By Michael Sragow, Salon Magazine, October 28, 1999

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What made you picture Richard Farnsworth in the role?

It's a thing coming through him that I think is unique. He's kind of an amazing person. He's smart but he's innocent and he's an adult but he's childlike. He feels what he says; and as he says what he says you see exactly what he's saying.

His emotional reactions become physical, like when the guy who sells him the John Deere mower tells him he's always been a smart man until now, and he cracks up – for just a second all his dignity crumbles, humorously.

That's exactly right. You can see how things strike him a certain way. Richard could really identify with this character and this dialogue beyond what people usually say; this is one of the most perfect marriages of material and actor that I can think of.

Did you consider character actors playing older than they are?

Some actors could do that but it's riskier. There's a lot to say about an old guy playing an old guy – they're going to bring 20 or 30 years more, or 15 years more, to it. And their face is going to be their face. Richard is just perfect.

This is the first time you've worked with the director of photography, Freddie Francis, since "Dune" in 1984. Had you tried to work with him again before this?

No, we just remained friends. I always say – "Freddie's like a father to me. It's no wonder I left home!" [Laughter] Freddie is a crusty guy with a great sense of humor and he's always putting me down but loving me. He was a real big supporter of mine on "The Elephant Man." On "Eraserhead" there were like five people on the crew at the most; "The Elephant Man" was my first sort of regular feature and Freddie helped me out a lot. Anyway, after "Dune," he was in England and I was going off in different directions and working with people like Fred Elmes, who had done "Eraserhead." But when it turned out "The Straight Story" was coming along, I just felt it was perfect for Freddie to do. It was partly because he's one of the world's greatest D.P.'s, and partly because I wanted to work with him again, and partly because of his age. He's 82. He was a little bit worried about really long hours in the beginning, so he asked me if we could keep it to 10 hours. Ten hours of shooting means travel time on top of that. That's not a killer schedule – 12 hours plus travel is what it usually comes down to, and travel can be a long time, if you're out and far away from base camp. But Freddie never slowed down. We worked a lot of days longer than that, and it was the younger guys who were falling before Freddie was.

I was hoping for a camaraderie on the set with Freddie and Richard, which happened; it helps Freddie to look over and see Richard and it helps Richard to look over and see Freddie. Richard looks over and sees a 35-year-old hotshot D.P., it's different; I wanted it more like a family going down the road.

However you two did it, the film does have an astonishing look.

The camera just kind of caught what was there. Out on the road there's just really one light, and that's the sun. But you can travel the road south, or north, or east, or west. The land is flat, especially in the beginning of the film, and the roads are blocked out in mile squares, they don't go diagonally. But it's beautiful to see the way the light plays going south or north or right into the sun; you can pump a little bit of light into a face but you can't go up against the sun. There are fewer choices than if you were building a set and lighting it. You go by what is there and then you get down into subtle little things based on a feeling, and that's your shot.

The whole movie is about a certain kind of American individuality. To use a California phrase, Alvin creates his own space wherever he goes. When he hunkers down in the yard of the Riordans, the people who help him fix his mower, he brings out a chair for the man of the house and says, "Now you're a guest in your own backyard." You give us a sense of the audacity of plunking down a house in the midst of these expanses; there's that incredible shot of Alvin waiting through a storm in an abandoned barn or granary, and he's both protected from the storm and seemingly submerged in it.

I love the idea of man and nature. So I love the image of a house and a person in this huge expanse of nature with clouds roiling and this kind of stuff. It's sort of what it's all about. And just that one image is about a lot of what's going on.

Although you follow the script closely, you also seem to have responded directly to what's happening on the locations – like when the businesswoman Alvin meets on the road complains about constantly hitting deer, and looks around, and wonders, as we do, where they come from.

We picked that location for the scene, and it was a surreal spot. But the day we shot, this strange, powerful wind and weather came up, and that just added a whole other thing to it – you couldn't choose that, it just happened for us. Film can clean up a room better than a vacuum cleaner almost – you really have to have a messy room for it to look messy on film, and you really have to have some nasty weather for it to register. But that day there was just a mood, with the clouds, that added to the surreal quality of the landscape.

Your tendency to heighten the abstract saves the film from any hint of sentimentality. When we first see Rose staring at the ball rolling in front of her lawn and the young boy going after it, it's just a pattern – we have no idea that she's lost her own children. The kid doesn't look at her, yet the combination of the visual and dramatic minimalism and Sissy Spacek's haunted face tugs at you. It seems like the epitome of how you want the movie to work.

It's like what I said about the dialogue between a picture and the audience. Watching a movie we're like detectives – we only need a little bit of something and then we'll add in the rest, no problem. The portrait of Rose – it's like in music, where you're going along, and a theme comes in. But it's only the introduction; the theme is beautiful but the rest of the music goes away from it. Then the music builds, and that theme comes back, almost in the same way, but joins with something else. And now it can destroy you.

This is also the first time that you worked with Sissy Spacek – and with her husband, Jack Fisk, as your production designer – even though they're both old friends of yours.

Jack is my best friend. We met in the ninth grade in Virginia. And we've been friends ever since. We were the only two in our school, with a graduating class of 750, who went to art school. Jack met Sissy when they were doing "Badlands" in '72 or '73; he brought Sissy to the stables I was setting up, when I was starting to make "Eraserhead." I have always thought Sissy was one of the greatest actresses; but it never happened that I was working on a film where a part was right for her, until this. And I was so thankful, I just wouldn't have wanted anyone else. So it finally happened. And I never worked with Jack as a production designer; I always worked with Patty Norris. But for the first time since before "Blue Velvet," Patty Norris said it was OK for her to just do costumes. It wasn't easy for her to say that, but this was perfect for Jack, so it happened.

The way Sissy does the daughter's stop-and-go speech pattern – it never makes us laugh at her, but we do laugh, because her character almost seems to enjoy how she can focus and finish her thought no matter who interrupts.

Playing someone who is a little outside the norm and making it real is always a delicate thing. Where that becomes secondary to a thing inside the person. And Sissy just dances along the high wire and makes it look simple.

With Jack and Sissy along, it must have been even more like "a family going down the road."

All different ages traveling together, and it was beautiful. It was like the film. It took the same amount of time, we traveled the same roads, so there was another whole thing going on outside the film, behind the camera.

One story that seems to get into all your movies is "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

Well, Alvin changed – he was another person and he changed.

And he compares the traumatic breakup with his brother to Cain and Abel – who are not that far, in a way, from "Jekyll and Hyde."

And he meets up with twins – but they're pretty much the same.

The other story that always recurs for you is "The Wizard of Oz" – and though I know this is supposed to be a different sort of movie, I thought it entered in here too. When Alvin advises the teenage runaway to go back to her family, it's just like the scene where the fake swami (Frank Morgan) persuades Dorothy (Judy Garland) to go home.

Yes! Yeah! It really is. But I never thought about that.

And the whole movie is about a guy who offers, throughout the movie, the real wisdom that the Wizard does only at the end.

Good deal! I never thought of that. I'm sure that Mary and John didn't think about that. But maybe there's something about "The Wizard of Oz" that's in every film – it's that kind of a story.

You do run the risk of seeming as if you're dispensing a lot of little morals.

The way I see it, it's not so much little morals, as it is about teachers and students. And that, too, is a circle, because a student has to be receptive or the teacher can't teach. And the teacher has to be intuitive and give the thing at the right moment for the student to jump. And that causes a question in the student and an answer in the teacher and suddenly there's this thing happening – and that occurs in everybody's life.

And the film isn't trying to make Alvin's way everybody's way – it's about doing something on your own terms and coming into full maturity and awareness at age 73.

Exactly. The way the trip is taken is extremely important – it's a good thing that Alvin did, to do it a certain way, to let someone know how much it means.

Some lines resonate on their own – like Alvin saying, "I'm not dead yet." But others are really tricky and two-edged, like when he tells the two young cyclists he's talking to, Steve and Rat, that the worst part of being old is "remembering when you're young."

Precisely. It's almost as if Rat goes out of his body and looks at himself for the first time. Talking with Alvin was not meaning much to him until then; to the other kid, Steve, it was meaning more. You can't know what it's like to be old until you're old, but you can get a feeling from it. So there's some of that going on there. And then, for Alvin: You can look back on when you were young as a good thing, and now it's different, or you can remember the things you did when you were young that you're paying for, or that you will.

And that pays off when Alvin and that old friend of the Riordans, Verlyn, trade horror stories – or exchange secrets – from the Second World War.

There's a bunch of things going on there, too. Because Verlyn tells his story first, and it's deeply disturbing. So for Alvin to tell his story is almost like a gift to Verlyn. Now, when Verlyn goes home, he won't feel bad and think, Jeez, I told Alvin this terrible thing and he just sat there. Instead, Alvin shares with him and puts himself in the same horrible, vulnerable memory spot. And, in a way, that's beautiful.

We've all been inundated with heroic clichés about the World War II generation. But here there's no inflation; the emphasis is on the emotional and psychological cost of the war.

It's just monumental that they lived with death and fear for so long, and no one else will ever know, really. But, again, you can get a feel from them. And Alvin and Verlyn can share an understanding more than they can with anybody else.

This is so much the opposite of a generation-gap movie. It's great, it's real, that Verlyn is the one who immediately gets what Alvin's going through and says, "You've come a long way." But the Riordans are terrific people in this wonderful middle period of their lives. Every generation is respected, and every age of life.

Each stage of life gives you something different. And it gets more and more internal as it goes along. The older you get, you kind of go into yourself; you don't start great big new projects, you don't do all the things you did at earlier stages. There's a lot of reflecting on the past, you kick into a different mode, and certain things that seemed real important don't seem that way anymore.

My wife and I have an ongoing debate about the relative safety of the city and the country. I always say I'm more afraid of the country, because if there's a serial killer out there he'll probably come to your house. But the countryside is peaceful in this film. Is that your Midwest fantasy?

It's not a fantasy – and that's the strangest part of it. Once I went with Mary to Wisconsin; she's from Madison. And I go to Madison and I start meeting her family and friends, and people in the store, and I think nobody can be this nice; someone is having some sort of fun, some sort of joke. Then I realize, no, it's true. And I think it has something to do with land and farms and the fact that there's fewer people and they get to rely on one another. And this reliance has to do with survival – they don't have any problems helping somebody, because they know that next day they could need help. Alvin did this trip and he didn't have anything bad happen to him, people did take him in and were rooting for him. You say that this is an American movie, but I'm convinced that there are people in every land who have the stuff to do that. It's certainly an American theme, but there are characters with this strength in them everyplace.