If anyone has a particularly surreal image of Venice in 2023, it's Caleb Landry Jones.
The actor was not only on the Lido for 24 hours — to attend the premiere of Luc Besson's film DogMan, in which he plays a cross-dressing thief with a pack of dogs at his command — but the 34-year-old was actually plucked from a muddy set on a Scottish mountaintop early one morning, flown to Italy, dressed in a shirt, taken from the press conference to the red carpet, then flown back to Scotland the next day and taken to the mountaintop to film a crucial scene.
“I was in Venice, but all I could think about was this really important scene I had to do,” he says. “And I kept falling asleep during the show and trying to wake up and Luke was like, ‘Man, it’s okay, go to sleep.’”
While in Venice, Landry Jones also created an air of mystery and intrigue by speaking throughout with a Scottish accent. During the press conference for “DogMan,” Besson said that his star was “in character,” and while he claims he never considered himself a method actor, after talking to others, he has since realized that he might have been.
“I don't do everything my character does, but I do a lot of things that would trick me into thinking like her and not fake it,” he says. diverseReferring to an interview with Nicolas Cage about the movie “Ghost Rider,” the actor said he surrounded himself with old trinkets to make him feel like the character (he says he particularly enjoyed the fact that Cage admitted he “didn't know if it worked or not”).
In a nice roundabout way, the film that Landry Jones was shooting in a muddy Scottish mountain with a Scottish accent returns to Venice after a year. “Harvest,” the first English-language film from Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, is in the running and sees the Texan in another lead role, this time as a city man turned farmer in “a tragicomic version of a Western,” according to the description, in which “over the course of seven hallucinatory days, a nameless village disappears, at an unspecified time and place.” The film is based on Jim Grace’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, an allegory for our times about the dangers of the modern world.
For Landry Jones, who won the Palme d'Or for his portrayal of an Australian mass shooter in Justin Kurzel's “Nitram” and has become famous – and in demand – for his portrayals of characters on the fringes of society, “Harvest” represents “something that's probably missing from cinema right now, a way of making films and the kinds of characters we see.”
This film was also one of those films that he claimed was “impossible” and that resisted its director throughout the filmmaking process.
“Athena was under a lot of pressure from every side, including from me as an actor, and it really bothered her,” he says. “But I wasn’t the only one. It was natural. It was from the set. It was from some of the crew. It was from the way people told her how the film could be made and how it couldn’t be made. And it was from the stunt coordinator who was furious and left in a rage waving his fists.”
“She was fought on every level and yet the movie was made and it almost killed her – and when I say that I think it almost killed her,” he adds.
Given the difficulties of making the film and the fact that films like “Harvest” are “extremely difficult” to produce, Landry Jones — who is an avid musician in his spare time, having released his debut psychedelic rock album in 2020 — says he is extremely proud to have been recognized with a spot in the competition and to have been part of Tsingara’s vision.
“Because her eyesight is so rare these days,” he says. “It’s so rare to find people with that kind of build, their minds and their hearts, and to become the kind of artists they are now.”
Another director with a distinct vision very close to the creative orbit of Andre Jones (though perhaps markedly different from Tsingara) is Besson, with the two recently completing their second film together.
“Dracula: A Love Story” — which Besson pitched to the actor while he was filming “Dogman” and represents his most ambitious film since “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” — is the French filmmaker’s most romanticized version of Bram Stoker’s classic Gothic tale, with Landry Jones in the iconic lead role and in a film he says has “some really wild ideas.”
“But I think it will also be a very moving story,” he says. “It’s about a love that’s been taken from you and it stays in your mind for 400 years and it turns into something else. But it’s a very moving story.” [Besson] “And full of things to make him laugh and get excited.”
Like Tsangari, Besson says he admires him, largely because of the way he takes his ideas from the page to the actual production while others spend time talking about them. “I’ve never worked with someone who is so masterful of his film,” he says. “He’s unyielding, absolutely unyielding, from day one to day one. I’ve worked with great directors, but I’ve never seen such tenacity.”
Landry Jones may have become a muse to Besson and a muse to filmmakers looking to expand his growing library of outsiders, outcasts and misfits, including Tsangari and Kurzel, but also Brandon Cronenberg (he played a celebrity pathogen salesman in “Antiviral”), Jordan Peele (Allison Williams’ racist brother in “Get Out”) and David Lynch (the drug-addicted, doomed rogue in “Twin Peaks”). But he’s had more mainstream studio experiences, most notably in 2011’s “X-Men: First Class” as the mutant Banshee. And yet, more than a decade later, he’s still not sure that’s the kind of cinematic universe he wants to return to — not that he’s really been asked.
“Every once in a while, you get an audition or something, but then you read the title and they give you a quarter of a page and I’m just like, ‘I don’t know,’” she says. “I remember when I was 19 and I came to L.A. and that’s all I got for the most part. But then I remember auditioning for We Need to Talk About Kevin and looking at the book, and then reading the script and being like, ‘Wow, this is what I expected, I could really do something with this, I could do my best. You have a character who’s not defined, she’s just saying how she dresses and she’s angry.’”
He recalls auditioning for a Star Wars movie (though he won't reveal which one), and having to say “something about a gamma ray,” and thinking to himself, “Is this what I was working for?”
But while he hasn't been offered any big-budget franchises, Landry Jones says he believes there's “potential to do great work on a large scale.” In a perhaps unexpected move given his film library, he cites the “Despicable Me” films as “great examples” of that.
“So I think there’s room to do good work in that kind of place. I haven’t seen ‘Joker,’ but I know people really like it, even though it makes me want to watch ‘The King of Comedy,’” he says. “I know there’s a way to do it. I think if companies could get off the back foot, because making movies like this is hard enough. Even on a movie like ‘Harvest,’ where we were completely isolated, we still had problems. It’s very hard to make a movie and I think the more money you get, the harder it is, because there are more people involved.”
For all his complaints about the upper echelons of Hollywood, Landry admits that everyone—including himself—“is very hard on each other” when it comes to talking about movies in general. “Because it’s impossible to make good movies, no more, no less,” he says, adding that he believes in the idea that every movie is a miracle.
“I remember talking to a director who makes a lot of romantic comedies, and he looked at me like I was making fun of him, and I said, ‘No man, I’m serious, The Notebook is a real miracle. You did something! You made military men cry!’”
