If anyone had a particularly surreal Venice in 2023, it was Caleb Landry Jones.
Not only was the actor on the Lido for barely 24 hours — for the world premiere of Luc Besson’s “DogMan” in which he played a cross-dressing vigilante-thief with a pack of canines at his command — but the 34-year-old had effectively been yanked from a muddy film set on the top of a mountain in Scotland early one morning, flown to Italy, put in a shirt, ferried from press conference to red carpet, flown back to Scotland the next day and driven to the top of a mountain to shoot a crucial scene.
“I was in Venice, but all I was thinking about was this really important scene I had to do,” he says. “And I kept falling asleep in the screening and trying to wake up and Luc would be like, ‘Man, it’s ok, go to sleep,’”
While in Venice, Landry Jones also created an air of intrigue and mystery by speaking throughout in a Scottish accent. During the “DogMan” press conference, Besson said his star was “in character,” and while he claims he never used to consider himself a method actor, having spoken to others he’s since come to appreciate he probably is one.
“I don’t do everything my character does, but I do a lot of things that are going to trick me into thinking like it and enough to fake it,” he tells Variety, pointing to an interview with Nicolas Cage talking about “Ghost Rider” in which the actor said he’d surrounded himself in ancient trinkets to make him feel more like the character (he says he particularly enjoyed the fact Cage admitted he “didn’t know whether it worked or not”).
In a nice round circle, the film Landry Jones had been shooting up a muddy Scottish mountain with a Scottish accent is now bringing him back to Venice a year on. “Harvest,” the English-language debut of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, is bowing in competition and sees the Texan in another lead role, this time as a townsman-turned-farmer in a “tragicomic take on a Western,” according to the description, in which “over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears.” It’s based on Jim Grace’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel, considered an allegory for our times about the perils of the modern world.
For Landry Jones, who won the Palme d’Or for his portrayal of an Australian mass shooter in Justin Kurzel’s “Nitram” and has become renowned — and sought after — for playing figures on the fringes of society, “Harvest” represented “something probably missing from cinema right now, a way of making movies and the kinds of characters we’re seeing.”
It was also a movie he claims had been deemed “impossible” and one that fought against his director throughout the filmmaking process.
“Athina had everything pushed against her from every fucking angle, including from me as an actor, I really gave her a hell of a time,” he says. “But I wasn’t the only one. It was coming from nature. It was coming from the set. It was coming from some of the crew. It was coming from the way people were telling her a how movie needed to be made and couldn’t be made. And it came from a stunt coordinator who was off his tits and left in a fury waving his fists.”
He adds: “She was fought at every level and still made the film and it nearly killed her — and when I say that I think it did nearly kill her.”
Given the trials of its production and the fact films such as “Harvest” are just “so fucking difficult” to get off the ground, Landry Jones — who in his non-acting time is a keen musician, releasing his debut studio album of psychedelic rock in 2020 — says he’s incredibly proud that it has been recognized with a competition slot and to for him to been part of Tsingara’s vision.
“Because her vision is very rare right now,” he says. “It’s very few and far between that people are built like this, their brains and hearts are built like this, and have become the kind of artists that they have become.”
Another director with distinct vision very much in Landry Jones’s creative orbit (although perhaps markedly different from Tsingara) is Besson, the two having recently wrapped their second film together.
“Dracula: A Love Tale” — which Besson was pitching to his actor while making “DogMan” and marks his most ambitious film since “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” — is the French filmmaker’s more romantic take on Bram Stoker’s classic gothic tale, with Landry Jones in the famed lead role and a film he says has “some really wild ideas” in it.
“But I think it’ll also be a very touching story,” he says. “It’s all about love being ripped away from you and that staying in your mind for 400 hundred year and it becoming something else. But it’s very much [Besson] and filled with the things that make him laugh and excited.”
Like Tsangari, Besson is someone he says he’s in awe of, largely for manner in which he gets his ideas from page to actual production in the time others would still spend talking about them. “I’ve never worked with anyone who is so on top of his movie, he’s just relentless, completely relentless, from day one to the last day,” he says. “I’ve worked with incredible directors, but I’ve never seen this tenacity before.”
Landry Jones may have become a muse to Besson and a go-to for filmmakers wanting to further expand his growing library of outsiders, misfits and ne’er do wells, including Tsangari and Kurzel, but also Brandon Cronenberg (he played a salesman of celebrity pathogens in “Antiviral”), Jordan Peele (Alison Williams’ racist brother in “Get Out”) and David Lynch (a drug-addled miscreant doomed to failure in his “Twin Peaks” revival). But he has dabbled in more mainstream studio fare, most notably 2011’s “X-Men: First Class” as the mutant Banshee. More than a decade on, however, and he’s not sure that’s the sort of cinematic world he wants to return to — not that he’s really been asked.
“Every now and again, you’ll get an audition or something, but then you read the title and they give you a fourth of a page and I’m just like, ‘I dunno,’” he says. “I remember at 19 coming to LA and that’s all you’d get most of the time. But then I remember an audition for ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and looking at a the book, then getting to read a script and going, ‘wow, this is what I expected, I can really make something of this, I can put my best foot forward.’ You’ve got a character that’s undefined, they just tell how they’re dressed and that they’re angry.”
He recalls an audition for Star Wars (although he won’t reveal which one), and having to say “something about a gamma something ray,” and thinking to himself, “Is this what I’ve been working towards?”
But while he’s not being approached about joining any big-budget franchises, Landry Jones says he believes there “is the possibility to do great work on a big scale.” In a perhaps unexpected move given his library of films, he cites the “Despicable Me” movies as “great examples” of that.
“So I think there is the space to do good work in this kind of place. I haven’t seen the ‘Joker’ movie, but I know people really like it, although it just makes me want to watch ‘King of Comedy,’” he says. “I know there’s a way to do it. I think if the corporations can stay off backs, because it’s hard enough to make movies as it is. Even on a movie like ‘Harvest,’ where we were completely isolated, we were still going to have problems. It’s very difficult to make a movie and I think the more money you get, the harder it is, because the more people are involved.”
For all his complaints about the higher echelons of Hollywood, Landry admits that everyone — including himself — is “so hard on each other” when it comes to talking about movies in general. “Because it’s impossible to make films and make a good film, period,” he says, adding that he subscribes to the notion that every film is a miracle.
“I remember talking to one director who makes a lot of romantic comedies, and he looked at me like I was taking the piss, and I was like, ‘No man, I’m serious, ‘The Notebook’ is a fucking miracle. You did something! You’ve got military guys sobbing!”
