Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
If CONVICTION was a total work of fiction, I would have cried bullshit about the path of this plot so many times, I would have lost count. But I'm here to tell you that the most unbelievable twists and circumstances in this true-life drama all actually happened, and director Tony Goldwyn made sure that each of those moments were re-created as accurately as possible for the film. CONVICTION is the story of Betty Anne Waters (played by Hilary Swank--this is the version of Swank that deservedly won those two Oscars and probably will get nominated again for this role) whose older brother Kenny (played by the incomparable Sam Rockwell) is jailed for a brutal murder in rural Massachusetts. After Kenny's conviction, Betty Anne devoted her life to getting a law degree, passing the bar, and proving her brother innocent--a process that took nearly 20 years and cost Betty Anne her marriage.
I'm a huge fan of this film, which opens this Friday, and of its impressive cast that includes Minnie Driver, Melissa Leo, Clea DuVall, Peter Gallagher, and Ari Graynor, all in top form, with story with more turns and loops than I could count, all of them true to life. I was extremely fortunate to not only conduct an interview with Betty Anne Waters and director Tony Goldwyn, but also do do a post-screening Q&A the night before with Betty Anne and one of the film's stars, Juliette Lewis. Betty Anne is about as personable as person as I've ever met, but you also get the sense that she's a tough broad, as the locals might call her. I was sad to hear that within a year of the events depicted in the film (during which the deal to make this movie were put into place, following countless TV appearances on shows like "Oprah" and "60 Minutes"), Kenny died in an auto accident, something that is not mentioned at the end of the film.
Tony Goldwyn splits his time between acting and directing. In addition to promoting CONVICTION, he's starring on Broadway in a revival of "Promises, Promises," the Neil Simon/Burt Bacharach/Hal David musical, based on Billy Wilder's film THE APARTMENT. As a director, he's best known for works like WALK ON THE MOON and THE LAST KISS, as well as great episodes of shows like "Dexter," "Justified," and "Damages." As an actor, most people probably remember him best as the villain macking on Demi Moore in GHOST, with supporting roles in THE PELICAN BRIEF, NIXON, KISS THE GIRLS, and THE LAST SAMURAI.
When our interview started, Betty Anne was running a minute or so late, so I began with just Goldwyn. CONVICTION is that rare drama where there are no real villains outside of "the system," with the heroes of this film tearing it down brick by brick over an seemingly endless series of years. Please enjoy Tony Goldwyn and the real Betty Anne Waters.
Capone: Hi, Tony. It's good to meet you.
Tony Goldwin: Hi Steve, how are you? I’m so sorry I missed the Q&A last night.
Capone: It actually went beautifully. It was really fun.
TG: I heard it was great.
Capone: And people really seem to respond too.
TG: Oh, good.
[Betty walks in.]
Capone: Hello again. If we cover some of the same stuff we covered last night, I apologize, I just want to get it all on record. Betty Anne, you had said that once your brother was free that Hollywood just kind of came knocking on your door. What made you decide that this version of Hollywood was something you could ?
Betty Anne-Walters: I was very nervous, because I don’t know anything about Hollywood. I know a lot more now. I was scared. I was afraid of it, thinking “How are they going to make this movie look?” or “I don’t trust these people” or “What are we getting ourselves into?” My brother, on the other hand, was “Oh yeah, all of these people are calling, we are going to have a movie.” I also learned, as someone told me, that if I don’t decide to hire somebody that somebody will make the movie anyway and it definitely wont be the way the real story went. So, the first person I turned to was Barry Scheck, because I trust him already, and his really good friend is Andy Karsch, who became one of the producers, and we had lunch with him - Kenny, myself, and Barry. We loved Andy and felt a total trust already, which is so founded, because he’s wonderful. From there, I guess that’s how we found Tony.
TG: Andy hired me really. I was pursuing the story when my wife saw a piece on "60 Minutes" with Betty and Kenny and told me about and I got excited about it, so I was trying to get a hold of Betty. By that point, everyone in the world was trying to get a hold of her, so I kind of dropped it for a couple of months, and then I got a call from one of my agents saying “You liked that story. You should meet Andy Karsch, this producer, because he’s getting the rights to it.” So he had already met with them and was in the process of securing the rights. So he and I met and saw eye to eye on how to tell the story. I didn’t meet Betty and them for several months after that.
Capone: Did you get to meet Kenny?
TG: No, in fact, I had met with Andy and Working Title who had developed the project, were really the bosses. The day I met with them was the day Kenny had just had his accident. They told me that he was in the hospital and was in a coma, so I never got to meet him. Although I feel like I know him very well.
BAW: With what he’s done with the movie, I can tell that he does know Kenny.
Capone: Tell me about then the “sessions” you had with the screenwriter [Pamela Gray], because you did say it was like therapy talking to her. Tell me about some of the questions she asked and stories that you told.
BAW: Everything… It was just like having a conversation with somebody I'd known for years. I remember Tony...
TG: What happened was that I met Betty Anne, and we had spent some time together. And then I came up to Betty Anne’s house with Pam, and the two of us just…
BAW: So I had already spent the day with Tony.
TG: Right, and the two of us just turned on a tape recorder and just talked for days, it seemed like. We just talked and Betty was like “This is like therapy.”
BAW: At the end, it felt like I was through therapy.
TG: And Kenny had died about three months before this, so everything was very fresh and painful.
BAW: I really did feel like I kind of needed it. It was painful even talking about it, but it was good. Like I said, it was like therapy.
Capone: Yeah. Was it the first time that you had really talked about it at length like that in a couple of marathon sessions?
BAW: Absolutely, yes.
TG: Reticent is not quite the right word, because she was totally willing to tell us anything and so open, but I think you weren’t used to talking that much about yourself, really. Betty Anne is someone who is always doing things for other people, and so we really had to draw her out to talk about stuff and not just about the emotional stuff, which is difficult. But Betty Anne is a very humble person, so at first she was like “I didn’t really do anything. I just did what anybody would do. It wasn’t really anything big.” I was like “No, wait a minute, let’s start at the beginning.”
BAW: I think everybody has a hard time talking about themselves, don't you feel?
TG: Until you come to Hollywood, then everybody loves talking about themselves [laughs].
BAW: We had [Betty Anne's best friend and fellow attorney, played by Minnie Driver] Abra Rice with us.
TG: We did, that’s true.
BAW: Abra filled in a lot of details that I might not have about myself.
TG: And Adien, who is a big character in Betty Anne’s life, the man who owns the bar where Betty Anne works. He’s a much smaller character in the film, but in real life he’s a very big character, but we had to focus the movie.
BAW: Much to his dismay.
TG: I told him to forgive me.
Capone: He’s there though.
TG: He looks good.
Capone: Can you talk a little about meeting Hillary [Swank] for the first time and what questions she asked you that you thought were the right questions, and what she wanted to know about you?
BAW: It was interesting, like I already said, when she showed up at my door, we had the same outfit on, it was like “All right.” I felt immediately a bond with her. It was not like meeting this big Hollywood movie star that I felt that she was from watching her movie; it was like meeting a friend and I remember coming in the house and making breakfast and her looking around for fig jam, her favorite. She made me very comfortable and she did obviously ask me a lot of questions, but I didn’t feel like I was being questioned. It was a very smooth day and, we took a ride all day with Tony.
TG: It was Sam [Rockwell] and Hillary. I brought Sam and Hillary up to hang out with Betty Anne. And when you see Betty Anne and the whole family, you get the whole fabulous clan of people.
Capone: Was it almost more important to you that Sam get it right, more than you cared if Hillary captured you?
BAW: Yes. I was more concerned about Sam than I was about Hillary, because Kenny is… In the beginning everybody said, “This movie is about you, Betty Anne. It’s not about Kenny.” I’ve always felt that it’s about Kenny, and Andy Karsch is the one that said, when he met Kenny, “Oh, Kenny is a character that is going to be portrayed the right way in this movie, not just somebody languishing in prison,” which made my heart feel like “He’s the right guy, anyway.” But yeah, I wanted to make sure we got it right and at first when they said it was Sam, I’m thinking “I only know him from THE GREEN MILE. Oh boy, I don’t know about that.” And his stature is not the same as my brother, he’s a lot smaller. Then I met him and talked to him and saw how intensely he wanted to get to know who Kenny was. He was walking around my house, going upstairs, going places just like he belonged there. [Laughs] And my son has my brother’s weights that he used to use, and he’s using them and was really just trying to get a feel for Kenny and after seeing him act, he totally is Kenny. He gets that personality and I feel like seeing him on screen, it’s Kenny’s personality, and Kenny would have been very proud.
Capone: Once the film got started, how often did you come to the set?
BAW: A lot. Actually, I was asking Tony at the beginning “Am I going to be allowed to go on set?” He said “Well, we'll see, because sometimes actresses don’t like if they are playing somebody that’s alive, they might not feel necessarily feel comfortable with them on set.” But after meeting Hillary, she said “No, if you want to com, you ought to come.” So I was there a lot in the beginning, then I had to go home. Then I came back and went home, but I was there for the wrap.
TG: Yeah and Betty Anne was very important to us. As she said, a lot of times it’s a dodgy thing with the real-life character being there, partly it makes the actors feel scrutinized and uncomfortable, and they don’t feel free to just do what they do. Secondly, it can make a person in her shoes feel very uncomfortable, but Betty Anne, amazingly, got it immediately, just understood the process and understood when we changed the stuff from literally how it happened and why and what the intent was. So she became a really valuable partner to the actors for sure and kind of to everybody as just a presence, just to talk about the psychology, the underpinnings of certain scenes or reminding me of “What happened?” and "How did this work?" with lots and lots of details. She really became a partner in the filmmaking which I hadn’t anticipated. It created an environment on the set where everybody… I remember on the first day of shooting, before our first shot, I introduced the Betty Anne to the whole crew, and people instantly just felt like “Whoa, we are doing something that’s about something,” and they all would get to know her and feel what they were doing was important.
Capone: On the days that you were there, were people coming up to you and asking you “How would this person do it?” or "How did you do this?"
BAW: Oh yeah, many a time Sam would ask me things about Kenny; Hillary would ask me things. One time she… It was that Christmas scene where she wears that Christmas tree sweater, and they were going to put something on her head, like a bobble Christmas thing. She goes, “You wouldn’t wear that, right?” I’m like “No, please.” So, she didn’t wear it.
TG: And they wouldn’t have let her in the prison, right?
BAW: Right, they wouldn’t have, and the shirt was bought to show that it was Christmas, although I did wear one like that once for my kids when they were little. She asked me many more important questions too about feelings. She was really into it. I’ll tell you one scene, it was the day that Kenny was being released from prison, and she comes out of an elevator and all of the press are there, and she comes over to me and she’s bawling her eyes out. She’s crying and going, “It’s just not fair. They say there’s a good side to everything, but there is no good side to this, what happened to Kenny and how it ended.” [Betty Anne's eyes start to well up with tears. And now I'm going to cry. I had to console her and say “No, there is. The good part is that my brother died free. He didn’t die in prison.” So I had to console Hillary.
Capone: Tony, as a film it seems to be important to you to allow the audience to have some doubt as to Kenny’s innocence or guilt. Tell me about inserting that into the story, and why it’s important.
TG: It’s important for two reasons. Number one, I was bored by the movie that says, “Here’s this amazing heroic woman. Here’s this wronged innocent victim of a man. Let’s watch her triumph over the system and show it.” In fact, in Pam’s first draft which was very rough, it was kind of like that. She didn’t intend it to be, but it was rough and so obvious that the trial, which it was, was a bit of a travesty, so we worked very hard to make it much more ambiguous. I thought it would be much more interesting dramatically if the audience goes into this movie going, “Well it’s this kind of movie. I know it’s going to have a happy ending. Let’s go watch this.” Then in the middle of it going “Wait a minute, I’m not sure where this is going,” so it creates tension. The second thing that’s even more important to me is that people that do extraordinary things in life, heroic things, generally seem insane when they are doing it at the time.
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: Or at least irrational.
TG: Or irrational, yes, because they're outliers, these are not things that must of us would do, and they see things that most of us don’t see, and so Betty Anne doing what she did and this determination and having this inner compulsion of “I can’t not do this,” at times to a lot of people in her life are like “What are you doing?” Whether it be her husband or when her kids were frustrated or other people or certainly the public at large or the legal system, and in spite of people going “You’re not going to be able to do this. What makes you think you can do this?” I think it’s much more effective if the audience too sees that point of view, and you are like “Wait a minute, what if he’s guilty. What the hell is she doing all this time?”
BAW: That was real life. That’s what people thought.
Capone: Oh, I’m sure.
TG: She didn’t want to tell people what she was doing, because people would go “Oh yeah, your brother’s in jail. You’re going to law school because he’s innocent? Wow.”
Capone: We had a conversation yesterday how no screenwriter on the planet would put in the scene--f it were a fiction film--of finding the box of evidence the way it's presented in this movie, because no one would believe it. [Laughs]
TG: You know some scenes we changed or created. That literally was exact, except it was Kate and it wasn’t Abra with you, but other than that…
BAW: And how we found the evidence was a phone call.
TG: But in the courthouse to the…
BAW: All of it.
TG: To the point of Mrs. Halloran coming in with empty hands, and the man with a box coming in right behind her, right? Isn’t that how you described it?
BAW: Well what happened was, she told me on the phone that she had finally found the box, but she wouldn’t let me see the box.
TG: Oh really? I conveniently forgot that. See, I don't know what's fact and fiction anymore [laughs].
BAW: So, I don’t know what the box even looked like or anything, because she didn’t know who I was on the phone. I was pretending to be Abra or Kate and everyone like you just said, and it was on the phone that she said “Okay.” She finally went down to the basement and she found something, so then I went right to Boston.
TG: Didn’t she make you wait? Like you went down there and you sat there for like 45 minutes or something?
BAW: Oh yeah. She made us wait a long time, because she wasn’t going to let me see it. I didn’t know what it was that she wasn’t going to let me see, because I was his sister. “You’re his sister, we can’t let you see this.” I’m like “No, I’m his lawyer first and I’m not leaving here until I see it.” So I sat and waited and waited and I didn’t know what I was going to see. I didn’t know it was going to be that. It could have been nothing. It could have been more paperwork, for crying out loud, something that I already had.
TG: You had no idea if it was bloody evidence.
BAW: No, absolutely not. That’s why I get it. When I saw the box, I’m like “Oh my God. I hope that it’s in there” and then open it just the way we show it.
TG: And she literally did the thing of taping the box with "Do Not Throw Away" signs.
BAW: And I opened it also and I was looking for that piece of curtain, it was bloody and certain things, so that part all happened and I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s in there,” and then I didn’t know what to do with it and did all of the taping.
Capone: You mentioned last night that you took a trip--was it with Hillary, to Ayer, Massachusetts?
BAW: Hillary, Sam, Tony, and Abra.
Capone: What was that like for you? What is it ever like for you going back there? I assume you don’t do it often.
BAW: No I don’t. It’s very scary actually. It’s a strange feeling, because I grew up there, and my grandfather’s home was there and that for me was my only real home, so that’s kind of a memory that I can’t feel the same about ever again. Going through that town gives me a creepy feeling now, you know?
Capone: I can imagine. Okay well thank you very much, both of you, for your time.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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