Tim Blake Nelson is about to shoot a “spectacular” Western “Shoot” in Spain, directed by Guillermo Navarro. Guillermo Del Toro’s regular cinematographer, he already won an Academy Award for “Pan’s Labyrinth.” 

“We have a great cast and a script written by British writer Ian Wilson. Westerns change, reflecting a cultural moment when it’s made. ‘Yellowstone,’ ‘Power of the Dog’… each generation needs to furnish its own take on film genres. This one is about the power of the gun as a corrupting force,” he reveals. 

“It’s absolutely a current script, but it’s 100% true to its time. We are starting to shoot in November. The great thing about Westerns is that they require big vistas, but good Westerns don’t have to cost $100 million. We made ‘Old Henry’ for $1.2 million. It’s a way of having a superhero film with natural environments and no visual effects.” 

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There will be no avoiding visual effects in “Captain America: Brave New World,” however, where Nelson will finally reprise his role of Samuel Sterns following 2008’s “The Incredible Hulk.” 

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“I deeply, deeply grieved over the prospect of not being able to come back into the MCU. All I wanted to do, as an actor, was to figure out what happens to this guy. 18 years later I got to do it and I wasn’t disappointed,” he said. 

“It was a great challenge and I was guided beautifully by Julius Onah, who’s an indie director. These are real directors who want to work with real actors and give them opportunities to play outlandish characters. Marvel supports that.” 

Despite some recent voices to the contrary, prematurely predicting its demise, according to Nelson, one should never “count Marvel out.” 

“Marvel is an unheard-of phenomenon in movie history. Kevin Feige and his studio created dozens of connected movies that exist in one cinematic universe, to use their term. There’s no comparable achievement. So no – I don’t think it’s over,” he notes, calling “Captain America” “the most grounded” of MCU franchises – along with “Logan.”

“This is going to be a wonderful movie,” he insists. 

“I couldn’t respect Martin Scorsese more, he’s his own genre, but I disagree with him when he derides Marvel. I come down on the side of Marvel movies absolutely being cinema. They return us to being kids again. When they are really good, and they often are, you lose yourself in them. Are they profound? Are they ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Miller’s Crossing,’ are they ‘Bicycle Thieves,’ ‘Schindler’s List’ or Kieślowski? No, but they aren’t aspiring to be. They are entertainment and there’s artistry involved in them.” 

“That’s my Marvel speech.” 

Nelson – currently at Locarno as a juror – is not forgetting his indie roots anytime soon, presenting intimate drama “Bang Bang” at the Swiss fest out of competition. Directed by Vincent Grashaw, it sees him as retired boxer Bernard “Bang Bang” Rozyski, determined to right past wrongs. 

Randomix Productions, Traverse Media produce, with Red Barn Films co-producing. 

“It demanded of me what no other role has, both in terms of its physicality and its mindset. In a sense, I am a fighter too – if you do what I do, you have to be – but I am not a confrontational person and this character is. It’s a guy who keeps himself in a fighting form. I have no background as a boxer, so I did some pretty extensive training.” 

After observing Daniel-Day Lewis on the set of “Lincoln,” he doesn’t mind preparing for roles. 

“Working with Daniel did change my approach to what it is that I do and I’m hardly unique in that regard. You get better just by being around him. I almost wanted to take all these 17-year-old roles I’ve done before and do them all over again,” he laughed. 

“I don’t do what he does: if I were to try to stay in character all day, it would be exhausting. He’s extraordinary in that regard – I’m not. At the same time, another wonderful actor, John C. Reilly, told me that every part is a ‘custom job.’ It’s this combination of developing a durable process for yourself and being open to changing it based on the part.”

In “Bang Bang,” he gets his very own “I coulda been a contender” speech a la Brando in “On the Waterfront.” 

“I love that scene. He discusses, effectively, what occurred that made him amount to the wreck of a man that he is. I have to give all the credit to Will Janowitz, the writer. It’s a speech that doesn’t feel like a speech. What a spectacular moment for an actor to play.” 

Over the course of his career, he got a couple of moments like that. 

“One was ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?,’ of course. Another – ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.’ When they said: ‘Come back to the MCU’ and when Damon Lindelof asked me to play Looking Glass in ‘Watchmen’,” he recalled. 

“As actors, we are often limited by ourselves and our own shortcomings, by how the industry and public perceive us. I’ve been given roles that asked for goofiness, imbecility, outlandishness. And quite infrequently, if ever, restraint. Suddenly, I was offered a character who was all about restraint. He only shares what he has to share. I look at ‘Watchmen’ the same way I look at Nolan’s ‘Batman’ movies. You enter this world and never want to leave.” 

He’s also readying to direct his next feature this year – his first since 2015’s “Anesthesia.” 

“The grandfather of it all was Cassavetes, but there’s certainly more tolerance for actors who direct. With ‘O,’ I resisted doing it. All these teen Shakespeare adaptations were proliferating at that time and I didn’t want to add to it, because I love Shakespeare. But it was a tragedy set in a high-school, not a comedy, and instead of it being repellent, it was an opportunity to make a statement about what was, and still is, going on with guns at schools in America.”

A modern adaptation of “Othello, “O” featured Julia Stiles, Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett.   

“The movie did strike a chord. Actually, it struck a bit too loud of a chord. As we were editing, Columbine happened. The movie was shelved and came out a year later. Shakespeare wrote about antisemitism, about racism. These issues endure, sadly,” he notes. But movies shouldn’t try to please everybody. Even now, when the future of indie cinema is seemingly under threat. 

“Once films start trying to be ‘liked,’ we are in trouble. In ‘Bang Bang,’ this character is borderline unlikeable. The trick was about making sure the audience wants to see what he does next. The Coen brothers’ movies are not trying to be liked. ‘The Big Lebowski’? There’s violence, you have the ashes of Jeff Bridges’ best friend blowing back into his face… I mean,” he says.   

“Here’s what I know: there’s an appetite for arthouse films in America. What’s missing is an ability for the platforms to make money off them. With Apple, for example, you could go to their ‘Movies’ icon and find ‘Independent Films’ and ‘Recent Discoveries.’ They have now folded that into Apple TV+, so they can foreground their own material. Another answer is to make the arthouse experience more special. You have places like Alamo Drafthouse – the movie I made with my son [Henry Nelson], ‘Asleep in My Palm,’ sold out there for a week. We need arthouse cinema in every major American city. And I need to be in great films and make great films.”

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