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Nostromo
read and liked
Anthony Breznican's
review of No Country for Old Men:
"Here's an unusual encounter.
I met Cormac McCarthy at the Oscars this year, and we had a very pleasant little chat. This was an important moment to me not only because he is the author of Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men and The Road...more
Here's an unusual encounter.
I met Cormac McCarthy at the Oscars this year, and we had a very pleasant little chat. This was an important moment to me not only because he is the author of Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men and The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize, but also because McCarthy is famous for his almost Salinger-like reclusive tendencies. He does not do interviews or show up on The Tonight Show. He doesn't walk red carpets, tour colleges on lecture tours, or do any of the public events that come with being one of the nation's greatest prose stylists.
He writes these remarkable, beautiful, elegiac tragedies, steeped in prose that at time becomes Biblical in its intensity. Then he stays utterly quiet about them. (With few exceptions – he did a New York Times interview in 1992 and sat down with Oprah Winfrey last June.)
I saw him at the Oscars on Sunday, just a face in the crowd gathered in the three-story lobby of the Kodak Theatre before the show, where champagne flutes were being clinked by the scores in anticipation of the big night.
Of course, the Coen brothers' adaptation of No Country For Old Men was up for many of the top prizes, and that is why McCarthy was making this rare appearance. At first, I wasn't sure it was really him, and then I lost him. A female voice over the sound system announced that there were 45 minutes before the start of the telecast. Soon after that, he vanished.
After cruising around a bit, talking with host Jon Stewart, making sure I didn't miss Nicholson's annual pass-through (last year he showed up with a shaved head) I ducked into the main hall of the theater. I am one of the few reporters with a pass that opens pretty much all doors. I spend most of the night in the wings of the stage, catching candid moments from the winners and presenters, chatting with the folks I know or have interviewed before, gathering behind the scenes color for USA Today's Oscar lead the next day.
The theater was mostly empty still. A few dozen seat-fillers were lined up along one side of the theater, getting instructions for the night, and some crew guys were checking the camera rigs near the foot of the stage.
McCarthy was sitting by himself, with his young son, John, (the inspiration, incidentally, for The Road) about four rows from the front, with no one else around. One crew member walked by and shook his hand, and the author seemed pleasant enough. On one hand I thought I should leave him be. He is famously press-averse, as I said, and I didn't see any value in trying to disturb him. My job is to do interviews, to gather anecdotes from the scene, but if someone doesn't want to talk, I try not to hassle. The New York Times, in its interview 15 years ago, described him as a "gregarious recluse" who "has lots of friends who know that he likes to be left alone."
On the other hand, when you are at these events as a reporter, you are also constantly aware of your status as an outsider. Not only that, but when you come from a little town outside of Pittsburgh and find yourself in the globally renowned pomp and circumstance of a setting such as the Academy Awards, you can't help but have a little pang of squirming desperation. It's easy to feel lonely in these crowds.
McCarthy's pleasant reaction to the crew worker who recognized him suggested he was not cringingly shy. I don't think this Pulitzer-winning author needed company from the likes of me, but he is a human being – and one I admire – so I decided to just put away the notebook and take a chance on simply saying hello.
I approached respectfully and said that I was a reporter, but not one who wanted to interview him. He smiled, stood up and shook my hand. "What's your name?" he asked, and I told him. "Bresnihan?" he asked. "Is that Irish?"
"No, it's Slovak," I told him. "Breznican," he repeated. "How is that spelled?"
Momentarily unable to remember the letter order of my own name, I looked at my credential. He said isn't it interesting how it could sound so much like the Irish name Bresnihan, and yet be from somewhere so far away? I agreed that was a funny coincidence.
"Is this your son?" I asked, leaning over to wave at the little boy. He reminded me of the little kid from There Will Be Blood – a round head with neatly combed hair and wise little eyes.
"This is John … John, this is Anthony," McCarthy said, and I shook the kid's hand. He had a big smile on his face. McCarthy asked me what paper I was writing for, and I told him, gesturing back to the stage where I would spend most of the night, describing my duties in brief.
Then I told him that I just wanted to say hello, to thank him for all the remarkable work, and wish the both of them an enjoyable evening. He said, "It should be fun. It should be trippy," and we both laughed.
He seemed pretty relaxed, and that was such a great line -- very unexpected. So I took another chance and said, "You know, I am writing about the scene here tonight, and … if you didn't mind, could I quote you? Could I get your thoughts on all this?" If he'd said no, that he'd rather not, that would have been fine. I tried not to put the pressure on. I know the guy's reputation. Showing up at Thomas Pynchon's door is not going to persuade him to pose for a snapshot, you know?
But McCarthy didn't balk. He looked around and waved one arm from the stage to the lobby. "What's there to say — I'm at the Oscars and I'm not even in the film business!" He said again that he thought it would be fun, and – knowing how stressed all the nominees have been – I said, yeah, it should.
After all the snark and cynicism of Hollywood, it was a relief to hear some pure cheerfulness for a change. I'm grateful he didn't shoo me away, and hope he doesn't regret chatting (or me describing the encounter here.)
I told him the thing that surprised me the most about the film was how similar the scenes in the movie seemed to the book, that the way I had pictured certain sequences were almost exactly as they appeared in the film – which means the Coens must have followed even the most subtle of descriptions from the novel.
McCarthy said, "Well, you can never put a whole book on the screen," but said he admired the movie they made from it.
"They got the heart of it," I told him, and he nodded, saying that he was surprised anyone wanted to make the movie at all, since the book has such an unusual ending. "I'm just glad people didn't run screaming from the theater," he said, chuckling. I said it was the best kind of ending: one that gives you something to talk about later.
With that, I decided to cut these two fellows loose. I could have stood there and talked to him from then until the end of the three-and-a-half hour show, grilling him about his stories, hearing the greater writer's thoughts on his work. That, he really would have hated. And I knew that was never going to happen anyway.
I wished them both a good evening, and waved good-bye. Part of me wondered if it had not been a missed opportunity. So few people get to encounter him, should I not have gathered some thought or nugget from him, some insight into the mind that has so eloquently pondered the violent and cruel tendencies of our species? Where are we headed? Why are we this way? What's next? Where did these tales originate in his synapses?
But that's heavy business, and interesting to me, but probably not to him. Surely he would have hated it – and has said so in the past. I decided beforehand that I wasn't going to talk to the great author, I was going to talk to a guy I respected. I only rolled the dice and asked to quote him because he ultimately did seem so friendly and happy to be there, and it seemed okay to ask. For someone whose writing explores our darkest natures, I enjoyed the opportunity to share an exchange about a happy moment. McCarthy doesn't attend events that are held in his honor, and yet here he was at the Oscars – and he was the first one standing and clapping in honor of the Coens when they won best picture.
Just meeting the man was a treat. Glen Hansard, the actor-singer from Once who won the best song trophy that night, told me that when he met Bob Dylan, he told Dylan: "This means as much to me as when you met Woody," referring to the iconic folk singer Woody Guthrie. I don't pretend to be on that level, but as a writer getting to meet McCarthy, there was nothing better for me that night, despite all the other famous folks around.
My brief, light encounter reminded me in some ways of Allen Ginsberg, describing in his poem Death News the time he and Jack Kerouac and some of the other Beats met William Carlos Williams and "inquired wise words." W.C.W. looked out his window and said, "There's a lot of bastards out there…"
My exchange was much more lighthearted, but no less surprising. I might have expected McCarthy to be grim, more stone-faced than he was, or to find him brutally uncomfortable with conversation. As it turned out, he was very warm and kind, surprisingly so … And I enjoyed meeting his little boy and seeing a father and son sharing a fun night out. McCarthy and I didn't exchange any secrets of life, but we exchanged pleasantries. In a world where cruelty is too often the top commodity, that's something, at least. I hope he felt the same.(less)
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