Woody Harrelson names the best director he’s ever worked with: “He’ll give you all the tools”
Woody Harrelson is a character in every sense of the word, and he’s managed to live a life offscreen that’s just as colourful as the wild and wacky flicks he’s appeared in.
Audiences in the late 1980s may not have expected that the young Texan actor playing Woody Boyd on Cheers would become one of the most acclaimed performers of his generation, but Harrelson’s success has become hard to deny. A truly chameleonic actor, Harrelson has shown an ability to transform himself physically and emotionally to play villains, heroes, and a historical figure that he claimed “just says exactly what he’s feeling at any moment”.
Harrelson’s experience has given him the opportunity to work with many acclaimed filmmakers, including Martin McDonagh, Oliver Stone, Ron Howard, Terrence Malick, and Barry Levinson. While it may have been expected for Harrelson to express his deepest admiration for a highly famous director like Robert Altman or Michael Ritchie, Harrelson actually told The AV Club that he was most blown away by the Israeli-American filmmaker Oren Moverman.
“The way Oren works is, he’ll give you great words to say, he’ll give you all the tools, great direction, help you with the backstory and get you into the character, set you up in a space, and give you no rehearsal,” Harrelson said of the director. “You don’t even hang out with the actor ahead of time.”
Moverman is by no means a household name, but he’s responsible for giving Harrelson one of his juiciest roles. The pair first worked together on the military drama The Messenger, where Harrelson starred as a United States military Captain tasked with delivering casualty notifications to the families of veterans who were killed in action. It was a supporting role where Harrelson’s character played a mentor to a younger serviceman played by Ben Foster, but he had more than a few heart-stirring moments that showed what a depthful actor he could be.
2009 was a strange period for war films. In the aftermath of the Iraq War, Hollywood seemed split on whether to make critical anti-war statements or overtly patriotic, heroic celebrations of the military. The Messenger doesn’t go out of its way to make a message of any kind; it simply showed the cost of service, and didn’t shy away from exploring how confusing it can be for a family to receive a notice about the death of their child.
Harrelson’s range is his greatest strength, and in 2009, he landed one of his most beloved roles as a snarky killer of the undead in the horror comedy Zombieland. There’s only a portion of the Zombieland audience that ended up also catching him in The Messenger, but it earned him his second Academy Award nomination, and his first in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category. Moverman was also nominated in the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ category, even if the film itself was shut out of the ‘Best Picture’ category in a baffling goddamn snub, considering that forgettable titles like The Blind Side and Precious managed to sneak into the Oscars’ extended lineup.
The Messenger is a cold, sobering film that doesn’t provide any closure, but Harrelson and Moverman didn’t seem to be dissuaded by potentially depressing projects. Two years later, they teamed up on Rampart, which saw him playing a corrupt member of the Los Angeles Police Department. It’s a tough film about an unlikable character (something that frustratingly puts media illiterate audiences off nowadays), but Harrelson revealed that he felt that it was an “exciting, visceral experience” to be given so much control.
“Inside of that, there’s a great deal of freedom,” he explained. “There’s improvisation. You don’t know what the blocking’s gonna be, you don’t know if I’m gonna come over and sit next to you and grab you by the arm and pull you over here.”
Curiously, Moverman hasn’t had a narrative feature film since The Dinner, but even if Harrelson is busier than ever, he’ll hopefully find time to work with his favourite director once more.
