And I ask ya...how can a lover of cannabis not be a fan of Woody?! Nice little article about him and his new movie from the NY Times today...interview takes place in Amsterdam.
_______________________________________________________
Why Everybody Knows His Name
By DAVID CARR
Amsterdam
THIS is not the first time Woody Harrelson has been lost in Amsterdam.
Mr. Harrelson is deeply fond of its canals, bike culture and twisting streets. Given that pot is also legal and potent here, being lost is a natural.
He is here kicking back with friends between promotional efforts for “Rampart,” a film opening on Nov. 23 about a dirty cop in Los Angeles. It was directed by Oren Moverman, with whom Mr. Harrelson also made “The Messenger.” In both films Mr. Harrelson, a happy man who finds no insult in the word hippie, plays men who are anything but.
We are looking for a restaurant in a city that is rife with them, but Mr. Harrelson is a careful, if voracious eater, who mostly consumes raw food. Someone has recommended a vegetarian restaurant on a lane called Rozenstraat.
Ever the optimist, Mr. Harrelson announces, more than once, “I’m pretty sure this is the right street.” Even though his cap is pulled down, his presence is noticed. Several fans shout out, “Woody!”: the young boy who side-gallops next to him, the blond girl on a bike who asks for a kiss, the guy running the coffee shop who slips him some prized buds for later.
“Woody has become a beloved figure in our culture, sort of like Willie Nelson,” said Owen Wilson, the actor and a close pal. “People come up to him like he is an old friend.”
Mr. Harrelson came into the public conscious in 1985 as Woody Boyd, a clueless bartender from Hanover, Ind., on the long-running sitcom “Cheers.” He may have played a homicidal maniac in “Natural Born Killers,” a lusty pornographer in “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (earning him a best supporting actor Oscar), and a ramrod military officer in “The Messenger” (which led to a best actor Oscar nomination), but to many fans he is still Woody, the one from “Cheers.”
That familiarity, along with a personal ease that makes him endlessly approachable, makes Mr. Harrelson seem less accomplished than his résumé would indicate. He is more beloved than revered, a status that suits him just fine. A noncareerist who has nonetheless had a very remarkable one, Mr. Harrelson has displayed enviable range — pivoting from the quiet theatrics of “The Messenger” to the hijinks of “Zombieland” in a single year — but probably would not be on the public’s list of big-time serious actors.
He will likely be on the short list of the Oscars again, this time for playing a cop in “Rampart” who is a vending machine of his own brand of rough justice, assaulting and killing in a city he sees as beyond redemption.
Millennium Films bought “Rampart” at the Toronto International Film Festival. “We’re expending an enormous amount of energy in a hurry to get it out this year,” Mark Gill, the president of Millennium, said. “I think that after last year’s Oscar nomination for ‘The Messenger,’ Woody has a good shot at being in the middle of things, and we plan on using that to make sure people see this really great movie.”
Written by Mr. Moverman and James Ellroy, an author of gothic, densely plotted crime novels, and shot in the hard daytime light of Los Angeles that serves as a kind of X-ray on the film’s characters, it’s “L.A. Confidential” meets “Bad Lieutenant.” Officer Brown, Mr. Harrelson’s character, may be deeply paranoid, but everyone does end up after him. “Rampart” is also a domestic portrait, with Brown’s failed marriages to two sisters and his children becoming the most important things he trashes on the way to a hell of his own making.
Mr. Harrelson waves off the Oscar talk with more sincerity than most actors manage.
“I don’t think there’d be any actor who’d be honest and say that they wouldn’t want one, but that’s not what I’m thinking,” he said. “My big hope is that people see this freakin’ movie. I love it. I’ve been in so many good movies that I felt like nobody saw, it’s a pretty dreadful feeling.”
It is easy to underestimate Mr. Harrelson, 50, as a kind of curious savant. Yes, there is the gee-whiz, caper-pulling Woody that makes him such a trip to be around, but there is also an acute intellect at work. Whether he is talking about politics, war or the movie business, he sounds deeply read. He can quote the number of casualties in American conflicts (“oil wars,” he calls them), or mention names like William Blake or Carl Jung to explain how a Yoga-practicing vegan can play a string of bad guys so effectively.
(He’s onto something with the Jung reference. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”)
After we finally find the restaurant, Mr. Harrelson says he had his doubts about playing a cop. He lives with his three daughters and wife, Laura Louie, on Maui, where he surfs and gardens; he has been arrested for his ardent environmental advocacy and protest of marijuana laws. His father was convicted of the contract murder of a federal judge and died in prison, with Mr. Harrelson insisting that law enforcement cut corners in convicting him. His suspicion of authority is reflexive.
“It was hard for me to believe I could even play a cop,” he says. “I remember the first day on the set and getting a picture taken in the uniform and looking at that picture and not believing it, whereas Oren looked at it and said, ‘Yes!’
“It helped that I spent time riding with two really good L.A. cops and was able to see the humanity in what they do.”
Of course his character is not that kind of officer. Still, he says: “I don’t think you can play someone and not think he is a good guy in some way. He is trying to keep this Shangri-La of living with these two families alive, and he reacts when that is threatened.”
There’s a lot of talent on the screen, including Ned Beatty, Sigourney Weaver, Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche and Steve Buscemi, but the film is hung on Mr. Harrelson’s performance.
“Woody sort of surfs through life, and it is captivating to watch,” said Ben Foster, who played Mr. Harrelson’s partner as a bearer of bad tidings in “The Messenger” and is cast as a bereft, homeless man in “Rampart” who intuitively knows that Officer Brown will end up next to him in the gutter. “He is not afraid that he will get lost in the violent and tortured men that he plays. He goes farther into them faster than anyone I have ever seen.”
Ms. Weaver, who plays the government lawyer who tries to corral his character, said the transformation was something to behold. “You’d come on the set, and he’d just be sitting there smiling, kind of like his own beam of light, and then he’d turn into this chain-smoking, tortured cop.”
It was Willie Nelson who informed Mr. Harrelson about the virtues of living on Maui, about as far away from Hollywood as you can get. They share a fondness for high-grade marijuana, and play golf and poker together as well. But Mr. Harrelson’s hippie aesthetic does not stop him from turning almost anything into a contest.
“Woody is a middle brother and deeply, deeply competitive,” said Mr. Wilson, who also has a place in Maui and says the poker games have grown to look like the bar scene from “Star Wars.” “Most vegans don’t look all that healthy to me, but he is in amazing shape — he still looks like a kid — and he will turn a friendly game of Ping-Pong into a four-hour death match because he wants to win.”
In an e-mail Ms. Louie said that there is nothing casual about Mr. Harrelson when he is after something he wants. “He will try anything, and when he commits to something, he will work tirelessly until he gets it right.”
The same could be said for his approach to smoking pot. After we eat, we meet some people at Barney’s, a “coffee house” in the Haarlemmerbuurt neighborhood. Two longtime friends of Mr. Harrelson, a lawyer from San Francisco and an owner of a retail store in Hawaii, are already there, firing up a contraption that vaporizes the THC in the marijuana and blows it into a bag that is then passed around. The three of them — others show up as the evening progresses — discuss the stoner merits of Blue Cheese, Tangerine Dream and Dr. Grinspoon, which, they tell me, is “more cerebral in its effects.” (For the record, I only take their word on it.)
The conversation turns to some behind-the-scenes conflicts over “Rampart.” “When I first saw the film, I hated it,” Mr. Harrelson says. “It was very different from the script, and that was a problem for me. As much as I love Oren, we couldn’t see eye to eye over it.
“And then I got a call that it had been accepted to Toronto, and they asked me to come, and I said, ‘Why would I come to promote a movie I didn’t like?’ Then Ben Foster called me and said: ‘Woody, you’ve got to man up, this is family. You need to see the movie again.’
“And so I am watching it, and the first 5 minutes are great, then the first 20, and I kept waiting for the problems, so I could tell Oren where I think it heads south — and it never came. I love the movie. I saw Oren and said: ‘Well, it takes a man to admit he was wrong. I was really wrong on this one.’ ”
Mr. Moverman has written several films, but directed just two, both starring Mr. Harrelson.
For a director “he gives you all the elements you need to succeed,” Mr. Moverman said of Mr. Harrelson. “He is complex and contradictory in a way that makes for a very layered performance.”
At this point in his career Mr. Harrelson has worked with Oliver Stone (“Natural Born Killers”), the Coen brothers (“No Country for Old Men”), Barry Levinson (“Wag the Dog”), Terrence Malick (“The Thin Red Line”), Robert Altman (“Prairie Home Companion”) and Milos Foreman (“The People vs. Larry Flynt”), among many others. He has directed two plays, including Kenneth Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth,” and has written the play “Furthest From the Sun.” More recently he wrote, with Frankie Hyman, the play “Bullet for Adolf,” which he produced in Toronto. He has been spending a great deal of time lining up talent and a space to bring that play to New York in the spring.
“I have had a lot of luck in films, but there isn’t much that compares to being in a live theater and hearing people laugh at something that you wrote because they think it’s funny,” he says on yet another stroll after Barney’s.
“I love my life right now,” he says. “I don’t need to be more famous or more successful, I just want it to keep going the way it is.”
As we near the center of the city, Mr. Harrelson hears a ruckus down the street. Occupy Amsterdam has set up shop in front of the Dutch stock exchange and we wade into the sprawl of tents, music and protestors.
“We have a screwed-up government and screwed-up industries that are ruining the planet, so I think there is a groundswell of consciousness,” he says, gesturing toward the protesters.
We make a quick pivot into the nearby alleys of the red-light district for a quick tour of the tawdry, cramped human aquariums. One of the working girls taps on the glass as we pass, looking at Mr. Harrelson. She mouths a single word: “Woody.”
_______________________________________________________
Why Everybody Knows His Name
By DAVID CARR
Amsterdam
THIS is not the first time Woody Harrelson has been lost in Amsterdam.
Mr. Harrelson is deeply fond of its canals, bike culture and twisting streets. Given that pot is also legal and potent here, being lost is a natural.
He is here kicking back with friends between promotional efforts for “Rampart,” a film opening on Nov. 23 about a dirty cop in Los Angeles. It was directed by Oren Moverman, with whom Mr. Harrelson also made “The Messenger.” In both films Mr. Harrelson, a happy man who finds no insult in the word hippie, plays men who are anything but.
We are looking for a restaurant in a city that is rife with them, but Mr. Harrelson is a careful, if voracious eater, who mostly consumes raw food. Someone has recommended a vegetarian restaurant on a lane called Rozenstraat.
Ever the optimist, Mr. Harrelson announces, more than once, “I’m pretty sure this is the right street.” Even though his cap is pulled down, his presence is noticed. Several fans shout out, “Woody!”: the young boy who side-gallops next to him, the blond girl on a bike who asks for a kiss, the guy running the coffee shop who slips him some prized buds for later.
“Woody has become a beloved figure in our culture, sort of like Willie Nelson,” said Owen Wilson, the actor and a close pal. “People come up to him like he is an old friend.”
Mr. Harrelson came into the public conscious in 1985 as Woody Boyd, a clueless bartender from Hanover, Ind., on the long-running sitcom “Cheers.” He may have played a homicidal maniac in “Natural Born Killers,” a lusty pornographer in “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (earning him a best supporting actor Oscar), and a ramrod military officer in “The Messenger” (which led to a best actor Oscar nomination), but to many fans he is still Woody, the one from “Cheers.”
That familiarity, along with a personal ease that makes him endlessly approachable, makes Mr. Harrelson seem less accomplished than his résumé would indicate. He is more beloved than revered, a status that suits him just fine. A noncareerist who has nonetheless had a very remarkable one, Mr. Harrelson has displayed enviable range — pivoting from the quiet theatrics of “The Messenger” to the hijinks of “Zombieland” in a single year — but probably would not be on the public’s list of big-time serious actors.
He will likely be on the short list of the Oscars again, this time for playing a cop in “Rampart” who is a vending machine of his own brand of rough justice, assaulting and killing in a city he sees as beyond redemption.
Millennium Films bought “Rampart” at the Toronto International Film Festival. “We’re expending an enormous amount of energy in a hurry to get it out this year,” Mark Gill, the president of Millennium, said. “I think that after last year’s Oscar nomination for ‘The Messenger,’ Woody has a good shot at being in the middle of things, and we plan on using that to make sure people see this really great movie.”
Written by Mr. Moverman and James Ellroy, an author of gothic, densely plotted crime novels, and shot in the hard daytime light of Los Angeles that serves as a kind of X-ray on the film’s characters, it’s “L.A. Confidential” meets “Bad Lieutenant.” Officer Brown, Mr. Harrelson’s character, may be deeply paranoid, but everyone does end up after him. “Rampart” is also a domestic portrait, with Brown’s failed marriages to two sisters and his children becoming the most important things he trashes on the way to a hell of his own making.
Mr. Harrelson waves off the Oscar talk with more sincerity than most actors manage.
“I don’t think there’d be any actor who’d be honest and say that they wouldn’t want one, but that’s not what I’m thinking,” he said. “My big hope is that people see this freakin’ movie. I love it. I’ve been in so many good movies that I felt like nobody saw, it’s a pretty dreadful feeling.”
It is easy to underestimate Mr. Harrelson, 50, as a kind of curious savant. Yes, there is the gee-whiz, caper-pulling Woody that makes him such a trip to be around, but there is also an acute intellect at work. Whether he is talking about politics, war or the movie business, he sounds deeply read. He can quote the number of casualties in American conflicts (“oil wars,” he calls them), or mention names like William Blake or Carl Jung to explain how a Yoga-practicing vegan can play a string of bad guys so effectively.
(He’s onto something with the Jung reference. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”)
After we finally find the restaurant, Mr. Harrelson says he had his doubts about playing a cop. He lives with his three daughters and wife, Laura Louie, on Maui, where he surfs and gardens; he has been arrested for his ardent environmental advocacy and protest of marijuana laws. His father was convicted of the contract murder of a federal judge and died in prison, with Mr. Harrelson insisting that law enforcement cut corners in convicting him. His suspicion of authority is reflexive.
“It was hard for me to believe I could even play a cop,” he says. “I remember the first day on the set and getting a picture taken in the uniform and looking at that picture and not believing it, whereas Oren looked at it and said, ‘Yes!’
“It helped that I spent time riding with two really good L.A. cops and was able to see the humanity in what they do.”
Of course his character is not that kind of officer. Still, he says: “I don’t think you can play someone and not think he is a good guy in some way. He is trying to keep this Shangri-La of living with these two families alive, and he reacts when that is threatened.”
There’s a lot of talent on the screen, including Ned Beatty, Sigourney Weaver, Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche and Steve Buscemi, but the film is hung on Mr. Harrelson’s performance.
“Woody sort of surfs through life, and it is captivating to watch,” said Ben Foster, who played Mr. Harrelson’s partner as a bearer of bad tidings in “The Messenger” and is cast as a bereft, homeless man in “Rampart” who intuitively knows that Officer Brown will end up next to him in the gutter. “He is not afraid that he will get lost in the violent and tortured men that he plays. He goes farther into them faster than anyone I have ever seen.”
Ms. Weaver, who plays the government lawyer who tries to corral his character, said the transformation was something to behold. “You’d come on the set, and he’d just be sitting there smiling, kind of like his own beam of light, and then he’d turn into this chain-smoking, tortured cop.”
It was Willie Nelson who informed Mr. Harrelson about the virtues of living on Maui, about as far away from Hollywood as you can get. They share a fondness for high-grade marijuana, and play golf and poker together as well. But Mr. Harrelson’s hippie aesthetic does not stop him from turning almost anything into a contest.
“Woody is a middle brother and deeply, deeply competitive,” said Mr. Wilson, who also has a place in Maui and says the poker games have grown to look like the bar scene from “Star Wars.” “Most vegans don’t look all that healthy to me, but he is in amazing shape — he still looks like a kid — and he will turn a friendly game of Ping-Pong into a four-hour death match because he wants to win.”
In an e-mail Ms. Louie said that there is nothing casual about Mr. Harrelson when he is after something he wants. “He will try anything, and when he commits to something, he will work tirelessly until he gets it right.”
The same could be said for his approach to smoking pot. After we eat, we meet some people at Barney’s, a “coffee house” in the Haarlemmerbuurt neighborhood. Two longtime friends of Mr. Harrelson, a lawyer from San Francisco and an owner of a retail store in Hawaii, are already there, firing up a contraption that vaporizes the THC in the marijuana and blows it into a bag that is then passed around. The three of them — others show up as the evening progresses — discuss the stoner merits of Blue Cheese, Tangerine Dream and Dr. Grinspoon, which, they tell me, is “more cerebral in its effects.” (For the record, I only take their word on it.)
The conversation turns to some behind-the-scenes conflicts over “Rampart.” “When I first saw the film, I hated it,” Mr. Harrelson says. “It was very different from the script, and that was a problem for me. As much as I love Oren, we couldn’t see eye to eye over it.
“And then I got a call that it had been accepted to Toronto, and they asked me to come, and I said, ‘Why would I come to promote a movie I didn’t like?’ Then Ben Foster called me and said: ‘Woody, you’ve got to man up, this is family. You need to see the movie again.’
“And so I am watching it, and the first 5 minutes are great, then the first 20, and I kept waiting for the problems, so I could tell Oren where I think it heads south — and it never came. I love the movie. I saw Oren and said: ‘Well, it takes a man to admit he was wrong. I was really wrong on this one.’ ”
Mr. Moverman has written several films, but directed just two, both starring Mr. Harrelson.
For a director “he gives you all the elements you need to succeed,” Mr. Moverman said of Mr. Harrelson. “He is complex and contradictory in a way that makes for a very layered performance.”
At this point in his career Mr. Harrelson has worked with Oliver Stone (“Natural Born Killers”), the Coen brothers (“No Country for Old Men”), Barry Levinson (“Wag the Dog”), Terrence Malick (“The Thin Red Line”), Robert Altman (“Prairie Home Companion”) and Milos Foreman (“The People vs. Larry Flynt”), among many others. He has directed two plays, including Kenneth Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth,” and has written the play “Furthest From the Sun.” More recently he wrote, with Frankie Hyman, the play “Bullet for Adolf,” which he produced in Toronto. He has been spending a great deal of time lining up talent and a space to bring that play to New York in the spring.
“I have had a lot of luck in films, but there isn’t much that compares to being in a live theater and hearing people laugh at something that you wrote because they think it’s funny,” he says on yet another stroll after Barney’s.
“I love my life right now,” he says. “I don’t need to be more famous or more successful, I just want it to keep going the way it is.”
As we near the center of the city, Mr. Harrelson hears a ruckus down the street. Occupy Amsterdam has set up shop in front of the Dutch stock exchange and we wade into the sprawl of tents, music and protestors.
“We have a screwed-up government and screwed-up industries that are ruining the planet, so I think there is a groundswell of consciousness,” he says, gesturing toward the protesters.
We make a quick pivot into the nearby alleys of the red-light district for a quick tour of the tawdry, cramped human aquariums. One of the working girls taps on the glass as we pass, looking at Mr. Harrelson. She mouths a single word: “Woody.”
