Capone talks with KELLY & CAL stars Juliette Lewis and Jonny Weston about the power of love and punk rock

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

I’ve been fortunate over the past few years to interview Juliette Lewis several times, and I’ve always found her to be thoughtful, enlightened about her craft and career, and just generally enjoyable to be around. And back in March, during the SXSW Film Festival, was no exception as she was in Austin promoting a couple films: the unjustly buried and ignored HELLION and her latest release, KELLY & CAL, in which she plays a former punk rocker, now suburban new mom, who can’t stand the life she’s trapped in.

She meets and becomes friends with Cal (Jonny Weston of JOHN DIES AT THE END, CHASING MAVERICKS, and the upcoming INSURGENT,), the 17-year-old son of her next-door neighbors, who is in a wheelchair. During the course of the film, the two kick-star something in the other—her to play music again and him to relearn to paint. Naturally, something bordering on inappropriate develops as well, thus risking all hell breaking loose in both their lives.

I sat down briefly with both Lewis and Weston at SXSW to discuss the film, the power of music, and finding that thing/person that releases your creative energy. Please enjoy Juliette Lewis and Jonny Weston…





Juliette Lewis: I’m so confused by today. I thought we were doing all this TV stuff, but we’re not. I don’t want to be on TV.

Jonny Weston: I don’t want to be on camera either.

JL: I just would not have this lipstick on then [laughs].

Capone: I don’t think the times I’ve seen you before--

JL: I know, we’ve seen each other so many times.

Capone: Most recently for AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY in Chicago.

JL: On the circuit, promoting.

Capone: I saw you play with The Licks at Lollapalooza a few years ago.

JL: Okay, how is this possible? It was 11:30 in the morning.

Capone: I dragged my ass down there right when the gates opened. I wanted to see you play, because I’d never seen you guys before.

JL: Oh, you’re beautiful!

Capone: I was a Sunday morning. It was the worst timeslot.

JL: I didn’t think anybody would be there, and there were like 5,000 people.

Capone: Yeah there were a lot of people. Was really 5,000?

JL: Yeah, I always ask.

Capone: It was a great turnout. But my point is, I didn’t realize when I started watching this movie, that the punk scene was a part of the history of this character, So immediately when you pop that tape in I’m thinking of seeing you play all those years ago.

JL: Well, here is what was interesting about it, I like to use that aspect of myself, because I am a songwriter, but she is much different than I was. First of all, she’s a bass player, but she’s also a songwriter, and she probably has a wild streak. So there are colors of me in it. So it’s neat when you get to use aspects of yourself. I did love writing songs as a different character, too.





Capone: And trying to make the songs sound like they’re from a certain era.

JL: Exactly.

Capone: It’s almost like acting within music.

JL: It’s absolutely doing that, and me and Clint Walsh, my old guitar player who wrote the songs with me, we listened to a couple of references that the director gave us, which were Sleater Kinney and PJ Harvey, and he came out with this brooding, seductive little riff for the main song.

Capone: And there was another song during the end credits, right?

JL: That came out of me. That was a trip how that happened. It was the same writing session, and Clint was just messing around on guitar, and I said, “Keep playing that.” And this beautiful feeling came, but I just believe in that. It’s written in the cosmos, and it was connected to the whole feeling of the movie, the sentiment, the hopefulness, but the loss. There’s a future and a letting go of past. That’s what the song is called, “Change.”

Capone: When you get this script, was there something in particular about your characters that you just latched onto and said, “I can build on that.”

JW: You know what’s crazy? I read this script in a rush the first time I got it, and I thought it was a great script, and I didn’t even somehow pick up that he was in a wheelchair the entire time. I was like, “This is a great script.” And I got really excited, so I was going to go in and audition, and I was going to read it with Juliette, and I re-read it with a fine-tooth comb, and I realized that added element to it. I was like, “Oh my god. What kind of an opportunity to add that element to it, those extra stakes to it.” But the fact is that the chair didn’t have to be there. It could have been a great story either way, because the way that the kid externalized his pain could have been from anything. I thought it was a great script, and I thought what an opportunity to play a kid in a wheelchair to represent these kids who have no use of their hands and their legs.

Capone: Other than the music, was there something about Kelly’s state in life that moved you?

JL: Oh, the music was last. Honestly, I tend to keep my music separate from the acting. Are you kidding? The juxtaposition between juvenile pain and angst verses someone who has experienced much more— Well no, that’s not true. That would be a wrong judgement call, because here you have this person who has lost mobility. But the way the characters express themselves, one is internally unraveling or lost at sea internally, and there’s a stillness. So this is something that people don’t know from me, but it’s where I come from, this kind of quiet reserve. All through my younger life I was really introverted and barely spoke.

JW: Yeah, same with me. I was very quiet. I was like a misfit but not even the cool kind. I just couldn’t talk.

JL: Oh yeah, it was painful.

Capone: How young are you talking about when you say you were like that?

JL: All through school years. But there’s a dichotomy of energies in me.

JW: Yeah, when it didn’t come out, it came out in spades.

JL: It was too much. But there’s something in the script that I had never seen before. I hadn’t seen this kind of fumbling around in new motherhood and then also in mid-life. The thing that spoke to me the most, like you asked, was the sentence when she said she’s going through an existential crisis, because I had just been saying that the year prior, and I even looked up the definition of the word existentialism. You have to look it up. It’s brilliant.

JW: The philosophy?

JL: Yeah, yeah, but it’s what an existential crisis is. We go though one probably once every seven years.

JW: I’d say more often.

JL: You go though it where you’re questioning purposes, you’re questioning why, and what worked for you before, no longer works. Your very foundation is crumbling.

JW: Yeah. I think that Cal had an existential crisis to a massive degree when he had his accident. What I think is very interesting about this script is the way that people deal with that, and the one element is depression. There are a million different ways to come out of a crisis like that, and the way that these two characters deal with it is what makes the script good.

Capone: The film is about these lost dreams too, and Kelly looses hers very gradually over the course of her life, but Cal loses his in a single moment. And I started to wonder which would be worse? For people to say, “Okay, that’s the moment my life changed.” Or to wake up one day and go, “Oh my god my life has changed.”

JW: To define where it came from and not knowing what’s wrong with you.

JL: I can’t answer that either [laughs]. We’re going to think about it for a while. I’ve experienced both.

Capone: In different ways, both physically and emotionally, these are very broken people, and yet they find something in each other that kick starts them down a better road eventually. What is it in the other person that you think they get something from?





JL: I know for me, Cal is a reflection of an energy that she feels she’s not connected to anymore, but kept her comfortable for so long. When you’re younge, you have that fire, that ambition, that pain, that discontent, or that ability to say “Fuck you” at every turn. There’s something in that that oddly can be your comfort even though it’s incredibly alienating. And even though she wants to be able to express that, but doesn’t know how, she’s reverting to her old juvenile nature, and she sees him, and he’s lit up. He’s all fire. And he breaks her out of her emotional atrophy that she’s experiencing. There’s a lot of things.

JW: In her quietness, Kelly’s quietness, Cal found some sort of a passion that actually kept her quiet. It was not a lack of passion; it was her passion and her love for life that actually made her unable to act. It was too much for her to express, so she just shut it down, and it was on the tip of her tongue the whole fucking time.

JL: He’s hitting the nail on the head, because when I had to go still I wanted to make sure there was a little tornado that was wound up tight. It’s different than just sitting there not feeling, you know what I mean?

JW: Yeah, they say that some people who divert to drugs and that lifestyle, it’s not because they’re depressed. It’s because they have too much love and too much passion for the world, so they have to quiet it. So I wanted to pull it out so she could be with me.

Capone: He does seem to get a certain amount of glee out of disrupting her quietness.

JW: Yeah. It’s because no matter how loud I am, Cal trusts his intentions are good. He knows that deep down inside, so he can do and say anything out loud and whatever he wants because he knows what place it comes from, and he knows that people are going to see what his intentions are in what he does.

Capone: Jonny, it was great to meet you. Thank you so much. Juliette, I’m always happy when you’re back on the boards making some music.

JL: It’s going to happen in two months. Come to the next show. You’re going to freak out. I’ll post shows; it’s all going to start happening.

JW: Great to meet you, man.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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