Almost a year ago to the day, I was on the set of Jonah Hex in hot and humid Louisiana. While on set, I watched Josh Brolin stand on top of a huge ship trying to find a way to defeat John Malkovich. Even though comic book movies might have been a small genre ten years ago, nowadays, some of the biggest actors in the business are lining up to play comic book characters. As a huge fan of the genre, it's awesome to see.

Anyway, while Josh Brolin was under hours of makeup and involved in most of the shots, towards the middle of the night he sat down to talk about the challenges of the makeup, the character of Jonah Hex, what was it like to go up against John Malkovich, how much of the action he could do himself, why he wanted Jimmy Hayward in the director's chair, working in the scope (anamorphic), and so much more. It's a great interview that's absolutely worth checking out.

Q: I've definitely been wanting to ask you, are you happy you took my advice to do the movie?

A: Oh that's right. I remember you. You were on the right side of me.

Q: Yes, exactly.

A: I was talking about what a piece of shit this was and then you were like "no it's not", right? Maybe you did have an impact.

Q: You seemed like you were doing a lot of decisions right there in that room about do I want to do this project? It seemed to me at that moment that you were really debating internally because it seems like you do a lot of internal debate whether or not you want to take a project. You kind of mentioned that during "Milk" and it seemed like at that moment...

A: No "Milk" is not... that wasn't the case. I read "Milk" and immediately I was very emotional after reading it and then I saw the documentary—the one that Rob Epstein did—and I said that's it. I saw it with my daughter and that was it. This thing is a different thing. It's like I've been offered these kind of superhero movies or "Terminator" or whatever those movies are and I just go ahh. If it really resonates, and "Terminator" when I read it, I thought was really dark and cool and interesting, but then I knew they could go this way with it or that way. With this thing I don't know wherever they went it was still going to be absurd. It was still going to be anti-hero. It was still going to bring back sort of this hybrid of spaghetti western genre, you know the balls of westerns and I've been watching, and I don't want to insult anybody, but I've been watching these westerns recently and they don't have any cojones anymore. And what I love about this is you don't really get into the supernatural elements. You've got this guy who refuses to die for some reason whether it be a physical or metaphysical reason or spiritual reason so you can do anything. You can kill off anybody and you can still bring them back because he’s kind of half there and half in reality, you know? What it reminded me of, at least in a positive way that allowed me to go in this positive route…travel along this positive route was Javier in "No Country". You know, is he in the room? Did he leave the room? Does he exist? Does he not exist? Is he a figment of Tommy's imagination at that moment and all that? So I just started kind of going off on that. Did that make any sense at all?

Q: You did and can I just say the makeup looks amazing. It looks great on you. How is it to wear?

A: It sucks man. It does, because we didn't want to do the CGI thing, and because of a certain movie that I thought it was extremely distracting for me personally. I said, "We have to go practical with this," but so you know… I have a piece of tape here, I have this thing that hooks in the back. I have this thing behind my ear so it pulls my face back, then we put a facial prosthetic on, then we put teeth in with wires going up here. So we had these teeth, so this thing holds back my lip, and then we do another prosthetic over here and then we paint the face, so it's a lot of work.



Q: But for you as a performer, does it put you in the right place by the time you hit set are you revved up and ready?

A: Yeah, I mean usually I'm telling jokes on the set and I haven't really got time and I'm like walking around here just like growling at everybody. I don't know why. I think it's because of this, I don't know. Yeah, it does. It helps for sure. For sure it helps. I don't like it personally but professionally it works, I guess.

Q: Would you have hesitation about doing it again if this a success; they wanted you to return to the role, would the prosthetics...?

A: Yeah, but I know what happens. I do have hesitation, honestly. We're half-way through it now and I'm like, "Never again, never again."

Q: Never go through it again?

A: Yeah, but we're talking about doing "John Brown 2" which would be absolute full prosthetics, you know? It starts at 56 years old, so we're talking... I'm becoming that actor, you know? Like the Lon Chaney.

Q: This is right after "W".

A: We had prosthetics in "W" also. Not this massive. But you know what happens with when you finish and if you're really proud of the job and all that and then you go "why not?" you forget. It's like having a baby I guess from what I heard from my ex-wife. You know she's like "oh I'm never doing it again" and then 2 months she's like "want to have another one?" So it's that kind of a thing, I think.

Q: Had you heard about the character prior to hearing about the film?

A: A little bit. I wasn't a big... I read comic books and stuff, but I didn't know a lot about it. I wasn't one of those graphic novels freaks, you know? I don't mean it negatively, I'm just... I didn't do that. I read a lot of Ray Bradbury. I read a lot of that kind of stuff, you know, Isaac Asimov and things. But no, I didn't know a lot about it, but I liked the idea of it, and I liked the idea that it wasn't a huge success. Do you know what I mean? There's not a lot of expectation and I love that. It makes it riskier for us. It allows us to do things that you wouldn't normally be able to do. And being loyal to Comic-Con people… Yeah, we're going to be loyal, but the guys who write Jonah Hex now came on the set and they were flipping out. They were like, "This is unbelievable," and they were truly feeling that, you know? We wanted to make them happy but at the same time we have a luxury to kind of do what we feel like doing, because it's not a failed comic book necessarily but it's the comic book that just won't go away. It has its loyal audience. People like it existing. It's not Watchmen but they love that it exists because they need it. They need the guttural visceral primitive thing, always. So it's kind of a law of balance right now—a law of averages, where we have all these superhero things and there's the other guy, who's sort of a protagonist but he's kind of an antagonist, and he's a drunk, and he's kind of curmudgeonly and then so are the other characters. So who's the good guy, who's the bad guy? I like that, you know?

Q: It's like the spaghetti western. It won't die.

A: Absolutely.

Q: You were talking about how westerns—modern westerns—a lot of them don't have the same kind of cojones or the same sort of gravitas to them, what are your favorite westerns? What are the ones that are touch stones for you?

A: I mean, there's a lot of them. There's a lot of them. There are things that I saw recently and there was a director... I don't mind saying that we were trying to get Park Chan Wook, who did Old Boy. There was a Japanese director, [Miike], who did Ichi the Killer, that I liked very much... We talked to Sergey Bodrov who did Mongol, who I thought was incredible. There were a lot of people who've done a lot of things that I really appreciate, and then you go back to the Italian spaghetti westerns that our spaghetti westerns were based off of so I've seen everything. Everything. I don't have a favorite. Then I'll go and watch Days of Heaven, and I go, "How beautiful is that?" So I think, at least my idea, was, "Let's bring something that's primitive and guttural but then let's also do something beautiful where you're outside and this isn't a typical western setting. It's lush. It's green. It's beautiful." I don't know. I love that the studio is like, "We don't have a model for this. We don't know." They don't know whether to be supportive or angry or anything and I like that. It's good. So if it works we'll have created something original that other people can copycat, other people can splinter from and try to make their money based on what we did. That's my hope. Who knows if it'll work or not but that's my hope.



Q: So many of the characters you've played recently have been guys who it seems you as an actor have to find a way to make them empathetic to an audience to a certain extent despite everything about them from George W. Bush to doing "Milk" and things like that. You've got to find a way to make the audience follow you along. I mean with "Jonah Hex" what is that to you? What do you present to the audience? Obviously he's not a character who has his... he's Superman with his big heroic arc, I mean it's a different kind of thing.

A: No, but he has a past, you know? The fact that his mother was a prostitute. I mean, that's why I like the relationship between Lila and Jonah, because Lila… I said this to somebody yesterday, I was like, "Well, you've got to have Megan Fox in your movie because everybody wants Megan Fox in your movie." No, we were looking at a bunch of different people. We were looking at people like Melissa Leo at a certain point. We really went through the gamut, and I woke up one morning and I was like, "It has to be Megan Fox. If I can get a performance out of her it has to be Megan Fox." Because to me [there's] this whole beauty and beast thing, and then you also have Megan surrounded by these toothless whores and she's the most beautiful and yet she's the most broken, you know? I like that. That's my understanding of life. What you perceive. You might be an interesting guy, an interesting reporter, then I get to know you and then I know you're this also and you're this also and you may hide it in a certain way. That's what I love. It's like the Dan White thing. Dan White was a good guy. It wasn't that he was a bad guy. He was a good guy who just snapped. What creates the snap in somebody? So that's why I like the contrast between what you're perceiving cosmetically and what's going on underneath. To me, Lila is the most broken character of all. Jonah's probably next, you know? Turnbull is probably the craziest. He's caught up in this romanticism and revenge factor of losing. He refuses to lose. Anyway, it goes on and on and on.

Q: You had a relationship with John Malkovich prior to this. How is it working with him where you guys are head-to-head in so much of the movie?

A: It's great. It's Malkovich. [Impersonating Malkovich.] "Um... Josh I was like..." He does this whole thing. It's fucking great. To me he's a genius. I mean he really is. He's been a huge inspiration for me and he became a great friend and I called him about this and it was like, "Will you please do this?" "Yes, Josh, I‘d like to read it and see how I feel afterwards and then I'll ring you afterwards." I just think the guy is freaking fantastic. And then the studio, they have an idea [that] John plays all the crazy people and I was like, "No, man." We started going through a lot of really wonderful actors and I said, "You know, the thing about those actors is… There's a lot of rage in the part, but usually with these certain actors they feel rage and it comes out straightforward. John, he feels rage and he may pick up a poodle and start petting it and reciting a poem or something, which to me is far scarier than somebody who's just screaming at you, you know? So John always does something very interesting and eclectic, and I don't think forcefully. I think maybe when he was younger that was a force thing. I think John is truly eclectic now. I think he's become what he was aspiring to become.



Q: How much action and stunt work do you do personally in this?

A: A lot. My stunt guy, who's my guy and comes from movie to movie, Mark Norby, when I broke my collar before No Country he was the happiest guy on earth, because he knew I wouldn't be able to do anything. There's a lot of stuff for him to do on this. He was the coordinator on W. You know, not a lot of stuff to do, but he'll do a lot of stuff on this. I would prefer to do pretty much everything but this movie's freaking killing me. I mean it is. Everyday is like…if you saw me wake up in the morning and walk to the bathroom, it's a joke. I mean I'm limping. I jammed my finger yesterday. I have bruises everywhere.

Q: When you’re breathing heavy in like an action scene, are you able to breathe properly with that on?

A: Yeah, I just slobber a lot. I do. I was going to incorporate the thing but I've gotten used to it now, because we have different ones I use for different times; so [with] more action stuff I can talk better now than I can usually talk. But I was trying to incorporate a little thing that I held in my belt loop and I would do that but then that was too Malkovichy because that's something that Malkovich does. So I decided to do away with it.

Q: You talk about some of the other filmmakers who you were sort of inspired by sort of when you came into this. What made Jimmy sort of the right collaborator for you on this?

A: He wrote me a brilliant e-mail. A brilliant e-mail. It was one of the best. And I'm an e-mailer, and I do a lot of my enticing through e-mail. I'm a decent writer so I guess I'm sort of good at that, and I read his e-mail and I was blown away. It was extremely passionate, extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgeable — not of the character necessarily but technically. You can't take away from the fact that the guy's worked for a company that can't fail. They just don't fail, and at Pixar you've got to be good man. It's like Apple. They just keep [meeting] challenge after challenge after challenge. Jimmy knew the comic book really well. He had a first edition of the comic—that I don't think he went out and bought after he knew we were going to meet. I think he had that. There was a great new adolescent energy to him, you know? And again, there's no expectation. There's the opposite. And there's no reason why he can't make a phenomenal film even as a mistake. He has the vision. He has the fashion. You look at Quentin Tarantino, when Quentin was working in the video store, you would never say, "Oh, let's get that guy to direct a great film," you know, a big film. This is a big film, but it's not a huge film. He's incredible to me, and if he pulls this off he'll have an amazing career. We don't have… we've got in the 30's or something as a budget. This is huge scope. Big, big, big scope. It may be ridiculous at times but it doesn't matter because that's the genre. We can do that. That's what I like about it. A mistake may be an asset to us in the future, so, yeah, I've never done anything like this. You know me, I get into all the complicated characters and shit. This is not what this is. It's very simple. It's very linear. It's very straightforward. My big thing was to get somebody like him, if we weren't going to get Danny Boyle we were going to get somebody like him, and then at that same time get brilliant actors. That was my thing and that's where I came in and I called Malkovich. I called Fassbender. I called Megan. I called.. who else is in it?

Q: Will Arnett?

A: No, I didn't call Will.

Q: Michael Shannon?

A: Michael Shannon. There we go. Thank you. Jesus. Who I think is just, I mean and I don't say it lightly when I say it, he cannot do…to me he can do no wrong. I mean he is such a brilliant presence and I like that. I want to be surrounded by that.

Q: I was just going to ask you quickly about you guys are shooting this anamorphically.

A: Yeah.

Q: And could you just talk a little bit about that?

A: 2:35, man. It's hard. It's hard for the camera people—the operators—to hold everything, because it's so thin and it's so wide...

Q: And could you just talk a little bit about that?

A: A totally different way but if you can pull it off, when you see it in the theatre it's going to be a genius experience. It's not like you're doing a thing—"Oh, it looks like the 70s." I don't want that. I don't want "Oh, it looks like a low-budget B movie in the 70s." Even Jimmy will say, "God, this looks so 70s." And I'm like, "No, I don't want to hear that. And I don't want it to look crisp like what we have now. I want something in between."

Q: You've had this incredible run of filmmakers you've worked with recently and an amazing set of films you’ve worked on. Sounds like you're very involved in making this one happen like you were a big driving force in this. Is that something that you're bringing these experiences to each film now and you really see yourself kind of driving the material that you're going to be doing?

A: You either want to live up to that or you don't and I was very, very lucky in that the studio said to me, "Do you want to helm this in finding the most appropriate director, at least for you? Who you deem to be the most appropriate person?" I said, "For me, I know that's usually bullshit." You're going to jerk off the actor to make him feel good, but ultimately you're going to make the decision yourself; and they were very honest with me and straightforward and they said, "We want to be in business with you and we're going to let you do it." Obviously they have the final say, which is just obvious, but they gave me a lot of range here, you know? If it doesn't work again I don't feel like a total failure. You do what you do man and it turns out you can come out with a perfect movie and it just doesn't hit the pulse of society at that moment. Or you can come out with a movie that's okay and it just works at that time when you release it. Everybody wants that. They want to embrace it. So between this and between the people speak, yeah I've been in much more of a producer mode, and we'll continue with that...

Q: John mentioned that you guys were... from what John said it seemed as if you were crafting your performances with each other in mind. He seems to be the almost, from the scene we saw, a Shakespearian type orator where it seems like and he mentioned you're quite the laconic protagonist.

A: Thank God, man. Yeah, look at him. He's so careful. (laughter) I could watch that guy forever, man. Yeah, I think that happens unconsciously. I mean we got together beforehand and we were talking about what we wanted to do with accents and the southern thing and how far we wanted to go with it, or if we wanted to stay generic. Just very typical talks and finding out the tone of the film. Not really actor talks but more "How is this going to affect the big picture?" I would never assume that I'm this type of actor, but I know that I can look at somebody when I'm acting and even though we're in the scene we're still figuring out and looking at each other. It's almost like a boxing match. You're hitting each other but you don't hate each other, so it's technique. It's all this stuff and seeing what works, what doesn't work and where you're going to get your best punches in, but you don't want to kill the guy, you know what I mean? That's kind of what I feel with John. It's a great ballet. With Sean [Penn on Milk] it was a ballet, with John it's more of a boxing match.

Q: Is there a reason why Jonah Hex that you feel still wears a Confederate uniform?

A: Because those are the only clothes he has. I don't know… No, because it's a comic book, that's why. Yeah. That's what I feel. Is there an emotional reason? I think that's what he represented. He doesn't want to not represent what he grew up being… He says, "Look, it turned out that I think you should always strive for your country but we were two countries but none better than the other." So he went and turned himself into a Union post to sit out the rest of the war in a prison cell, and it ended up backfiring on him and killing a lot of his, you know, compadres. But I think there's a pride that you have. My mom was like that—not Confederate, but a southern girl and she carried that wherever she went, even though I know she could have lost the accent, she could have done that. She carried that with her. She had that pride, but then she also never wanted to go back to the south, do you know what I mean? It's that kind of a feeling.