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Tulsa native Tim Blake Nelson returns home for the premiere of his Oklahoma-set film “Leaves of Grass.”
Tim Blake Nelson is one of Tulsa’s favorite, and most successful, native sons. The actor/writer/director now lives in New York and has achieved success with such projects as “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (actor), “The Grey Zone” (playwright) and his newest product, “Leaves of Grass” (writer, director and actor).
“Leaves of Grass,” which is set in Oklahoma and stars Edward Norton as twin brothers, premieres at Circle Cinema April 16. Nelson will be present to introduce the film and participate in a question-and-answer session after the screening.
Nelson will make a few other public appearances while he is in Tulsa.
On April 15, he will be honored with the Greenwood Cultural Center’s Legacy Award, which honors Tulsans who have made a positive impact on their community and the world. Fellow Tulsa native Alfre Woodard, who appeared with Nelson in the film “American Violet,” is the honorary chair of the event and will present the award to Nelson.
On April 18, Nelson will interview playwright Tony Kushner as part of Congregation B’nai Emunah’s “Talking Heads” lecture series. Kushner wrote the “Angels in America” play and television miniseries.
Nelson recently conducted a phone interview with TulsaPeople to discuss the Legacy Award honor, “Leaves of Grass” and his plans for his visit to Tulsa.
What was your reaction when you found out about the Legacy Award honor?
I was certainly taken aback in a very good way. You know my mother (Ruth Nelson) is heavily involved with that area of Tulsa, and so I was especially proud to be honored by an organization that I know is very important to her.
When you’re here for that award, it’s going to be presented by Alfre Woodard, another Tulsan we’re very proud of. Are you excited to be paired up with her again for that event?
Yeah. I think the world of Alfre. From the moment I met her, I felt a visceral connection, both as a Tulsan but also our approach to acting and storytelling. I’ve always been an admirer of Alfre’s and I found her as an acting partner to be as generous and available and as smart as any I’ve encountered, and for that to be embodied in a fellow Tulsan is to me fantastic.
You will also be attending the “Leaves of Grass” premiere in Tulsa. Is it more intimidating to be presenting a movie about Oklahoma in Oklahoma compared to another location?
I wouldn’t say intimidating, actually, and maybe I should feel intimidated. On the contrary, I feel very excited about it. The movie is a comedy. It’s not purporting to be necessarily an irrefutable depiction of what Oklahoma is like. It’s a consortium based on truths and it’s got essential truths in it rather than actual truths. And the approach, again, is meant to be humorous, so I’m probably more confident about the Tulsa audience than any other audience that would see the movie with the possible exception of the Austin, Texas, audience, which for similar reasons and then a separate set of reasons also felt very connected to the film.
Are there any Tulsa references in the film that audiences can look forward to seeing?
Too many to mention. In large measure, the movie is about going home. So there’s a lot of Oklahoma in it.
When developing and writing this film, was Oklahoma always the setting you had in mind?
Yes, it was. The main character follows a trajectory similar to my own in that he leaves Oklahoma to go to school in the East and in his case he can’t escape his ties to Oklahoma no matter how hard he tries. In my own case, I was never interested in severing those ties. The movie is therefore not strictly autobiographical.
During the preparation of the film and working with Edward Norton, did you have many opportunities to share your Oklahoma background with him, and did that define how he created this character?
I was a help as a resource, but Edward is also an extraordinarily capable actor … he didn’t need a lot of schooling once he’d gone to Oklahoma, which he did, and spent about a week there on his own prowling around Broken Bow and Idabel, which is where most of the film takes place. So Edward did a great foundation of research on his own, and then I guess I was able to nuance that, but the performance is very much Edward’s, and as a director I spent a lot of my own energy just making sure I didn’t say too much because he really took to it like hand-in-glove.
Do you feel like this film overrides some stereotypes people have of Oklahoma and changes the image you might typically see in a movie about this part of the country?
I certainly hope it does. The main characters in the film, all of them from Oklahoma, are very smart. And in fact, the most intelligent character is the one who is the twin brother who stayed in Oklahoma. And probably the wisest character in the film is one who actually returned to Oklahoma — that’s Keri Russell’s character. And what I hope I’ve done, what I hope we’ve done, is to depict the idiosyncratic nature of life in Oklahoma in ways that are nuanced enough and specific enough to be a lot more interesting than hick stereotypes.
Is that something that you have encountered in your experiences in Hollywood — that people do have that stereotype of Oklahomans?
I think that by and large the coastal perception, which encompasses the northeast but also California, the coastal perceptions about the middle of the country in general are, of course, misleading, which is how we’ve heard the rubric “flyover state.” And I think that most of the country does consider people from Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Nebraska to be generally provincial and uninformed. And the truth you learn when you move to Los Angeles or New York or many other coastal cities is that everybody there is just as provincial and uninformed. It just looks a little different. I think probably we’re just uninformed about each other.
This is the first movie that you’ve directed and acted in. Describe that experience.
At times I regretted it. It was just too much to handle. I adore Edward Norton and will work with him whenever I can again. He’s demanding, though. And I had him in two roles. And Edward deserves to be demanding … as an actor he comes at you with so much. He’s so smart and he’s so generous in his approach to what he does. You really need to be there for him. And sometimes when I was acting, I felt that I was falling short. But then on the other hand, because I had Edward, who is a friend and with whom I’d acted before, I was able to turn to him in scenes when I was acting and check in and get his take on what I was doing, which was a big help. But the Bolger character is somebody I’ve always wanted to play, to be able to push out into the limits of that feral, southeastern Oklahoma, hog-farmer reality.
Your wife and sons appear in the movie as well?
I have three boys, and Lisa, my wife, is from San Antonio, Texas, and we met in acting school when we were 22 and 23. That’s 23 years ago; we’re both 46. And I always try to put Lisa in the films because she’s a wonderful actor. She’s in all of them, actually. She’s in “Eye of God,” “O,” “Grey Zone” and “Leaves of Grass.” And in “Grey Zone” and “Leaves of Grass,” I’ve given her larger parts. And then I have these three boys, and I had these parts of kids, these loud-mouthed kids, and this mother trying to contain them, and I just thought, again, even though it’s not autobiographical — I don’t consider my kids loud-mouths — it would be really funny to throw them all in there together and allow for what would happen. But it’s also quite selfish. I don’t like being away from my family. And in my line of work, it’s often the case that I am, and this was a way of having us all together and also not only allow them to visit me at work — and here I’m talking particularly about the two boys — but give them really a sense of what it is I do, what the demands are and also maybe how it feels to work on a film.
Are any of your sons looking toward acting as a potential career?
No, not at this stage. The oldest boy is the only one with whom there’s any congelation of an idea of what he might want to do with his life, and he’s much more interested in music. But it’s possible that one or two or all of them would end up working in movies, and that would be fine, as long as they’re aware that success is extremely unlikely and it takes a long time and then in a moment everything can change.
If you look at my own career, I was kicking around and being kicked around for 10 years before the Coens asked me to do “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and then as a director my first movie, although I’m incredibly proud of it, didn’t make any money. My second one made a nice amount of money, but the third one then lost money, “The Grey Zone.” I’m proud of all of them. And “Leaves of Grass,” I don’t think it’s going to end up being No. 1 at the box office opening weekend. You’ve gotta do it because you can’t live without it. There are much, much, much better ways to make a living … and I’m considered a success story and the amount of failure I’ve encountered has far outweighed the amount of success.
Looking at everything you’ve done, from acting to writing to playwriting to directing, do you have a favorite of those, or does each one have its own benefits and aspects you enjoy?
I’m probably proudest of writing and directing because it’s what’s most challenging and just to have written and directed three movies and to have directed four movies has caused me to grow to how I perceived the world and approached the world in ways that I can’t imagine any other pursuit would have ... I’m not claiming that writing and directing movies is the height of any pursuit; I’m just talking about my own makeup and what I can do and how I see the world. Writing and directing movies acts more of who I am and what I want to be than any other pursuit I can imagine.
On April 18, you will be interviewing Tony Kushner at Congregation B’nai Emunah. What are you most looking forward to asking him?
How the bema (the stage in the synagogue) on which I’ll be interviewing him … the one on which I was bar mitzvah-ed, compares to the one where he was bar mitzvah-ed. That’s a joke, actually. … I know Tony, so I’ve asked him a lot of the burning questions. I’m interested in getting him to talk about how — because it’s at our synagogue in front of the rabbi who married my wife and me, a group of families that I know well, the congregation where I grew up and was bar mitzvah-ed — I want to ask him what it means to be Jewish in America as one of our leading playwrights and how that identity informs what he writes.
While you’re here in Tulsa, what else are you going to be doing?
Hang out with my mom and her husband, Tom. … She and I can just get in the car and kind of roam around, and she’ll have some newspaper ad she’s read in which you can go out to west Tulsa and buy a stock pot for $15, and she’ll want to go see what that’s about. And then sometimes she’ll have Housing Authority functions and I’ll go with her to one of those, and I’ve got to get my license renewed. I keep an Oklahoma license. I’m very proud of this — an Oklahoma license with my New York address. People do not like it.
Are there any future projects that you’d like to talk about?
The only thing I know I’m doing is a movie about this National Guardswoman who is shipped off to Iraq and comes back and tries to put the pieces of her life back together as a mother and a wife, and she has a great deal of difficulty doing that. That’s an indie film by this filmmaker named Liza Johnson. That’s probably what’s next.
