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Q&A with Daniel Craig and Justin Kuritzkes

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Queer.

Lee feels like he’s vibrating with how nervous he is. He has this energy that makes you feel like you could touch him and feel static. Was that exhausting to play?
Daniel Craig: If it was, I don’t remember. I mean, I’m trying to think of something intelligent to say and I can’t think of anything, because I’m trying to think of something that sort of says that, “yes, I was trying to achieve that,” but I can’t say what I was trying to achieve. I just… I was just trying to embody him. You know, through Burroughs’ words, Justin’s words, you’re kind of… you can feel this man just trying to communicate, trying to attract people’s attention, probably quite annoyingly, doing all of these things.

And none of that mattered. I didn’t want to judge him; he was trying to connect with the world. That was all I wanted to do. Luca asked his brilliant researcher to go and find a piece of work by Burroughs about love. And it’s the last page in his journal. And I was like, “well, that’s it. That’s it right there.” That tells me everything I need to know about the man. And all of the drug taking and the sort of, you know, that image that he set up for himself, that was the sort of the truth of it right there.

I told him I’d never seen anything like that in cinema.

How is Lee described, on the page?
Justin Kuritzkes: Well, interestingly with this film… Maybe it was just because of the work I had gotten to do with J.W. Anderson, our costume designer on Challengers, which he was also our costume designer for this. I think the first line of description is of what Lee’s wearing, and it’s this tattered white Oxford, you know, that he’s sweating through.

And he’s looking across the table, and that was the first scene I wrote, which was the first scene of the movie. And I kind of knew that… I knew that I had found the rhythm or the vibe of the movie, when I figured out that the movie was going to start with Lee looking into the camera and saying, “You’re not queer.” That involving the audience somehow in that, you know, and then we would flip around and see that he’s talking to this nervous straight kid who’s… you know, whose mother wouldn’t like it if he were queer, because he’s got the Star of David on his neck, you know. And so that was… all of that was something that sort of came before anything else and helped me get into who this character was.

Do you allow yourself to look at Burroughs himself when you’re preparing to play Lee?
DC: For sure. There’s actually very little real footage of Burroughs. Well… two things: One, Lee is an invented character of Burroughs. So it was important to remember that. I wasn’t trying to do an impression of William Burroughs. And two, the only footage I really could find of him shows him in very sort of stiff-mannered interviews that he would give, and where he would talk in this very deep voice. And I just thought that was sort of a carapace around something, especially because I’m reading Queer and, and even Junkie to a certain extent. And you know, the person underneath was who interested me, so we had to construct that. And so Lee is an invention. There are only little bits of footage of Burroughs where they’re caught sort of more privately of when he’s, let’s say… more at ease. Those felt much closer to reality, to me. Those are the bits I really clung on to.

There is sort of a performance art element to the movie, which is the tripping scene deep in the jungle. I understand it was carefully choreographed; it’s a stunning sequence. Have you ever done anything like that before?
DC: No, isn’t it obvious? No, I haven’t. I’ve wanted to. I’ve always dreamed of being a dancer. I’ve always had an admiration for dancers and people who use their bodies so beautifully. When Luca was talking about that scene, he said, “I’ve never taken ayahuasca, I don’t want to, but this is what I think it could be,” and for me that was just sort of glorious, you know, how delicious, to be able to kind of get into something like that. Drew [Starkey] and I had to discover this relationship very quickly, as you always have to do on a movie. There’s never enough time. So from day one of rehearsals, we were sort of rolling around on the floor doing interpretive dance! It’s a great icebreaker. I encourage you all to do it.

Justin, what did that scene look like on the page? Is it detailed, or just in brackets, “[cool things happen?]“
JK: Very detailed. I mean, I could have just written in brackets, “cool things happen,” and you guys would have figured out something beautiful, but You know, it’s, with something like that you want to evoke what’s going to be more than describe it. Because you’re dealing with light, and sound, and, you know, mood, and texture, and all these things that you couldn’t possibly describe.

You know, I mean, I remember when Luca showed me the first cut of the movie, and I saw what has become the ayahuasca dance sequence, and I told him I’d never seen anything like that in cinema. That’s like the first time I’ve seen something that moves like that. So I tried to write something that would give the energy of that, the mood of that. But certainly, I didn’t describe every movement – I left that up to my brilliant collaborators.

Q&A with Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Daniel Craig, and Rian Johnson

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Can you talk about writing this film and bringing these characters to life?
Rian Johnson: It all started with me loving Agatha Christie growing up. I always wanted to do a “who done it.” I thought it would be really interesting; I’m a “who done it” junkie. I watch all of them that come out. I love them all. Usually when you see them today, they’re period pieces, because they’re usually Christie adaptations. The idea of doing a “who done it” set in America in 2019, and really using that to plug into America in 2019 and to draw the characters the way Christie drew the characters from British society when she was writing, to draw that out of today and right now, seemed really interesting. Tonally, you need really good actors to ride that line of going as big as we did with this movie and still having it feel grounded to work as a movie and not tip over into parody. That’s why you hire the best actors on the planet and then it all sorts itself out.

make it feel like a roller coaster ride and not a crossword puzzle

Don, can you talk about the characters and how all of their misanthropy is tempered by some sort of internal pain?
Don Johnson: Well all of them except for my character, who does nothing happily. He’s kind of the personification of the entitled family vibe. It was fun for me to do, because I have never played a character like that before, I loved how obsequious he was and how deferential he was to Jamie Lee’s character. It was fun.

Daniel, can you talk about your character and the way he carries himself and his accent?
Daniel Craig: I was just lucky to get a script that was as richly and as well drawn out as this one. I read it and I saw it. I think it has a lot to do with Rian and I sharing a love for “who done it” films. I grew up watching the same movies as he did and watched them religiously over and over again. I kind of understood the language that Rian was using. So we looked it up and it was a gentle southern language. I inhabited the character immediately in one reading, I talked about this the other day, about as actors and how arrogant we are, we go and change this and that during our first read-through, as though we know for sure… but that did not happen when I read this script. I just read it and said to myself, “I know who this is.” I want to play it. I sort of then picked a few people, Tennesse Williams, his voice has a high pitched accent and was not very suited. Then I landed on Shelby Foote, the historian, who has this beautiful Mississippi rolling accent. He speaks slowly, but has this incredible speed of thought. He talks about things with authority and I nailed it with a great accent coach. We sat for a few hours a day for months on end. Then when we got to set, and Jenny our costume designer, whom I’ve worked with before and is great to work with, gave me the physical material and we paired the two together.

Did you have to change anything in the language so that the characters and the house functioned in the plot together?
RJ: These guys clicked into it really easily. The only thing we would adjust on set were expository scenes. I wanted to be really tuned in if the actors could not follow the through line of what was happening in any given scene. I wanted to make sure every scene was clear to everybody, because I figured if it was clear to you guys then it would be clear to the audience. That’s where ninety percent of the work on a script like this goes into is making it feel easy for the audience, making it feel like a roller coaster ride and not a crossword puzzle at the end of the day. That was the main way we did tweaks on set.

Knowing that you’re in a “Who Done It,” do you play up to that and twirl your spiritual mustache a bit?
Jamie Lee Curtis: When I first had a phone call with Rian, the only questions I had were about tone. I had done a few different types of things, I just wanted to know where he was on the scale of tone. Because it does not matter where he is. I’ll go to whatever place he wanted. He said he wanted it to be heightened reality. Very much real, but with a slight accent of heightened reality. For me as an actor, the only question is how to tell the truth. It doesn’t matter to me, I don’t care what it is. Also I’m just like Don, I’m not a fan of the genre, I don’t care about the genre, I don’t watch those movies. There are other movies that I enjoy very much, but I’m not a particular fan of this genre, but it doesn’t matter. That is the beauty of this collaborative medium. It doesn’t matter if I’m a fan or not. As an actor, it’s simply my job to tell the truth. If you’re telling the truth through Linda’s point of view, she’s in grief. She loved her father. I think she may be the only one in the family who really loved him and she lost him. That was my truth, and the rest of it was just dross as we say. It was just hilarious.