Thomas Jane
Marjorie Quinn: Dark Country is about a couple's honeymoon that takes an unexpected turn when they rescue a car crash survivor. What would you like the audience to take away from the film?
Thomas Jane: I made this movie on a dime. I wanted to prove that you 3D wasn't just for the blockbuster or the children's animated movie; 3D could be used in a dramatic way to tell a story. The DVD is in 2D so you will not take that away from the film.
The kind of film I wanted to make was for people like me where when most of my friends were watching Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood I was watching Sid and Marty Kroff. I was watching The Twilight Zone when I was probably too young to be watching it and The Outer Limits when that came on. We had UHF when I was a kid and I would stay up late and watch The Brain That Wouldn't Die or Carnival of Souls.
One of my favorite shows was by Herk Harvey and shot in Lawrence, Kan., for a dime in 1962. There is oddness and otherness about the movie that I loved that I haven't seen since.
It seems we are kind of losing that oddball film. There is probably a sexier way of describing this film, call it a cult sensibility. Dead of Night which is a classic British thriller, Curse Of The Demon. These are movies that really turned me on and they were strange.
You know the films of David Lynch are strange. The Coen Brothers, their first couple of movies was really odd. Just so much oddball to it that it was very attractive to me and I wanted to create a movie that had a distinctive look and feel and tone to it that would turn on people that were just sick of watching the blockbuster and the formulaic sort of nonsense that we're subjected over and over and over again. I'm hoping to demonstrate that there is a market for people who enjoy left of center in their art, in their film, in their music, in their taste, in how they dress, food that they like. There is always left of center. And I think that this movie, if anything, is left of center.
MQ: So those were the movies that inspired you and you looked back on while making this film?
TJ: Yeah, you got it! If you go to Rawstudios.com I have a production company that does graphic novels. So I do science fiction graphic novels. One I wrote is called Bad Planet. We put out another one called Alien Big Farm 3000. I'm a huge fan of illustrated art and I think when you watch the movie you see that there is a big kind of graphic novel influence to the film that does really look like a graphic novel.
I'm proud of the tone, the style, the mood that we were able to create with such a low budget and actually created something that looks and feels different and really graphic. So there is all these graphic influences and Bernie Wrightson, who is a terrific graphic artist and is famous for drawing horror stories. He designed my Bloodyface, the bad guy in the film. I had a fantastic storyboard artist named David Allcock out of London and he's a graphic novelist. Those are the influences on top of the Coen Brothers and Hitchcock.
On the music side Eric Lewis did a fantastic score but it's very off beat, very left of center; it's eight tonal. I was very inspired by the work that Stanley Kubrick did on The Shining. The idea that it needs to get away from the traditional Hollywood score and go for something that was much stranger, more delicate. These are the things that interested me and inspired the film.
MQ: How was your experience of directing and acting?
TJ: I was nervous about directing in something that I was starring in so I called Mel Gibson because he's done it a few times. And Mel Gibson talked to me on the phone for an hour. He was very helpful, very kind, and really supportive of what I wanted to do. I told him I'm doing this little movie, straight to DVD film for a straight to DVD department of Sony but I'm starring and directing in it. And Mel was like it doesn't matter who or what you're doing it for, you're doing it, you're making a movie and that's fantastic. He said when I did my first film, 'I was so scared I called Clint Eastwood. Clint had done it a few times and Clint told me that he was nervous so he called Don Siegel who he had worked with a bunch and Don told Clint, don't sell yourself short. Take time for yourself, as much time as you take for all the other actors and all the other aspects of production, spend as much time on yourself as you do on those people.' Don't sell yourself short and that's what Clint told Mel and Mel told me and that's what I did. I tried to spend as much time on me and treat myself as an equal member of the cast as I did on everything else and it was very, very helpful advice. I think just the fact of being able to talk to someone who has done it before got me through the worst of my nervousness about that job. It does feel like you're doing two jobs at once and you are. You're juggling a lot of balls in the air, and one of them is you as an actor.
MQ: Do you think one day you may stop acting and just direct?
TJ: I don't know. I did fall in love with the process. I absolutely fell in love with it and I definitely want to direct another one. I could do it starring myself or I could not star in at all, but directing is an honor, a great responsibility, and it is a great chance to share a vision with somebody.
I want that vision to be something unique. Something that other people couldn't do. I want it to have its own signature so that you recognize it's a voice and I'm not trying to imitate anyone. I think that Dark Country accomplishes that. It's unique voice and not trying to copy anyone and I think that comes true.
MQ: Are there any other projects you're working on now?
TJ: Well, I'm going back to work on Hung in February.
MQ: Congratulations.
TJ: Thank you. And then I'm going to do a biopic on Glen Sherley. It's a great story about a guy who sings himself out of Folsom Prison. I'm also going to do a 3D film called The Devil's Commandos about a platoon of soldiers who get stranded on an island surrounded by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Those things I got in the pipeline.