It’s no surprise really. When you watch Riley as Sal Paradise (the alter ego of Jack Kerouac) in Walter Salles’ long-awaited big-screen adaptation of On the Road, Kerouac’s iconic 1957 novel, you will need no convincing that Riley knows how to suck the guts out of a filterless fag. Maybe it’s one of the skills he learned at Beatnik Bootcamp, the month-long preparatory period Salles organised for his principal cast, including Kristen Stewart (Marylou), Garrett Hedlund (Dean Moriarty, based on Neal Cassady) and Tom Sturridge (Carlo Marx, based on Allen Ginsberg), to learn the wild ways of the Beat Generation.
“Neal Cassady’s son came to speak to us,” says Riley, “as did biographers and experts on the period. We watched documentaries about jazz musicians of the time and films that Walter wanted to inform the way he was going to shoot, early Cassavetes. There were a lot of French-Canadian dialect sessions for me and typewriting practice.” He pauses, before adding with a sarcastic transatlantic twang, “It was a full programme.”
We went all the way across America. We went to Canada. We went to Argentina at one point because Walter wanted real snow.” He laughs. “He remembered a road in Patagonia that he thought looked American when he was making The Motorcycle Diaries so we all flew there. It seemed to never end, somehow.”
Unsurprisingly, Salles has assembled a fantastic cast for the project from Viggo Mortensen playing a morphine-muddled Old Bull Lee (based on Burroughs) with Amy Adams as his Benzedrine-befuddled wife, Jane, to Kirsten Dunst as Camille, one of Dean’s partners and the mother of his children. Of course, much attention has been focused on Kristen Stewart, not least because until promoting On the Road, she’s hardly been seen. For his part, Riley is full of praise for Stewart’s performance.
“Kristen was hired before Twilight I think but it took that long for this film to come to fruition. Before that she’d worked with Jodie Foster, Sean Penn had chosen her, a lot of people with a lot of knowledge of the business had hired her for the actress she is.
With Garrett [Hedlund] as well, the system at the studio tends to mean only certain types of film are made, which then pigeonholes actors as eye-candy. But it’s not true. They [Stewart and Hedlund] don’t have anything to prove to their colleagues but they have something to prove to elements of the media or the industry that pigeonholes them. I think Kristen is great in the film.”
I wonder what it feels like for Riley having his two highest profile roles as parts based on real people – Curtis and Kerouac?
“I learned to stop looking on the internet pretty early on.” He laughs grimly. “It’s a lucky thing to have these parts that are so well developed but you have to have a bit of a f**k-you attitude with this biz anyway. Acting is a strange mix – you have to be sensitive enough that you can cry in front of a roomful of people and thick-skinned enough that when you read that you’re sh*te you don’t take it to heart too much. Being the frontman of a vilified rock band from Leeds was good preparation because people used to shout that you were sh*t while you were singing.” He laughs. More at source
Via @KstewAngel
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