E-mail a friendLuke Wilson
airdate May 18, 2007
Luke Wilson has appeared in a wide variety of movies, from indie features to blockbusters like Charlie's Angels and Legally Blond. He landed his first star turn in the film Alex and Emma and has TV credits which include guest roles on The X-Files and That 70s Show. The native Texan excelled at track and field, but gave up sports when he discovered his love of acting while attending Occidental College. Wilson makes his feature film writing and directing debuts with The Wendell Baker Story.
Luke Wilson
Tavis: Luke Wilson has starred in a number of notable and popular films including "Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore," "Old School" and "The Family Stone." You can currently catch him opposite Kate Beckinsale in the thriller, "Vacancy," and more on that in a moment.
Up next, though, a film that he not only stars in, but also wrote and co-directed called "The Wendell Baker Story." The film opens this weekend in New York and Los Angeles with more cities coming in early June. Here now a scene from "The Wendell Baker Story."
[Film Clip]
Tavis: As one who was here during the heyday of Fernando at Chavez Ravine and the Dodgers, that was a great line. "Not a great advocate for physical conditioning" (laughter).
Luke Wilson: Yeah, I was always struck by those pictures of him on the mound where you think, "God, he must be a better athlete than the best athletes if he can be in that kind of shape and be operating at that level."
Tavis: And yet, there was Fernando mania everywhere.
Wilson: Right, yeah, he was incredible.
Tavis: I'm glad to have you on the program.
Wilson: Thanks very much for having me, Tavis.
Tavis: I want to talk about this movie in a variety of ways, but let me start by asking you to tell what the story is since you co-wrote this thing.
Wilson: Yeah. It's a story about kind of a schemer and a dreamer, Wendell, that I play. His business is selling fake ID cards to migrant workers coming up from Mexico. He sees himself as kind of doing a service both to them and to our country, that he's just kind of helping everybody move forward.
Then he gets arrested for that and sent to prison and he loses his girlfriend, played by Eva Mendez. When he gets out, he's trying to go the straight and narrow. He's interested in the hotel business, so he goes to work at a retirement hotel where my brother, Owen, plays the evil head nurse.
Seymour Cassel and Harry Dean Stanton are a couple of classic character actors. They're residents there along with Kris Kristofferson. He ends up trying to help them kind of get out from under Owen's thumb and they're trying to help him win his girl back. It's a real simple story (laughter). That's what I like about it.
Tavis: (Laughter) Speaking of simple stories - first of all, I didn't know there was another Wilson brother. There's a third one.
Wilson: Right, Andrew.
Tavis: Andrew, on this project.
Wilson: He and I co-directed it, yeah.
Tavis: Co-directed the project, and is there like anybody in your family, literally including your dog, who did not have some credit on this project?
Wilson: Yeah, I know. There was a crew guy down in Austin and he's like, "So when does Zeppo show up?" But no, it's just one of those things where the directors I've liked over the years and just from reading about those guys in the 1970s. I'm working with kind of the same production designers, cinematographers and producers. I just like the idea of working with people you know. Yeah, my mother, Laura, is a really good photographer who's had a few books. She worked with Avedon in 1970s and 1980s.
Tavis: So she did set photography?
Wilson: She did the still photography. And my uncle Joe, we called him the Minister of Special Operations, he just kind of did a bunch of different stuff. Then my godfather played a prison guard. He's kind of a cool looking guy. Then my dog, Brother, played the character of Junior, Wendell Baker's dog. Yeah, it sounds kind of weird, but it just kind of happened actually (laughter).
Tavis: It doesn't sound weird at all. I mean, if you can't hire your family on a project, who can you hire? On a serious note, that must be a good family, though, I mean, to have people around you, to your earlier point, who you like and you're comfortable with, but who also who are a part of your - these are blood relatives here.
Wilson: Yeah, it does help to make you comfortable. Anytime you get on a movie, I mean, it takes a little while to get to know people. Invariably, I get left with the feeling at the end of the movie like gosh, I've had so much fun working with these people and now I kind of know how they work. I wish we could go back and do the first week over or the first ten days.
Yeah, just working with Owen and Andrew, we just kind of had the same senses of humor. It's not like that cliché where we're like twins where we finish each other's sentences, but we definitely get along well and I think we communicate pretty well to where we could save time.
Tavis: Do you have any way of knowing how creativity decided to reside in your family? Oftentimes, you'll find in a family where one person is creative and everybody else goes a different direction. Then, of course, you have the Wilson family or the Wayans family where everybody in the family is creative. How did that happen for your family? Do you know, where everybody has a creative expression?
Wilson: Well, my dad ran Channel 13, the public television station in Dallas. So he was kind of always around interesting people and they had this show, "Newsroom," That's where Jim Lehrer got started. They always kind of had interesting friends around, artists in Dallas, where Dallas could be kind of a staid community, but there was this kind of small group of people that were kind of doing creative things. My mother was a photographer and I just think they kind of encouraged it.
It's the kind of thing where sometimes as you get older in a place like Dallas or communities like that, you can kind of be encouraged to like, okay, those days are over and then just go find a real job. You know, we didn't have a television growing up. Even though my dad worked at the public television station, after a while they just got rid of the television because we'd started watching too much of it while they were gone.
They'd do the kind of thing where they'd get home after going out to dinner and have to feel the television to see how hot it was. So they got rid of it on us and that kind of encouraged us to read and things like that. Yeah, it was just one of those things. Like you were saying about the Wayans, those guys just seem very tight and I just think you get kind of encouraged to do more creative things maybe just with humor too, just kind of being always in the mix.
Tavis: Let me go back to that comment you made about the television because it occurs to me, as you well know, there's a great debate in this country about whether television is leading to the damning of America or whether or not, as some people believe, that because of the variety of channels now, there's a lot on television that you can learn from, History channel, PBS hopefully, you know, etc., etc.
What's your sense as an adult now of what it did for you when your parents took the television out? Do you think that was a good thing on balance as you look back now?
Wilson: I definitely think it was a good thing. I mean, yeah, there are great things on television now, but when you're a kid, I just think you can get locked in to it. Even in terms like videogames, we'd go out to go to arcades which I now look at as like the golden age. Yeah, we were out and, you know, being around other kids. Now kids are just at home in front of the television.
You can't beat reading or just kind of being around other people as opposed to being in front of the television, but I think there is obviously a time and a place for it where you can learn. On the flip side, when I'd get around a television, you know, I'd go to a friend's house, I'd say, "You guys play outside. I'm going to settle in here and enjoy this for a while. I haven't seen one of these in a week."
So, yeah, I think there's definitely a time and a place and there is so much with other channels, like you were saying, the Discovery channel. I think it can be unbelievable and you can just learn so much. It probably ties back into like the internet which can be a great thing, but it can also be the kind of thing where some people just get lost in it.
Tavis: How did you, in that creative family then, figure out that this is the space as an actor-writer-director that you wanted to carve out for yourself?
Wilson: For me, it's something I just kind of fell into through Owen. Growing up, I never knew exactly what I wanted to do. I was really interested in the newspaper business. You know, the Metro section was always my favorite part of the paper, and I was interested in photography and movies. That's kind of what I read about and what I learned about on my own.
Then it was through Owen and his partner, Wes Anderson, really being driven to be in the movies that I just kind of followed them into that. So that's kind of how it happened for me. Then in terms of the writing, it's just something where, whether I was acting or not, I always had a lot of free time and I wasn't maybe getting the parts that I wanted to. Then the parts that I was doing, not that I didn't like them, but I might not have felt necessarily that connected to them. They wouldn't have been necessarily the kind of thing that I would have been blown away to watch.
Tavis: I got about a minute here to go. I haven't seen "Vacancy" yet, but I've seen the trailers for it and it looks a little eerie (laughter).
Wilson: It is very eerie. It was the kind of thing where I don't know what I was thinking when I read it, but it was about a week into the movie and I thought, "What am I doing here?" I even said to one of the crew guys who'd been on old school with me, "We don't do this. We do comedies."
But it was actually really fun and it was a challenge for me and I'm glad I did it. It turned out real well and it was good to work with Nimród Antal, the director, and Kate Beckinsale. Yeah, I think it's good to push yourself sometimes.
Tavis: Well, Luke Wilson is pushing himself in a variety of ways. The new project forthcoming, "The Wendell Baker Story," starting in New York and Los Angeles and other cities to come. And then, of course, "Vacancy," that eerie thing you want to check out. Nice to have you here.
Wilson: Tavis, thanks very much.
Tavis: Pleasure to meet you.
Wilson: Thank you.
Tavis: My pleasure.
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