I FINALLY finished this. It took FOREVER. If you want to copy this somewhere, please give me credit.
Luke Wilson on Letterman’s Show – May 5, 2005
David’s introduction: Our next guest is a talented gentleman who wrote, directed and stars in an upcoming film entitled “The Wendell Baker Story”. Here’s Luke Wilson. Luke!
David: Welcome back to the show.
Luke: Great to be here.
David: Tell me a little bit about this movie. I really enjoyed the film, and, uh, it was a family and friends production, wasn’t it, really?
Luke: Yeah, it was.
David: You wrote it, is that right?
Luke: I wrote it and my brother, Andrew, and I, we directed it together.
David: Now, let’s run through the brothers. It’s you, it’s Owen, and Andrew.
Luke: Right.
David: Is that, are there any more?
Luke: That’s it, yeah.
David: And who is the oldest, down to the youngest?
Luke: Andrew, uh. Andrew’s the oldest and Owen’s in the middle.
David: And which is your grandmother’s favorite?
(Audience laughs.)
Luke: Uhh (he chuckles)…
David: Who is your grandmother’s favorite?
Luke: I’m not sure. It probably depends on who she’s speaking to.
David: But, the whole family…. I mean, what did your parents do? The whole family is talented – in films and theater and such, right?
Luke: Um, yeah. My mother’s a photographer and my dad, he worked for the public television station in Dallas and then had an advertising company too, yeah.
David: So you guys got together and, uh, you…this is a story that you had in mind or where did the story come from?
Luke: Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s just a story that I started – you know, I have a lot of time on my hands.
David: Is that right?
Luke: Well, um. I mean, even if you are working on a movie, I have plenty of time on my hands, so I just decided…..
David: Because the process is very slow.
Luke: Right, right. And I thought that I might as well try and write something that I’d have fun working on, and uh…
David: Now you’ve co-collaborated on other films previously, haven’t you?
Luke: I hadn’t written anything before, but Owen had written a few movies.
David: That’s right. Sorry, that’s what I was thinking. He had written…..
Luke: He wrote Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums . He wrote those with Wes Anderson.
David: Wes Anderson. That’s right. OK. Now is this your first, is this the first film that you’ve written?
Luke: Yes. It is.
David: And, uh, the idea came to you as what? This is something you’ve thought about all your life, or….
Luke: Um….No. I was just, you know…. I liked the idea of writing a character that I’d have fun playing – that was maybe, you know, a little different from me, as a person. And, uh, you know, just something that I’d have fun … just kind of - working on.
David: Right.
Luke: You know, something that would kind of keep my interest.
David: Now, from the beginning, as you were writing it, did you think you would also direct it, this project?
Luke: No….. No, I didn’t. I mean, uh, I never really wanted to direct. It never really - it wasn’t something that really interested me. But, uh, just kind of working on it, I, uh, you know, I met with a couple of directors after I’d finished the script. And…. sometimes I’d get a little bummed out, you know. And I’d hear their ideas about what they wanted to do with the…
David: Not, not necessarily what you had in mind?
Luke: Right. And I just thought, well, maybe I can, you know, do it on my own. And that’s when I thought that my brother, Andrew and I could direct it together. And that’s what we ended up doing.
David: And how was that: acting in the film and directing the piece with your brother, that you had written? What is.. It seems like an awful lot of responsibility there.
Luke: Yeah. It was actually, uh – it was pretty fun. It wasn’t that, it wasn’t that difficult to do. We had it worked out pretty well to where we just kinda split up the, uh, split up the work.
David: Mm hmm.
Luke: Yeah.
David: And you worked with, uh, some terrific actors.
Luke: Yeah, there were some great…
David: Kris Kristofferson.
Luke: Kris Kristofferson.
David: Harry Dean Stanton.
Luke: Harry Dean Stanton, Seymour Cassel, and Eva Mendes. And then my brother Owen’s in it, and Jacob Vargas. A lot of really good, fun people.
David: How did you get along as a director or a co-actor, with the, uh, older actors, like Harry Dean Stanton?
Luke: Uh…
David: How old is Harry Dean now?
Luke: Harry Dean’s 78.
David: 78.
Luke: And we got along great. We’ve been friends before the movie, but, you know. You get to a certain place in your life and you can’t really picture yourself yelling at a 78-year-old man.
David: You really shouldn’t do that.
Luke: You shouldn’t do it, yet, yet…
David: No, no.
Luke: there I was – Harry Dean and I yelling at each other.
David: Really? What provoked this?
Luke: My, uh…Harry Dean, uh…. Well, there was this one scene where, uh, he was supposed to give me his wife’s wedding ring for me to give the girl that I was in love with in the movie, and, uh. You know, Harry Dean’s been in, you know, 150 movies and been in the business 50 years – but he can get a little cantankerous. And, uh, he started saying to me, (imitating Harry Dean) ‘I’m not just going to flick my dead wife’s wedding ring in the air, man.’ And I said, ‘Harry Dean, you’re not flicking it in the air, you know, you’re giving it to me. It’s kind of a, it’s a nice moment.’ And, uh, we just kind of went back and forth and I just finally said, ‘Look Harry Dean, we don’t have a lot of time here. Are you going to do it or not?’ And he said, (imitating Harry Dean) ‘I, I don’t know, man.’ (audience laughs) And so, at that point, I thought, I’m gonna try and actually scare him –into doing it. So I had these script pages in my hand which I thought I was going to rip in half only I had a little too many pages, so I couldn’t quite get it, in half, so I just threw it on the ground and then kicked the chair as I stormed out of the room. And as I’m going down the hallway, I hear him say, (imitating Harry Dean) ‘I’d said I’d do it.’ Which he’d never said, of course, and then, uh. So, uh. You know, I. Later that – he kind of avoided me for a couple of hours and then he kind of sauntered up to me after lunch and said that, uh. Also, my mother was working on the film as the still photographer…
David: Oh, that’s great!
Luke: just kind of taking publicity pictures and, uh, Harry Dean walked up and said, uh, (imitating Harry Dean) ‘You know, uh, I spoke to your mother. I told her that you swore at me this morning…. (audience laughs) And, um, she’d like to speak to you.’
David: Harry Dean ratted you out!
Luke: Yeah, and sure enough, I get a talking to by my mother, you know, later that day: (imitating his mother) ‘You’ve got to be more kind to Harry Dean.’ And he, and also, those guys, uh, like Harry Dean, uh, he would claim that I didn’t, that I wasn’t flexible, that I didn’t like him to change the words, which wasn’t true, but he’d go up to Andrew and say, you know, referring to me, (imitating Harry Dean) ‘Shakespeare here won’t let me say “a” instead of “the”!’ And, uh, and Andrew said, ‘Harry Dean, you know, maybe you should just, you know, do it the way it’s written, and you know, we don’t have a lot of time.” And Harry Dean would say (imitating Harry Dean), ‘You’re both like a couple of damn dobermans!’ (audience laughs) And, uh, so like, we’d have one kind of rough day of going back and forth about the script and I’m, I was sitting in the hotel bar, just kind of relaxing and having a beer, alone, and Harry Dean walks in and he’s sitting, he sits, at the other end of the bar and just kind of starts looking at me. And I just kind of looked back at him and he orders a drink, and then says, ‘Comma!’ to me. (audience laughs)
David: Comma! (laughs)
Luke: You know. So. These. I uh, I don’t even know what he meant. (audience laughs) I guess it’s just, it’s just the little things.
David: Yeah, I guess so! Ah, do, do you have any stories of you and your other brothers, um, going about your lives and then suddenly, something happens and it’s, it’s a melee. A fistfight. Craziness breaks out. Is it that kind of existence?
Luke: Yeah, you know, we don’t, uh, we don’t really fight physically that much anymore and, and Andrew and I have always really gotten along, although, on the movie we did have one, kinda, blowout, where we were kind of having a discussion and, I, maybe, said some stuff that I shouldn’t have said – so did he! And I kinda stormed off and then we started texting each other. And Andrew was saying that he was gonna knock me out. And so I texted him back and I said, ‘Yeah, you wanna knock me out? Come on over. Room 403.’ That was my hotel room number. ‘Come on over, we’ll see who gets knocked out.’ Send. And then, you know how sometimes it takes a while to realize you’ve made a mistake – I realized immediately that I’d made a terrible, terrible – he’s, he’s bigger than me, he’s stronger than me – and, I’m pretty sure he could take me in a fight. The only reason I don’t know that is cuz I’ve never fought him – that’s cuz I’m scared of him. So I, I then had – all the while I’m thinking this – and I’m thinking, I’m wasting precious time cuz that maniac is on his way over here, (audience laughs) and I now have to get out of the hotel so I have to take the service elevator down – you know – down to the lobby. And as I’m getting off the hotel, this bellboy says, ‘Oh, hi, Mr. Wilson! Mr. Wilson is looking for you!’ And I said, ‘Shh!’ And then I have to kind of - back out of the room.