Back to Reality: David Gordon Green on Joe

“That dog is an asshole!” Joe (Nicolas Cage) declares mid-way through David Gordon Green’s Southern crime drama, when the vicious beast bares snarling teeth and bars him from entering his favourite local brothel. Later, in the film’s most arresting sequence, Joe sets his own French bulldog on it in a fight to the death, sublimating his own desire to kill. The scene serves as a central metaphor for Green’s film: dogs (a favourite subject of the director) are our closest animal allies, the most domesticated of beasts, but they’re just as easily capable of tearing us apart when backed into a corner or abused. Or even, like true assholes, just because they feel like it.

The ostensible hero of the film, Joe is most certainly an asshole, and one often without cause, like his whorehouse canine nemesis. Struggling to control his impulse to continually lash out at the world and blow up his own life, Joe is plunged into an existential despair he thinks only sex and booze can quell. Green, however, seems like the quintessential amiable guy, just excited to be getting the chance to do what he’s doing. But he admits he has some of Joe in him, like we all do. When pressed about the idea of suppressing the beast within the man – whether it’s something that’s even possible, and whether it denies basic human nature – Green is circumspect. “Wow, man, we need a few drinks at the bar to talk about this,” he offers with a chuckle. “To me the whole movie is like – I mean, you have that, I have that, Joe fucking certainly has that – how do you juggle who you are with your community’s laws and your culture’s expectations of you?”

Green knows a thing or two about cultural expectations. He first burst on to the indie filmmaking scene with his 2000 debut, George Washington, a stunning, near-perfect film about youth on the economic fringe of Southern US society, which won the New York Film Critics’ award for Best First Feature and the Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. By turns deadpan funny and harrowing, with exquisite naturalistic cinematography from his now-longtime collaborator Tim Orr, the film announced Green as an heir to the likes of Terrence Malick (who produced his third film, 2004’s Undertow). But unlike that filmmaking legend, Green had an obvious sense of humour, and seemed more content to study the roots of terrestrial human relationships than what happens in a more spiritual realm, above the tree branches.

“I like weirdos. I like outcasts. I like places around the corner and down the street that you have to kind of like, hold your breath when you enter,” he says. “I like when you take a little bit of the polish off people and their places.” Green himself might not be a weirdo, but his career trajectory is most certainly strange. After following up George Washington with a few moderately successful indie dramas (All the Real Girls, Undertow, Snow Angels), he scored his biggest hit to date, the uproariously funny doper comedy Pineapple Express (2008), and quickly followed it up by co-producing and directing the profane HBO cult sitcom Eastbound & Down (star Danny McBride is an old friend from university). It couldn’t have been a bigger about-face, something Green readily acknowledges.

“I work in a very playful, whimsical way,” he says. “When I’ve done something I try to do something different. I try to exercise a different muscle.” Green was drawn to Joe’s star Nicolas Cage, in part, because of his similar career trajectory. “I just think somebody that has that weird career, is somebody that has the complicated levels and layers of Joe,” he says of Cage. “A lot of movie stars, once they’re accepted at something, won’t mess with it. He’s constantly willing to go out on a limb and challenge that, and I think that’s exciting. I like to do that as well.”

While Green says he likes to take “a bit of the polish off” his characters, unfortunately that lack of shine has applied to his own output in recent years. His 2011 studio projects Your Highness and The Sitter were critically eviscerated commercial failures, ironically (at least in the case of the latter) not because of any artistic risk-taking, but out of a slavish adherence to the bland Hollywood ‘product’-by-committee that Green himself despises. When discussing the creative leaps made by the filmmakers of the late 60s and 70s that he so admires, and their subsequent dissolution by Hollywood, he is noticeably dismayed. “We’d betrayed everything we’d learned and started making everything that was an action figure and a franchise, and everything had a commercial polish,” he says. “And so, when you go to the movies now, you’re buying a product. You’re getting on the assembly line and you’re taking a ride with the toys.”

Perhaps he feels a bit burned and is just too genial to admit it, because Green’s last two films, the charming, contemplative and quirky Prince Avalanche (2013) and now Joe, mark a return to his filmmaking roots and a return to form (although he has yet to re-attain the heights of his debut). Green denies being an auteur, deriding the entire concept.

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“I like weirdos. I like outcasts. I like places around the corner and down the street that you have to kind of like, hold your breath when you enter” – David Gordon Green

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“Nic [Cage] actually, he looked at me and said, ‘You’re a character-actor director. You like to disappear into your work,’” he recounts proudly. But his characteristic early thematic and stylistic preoccupations are all over the film: the outside (nature) invading the inside (both figuratively and literally), a heightened sense of naturalism nearing the sublime, animalistic masculinity, love as an emotional brutality, a diffuse episodic narrative leading to a decisive moment, children and animals (the latter, and sometimes the former, as both companions and meat).

Above all, Green desires to find the humane in the horrible, baring a seed of hope nestled in diseased, rotten fruit. That’s personified in Joe by Wade, the vicious drunk and Joe’s chief antagonist, played by Gary Poulter, a homeless man discovered in Austin who sadly passed away a few months after filming. After seeing Poulter teaching people to breakdance on set, he decided to integrate it into the film. “I was like… let’s have the villain have a side of humanity,” he explains. “Let’s challenge our perception of this guy and like him for a second.” Similarly, Green gave non-scripted direction for Poulter to place a tender kiss on the forehead of a fellow drifter he’s just robbed and murdered. His penchant for ad-libbing makes sense given his affection for human foibles and oddball connections.

Green’s next film will be another antihero drama, the Al Pacino-starring Manglehorn, but he’s also got more comedy in the works, including a television collaboration with his own personal career hero, Steven Soderbergh, called Red Oaks. Whatever he does, Green will most likely continue to make a career out of keeping it weird, like any true iconoclast. “Sometimes you just say it out loud and you put your foot in your mouth, and sometimes you say it out loud and get in trouble,” he muses. “And sometimes you say it out loud and people say you’re a genius. You never know, man.” It seems for Green, the not knowing – just being in the moment – is the whole point. “There are no rules. There really aren’t,” he declares. Spoken like a true nice-guy antihero.