The Story of O
He got kicked out of an exclusive prep school in Dallas. He didn’t even graduate from UT. His first movie was a commercial disaster. (And that nose!) So why is everyone in Hollywood trying to be buddy-buddy with Owen Wilson?
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At a cafe in front of Fred Segal’s high-toned shopping center in Santa Monica, Owen thought out loud about how he’s become everybody’s buddy. “Maybe it’s from growing up with my dad, who can be real funny but who can also be kind of moody, up and down. So I became good at getting along with tricky personalities. And growing up in Texas, it was important that we be polite. When I meet these guys like Eddie Murphy, Bruce Willis, and Jackie Chan, I’m always super respectful. Then I get to know them, and then I can start to kid around with them.” It’s an exercise he enjoys. Working with Murphy on I Spy fulfilled a childhood dream—if not box-office hopes—and he’s become close friends offscreen with Chan and Stiller.
What’s harder for Owen to understand is the way critics describe him, favoring words like “oddball,” “slacker,” and “quirky.” “I guess ‘quirky’ is a euphemism for something most people, like, aren’t going to like,” said Owen, between bites from a bowl of turkey chili. But when I asked him about a New York Times review that called him a “stoner’s version of James Garner,” his answer didn’t quite counter the charge. “That’s great, because I loved James Garner in The Rockford Files,” he said, without a trace of insincerity. “I loved the way they’d open each show with Rockford’s answering machine going off and him getting some cruddy message like, ‘Hey, Jim, just calling to let you know that that race down in Baja that we thought was this weekend—it turns out it’s next weekend. Hope you haven’t already left.’ I love that.”
In truth, Owen is well aware of how he’s perceived, and it informs everything he does on the screen. When he signed on to play a cocky top-gun pilot in Behind Enemy Lines, he pushed to have his character moved to the back seat, figuring his persona would play better as a put-upon navigator. It did. When he didn’t feel right portraying an accomplished intelligence agent walking Murphy through the world of espionage in I Spy, Owen created a second, rival spy in the script who would outshine his own and get all the best 007 gadgets. And instead of portraying a hard-guy gunfighter in the Shanghai movies, he converted the character into an inept, insecure, wannabe train robber who was really just in it for the girls. “We’ve worked these characters to be ones that I’m comfortable playing, that aren’t such badasses,” he said. “I’m more the kid in the back of the class making wisecracks.”
These are natural roles for Owen, all the more so because he tends to invent his own lines. Here is where his generation really hears itself, connecting with the pop-culture references Owen uses to fill out his dialogue. A favorite line from Shanghai Noon, “I may not know karate, but I know ka-razy. And I will use it” is from a James Brown song. His taunt to rival male model Stiller in Zoolander, “Who are you trying to get crazy with, ese? Don’t you know I’m loco?” was originally a point of high drama in 1992’s Chicano gangster flick American Me. And the line that may be his most quoted, “They’ll never catch me because I’m f—ing innocent,” from Bottle Rocket, is lifted from a Guns n’ Roses song. “Scorsese wrote in Esquire that that was one of his favorite lines, and it’s from ‘Out ta Get Me,’” he said. “Obviously it’s used very differently in the film from what Axl Rose did with it.”
Owen comes up with all of this, and though this kind of riffing may not be heavy lifting, if you’re in on the joke, it’s part of that otherness that makes up his appeal. Maybe that’s what the critics mean by “quirky.” Brooks, who gave the world could-be savants Georgette Baxter from Mary Tyler Moore and Jim Ignatowski from Taxi, favors more-flattering terms, although he ends up sounding like Owen himself when he talks about it. “It’s a very delicate thing to maintain the right distance between you and the world,” he said, “but Owen’s got a great perch. You could throw him in a Hemingway novel, you could put him in the twenties, you could put him in the forties; he would be a star in any era. There’s something nicely literary about that little remove. I don’t even know what I mean when I say that, but I’ve always thought it.”
So maybe Owen has a slacker’s remove but hardly a slacker’s workload; fans will see plenty of him in the coming year. Next in the theaters will be an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce, opposite Morgan Freeman. It’s set in Hawaii, and Owen said it concerns “a crime and a con, and I play an antihero. You know you’ve almost made it when you get to play an antihero.” He’ll be shooting Starsky and Hutch through June, then he and brother Luke will make cameos as the Wright brothers in Jackie Chan’s remake of Around the World in 80 Days. Then it’s to work on The Wendell Baker Story with both Luke and Andrew. Throughout these projects, he and Wes will be sending ideas back and forth on a top-secret project known in Hollywood as Wes’s “oceanographer” script. Within the next couple years, he’d like to write a script of his own, but in the meantime, fans will have to content themselves watching Owen in other people’s projects, listening for those signature lines only he would make up.
AND FINALLY, THE OPENING SCENE: “Mooooonshine,” said Owen Wilson, sounding typically awed and random. “How great a word is ‘moonshine’? I don’t even know exactly what it is, and I’ve never seen it, but I know I want to drink it for the rest of my life. It’d probably be a good name for a dog. ‘Come here, Moonshine!’ Like an old Where the Red Fern Grows type of dog.”
The Oscar-nominated screenwriter and big-popcorn movie star was driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, and the talk in the car was going a lot like it does in his films. The discussion had started with, of all things, a quote from Samuel Beckett after I’d asked Owen, who is known as well-read, about a large black and white photograph of Beckett hanging in his living room.
“He wrote one of my favorite lines,” said Owen as we got into the car. “‘Fail. Fail again. Fail better.’”
“What’s that from?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve never really read Beckett, but I like that line. And I really just like the photograph—all the lines on his face. You hope God looks like that.”
And from there he started rolling from his dad to Ireland to Planet of the Apes and finally to moonshine, where he ultimately got stuck.
“Mooooonshine,” he said again, letting the word roll around in his head. “Just think, if it were legal, what a good adman could do with a word like ‘moonshine.’ How is ‘water’ or ‘milk’ going to compete with something called ‘moonshine’? Orange Crush could maybe give it a run for its money but not really. It’s like ‘aaaangel dust.’ I guess its real name is PCP, but that doesn’t sound so good. ‘Angel dust’ sounds kind of wonderful. What about ‘skunk bud’? That’s not really a beautiful name, but it sounds … intriguing. I wonder why things that are so bad for you have to have such great names.”
Owen paused, realizing he’d answered his own question. I tried to bring him back down to earth. “So that’s Beckett. What about Joyce?”
“What about him?”
“Didn’t Beckett work for Joyce? I think when Joyce was going blind, Beckett was his secretary. He’d read to him and take dictation.”
“You know,” said Owen, “there’s that story about Finnegans Wake, when Beckett is taking dictation for Joyce and there was this knock on the door. Joyce heard it, but Beckett didn’t, so when Joyce says, ‘Come in,’ Beckett writes it down. Then later, when they pick back up and Beckett reads back to Joyce from the place they’d left off, Joyce asks how ‘Come in’ got in there. And Beckett says, ‘You said it.’ And Joyce decides to leave it in. He decides it would be okay for coincidence to be a collaborator. Do you know that line in Finnegans Wake?”
“In Finnegans Wake? No.”
“Neither do I. But I sure like that story. Doesn’t that sound like a great way to write?”
To the guy taking dictation, it certainly does.
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