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Nowhere in movie-making is the balance between practical concerns and creative process more in evidence than in production scheduling. Even large-budget movies have to make compromises here. Movies are rarely shot in sequence, though that would seem best for the actors. Instead, an actor may do his…

Time and again an actor would walk onto one of Nora's sets and say "Okay, now I get it.” The mood of the place would help feed their acting, help them inhabit the character. And in the natural settings—in the woods at night, inside the coal mine—there were moments of eerie identification. The col…

The casting of Few Clothes seems to have been our reward for surviving all the ones who got away, all the actors who got cold feet or lastminute conflicts on our previous movies and sent us back into casting only days before we started shooting. Few Clothes is mentioned in the history books as a gi…

In Matewan I try to give even the most negative of characters something else to play besides evil. At one point we learn that Hickey, one of the Baldwin agents sent to town to stir up trouble, is a war hero with a traumatic past in the trenches. This information is meant not as an excuse or a Freud…

The characters have an archetypal outer appearance—Joe is the stranger in town, Sid the representative of brooding violence, Few Clothes the John Henry of coal, Turley the company man—but they also have to work on a merely human level, to seem to have a life outside of the story, other fish to fry.…