INT: Thomas Haden Church

A
lot of people might not know him as anything more than “that
obnoxious wine guy” from SIDEWAYS. But with the ever-nearing
release date of SPIDER-MAN
3,

Thomas

Haden

Church

is sure to get the recognition he so rightfully deserves. Heck, if
we’re lucky, maybe soon people will start calling him “that
villain who was made out of sand.” I kid, I kid. While it’s
true this guy hasn’t headlined a lot of big
Hollywood
movies, the fact that he just about stole the spotlight from the
awesome Paul Giamatti (in the previously mentioned film SIDEWAYS)
more than proves his worth as an actor. And now his efforts have
paid off, as he gets to bump heads with Spider-Man as the super-cool
baddie Sandman (one of my personal favorite characters from the
Spidey universe). You can see them battle it out this Friday, May 4
(you can read my review HERE).

JoBlo.com
recently got the invite to come down to the Four
Seasons Hotel in LA, allowing us press to have a little Q&A
session with the respected actor. With SIDEWAYS being one of my
favorite movies of 2004, I was incredibly excited to get up close
and personal with the guy. To my great pleasure, he did not let me
down. He was smart, funny, and surprisingly really nice (despite the
types of characters he normally plays). He also had some really
interesting things to discuss, including some insight into the
deeper meaning of the story, and information about the painstaking
transformation process that went into making him a shape-shifting
behemoth. Read on to find out more.

Thomas
Haden Church

I
imagine you spent a lot of time in front of the computers, with the
FX team getting scans of your body and such…

Yeah,
the pre-production aspect of it was lengthy, and all of the body
scans and motion capture and all the various technological
processes.

Was
it interesting at all, or was it pretty boring to go through?

No.
I found it very interesting. I’m not a tech head, but the whole
phenomena of what they do is cool and I got to be pretty close with
[visual effects supervisor] Scott Stokdyk who I had actually met at
The Academy Awards in 2005. Scott’s a really sweet guy and he was so
generous in sharing information and letting me know how they build
the creatures, but a lot of it, like they like to say, is inspired
by me because the three big sequences, the birth of Sandman – for
my character, I don’t want to seem self-aggrandizing – and then
whenever he manifests himself out of the truck and then of course at
the end of the movie.

It
was kind of this video-tracking, camera test process where many,
many times they would have multiple camera sets and I would act it
out because it’s all so muted and bestial. It became, to some
extent, the bane of my daily life when I was shooting because you
would hear crackling over the walkie, “Sam wants to meet with
Thomas at lunch to shoot some more video of the birth of
Sandman.” We really did a lot of it. There were very specific
emotional beats that we wanted that they were going to layer upon.

Particularly
in the birth of the Sandman, without the advantage of eyes and real
human facial expression you still wanted to convey the tragedy and
not just leave it up to things like when he grabs the clasp and it
breaks apart in his hand and then he kind of re-manifests himself.
It could just be that. It had to be everything that was happening
and how he would breathe as he’s re-ionizing the evolution of the
beast.

With
all of the CGI, there wasn’t a whole lot of dialogue for your
character. How did you go about building your character?

It
was very challenging. It was the most challenging thing. The birth
of Sandman was by far the most challenging dramatic thing that I did
in the movie because we did it so much and it’s setup by the terror
of being ripped apart. It also happens to involve by far the most
dangerous stunts in the movie, which I did myself. The insurance
company would only allow me to do them one time and we literally
rehearsed it for six hours before we shot it. It was when the de-ionizer
or however you want to describe it.

I
always called it a kind of molecular accelerator. [Jokingly] I
decided to have my own scientific terminology. But that thing was
built off of this Bell helicopter turbo engine and when it got up to
full rev, the guys were like, “Look, if you get hit it’s like
getting hit by a car at eighty miles an hour.” So that’s why we
rehearsed it as long as we did. I was on a tether, but the way that
Sam wanted to do it, and you’ve seen it, is that where the camera
was and you see the light bars going by and I had to run straight at
those light bars and then get yanked back. Like I said, the
insurance company – believe me, there was a phalanx of
representatives there that day – would only allow me to do it one
time. I wanted to do it again, but it’s the one that’s in the movie.
The intensity, and quite frankly the fear, is really there.

You’re
right though, because it was so muted and because you don’t have any
vocalization of the character, you kind of just have to rely on how
your body conveys the tragedy and your face to some extent, but not
really in the birth of the character, and then the same thing when I
come out of the trick. There is this ferocity that I’m really glad
we were able to capture in melding the CG with how I acted it out in
the video tracking. I thought it came through very well. I wanted to
have that mix of anger and innocence. I’m just trying to get away
from them and then whenever I come up they start shooting me and
then I kind of get upset.

Did
you see your characters, the Sandman and Flint Marko, as totally
different entities?

No.
They’re absolutely, intrinsically woven together really just the
core of who Flint Marko is. When we first started this process, they
asked me to do this movie in January ’05 and we immediately started
having story conferences. I live in Texas full time and so a lot of
it was on the phone, but any time that I came to LA for prep stuff,
Sam [Raimi] and I would together – and Alvin [Sargent] and Ivan [Raimi],
Laura [Ziskin] – we’d all get together and talk about the
character and it was always about Flint Marko.

It
was about the man because it was very important to myself and to Sam
that we know who the man was and what his propulsion through the
movie was sustained by. Sandman, like Frankenstein, is just the
darker monstrosity and malevolence that he can’t control, not unlike
the black suit that Spider-Man can’t control and ultimately Venom,
Eddie Brock, can’t control. So, while Venom and Sandman don’t have a
direct connection they’re mutually exclusive. They kind of suffer
from the same problem as does Spider-Man with the black suit.

How
were the final moments of Sandman’s story arc worked out?

They
were asking me in Japan if [the ending] was a calculated move, and
it wasn’t. We re-shot the end of the movie. Tobey [Maguire] and I,
we shot four versions of it and to some extent it was about what was
happening between Flint and Peter, but it was also about how does he
leave the movie in a satisfying way and ultimately the most
satisfying way was the most mysterious way.

So
will we see the DVD advertised with four alternate endings?

No,
you’ll never see that. You’ll never see it because it takes away
from the movie. We wouldn’t have kept redoing it if it wasn’t
getting better and wasn’t becoming what we thought was a fulfilling
closure to the story. No, the others were inferior. So you will
never see them.

With
all the critical success that you got for ‘Sideways,’ did you worry
at all about just sort of growling in this film as a follow up to a
great performance?

Two
names: Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire. They are genetically incapable
of delivering anything that isn’t superlative in the business. It
has to be good. I knew that it was going to be a compelling and
dramatic story because Sam refuses to do anything less, and you go
all the way back, I’m not a huge fan of ‘Evil Dead,’ but I think
that the characters’ stories in ‘Evil Dead II’ are very compelling.
Then you move onto ‘Army of Darkness’ and particularly ‘Dark Man’
and then really one of my favorite movies, ‘A Simple Plan,’ which is
a very intimate character study really – I mean it has its
psychological thriller kind of aspect to it – and I knew that
between Sam’s filmmaking history and what a thoughtful performer
that I think Tobey is that this was going to be good.

Sam
introduced Tobey the other night at the Tokyo premiere as perhaps
the finest actor of his generation and I concur. If you look at
‘Ride With the Devil’ which I think is a great film and he’s
terrific in it and then you look at ‘Deconstructing Harry’ and he’s
hysterical in it – he just has such amazing range as a performer.
I think that they picked the perfect guy for these movies, and then
having worked with Tobey over the last two years he really is
profoundly determined to find a character that the audience
understands and what’s to take a journey with. From the onset to the
end they’re going to be happy and thrilled and saddened, but
ultimately rewarded. So it’s the two of them really that made me
want to do it. That was the fire down below for me.

Like
Doc Ock in the second movie, you’re a villain with sympathy rather
than a villain who’s hated by the audience…

I
think that my character certainly starts off in a place emotionally
which addresses the worst fear of any parent, the possibility that
you’ll lose your greatest gift which is your child. I’m a father and
Sam is a father and Laura and Alvin are parents, Avi is a parent,
everyone involved – early on that’s what we wanted the anchoring
of the character to be. It was that kind of impending tragedy with
the character. You’re right though, he’s sympathetic and certainly
some clicks beyond Eddie Brock and Venom, but I think that as Avi
has said before there are no bad guys in these movies.

They’re
just people that this far into the series, I think, come into these
movies with a value system in tact that’s corrupted by ambition or
lust. In the case of Sandman he’s really corrupted by the ferocity
of his own good intentions. You’ve got to pretty much figure that
whenever I become a sand tornado and I’m spinning through the
streets of Manhattan and flipping over cars some people probably got
f**ked up. That’s probably a drag and they don’t care if my daughter
is dying because their car got turned upside down, their Hyundai
Excel. They don’t even see the hidden benefit that insurance pays
and they get another car.

Not
if they’re dead.

True,
in which case their family collects death benefits, huh? [Laughs]
They go party in Cabo. “Damn! I am all about Sandman,
ya’ll!”

How
much did you workout because you looked pretty ripped in the film
and you’ve still got some of that going on?

By
the end of shooting I clocked in right at two years. We started out
pretty intensively for nine months before I started shooting, and
just stuck with it because I had to maintain the appearance, but it
was pretty intensive.

Did
you have a personal trainer?

I
had guys in L.A., guys in Texas, when I went to do ‘Broken Trail’ in
Canada I had two guys there, and a school hall monitor that came up
to check to make sure I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.
The guy that trained me in L.A. were the guys that trained Brad Pitt
for ‘Troy,’ these guys Duffy and Mike, and Duffy would come and
check in on me in Calgary to make sure I was behaving.

But
it was really about strength training and diet, I never did any
cardio because as any fitness expert will tell you cardio is the
enemy of muscle and they just wanted me to get bigger, and I did, I
gained 28 pounds of muscle and dropped 10 points of body fat, which
for a dude in his forties was, let me tell you, no bake sale. You’re
talking about… [Feigns lifting weights, groans] – [Jokingly]
“I could have done a Robin Williams movie!” Which is true,
I was offered ‘RV’ at the same time I was offered ‘Spider-Man.’

Your
dramatic scene with Theresa Russell established the whole dramatic
arch for your character. Can you talk a bit about working with her,
and also kind of setting that tone with your character?

Unfortunately,
Theresa [Russell] and Perla [Haney-Jardine], the little girl, did
have some other stuff in the movie and ultimately – I think when
they were testing the movie it became just too tragic, and it
started to, I think, imbalance the other stories. It’s a little bit
of a drag because I did – Theresa was terrific and Pearla was
terrific, but I think they just felt like, as I said, that early
emotional anchoring is there, and maybe it’s better that it becomes
kind of nebulous after that.

But
Theresa was so dedicated and in the summer of ’05 I read with a lot
of actresses to play the mother and then a lot of actresses to play
my daughter, every great young actress, Dakota Fanning’s sister and
Abigail Breslin came into read to play my daughter. Pearla captured
this quality and Theresa captured this quality that was kind of at
once tragic but hopeful. And I think that they really felt like less
is more, you just needed a little bit of that to set the stage and
then you just turn the ferocity of Flint Marko and Sandman
loose.

You
almost expected like a hospital bed scene somewhere in there too.

No,
we never had anything like that in there. I’m also thankful that we
did not. I think that it did what they needed it to do. I’m not
really objective enough to know otherwise. In my mind I can really
describe the scenes, and there were a few scenes that I was
surprised to see were taken out. The movie is long and I’ve directed
a movie, and in fact I’m writing a western film right now for
Sony
, and I just know how it goes. Sometimes you have to just cut them
loose as painful as it might be. Like I said, Sam and I talked about
it and actually he said as much to me yesterday. He said, “I
loved that scene, but I feel like we kind of established that
emotionally already and I really didn’t think that it was
necessary.” I also think that Sam is on his way to being, if
not already, being a legendary director, and I just defer to him
always.

What’s
the western that you’re writing right now?

Oh,
it’s a movie called ‘Last Horseman’ that I’m writing for
Sony
and for AMC.

Is
it an adaptation?

No,
it’s an original. Well, kind of, it’s based on a short story that I
wrote when I was in college. After the success of Broken Trail, and
in that scenario AMC was the lead partner and
Sony
kind of came in as the production partner, but this time it’s
reversed.
Sony
is kind of the lead and AMC came in as a production partner. So I’m
not sure if it’s going to be a feature or a mini-series, but it’s
based on a short story that I wrote when I was in school and it’s a
very compelling story. It’s based on a real guy in the old west. It
was a guy who was born into slavery and became this master horse
breaker and then this really horrific racial violence was
perpetrated upon him and was driven into this kind of notorious
fugitive life. So it’s a really compelling story about an African
American in the old west. I mean, the story spans from the Civil War
to 1901.

Will
you act in it?

We
haven’t shot it yet. We’re going to shoot it in the fall in Alberta
and I’m producing it, but I don’t think that I’m going to be in it.
I don’t know, maybe.

What’s
the character’s name?

His
alias was Isom Dart, but he was born Ned Huddleston. He’s a real guy
though and a very tragic character.

Do
you have anything else going on or coming out?

There’s
this movie Smart People that’s going to be out in the fall with
Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker.

What
do you do in that?

I
play Dennis Quaid’s brother. It’s produced by Michael London and
it’s tonally similar to Sideways. I think that it’s a balance of
drama and comedy. There is an amazing young actress named Ellen Page
in it who you might be familiar with. She’s from ‘Hard Candy’ and
‘X-Men 3.’ She’s got a ton of movies coming out. She’s kind of
taking the industry by storm which is weird because she’s like
4’11” and probably weights 95lbs, but she’s just
preternaturally gifted like Leonardo DiCaprio was in ‘This Boy’s
Life’ – just a force, a force to be reckoned with.

Got
questions? Got comments? Send me a line at: [email protected]

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