Garrett Hedlund: ‘Life is fun when you’re in motion’
Garrett Hedlund fell in love with Kerouac’s electric prose as a teenager. Now aged 28, he plays Dean Moriarty, the free-thinking spirit at the heart of On the Road. Here, he discusses drugs, his love of the 50s – and the appeal of America’s backroads.
Did you know much about the beat generation, Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road before you made this film?
Yes. I was 17 when I read the book. I was such a literature freak, I was doing world literature, creative writing and photojournalism at the time. I fantasised about F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – I loved it, and then I read everything JD Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the 40s and 50s.
So you weren’t always going to be an actor?
No. My first manager said: “If you don’t get a film by 18, it’s too late.” I was so much into writing that I said: “All right, if I don’t get a film by 18, I’ll try to be a novelist by 19.” But I did get a film at 18, and then I was off to London, Malta and Mexico with Brad Pitt on Troy. I’d spend most of my days with people like Peter O’Toole, Brian Cox and Sean Bean, and I would be writing the whole time. Not about the people – I felt that was unfair. I felt that the only way to write was out of the imagination, because it was cheating to write out of experience. [Laughs] Later, I found out that it’s much easier to write out of experience, because things are so much more interesting when you’re in motion. And that’s what I found with On the Road.
More under the cut …
Of all Kerouac’s books, were you inspired by On the Road in particular?
For me, yes. Y’know, other people are, like, “Man – Big Sur! I love that.” But I was just inspired by the adventure, and when you’re a kid living under your mother’s roof in Minnesota, and you have curfew and you have school in the morning, all you want is to be as free as these guys and how they lived. You just couldn’t wait until you graduated, to get out!
You’re playing a character who’s based on a real person. How much research did you do, and how close did you get to Neal Cassady, the real Dean Moriarty?
I was cast in 2007, so that gave me plenty of time. I said to Walter [Salles] that I wouldn’t do another movie until we made this one. And I didn’t for two years, until basically I almost had to go back to my mom and ask her for rent money. Because the film couldn’t get made. Oddly enough, no American production company would produce it! Anyway, I tried to read as much of Kerouac as I could from that time, but it was more important to read Neal’s stuff. He wrote a book called The First Third, which was mostly about his childhood and growing up, so I got to know him that way. Then I went on to the letters he had written at the end of his life; they were so honest and vibrant, they gave you such a sense of his personality.
Did you meet the people who knew him?
I got to hang with John Cassady, Neal’s son, and sit down with him. I had a notepad of questions about his father; we just sat there, having wine, me, him and Walter, for five or six hours. Sitting in front of the spitting image of Neal – the seed, the result. Then we went up to Berkeley to sit down with a beat writer named Michael McClure, and had cheese and wine. And then Gerry Nicosia, who wrote Memory Babe, a huge biography of Jack Kerouac, came to our “bootcamp” and played us tapes of LuAnne Henderson, who’s Marylou in the novel, talking about her love for Neal and also Jack. We got such a sense of him from a perspective other than the way Kerouac portrayed him, as an iconic, energetic, flying cowboy.
The film does seem to take more of an angle on Neal’s irresponsibility than the book.
In the book it can just seem to be thoughtless, some of the things he does, and without regret. That’s why reading his material was the most important thing for me, and meeting his family. Because that material expressed who he was in his own mind, and his family got to express who he was as a father. John Cassady loved his father. He couldn’t wait for him to come home from work. Neal would put John and his two sisters, Jami and Cathy, on his arm and raise them up on his bicep and try to lift them as high as he could. He was a wonderful father to them, and that’s what they wanted to share with me. They said: “Don’t represent him as an ass all the time, because he wasn’t.” That was just a way for Kerouac to structure the book. So we wanted to show that he did have a heart, and I hope there are beautiful moments in the film where people can see that.
The film is also very open about the characters’ sex lives and drug use. Was that important?
Yeah. It’s a nonjudgmental view on being open to experience, and there’s an appreciation of the knowledge and wisdom that comes with that. You’re much stronger for it, in their eyes. Which I believe as well. I mean, you know the old line, “Everything in moderation”? Then there’s another line that goes, “Don’t mortgage your health for pleasure.” In my mind, I’m like, “Fuck that.” [Laughs] I’m no druggie or anything like that but I’m open to adventure, is what I’m saying. I know that if I let loose, I’ve got a lot of things to lose.
Why’s that?
Because I’m so passionate about acting and finding the next role after this that I can be dedicated to. But within those two lines, there’s so much conservatism. And those lines represent the conservativeness of that time. Especially in terms of censorship. See, the On the Road that came out in 1957 was censored. A lot of the honesty of it, the bitter honesty, is in the original scroll version that came out in 2007 on the 50-year anniversary. Back then, there was so much post-second world war fear that was imposed on everybody – “You must live life this way” – and these guys were bored. There’s a great quote from Einstein. He said: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds” – because they won’t thoughtlessly conform to the latter. These guys lived to the beat of their own drum, always trying to discover new things. But, as writers, also trying to capture them, so they didn’t go to waste.
Have you done your own On the Road trip?
I’ve done it on my own, multiple times. Just getting full of angst at two o’clock on a Tuesday, jumping in the car, showing up in Salt Lake City 12 hours later, or driving 19 hours straight to Bismarck, North Dakota. [For the film] Walter and I did a 4,500-mile trip in a 1949 Hudson from New York to Los Angeles, and we were able to film a lot of the countryside that we weren’t able to film within the production dates. There were five of us – the cinematographer, focus-puller, the sound guy, me, Walter and somebody driving a minivan with all of our luggage. We had no deadline, we broke down nine times across the states, and we tried to follow as good as we could the journey these guys had taken. But we couldn’t. We had to follow the backroads.
Why?
The freeways were all billboards and telephone lines. That’s how boring today’s roads are. But when you follow the backroads you remember what beauty’s like. Having grown up on a farm, I was able to look at these places and say, “Wow!” I used to be sick of the backroads of Minnesota. I had to drive 30 miles to get home every day, take the schoolbus for two hours. But to drive through America and see the backroads, from Nashville to Memphis, Lovick to New Mexico, was incredible. It was probably the greatest trip of my life.
Related posts:
- On the Road interview with Garrett
- Road Trip of Opportunity – Article
- USA Today Article
- Garrett’s Interview For ‘On The Road’
This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2012 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Articles, Garrett Update, Interviews, Media, On The Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
