Indie Film’s Patron Saint

Actor Campbell Scott. Photo by Jamie Pattyn.

Here’s a paradox: Campbell Scott is not a star, and Campbell Scott is a star. Nearly 15 years ago, while still in his 20s, he played a grumpy cancer patient to Julia Roberts’s devoted nurse in the chest-heaver Dying Young. Scott, a trained stage actor with screen-worthy good looks, might have followed Roberts towards tabloid fame, but he didn’t. Instead, his career has moved in reverse. He shrunk back from broad, populist fare like Singles, choosing instead to deliver learned, controlled performances in small films like David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner and — in the role he’s perhaps best known for — Roger Dodger, where he played a deluded philanderer to great acclaim.

Continuing to distance himself from the mainstream, Scott moved behind the camera to co-direct the food fetish film Big Night, and recently, to solo direct a feature about counter-culture living called Off the Map. In the process, at age 43, he has become a big star in small cinema, as ubiquitous a presence in independent film as Ben Affleck is in the multiplexes.

But his previous small films are commercial epics compared to his latest project, a quiet Canadian movie called Saint Ralph. Based on a true story, and set in the 1950s, Ralph is a ninth grader who strikes a deal with God (whom he envisions as a cheerleader in a Santa suit) that if he wins the Boston Marathon, his mother will come out of her coma. Scott plays the boy’s guide, a priest and teacher with a thing for Nietzsche and jogging whose arch-nemesis is a conservative Father (Gordon Pinsent) with a hate-on for the marathon. Watching Scott in his cassock cheering on a bowl-cut boy as he runs across a finish line to a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah — a truly Canadian moment — we must ask: how does someone of Scott’s stature end up in a little film set in Hamilton, Ont.?

“The enormous amounts of money I was paid!” booms Scott in a voice that’s bigger than he is (he’s average height in person, though he plays tall on screen). He laughs and says simply: “I did it because they offered it to me.”

It’s easy to tell that Scott trained with Stella Adler and started on Broadway because the man can emote. Also, he is the son of George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, so no doubt he picked up a hint or two about diction. Scott has a surprising mop of grey hair and a firm handshake. His eye contact is unyielding.

Explaining how he came to be in industrial Hamilton for two-and-a-half weeks of Saint Ralph’s five-week shoot last summer, he speaks like he’s on stage, although with a throat lozenge in his mouth. “I don’t know why everyone is so surprised that I’m in this movie,” he says. “I subsist on independent films. If it’s an offer, you always read it. Mind you, 90 per cent of the scripts suck, and you say no thanks. But this was dry and had a wonderful point of view and felt accurate and was a world I knew nothing about. Then you hear Jennifer Tilly’s in it, and Gordon Pinsent, and you take a leap. But it’s never that much of a leap for me, really. Look at my f---ing career! Nobody’s pounding down my door.”

This modest posture seems disingenuous somehow, but Scott leans in and gets even louder: “It’s not self-effacing. It’s true.”

Campbell Scott and Adam Butcher in Michael McGowan's Saint Ralph. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

Michael McGowan, the young director of Saint Ralph, did pound at Scott’s door. When casting for his second feature film, the Toronto native sent the script to Scott’s agent with his fingers crossed. It’s not uncommon for a Canadian film to feature a prominent American actor in a cast of Canucks: Andrew McCarthy in New Waterford Girl, Kirsten Dunst in Deeply.

“Absolutely, [casting Scott] is strategic,” admits McGowan. “It allows you to say to distributors around the world, ‘OK, at least Jennifer Tilly and Campbell Scott are in it.’ It opens the door. But at the same time, if the film doesn’t work as a film, well, no offence to Gordon and Campbell, they’re not big enough to make it a financial success.”

McGowan had Campbell in mind for the part of Father Hibbert because he knew the Saint Ralph audience would be the audience to whom Scott is a star.

“If Campbell Scott is in your film, it says something about your film because he’ll only do films with a certain integrity,” says McGowan. “He’s not doing the Dying Young parts anymore. If we’d gone after a big Hollywood actor, a Chris O’Donnell, say, we know him somehow. But Campbell is always different. He’s known and unknown. He has indie credibility.”

Campbell, says McGowan, showed up ready to work. (He approaches press with the same zeal, clapping his hands at the start of the interview: “Let’s go!”) But Campbell didn’t hunker down with priests in preparation, instead asking McGowan, who did attend Catholic school, for some advice and, otherwise, looking inward for the part.

“I’m not interested in showing pieces of myself, because frankly, you’re going to get them anyway, but at the same time, it’s kind of offensive for me to say, ‘Well, I researched priests and now I know what it is to be a priest,’” says Scott. “No, you don’t. I’ll never really know about men who dedicate themselves to a faith. But I can still do them justice by trying to be like a real person, a human being. What I’m interested in is: how am I going to surprise myself?”

The element of surprise shows up on his CV: before doing Hamlet on television, Scott played writer Robert Benchley in Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle. “You play him by not playing him,” he says, a philosophy he abides by when portraying real people. But Scott doesn’t buy the version of his life that sounds like he made a conscious decision to turn away from fame.

“Everybody always says that but nobody knows. There’s never a moment [when you reject big movies]. There are lots of incidents that fall upon one another to create a career,” he says. “There are specific people who have a talent for generating excitement and buzz about themselves, even apart from their acting careers. That’s called fame. I guarantee you that the ones with staying power, the Julia Roberts, the Brad Pitts, they all have talent, in some manner, and then they have this other energy. I don’t know what it is, but I ain’t got it.”

Then again, Scott makes no effort to create buzz. He almost never appears on the talk-show circuit, though he is quite hammy in person, and he tells me that he rarely watches the Oscars, let alone attends them (though he did tune in a few years ago to see director Akira Kurosawa, his hero, win an honorary award). But he says he finds the prospect of fame “fascinating.”

“One is a human being. One is always trying to pay the mortgage,” says Scott. “One wants to be praised and loved – all that. Anybody who says he doesn’t is full of it.”

Scott grew up in New York. His parents divorced for the second time when he was 13, and he entered the family profession reluctantly, anticipating the travails of stepping into four very large shoes. “If you’re a young carpenter, you do not want to keep hearing about how your dad built the great house down the f---ing road. You’re like, ‘Okay, great, can I build my own house now?’”

Those feelings are long past, he says. Dewhurst played his mother in Dying Young in 1991, and passed away that same year. George C. Scott died in 1999.

“When you’re young, you have to figure out if you’re any good at what you do. You carve your own identity separately from your parents’,” he says. “But now I just miss them. They’re both dead. Any opportunity to bring them up is welcome. I love bringing them up now, and thinking about what they did.”

Dewhurst was born in Montreal, and though she’s famed for her Tony award-winning performances on stage in New York, the scratchy-throated beauty is probably best known in this country for playing Marilla in Anne of Green Gables. She kept a home in P.E.I. in her later years, and a sense of ownership over her lingers amongst Canadians. “I appreciate that,” Scott says. “And she did, too. She was always most comfortable here.”

Now there is another generation at the ready: Scott has a seven-year-old son. He designs his career so that he won’t be away from him for long periods of time, another reason he jumped at the Saint Ralph script. The prospect of this boy becoming a third-generation actor has his father waffling.

“I’ll have to have him killed,” he jokes. “Look, what are you going to do? I hope not. You want to see something else. Of course, I’d like to see him helping people in a more direct manner than even being in the arts. But that's selfish, of course. It will be about what he wants, not what I want.”

Saint Ralph opens across Canada on April 8.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.