 |
| Wyatt Russell and Dennis Quaid in Broke |
A modern Western of sorts about a rodeo rider forced to reassess his life after learning that it’s dangerous for him to keep on riding, Carlyle Eubank’s slow-paced, beautifully photographed film centres on a performance by Wyatt Russell, the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, who is best known as an actor for his work in TV series The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. He’s supported by Dennis Quaid as his father, and both actors ease into the world of horses and ranching as if they had been born to it – Quaid is, in fact, distantly related to legendary rodeo star Gene Autry. I met the pair of them a few weeks ago for a chat about the film, Broke, and began by asking Wyatt how he approached a role which, as it explores concussion, headaches and mental illness, requires him to get into several very different states of mind.
“I had some previous experience with feeling that way as I was hockey player in a different life,” he says, referring to his time in goal for Chicago Steel and others. “For this, I went through all those different machinations of what it was like to go through concussions, try and get back, try and play with them, which is not a smart thing to do, and kind of put it out of your mind. Like, you don't have this problem. This doesn't happen to you, and you're going to beat it, and it just doesn't happen that way. So drawing on what I had already felt and what I'd already done, it was a little therapeutic for me.
“I really, really, really connected with the story and the character over those specific things, because it's just about someone who couldn't let go, and I couldn't let go of hockey. I'd probably still be in some weird country like Latvia or Estonia playing hockey right now if I could, if I wasn’t injured in a game, which would have been a horrible life decision. And I'm glad that I did get injured. And so I think that it was fun, it was interesting to connect with that side of myself again, 20 years later.”
We see the overbearing fathers a lot in films, but while Wyatt’s character sees his father that way, the older man never comes across as bullying, and he never comes across as having that kind of nasty, brittle masculinity that a lot of those characters do.
“He was real, you know?” says Dennis. “He didn't want his son to go through what he’d gone through. And he knew there was no way to stop him. So he was conflicted in that sense. The whole script was so authentic as to who these people are. That was the reason I did it.”
He knew Wyatt as a child, he says, so it was easy for the two of them to find that chemistry.
“Both Dennis and my dad are pilots,” Wyatt explains. “There are a lot of similarities.”
“We've got a Western thing going on,” Dennis says with a smile. “We’re also both the same kind of dad, I think.”
“Yeah, it's very similar,” Wyatt agrees. “You know, there's just a chemistry feel with some people sometimes – you can't quite explain why you get along with somebody or why you connect with somebody. I think that you can just tell. Sometimes you're like, you know, ‘Dennis would be a great father for me on camera.’ That was obvious from the very beginning, and sometimes you just can't put your finger on it. Like, I could say we went on a fishing and hunting trip for seven weeks where we got to know each other, but I met him the day before shooting, and we just fell into it.”
“I think you were 11-years-old, running around the house,” says Dennis, remembering when they last met before that.
“Yeah. A long time ago. But, you know.” He shrugs.
They’re both physically at ease in their roles, in very different ways.
“Like I said before, how Carlyle wrote description and directed, it was just really apparent from the very first page how authentic this was,” says Dennis. “I really relish that because so many times they miss the details. They don't really know the people a lot of times, in a lot of the writing or stories that come out of there, and this felt really real. So we wanted to get it right. I mean, just shoeing a horse or whatever, that whole process really made the scene in a way.”
“Like all of the roping stuff from roping the bull,” says Wyatt. “And that’s me doing all the horsemanship as much as I could do. I had experience around horses. Obviously, when the horse bucks out of the chute, that's different. But I got put on a bucking machine that they train on, and we were able to...” He hesitates. “I mean, that was no easy task. It sounds like easy, and then all of a sudden you get on that thing and you're like ‘Oh, my God, this is gnarly.’”
“The machine's probably harder than the horse,” Dennis observes.
“Oh my God, it was so gnarly. I had the worst bruises I've ever had in all of my life playing sports. They lock you into the... it was horrible. It was. And I was doing it over and over and over and over again where I'm like, ‘You know, you guys do this once for hopefully eight seconds. I'm doing it, like, for 30 seconds at a time.’ I came back, and it was gnarly. So there was just a lot of that stuff. Doing it authentically, what people forget is you're doing it authentically for 12 hours a day, something that you might do once for eight seconds, so that it's really difficult.”
“If it doesn't work, you're not doing it right,” says Dennis.
“Honestly, it's true,” Wyatt agrees. “But that authenticity, and even the authenticity that bleeds into the story, which is not a beautiful life, ranching, farming, and mostly rodeo riding, for 99% of the people. We kind of aggrandise it, make it seem like this very romantic thing. Well, it's not that great most of the time.”
“It's hard,” Dennis says.
“It's fulfilling,” Wyatt allows. “And there's a world that relies on this culture that people might not appreciate all the time. And so that was part of what I thought was great about it, was giving this aspect of this culture a real look, not like just making, like, ‘Here you go: here's some horses and some people who are making out.’”
Broke opens on digital and on demand in North America on Tuesday 6 May.
