Chad Taylor

Woody Harrelson at the BFI

Before Woody Harrelson came on stage for his live interview at the BFI London Film Festival an official reminded the audience not to take their own photos. I respectfully complied while everyone around me snapped pictures on their smartphones and cameras for the next 90 minutes. Some of them even used flash.

It's always interesting to see movie and TV actors in the flesh. Harrelson looks and sounds exactly has he does on screen: crooked smile, Texas drawl (he was raised in Texas and Ohio). It's interesting that such a distinctive actor has had such a varied filmography. He called his career sketchy but it could be compared to Michael Caine's: the same presence tuned to different intensities.

The interview presentation leaned to the political. Harrelson was queried about his roles in The People vs Larry Flynt and Natural Born Killers in terms of their political and social "impact" and the actor responded in kind, saying he had "learned things" from every role and that "we don't have free speech in my country." But the tilt of the questions implied a right and a wrong answer, resulting in some awkward silences. It's only acting, after all, and off someone else's script.

Harrelson majored in theater arts and English at college before moving to New York and landing no parts for two years. His breakthrough role in Cheers came a few months after he landed an agent whom he credited more than once for his success.

He talked about Oliver Stone's "gentle quality" and mimicked Milos Forman's fatalistic gruffness. He cited Marlon Brando's quote that acting is not an art and said now that his kids are at school, "school always wins out" against career decisions. He dropped a good-natured hint (not picked up) about drinking with Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock and is still friends with Larry Flynt. When Harrelson and his wife "were having some trouble" in the past Flynt "helped out" by appealing the actor's wife on his behalf. We don't know what the trouble was or what the publisher of Hustler said to her that helped. Cue another awkward silence.

The best question of the night came from the floor, about working on The Thin Red Line. Harrelson said Terence Malick was an interesting man and "kind of a savant" before raising his voice to a childlike whine and imitating the director standing with his head tilted, pointing at a field of grass saying, I kinda like the way the light falls; let's film that.

Harrelson was at the London Film Festival to promote his new film Rampart, which is based on a James Ellroy story. The clip looked good. Harrelson said the dramatisation differs from the source not least of all because director Oren Moverman has been "making a lot of changes in post," his emphasis implying changes beyond traditional editing. In the clip that was shown Harrelson's crooked smile appeared to tilt the other way and I wondered if the footage had been flipped: the opposite of the man we saw on stage.