Michael Pantozzi’s “Off The Face of the Earth” opens with a reclusive photographer, Tim (Pantozzi), who struggles to find the courage to delete his social media account. Once he does that, will he truly be alone and perhaps freer? Or is he trying to take a stand against being a product that exists only to feed bots and algorithms? Whatever the case, it’s a monumental choice, and his mother (Kimmy Robertson from “Twin Peaks”) cannot fathom how he will exist in the world with no friends, especially when she relies on social media to keep in touch with hers, seeing as how her physical limitations keep her confined to the house. 

Then something weird happens. Tim takes the dog for a walk on the beach and, while trying to take a photograph for work, he sees a woman about to jump to her death. The weird thing is, he can only see her through his phone camera and not in real life. He eventually learns that she might be a missing person who has been gone a long time, but this does not answer why he can only see her on his phone. Did she somehow “delete” herself as well?

Pantozzi’s premise remains intriguing throughout, even if we’re not exactly rooting for Tim in any capacity. He’s not always likable or charitable, and the way he treats his mother will put some viewers off. Still, Pantozzi builds the tension nicely and knows how to slowly reveal the nuts and bolts of the mystery at hand. Robertson is especially good as his poor mother, who only has the best intentions for her son and cannot wrap her head around his depression. Her final moment in the film is truly heartbreaking. 

In the end, viewers will come away thinking about, among other things, their own social media presence and what it says about them, and the need to keep adding to it. What if you just disappeared from it all? Most people over a certain age who are reading this remember a time before Facebook and the like, but could you bring yourself to go back to that existence if you had to? If you’re already there, congratulations to you. Tim, for whatever reason, has that same need. Perhaps, just perhaps, his ending is actually a happy one. 

Q&A with director Michael Pantozzi

How did this come about?

At a glacial pace. I had the initial idea for it maybe 10 years ago. One day, my now-wife (Kathleen Littlefield, who plays Ellen in the film) and I were trying to meet up after running some errands and could not find each other, even though we were on the phone and able to determine from our surroundings that we were in the same place at the same time. It was an unsettling, uncanny sort of feeling that later struck me as a good starting point for a high-concept short. 

During the pandemic, I decided to completely get off social media. I did this for all the reasons that social media can be so horrible, but there was also an impulse to just withdraw from everything and not participate in this often very harrowing world anymore. I think it’s something many of us still feel these days. Like, why am I trying so hard to take up meaningful space in this nightmarish society? I can just stay home and get by doing very little with the people I really know and love, and nobody out there will see the difference.

But the feelings that followed once I did were somewhat unexpected. The first thing I realized was that this was the main way that I had crossed other people’s minds, and without it, I felt like I was in hiding. Like no one knew I was here anymore. I also suddenly felt much more in control of who had access to the time and energy I’d rather be spending at home with my wife. My next thought was: Wait a minute, I think I might want this.

But then this finally brought about what I needed to finish the script. Making art is, ideally, an act of communication, I think, and my inability to resist the urge to try to accomplish this led me to understand that simply vanishing wasn’t going to work for me.

Tell me about the casting. A lot of “Twin Peaks” fans are excited about seeing Kimmy Robertson again.

One of my earliest and fondest memories of moving to Los Angeles from the New York area, where I grew up, is watching “Twin Peaks” for the first time. I was living in a Park La Brea two-bedroom with three other people and subsisting on dollar-store deli meat and Trader Joe’s Simpler Times beer, and I remember feeling what, of course, the same thing so many of us have felt about it. It was just so formative and foundational. I had seen all of Lynch’s movies in college, and it felt like a major missing piece of the spiritual puzzle of the artist I hoped to become someday. That’s going to sound however it sounds, but it’s true.

And so when I set out to cast Margo, my own character’s mother in the script, that was where I started from, the on-screen place I perhaps loved most. Kimmy made by far the most sense, given that my own mother inspires the character. What she looks like, what she sounds like, the way she behaves. So I felt insanely fortunate when I sent the script to her manager cold and heard back that she was interested.

That said, I didn’t understand how fortunate I really was until the day she arrived on set. It was 105 degrees in September at this house in Glendale, the first of two days we shot there with her, and this was just nothing to her. “I’m a California girl, I shot in 125 degrees in the desert once,” she said. She was also an exceedingly smart, sophisticated, and generous actor. I couldn’t believe I was acting alongside this person who played such an iconic character, and it goes without saying that she’s as responsible for the film’s success as anyone.

The film touches on a wide range of issues involving the current climate of social interaction, or lack thereof. What do you ultimately think is at the heart of the loneliness Tim feels and wants to embrace?

Tim is in his mid-30s, which I think is a time when many people start to feel they see the writing on the wall about what the rest of their life is or isn’t going to include. I’ve hoped that it’s kind of easy to gather from Tim’s behavior that he probably hasn’t come away from most interactions with other people throughout his life feeling terribly good about them. I think in Tim’s head it’s: “OK, something about me just doesn’t really work for other people, and to be honest, the feeling is generally mutual, so I’m going to stop torturing myself, and letting other people torture me. This is much easier.” 

The fact that we can never truly know what’s in each other’s heads, and that we’re essentially trapped in our own, even though life is this unique and incredible thing we all experience, is perhaps a fundamental tragedy of humanity. Some of us navigate this way better than others, but Tim is definitely not one of these people. That said, especially now, I don’t think anyone is immune to this sense that if we’re not widely observed, we may as well not exist. The tree in the forest that makes no sound when it falls. And Tim is no different: “Hell is other people” is still going to give way to “Hey, where is everybody and what are they doing without me?” particularly when the answer to that question is something as intriguing as his experience with Ellen.

There are many ways to interpret the film’s ending and its relation to digital erasure. Were there any other ideas for the ending that you thought about?

The disappearance in the final moment was the very last revision to the story, made in post after we shot it. I showed my parents an early rough assembly in which the final shot is just the two of them sitting on the bench. Tim has successfully made his way from the wider physical world into this strange liminal pocket of it that Ellen has slipped into, and we know they’re together now and are going to have to deal with each other, so we’re in this with them and able to perceive them as they perceive each other and themselves. Then, my father said something like, “Oh, huh, I thought they were both going to disappear from our view of them now after that.” So I really have him to thank for that final stroke there.

But the story was always: He’s looking for her, and then he finds her … one interpretation of which I imagine could be that digital erasure is not death, as much as it might feel that way. There’s been a fair number of responses I’ve heard that equate what happens in the end to a kind of suicide, which I thought was interesting. But I also think there’s perhaps an implicit hope that we can still find each other outside of all this. 

Have you had any other interesting reactions to the film in terms of how it resonates with people?

Yes, one thing I’ve been thrilled about, in terms of both intention and result, is the space I wanted to leave for viewers’ own stories as they’re experiencing the film. There’s been a surprising amount of personal history shared that, on the surface, doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything I was thinking about when writing it. But the unifying pattern has been this sentiment: Relationships with others—let alone with the rest of the world via the internet—can feel so unnatural and just so, so hard. For some more than others, and indeed what about those of us who are among those some?

I’ve also been very pleased (though not surprised) by the vocal appreciation for not just Kimmy’s performance but also for the work of our DP Laela Kilbourn, who has deservedly won an Emmy, and our production designer Jenny Melendez. They are likewise among the authors of this film.

What’s next for you?

Everything else I have going on is at the writing stage. I’m writing a feature with the editor and associate producer of this short, Josh Bernhard, who is not the director of this short. However, I’ve also been getting started on something that could be a proof of concept for a feature. Either way, I’m still very slow, so these will probably take some time, but hopefully not nearly as much. Finally, I’m also helping (“The Nanny” star) Renée Taylor with some further work on her play “Dying Is No Excuse.” I appeared in it as an actor at the Berkshire Theatre Group over the summer and had the extraordinary opportunity to participate in its earlier development under the direction of Elaine May. Now it’s onto its next stage of life.

Genesis 2 describes a scene after Adam and Eve have been created, that “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” This is the type of imagery—describing two people in the throes of love—that gets a deranged and unhinged visualization in director Michael Shanks’ body horror film, “Together.”

Married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie (who also serve as producers on the film) star as Tim and Millie, a couple who have been together for so long that it can be hard for each other to tell where one of them begins and the other ends. That steadiness may sound cute, and there’s a certain comfort in that consistency, but Millie and Tim both worry that their passion has curdled into a complacency; to paraphrase a line Millie says to Tim, do the two love each other or are they just used to each other?

Tim and Millie leave their city life for the countryside as she got a new job as a teacher. The couple explores the woods, only to discover a cave filled with mysterious church bells, pews embedded in the rocky walls, and a well that seems to be exhaling. Parched and fatigued, Tim drinks the water. Inexplicable and horrific events befall the couple after, with the two noticing that the longer they spend in each other’s proximity, their bodies attempt to fuse into each other. To go back to the well of Genesis: “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” takes on new meaning here.

For Shanks, the film was a way to take on body horror that was more realistically brutal. “I love 80s body horror, but I didn’t want to do the sort of kitsch visual style where I was recreating a kind of glossy, often gooey sort of aesthetic,” he shared. For Brie and Franco, working on the film was a way to push themselves to their physical and mental limits. “I feel like people need to kind of pull us back in certain ways. There’s something about just being in front of the camera where we want to just give everything we can to make it look as realistic as possible,” Franco said. “I do feel like the longer that we both work in this industry, the more we crave the excitement of trying new things and facing our fears. If [a job] scares me, it likely is something I should try,” Brie concurred.

Over Zoom, RogerEbert.com spoke with Brie and Franco–who were so in sync they began to finish each other’s sentences–and then separately with Shanks. Per the film’s MO around fusing, this piece combines their interviews into one, fluid conversation. The trio spoke about creating the crepitating look of the body horror, how to maintain individualism while being a public couple, and the fascination around telling stories about what it means to age gracefully.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This interview contains spoilers for “Together.”

Michael, one of the challenges of setting a horror film in the modern day is how to incorporate the reality of technology. Our phones can demystify what’s terrifying, but in “Together,” you make exif data and geotags a part of the plot. What are the fun challenges of having to use the accoutrements of tech from a storytelling perspective?

MS: There was no question about setting this film in the modern era because it’s very much based on my relationship with my partner. Despite being slightly curmudgeonly, I do live in the present day (laughs). There is such a cliché in horror films where characters tend to lose their phones early on. That is always kind of slightly frustrating as a viewer and as a filmmaker to deal with, and it can feel lazy.

This happens in “Together,” but I tried to make that development something that informed the characters’ arcs. When Tim and Millie fall into the cave and Tim drops his phone in the water, there’s that joke about the only thing Tim is worried about is losing his music demos. That is genuinely what I think I would say because I do have a whole album of unreleased music that is only on my phone, and I don’t know how to get it onto my computer.

There’s also that scene where Tim is on Facebook and looks at the page of someone who has gone missing and is probably dead. I remember thinking how strange and macabre that must be. That was something I did, though; there was this horrible accident near where I lived. I kind of looked up the names of one of the victims who had died in this crash, and I found them on Facebook. It was a public account, and they had two mutual friends with me. Thatfreaked me out. I was in my early twenties when this happened, but suddenly I could use this modern digital space like a stalker. I was able to look at the final posts of this guy who lived just a suburb over from me, who was now no more. It was strange.

It’s not remotely the same scale of tragedy, but it makes me think of how sometimes I’ll find out that two people aren’t dating anymore because I notice they’ve removed photos of them as a couple, and they’re not following the other person anymore.

MS: This technology–particularly social media–is such a part of our lives that to portray modern life accurately means they have to be featured in some way. There is something uncinematic about filming laptop screens; we don’t have a lot in our film, but I’d like to think it was crucially deployed. In horror films in the past, there would be classic horror scenes where the characters would go to the library and look at the microfiche and Zoom in on all these old newspapers.We’ve replaced that process with what you were saying, with looking at the geotags for everything. I wanted to make it believable and relatable because that rabbit hole that Dave went down was the sort of weird thing I would do late at night.

In another interview, you spoke about the Heaven’s Gate movement as a point of reference for this cult community we see. How much backstory of this cult did you build out?

MS: I wrote this film about 7 years ago, and when I think back on all the drafts of the film, it’s very similar to where it began. One of the things that wasn’t in the first draft, though, was the cult element. There was this ancient kind of force, the cave, and the water, but there wasn’t an additional element of this community that had encountered this water and tried to harness it. Once I kind of had that idea, it elevated the horror elements of the film.

I was conscious of not wanting to have that scene in the third act where a character sits down and explains everything. So I worked out a mythology for the cult and for what this kind of force might be, but I wanted to reveal it to the audience in the same way the characters receive the information in a film, where you paint enough of the contours and you can let your brain fill in the middle.

What’s funny is that I saw “Bring Her Back” later during its run because I was flying with the film and going with it to festivals. I know Danny and Michael Philippou a bit and love their work. When I got to see the film, I was like, “Man, this is such a funny parallel thatthese two Australian horror movies released months apart both have this cult element that they don’t fully explain, yet it is explicated to the audience via 90s VHS tapes. I’m delighted by it.

Cults in Australia are so considerate in that they’re gifting their potential followers video tutorials. Not to get all Cinematic Universe-y, but if there were ever to be a sort of cinematic universe with NEON films, you have your secret society, S.H.I.E.L.D., right there with this cult.

MS: (Laughs) [In Nick Fury voice] I would like you to join the “Together” initiative.

Exactly. More on the body horror elements, there are lots of ways one could have crafted visuals around two couples fusing, but there’s something so crunchy and visceral about your depiction. Can you speak to how you built out that visual language, particularly with folks like prosthetics designer Larry Van Duynhoven and special effects supervisor Arlo Markantonatos?

MS: One of the things I do when I’m writing is I draw quite a lot. I’m not necessarily a great illustrator, but if I have an idea for a scene, I might draw a picture of it first, which helps unlock something in me to be able to write more. Then I storyboard very fastidiously. The direction I have for the body transformation to Larry and his department–and also tothe visual effects department led by Genevieve Camilleri, who did some of our more intense transformation moments where practical effects just weren’t going to be viable–was that I want it to feel like there’s friction.

I love 80s body horror, but I didn’t want to do the sort of kitsch visual style where I was recreating a kind of glossy, often gooey sort of aesthetic. I was thinking more of what it would look like in the modern horror aesthetic. For example, I love “The Substance,” but it’s also very, very much celebrating that slippery and goopy style. I want the body horror in “Together” to feel dry and crackly.

“Crackly” is the perfect descriptor there, especially amplified through the sonics of that scene.

MS: Oh yeah, shout out to the supervising sound editor, Paul Pirola, for that. At that moment when they’re fusing into each other, I think back to this memory from being a kid, and I had this one uncle who, every time he shook my hand, he would shake it so hard. He was a famous rugby coach and was a lovely guy, but every time he squeezed my hand, I would dread it (laughs). I could feel the tendons getting crumpled. So I told the department heads, “I want this shot to feel like an uncle who is shaking your hand too hard.”

The other direction I gave for that moment, I think it was written in the script, was that I want Alison’s and Dave’s arms to feel like the closed umbrella that was being unhappily snapped. Those were some things that were at the top of my mind; it’s more of a feeling than just expressing a visual, but everyone did an amazing job interpreting those images onto the screen.

I’m curious: that picture of the malformed dog that one of Millie’s students drew, is that something you drew?

MS: No, I didn’t; I tried to draw, but I couldn’t get anything close to it. Then somebody in the art department was like, “I know a guy who specializes in drawing kids’ drawings for films.” This guy has done it in a bunch of movies and can draw something that looks clear and you can understand what it is, but also looks like there’s this amateur kind of quality, which is an amazingly specific skill. He drew forty versions of that picture, and they were all amazing, so I just had to choose which fit best. I have it on my wall back at home, just next to the Dave Franco bust that was built for the film (laughs).

Alison and Dave, I remember an interview you two did for “The Rental,” and how you both did Molly “for research purposes,” particularly for you, Alison, since your character uses it. You both aren’t afraid to commit yourself to your roles, and in “Together,” y’all have honest bruises and scars to prove it. As actors, how do you decide “I’ll try this crazy setpiece myself and throw myself into this” versus when do you go to your stunt doubles and say “Bray, Heather, and Monique, actually you do this instead.”

DF: I think the only stunts that we didn’t do ourselves in “Together” is when we fall into the cave …

AB: There’s also a big fall in the driveway.

DF: No, I fell.

AB: Yeah, but there’s that moment where Bray falls back really hard.

DF: They didn’t use that take! I’m not giving that to him (laughs).

AB: (laughs) Anyways, I have a contortionist double as well. 

DF: Everything else was us. As you can imagine, we got very injured on this film, and every day we were walking away with several bruises. I think about the shower scene where I am fully nude, my character’s unconscious, and I’m throwing my limp body against these porcelain walls, and I can’t brace myself. That’s me just smacking my face into the wall, which hurts.

AB: To speak more to what you’re asking about, I think how I approach a lot of this stunt work in particular is with a sense of adventure. I do feel like the longer that we both work in this industry, the more we crave the excitement of trying new things and facing our fears. I sort of use that as a prognosticator of which job I should take. If it scares me, it likely is something I should try because maybe it’s something I haven’t done before. This script was certainly all that.

DF: When the cameras are rolling, I feel like people need to kind of pull us back in certain ways. There’s something about just being in front of the camera where we want to just give everything we can to make it look as realistic as possible. Sometimes there were moments where a stunt coordinator is like, “We’re not allowing you to do that.”

Well, to that intensity, that sequence where the two of you are dragging yourselves across the hallway is a standout. It almost felt like it was a pregnancy scene in a way because of how you two were talking to each other. “You have to keep pushing! You’re so strong!” was being tossed around, but it’s about trying to get rid of something instead of giving birth to something.

DF: That’s interesting …

AB: We hadn’t looked at it in that way before. That was a really high-intensity scene, and there was this fun shot that I think Shanks had not planned in advance. At one point, he put the camera on the ground on this little swivel rig so that they could get both of our coverage through the whole scene in one take. It was the most exhilarating thing.

We were both going full force even when we were off camera in that scene for each other, but it was fun to play it straight through that feeling of the tension with one another. We had some discussions about whether we could use that oner footage for the whole scene, but you want to see more dynamics in terms of what’s happening to us physically. But some of that footage is incorporated, which makes the scene really dynamic.

DF: That was the only scene that we shot over multiple days. I remember after take one, day one, there’s footage of me just giving everything to this take and looking up at the camera and saying, “This is gonna be a long fucking scene.” It’s one of our favorites, though. We were just so excited about the footage that we were getting. It just really felt like we were hopefully creating something that people have never seen on screen before. That excitement fueled us through any of the pain that we were feeling.

I know the final version uses a mix of your stunt work, Alison, and also of your body doubles’ work, but I heard elsewhere that there is a take of you, Alison, doing that whole contortionist scene by yourself. Are we getting that on a Criterion release or …

AB: We would like for you to.

DF: So obviously Alison’s face was CGI’d onto the contortionist but …

AB: I did both; I can’t do a back bend like how you see in the movie, but I tried to mimic the physicality of that scene for one take. Then there was an opposite take where I just remained still and sat in the hall, and Shanks said, “Just your face, give us the whole scene.” So for two and a half minutes, I was just making facial reactions as if my body was contorting. That footage is like its own avant-garde horror movie where I’m just sitting there screaming in pain.

That’s commitment, truly, just to flash forward to the end of the film for a bit, I have to ask: is “2 Become 1” the wildest song you both have made out to or danced to together? Just curious where that might fall on the rankings …

DF: (laughs) I feel like there’s been stranger ones …

AB: Here’s what I’ll tell you: our wedding was really small; we just had a small ceremony with just our family. But then we had a reception with sixty friends or so, and we didn’t want to do any of the traditional stuff. We didn’t plan a first dance, but inevitably, we both found ourselves on the dance floor at the same time.

If you’re at a wedding, when the bride and groom are on the dance floor at the same time, everyone clears the floor. All of a sudden, we found ourselves dancing to Lil Wayne. We were doing this beautiful slow dance, everyone left the dance floor, then, and we were both like, “I guess our first dance as a couple is to Lil Wayne.” Was it “6 Foot, 7 Foot?” or “A Milli”?

DF: Maybe … in our wedding vows, my vow to Alison was that I would dance with her no matter where we were. She takes advantage of this when we’re in public, if we’re at the movie theater, or a grocery store, or restaurant … if there’s bad music anywhere …

AB: I’ll give him a look and he’ll just be like “Oh no ….” but he always does it.

That’s commitment, truly. To lightly touch on spoilers, have you two speculated how Millie’s parents respond when they open the door and are greeted by your hybrid?

AB: (Laughs) I think Shanks, Dave, and I all agree that this movie could not go on a second longer because the longer the movie goes on, it opens a whole new can of worms. I’dl ike to imagine there’s just a pleasant brunch.

DF: She likes to believe that the parents immediately accept this new person in front of them.

AB: Dave’s not sure it goes that well.

DF: I just think the movie takes a hard right turn, and you just explore completely new territory.

AB: I think now, actually, that we’re serving the parents some water and recruiting new members.

The possibilities are endless for a sequel. I was talking with my friend, Claira, and we ruminated on how so much of the promotion of this movie has centered around you two being a couple. From our discussion, I wanted to ask: How do you two maintain your autonomy and individuality when you’re also a public-facing about your relationship?

AB: I feel like it was nice that we’ve ramped up together to this movie. We acted together in “The Disaster Artist” and “The Little Hours,” and then Dave directed me in a couple of projects, of course. We’re always really conscious about going and working on other projects separately. We love working together, and we love maintaining independence and doing projects on our own as well.

I’ve honestly been thinking a lot about this on this press tour that I’m so glad that we’re doing something like “Together” now, thirteen years into our relationship, we have established ourselves separately. We have our careers within this industry, and I think it would scare me if this were year one and we were parading around talking about how wonderful our relationship is.

DF: It’s a good question. As open as we’ve been about our relationship on this press tour or in past press tours, we still do have boundaries. We’re very private people. I’m not even on social media, and I feel like we have been pretty good about …

AB: Keeping our home a safe place. You can’t give it all away. You have to reserve some things for yourself, and we do try to do that. It might not seem like it on this press tour, but it’s true.

DF: There are a lot of people who are still surprised to find out that we’re together, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Michael, I screened your short film, “Rebooted,” and a throughline across a project like that and “Together” is that you seem to be ruminating a lot on what it means to age gracefully. Millie and Tim are together, and are worried they’re just used to each other instead of being in love … what brings you back to the well of this theme?

This is kind of an embarrassing thing to say, but I had comparative success in my career when I was very young. I made a little short film in my final weeks of high school that won this film festival and got me a job professionally working as a filmmaker as a 17-year-old. I told myself then, “Oh, maybe I’m quite good at this. Maybe this is the beginning of how I’m going to become a filmmaker or a musician.” I had these years where every project I would work on would get bigger, better, and more well-received, but then at a certain point, I found it hard to graduate to the higher level.

I’m still only 34, but for about 8 years, that was a chunk of my life where I was like, “Oh no, have I already peaked? I feel like I have and now I’ve lost it? Is it now embarrassing for me to be somebody entering his thirties, now going to his mid-thirties, who is still publicly saying ‘I’m going to be a filmmaker.’” Those questions formed the character of Tim; he’s worried that he’s missed the boat to fulfill his artistic ambitions.

The same sentiment courses through “Rebooted.” At that point, I had already made short films, and I wanted to make a feature film because at that point, I had also made a television series in Australia, and I wanted the next thing I did to be bigger. I loved the story “Rebooted” and its concept, and at the same time, there was a part of me that was like, “Oh, I’m going backwards. I’m making a short film.” I was feeling aged and irrelevant. So I do feel myself drawn to characters like that who are full of regret. I think it’s cathartic that throughout these stories of mine, these characters sort of typically find, in their way, sort of happiness. It’s a happiness that hopefully I’ll find one day.

“Together” opens in theaters on July 30th from NEON.

Ed. Note: This interview was originally published on MovieMom.com in April 2012 and is being republished here in honor of Michael Madsen.

Michael Madsen is a favorite actor of writer/director Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill: Volume One). He appeared in Thelma & Louise and on the television series “24.” And he is a published poet, about to release his second collection. I had a wonderful time talking to him about growing up in Chicago, meeting his idols, and the two movies he just made back-to-back. In “Loosies” he plays a cop chasing a pickpocket played by writer/director Peter Facinelli of “Twilight.” And “Infected” is about the spread of a deadly Lyme disease-like virus.

We both grew up in Chicago — do you get back there often?

Well my father still lives in Chicago.  He’s a retired fire-fighter. He was a Chicago fireman for thirty years…and he made lieutenant and he retired, so I go once in a while to visit him.

As an actor, you are especially good at the quiet moments, at listening and at waiting.  Is that something that comes naturally or are you very conscious of it?

I think what it is, is that I don’t know.  If I knew what it was, I might not be able to do it.  I don’t think it’s an actable quality. I just think it’s something that is or isn’t.  I can tell you that when I was a kid, I noticed that in Steve McQueen, and I read a lot of books about Steve, and I know he used to cut a lot of dialogue out of his movie scripts because he didn’t like to talk a lot. And I noticed that in Robert Mitchum. I met Mitchum and I know he was very much like that in real life.  Humphrey Bogart had that.  I don’t know, but I consider it a compliment.

You remind me of Mitchum. What was it like to meet him?

Well, he was making a picture with my sister, he was doing that Hearst and Davies thing in Toronto, and I really wanted to meet him, because he made this movie called Heaven Knows Mr. Allison directed by John Huston, with Deborah Kerr, he played a marine that gets washed up on an island.

And she’s a nun.

I don’t know, his performance in that movie is about—I would say—75% responsible for my even fantasizing about being a film actor. And I had always wanted to meet him because of that movie, and I actually went to Toronto under the guise of visiting my sister, but the real reason I went is because I wanted to meet Robert. And so, you know, there he was, eating breakfast and he was sitting there eating his waffles, and my sister brought me over and introduced me, and I sat down—and he kept eating… and he didn’t even look up at me! And I was sitting there thinking, “Well, ok, that’s it,” and I was just starting to get up to leave and I suddenly heard him say, “What are you going to do with yourself, son?” And I realized, he was actually talking to me, and I sat back down and I looked at him and I said like an idiot of all the things in the world I could’ve said, I said, “Oh well, I was thinking about…I’m an auto-mechanic and I’ve been doing a few things here and there, but I’m working on a film-career. I was thinking maybe I could make it as a film actor.”  And he put his fork down, put his knife on the plate, and he looked up at me and leaned forward and he said, ‘Why?” It was kind of funny, I started laughing. It was just so ironic that he was so much the way that the character that he plays—he really was like that! And we had a good laugh about it, and I’m just glad that I got to meet him that day.

Oh, he was good. He was really nice to me.  I asked him if he had any advice for me, and he said, “Yeah…Smirnoff!” Ok, alright. And he goes, “Forget about all that working out stuff, don’t start trying to turn yourself into Hercules, just get a padded jacket.”

Tell me about the characters that you played in “Loosies” and “Infected.”

I did “Loosies” because of the kid Peter Facinelli, from Twilight. He wrote the part for me, and when I met him he was such a great kid, I couldn’t turn it down. I mean, I’m a New York detective, and he plays a pickpocket, and he gets my gold shield, and he’s running around New York with a gold shield, and kind of making a fool out of me in the newspapers, because I’m the pretty big-time New York detective. So, I’m basically chasing him throughout the movie trying to get my shield back. Vincent Gallo is in the movie, and he’s a great, great kid, a good actor, and it was great to have him on the set and Michael Corrente directed it and we shot in Rhode Island. The fact that he wrote the role for me, and I’m not a villain in the picture — it worked out pretty good and I ended up making “Infected,” another film for the same production company.

Well, it’s a first-time director, Glenn Ciano, and Quentin Tarantino was a first-time director, and a lot of times, they don’t want you to get involved in movies with first-time directors because you never know, but if you don’t give somebody a chance, you’re never going to know.  Like if I had turned down “Reservoir Dogs” because Quentin was a first-time director…you know, that would’ve been a big mistake.  And so, it taught me a lesson. You never know the way that these things are going to go, and Glenn Ciano, it was his first shot…and I had never done a horror picture before and it was a horror genre of movie about a family that goes off into the woods and stay in a cabin and everybody gets this crazy Lyme disease that turns everybody into cannibals.  I end up having to shotgun everybody with a Winchester pump.

Oh my gosh!

Yeah. It sounded exciting and I wanted to give Glenn a shot as a first time director, and it was the same production company that produced “Loosies,” and so there was no reason not to do it.

And plus you get to shoot everybody!

Yeah, plus I get the pump. It was a nice gun, it was an older shotgun, it was really a highly effective weapon, let’s put it that way.  I don’t know if you saw Vice, but there was some shotgun action in that movie—it was my idea—I rewrote the whole beginning, I rewrote the whole ending of that movie. I like shotguns.

Would you like to write an entire screen play? Would you like to direct?

Well, I’m going to do a movie with a woman director, her name is Heather Ferreira.  She used to work with Quentin a few years ago, and we’re doing a picture in New York City, it’s called “The Little Matchstick Boy,” and it’s about a Vietnam vet, and I’m excited. I’ve wanted to work with a woman director, I think it really kind of changes things up a little bit.  I’m looking at stuff all the time, now, for directing and producing. I produced “Vice,” and you know, most people can write it off as a B-genre movie, but if you really  watch it closely with attention to boot, maybe watch it twice…there’s a lot going on in that movie. There are a lot of subliminal, subtle things that are happening in that film that could easily be not recognized because it wasn’t theatrically released.  I was really involved in locations, I wrote and rewrote the beginning and the ending, I cast the whole thing. Getting involved in all this other stuff, just besides playing a character—it makes it a lot more fun. It makes me feel a lot more responsible for the end product. I can’t take responsibility for some picture that’s horrible, that people wouldn’t take my advice on certain things, you know?

What got you started writing poetry?

When I was still in Chicago, I was painting houses and working at a car wash.  Like I told you, I saw “Heaven Knows Mr. Allison”   I must’ve been around seventeen or eighteen years old.  So, I got curious about actors and I was in a library with a friend of mine and I found myself in the biography section so I read the biography of Clark Gable, I read Spencer Tracy’s biography. That’s the first time I read Hemingway. While I was there I got For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was Hemingway, and I guess after reading the biographies and reading the Hemingway book, I realized that I think about a lot of stuff. I started writing it down. When you’re making pictures, you’re often on an airplane or in a motel, and you have a lot of down-time in travel, or sitting around in your camper waiting for something to get set-up, and I would just start writing down poems and short stories and events that have happened in my life. I never really intended for it to be a book, but I spoke to a publisher and now I’ve just finished another one—it’s coming out in September. It’s called, Expecting Rain. It’s a book of photographs and short stories and poems. Jerry Hopkins, who wrote the biography of Jim Morrison, he wrote The Lizard King—he’s going to write the foreword.

Are there poets that you like, that inspired you the way that Robert Mitchum inspired you as an actor?

I would say Loren Eiseley and Hemingway was a terrible poet, but some of his books, though, his way of writing inspired me, his early stuff. And of course, Charlie Bukowski, you know, I can’t really think of anybody else. Robert Frost, maybe a few of those.  Kerouac—I’d love to play Jack in a movie, but nobody’s ever asked me, which is bewildering, because I think I’d make a pretty good jack.

What else would you like to do?

To be honest with you? A long time ago, what I really wanted to do was drive in Nascar. Richard Petty was my big hero, I wanted to drive a Nascar and that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I was thinking I was going to do. I built a couple of cars, and I actually ran a few quarter-mile drag cars, and I drove a Nascar when I was making The Getaway. James Woods’ character has a race car, and we shot a couple of scenes up in Phoenix International raceway, and I got to drive the Citgo Dirt-Devil Nascar. I did five laps in that thing on an open track and it was one of the highlights of my acting experience.  By the third lap, I did about 160, and the car is so well-built and balanced that it really does all the work for you. I was so happy I got to do that. It was so exciting. I was having a lot more fun doing that than I was shooting the movie. I’ve been convinced for years that some day I’ll be able to take advantage of that, but as time goes by it seems less and less likely that that’s going to happen. I would like to do a movie about a Nascar driver.