Austinist Interviews SXSW: David Pomes and Anson Mount of "Cook County"

DP: I looked you up on IMDB. Yeah, so I got lucky. She read it, she liked it, said she would give it to Anson. A week later, Anson had read it, and was interested. And then from there, through people Anson knows or others, we were able to get other actors. Kind of a one thing led to another kind of situation.

So what made you want to do it?

AM: Um, you ever seen any of my other movies?

I haven't seen Crossroads, but I have to tell you that I was working at YM when it came out, so I'm familiar with your face.

AM: You can get the idea of why I wanted to do this movie. I'm 35 now. I'm tired of playing the cute boy, or the goodlooking other guy who you don't want her to end up with, or the dangerous romantic guy in the office. I'm so f***ing tired of being typecast in the same dull thing.

You could get radical plastic surgery, maybe. So you went with a really hard role.

AM: It was a great story, and there's a real warm heart at the center of the story, and it was definitely an acting challenge, and it scared the hell out of me. Not just the material but how I was going to do it. I just went back to my roots, to the basis of my training. I went and studied in Paris for a little while, and worked with a friend of mine who had some of the same training. I started from a physical point of view. I was sort of looking at how Bump moved. I started with that.

That really comes through—everyone in this movie is very specific in their movements. How did you guys research what happens to someone on crystal meth? Did you have contact with it from being a lawyer, David?

DP: No, I had never seen it. The Internet is a great tool, and I got some documentaries to Anson, some programs on DVD that showed people tweaking.

AM: I interviewed some recovering addicts.

How did you get access to them?

AM: You meet people...If you ask around, you'll know someone who knows somebody in Narcotics Anonymous. If you ask everyone you know, they'll be able to ask if someone will be willing to talk. It's not the easiest thing, because it's kind of touchy. Nobody talks about it. That's one of the most interesting things about the subject, that even in general, nobody realizes that it's that big a problem. I didn't realize that it was that big a problem. Before I really researched it, I just equated methamphetamines with speed. I had no idea.

DP: We filmed in a small town. And the problem was recognizable out there, it was in your face.

But were people talking about it out there? Because that was another thing about the movie, I got the sense in it that the storeowners in the film, for example, who run the place where the methheads buy the ingredients to make the stuff, see it happening, but are somehow oblivious in a way that's willful.

DP: The goal with those characters was to somehow represent a community without bringing a ton of people into the story or making a political statement, or being heavy-handed with it. I didn't want to have a situation where you have everybody and his dog in the town coming over to the house. I didn't want it to be one of those. So the Mr. Jimmy character from the store kind of symbolized people who were living in days gone by, haven't really caught up on what's really going on.

Is that the way you saw the dynamic going in Cleveland? Like the people who weren't into meth, were they aware of it?

DP: Well, just in my experience going to small towns, there's always part of the community that's very connected and very well to do, a small chunk that kind of runs the community and takes civic pride, but there's a lot of decay underneath that. I don't want to say particularly that it’s true in Cleveland, but in small town America, it's a serious issue, and I'd never really seen a movie that addresses meth in a small town.

I read in the notes that you wanted to make it feel kind of claustrophobic, and first of all, the house in the woods is so small that that worked really well...How did you end up filming in that house?

DP: I found that house through my makeup lady, she said she knew the house and it was a great location, and I went there and thought "This is it" right away. But you can't help but feel claustrophobic. You're in the house, closed in....and we also shot things so that people looked like they were right on top of each other. I wanted to create an intimidation factor with the Bump character, especially when he's dealing with Abe.

And there's a sense that there’s not really anyone...like, where's the school, where's the social worker? There's no one outside coming into the situation, nobody the kids can turn to.

DP: Yeah, the original script had a lot more of that in there, and I whittled it down because I thought it was unnecessary for the story.

AM: Yeah...social workers...I grew up in a very rural part of Tennessee, and where I grew up, people in this situation would not necessarily qualify for social workers. That's for people that are south of that. There's a stigma to allowing yourself to receive social help in rural places.

And this kind of comes across in the movie when Bump keeps saying, "That's my kid, that's my kid."

DP: And there's a paranoia aspect too, with meth addicts, they don't want anyone coming around. We were out there, where we were shooting, it was really meth infused, and they thought we were an organized undercover DEA sting operation. Or something. There were all kinds of crazy rumors going around.

What other rumors?

AM: Somebody came up asking where Kevin Spacey was. They thought Kevin Spacey was in the movie.

DP: And then that we had, there were some off-duty officers working security at night and that was causing more paranoia.

What was it like working with a child actor, the girl who plays Deandra, in a movie about such scary stuff? Was she really six?

DP: She had maybe just turned seven. She was fantastic. She has got an unflappable personality. One thing that I picked up on, when I was casting for that part, was that girls around six or seven are very natural and they don't take any direction at all, and girls who are a year or two older do everything you tell them to do, but they're just stiff. And she was the only one of all of them who was a combination. She was very natural, and if I told her to do something different she'd do it different. She was a very bright girl, charming, natural.

You said you had plot elements or scenes in the movie that got written out or cut out. What were they?

DP: A lot of the dialogue was just unnecessary. We felt like the story just needed more of a connection between Abe and his father, so we added a lot of stuff in there. And then, as we went along we'd say, we kind of need something else...there was one, one of my favorite scenes, I felt like the relationship between Bump and Lucy was missing something. It was too rough; there wasn't a sense as to why these people would hang out together. So I asked Anson and Polly [Cole], who was playing Lucy, to ad-lib a scene. I told them to go into the kitchen, and that they'd be doing drugs together, and just to talk. And everything was off the cuff.

I thought that was great, there was a flavor of what the interchange would be like.

DP: And a better perspective on the relationship.

It reminds me a bit of Requiem for a Dream, you know that movie? The scene where his arm is about to fall off...man, that's a tough scene.

DP: I didn't want it to be a typical drug movie. I didn't want the scenes where needles are hanging out of arms. I wanted to show them having a good time. People do drugs to have a good time. I didn't want to have scenes with people falling asleep. This is speed, people feel like they're the king of the world. Well, we wanted to show the bad parts...

Like when their father is dead on the floor...

DP: But we mostly wanted to point out that there's an intergenerational pull to this thing. Like, the Bump character is trying to get other people involved, even his six-year-old daughter. Believe it or not, that is not unusual. You'd be surprised how young some of the kids start to do it.

What kind of research did you do, before you wrote it?

DP: A lot of research. The Internet is an incredible tool. It's hard to know what people did before the Internet. This drug people, this is the one place where it's getting the attention it deserves. There’s so much, there was a little while there where people were giving it coverage, but it had kind of fallen off. I don't know if it's because of the election, but the problem is enormous.

I feel like with stuff like that, people can only hear so much. And I actually wanted to ask you that, because I read an article on Slate.com a while ago about the coverage of meth, and how some common themes were sometimes blown out of proportion, like the question of what meth does to your teeth. All of the kind of really nasty stuff. But the author was pointing out that the sociological stuff behind it is not given as much room in the story. In your movie, I really liked the way that it seemed obvious that this was a failing of society also.

DP: Yeah, small towns across the country are decaying. I think the horse is the decay, and the cart is the drug. There are people out there doing it because they have few prospects, they're bored, it's cheap.

Do you think people are going to leave the movie thinking "Oh, I have to do something about this"? Did you want it to be an activist movie?

DP: I never intended to have a sociological message or political statement. It was a story about a family. It was never meant to be anything like that. People might walk away that way. I don't think movies are very good that start out political statements.

Syriana? I liked that one. Anyway, I also liked the way that the Houston scenes in the movie, when the kids go to visit their aunt and uncle in the suburbs, are really stable, and make you feel relaxed. I liked the way that the house in Houston is very middle American, with that flowered bathroom and everything, and under other circumstances would have made me feel claustrophobic, but in contrast to that meth house in the woods, it really works as a center of stability.

DP: Actually, that's my parents' house in Houston, where I grew up.

Oh my God! Are you kidding? Are the actors your parents?

DP: No, no. But I gave my dad a small part. The way we shot the film in Houston was different than the way we did it in Cleveland. In the deep woods, everything was handheld, everything was close, the intimidation and claustrophobia was there. But when we shot in Houston we put everything on a tripod, let the room kind of breathe a little bit, kind of relax. It was quieter and more peaceful.

[Anson comes back to the table]

Anson, since you're back, I wanted to ask you, were you happy with the way the Bump character turned out in the end?

AM: Yeah, I think it's the best work I've ever done.

What has it made you think about what you want to do next?

AM: I think I've proven to myself that I'm capable, that I have a broader range than I maybe thought I had or anybody else thought I had. It's, I really think that having a hand in the creative side of things, being able to produce and approach it from the standpoint of being one of the people who’s helping to make the artistic vision happen, really allowed me to have space to create that I don't normally feel as an actor. A lot of times it's a job and you're hired to do a job and that’s it. If Curtis Hanson says stand there, you stand there. So I really enjoyed the ability to look at how to develop a role at the same time that we were trying to figure out where the whole thing needed to go to get it done and get it done quickly and creatively and in a way that fit David's vision.

How much time was it altogether?

DP: We shot over a month, 23 days over a month. I think all of the performances are outstanding. I think Anson's performance had the most impact on people. I think I let actors, all of my actors are really intelligent and talented, and I just wanted to let them work it out. So I'm really proud of the performances, especially Anson's. He hit a home run.

Are you going to write another one?

DP: I wrote another script, it's about a guy in his thirties or forties, who doesn't like the way his life was turning out. His wife is leaving him and he's lost his job. And so he thinks that most of his problems began with an ass-kicking he got in high school. So he decides to drive back to his hometown and find the guy who beat him and kick his ass.

Oh, you know, I can't remember the name of the author, but there's a book called Goat, a memoir about a guy who gets his ass kicked in college—oh, I actually think he went to UT! [note: nope, it was Clemson] —and how it affected him the rest of his life.

DP: Yeah, I have a friend, who's from Minnesota, and who got his ass kicked in high school, and still talks about it, talks about going back to Minnesota to kick this guy's ass. But it's a pretty good and easy concept. I don't know if there's been a movie about it.

I feel like the ending that would be expected would be, well, now that I've kicked this guy's ass, I realize it didn't really matter, and that sort of moralistic tone. But what if you had an ending that had the protagonist kick the guy's ass and then be like "Wow! That really did change my life for the better!"?

DP: Wow, I hadn't thought about that. I didn't end it that way, and that's an alternative I didn't' think about. I didn't put too much stock in the plot, it's more about the guy himself. I find with storytelling, it's all about telling the character's story. Like in Cook County, the dynamic between different characters, like between Bump and Abe, Sonny and Abe, Sonny and Bump...there were things that came through that weren't obvious to me at the beginning. Like, there are these two characters. Sonny and Bump, two brothers, and bad things are happening to them at the same time, and they're responding in different ways. One is trying to do good, while the other is letting himself go bad. They're going their separate ways. And I didn't expect that, or intend that. If you let characters just develop, that's the way it works.

Cook County will have its World Premiere this afternoon at the Alamo South Lamar as part of the SXSW Film Festival. More info at the B-Side / Film Threat SXSW Film Guide.