Come on, kids, gather round
We have a treat for you
If you’ve never seen it
Then you’re long overdue
Observe the twisted metal
Bloodstains and broken glass
We’re glad your folks all brought you here
With pockets full of cash
For a dollar you can step inside the rope
You look to me like brave kids who can cope
For two bucks you can stand up on the stage
And look inside the wreck that’s all the rage
We travel around the country
To entertain the masses
To show the bloody floorboard
And the scarf and the dark glasses
Come on, folks, step right up
We’ve traveled oh so far
To let you people have a look
Inside Jayne Mansfield’s car
Gaze up at the horror
Tell me what you see
I know it’s just a mannequin
But a good facsimile
—“Jayne Mansfield’s Car”
(Thornton/Andrew/Butler)
ORWELL WROTE 1984, WHICH OBVIOUSLY HAD A LOT OF FORESIGHT, but now it’s Revenge of the Nerds. This whole thing I was saying about the computer—it has become the single most important tool in our society. Cell phones, gadgets, all this kind of shit. Before the computer, you had to be able to run fast, jump high, write a book that said something worth a shit, write a movie, make a record, sculpt something. When I was a little kid, I lived in a place that didn’t have movie theaters, so we played with sticks and rocks. When I was about nine years old, I moved into a town that did have a movie theater, and I would be entertained by movies with Don Knotts and Dick Van Dyke because I was a little kid. When I started looking at movies in earnest, when I was probably a teenager, the movies that meant something to me were movies like the original A Star Is Born with Fredric March, A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan’s movies. The thing is, they all had something to them. They were movies that were based on something, they had a story to tell, with characters that had something to say. That stuff is no longer important. What’s important is that you can sit there and figure out a bunch of shit to bypass all art. The whole experience of going to a movie or going to a concert is lost now. The buildup was as fun as the experience; it was exciting, and when you finally got there, to the movie theater or the concert venue, you listened and you watched and you loved it. To anticipate it and to experience it, the smells and the sights and the sounds of it all, the whole carnival of rock and roll and the circus of movies, it’s a beautiful thing, and people don’t even have the time to do it anymore. Everything is so quick.
Movie stars used to be Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, and Fredric March. Now movie stars are short little fat kids with curly hair. They’re in movies where they go to Mexico and get in trouble with a goat and things like that. That’s what a big movie is now.
One night a little more than a year ago, I was sitting around bitching with a buddy of mine down here about how there are not any good movies anymore and how every now and then I have to go out and be in a movie and play some task force leader just to pay the bills. So I go into the office, and I start looking around at these plaques I have in there for writing shit and think, Well, goddammit, just write your own movie like you used to. You know, you reach a certain level in your career, and you start thinking it’s gotta be done that way, but then I realized things are never changed by rich people. If you look back through history, things are changed by poor people. Maybe not necessarily poor people, but whoever is on the bottom, and I started thinking, Instead of being on your high horse, look at it like, well, I’m a little shit with no money and nothing at all, and I gotta start all over, and so if I’m going to make my own thing, I can’t say, well, I want $100 million to do it. I gotta do it like I used to do it. Then I started thinking about what movie I was gonna write.
Now, sometimes you don’t have a conscious thought about something, yet it’s been there all along burning underneath you. For this album J.D. and I made, I wrote a song called “Jayne Mansfield’s Car” about something that always fascinated me about my dad. You know by now I was raised pretty poor in the South and my dad was a hotheaded little Irishman. And as I said, we didn’t get along very well—he didn’t pay much attention to me, period—but one thing that we did together was, and he was a morbid guy, from the time I was probably four years old, he would take me to see the aftermath of car wrecks. We would go out there, and he would study them. I think he had a fascination with the horror, but at the same time—and he wasn’t a very articulate guy—I think he wondered about life and death a lot. I think he was fascinated by what the people in the car—who had died—were thinking when it happened, how it happened, whether or not they were scared when they went up the tree, if the accident knocked them out enough to where they didn’t feel it. I think he thought about all that stuff and how this poor son-of-a-bitch was just going to get a roll of toilet paper and if he hadn’t been, then he’d still be alive. So how does that fit into the scheme of things? Is there a God? Is there a devil? Is there a heaven or a hell? Are we aliens? Somehow I think he had some thought process there.
THERE WASN’T REALLY A LOT OF ENTERTAINMENT IN OUR SMALL TOWN, but the carnival would come around every now and then. Some snake oil salesman figured out a long time ago that people are really fascinated with other people’s pain and misery, so they’d bring around the Spider Woman, the five-legged cow, and these other sideshows. It’s been going on forever. It’s not like human nature changed recently, it’s that now there’s more outlets for this fascination. Back in the old days, what was there? Before the printing press—which I saw on some show was the number-one invention of all time because it put news out in mass fashion—they were feeding Christians to lions and watching gladiators chop one another to bits. People have always wanted to see that shit, you know? So all of a sudden in the sixties, maybe even before that, these guys started bringing things around and charging you a dollar to see them because it’s like, hey, people like to see this shit, let’s make some money off it.
They also brought around car wrecks—Bonnie and Clyde’s car with all the bullet holes in it, stuff like that. One time they brought Jayne Mansfield’s car around, and my dad of course took me to see it. I was in my early teens by that time. Tom Epperson came out to see it too. So we paid our fifty cents or dollar or whatever it was to walk up on a little stage, and for an extra fifty cents we got to look in this destroyed car. Jayne Mansfield’s car. One of the added attractions to this deal was a mannequin head with a wig on it and fake blood on the wig. People think she was decapitated, but she wasn’t, she was scalped. There’s a technical name for it, I don’t know what it is. Tom remembers the head being in the backseat, I remember it being in the front passenger floorboard—who knows who’s right?—but anyway, people didn’t walk up, look in there, and go, “Aw geez, that’s stupid, they got a mannequin head here.” They looked at it like they were looking at the Grand Canyon.
Now, there are a couple of ways to look at that. I have friends who are great tourists. Not just tourists, but people who are interested in a bunch of shit.
When I was making Pushing Tin in Toronto, a friend of mine who was on the movie said, “Hey, the shoe museum is here,” so I went to the shoe museum. Well, I get there, and after I see about ten pairs of shoes—the kind of shoes that Chiang Kai-shek wore, the kind of shoes that they used to bind people’s feet in, the shoes that Elizabeth the Third or whatever wore—all I want to do is go outside and have a cigarette, because to me it’s all just a pair of shoes. But a lot of people like stuff like that. I don’t mind. I really don’t want to go to the Nestlé factory and shit like that. But I know people who do. And I’m fascinated with World War II and the Civil War to a degree, so I’ll go look at that stuff.
So these people go see this car, and as I said, to them it isn’t just some mannequin head. It’s her head on the floorboard, and it starts them thinking how it happened. “Wow! They ran up under this mosquito spray truck, and look, the top is all ripped off, and oh! She must have gone out that door!”
So I’d always wanted to do something on that. That’s why we wrote the song, and I loved that title: “Jayne Mansfield’s Car.” But it’s not a movie about Jayne Mansfield. What Jayne Mansfield’s Car is actually about is how different generations view war and are affected by it. It’s done in a darkly humorous way for the most part, with some drama in there too. It’s also about the fascination and the fear of life and death, and how families are affected by the dichotomy. Jayne Mansfield was killed in 1967, and the movie takes place in 1969, so it’s around the time of her death, and her car does figure into the movie, but it’s really just a metaphor.
I often find that when you can explain what a movie is about, it’s usually not very good. If it’s about a butler who goes insane and kills everybody and it turns out he was never really the butler, but the father, that’s fine, I guess. But Jayne Mansfield’s Car is a movie that we made in the spirit of the movies that I loved in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, so hopefully the people who loved those movies will go and see this one.
SO NOW A DINOSAUR LIKE ME COMES IN AND SAYS, “HEY, I HAVE A MOVIE I want to make that actually says something, and the cast list is me, Robert Duvall, John Hurt, Kevin Bacon, Ray Stevenson, and all these other people, but I need $11.5 million to make it.” Ten years ago they would’ve shit themselves and opened the checkbook. But now they say, “Well, yeah, but you guys are these real actor guys, and there’s going to be a lot of talking in it and stuff. There’s no real market for that, so we’ll give you $4 million to make it.” So when your movie comes out and you’ve got a boom shot in one wall that you didn’t have the money to take out and everybody goes, “See? They make those shitty little art movies and the curly-haired little fat kid’s movie didn’t have a boom shot in it,” well, yeah, no fucking wonder. That’s because you gave $75 fucking million to the curly-haired kid to make the most vapid horseshit you’ve ever seen in your life.
I went around to everybody in town to try to get them to make this movie, and everybody wanted to finance it, but they wanted to finance it for a fraction of what I needed to make it, which wasn’t much to begin with. And this is, by the way, with me and the other actors making nothing. We didn’t even ask for any money. These are my friends, and they said they’d do it because they wanted to do something decent. Everyone questioned the foreign value. “The Japanese are never going to go out in droves to see this because it’s about America.” So guess who financed it? Well, not the Japanese, but my manager gets a call from these Russian guys who had read the script and an interview with me saying you can’t get a decent movie made anymore, and they say, “We want to finance your movie.” So Jayne Mansfield’s Car, which is about a British family and an American family meeting up in Alabama in 1969 and about their connection to each other through war, is financed by Russians.
We’ve cut the movie—we have the final cut. We’ve done the music. We’ve put together sound effects. We’re in the process of getting it all wrapped up. It’s going to be ready in about two weeks, and I know I’ll be able to sit back, look at this movie, and truly believe we did what we set out to do. If there’s something you overlook, you kick yourself in the ass for the rest of your life, but we’ve taken great care with this one. I feel it emotionally, I feel the humor, it looks right, feels right, the cast was right, I think everybody involved did their job, and I think it’s a really, really good movie. We dedicated the movie to Rick Dial, my old buddy who was in Sling Blade and The Apostle and was going to be in Jayne Mansfield’s Car, but passed away. Rick, God rest his soul, was a guy I grew up with. I put him in Sling Blade, and he actually ended up with an acting career, doing twelve or thirteen movies.
AGAIN, I’M NOT ONE OF THESE GUYS WHO SAYS THAT INDEPENDENT films are the only good films. I did a big blockbuster movie, Armageddon, and a lot of people say, “Armageddon, it was a big, splashy Michael Bay movie.” I have to tell you something—I tear up a little bit at the end of that movie every time. I think Jerry Bruckheimer is one of the best producers out here, he’s a guy who really cares about his movies, and I think they made a terrific movie out of Armageddon. I’m proud to have been in that movie. I think it was good, I think it was made with the right spirit and that it still holds up today. A lot of people love that movie. So I’m not trying to say that all big blockbuster movies are bad. There are as many shitty independent films as there are commercial movies. In my mind, the big commercial movies at one point were so good, there wasn’t that separation. And there are also what you might call art films—like the one about a one-legged grapefruit salesman who sleeps with his mother and lives in a closet—that bore the hell out of me and a lot of other people.
It’s like this time when I first came to L.A. and a girl who I wanted to get in with wanted me to go to this art show in West Hollywood. She and her brother were both artists. So I went with her and saw these squares of beige carpet that I guessed the paintings were going to be hung on—then I found out that the art show was a bunch of squares of beige carpet. All I could say was, “I don’t get it, I’m sorry.”
What Tom Epperson and I wrote will be on the screen the way we envisioned it from the script. They say you make three movies. The one you write, the one you shoot, and the one you edit. That’s true sometimes. I think in this case, the movie was shot and edited already within the script. Those are the ones that I feel comfortable making. That’s why I’m not a good guy to hire as a director if you’re looking for a person to do somebody else’s stuff, because I’m going to be the wrong guy. I’m the right guy to do my own shit. Woody Allen does it, and I respect the fact that he knows what he wants to do and he goes and does it. You’ll be happy with your shit sometimes, and sometimes you won’t, but I guarantee you’re the best guy for the job.