Billy Bob Thornton’s advice for first-time filmmakers: “Don’t pay any attention to anyone’s advice”
These days, Billy Bob Thornton is best known as the star of movies like Bad Santa and Friday Night Lights, as well the current TV smash hit Landman.
However, he’s actually one of Hollywood’s most underrated triple threats, and first broke into the movie business by writing and directing his own material.
Thornton’s journey to movie stardom was long, winding, and unlikely. For starters, his first love wasn’t the movies. He first moved out to Los Angeles from his native Arkansas to try to make it as a musician, but when that didn’t work out, he began to explore the idea of acting.
At this point, the thought of directing motion pictures couldn’t have been further from his mind. That all changed one night while working a catering job, though, because the young Thornton suddenly found himself in a room filled with Hollywood bigwigs. A “little German guy” asked him if he was an actor, to which he said yes, but the man then shook his head and said, “You’ll never make it just being an actor. You’re not good-looking or ugly enough to stand out. Can you write?”
Thornton and his friend Tom Epperson had dabbled in a little bit of screenwriting, but not much, so he told the man he’d written a few things. “That’s the ticket,” the vertically-challenged guy said. “Stick with the writing and you’ll make it.” When a bemused Thornton returned to the kitchen, one of the other waiters asked him, “So, what were you and Billy Wilder talking about?” He was stunned, having had no idea he was speaking with the iconic Sunset Boulevard director.
Soon after that encounter, Thornton “got really serious about writing,” and that eventually “changed everything”. He and Epperson wrote the rural crime thriller One False Move, which not-so-coincidentally included a supporting role for Thornton, and he followed that up with the script for a short film entitled Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade.
In the short, Thornton played Karl Childers, a mentally disabled man released from a mental hospital 25 years after murdering his mother and her lover. He told Venice magazine that writing and playing that character “sort of took on a life of its own,” and mused, “I just knew what this guy looked like, talked like, how he walked, how he smelled.”
The short was directed by George Hickenlooper, with whom Thornton worked on 1993’s Ghost Brigade. However, after it garnered significant acclaim and the opportunity arose to turn it into a feature film with the shortened title Sling Blade, Thornton chose to step behind the camera for the first time. “We shot it on 35mm with Panavision, the whole deal,” the proud director remembered. “But because I shot it back home in Arkansas, a lot of folks were real nice and helpful, and we got a lot of stuff for free. We had a great time doing that movie; shot it in 24 days.”
To his surprise, Sling Blade put Thornton on the map in Hollywood as an actor, writer, and director. He received an Oscar nomination for acting and a win for ‘Best Original Screenplay’. Over the next several decades, Thornton directed three more films: All the Pretty Horses, Daddy and Them, and Jayne Mansfield’s Car. However, a terrible experience with Miramax’s tyrannical Harvey Weinstein on All the Pretty Horses arguably put him off investing more of his time and effort in directing.
Even though Weinstein butchered the film so much that it barely resembled Thornton’s intent, which star Matt Damon claimed broke his heart and put him in the hospital, when he was asked if he had any advice for first-time filmmakers, Thornton didn’t suggest playing nice with a studio head. Instead, he quipped, “Don’t pay any attention to anyone’s advice.” Then he gave his honest advice, insisting that the key to directing isn’t changing your vision to fit that of a studio or even an audience.
“Make your movie about something that’s close to you, that’s your thing, as opposed to trying to make something that you think they’ll like,” he concluded. “Basically, know what it smells like, feels like, tastes like and sounds like, and then go do it. And nobody else has to know what you’re doing, except you. That’s my advice.”
