Joshua Jackson recently sat down with Movies Online at the Los Angeles press day for Emilio Estevez’s new film, "Bobby," to discuss how he got involved with the project, what it was like working with Estevez as a director, and why the film is so timely and important today.
Jackson’s credits include his popular roles as fast-talking Pacey Witter on "Dawson’s Creek," as well as such feature films as "The Mighty Ducks" series, "Cruel Intentions," "Skulls," "Urban Legend," "The Laramie Project," "The Safety of Objects" and more. He was most recently seen in the ABC family telefilm "Shadows In The Sun." Jackson also starred on London’s West End in David Mamet’s "A Life In The Theatre" alongside Patrick Stewart.
Joshua Jackson is a really nice guy and has some very insightful things to say about his experience making "Bobby." We really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had shared with us:
Q: We heard people did not do this movie for money strangely enough. Can you talk about how you got involved with ‘Bobby?’
JJ: Well the way I got into it is banal. I auditioned. I’d read the script many years ago in one of the first incarnations of the film but then became… I was actually much too young then to play the character that I ultimately ended up playing. And the movie took its time as movies do to get financed and find its place and its way and get cast and all the rest of it and by the time the movie came back around I’d actually grown up enough to be able to play that role and then it was the most basic of ways – come in, audition, wait, campaign, basically beg as best you can. And actually to tell you the truth, the role initially was going in an opposite direction. It was going to somebody else.
Q: Who was like 40 or something?
JJ: Oh no, it was always a young man, a contemporary of mine. Thankfully for me, unfortunately for them, they were otherwise engaged and so it came to me.
Q: And what did you find out about Emilio as a director?
JJ: What I found out about Emilio as a director is a lot of the same things that I knew about Emilio as a man and as an actor because I had worked with him when I was a kid.
Q: You did?
JJ: Yeah, three times – we made all the Mighty Duck movies together. (laughs) So I …
Q: Well that must have given you an in?
JJ: Well an in to a certain extent. It’s not… I would hate… A lot of this business is about knowing the people who can open the doors but at the same time I don’t think he was willing to trade on that. He cared too deeply about this film to hire anybody just because he knew them or he liked them. And he was instrumental…I was 13 years old when we shot the first Mighty Ducks movie.
I had no idea what it was to be an actor, but really no idea what it meant to be on set beyond what was going on in front of the camera which at 13 is pretty easy. You just do it. He really gave me an education on what it meant to be an actor behind the camera, to have respect for your workplace, to have a respect for not only your fellow actors but the rest of the crew who’s there – you know, the 75 people who if you work 12 hours, they work 14. So who are working their ass off to give you the space to do what it is that you have to do. And he’s very much the same way as a director. He is just hands on enough so that you know you’re being cared for and that you’re being pointed in a direction and respectful enough and has enough belief, I think, in each one of his actors to allow you to go and play. He actually said, I don’t know, on the second or third day, we’d got to the end of a take and I think he’d sort of said this individually to all of the younger actors because it was an intimidating set to be on…
Q: Because of all the famous people?
JJ: Not just famous but truly Bill Macy and you had some truly powerhouse actors on this set and it’s kind of typical after a take, you go to the director and you say, ‘What do you think? Shall we do this and blah blah blah.’ I guess I’d done that two or three takes in a row and he said, ‘You know, I just want you to know you’re good enough to be here. If I think it’s bad, I’ll tell you. But you don’t have to come to me after every take. I want you to be here.’ And I think he sort of did that individually with all of the kids. So he was that type of man. He builds the box for you and then he trusts you to be able to play inside the box.
Q: He truly is the same kind of person, isn’t he? I mean we’ve talked to him for years and he hasn’t changed much.
JJ: Yeah, I mean from the very beginning even before I knew what it was that I was watching, he has a very workman like approach to his job. It’s not about ego and it’s not about self satisfaction. He has essentially a belief in whatever the project is that he is doing. And then I think he also has enough pride as a man, frankly, to want to not have to be constantly flattered and to have respect for the people around him.
You know, that’s not always the case so the things that I learned from him, you know, watching as an actor when I was a kid I saw again in evidence with him as a director at this point in my life and I can’t tell you just on a personal level how satisfying it was – I hope this was the case – but how satisfying it was to sort of come back and in an unspoken way say, ‘You are a huge part of who I am as an actor and I hope you see a reflection of yourself on set because those lessons I learned from you are the way I would chose to work always and to bring that sort of respect and honor to the job that you are doing.’
Q: So which of The Mighty Ducks is your favorite?
JJ: The first one.
Q: Don’t you notice that he’s the only actor who can actually skate in the movie?
JJ: (laughs) I’m Canadian. They’d throw me out of the country if I couldn’t.
Q: Is that how you got the role? You were a good 13-year-old skater?
JJ: No, it was sort of the Disney mill. You know, they bring 250,000 kids down to a hotel in Burbank and they let you stab each other until one walks away with the job. (laughs) It really is like a battle royal.
Q: And how old are you now?
JJ: 28.
Q: So you’ve been doing this for more than half your life, 15 years, and you’re one of the few people – I mean there are not a lot – who have a hit series as a teenager who managed to keep a career going? A lot of people just disappeared and you never see them again.
JJ: I feel like I’m still in the process of proving myself along that way so I don’t take that as red. I don’t take that as being a fact that I can look back on. It’ll be a couple more years but I do feel like, as an actor, I guess as in any profession but particularly as an actor, if you have only one thing to say, then chances are you probably shouldn’t keep on working, you know. If the best that I had to offer was left on a screen on Dawson’s Creek, then I probably wouldn’t be happy about it but I would have to accept the fact that that was the high water mark for me, but I’m plenty arrogant enough to think that that’s not the high water mark for me. (laughs)
Q: What do you want to do with your career now? How do you see it going?
JJ: Well, if I was to pick my path, I’d love to be able to – and maybe never quite a cast like this – work with high caliber, high quality, challenging people. So it doesn’t need to be so specifically political like my character in this film but to work on things that I find emotionally and intellectually challenging and to try and marry those two things together.
And then at the same time to just continue to diversify and branch out because it doesn’t always need to be – I’m a huge fan of popcorn movies as well – it doesn’t always need to be the head scratcher film. (laughs) So if I was to write my own future history, it would be to continue working and to continue putting myself in the path of good material and really good people. This is an atypical movie because it’s all of them all at once. If I could choose, I’d work with all of these people individually over the course of the next 15 or 20 years
Q: We heard that it was a very tight budget, very tight shooting schedule, very tight circumstances with the location and stuff. What was your schedule on all of this? Did you do all of your campaign scenes in that hotel? Were you in the Ambassador Hotel at all?
JJ: I actually worked on the first day which was nice to be there because one of the difficult parts of any cameo I always find is you usually get dropped into a movie set which is by necessity a very closed space. There’s sort of a guerilla warfare attitude that most sets take on and so I got to be there for the first week or ten days and on most of the days there was a passing of the guard half way through the day. This group of people would do their section of scenes and then that location would be used later on for whatever it was going to be and frankly from a performance standpoint I never felt rushed. I never felt we were out of time which is also a testament to Emilio.
I think he was very specific about trying to protect his actors, about trying to protect that space, but you couldn’t help but notice the unbelievable stress that he was under. You know, this is a really low budget movie. You have 22 main characters all of whom are working actors so all of whom have scheduling conflicts and can be there on Tuesday afternoon but not Wednesday before three and blah, blah, blah. On top of which, from just a physical production standpoint, you are making a large movie. There are extras, there are period cars, there are period costumes so these things take time and they take money – neither of which he had to work with. So every little domino that fell became a cascading event and at the same time he is trying to direct a film. You know all of these little decisions that … he quoted Danny DeVito. I might misquote this but he said that Danny DeVito was quoted as saying, ‘Directing is death by a thousand questions.’ (laughs) And I think that’s very appropriate because you are all of a sudden the captain of an industry where everybody needs your attention and, all of us being creative people, we all think our question is the most important question at that point.
And then he has to somehow find answers to all those questions and remember what it was that he wanted to shoot that day and try to keep a throughline. I think actually from just a pure storytelling/directing standpoint the most impressive thing for me about this film beyond getting the story over and having it be emotionally impactful at the end is that the performances are even. This wasn’t a group of four or five actors who are working together over the course of a couple months who sort of work out their rhythm together. It was these three and those two and these three and those two and that could lead to incredibly uneven performances because you are not working together as a piece. And he was able to, without really specifically saying it, get us all to be a part of the same movie.
Q: The last 15 minutes of the film are very powerful. Can you tell us what it was like actually filming that and what was the mood like on set? Was it really tense?
JJ: No, I think everybody had a couple moments of standing back from it and going… And frankly it wasn’t so much that it was tense. Everybody had that moment… You’re recreating an actual death. It’s more difficult to achieve this thing that most actors do which is to put that sort of psychic buffer between what it is that you’re doing and the events in your personal life. But here we were recreating the end of a human’s life and I think that became really eerie to people and the man that we hired… You know, we were physically recreating this footage that we’ve all seen and the man who was the photo double was an uncanny resemblance and so I think that was slightly offputting.
The shooting of it was difficult and just emotionally taxing but they were also some of the most collegiate days that we had because we had all of the actors. Right? So while they’re setting up, everybody was sitting out front and doing one of the most fun things on a set which is to shoot the shit and just listen to stories and this was a pretty good storytelling set. (laughs)
Q: Who told the best stories?
JJ: Well it depends on who you’re asking but when Bill Macy starts a story off with, ‘Well David told me’ and you realize that he’s talking about David Mamet and going back 30 years and whether they be personal stories or professional stories, you’re off to a pretty good start.
Q: What’s up with you next?
JJ: Well I’m going to go work on this movie Battle in Seattle.
Q: About labor protests?
JJ: It’s the World Trade Organization protests, yeah, and part of it was the organized labor movement. So this is written and directed by Stuart Townsend so another politically oriented film.
Q: And co-starring his partner.
JJ: His wife or maybe not his wife.
Q: Not wife. Charlize Theron.
JJ: Yeah. So documenting or recreating the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle in 1996 I think it was. And then after that I’m going on vacation.
Q: I saw that great little film set in Minneapolis.
JJ: Aurora Borealis?
Q: Yes, which I don’t think anyone has seen.
JJ: It’s a movie with Donald Sutherland and Louise Fletcher.
Q: He has Alzheimers and plays your grandfather.
JJ: Yeah, which is a movie that I’m very proud of but it’s the unfortunate part of independent filmmaking that it’s difficult frankly to get you guys assembled to get the eyeballs into the theaters.
Q: Was it at the Toronto Film Festival?
JJ: No, which is another… That’s a very political question that I’m not going to field right now because it makes me incensed that the Canadian Film Festival would not have a Canadian made movie with two Canadian actors in it but I digress.
Q: What about the old Dawson’s Creek gang? Do you see any of them? Are you and Katie Holmes in constant attendance for her upcoming wedding?
JJ: Yeah, actually I picked the dress, chose the china. It will be a lovely off white. No, I haven’t seen Katie in a long time now – almost two years.
Q: Michelle?
JJ: Michelle I’ve seen a couple of times. As what happens when you get nominated for an Academy Award, she’s pretty busy these days. And then you add on to that the fact that she’s got an almost one year old baby. So she’s pretty busy and speaking of busy, I see busy on occasion. The thing that brought us into constant contact obviously is gone now and so we’re sort of scattered to the four winds. I have seen them but I can’t say that we’re day to day parts of each other’s lives.
Q: And are you single, divorced, a father at this point?
JJ: I just got out of rehab and the second of my two illegitimate children is beginning kindergarten next week. Is that a good answer? (laughter) Not single but not divorced and have no kids. It’s OK in the audio world but I have learned the hard way that sarcasm and irony does not really translate to print.
Q: What impact did Kennedy have in your life?
JJ: Before or after the film?
Q: Both.
JJ: Well, before the film the historical Kennedy would be the same thing that everybody who was born after him knows about. You know, you know about the Camelot era of American politics and you also learn about the end of the 60s transformational politics which is what his death symbolized if it wasn’t the actual moment and then after the film you come to realize in a truly heroic sense, in an almost Greek epic way, that it was on the campaign trail that he was ultimately assassinated and that he came to his deepest, truest personal awareness. His platform plank about poverty and equality grew over the course of that and was deeply affected by his trip to the Appalachians which we touch on briefly in the film. There’s something epic about that journey for a man who at that point was a career politician.
But you listen to the tone, not only of his voice, but just the tone and tenor of his speeches and it takes on a much more personal weight as he goes along that campaign trail. I think he felt – I guess it was his come to Jesus moment – he felt a personal responsibility, a deep moral responsibility to create in actuality the nation that he had always loved and its idea. And that really was what his campaign became about. You listen to the speeches that we use in the film and to me that’s what’s so inspirational. He calls and beseeches the best part of our humanity rather than the worst. And in a way he comes to emulate and ask of his fellow citizens, the rest of us, to live out the words of Jack Kennedy: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you.’ He really…he talks about sacrifice and he talks about sacrifice for the greater good and he rails against something that I think is endemic in American politics now and was just starting then – this idea of identity politics – which is a great way to divide and conquer a nation politically speaking.
Because the smaller the identity group that you can be divided and subdivided into, of course, the less voice you’re going to have as one unified nation. I think he really, really saw the evils of that and he saw how divisive those issues could be and the wedges that could be driven inside of a population between Americans, between the one people. And then I think also he was willing to in a way that we’re not willing to in 2006 turn a cold and sober eye to racial and economic injustice. We’re not allowed to call it racial. It’s not a black thing or a white thing or a brown thing anymore. It’s an education gap or you’re underemployed – my favorite term, underemployed which I think is a phenomenal doublespeak political term.
Q: Is the character you play a real person?
JJ: No, none of them are real people. He’s a composite, an amalgam of several things, and also Emilio wanted the freedom to create the characters in his own mind.
Q: Do you still play hockey?
JJ: (laughs) I’m a Canadian. I can’t help myself.
Q: Thank you.
"Bobby" opens in theaters on November 17th.
