An interview with John Hillcoat where he talks a bit about how Tom Hardy works with a character. Quite interesting!
Were you surprised by Tom’s performance?
Everyone was. The other actors, the producers, myself. Everyone on set. It wasn’t so much buzz as it was ‘Oh my god, what the hell is he doing?’ He has a very unconventional approach to how he breaks down a character and his process is very different. His approach is to keep the script at a distance and kind of circle around it, in unexpected ways. Just discussing Forrest he brought up something which was really fantastic. He referenced the grandma in Tweety Bird, the old matriarch of the family, which Forrest is. So he kind of honed in on unexpected qualities which made that character. And the inarticulate qualites, which we were hinting at but he took it a whole new level. In a great way.
