By the end of this year, 50 year-old Ed Harris will have acted in 51 films.
You may know some of his best-known roles - intense characters in such films as The Right Stuff, The Abyss, Glengarry Glen Ross, Apollo 13, The Rock, and The Truman Show. Now, Harris has been nominated for an Academy Award for his lead role in Pollock, a biography of artist Jackson Pollock which also marks his directorial debut.
But while you likely recognize Harris the actor, what you may not know is that he was actually a ghostly Tufts student for one semester in the early seventies
"I got accepted to Tufts, and I actually got in the mail a first semester report card with a couple of grades for two different classes, and I had never gone there. They weren't great grades but they were all right. It was really odd."
Soon after this, Harris made a conscious decision to look into acting. "Between my freshman and sophomore years at Columbia I became interested in acting as something I should check out, not as a career but just as something I should investigate." He transferred to and graduated from Oklahoma University before completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Soon, Harris landed small roles in several films and later made his mark on the stage, winning a 1983 Obie Award for his work in Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love."
As for Pollock, Harris says he first became interested in the artist about ten years ago.
"I really didn't know anything about him. My dad just gave me a biography about him and I got interested in him."
Through the years, Pollock's intense devotion to art, his conflicting personality traits, and his inability to cope well with life would continue to intrigue him. "During the years I spent [time] reading and thinking and feeling about Pollock, and I spent time painting and trying to understand emotionally what it is to be a painter - I had to trust that something had seeped into my bones that would allow me to portray Pollock honestly... This man could not stand being a human being... By the end of his life Pollack was in bad shape psychologically and physically."
It intrigued Harris that "normally people try not to be too confident, too happy, too angry, too out of control, too sad, but Pollock went to the wall on all of those."
"I've never been interested in exploiting Pollock," he said. "In fact, there were times I would say to myself, 'Why are you making a movie about this guy? Let him rest in peace.' But then I realized that was only a desire to leave myself in peace."
In scenes depicting the artist at work throughout the film, Harris vividly channels the beast that was Pollock. "Whenever there is painting in the film I am the one doing it... but when there are [completed] paintings around they are done by other painters who made incredible reproductions... I like painting, I hadn't done it previously [to learning about Pollock] but I enjoy it."
Last week, Harris received the Best Actor nomination. Pollock co-star Marcia Gay Harden, who portrayed Pollock's wife Lee Krasden, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Prior to hearing of his nomination, however, Harris was skeptical about his chances.
"I'd like to be nominated. I'm not even sure if I'll be invited. The Oscars, for me, are more annoying than anything else because I can understand with something like football or throwing discus that there are winners and losers, but with acting that's not what it's about. But, I guess, it would be great [to be nominated] to help the movie."
After spending years thinking about Pollock and making a film about the man, Harris says he's happy with the outcome.
Though his directorial debut turned out well, Harris has a few ideas about why other films he has been involved with over the years have not met with such success.
"[There are] a variety of reasons. You know how directors are out there, and they don't have final cut. And sometimes, the producers come in and mess around with it. It becomes filmmaking by committee... I think that editing is such an important part of the filmmaking process. Sometimes the film is rushed out too quickly before it's done or someone just doesn't cut it well.... Or sometimes an idea that a director or writer set out to implement just doesn't work. [Similarly] you might have someone who writes a novel who looks at it and says 'Well, this paragraph is good and this chapter is good but it just doesn't work.' It's the same with film, painting, or writing: sometimes it doesn't work out."
"The first thing I do when I get a script is see how long it is. And, usually, if it's 90 pages I think, 'This could be good' cause the writer is more likely to have known what they wanted to do. For Pollock, the script was 110 pages but only about 90 pages are in the film."
As for future directing plans, Harris says, "I may direct something ... but not for a few more years. Maybe if some idea captured my interest and starts germinating... I probably won't direct and act because that's a lot of work."
