Actor-director D.B Sweeney, co-star of CBS's "Jericho"(2008).
© CBS
MANIA EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: D.B. SWEENEY
By: Rob VauxDate: Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Sci-fi fans know D.B. Sweeney as not-at-all-nice-person John Goetz in the late, lamented Jericho TV series. Other genre projects include Fire in the Sky, Spawn, and TV shows like Strange Luck and Harsh Realm. But his career has encompassed a number of different projects and roles, from disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson in Eight Men Out to guitar-player-in-denial Billy McGriff in the upcoming Two Tickets to Paradise. He recently spoke with Mania.com about his role in Jericho and Two Tickets, which he also wrote and directed.
NOTE: Spoilers about Goetz's final fate appear below.
Mania.com: Was it always part of the plan to bring your character back for the second season of Jericho, or was that just a happy byproduct of the show's resurrection?
D.B. Sweeney: Some of the people who really fought to resurrect the show specifically cited liking my character, and that helped. I think [the creators] always sort of envisioned the character as the dragon over the mountain who they could bring in whenever they needed him. So there was always a plan to bring him back. When the show came back the way it did, I thought the way they set it up was pretty cool: do seven episodes and be prepared for the show to be done after seven. So instead of spreading things out over twenty-two episodes, you throw everything you have into seven. I thought that was kind of exciting. I was pretty happy to be a part of that.
At the same time, I wasn't entirely happy with the way they wrapped up my character. I think they sort of punted. I understand why, because they had so many characters which they had to wrap up so quickly, but I was a little disappointed when I saw how it was going to unfold. I guess I was looking for a more epic kind of death. He's sort of killed inadvertently, and you know, you build the guy up and you build the guy up… let him go up on top of the water tower and scream something. Still, there were so many good scenes—there was one scene I had with Alicia Coppola that I think was the one of the best scenes I've had on TV—so I'm pretty happy with the experience.
M: How much back story or prep work for a character like Goetz do you get beforehand? Is it something the writers have detailed, or do you have chances to flesh it out yourself?
DBS: In TV, it often falls to the actor to fill in some aspects of the character. Obviously, you hope the script gives you all the information you need, but a lot of that's going to be plot and story information. You get some of it in movies too, but more in TV because there's so many stories going on that the writers, understandably, have to concentrate on making character arcs coincide. And that comes down to big events in the character's life. So it does really fall to the actor. For a character like Goetz, here's a guy with a military background who's very cunning, and… not that he's evil, but he's completely selfish and will run through anyone in his way. Now he finds himself in a situation where selfishness is very justifiable and a good way to go about your day, to get results. I just thought that that was extremely compelling and playable.
M: Is there more freedom to do that in TV than in movies?
DBS: On a big Hollywood movie, you might shoot two or three pages of script a day. With TV, you might do nine pages a day. You're working so much faster in TV—you have an hour of programming to fill. On a movie, you're not under that kind of pressure, you can set up more interesting shots, you can do things a little more differently, and you can take a little more time. So that's always fun. But I like the energy of TV. It doesn't tolerate people not knowing their lines or not being prepared. I sort of like to go to work that way.
M: You've written and directed a movie, Two Tickets to Paradise, which is coming out later this summer [July 22nd]. What was the impetus for taking on those duties instead of just acting in it?
DBS: The origin of the story actually goes back to the fall of 2001. I'm from New York, and I have a lot of friends who are firemen and cops, who were directly affected by the events of September 11. You may recall from the news coverage that there weren't enough honor guards to bury the dead. A lot of firemen had gotten into a pattern of going to funerals—sometimes two a day—and then hitting the bar. When you have to do that for three or four months at a time, it's not the greatest situation. So I'm sitting in a bar with a couple of my firemen friends one night, and I said, "Listen guys, you gotta take a break. This is a profoundly tragic time, but you can't keep going to the bar every night. You gotta go bowling or go to a movie or something." Then one guy looks at the other and says, "Movies? Nobody makes movies for us."
The comment just hit me like a dart in the forehead, and I thought, "I'm gonna change that." So I set out with my buddy Brian Currie to write a movie—not just for firemen, but for people who… I think that Los Angeles and New York don't always think of the rest of the United States in terms of what people's tastes are. And once you turn thirty, you don't exist as a viable demographic for the movie business—not as mass entertainment at least. So we set out to make a movie that would be interesting to anybody over thirty. I didn't want to direct it originally; I just wanted to play the character I ended up playing. We were shopping it around and had gotten very positive responses on the script, but people wanted to take it over and make changes. We had worked so hard on it, and we wanted to preserve the idea of getting it to people who don't have movies made for them. So I made the decision to finance it myself. I was able to get a loan against my house, and was able to get another investor, so I didn't have to go into post production with no money. But that was how I ended up directing it and producing it. We really wanted to get it done without giving up—not creative control in a selfish sense, but just the ability to preserve why we wanted to make it in the first place.
M: You managed to get some pretty big names attached: Ed Harris, John C. McGinley, Pat Hingle…
DBS: Yeah, I just called everyone I knew. John McGinley and I were at NYU together. Ed Harris and I tried out for a Broadway play 20 years ago and became friends through that. I knew Moira Kelly from The Cutting Edge. Paul Hipp was a friend of mine; he's a great actor and he never quite got that plum role. So I thought, "I'm directing my first movie, I want to be the guy who gives another guy a break," and that's how he ended up in there. Just about everybody I called said, "Yes." It was very gratifying and humbling.
On the music end of it, I reached out to Bruce Springsteen—who I had met once like fifteen years ago—and he gave me a song for next to nothing. Bob Dylan gave a song, Stevie Ray Vaughn's estate gave us a song. Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits gave me two songs. It was interesting that those guys—that branch of rock and roll—got this movie instantly, while Hollywood wasn't always sure what to make of it.
M: Did you get the Eddie Money song?
DBS: No, Eddie Money was writing a Broadway play with the same title, and he thought it might dilute that. Eddie Money's great, but obviously I can't complain about the stuff we got. I got almost every song I wanted for the film, and you really never get that.
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