AFTER LOOKING FOR HIS CALLING AS A PAINTER AND DIRECTOR, JOHN HUSTON’S YOUNGEST SON IS FINALLY MAKING HIS MARK AS A FORMIDABLE ACTOR. DANNY HUSTON TELLS MICHAEL DWYER ABOUT GROWING UP PART-TIME IN GALWAY, PLAYING ORSON WELLES AND STAYING OUT OF THE SUN WHILE MAKING HIS LATEST FILM, A BRUTAL AUSTRALIAN WESTERN
'DID they laugh?" Danny Huston asks when I say I've just seen The Proposition before meeting him. "Sometimes, mostly nervously," I reply. "It is quite funny in parts," he says. Yes, but not very often.
Singer-songwriter Nick Cave makes a predictably unpredictable and thoroughly impressive screenwriting debut with this violent western set in the Australian outback in the 1880s. The Proposition follows the determined efforts of a police captain (Ray Winstone) to capture the leader (Huston) of an Irish outlaw gang, and the deal he makes with the leader's brother (Guy Pearce) to turn him over to the law. Directed by John Hillcoat, the film draws an unflinching picture of a brutal era against striking landscape compositions.
"All Nick Cave's songs have stories and they're very rich in that sense," says Huston. "So I wasn't that surprised when I read his screenplay. It's very lyrical, funny, hard, violent and beautiful. It seemed to conform to the western genre, but in a slightly unhinged way.
"The interesting thing about my character, Arthur, is that he is the only one in the film who isn't suffering from a moral quandary. He's quite sane in his insanity. He knows who his enemies are, and he'll kill you before you kill him. He has an extraordinary sense of love for family, perverse as it may be, but it's there."
The cast and crew suffered for their art during the shooting of The Proposition. "We were in Winton, in the middle of Queensland," says Huston. "It's a mining town. We stayed at this motel that was lovely but very basic. It had a very small swimming pool, which was a great luxury because it was so hot. A beer had never tasted so good. There were flies everywhere. When I had to put on the fake blood, which was a sweet resin thing, I had a whole cheek full of flies, like an organism on the side of my face. If you took a sharp intake of breath, you were bound to swallow flies."
Having spent much of its childhood at St Clerins, the Co Galway home of his writer-director father John Huston, Danny Huston welcomed the opportunity to play an Irish character for the first time.
"I pine for Ireland all the time and I have healthy bouts of nostalgia, and Arthur is really suffering that in a way as he lives in this very different and barren landscape away in Australia. I've read this book, Blood Meridian, with terrible tales of that period in Australia - stories of cannibalism and savage behaviour just to survive. When one understands the time and the setting, the violence is less shocking."
Huston speaks fondly of life at St Clerins with his father and his half-sister, Anjelica. "I went to boarding school in England and I spent all my summers, Christmases and Easters in Ireland until I was well into my teens. I haven't been back since I was about 20. Anjelica and I talk about the house all the time. The memories are so clear of that period in our lives."
I mention that John Huston was one of the first people I ever interviewed, in the early 1980s, when he downed tumblers of whiskey while discussing his autobiography, An Open Book. Danny Huston does a perfect impersonation of his father.
"It's a great book. I started reading it again recently. A lot of Hollywood children suffer from having famous parents, but it was different for us in Galway. It felt more like being the son of the master of the Galway Blazers, who just happened to make films. He was a larger than life character and a true gentleman, and later a buddy to me."
When I note that the centenary of John Huston's birth is this year, his son seems taken aback. "Oh, really?" he says. "Good lord! I didn't know that. I'm not a very good son if I haven't remembered that."
Now 43, Danny Huston took a circuitous, unplanned route into acting. He started out as a painter and turned to directing in 1988 with Mr North, a Thornton Wilder adaptation starring Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum and Lauren Bacall, along with Anjelica Huston and his first wife, Virginia Madsen.
"I had no acting ambitions whatsoever when I was younger," he says. "As a young man I met greats like Mitchum, who was a real man's man, but I had this odd point of view where I regarded acting as a vain, self-involved profession. Directing and screenwriting were my ambitions back then. During those incredibly long stretches of time I spent waiting for the green light on projects I wanted to direct, some of my friends, Mike Figgis and Bernard Rose, out of the kindness of their hearts offered me acting jobs."
His breakthrough came in Rose's 2000 movie, Ivans xtc, which transposed Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich to contemporary Hollywood. It drew an unflinchingly caustic picture of the film business and featured Huston in a riveting portrayal of a debauched, dying agent.
"It didn't get seen much in the States," Huston remarks. "Bernard has all these conspiracy theories, and he might be right. I haven't been able to prove him wrong. Hollywood and a whole lot of agents, especially CAA [Creative Artists Agency] were not happy with the film, and Bernard thinks that they suppressed it. But it developed a very strong cult following, and a lot of directors liked it a lot and wanted to meet me, which is how I got quite a few parts."
Huston's busy new career as an actor has included roles in 21 Grams, Silver City, Birth, The Aviator, The Constant Gardener and Sofia Coppola's upcoming Marie Antoinette. And he recently played Orson Welles in Fade to Black, which is set in 1948, when Welles was in Rome to play a hypnotist in Black Magic.
"You know, Marlene Dietrich said that one should cross oneself before even mentioning his name," Huston says. "I must say that I have a similar reverence for Welles. I met him with my father once and it was great to see those two mavericks together.
"Fade to Black is set when he was in his late 30s. He's broken up with Rita Hayworth after making The Lady from Shanghai. He arrives to act in Black Magic, and from that point on, our plot is a complete conceit - all smoke and mirrors. It's not really a biography of Welles, but more a political thriller in which he is a character. It's all low angles and magic tricks - a whole tapestry of Wellesian stuff."
The cast includes Diego Luna, Christopher Walken and Paz Vega. The screenplay is by John Sayles, who directed Huston in Silver City, and the director is Oliver Parker, who, coincidentally, made his film debut in 1985 with Othello, a play filmed by Welles in 1952.
"I'm itching to direct again now," Huston says. "I've been working with such remarkable people and I really enjoy watching directors at work, having watched my father at work for some years. I'm writing away at present and I expect to finish a screenplay soonish. If it's any good, I'll try setting it up."
Does he feel at all left out as a member of the Huston clan who has not won an Oscar, an award received by his half-sister, his father and his grandfather, Walter? "No," he laughs. "I don't think those accolades have really been that important to my family. But I remember my father talking about Bogart and saying that Bogart wasn't really interested in winning an Oscar and that he couldn't care less.
"Then, when Bogart won his Oscar, my father said he seemed inordinately proud. I suppose it's something that you feel rather good about when it happens to you, but until it does, it's hard to think about. But even though I say I don't care about it, I'm sure if I ever get anywhere close to it, I'll feel differently. I certainly won't do a Brando and not turn up."
The Proposition is reviewed on page 8
