Josh Brolin talks about his role as a conflicted studio fixer in Hail, Caesar! He jokes about how the old Hollywood compares to the new
Where does Eddie Mannix fit into this storyIJ He’s a guy who has to keep the studio’s stars in line and make sure that their misdeeds don’t get into the press, is that rightIJ
What I’ve learned, especially from this book I was reading called The Fixer, is that this was an extremely debauched era. There was a lot of drinking and a lot of drugs and a lot of hiding of one’s behaviour, and on a massive scale. The real Eddie Mannix, I even think there were deaths that happened that he could kind of squash and make go away, but I play some amalgamation of the PR guy of that time, Harold Strickland, and Eddie and louis B. Mayer. So there were a lot of different guys that we constructed Eddie out of, at least in the Coens’ creation. I think he was a guy who was just making sure the image of the studio stayed intact in a certain way as to bring them the most profits possible.
So he’s controlling the mythIJ
Yeah, that’s what it is. If you look at the kind of Jesus manifestation of Eddie — he’s dealing with this guy, (studio head) Nick Skank, who you never see, who’s the kind of god, the studio boss. He’s protecting the profits of the upper echelon.
So he’s dealing with the dirty laundry but deep down does he love HollywoodIJ
He does. It’s like when he meets with the guy in the Chinese restaurant and the guy says, ‘What you do with these little brats, this is a thing that’s going to come and go, and when you have the television set, all of these moving pictures are going to go away,’ and he’s like, ‘No.’ You can tell he cares. And when it comes down to it, it’s like, ‘I want to do something that means something.’ Movies have an impact on society, we see it happening. It’s hard, it’s difficult to keep these little bratty children in line, but ultimately it’s kind of great what we get to do, we get to manifest great storytelling and people are affected by it. I still feel that way. I feel more like Eddie after this movie (laughs). I have a deep appreciation for what we do. Somebody said the other day, you know, ‘It’s kind of a horrible business that we’re in.’ I said, ‘ReallyIJ’ They said, ‘There are some bad folks,’ but there are bad folks in every business. That’s what’s great about working with the Coens is that they don’t allow that stuff, like what happened to George (Clooney’s character) in the movie — the power and the influence of somebody else and suddenly he starts thinking that he’s above everything. We stay grateful, man. We stay grateful that we get to make movies like this.
Has filmmaking changed all that much from the ‘Golden Age’ that we see in Hail, Caesar! to nowIJ
We tell a story and sometimes it’s humiliating and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. There’s an elusive element to this business that will never change. Somebody likes stories with a beginning, middle, and end, other people like stories that are more elusive and just like this, where it’s more like a day in the life, and it’s just a conglomeration of scenes that you put together that are just
amazing.
(Hail Ceaser will premiere on Sony le PlEX HD on March 12, 2017)