On September 11 last year, Bill Paxton was on a ship in the North Atlantic, directly above the wreck of the Titanic. Paxton, a likable Hollywood journeyman known for his true-blue American roles in Twister, Apollo 13 and Titanic, was helping director James Cameron to make an Imax documentary that mimicked Titanic’s opening sequence, in which salvagers search the famous wreck in mini-submarines.
“When we first got word, Jim had just gone down with the two subs,” Paxton says. “It was the last dive, because Hurricane Erin was coming.” Paxton waited hours for Cameron’s return to tell him the news of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. “I said, ‘Jim, the world changed from the time you went down till you came back.’ It was strange. We felt a little bit like survivors out there.”
What Paxton didn’t realise was that the attacks would also affect another movie: his directorial debut, a psychological thriller called Frailty. The film, which will be screened at the Edinburgh film festival tomorrow, was delayed several times before finally getting an American release.
Paxton also stars in Frailty, cast against type as a blue-collar single father bent on religious vengeance. The film begins with Paxton, as a widower, telling his two young sons that an angel has come to him in the night with an order to slay demons. The demons appear to be innocent citizens of the small Texas town where he lives, and the boys are at first horrified and reluctant to heed his command to help him in what becomes a series of axe murders.
Referring to September 11, Paxton says: “I know I can’t skirt this. After that event, everything gets put through that lens. I always saw this as a good, creepy, gothic story and a family tragedy. But let’s face it, it has a lot to do with religious fanaticism. It’s a film about a guy who thinks he has been chosen to hand out God’s justice.”
Uncertain how Americans would react to the dark tale, Paxton took encouragement from Fred Durst, the lead singer of nu metal band Limp Bizkit, who attended a screening. “He told me his audiences would love it,” Paxton says.
Taller and fitter in person than he often appears on screen, Paxton, 47, has the natural ebullience of a good salesman, possibly inherited from his father, whose only connection to the entertainment industry was selling lumber to Hollywood studios for a Texan company. Paxton moved to Los Angeles at 18 and took low-level movie industry jobs until he became a set dresser in the mid-1970s, crisscrossing the city in a van to find the right sort of clocks and lamps for movies such as Days of Heaven, Carrie and Eat My Dust. He tried to go to film school but was rejected by both of his choices, a setback that still rankles 25 years later. “I was so hurt by that, really hurt,” he says.
He eventually became an actor not out of any burning desire to perform, he says, but because “I thought as an actor I’d have more to say about the way a film turned out.”
Although chosen by Cameron for supporting roles in big-budget productions such as Aliens, True Lies and Titanic, and much praised for his subtler work as a leading man in Carl Franklin’s One False Move and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, Paxton continues to think of himself as a film-maker as much as an actor. And he couldn’t help but notice the success enjoyed by his friend Billy Bob Thornton, who became famous for writing and directing Sling Blade in 1996. “I watched how Billy, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck - all these guys - were suddenly lauded because they made films. I don’t think you get respect as an actor in this town, unless you’re Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks. But you get respect as a film-maker.”
With that in mind, Paxton produced the low-budget 1997 movie Traveller, starring him, Mark Wahlberg and Julianna Margulies as scamming Irish Gypsies. He later hooked up with David Kirschner, an animation producer. Kirschner had discovered Frailty, an original script by a young Texan, Brent Hanley, that combined Stephen King horror with Old Testament justice.
Not visually gruesome by prevailing standards, Frailty, another low-budget film, becomes psychologically tortuous when Paxton’s character forces his disobedient older son, played by 13-year-old Matthew O’Leary, to dig a dungeon in the back yard, where he will be imprisoned.
“Yeah, it’s tough stuff,” Paxton says over lunch in a Hollywood restaurant. “I was intrigued by the script and thought, ‘There’s a way to do this.’ And I loved that it was set in Texas. I knew the regional landscape of the film. It was original and disturbing. Studios loved the writing, but they all got a little nervous about the subject matter, and the idea of the kid and how that was going to be handled.” He hired the veteran cinematographer Bill Butler, who had shot Jaws and The Conversation, to give the film “an old studio look” - understated rather than lurid.
Matthew McConaughey, who worked with Paxton on the second world war submarine film U-571, plays the older version of one of the sons, telling the story in flashback to an FBI agent, played by Powers Boothe. “I was coming off The Wedding Planner and was looking for something dark and edgy,” McConaughey says. “I thought it had the chance to be a great mystery.”
Paxton insists he did not want to play a religious fanatic in order to counter his image as a good guy. “Anyone who says that is just taking Twister, Apollo, Titanic and saying, ‘He’s the wholesome guy.’ But they’re not looking at Near Dark, True Lies. I get kind of tired of reading that. I’ve played a lot of different people. You see, I don’t believe in heroes and villains ultimately. I believe people are capable of great villainy and great heroism - the same person.”
He admits that he expected the critical success of A Simple Plan, the small-town tragedy in which he played Thornton’s older brother, to have paid a bigger dividend. “I thought that one might be the role that put it all together for me, that connected the dots,” he says. Somehow it did not, any more than the blockbuster parts. “I’ve been in a lot of big movies, but they never seem to...” They never seem to matter, he seems about to say.
Although he did not start out to be an actor, Paxton admits to an actor’s regrets. “My biggest disappointment is not getting to do the romantic roles I always dreamed of,” he says. But I’ve had a pretty good career. And you know what? We’re grist for the mill out here, and if I quit doing this, there’s 10 guys ready to take my place.”
· Frailty screens at the UGC, Edinburgh (0131-623 8030) tonight at 8pm, and is released on September 6. © 2002 New York Times.