On-the-lam Shepard returns
Posted By Admin on April 29, 2011
Shepards Cassidy is a grizzled old man whos been lying low under an assumed name for decades. Deciding he needs to return to the US to see his family before his death, he teams up with a Spanish mine robber (Eduardo Noriega) who promises him a cut of the loot. But there are a lot of surprises along the way in the film, which was shot on location in Bolivia.
It was Shepards first trip to South America, and it was an arduous film to shoot, he says in a gravelly voice during a cellphone interview while traveling across West Texas. Breathing was difficult because we were working at great altitude. But I thought the screenplay was head and shoulders above anything Ive been offered in the last three or four years.
The famously terse and private 67-year-old, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Buried Child, acknowledged that the pace of his film acting career has picked up of late (he has two completed films awaiting release besides Blackthorn, which is seeking a US distributor).
His film career began on a 1970 underground film (I was working as a busboy at the Village Gate), though he didnt make much of an impression until Days of Heaven (1978), released the same year as his first famous play, Buried Child. Hes also directed a couple of films with his companion of three decades, Jessica Lange, who he met while they were working on Frances (1982).
I need to work. Everybody needs to work, he says cryptically. Shepard, who lives in Minnesota and is afraid of flying, is on his way to New Orleans to shoot the thriller Cogans Trade with Brad Pitt, then its off to South Africa to support Denzel Washington in another thriller, Safe House.
At least on the phone, Shepard laughs a lot for someone who specializes in plays about tortured family relationships and has talked about his struggles with alcoholism and his late father. He seems particularly amused by the idea that his rugged good looks regularly landed him on sexiest-men lists in the 1980s, when there were predictions hed become a big movie star like Harrison Ford.
Critics dubbed him the new Gary Cooper for his Oscar-nominated favorite role as test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, and dubbed him the new James Stewart when he played a veterinarian in the romantic comedy Baby Boom.
They just didnt know what to call me, did they? he says with a laugh.
Rising star or not, Woody Allen replaced Shepard with Sam Waterston when he completely reshot the 1987 drama September with different leads.
I think he replaced the actors playing my character 12 times — I replaced Christopher Walken, and you couldnt imagine two different actors. And Woody told me he liked what he did, he says with another laugh. Id love to work with Woody again, but I probably wont get the chance because he thinks I insulted him in an interview.
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