CraveOnline: It’s so pragmatic. I look at these movies where, let’s say, people actually kill someone and say, “Oh no, our lives are ruined!” And I’m like, “Your lives are going to be a lot more ruined if you hide the body.”
Oscar Isaac: Yeah!
No one’s ever watched a movie? You’re talking about how you’ll go to jail if you do these things in A Most Violent Year. It’s outside reason.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
This isn’t petty white collar crime, this is crime-crime. You didn’t want to get involved in that. I respected that.
Yeah, so it’s almost like… in a way what I liked about it is like, it’s when pragmatism becomes principle. Or, principle in practice is pragmatism. If you can find a way that your principles are actually the strategically smartest thing to do, you’ve kind of figured it out.
I really hope you’re going through this level of thought process in Star Wars.
[Laughs.]
I hope it’s that rich. I hope it’s that complicated.
Definitely! That’s the thing. Between “action” and “cut,” the job is the same no matter what it is. Now obviously sometimes you need to fill it out as much as possible, but again, it’s about how much you can fill the tank up so that when you do press the gas, it goes.
“With [‘A Most Violent Year’] we actually talked a lot about the three-movie arc.”
You’re doing a bunch of sequels. Is there any chance we’ll get Outside Llewyn Davis?
[Laughs.]
Have you ever thought about following up with what one of your characters did afterwards, like in A Most Violent Year? Or does that not concern you, and the movie is over and that’s that?
It’s funny, with this one we actually talked a lot about the three-movie arc.
Really?
Yeah, we did, because actually, weirdly enough, statistically every ten years since ’81 has been the most violent year on record [in New York City]. So in ’91 it was the crack epidemic explosion. Overall, ’81 – throughout the city – was the most violent. I think in ’91 certain areas spiked way high, and then 2001…
Certain things happened…
Certain things happened, and those were all considered… you know, 9/11, that was considered murders.
Well, it’s a crime!
Yeah, so ten, ten and ten. Crazy, right?
Have you seriously considered going back, like Before Midnight style, and ten years later revisiting it?
Well, no, we talked about all this kind of stuff. Just vaguely the arc of where it was going, because interestingly enough I read Memoirs of Hadrian, which is a great book by Marguerite Yourcenar, and it’s in the form of an epistolary. It’s letters that he’s writing to Marcus Aurelius, who’s going to be the next emperor. It’s like this lesbian in the ‘50s in Paris wrote it as the Emperor Hadrian, and it’s amazing. Amazing. The arc of that, she says it so brilliantly, is from ambition to mastery, to exaltation, to… disavowment, or the descent basically… to a reconciliation.
This movie is ambition to mastery. It’s someone having the ambition to risk everything and making it to mastering this thing, this thing that he sent out to do. From there you can see it going to the place of then becoming this exalted figure, and where that leads.
Do you envision him staying in the same business, or maybe actually going into politics someday?
I don’t know. I’ve definitely envisioned him involved with politics, not necessarily as a politician himself. There’s something a little bit introverted about him. I don’t know if he’d be great for politics.
He’s a good salesman, though. I can picture him doing that stare at a press conference.
[Laughs.]
“What are you going to do about the crime problem?!” [Six second pause.] “That’s a good question.”
[Laughs.] Yeah, but I think that thinking about [the idea that] there is a trajectory gives you a sense of reality. It feels like a real person.
