As an old school, hard-living country singer named Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart,” Jeff Bridges gives yet another solid performance, playing a man who was once successful but who has almost blown all his chances to get back on top. It also stars Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall.

But “Crazy Heart” is really all Bridges – from top to bottom. He just received a Golden Globe nomination for the performance, and many pundits – including myself – are predicting this could be the actor’s year to bask in the award season’s light; that he may finally snag the Oscar he’s been poised to win ever since he was nominated for his turn in “The Last Picture Show” (he’s been nominated three other times for “Thunderbold and Lightfoot,” “Starman” and “The Contender”).

We journalists had a brief but meaningful conversation with Bridges about singing in a movie for the first time, similarities between country singers and actors – and who his mentors have been in his career.

Q: What got you to use your vocal chords this time?

Jeff Bridges: “When I first got the script, there wasn’t any music attached to it. So I kind of took a pass on it. Then when I found out from my good buddy T-Bone [Burnett] that he was going to do it if I was going to do it, then that filled in that empty missing piece. So when he got involved, I knew the music was going to be top-notch. That got me to the party real quick.”

Q. Playing the hard life as country singer on the road, do you see any similarities in being an actor?

Bridges: “Yeah, my wife told me, ‘You know we’ve been apart 11 months this year.’ 11 months, man! That’s tough, that’s the hardest part for me. But we’ve been married 33 years, so we’ve done this a lot together. We know the routine and how tough it is; we depend on each other. It’s great to have a partner like that.”

Q. What about the idea of being down on your luck?

Bridges: “One of the things appealing about country music is dealing with human emotions that people can relate to. I think we can all relate to not only the fear of failure, but the fear of success, too. What we do to ourselves when we get kind of successful and when you get to the top of the mountain, there’s only one place to go. You roll down. So how do you deal with that? A lot of us deal with that by numbing ourselves and that’s our strategy to slow ourselves down. So, I can relate to that just as a human being. Not only as an actor, but just being alive.”

Q: You and Colin Farrell were wonderful together. Can you talk about working and singing with him?

Bridges: “Well, with movies, you only have a certain amount of time to pull it all together and for ['Crazy Heart'], we only had 24 days. So you really look for comrades who can get the fire going as quickly as possible. Colin flew in and only worked about four or five days, very short. But we hit it off right off the bat and approached the work in a similar way and got along great. And singing together was a great way to strike up a relationship with your fellow actor, to harmonize and stuff.”

Q: In the film, you play Farrell’s character, Tommy Sweet’s mentor. Who have been your mentors?

Bridges: “Do fathers count as mentors? I guess they do. So my dad [Lloyd Bridges] was my mentor. He really encouraged all of his kids to go into show business, he loved it so much. I remember as a little kid, he’d come up to me and say, ‘Hey, do you want to be in “Sea Hunt? There’s a little part” – this TV show he did in the ’60s. And I’d say, ‘Ehhh … ‘ and he’d cajole, ‘You get to get out of school. Make some money to buy some toys.’ [Laughter] So, I’d say OK. And I remember him sitting me on the bed, giving me the basics of acting, teaching me how to do it. Of course, my brother [Beau Bridges] was also my mentor, took up where my dad left off. Worked on scenes to get my agent. I remember a big turning point in my career was doing a movie version of the play ‘The Iceman Cometh.’ And I got to work with all these masters: Robert Ryan, Frederic March, Lee Marvin. Most of my scenes were with Robert Ryan, who I learned a lot from. About fear and insecurity. I remember doing a scene with him across a table, and we were waiting for the scene to start. He took his hands off the table and there were too puddles of sweat on the table. I was like, ‘Wow, after all these years, you’re still frightened. You’re still nervous and scared.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, I’d be really scared if I wasn’t scared.’ That thing about fear, it’s always going to be with you, that’s how you deal with that. It’s hopeless to think you can get rid of that.”

Challenges of adapting and will we see some of the scenes that were cut from the final film?

Peter Jackson: “In any film I’ve done, you shoot scenes that don’t end up in the final cut. In my mind, there’s no such thing as a perfect adaptation of a book. The master work is the book. Alice Sebold’s novel is The Lovely Bones – that is the work that has everything in it, every character, every subplot and that’s the way you should experience the story in its most pure form. A film adaptation of ANY book, especially The Lovely Bones, is only ever going to be a souvenir, an impression of aspects of the book. So to me to adapt a book isn’t to produce a carbon copy, would be impossible. To include everything, the film would be five to six hours long. It’s a personal impression that Phillips Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself, the three of us wrote the screenplay and we responded to aspects of the book, especially emotional themes and the comforting value of the book and the things it had to say about the afterlife, which is personal to anybody. It’s what we responded to and our adaptation is just elements of the book restructured following our instincts and tastes. No adaptation is perfect, it’s impossible. You don’t make a movie for the fans of the book, you can’t do that.”

Stanley Tucci’s contact lenses and getting into that awful role

Tucci: “No, not to make him slightly inhuman. I just didn’t my eyes should be the eyes of this guy. He needed to be more quintessentially American looking, so skin tone was changed, the hair was, uh, added. The eyes seemed to be appropriate for him. In some scenes, I think they look normal, but in the close ups, the reflections in the mirror when he’s sitting in his car, I think then the eyes take on a different quality. Because of how it’s lit and because of my horrible thoughts.”

Tucci: “It was hard in every respect. Pete knew I was very reticent to take the part at first because of reasons Mark just explained. I can’t read or watch anything about kids getting harmed or anything about serial killers. And there’s so much serial killer information out there, documentaries and whatnot. A lot of it is just gratuitous, almost pornographic really, what’s being shown. But this was not that. This was a beautiful story about an exploration of loss. Phillpa, Fran, Pete and I had long conversations about it, and I felt safe with them that this wouldn’t be gratuitous and that we were going to create a person together. That Mr. Harvey was a real person. The more real he is, the more subtle and banal he is, the more terrifying he is. At the beginning, it was very hard to leave it at the end of the day, to drop it especially after being fresh off the research. It was repulsive. But once you understand who he is and you find him for me, then I could drop him at the end of the day. And no doubt, it was the most difficult thing I have ever done as an actor. I looked forward to going into the make-up trailer and taking everything off and having a martini at the end of the day. And at the beginning of every day, for that matter. ” [Laughter]

Jackson: “If there’s something going on with their character’s eyes, it’s because of the performance. As a filmmaker, I like shooting some extreme close ups of characters occasionally, because that is a technique you use to really get inside someone’s head. And Stanley was playing a very dangerous and frightening character so getting close to his eyes was a way of increasing the menace.”

As the comic relief Grandma Lynn

Susan Sarandon: “The fun part was figuring out how to clean the house with a cigarette and a drink. That was a new area for me. Obviously, she’s been self-medicating for years in anticipation of some grief. Maybe she mourns in another movie but not this one. That’s not my job [as the character]. My job was to keep things moving forward. It’s really a great choice to have someone inept try to keep the house going. Cause if I was a seemingly solid, knitting granny you’d expect to come forward, it would be really boring. But the fact she’s throwing ashes everywhere she’s cleaning, it allows the audience to laugh in the appropriate places. I love that this is just the way life is. When something horrible happens, you do find yourself laughing in weird places in the midst of grief and crying in the supermarket when you see a cereal that somebody used to eat. There’s just no way of guarding yourself one way or another. Everyone griefs differently, there’s no right or wrong way. And my function in the film was to be hilarious. I’ve been there and have lost many a child on celluloid, so I was happy I was once removed.”

The parents dealing with their worst nightmare

Rachel Weisz: “As an actor, you have to imagine all sorts of things. I imagined I was a young woman in the 1970s, I imagined I was American – neither of those bad things. You imagine beautiful things, you imagine ugly things, that’s my job. I just don’t think that way that something’s too dark or problematic to go to. I don’t know why but I just don’t think that way. I immerse myself in something but I’ve learned to come out of it. I’m a mother in real life, so I can’t go home to my kid in a state of despair and tears. It’s a skill you learn, like one might learn to juggle, that you learn to turn things on and off. But bad things happen in story since the beginning of time. So it isn’t a new thing to be a storyteller and be in a film where there are bad things. There are also beautiful and uplifting things about this film and the book, and I knew that going into it. You know what? I guess the uplifting theme of book to me is that life is a treasure, and precious and a miracle, which did make me want to hug my son tighter. It’s hard to remember life is a miracle. Often we’re just living it and forget that. It gave me a positive feeling rather then a depressed one.”

Mark Wahlberg: “Because of the way I approach work, I wasn’t that thrilled with the subject matter because I have one beautiful little girl and two beautiful boys. I don’t have the God-given talent like Rachel [Weisz] has and just snap into it. Have these floods of emotion coming out and then just turn them off. I’m still learning to juggle … I would just go home and just grab my daughter and hold her and I would start crying. She’s like, Daddy what’s wrong with you, she just wanted to play. And I would try to talk to her about taking care of herself and not talk to strangers. She was 3 at the time. But thankfully, I had another movie to go into right after, so I was able to shake it after awhile.”

Not showing the rape

Jackson: “There are artistic, moral, impractical reasons, a variety of them, really [for not showing the rape and murder]. The film is about a teenager and her experiences of what happens: she’s murdered, she goes into an after-life and we wanted to make a film that teenagers could watch. Fran and I have a daughter around Susie’s age, and we wanted Katie to be able to see this film. So it was important to us not to go into an R-rated territory at all. Also, I never regarded the movie as being a film about a murder. And if we shot any aspect of that particular sequence … to show a 14-year-old girl murdered in any way, no matter how briefly, it would completely swing the balance of the movie. And frankly, make it a film that I wouldn’t want to watch. I would have no interest in seeing that depicted on film. Every movie that I make is a film that I want to see. It’s very important. I make movies that I know I’d enjoy seeing at the cinema … I’ve shot some pretty extreme things in my time, with Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles and Braindead, and there’s a certain style and sense of humor that I believe you can do to get away with that. But to do anything that depicted violence, especially towards a young person in a way that was serious, to me I’d have no interest in filming it. It would be repulsive.”

Tucci: “To that, we talked a lot about that and how far it should go when we were getting to know each other. And in our conversations, I ask, ‘We don’t really need to see this, do we?’ and we all agreed that no, not at all, we don’t need to see it. But then I had a conversation with a journalist this morning who said people were upset that the rape WASN’T shown and the killing. And I just don’t get that.”

Jackson: “I mean how much murder and killing do you need to see to be satisfied? How much to make someone happy?”

Tucci: “I don’t know. Obviously, a lot because there’s a lot out there. I think anyone who’s disappointed in that regard should go onto the Internet, they’ll find a lot of stuff like that. It’s so much more interesting what Peter did to me. To leave it to the audiences’ imagination, because our imagination of rape and murder are much greater than what anyone could ever put on film.”

Sarandon: “Also [Susie’s] the narrator and she disassociates herself at that point. So to watch it happen, you’ll lose that element of her confusion and her displacement.”

Jackson: “One things we did that’s different from the novel in restructuring the screenplay is we had [Susie] fleeing from the murder … At the point her spirit becomes disconnected from her body, she’s running, across the field, into the streets, running home. Susie doesn’t know what has happened to her. She’s literally confused and finds herself in the in-between, essentially the world of dreams and the subconscious and she has to start to put the pieces of the puzzle together like a mystery. So showing the murder would have changed all that.”

When the emotions overtook you

Saoirse Ronan: “For me, there was always one scene that stuck out I got very emotional with, where I was drowned in the scene for quite a long time: It was the barley field scene towards the end in which Mr. Harvey’s victims come to take Susie to heaven. One of my favorite scenes in the film and definitely my favorite to shoot. It was so emotional and touching.”

Ronan: “There were quite a lot of scenes on my own in the in-between. We actually did go on location in New Zealand, which was beautiful, a great experience. But when we used blue screen, there were different things that they figured out would help me. Of course, how well written the script was. Really, most of what I needed was in the script already. We would also play music during the day, during the shots. Music that would reflect the mood of the scene, which would help so much. Pete would talk to during takes as well, describing what was around me. I never really felt like I was alone, because I had my guardian angel there [looks at Peter Jackson] … and I loved New Zealand, very similar to Ireland. One of my favorite places to shoot and visit. I’d move there.”

Jackson: “The only thing as a filmmaker I’m scared of or fear is repetition. I have no interest in doing the same thing over and over again. And that’s not to say I wouldn’t do another fantasy film or another splatter film one day or another film with puppets. But it’s nice to have a break and turn your mind to something different. The Lovely Bones is a challenge. One of the things – something most of you in this room would appreciate – is that things are immediately more interesting and enjoyable if they are difficult. If you decide to take on a project for next year or two years, and it’s familiar, treading the same ground you’ve covered before, than it’s less interesting than something that has new demands and a fresh challenge. And The Lovely Bones is a wonderful puzzle, the book, takes you on a emotional journey and as filmmaker find a way to tell the story.”

You sort of forget how long Colin Firth has been around. He is always the consummate actor, who brightens even the most banal of movies (we forgive him for “What a Girl Wants”). Most of us remember the performances he shines brightly in, such as titular character in “Valmont,” Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice” – and even Mark Darcy in the “Bridget Jones Diaries.”

But every once in awhile, Firth is handed a plumb role he can really sink his teeth into. His turn as painter Johannes Vermeer in “Girl with a Pearl Earring” comes to mind – and now his work in “A Single Man,” fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut. Based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, the film focuses on one day in the life of a lonely gay college professor named George, who is struggling deeply with the sudden tragic death of his longtime lover – and Firth is finally and deservedly getting major Oscar buzz for his performance. Lucky me got to sit in on a press conference in which he talks about creating the character and how he treasures those quiet moments in film.

On playing gay as just another way of expressing love

Colin Firth: “Whenever I embark on a project, it’s an opportunity for me to plunge into a particular world, a different perception. Learn maybe about a time and a place I didn’t know so much about. Love is love, so I don’t really feel there’s anything different to play because the partner happens to be male. The person I’m playing opposite is unlikely to be my lover anyway. It’s the job description. These emotions, you find them from somewhere, it’s the job. I think one of the things I appreciate most about [Christopher] Isherwood’s writing is that he doesn’t make the sexuality a salient feature. Sexual love was part of it but he was writing at a time where there were a lot of writers covering that up. His characters just happen to be gay. I don’t define myself by my sexuality either. And I think one of the things George isn’t struggling against is his sexuality. He is struggling with a lot of things, but he’s not struggling with being gay. I think he’s very happy with who he is in that respect … Because the character is not taking this on as an issue – it’s not his war with his sexuality or war against prejudice – I think the fact that he is comfortably open about the fact he is gay is definitely significant. Otherwise, why bother to feature it at all? It’s not irrelevant, I just think it’s about love and regret, which is absolutely, unashamedly and unassumingly THERE. Homosexuality simple as any other kind of sexuality.”

On trusting your director, even if he’s a newbie

Firth: “[Tom Ford] has a great gift. He’s never made a film before but it didn’t feel like working with a man who was a novice. At all. There were a couple of little pieces of film parlance he was unfamiliar with but it didn’t seem to matter, he’d just add them to his vocabulary and carried on. People treated him with the most enormous respect. There was such a strong sense he could be trusted with his taste and judgment that it actually relaxed people. A film set can be a very neurotic place. There can be rampant insecurity, people frightened of falling short, of failure, of miscommunication. There can be all kinds of complications. A good director smooths that all out and unites the set and creates a kind of unity of vision. He has that gift and I think he’s learned that over many years working in fashion.”

On how the fashion world has a lot in common with filmmaking

Firth: “I think he may have just said to you now that fashion has something to say. It may not be a very popular thing to hear, even if it’s ‘I must make this woman wear this dress!’ or ‘This woman must feel like she has to wear this dress!’ He has to get that across in a few seconds on the runway. So he’s still using his creativity, still having to get a group of people to share a vision and still working towards having an impact. This time, it’s narrative drama, something he hasn’t done before but it’s clear to me it wasn’t a vanity project for him, not just a chance to show off his spring collection, you know. But yes, the clothes looked beautiful and wonderfully designed, but it was to the service of the story. The way George dresses so fastidiously, it’s really a sign of desperation. You get the feeling if he took off his cuff links, he’d fall apart. That he’s actually getting his body armor on, hanging on by his fingernails. It’s only his exterior world that he has any control over because inside, it’s all a mess. So to me, that was the purpose of the costumes, wasn’t just we’re going to have great silhouette because we are in a Tom Ford film. He didn’t give us a lot of verbal instruction; things were told to us through the senses.”

On how Colin was perfect to play George

Tom Ford: “I think that I’ve always seen this character in Colin whenever I’ve seen him in anything, no matter what it was. Colin is such an amazing actor, and I’m not saying that he’s had small parts because he’s done some wonderful things in his life, but even in the smallest thing that you’ve ever seen Colin in there’s something that comes from inside him. He’s able to telegraph his thoughts or what his character is feeling, whether it’s real or not I don’t know. I don’t know enough about his process but he’s able to telegraph that with almost no movement to his face. There’s something about Colin that does seem very contained on the surface and yet inside you know there’s enormous emotion. That seemed absolutely perfect to me for George.

On appreciating the simplicity of the human face

Firth: “I love a scene without dialogue … when the material is incredibly coherent and eloquent, you feel inspire by it and you don’t want to go into a series of hugely demonstrative gestures, particularly when you believe in the power of just thinking things onto the screen. I love that kind of cinema. Bergman could spend a very long time on someone’s face, and to me the most interesting thing you can find in cinema is the human face. There’s a lot of beauty in cinema, but the most interesting thing to me is THAT. But one of the most dispiriting things is to see the possibilities of that, in a quiet scene and you’ve got an imaginatively creative director saying, ‘OK, we are going to start on the doorknob, and then we are going to pan across the floor and there will be a shot of the tape recorder light flashing and then we are going to get a close-up of your right eye. And I want a lot of orange in the shot and I want a silhouette of you, but way over there in the corner …’ That may look great, it’s just I feel it’s a waste for me. And that happens quite a bit. But then on the other hand, you might get a director who does put the camera on your face, but he decides he wants to interfere, control it, provoke it out of you: ‘Just think about the time your dog died when you were little.’ No, I was fine before the dog thing, thank you. I don’t know, Tom just let you do things. The script was clear to me. By the time we were there and saw the way he set things up, it was eloquent already. And so we were free, everyone in the film. Something about being very truthful and in the moment. If all of those things are happening, it’s has to be because of the director. [Tom] has cultivated an atmosphere where he’s not going to fuss around and just lets people connect with each other.”

On getting all the attention

Firth: “It’s confusing. [Actors] are confused and do want attention. It’s hard to judge an actor whose having his insane and insatiable need for attention fulfilled because he’s probably being at his best. It’s that Tom Waits line, ‘I don’t have a drinking problem except when I can’t get a drink.’ Check in with me when I’m not getting any attention. I don’t know, it is my day job, acting. And I do have a life. My wife is spectacularly good at keeping my feet on the ground. I have a home to go to at the end of the day, so all the rigors, disappointments, expectations, the ups and down, they come and go. Constantly. Disappointments don’t last unless you cling to them. And neither do expectations, really. Even if you get rewarded, you can’t cling to that moment.”

Viggo Mortensen is just as introspective as you’d expect him to be – especially when he’s talking about his latest film, The Road, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel. Mortensen and his young co-star Kodi Smit-McPhee play a father and son who are left to live in a world gone ka-blooey, fighting for their lives against insurmountable odds, such as the cold, harsh elements, starvation, cannibalistic survivors. Yeah, not the most happy of topics to discuss with the man who used to be Aragon, but the soft-spoken actor tells us in great detail the emotional journey he and Smit-McPhee went on making this film, experiences that were daunting, exhaustive – and almost poetic.

Q: How invested were you in Cormac McCarthy’s story?

Viggo Mortensen: “The moment I read [the script], I went out and got the book. I hadn’t read it yet, even though I had read all of Cormac McCarthy’s books, and it was some book. And the script was a very faithful adaptation. But I was reluctant [to do the movie]. I had initially said I don’t think so. I told my agent I was really worn out, I won’t be focused. And then I looked at the story and thought, ‘Well, you know, being worn out might work.’ There were times when it was just bubbling under the surface, being too tired, annoyed, kinda depressed. Sometimes it did help. But then – you can’t put something in there that isn’t in the story just to distract people. You can but then it’s not done the right way. But how do you keep it from being flat? OK, enough with the suffering already, yet you trust the story, and there are so many things learned along the way, and the interactions with people and the environment and from each other, not always agreeing, you just have to trust what Cormac McCarthy wrote. And because the script was a very faithful adaptation, you just have to trust that book, that there are inherently dramatic situations and moments, the overall predicament, stripped away, what do you do? How do you behave? How do you treat others? Do you even care anymore about being alive? Do you know why you want to stay alive? Do you find out a reason to stay alive by the end? I think, yes you do and THAT is interesting.”

Q: Were you able to talk to McCarthy directly?

Mortensen: “I talked to him one time before shooting, a relatively long conversation. We just talked about my kid, his kid, being dads. And at the end of the conversation, he asked me if I had any questions. He hadn’t read the script and he didn’t want to read the script, which is unusual for a writer. He says ‘It’s a different medium, you guys just do your thing, but do you have any questions about the book?’ I mean, I had a pad, 50 post-it notes in the book, not one but TWO pens in case one ran out of ink, I was ready to pick his brains. But when he asked, I said, ‘Nah, I don’t really’ because [what we talked about] was all I needed to get going. That there is something universal about this adult and this child. I think that’s why this book has had such a reach, more so than any other [Cormac McCarthy] book, even though with No Country for Old Men’s Oscar success. It’s so heartfelt and so free of gimmickry, this story. It transcends cultures and languages, which makes it a very successful book. And a lot of people are looking forward to seeing the movie, which makes me hopeful because it’s a daunting kind of movie.”

Q: How did you prepare for this role mentally?

Mortensen: “Very different from any other role I’ve done, just how much I had to throw away. Because really it’s about being naked emotionally and just be honest about it. In subtle ways and in ways that are more obvious. But it had to be real, very organic, which was the most daunting thing. Not so much the physical journey we would make if this was going to be done properly, but what I would have to expose, from here [he points to his heart]. I thought I might need some help, especially from the boy. I hoped they’d find a great boy. I read with the last four, and Kodi was the very last one. There was just something about him, he at least understood the story in a way that maybe the other kids didn’t. I mean, he’s a joyful, well-adjusted kid, but there’s something in his eyes when he was playing those scenes, even in those auditions, that was sad, knowing. I thought, ‘Wow, this could work’ cause I was really worried if we didn’t have a great kid, it wouldn’t matter what I did.”

Q: There’s a lot of rough stuff going on in this film, did you feel protective of Kodi, wanting to shield him a little bit?

Mortensen: “It was hard emotionally, but what helped us and what he didn’t like, was the fact we were so cold and wet all the time, tired. Particularly cold for Kodi because he is from Southern Australia, although you couldn’t tell from listening to him in the movie. He’d never seen snow, and the first day it was snowing and very cold. He couldn’t believe how cold it was, and it wore him out pretty quickly, which pushed his emotions to the surface – and mine. It made me more protective of him in that way. Just trying to get him through the day, and the next day. It’s kind of like the story, in a way. Had it been shot with green screen, it wouldn’t have been the same. Yes, he’s a good little actor, and together, we would have made it seem like we were cold, but it wouldn’t have worked the same. Because it was so difficult in a way, for both [me and Kodi], we both grew to be very close friends and found a sense of satisfaction for having gone through it. ”

Q: Did it make you think of your own son?

Mortensen: “When I started doing the movie, I thought about my own son quite a bit. And that transition that he also made in his pre-adolescence. Kodi reminded me of my son a lot, the character in the movie, kind of wise beyond his years. And that transition you see in the story, when the kid is calling his dad out on his straying from path that he had been teaching his son. I remember that phase [when his son did the same thing] and how I didn’t much like it but learned to accept it when he was right. That’s universal. Any parent who has a relatively consistent relationship with their kids, no matter how good or bad it is, there comes a point in adolescence when they look at their dad or their mom or both of them and realize that they are not gods. And then they rip them. Because it’s such a shock, you want your dad to be that and then they’re not; it’s massively disappointing. You know what I mean? But it’s natural that it happens and sometimes, even really good kids, can be brutal by tearing that adult off the pedestal that they thought they were on. And it can be hard to take as an adult, but you have to find a way to take it eventually. Then, what’s interesting in life, is as you get older – I remember being that way towards my dad, and when I got into my late 20s, early 30s, I realized I wasn’t a god either. It takes awhile, because if you are tearing something down off the pedestal, it means you are putting yourself above it in some way. And you don’t realize it in some way, it’s instinctive.”

Q: I heard you did some research by talking to homeless people. What did you discover?

Mortensen: “I did speak to them just to ask them how they got this way and how they felt about it. Not all of them would want to talk, which was fine, like anybody in life. Very rarely, but some were living that way by choice. Some lost their job, some it was drugs. Mostly it was just financial hardship, there was no other thing they could do. And how they felt about it, how they kept alive, and what things they worried about. Have to figure out where they were going to sleep so no one could do them harm or steal their stuff.”

Q: Are you concerned about the world coming to an end? And how did this movie make you appreciate life more?

Mortensen: “Of course, sure I do. Even though it’s not explained [in The Road], you believe the emotional journey, believe the visual, the landscape, it’s real. We shot in real places that had been devastated by nature AND by man. This made me think more about my son, my family and just about how life is, that it is worth making that effort to see more, learn more. To appreciate it. It’s a very simple idea in a way. No matter what the excuse not to be kind, it’s always better to be kind. Simple. But if you make this journey honestly as a spectator or as us filmmakers, you earn the right to come to that simple conclusion and you understand in a profound way. In a lot of the Q&A screenings, I noticed in the first few rows that they were crying or had been crying, obviously moved, but they have a hint of a smile at the same time. So somehow at the ending is, that we’ve earned as I was saying, strangely uplifting. And I see reflected in their faces exactly how I felt telling the story. Even though I know this film backwards and forwards, the first time I saw it still affected me so viscerally.”

Q: Do you think you could survive in this scenario?

Mortensen: “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d have the courage to keep going if it looked impossible. I’d like to think I would. I’m actually better with a gun than he is, more comfortable. He’s not necessarily. He’s learned to be, but needed to make it seem that way. Not like an action guy. And he is constantly reminded himself and the kid of what to do.”

Q: There’s already a lot of Oscar buzz surrounding the film. How do you feel about all that?

Mortensen: “If you see it, you are there but describing it, you’d think, ‘I don’t want to see that!’ Which is why a lot of people said it couldn’t be done. You can’t make an engaging, entertaining, beautiful, poetic story movie from this book. It can’t be done. They were wrong. And if you see it, I find people will tell others they should see it. It’s a very word-of-mouth movie – and there’s no better word-of-mouth than reading in a newspaper, ‘Oh, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor.’ It would help this movie get seen, I know that. It would help any movie, but especially a movie like this. As far as the likelihood of that happening? I don’t know. I was sure with History of Violence that David Cronenberg would be nominated for Best Director and it would get a Best Picture nomination, but it didn’t get that. Then for Eastern Promises, I ended up getting nominated for every ceremony. It was like ‘Wow, how did that happen?’ So you just never know. But I know with a movie like this, it would be really helpful.