\n<\/p>\n
What I didn\u2019t want to do is bounce back and forth between each scene. I noticed that sometimes I\u2019d stay with a whole section for about 30 minutes or 40 minutes and then move to something. As long as I felt that it was compelling, as long as I had to get all the characters established and had to do that\u2014I had to resist a lot of conventions that people were wanting.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why I ask.<\/strong><\/p>\n They were coming to me. I said, \u201cNo, I\u2019m comfortable.\u201d \u201cWell, Kevin, nobody knows you\u2019re in the movie.\u201d I said, \u201cThey\u2019ll get it. I\u2019ll show up.\u201d And I finally showed up, but I couldn\u2019t do anything about that. I needed, number one, to wean the audience off knowing it\u2019s just not going to be about me. It\u2019s going to be about a lot of us, and I\u2019m going to get my screen time. More of it\u2019s coming in three and four. But I\u2019m gratified that people were accepting these other characters. I could feel it. That they were inside that particular story.<\/p>\n Did you always know where your character would enter the movie, relatively late into the opening act?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah. Actually, I came a little later [initially], so I have listened to people go, \u201cCould you please come a little sooner?\u201d And so I did. I moved myself up about 10 minutes. [Laughs<\/em>] I try to listen, but sometimes it just doesn\u2019t make sense to me.<\/p>\n It\u2019s audacious to stay with certain sections as long as you do.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, the battle\u2019s 45 minutes.<\/p>\n Did you think of yourself as doing something that was daring in that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n No. I realized it was daring to some people, and I\u2019m thinking\u2014this conventional wisdom thing, it really kills me, because what if everybody\u2019s wrong? Imagine we just stop talking right now. Be like, that was it, that was the interview. But if we\u2019re talking for two hours, we might start to wane. But right now it\u2019s like, \u201cLook, as long as we\u2019re really engaging\u2026\u201d I am really particular about the writing. If it doesn\u2019t work in the writing, I can tell when it\u2019s going too long.<\/p>\n How did you think about each of these stories? So many different characters in this Western backdrop are on their own paths, with their own dramas. What did they say collectively?<\/strong><\/p>\n This promise of America, people were just moving towards it, and a lot of them were moving toward a myth. A myth that what exactly exists there. There\u2019s a myth of maybe what actually happened there, in how these towns were formed. That was the point\u2014to debunk the history. Like, \u201cThat\u2019s not what happened at all.\u201d What happened was, guys came and put stakes in the ground because back in Chicago, somebody knew a train may be coming through here. \u201cI was going to make money in America, and it just disrupted the lives of thousands of people and spelled the death knell of a culture that had been there for 15,000 years because entrepreneurially, somebody goes, Train comes through here, we\u2019re going to make money.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n