Garrett Hedlund The Man and The Muse
He’s the Dean Moriarty of Walter
Salles’ adapation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Which makes him a
caricature of a caricature of Neal Cassady, America’s most fabled rebel
muse. But Garrett Hedlund is still his own man.
Garrett Hedlund
is not the same kid who grew up on a cattle farm in the remote
outerlands of Wannaska, Minnesota. At twenty-eight, he’s found his
footing in Hollywood with the easy confidence of a child superstar born
and bred for life on the Hills. His bio glistens with big-screen hits,
from Troy and Tron: Legacy to Friday Night Lights. He can share a spotlight with Brad Pitt without fading off into the shadows. And now, as rugged, rebel muse Dean Moriarty – the larger-than-life caricature of the already larger-than-life Neal Cassady - he’s taken Walter Salles’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and made damn sure that all eyes are on him.
But groomed for this life, he was not. At fourteen, Hedlund found
himself in Arizona with his divorcee mom, busking tables after school,
knocking on every talent agent’s door, and hitching rides to LA
auditions, 800 miles away. He studied hard, graduated early, and, with a
breakout part in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy,
landed in Hollywood on both farmer-boy feet. But there are hints of
Wannaska in that Hollywood smile – least not when he’s quoting Tennessee Williams on the fly.
HUCK caught up with Hedlund during the red-carpeted globe-trot that
was always bound to follow in Cassady’s wake, and found the gooey-eyed
optimism that keeps a kid from Minnesota a kid from Minnesota for life.
Kerouac is said to have wanted Marlon Brando to play the role
of Dean Moriarty. And Dean, meanwhile, is a caricature of Neal Cassady.
That’s a lot of personality, right there. How do you channel the
influence of icons like that when approaching a role like this?
Between Walter [Salles] and I, it was about finding the voice of the man
who said it for the first time and not the repeated soul.
Unfortunately, the only video footage we really have of Cassady, which
is when he was older, are YouTube clips when he’s driving the bus for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test [with the Merry Pranksters]:
he’s a motor mouth and super high on acid. At first glance, you’re
like, ‘Man, I can’t wait to play this character.’ But really it’s about
finding that soul which is experiencing it, verbalising it for the first
time, what he really felt about this and that, and not the motor mouth
that was the last figure at the museum. He was the one on display. He
was the one voicing the inspiration and wonderment. He was the one
saying, ‘Wow, Sal, look at that. Man, everything that I see is so whole
and complete and we have to get some of this…’ It was about playing
someone experiencing something for the first time with such electricity
and such amusement and wonderment at life and the world that it was
infectious to Kerouac and Marylou and Ginsberg.
How did you develop the chemistry with Sam, who plays Jack
Kerouac’s alter-ego Sal Paradise, and Kristen Stewart, who plays your
teen wife Marylou?
Sam I feel is, in a way, my brother, my life. And Kristen is, I don’t
know if it’d be unfair to say, like, my sister in a way. She’s very much
that close. We would punch each other in the shoulder and say, ‘I can’t
believe we’re fucking working on On the Road! It’s insane!’
Then we’d snap back and get back to our priorities and our obligations
creatively. But, I mean, the wonderful thing about Kristen is that she
was so devoted to playing this character. It was as important to her as
it was to all of us. And Sal was as important to Sam as it was to each
of us. […] Everybody had the same level of devotion no matter if you
were in four scenes or forty. It was such a wonderful family to be part
of creatively because nobody was going to come to work late. It’s such a
rarity.
Did you have any doubts? Was there a little voice in the back of your mind questioning whether an adaptation could really work?
No, not at all because when I read the script I thought it was so
wonderfully done. What Jose [Rivera] had done in terms of capturing some
of the most pertinent moments of the story, from the most influential
to the most inspirational bits were all in there. And then you’d see
other bits of the book that you thought were great and we’d get all
those down. I mean, from what we shot in comparison to what’s in the
film, there could easily be a six-hour film out there. And the Beat
enthusiasts like myself or like a lot of the other people involved on
the film, or like a lot of people ranging from San Francisco to all
around the world, they would be happy to watch that six-hour film. I
think a lot of people that haven’t read the book or have no idea about On the Road are
just gonna, you know… I think hopefully they’ll watch it and get the
inspiration to get out and drive, the way the book enthused a lot of
Beat enthusiasts.
Why do you think now is the right time to do this adaptation? When Jean-Luc Godard
was asked to do it, he left a message for Kerouac saying, ‘There are no
new routes in America.’ This is a book about freedom and opportunity,
but it feels like those things are curtailed now more than ever. So what
can On the Road tell us today?
I guess for Walter Salles there’s an optimism that says, ‘There are
plenty of new routes in America.’ Walter has driven across country
twice, interviewing people – film legends like Wim Wenders and all these
other cats, family members, Al Hinkle and other guys who were on these
journeys, all the wonderful people involved. I think he was so inspired
by the book, what it said about American culture, the freedom coming off
- not necessarily the freedom, but the ambition of these characters
coming off the back of a World War, the way that jazz influenced the
story. I think Walter was so inspired by this project that he wanted to
share that feeling, that ambition with everyone. It takes someone that’s
actually affected by it rather than someone who’s just trying to push
for a film to be made. Walter’s been involved with this for over five
years, you know? He’s already made a documentary about trying to find
this project, where he interviewed everybody I mentioned plus the likes
of Sean Penn and Johnny Depp and guys that were potentially going to be
involved in the project. He asked them at the end of the day, what they
expected from the finished product. The stuff ranged from, ‘I don’t want
it to be black-and-white’, ‘I don’t want it to feel like a period
piece’, ‘I don’t want it to feel contemporary’, all the way to Sean Penn
saying, ‘I would like it to be well acted.’
Do you think that the Beat spirit lives on or has an analogue today?
No. [But] I think the spirit of freedom and yearning to journey and
wanting to get out and breathe and see lands that no other man has seen
is such an ongoing compulsion within everybody ranging from the youth
all the way to parents that are dealing with work in the morning and
kids going to school. Everybody just wants to get up and leave
sometimes. I think, within the expression of this, when you’re in your
early twenties, everything in life is possible and also, later on,
depending on how your mind formulates or depending on what obligations
drag you down to slow that. But as long as you’re always motivated and
you never lose touch with your wonderment, there’s always going to be
something to drive you. And these were guys that, just coming off swing
into the jazz era, just coming off wonderful writers like Wolfe and
Twain, got into this wonderful Beat feeling. Almost like reading to be
heard not to be read, in a way. That’s how much to the beat it was.
There was a rhyme to it, there was a rhythm. It was kind of new and now
they want to extend those boundaries but there’s no way to extend them
but to go out and experience life and to live it to where you could shed
that gained knowledge into your work. That’s what this was. It was all
about pushing your own ability further. The experience of drugs and sex
and music was only to lengthen your own self-encyclopedia of life; to
know about not just the world but the solar system, not just the heart
but the whole body itself. That’s what I thought was most wonderful. It
wasn’t to destroy or to suppress or sedate yourself because of what you
were internally going through; it was to expand what you were internally
going through. That was the wonderful thing about it, I think.
Is this how you imagined movie stardom would be when you were nine years old?
Ha. Fuck. No because, you know, when I was on the farm, none of this
ever seemed fathomable; none of it ever seemed reachable. I always think
about it in terms of if my parents had stayed together. My parents
divorced when I was under a year old, my mom took off. Now, if they were
together I probably would have never left the town, everything would
have been right there and all right and hunky-dory. But in terms of, the
nine or fifteen-year-old me I guess I would have to have that same
sense of wanting to achieve my ambitions. I think a lot of people can be
driven by what you don’t have and then when you have it, your ambition
is sort of redirected in terms of what’s next, instead of, ‘How can I
start?’[…] Now, the ambition is redirected towards, ‘How can I enhance?
Or how can I go bigger or deeper or more powerful?’ Rather than, ‘How
can I start?’ So yeah, I’m sure… I wouldn’t really be able to fathom it
if you’d told a nine-year-old me that one day, in about seven years time
you’ll read a book called On the Road and the 27-year-old you will have just finished filming the movie adaptation to it, I’d say, maybe, ‘Bullshit, but try me.’
What do you love about movies?
Jesus. Um. What do I love about movies? Right off the top, it’d be the ability to escape. I think Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie captured
it the best with Tom Wingfield being able to leave his job at the
factory, his mother and his insecure sister to go to the movies and to
get away from his own reality. That’s what I’ve found myself doing and I
constantly find myself doing. When I want to escape present time
troubles and tribulations and trials and joys and vicissitudes, you go
to the movies and you get to be away from your present problems.
BRIDGES: So tell me about On the Road. That was kicking around for a while and went through some directors, didn't it?
HEDLUND: Yeah. I'd read it in high school. It's funny that I got to do On the Road because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree. I also always thought of myself as more like the Sal Paradise character—you know, being a listener and writing about a conversation more than being the one that others listened to. So it was interesting that I got to play Dean. I actually signed on to do On the Road before we started on Tron, but we were in flux for a while, just sort of playing the waiting game, trying to get the right budget and the right cast. I think I first met with Walter in March of 2007. But I told Walter that I wouldn't do another film until we did On the Road, so I had a lot of time to do my own research—to go up to San Francisco to City Lights bookstore, to watch video interviews of Neal Cassady with Allen Ginsberg, to sit in Vesuvio [Cafe] and visit Jack Kerouac Alley, to go to the Beat Museum and things. We had time, so Walter and I also did road trips and talked to people, be it family members of some of the people who were around the Beats or other writers. But it was really just about finding something that we could add to the story beyond what was on the page, even if only from life experience. I mean, I grew up around country roads, but this was a different route that these guys took. Eventually, though, it all came to fruition.
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