A nice, long interview showed up at Hollywood & Fine today. Snippet below, read the rest at the link.
Where Burt tends to blurt whatever’s in his head, Dillahunt’s character in “Any Day Now” tends to come out with perfect citations of legal precedent, to be the voice of reason to Cumming’s voice of passion.
“It’s fun to work with dialogue like that,” Dillahunt says. “It’s sort of how it was on ‘Deadwood,’ when I was playing Francis Wolcott and would have these incredible speeches. Somehow, because they’re well-written, they flow off the tongue. It’s fun to express yourself in different ways. You hardly ever get to do things like that.”
Dillahunt, who grew up in Washington State, went to NYU’s graduate school to get an MFA. But he claims he got a new lesson in acting from working with Isaac Leyva, who plays the teen at the center of the film’s conflict.“He was probably the best actor on the set, to our shame,” Dillahunt says. “The thing that was so valuable to me was that he was so filled with joy at the whole process. It was his dream to be in a movie. And his emotions are right there, so close to the surface. It shamed me. I’d get caught up in minutiae of the business or be dissatisfied with the way things were going. You get cantankerous and start to micromanage.
“And then you get reminded by this boy why you started doing this in the first place. It helped the dynamic of the movie. There was a real danger of falling into sentimentality or stereotypes, which would make the movie easy to dismiss. But Isaac – and Travis, the director – helped us tread the fine line between sentimentality and keeping the emotions truthful.”