Sean Penn Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

When the movie was finished, my son was upset with me for kissing James Franco, and my daughter was upset with me for James Franco kissing me. Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was my second movie, and I was in my parents' garage. My agent tracked me down at their house and said that there was this movie and that I should get a hold of the book. So I went out and I got the book and I read it, and I immediately recognized this guy. Do you ever fear for your life? Well, Sue, I'll tell you, surfing's not a sport. It's a way of life, no hobby. It's a way of looking at that wave and saying, hey, bud, let's party. I had grown up with a kid that was real similar to that, and I thought, yeah, I could find the music of this, and then I went in to audition. It was a disaster. I was never good at auditioning, but there was a casting director on that movie named Don Phillips who was extremely important to many careers. He was an actor lover. He really cared about people, and he saw things that maybe you weren't even presenting, and so he convinced them to see me again and pushed and pushed, and the next thing I knew, I got the part and had a blast. Wait a minute, there's no birthday party committee here. What's the reason for your truancy? Just couldn't make it on time. So much of it came from this one character that grew up in Malibu that I had known throughout my teens. It was a combination of, and I can't remember what blend of this it is now, but of what Cameron Crowe had written, and this one particular guy that I knew, and it just, that merger was where I went. Do you have a guy like me in class every year? You know, a guy who you make an example of? I recently ran into him for the first time. We were passing on a trail to and from the beach, and this man with his wife and children was walking down the path and who spoke in a very articulate way and greeted me knowing, you know, he'd had the advantage of watching me age, so he knew that it was me, but then he had introduced himself, and I couldn't believe that it was him, but I had never told anybody who it was, so I don't think he knows. Mystic River. Clint and I had met and talked about another movie that I didn't feel like was something right for me to do. He made that movie, and then I didn't know if I'd ever hear from him again because I had not wanted to, but he came back and offered me this one, and I probably got about 10 pages in and called him and I said, this is a beast, let's go. Can I ask you something, Jimmy? Shoot. Why do you hate that kid so bad? It's not hate, it's just when that little mute ****** spooks you out sometimes. What I have always found, and this is definitely true of that, Mystic River, is that when the character you're playing has a kind of confidence and comfort with themself, that you kind of inhabit that feeling. You're able to take that part of yourself and feel that way. When you have somebody that's extremely insecure with themselves, you kind of inhabit that feeling, and that generally is the measure of whether you had a good time or a bad time on a movie. My approach to that was very much, I had read it the first time, never read it again. When I would read the script, I'd skip over the scene, and I just put it off until the day, and then Clint Eastwood did a really smart thing, because he wanted me to be able to give it all the fight I had. So he got, instead of what was scripted as, I think, three people to, because I think any grown man can struggle a lot with three people, doesn't mean they're going to dominate the three people. I was easily going to be dominated by the three of them, but not stopped, especially if you want to give it your all, and you don't want to hurt anybody in making a movie. So he put like 15, and they locked up every part of my body so I could really go, and so we did it in very few amount of takes. Milk. So because you'd go in very early in the morning, I needed a wake up, and where I lived was on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Come in over that, get on Lombard Street, and right at the corner of the Visadero, which is where you would go to summit, to look down into the Castro, which is where we shot most of the movie, there was a little hot wings place. So about seven, eight o'clock in the morning, stop in there, grab the hot wings, and then drive up that would sort of make me feel like it wasn't early morning, eating that way. Just as it would kind of come over the summit, my driver, Chet, would hit the CD player, queued up, and just as we'd see the Castro, It's Raining Men, we'd be playing, and it was time for another day of work on Milk. 40 years old, and I haven't done a thing. You keep eating this cake, you're going to be fat by the time you're 50. That's if I ever get to 50. Oh, happy birthday, old man. It was a little bit unique because there was so much archival footage that really gave you such a round sense of the personality of the real Harvey Milk, and so many of those who were part of his campaigns, and his closest friends who were still around, and kind of gave the movie their embrace, and so we had the availability of those people to check in with. But essentially for me, it was putting all of the footage, I had about three hours of random footage, and then a whole documentary, and I just kept it on a loop, all of that on loop for a couple of months where I was living, and just let it get in there because he had such a beautiful personality that you kind of felt like when somebody asked you that question, you know, who's no longer living, would you have liked to have met? I really felt like I was missing out on that, on having met him. There's a scene in that movie which is where Harvey Milk wins his first election that I remember, I think we all in the room kind of, whatever it was that Gus Van Zandt did that created the feeling of all those people that had invested so much to make that happen, that that really kind of caught on a moment where you felt like you were in, really in that space. I Am Sam. That was one of the movies I had the best time on, a really great group of people, the director Jesse Nelson and Michelle Pfeiffer, we really had, it was a very good spirit on that, on that set. I didn't even know where to start, but I knew I wanted to do it, and so then I went, there's a place locally in Los Angeles, West Los Angeles, that is like a, where mentally challenged young people go to be educated through doing arts and crafts, and so I was able to go as if a student and spend a lot of time with a lot of different rhythms of spectrums, you know, different, different kids with very different, you know, and young adults with very different rhythms, and bit by bit, you know, you'd go, you'd spend time like that, and then you'd go back home at night, and you'd read the script, you say this, this is what parts of these things are going to work best. You need a pair of good sturdy school shoes. These are sturdy. Arches are very important. No, sturdy is boring, Sam. The circle of Sam's friends, and I thought that there'd be nothing to keep me, at least in my own judgment of it, honest, than if the circle of friends were cast from this arts place that I had been working at or observing at, and the director was very game to do that. Very smart. She really does. I think she's really beautiful. Yeah, of course she looks smart. She's already reading the paper. So I wouldn't know whether I was in or out sometimes, you know, and became far less self-conscious about it very quickly, and what was also interesting is they had known me now for months before they got cast in the movie, had never seen me as Sam, and didn't bat an eye. It was just as if it was still, you know, Sean, but I'm supposed to call him Sam. I just didn't want to do a fake looking fall, and I'm looking at this cake, and I realized that I just put the cake down, and I took some of the frosting and went to a spot on the floor next to the stairs and put the frosting there, and just made a slick spot, and then I just geared myself up. No, I didn't just gear myself up. It's like I put elbow, you know, padded and all of that, and I just decided I'm just gonna run at that thing, and when my left foot goes forward into that, it's just, I'm gonna try to just do this straight and see if that thing takes me down. And it did. It knocked my feet right out from under me. The thin red line. I always kind of graph things and try to, you know, get in there and craft something that I can rely on if the instincts aren't bringing it on the day, right? And also, you know, they're paying attention to where I came from, where I'm going, just the basics of acting, but Terry, you know, it's true of, I think, film in general, but nowhere, in my experience, more extreme than with Terry, that he writes the script three times. He writes it when he writes it. He writes it when he shoots it. He rewrites it in the editing room, and can be completely different films, completely different demand on what the character one is playing is serving, so it's kind of this ephemeral thing. It became more scene for scene playing, and because I think that he likes to have things that become colors on his palette, and then he's going to paint when you're absent. This is C Company, of which I'm first sergeant. I run this outfit. Now, Captain Starles, he's the CO, but I'm the guy who runs it. Nobody's going to foul that up. You're just another mouth for me to feed. Normally, you'd be court-martialed. With any scene of substance, in terms of dialogue, we also shot an alternate that was silent, so that we were working on a behavioral version, and this wasn't just as an exercise, because as it turns out, in a lot of cases throughout, with all the characters in that movie, there's a lot of these silent vignettes that you'll see, or vignettes under music, that also had been played out as dialogue scenes. Moving out in five minutes. Terry would come in and say, how would you two communicate that if you didn't have any words? Sometimes, there's nowhere to go with that, and other times, some interesting things came out of it. Dead man walking. I went down and spent some time in Louisiana. The first trip was really just to tape people talking, accents that were specific to the areas, and to do it both men and women, so that you're just really finding the sounds and not over-influenced by a character. Sister Prejean, who had written a book, took me up to Angola Penitentiary, to the death row, to meet with some people that she counseled, just to get some background on it. What? The trespasser's private property. We'll leave. Let's go. You're under arrest. Step out of the car. We'll just leave. We didn't know it was private property. Get out of the car. Going in to play these things, sometimes, there was the one very brutal scene, where the murder and the raping and all that stuff happened. I remember thinking, I don't know that I want to do this anymore. It just felt really, really, really ugly. I think that that was a beginning of a corrosion of the joy that I typically would have had in acting that period, though a great job, a great job with great people. There can be one scene that changes the landscape a little bit. I'm going to die. You know the truth. The truth that's made you free. God knows the truth about me. I'm going to a better place. I'm not worried about nothing. I think we all face our own mortality at some point. There is something about that struggle with the defiance and the withholding of the truth. The famous line of the thing is, the truth will set you free. I think that's relatable, whether we're talking about the death penalty or a murderer or anything else. Tomorrow's the day of your execution. You're bound to be under stress and the test often mistakes stress for dishonesty. No problem. I'm home free. You been reading your Bible? I tried to last night. Makes me want to sleep. Trying to stay conscious. The character is in control of so little in his life that it was like, for example, the look of the character, the hair. It was one of the available anchors into identity, you know, so that a lot of care was taken with that. 21 grams. You know, who of us wouldn't be provoked by the notion of carrying around somebody else's heart in the way that we associate the heart with our care and our love and all of that? It makes no scientific sense, but it's embedded in us that our heart is this place that holds such personal things. What an interesting story. This is somebody who's kind of going off in search of connection to the deceased who allowed him to live. Who will be the first to lose his life? He, in the coma, or me? It was clear reading the screenplay that this was an expression of how we experience our lives in terms of time. What's literally present, what's metaphorically present, what's sort of spiritually present, and what's distant in all of those ways. And so that was clear. And also, he's a very clear guide. So you never, you know, were without the dictionary to look up the word of what the day meant because you had in Alejandro that clarity of storytelling that he knew what he was after. Asphyxiated. It's an awful death, Paul. You can't imagine it. At least here, we can help you. You can help me die better. That's what you're saying. You can help me die better. In a lot of stories, there can be the demand to really understand the technicalities of a certain world so that it's second nature. And other times, the characters are just a different version of one's own experience. And so, when you have a really good script in the latter category, which this one was, there ends up being not much to tell. It's directly from the script to the actor and the director and actor together. Flag Day. The great thing about the experience was working with my daughter, Dylan, who's just extraordinary in the movie. And the awful thing about that movie was acting and directing. It was not something I would choose to do. It really happened. We were kind of in a pinch where I had to come in and do it. I'm really glad it happened. I just was immediately engaged by Jez Butterworth's screenplay. Just did stupid things, you know? I'm angry at you. You're smarter than that. Don't think I couldn't tell. It's not my first rodeo. Have you done drugs? Never. Any parent is going to recognize times where they didn't offer their entire authentic self to their children. That's kind of a hellish thing to unwind. And there was something that I felt was very moving in this situation where the father is very truth resistant. Dad, what do you do? What do you mean what do I do? I mean for a living. What do you do for a living? What do I do for a living? I'm an entrepreneur. Which develops a daughter who is a truth seeker. And so those are dynamics that were just very active and playable. Sweet and low down. Sometimes it's just about where you kind of catch the music of something and you feel like, okay, I want to see where this goes. And that was one of those. Very much so. But what was interesting is that he'd written what in my view was a pretty extreme character. And he never asked me what I was going to do with it. He never saw what I was going to do with it until the first day of shooting. Where'd you learn to play that thing like that? Yeah, I never heard a guitar sound so good. Yeah, I'm the greatest in the world. Well, you know, in France it's Django. And then we shot the first take of the first scene. And you know, it was pretty clear that I had a certain flamboyance of character that was very specific. And he never said a word about it. He said, okay, should we do another one? And so I just figured, well, I guess he's okay with the music I heard in my head. Here we go. Yeah, that was a difficult one, because I didn't play guitar. And I had about four months, as I remember, to learn the fingering on 30 pieces. I think in the final film, I think there's about eight or nine pieces represented. So I ended up moving in with my guitar teacher. And, you know, virtually, I was on another job in Europe. And I had like, you know, the two twin beds in the room. And if I would wake up at two in the morning, we would work until I was tired enough to go back to sleep. If we just work with every spare hour on the fingering, you would never would have wanted to hear my playing. But I did get to where I was pretty adept at the fingering. And it was a lot of work. And I never wanted to touch a guitar again afterwards.