Chris Cooper: in film after film, he's been the guy you go home talking about—but never the one promoted by the studios. Now he's finally getting his due and having his day

Interview, August, 2003 by Spike Jonze

A chameleon. A shape-shifter. A great character actor. Call Chris Cooper what you will, but as the man who dissolves into each role and leaves nothing behind but an unforgettable performance, he's one of the movies' finest talents. Some cinephiles have lauded Cooper for years, but it took last year's Oscar-winning turn as a toothless orchid thief in Spike Jonze's Adaptation to alert the masses. Here he talks with Jonze, and though the telephone connection proves shaky, the bond between the men is anything but.

SPIKE JONZE: Hey. Chris. How are you?

CHRIS COOPER: Spike!

SJ: How's it been? Is everything good?

CC: Yeah, it's going pretty good. I'm in New York. I had to do some looping for Seabiscuit, and after that they set up a screening.

SJ: And how did it compare to what you expected?

CC: They're still tinkering with it, but it looked pretty good. So, you're in Brazil?

SJ: Yeah. We shot some Brazilian soccer players for a commercial. It was fun. So. one thing I've never talked to you about but always wanted to was how you prepare for scenes and parts. There would be times on the set [of Adaptation] where I'd see your script and it would be covered with notes--every bit of white space, the columns, the backs of opposite pages... And sometimes I remember we were all going to go out to dinner or something, and you'd say, "I have to go back to the hotel and prepare for tomorrow." I'm curious what you did when you were in the hotel. What is your process?

CC: Well, I think it's a continuation from years of stage work, before I did a film, when I was studying with different acting coaches, in particular Stella Adler. I took her class called Script Analysis [the line goes dead]

A FEW MINUTES LATER

SJ: Hey, Chris. Sorry about that. I don't know what happened.

CC: Did you hit something?

SJ: No. I just heard a beeping. Anyway, you were telling me about the Stella Adler class...

CC: Right. You jot down ideas, memories, whatever, concerning your real life that somehow parallels the character you're playing, and you incorporate that in your scene work. What was made very clear early on in my studies was that often the words, though they're important, are not the most important thing. And where I have so much fun creating a character is when I'm doing the homework--imagining, going on little head trips. I love to fill my head with whatever I can concerning the scene and the character.

SJ: So it's really going home and working on the thought processes of the character so that when you are in the scene, you know what the character would be thinking?

CC: Yeah. It ends up, hopefully, giving you a freedom, so that you're not glued to just the lines. Something that presented a problem [for me] early on was you'd study these scripts so much that you knew what the other actor was going to say next. To combat that, I fill my head with my own imaginings. And in the last 10 to 12 years or so, it's gotten to the point where I don't care how many times we rehearse the scene or how many takes we do--if I'm working well in the scene, I won't know what the actors I'm working with are going to say next.

SJ: I think that's why your performances are so multileveled. There's one thing going on physically, one going on with the dialogue, and many things going on in terms of seeing your thought process as it influences the dialogue, your face, or body language. Now, on our shoot I remember you took a lot from Susan Orlean's book [The Orchid Thief]: You'd really mine the material for details that weren't in the script. Was there a similar process on Seabiscuit?

CC: Not really. But with Seabiscuit, there was so little about the character of Tom Smith in Laura Hillenbrand's book [Seabiscuit: An American Legend]. You got these little pictures, primarily through the narration, that this man was one of the last cowboys. But because there was so little on Tom, we had to find some other materials--Marianne [Cooper's wife] happened to pick up this wonderful book at a yard sale from the turn of the [20th] century, when Tom was doing his cowboying. It's a really intricate study of cowboys at that time, and it has particulars I could draw on. But when you can't find something like that, well, I've always trusted using my imagination. Those are the two mainstays of creating a character: your imagination and what you can glean from the script and your research.

SJ: Mm-hmm. In terms of the rest of the cast, who did you have most of your scenes with?

CC: Probably Seabiscuit. [both laugh] It was kind of a draw between Jeff Bridges, who played Charlie Howard, and Tobey Maguire, who played Red Pollard. We were the three guys who came together to work on this horse and help him be the champion he could be.

SJ: Now are these three characters more or less underdogs like the horse was?

CC: Yeah. The film opens by seeing what's going on with these individuals in their younger lives, and they all had difficult lives; they went [the line goes dead again]

MOMENTS LATER

CC: Spike? I'm sorry to put you through this, man.