Matt Dillon slaps his hand into his fist. “What the FUCK is going on in this place?” he yells, his voice suddenly leaping from the civil tone he’s maintained throughout the interview to something more rasping. He’s dressed down, unshaven, almost monochromatic in a grey top. He has been discussing his first-ever foray into television, the new 10-part series Wayward Pines, based on the Blake Crouch novel Pines and directed by M Night Shyamalan. Dillon plays FBI agent Ethan Burke, injured in a mysterious car crash while in search of a missing colleague. When he wakes up in hospital, unaware of where he is or what’s happening, he’s stonewalled by everyone he meets. It’s Burke’s angry confusion Dillon is conveying in his outburst, as he recalls how he got to grips with playing the lead role.
“You can’t just make the character a spectator of events – he has to have agency,” says Dillon. “If the audience is going to ask a question, Ethan at the very least is going to ask a question. I’m not the creator of the show and I know there’s a big plan and a scheme, I get that, but to make sure the action is coming out of the characters, not some schematic thing the actors are adjusting to – Night and I talked a lot about that.”
One can imagine they did.
This is M Night Shyamalan’s first venture into television also, after a strange career that has seen him drift from a wunderkind, a latterday combination of Hitchcock and Spielberg, to box-office poison. Having been universally lauded for The Sixth Sense, he then attracted increasing opprobrium with each successive film, from Unbreakable through to Lady In The Water, which struck many critics to be not so much magical and confounding as conceited and grossly, even laughably implausible.
He still has his defenders (The Village is really rather good), but by the time of 2013’s sci-fi flop After Earth, starring Will Smith, Night was considered such a liability to audiences as well as critics that his name wasn’t even used in the promotional material. Night nonetheless remains remarkably buoyant in the face of what others might regard as crushing humiliation. He’s immensely likable, effervescent and articulate. Despite it all, he has the fresh-faced energy of a debutante.
“He’s so positive,” marvels Toby Jones, who also stars in the show. “British people have to get used to it, whereas Americans immediately embrace it. He’s a force of positivity, and when you think of the career he’s had, the pressures he’s been under, that’s really admirable.”
Nonetheless, Night feels that the current malign conditions of cinema, in which “everything has to be third act, there’s hardly any first act”, have made things impossible for film-makers. It’s why he feels TV is now more of a natural home for him.
“Television was once perceived as a lesser medium,” he says. “Primarily it was network shows supported by adverts and the most important thing for the detergent people was how many people were watching. Film used to be about resonance – ‘Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, Oh my God, that was so good’ – that sort of word of mouth would make the film a success. That sort of resonance was more important than marketing. Now, film is mainly about marketing. You don’t hear whether a movie is good, you hear about how many millions it made. Now in movies, they want as much sugar as possible. TV used to be sugar content. Now thanks to cable, it’s about resonance. How many people heard, say, Mad Men was a good show? Even networks like Fox are saying, make it pop but make it resonant, make it different.”
Night promises that the experience of making TV, with its speedier processes, has affected his subsequent film-making; he’s made two more movies since Wayward Pines that he hopes will offer the proof. “The same thing happened with Hitchcock. He did 10 years of TV then made Psycho. You see the difference. You’re a leaner version of yourself.”
Wayward Pines sees Night consciously recall not only Twin Peaks (cited by Crouch as a major influence on the original novel), but also One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Lost, The X-Files, Les Revenants and The Truman Show in its anachronistic world, which drifts between the 1950s, 1980s and beyond. Its sense of a sinister invisible hand, its malevolent nurse, its psychiatric doctor (played by Jones) who seems a bit psycho himself, all contribute to a woozy sense of deja vu that inspires disorientation.
What attracted Night to Wayward Pines is what he describes as a “giant twist” in episode five, the sort in which he has specialised as a film-maker himself. We can only wait on this, but be assured that the almost parodic tone of the opener, in which the tropes of sci-fi TV come so thick and fast you might think you’ve stumbled into a Saturday Night Live spoof, is all to lull us. Come episode five, according to Night, the show will “practically shift genre”.
Meanwhile, you sense that Dillon was chosen in part as a signifier, for his classic agelessness as an actor, from Rumble Fish onward, for his Matt Dillon-ness. “I’ve never met anyone who looks more like a hero,” says Jones (whose own heroic roles have included Truman Capote and are set to include Captain Mainwaring in the Dad’s Army remake) of his co-star. “He’s got that frown, of someone who’s seeking.” Night says. “We wanted an iconic actor, a guys’ guy, someone who hadn’t done TV before, who could do humour. And make them vulnerable – these older, manly guys – make them go deeper in themselves.”
Not that Dillon was keen on being a mere postmodern pawn. He is evidently of that school of actors who struggle with the contradiction of their profession between artifice and authenticity. In a world of make-believe, he wants to convey, with the rhetorical power of a fist hitting a hand, something real. “My favourite word that I learned on this show is ‘verisimilitude’, the appearance of truth, although it’s a very real thing that triggers a deeper truth,” says Dillon. “This town is a fabrication, it’s been created. And it’s not dissimilar to what we do as storytellers, as actors.”
Wayward Pines, for all its Americana playfulness, does touch on universal themes: the choice available to us of living in a bubble of blissful ignorance (“You could be happy here,” one of the characters tells Burke) or finding out the truth that lies beyond the perimeters of our lives. Author Blake Crouch was inspired to write Pines following a visit to a high-altitude small town in Colorado. Anyone who has visited, say, Telluride, will be familiar with the setting – idyllic yet inaccessible, potentially inescapable, walled in on all sides by mountains and tall trees. “I got this creepy sense of what would happen if one guy owned every building, every house in this town? And what if I was stuck here and I couldn’t leave?”
Matt Dillon, however, was attracted to Wayward Pines precisely because he could leave. In another sign of the changing shape of small-screen entertainment, producers have promised the drama will last just one series rather than drift on aimlessly for years like Lost (though as Crouch puts it, “No door is fully closed”).
“The way TV is set up now, it’s another world for an actor,” says Dillon. “With a movie, you know it’s two or three months’ commitment. With TV in the past it might be several years. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do a ‘solve a crime of the week’ show,” he says, alluding to CSI. “But now, a TV series can be like the movies-plus: you can tell a movie-style story over a longer time. I love that. I want to do more of it.”
Wayward Pines begins Thursday 14 May, 9pm, Fox
