Hampton, Rick Dial, Lucas Black, John Ritter, and Natalie Canerday—they all should’ve been noticed way more than they were for that movie. I’ve spent nights hanging out with Dwight, Gary Busey, Kinky Friedman, Bud Cort, and Warren Zevon all at once. Now, think about that group.
There have been some really, really good people, so many to name, who have been good to me over the years. Those old directors who took me in and gave me advice early on: Stanley Kramer and Billy Wilder, who I’ll owe forever.
I’ll always love Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. I knew them back when they were kids running around town. Just good kids. And look at them now.
Fred Roos. Great producer. He was a casting director in the sixties and has been responsible for discovering a lot of people: Harrison Ford, Suzanne Somers, Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Le Mat, just to name a few. And me. Fred, if it weren’t for him seeing me in a couple of things in the theater, I don’t know what I’d be doing. Joe Byrne, Jeb Rosebrook, producers of The Outsiders television show Fred got me in for. My friend Coby and his wife, Katja, who took me in when I was broke and starving and really saved my life. Another great guy, Brad Pitt. Another great guy, George Clooney. These are big movie stars, you know, but I have to tell you, they’re regular guys. Kristin Scott has been my assistant for ten years. Bruce Heller was my assistant years ago and became a producer with me, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to him. And also my West Coast Ensemble pals Greg Littman, Forest Witt, Jesse Dabson, Rick Krause, and Tom Chaliss.
These are all people who make a life. If you add them up, the famous ones and the not-famous ones, they’re the people that are just the fabric of this life you build out here. Anybody who ever has a bad word to say about any of those people I mentioned, they are full of shit. I can tell you at the end of the day, those are the people that if I needed them they’d be there. I’ve had assistants, managers, agents, some of them who have been awful, some of them full of shit. Some people you want to slap the piss out of. But I won’t go into those folks because I don’t think it’s good to talk bad about people, I never have. I’ll talk bad about types and injustices, not individuals. That’s my policy.