You describe "Changing Lanes" as an "actor's movie". What do you mean by that?
I think it's an actor's movie mostly because the story essentially is character-driven. It's about what people do and how they treat one another, rather than having some larger over-reaching plot that the actors serve by picking things up in one place and putting them down in another so the story can move on. There's not a lot of histrionics. There's nothing really happening except the way these people are relating to each other. There's a cycle. I do something to hurt Sam Jackson's character at the beginning and then he hurts me back, and then we get into this cycle of exacting revenge on one another. And then it's about how that affects our lives, so it lives and dies on how the actors perform. There's a lot of good actors in this movie, it was wonderful.
What appealed to you about the two lead characters and the way the movie tells each one's story?
One of the things that I really like is that you have two types of protagonists. Both characters do things that are kind of reprehensible at times. And I think that the way it's done, it makes audiences shift allegiances back and forth between the two men throughout the movie - which is unusual, I think. This really is the kind of movie that I want to go out and promote just a little bit more wholeheartedly. I'm really proud of it.
You say you were challenged by this role. How did it stretch you as an actor?
I think every time you're asked as an actor to play something three-dimensional, to go a little deeper than your average fare, that in itself is a more difficult task than just serving a larger thing, just showing up and going, "I'm the hero" or "I'm the bad guy". You know what's going to happen so the audience kind of goes along with you.
When you challenge the audience's preconceived notions about what's supposed to happen in a movie, then the audience asks for more explanation of you as a character. They want to know what you're thinking, what's going on behind your eyes, so they can better understand what's happening. There's a lot of emotional stuff going on here, a lot of behaviour that belies the intentions of the characters. Roger Michell is a sophisticated director. He's very deft. He's a very sensitive director of actors, an extremely smart guy with a strong sense of what will resonate with an audience. He's everything you could hope for in a director.
