A slightly tipsy Billy Bob Thornton, a bunch of foul-mouthed kids and white and yellow Little League uniforms. Really, do you need anything else to pitch a modern version of The Bad News Bears straight through the strike zone?
Hollywood.com warms the bench with Billy Bob as he serves up the “Inside Baseball”-style scoop on the new film.
Were you a fan of the original Bad News Bears and did you watch it either before or after working on this film?
Billy Bob Thornton: “I didn’t watch it purposely before we did the movie, because obviously I already knew the story. I was a fan of the original, I was a fan of Walter Matthau, actually, I think he’s amazing. I’ve done too many of these things–it’s like I know what you’re going to ask me next. ‘Speaking of Walter Matthau, what was it like filling the shoes of someone, going and playing a character as iconic…’ ‘Why make the Bad News Bears? Why remake a movie that’s a classic?’ [laughs].”
We’re done!
Thornton: “But I didn’t watch it just because I didn’t know what the movie was, because I really did love that movie. I think we all did, it was a great movie. But I didn’t want to watch it right then because I was afraid that I would subconsciously try to do just little physical things that Matthau did back then, and I didn’t want to do that. Like I didn’t want to catch myself opening a beer the way he did, or stuff like that, and you can’t help that. Sometimes they’ll accidentally sneak into you.”
Do the kids you worked with know more curse words than you do? And were you surprised?
Thornton: “The kids have so much more access to that kind of thing. I mean, I’m sure that right now that Herbie movie’s out, I’m sure there’s some angle on that. I’m sure that there’s a story for every movie, there’s a question for every one. And with this one obviously we’re going to get that. But then, if you look at television, South Park is available for anybody to watch and the language in South Park is way worse than it was in Bad News Bears. But I think because television is free–well, not free necessarily, but I mean if you’ve got cable, what is it? Three and half bucks a month or whatever it is these days–but it’s on, so people don’t question it so much. And then there’s a movie. And also you see kids out in places and if you hear kids say ‘Come here, you little son of a bitch,’ or something, nobody thinks anything about it. Then it’s in a movie, and it becomes a big deal. Really, all these kids do is they say some ‘damns’ and ‘hells’ and ‘shits’ in the movie. That’s about it.”
How old were you when you started swearing?
Thornton: “My dad helped me out with that. [laughs] I mean, it was a natural part of our lives. Not real heavy curse words, like, you know, we didn’t say the F-word or stuff like that. Matter of fact, when I was growing up, we didn’t know what that was. Now they do. I didn’t hear that word until I was like 11 or 12. It wasn’t as much of an old fashioned word, I don’t think. It’s pretty common now. Probably, in junior high school, I would say my share of curse words, but the real heavy-duty ones I didn’t say until I was in high school on a regular basis. My high school teachers certainly inspired me to say some of those.”
Did you have fun playing Little League as a kid, and what was your coach like?
Thornton: “I was actually fortunate growing up to have really good coaches, real stable sort of guys. There were some coaches on some teams I played against that–two of them got in a fight after a game one day. I saw it, and these were like dads of guys I knew, and one of them knocked the other one out, literally knocked him out right in front of everybody. One of them happened to be umpiring that day. It’s pretty dangerous work. I played baseball all the way through high school and beyond, had a couple of scholarship talks. I was a pitcher, and I actually had a tryout with the Kansas City Royals and had my collarbone broken at their camp. You know, I think that worked out. Who knows if I would have gone any further with them or not, but I’m a sort of local high school baseball hero in those parts. So I loved the game. I’m not just sort of a fair weather fan of baseball. I’m sort of obsessed with it. St. Louis Cardinal fan, from the time I was born. Baseball was actually the place were I fit in as a kid, that and playing music in a band. Throwing pitches on a mound. Because I wasn’t a popular kid in school. The thing about baseball is that since it was in the summer, it didn’t have as much to do with school, so you if weren’t one of the popular kids, if you were good at baseball, it wasn’t associated with the student council or the honor society, or any of that kind of stuff, so anybody could be a hero in baseball.”
Do you think kids have as much fun on the field as you did then?
Thornton: “That’s a good question, because I’m not so sure they do. I think that we grew up in a slightly more innocent time. You can say, ‘Well, there was the Vietnam War’ and that kind of stuff, but I think kids were more protected from what was going on in the world than kids are today. I think kids know too much now, I don’t think they get to live out a childhood as long as we did. I try to give that to my kids–my boys are 11 and 12–I try to give that to them as much as I can, but at a certain point there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re just going to see and hear these things. And I’m not talking about language or stuff like that. I’m talking about the cynicism in the world now, that kind of thing more than anything else. These days it’s easier to become wildly popular through negative means now than through positive means. You can be a sports hero and be a criminal, you know, and that’s who kids look up to now, it doesn’t really matter anymore. And before, I mean, sure Mickey Mantle drank a lot, but still, they didn’t know that–they just saw him as a baseball player. Different things were accepted then. I don’t know, I happen to miss the old days. I really do believe that the Beatles were better than some of the bands that are out there now. I’m not just a dinosaur who’s like my dad saying ‘Oh, these newfangled kids’ or whatever. The Beatles just were better. Check it out, read some of the song lyrics now.”
Did you find yourself playing the father figure on set?
Thornton: “Yeah. I’ve done a few movies with kids. Bad Santa and then this one, and Mr. Woodcock, which I just finished, as well. When you’re in that situation, some of that is going to rub off. If you’re playing that figure in the movie, to a certain degree you become that just hanging around with them on the set. And they look up to you. I was about, not the only person, but I was the person on the set of Bad News Bears who, if it really got desperate–like we’re losing the light and they really needed the kids to settle down and focus–I was the one ultimately who could say ‘Come on guys, really. Do what they say.’ Because they looked up to me as this actor guy they knew, too. And I talked to them like I was their pal, and I think they respond better to that than they do just the boss, you know what I mean? So yeah, you always assume that role to a certain degree. And then after the movie, it’s weird. Some of the kids, especially the ones who had never done movies before, they didn’t realize exactly what a family it becomes, and they were in tears at the end of the movie, they don’t know what they’re going to do. This is like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ You don’t have to go to school–well, you go to school, but it’s like school on the set. I think adjusting to civilian life again was hard for some of them. They would call me on the phone, call Kristen, my assistant, talk to her, call each other. They wanted to keep it going.”
You just had another child. How is fatherhood once again?
Thornton: “It’s great. My little girl is 9 months old now, her name is Bella, and she’s just adorable. It’s interesting because my boys are 11 and 12, so it’s been a while since I had an infant, or a little, little kid, and it’s just like riding a bicycle, you don’t forget. My girlfriend, it’s her first child, so she didn’t know anything about it, and so I was able to say you fold this thing there, and then you do this, and then when her butt gets red, you rub just some of this on there. Now she’s like an expert, she reads all the material. I’m not much of a researcher, and now she’s like leaps and bounds beyond me. But Bella–I gotta say, it sounds corny to say, but she really kinda gave me a new lease on life. She really makes me feel excited and everything. And she’s really big. When I was a kid, they put me in the newspaper because I was so fat. That’s the truth, they really did! I was in the Clark County newspaper as the biggest baby in Clark County, Arkansas, when I was seven and a half months old. I weighed 30 pounds. That’s huge. That’s like a first grader. And Bella is 9 months old and she weighs almost 24 pounds, so she’s pretty close to what I was. She’s got these huge cheeks, and she’s got this little twiggy, she has a lot of hair for a baby, though, but still, they sleep on their backs, and it rubs off the hair on the back, so she doesn’t have any, well she’s got it but it’s not long in the back, but she’s got these twigs on the side, so we put them in pigtails. But it’s not long enough to hang down, so they stick straight out, so it’s like this little fat face with these things sticking straight out. It’s the funniest thing you ever seen in your life.”
Is this role something you’d want to play again?
Thornton: “I work enough to where doing this again wouldn’t hurt. Plus, I’ve got a contract and I’ve gotta! But you’re right, this is probably the first movie I’ve ever done that would be considered a franchise thing, and I would do another one. I had a lot of fun doing it. And the main reason I would do it again is because they chose to make the movie more or less the same tone as the original, they didn’t make it in to a big splashy, goofy studio comedy. It’s still kinda real and low key, and a lot of that is a tribute to [director] Rick Linklater, who makes movies more low key like that. So because of that I think I would do it again. If it became out of control, it was one of those bonehead kind of comedies, I probably wouldn’t do it. I would enjoy playing the character again, but I would want to make sure that it wasn’t real soon after this one. Even if we shot it right away, I wouldn’t want it to be put out real quick. They’d have to shoot it soon, ’cause these kids, they grow real fast. But I’ve got enough other things in between now and then, I think. I’m going away right now pretty soon to do another drama, because I’ve done two or three comedies in a row and I’m not used to that. I’m doing another independent film that’s a real heavy psychological drama right now, so that’s going to appease me for a while, I think. But I would go back again and do this.”
What is the best advice you can give to kids on how to enjoy the game?
Thornton: “I would say the best way to enjoy the game really is the message in the movie, which is no matter if you’re the fastest kid in school or the tallest or the strongest or whatever, if you’ll just go out there and have fun and enjoy it as a game, you may realize that maybe you’re better at it than you thought you were, if you go out there and try. If you treat it as a game and have fun at it, then you loosen up and you can actually become better at what you’re doing because you’re not intimidated so much by people. I think guys particularly, you know women have their own things that were placed on them growing up that were setbacks for you or screw you up psychologically, and then men have them, too. It’s like, we’re told growing up ‘you have to be the biggest and the strongest’ and the whatever. I think a lot of times that’s the parent’s fault. I would say to kids enjoy the game because you want to not because you’re supposed to, and then that takes a lot of pressure off of you. Don’t do it for anybody but yourself and the team. Don’t do it because your uncle pitched for the Yankees or something and you have to live up to it, you know?”
Bad News Bears opens in theaters July 22.
