BECAUSE OF TOO MUCH ACCESS, WE NOW HAVE NO HEROES. WE’LL never have heroes again like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Stewart, and Marlon Brando. When we saw Jimmy Stewart, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, or Ava Gardner, the only time we saw them was on the screen. Not scratching their ass walking down the street on YouTube. I’m not saying there will never be somebody who’s hugely famous again. There will be plenty of those motherfuckers. I’m saying we won’t have magical heroes.
I mean great people who have done truly great things. And I don’t just mean actors and musicians, either. One of the things in my career of which I’m most proud is playing Davy Crockett, because all those guys at the Alamo were heroes to me. From now on, I can know I played Davy Crockett in The Alamo and that will be in cinematic history, you know? John Wayne played him too, but I was told by the historians that we made the most historically accurate movie that’s been made about the Alamo—not only in the performances but in John Lee Hancock’s treatment of the script.
Some people don’t want to hear it that Davy Crockett was executed, but that was in the diary of a Mexican lieutenant who was there, and that’s as close as we can get to the truth, so that’s in the movie. For some reason, people say, “No, Davy Crockett died like in the painting, where he’s swinging his rifle and he was the last man standing. He was overrun and killed.” I mean, really, what’s the difference? When you’re shooting those kind of black-powder rifles, those muskets, you got one shot, so if you didn’t get reloaded in time, it’s completely conceivable that he was just overrun, but when you think about it, if Crockett and his guys were captured, that means they were the last ones standing. So Davy Crockett fought to the end and they captured him, and I’m sure as big a name as Davy Crockett had, Santa Anna in particular wanted to be eye-to-eye with him before he killed him. In the Mexican lieutenant’s diary, it says that Davy Crockett died with dignity. So that’s the way we portrayed it.
John Lee Hancock made a great movie. Jason Patric, Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid, and everybody involved, from the production staff to the extras, felt the same way. On top of that, we were based in Austin, Texas, which is my second home. I know everybody in Austin.
I think it didn’t do better at the box office because fourteen-year-olds go to movies and fourteen-year-olds don’t give a shit about history anymore. I think if the whole movie had been about a battle, it might have been different. But it wasn’t. The Alamo was about waiting. It was thirteen days there in that fort, and people don’t want to watch the waiting-for-thirteen-days. Well, that’s not the whole movie, but today’s audiences just want to see somebody get stuck with a bayonet and a bunch of shooting. I think if that movie had come out in the seventies, it would have done very well.