Interview With Actor Joel Thomas Hynes
Getting the Dirt with Novelist and Actor Joel Thomas Hynes
Q : What was the inspiration for the novel?
The story had been percolating in my head for years, although it was a long time before it took on the look of a novel. If I were to go over all my old journals from the back end of high school and my early twenties I know I could find lesser developed versions of certain aspects of the book as it stands today. As a theme, both in writing and in terms of personal mythology, I’ve always been most drawn to self-destruction and the more ambiguous side of redemption. By the time I was twenty-three, which was around the age I was when I started working on the novel, I had pretty much destroyed myself physically and socially and spiritually and all I had left was this desire to rise above my own battered self-image. So I wrote my first book as a sort of means of recreating and reconstructing a life I was equally proud of and ashamed for having lived.
Q: How would you describe Keith and his journey in the film?
Keith is a very unsettled, frustrated individual who feels hemmed in by the constraints of his small town existence and wants to escape so bad that he continuously reaches out for the wrong remedy – drugs, booze, sex, hooliganism. He thinks he’s a tough guy and tries hard to make other people think it too. He’s also pretty smart and hungry for knowledge, very well read and interested in words. But he never seems to put enough stock in his literary interests, never seems to realize that it can be a good aspect of his life, or that it’s potentially a real path he can go down. He’s more ashamed of it than anything else. And coming from a small dead-end town as he does, there’s not much support or resources for a guy with those sorts of interests. So the one thing he’s good at is something he instinctively hides.
Then he meets Natasha, likely his first big love, and he suddenly finds himself comfortable sharing that side of himself. They fall in love and high-tail it out of town together and Keith thinks he’s leaving all his troubles behind. But they both soon realize that there is no such thing as a geographical cure. Yes it can help you gain a fresh perspective, but ultimately we are always going to wake up in the same skin we were born in. Keith’s journey in the film is one of learning to accept responsibility for who he really is and who he is to become. Of course he has a lot of drunken, maniacal fun getting to the end of the line, no doubt about that.
Q: What was it like playing the lead, having written the novel?
Christ. Someone came up to me during the filming and said:
– Well it mustn’t be too hard to play yourself in a movie?
I told him to go fuck himself. Because the truth is it was oftentimes confusing and it got me back in touch with a lot of old devils that I’d thought were long since buried. And the fact of the matter is that I had some extremely emotional scenes in the film that I really had to work hard with.
Just because I might have broken down crying over a situation in real life years ago doesn’t mean it’s an easy place to go back to when the camera is rolling. And it was difficult not to be self-conscious performing a certain line of dialogue or type of behaviour, when it’s common knowledge that the original text is supposed to be really autobiographical. But… you know the book came out when I was twenty-seven and was based on my adolescence right up to probably the age of twenty-one.
So here I was at thirty, the father of a little boy with a decent career and a pretty stable life, playing “myself”? Well that’s just horseshit. I was so far removed from Keith’s psyche and self-image that if not for the experience I’ve gathered up on other movie sets and TV shows and theatre gigs, I seriously doubt I would have been able to play this role. Because in the end that’s just what it was, a role I was playing.
But I will say this: in the scene where Keith is lying in the alley in Halifax passed out drunk in the rain, those leather pants he has on are the same leather pants that Hynes (that’s me, referring to myself in the third person) wore all those years ago when he was passed out drunk in Halifax in the pissing down rain.
So doing the movie got me thinking a lot about personal mythology and how we never can know for sure where we’re gonna turn up or how things can work themselves out. I know back then I always felt like I was in a really dark movie about my own life that no one else found funny. But if someone had leant down and whispered in my ear while I was lying there in the gutter that one day this very scenario would be filmed in a movie based on a book that I would write about my life… well I guess I would have just went for a drink somewhere and waited around for the offers to start rolling in.