She’s a radio-listening angel, he’s a singing cowboy–and that’s exactly how you know they’re starring in director Robert Altman’s film adaptation of the enduring public radio smash A Prairie Home Companion. Hollywood.com gets tuned in to Oscar nominees Virginia Madsen and John C. Reilly.
Hollywood.com: What was your first reaction when you learned that Robert Altman wanted you to appear in A Prairie Home Companion?
Virginia Madsen: My agent called me, and he has this funny kind of trying-not to-be-nervous sound in his voice when I know it’s a good job–he said, “Bob Altman wants you to call him.” I said OK and then I thought, “But I can’t call him Bob.” Then his assistant said, “Virginia, I have Bob Altman calling you.” I was like, “I can’t call him Bob.” “Yeah, you can. Everyone calls him Bob.” I said, “I have to call him sir.” She said, “No, no. Everyone calls him Bob. You’ll see that when you meet him. He’s Bob.” Well, he was “Mr. Altman” and “Sir” for about a week. He didn’t want me to call him that, and so then I didn’t call him anything. I just responded–but the thing is that very quickly when you’re around him you realize that he is Bob. He’s very amiable. He’s a man of great power and you can sense that about him. He’s really the original sort of Alpha Male. So in that way you just kind of want to follow him, but there is something about him that also has–there is a light about him that makes you feel very relaxed and not intimidated at all because he wants you to be creative. So it took a while, but he became Bob.
John C. Reilly: I was doing A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway at the time and felt like I wanted to do a movie next, if I could. So I made a list of directors that I thought I wanted to work with at one point—this sounds like a phony story, but the first name on the list was Robert Altman. Then three days later after I made that list he called me up and said, “You want to come be in this picture?’” “Yes! What is it? Where? Just tell me and I’ll be there. Whatever.” It was pretty amazing, and then I finished the play on July 3rd and then on July 4th, I flew to St. Paul and started working on July 5th. So it was just like a shot-out-of-a-cannon type feel. I was really nervous before I went. I kept calling Bob and saying, “What’s your idea for the overall concept of the cowboy?” He said, “John, when you get here you’re just going to see how we work and everything is going to be just fine.” I hung up the phone and thought about how that didn’t make me feel any better. [Laughs] Then as soon as I got there I realized what he meant. You just walked onto the set and it was already kind of alive. It was so fertile. It’s not like a lot of movie sets you get on, where there is this pressure. I just never felt like I could make a mistake, honestly. Bob was just so happy to have me there, and any time I had a question while we were shooting he had this great habit of just bouncing it back to you. “What should I do?” “I don’t know. I hired you. What do you think you should do? That’s why I hired you, so that you would be able to do that work. I don’t want to do that work. You tell me.”
HW: What is the secret of Altman’s cinematic genius?
VM: On an Altman set, you have creative freedom and you can sort of dare to be bad because he’s not really going to let you be bad. I think that if someone were that rigid they probably aren’t all that confident. Altman is such a man of confidence, and so he loves other people’s ideas. He likes everyone’s input, because he is that confident.
JCR: I think that actors love him so much because he gives people their own power. He lets you collaborate in the process, as opposed to being like a marionette. He really encourages you to fill out your character.
HW: On the flip side, were you at all intimidated by the loose improvisational style that he employs?
JCR: No. Actually, I’ve worked with directors in the past that work in a similar way. Every director has their own way of making a movie, but Paul Thomas Anderson encourages a lot of improvisation. Lasse Hallstrom, when I did What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, would let us just go. He would ask us to get these basic ideas across and how we got to that place was up to us. So I’ve worked with a lot of directors before that let you improvise and it is exciting, but it’s also a big responsibility, because in essence you’re writing the script on your feet, but I like to work that way. As long as I have a confidence about what the character is about I feel like I can improvise in an organic way and not just be layering some idea on that I thought up. Then I like it. But honestly, on this movie I was more intimidated by walking into Garrison’s group with all of these musicians and having to perform music in front of these guys and going to St. Paul, even though I’m a Midwesterner—Virginia and I are both from Chicago. There were a couple of days there where I wasn’t sure how St. Paul was going to take to all of these people coming in to make a movie. They couldn’t have been nicer. I had this amazing–it sounds so phony when you talk about these circumstances that all actors talk about. “She was wonderful. He was wonderful. It was wonderful! We loved it. Wonderful.” [Laughs] But it’s really true. Like, I lived in St. Paul with my family. They came out with me and we were getting invited to BBQs and our neighbors were babysitting for us. It was amazing. It was really a great 28 days that we shot this. We shot it really fast.
VM: Yeah. It seemed like not long enough before we had to go. It was so much fun.
HW: And did you also kibbitz with Garrison Keillor?
JCR: At the same time I was calling Bob trying to get answers I was calling Garrison and they were going, “Oh, he’s in Chicago today with the show. Oh, they’ve moved to Sioux Falls.” So they would be traveling. He plays my character on the radio show, and I thought that I had better check in with him in that I was doing his character. He was incredibly generous with allowing me to interpret the character as I saw fit. He never once said, “That’s not really appropriate.” I would just say “What about this?” He’d go, “Do you want to do that?” I’d say, “Yeah. I think that it would be good.” “Well, good. Then do it.” Garrison is so modest and humble. He can be somewhat cryptic. Just when you want to get some chit-chat out of him or you want him to talk, he just doesn’t go there. He knows what he believes and he’s very confident in it, and he’s not one for idle chatter.
VM: He did open up a lot. He was around all these crazy actors.
HW: The Altman voice and the Keillor voice are both very distinctive. Can you talk about how they dovetail for this film?
JCR: I was really impressed, I have to say, given that they’re two old men of the sea. With age comes a certain amount of, I don’t know… You’re used to being the center of your universe and that can inflate your ego a little bit, but I was amazed at how easily they ceded territory to each other. Bob for the most part, because of just the physical side of the production, was out in the audience most of the time, unless we were backstage, and Garrison for the most part was sitting up there on the stage with us and backstage the way that he does on the real radio show. So I thought that these two strong personalities are used to having total control over their respective kingdoms, and how is this going to work out? It worked out beautifully. I think that there was just a lot of respect. Garrison really respected Bob’s work and Bob obviously respects Garrison’s work or he wouldn’t have taken the film. I was like, “Wow. I hope that I’m that generous and that cool with my peers when I’m that age.”
HW: Virginia, your role is particularly unique and ethereal, and you have a certain aloof distance from the other cast members. Did you ever feel at all disconnected from the rest the film?
VM: Yeah. It was very odd in the beginning because I didn’t get to kind of join in, and I wanted to do. Like, I wanted to play in the sandbox with everyone else, and instead I had just be on the swings watching. And so I started, in the beginning, to think that I would just kind of haunt the theater and I told the props department that I wanted this camera with a big telescopic lens so that I would always be around watching from a distance. And it was just such an actor’s trick. I threw all of that stuff out the window and I just loved being there. So ultimately I felt like I was really a part of things. I didn’t get to do what they were doing, but on most days I just sat behind Bob and watched him direct and watched everyone rehearse and there was a real feeling of a theater company. It really felt like we were doing theater everyday, like we were in rehearsal or we were in a performance. It was so creative all the time that it was kind of like actor’s camp. So, no, I didn’t get to participate on camera, but overall I felt very much a part of things.
HW: John, what was your impression of Lefty and Dusty, the singing cowboys played by you and Woody Harrelson?
JCR: I mean, those guys are like living a performer. That’s like one of the wonderful things about what Garrison did with Lefty–rather than make him an onstage personality and then backstage he’s totally different, I personally like playing characters that believe in some alternate reality, people who believe in a dream. And Lefty and Dusty are living the cowboy dream. So it was a lot of fun. Luckily, I already had a similar relationship with Woody. We worked on The Thin Red Line together, so I already had this kind of teasing relationship with Woody. The way that we act with each other as Lefty and Dusty is very similar to the way that Woody and I treat each other.
HW: You were, we hear, performing for the extras that were there in between takes with Woody?
JCR: Yeah. You know what? I had that feeling as a performer when you’re standing on a stage and there are a few hundred people in front of you, you better do something to keep them interested. It’s the contract between an audience and performers, and me and Woody were just thrilled to have them there. We could kind of pluck out a song as best as we could, but these guys were filling it out in the most amazing way. So any song that we covered would sound really good because we had this incredible band behind us.
HW: How did it come that Paul Thomas Anderson was on set?
JCR: Because of Bob’s age, the insurance company insists that there be a back-up director on set in case he should ever not be able to make it to the set. So they asked Paul to do it and Paul jumped at the chance, because he lives with Maya Rudolph [who’s in the film] and they were having a child at the time and he needed to be there anyway. He was a real facilitator. I never saw Paul make a decision. It was always him carrying out what Bob wanted him to do. Often times Bob would be sitting at the very back of the theater when we were onstage and there would be all this equipment in the way and it was just a pain in the butt to get up on the stage, and so Paul would be the runner. He’d come up there and be like, “Bob says so-and-so.” And he had a director’s chair that said “Pinch Hitter” on the back, but luckily the official purpose for Paul being there never came to be and he was just there because he wanted to be there. In fact he didn’t have to be on the set, but he was just there–because why wouldn’t you want to be on a Robert Altman set, especially if you’re a filmmaker?
HW: Virginia, you’ve got a little break coming up?
VM: I’m taking a little time off, and it’s the first time ever for me that didn’t just mean “unemployment.” [Laughs] I’ve got some movies coming out and I’m doing a series for a year in the fall. So I’m just going to spend the summer with my son and just enjoy it.
JCR: I always think of unemployment as “vacation time.” It’s just a matter of your perception, I guess.
HW: How nice is that feeling, to be able to do it on your terms after all those years of constant auditioning?
VM: It’s absolutely incredible. I guess that I kept waiting for it all to kind of go away after that year of Sideways. I was really prepared for it to go away. “Okay, I’m going to have to come down from all of that and there is going to be a big let-down.” But there never was, because I had incredible opportunities, and so I sort of remain in that same place that I was in before although now I’m just more confident—but always grateful. I kind of feel like it’s not always going to be like this, because it never is with any artistic career, especially acting. So as long as this keeps going on, I’m going to really, really enjoy it as much as I possibly can and allow myself to take it in until it does change into something else.
