Interview: Emilio Estevez & Martin Sheen “The Way” – Part 1

The Way is the latest film from director Emilio Estevez which stars his father, Martin Sheen. Releasing to a wider audience this Friday, the film’s deeply spiritual message is sure to be praised by many and scrutinized by others. Despite a few weaknesses, we found a lot to like about the film.

In the story of a father scattering his son’s ashes along the Camino de Santiago, Martin Sheen plays Tom, a man holding on to his son’s memory by completing his son’s pilgrimage. We had the chance to sit in at a roundtable with Sheen and Estevez and found they had a lot to say about their film, their beliefs, and challenges that come shooting in sequence and on location. Enjoy Part 1 of our two-part sitdown:

Interviewer: I liked how Tommy, Martin Sheen, kept going into solitude thinking he was all alone. But then he’d always be surrounded by other pilgrims (people walking the Camino). Even when his backpack falls in the water he sets up a camp for himself and is about to dwell in his solitude – a group walks by. It makes it feel like such a communal place.

Emilio Estevez: Indeed. You may think you’re out there alone. And that was a tag line David’s (Alexanian, the producer) father came up with. “Life is too big to walk it alone.” It’s in community, you’re walking with god. Whoever [God] is, we are not alone on the planet. The world has gotten smaller and the global village has gotten a lot bigger. So we like to live by that, life is too big to walk alone.

GUY: Did you guys run into any challenges during the location shooting?

EE: Well we spent a couple of months, prior to bringing the cast out there, it was David and my son and I driving the Camino. Starting in Saint-Jean (of France), doing the grip and grin, meeting officials. Whether it was in the government or police officials. Stopping at hotels we thought were of interest that could maybe house a sizable crew and going to restaurants. Same thing: “We like your establishment, may we shoot here? We’re going to be making a film.

The world has gotten smaller and the global village has gotten a lot bigger. So we like to live by that, life is too big to walk alone.

Y’know, it was these three young guys walking into your establishment. I don’t think people took us that seriously because it wasn’t obvious. I wasn’t getting recognized so it wasn’t like “Oh yeah, we know you from the movies.” No, we had to work it. And we’d get to Santiago, we’d go back and start all over again. And just go a little bit deeper each time…

And we shot everything in sequence. We started in Saint-Jean and sort of reverse engineered it. We’d say “Okay, we need to be in Santiago by this date. We need to be at Leone if we’re going to shoot [inaudible]. They have a wedding on Saturday and some big convention on Thursday, and so if we’re not there on Friday to get those rooms those days, we won’t get them. ‘So can you say with absolute certainty you will be there on those days?”

So David and I would look at each-other and say, ‘We’ll be there on those days.” With complete confidence, but also terrified.

David Alexanian: We were putting ourselves under that kind of pressure because the windows were tiny.

EE: They were nonexistent! And then we were warned against shooting in the north of Spain because they said it was going to rain every day. So as we’re working backwards and planning all this out… we get to the Pyrenees  and are thinking “Well if it rains everyday we aren’t going to make it to the end by that date.”

At this point Mr. Martin Sheen enters the room.

Martin Sheen: Don’t get up, don’t get up.

Everyone stays in their seats.

MS: Nobody got up!

Everyone laughs. He warmly greets us personally before the interview continues.

EE: So it ended up raining only twice. And both those days we were shooting indoors.

Interviewer: What day on your trip are you right now?

EE: Week two and a half.

MS: We started the 28th of August. It’s (Minneapolis) our 11th city. So we’re finished with the desert. My god, it was 113 [degrees] in Phoenix. One shy of a record!  Austin was burning down when we were there! Austin was on fire!

It was like 105 for three months down there. Finally we came up, we got into Oklahoma we started to see a difference in vegetation. Then Kansas and Iowa. And now? Wow, now it’s freezing cold!

EE: [laughs] We can’t wait to get back to that heat!

Interviewer: I have a question about character creation. All your characters have different voices, which a lot of people struggle to capture. But you did an excellent job. [To Mr. Sheen] How was the character creation process for you and what was it like to play that role that your son wrote, and what did you do to get into the role.

EE: I wanted to create a role that was unlike who Martin is. I wanted to create this curmudgeon; I wanted to create a guy who he [gesturing towards Mr. Sheen] would not be friends with. A guy who plays golf at the country club…

MS: [joking] I used to caddy.

EE: Right. He’s cut off from the world and that is not who this character [referring to Sheen] is. My old man jumps in and he wants to know where you’re from and what your parents do. And he’s very interesting in people.

On the contrary, this character (Sheen’s character Tom in the film) is not. So I had to keep him from playing himself throughout.

MS: That’s true.

EE: I had to structure this guy, that he will reveal himself and he will be awake. We start to see little pieces of fall away. It really happens in the hotel room, when he realizes that they’ve no created this [unit] in the hotel room. They wanted all of these creature comforts away from each other – room service, get their laundry done. All these things that they thought that they wanted. They really, ultimately just wanted to be together.

I said “That’s the moment!” That’s the moment where he becomes himself and he realizes he’s a father now to these three younger people.

MS: He’s the father he never was to him (Estevez’ character, Daniel). And it’s because of him (Estevez), he led me through the journey. And one thing he said to me when I was being gregarious and friendly to people: “Let’s be even and direct here, you’re playing a guy who would never vote for Jed Bartlet (Sheen’s West Wing character).”

So I kept that to myself. I said, “Oh what a conservative curmudgeon this guy is.” The country club and all that. And I started to gather. But he (Estevez) structured the script and the characters so that the journey on foot, he was so determined. And I didn’t practice for it! Because I wanted to see what that would really be like.

The bag was heavy, man. He (Estevez) said, “You want to fake it?” I said no because it’ll make a difference of the way I walk, the way I breathe, the way I talk, everything. Tom wouldn’t have known that. You know, the guy didn’t plan on doing it.  So I just surrendered to that and that worked out very well.

Let’s be even and direct here, you’re playing a guy who would never vote for Jed Bartlet…

But the interior journey was the one that he had structured so that eventually… You know, in most father/son stories, “the son becomes the father” route. In this case the father became the son and eventually became himself. So it was the interior journey, the transcendent journey, the pilgrimage inside.

And all pilgrims experience that. At one point along the way, invariably people want to walk alone. Even husbands and wives [along the Camino], eventually they start separating because they hear the inner voice and the heart and the breath and the voice start talking… He hears that inner voice and they’re allowed to become themselves.

EE: In fact some people actually leave their wives or husbands out on the Camino. They’ll start out and the wife or husband will give them a big hug or the blessing. By the time they get to the end of the pilgrimage they’ve either met somebody else that they’ve decided they want to marry or… I mean, we had a couple of crewmembers on the crew who found love on the Camino. They’re now married.

MS: Is that true?

EE: Yeah!

MS: …In fact, the day we were there in Saint-Jean scouting a location, exact story [of the film] had happened. A kid went out and got killed and the parents came and walked the journey. There were three of them that year, three people had died in the Pyrenees. It was bad weather of bad judgment. And relatives came and did the journey.

[In the film] everybody started out with one intention and ended up with another.

EE: Did you guys all catch the Wizard of Oz reference?

Everyone nods yes, mentioning the Q&A screening the previous night.

EE: The Camino is marked in yellow. So it just became self-evident that this was in fact the retelling of that. The tornado is a tornado in the emotional sense – in Tom’s life. That transports him to Spain, a place he would never go. And he meets the tinman in her (Deborah Karen Unger as Sarah), the cowardly lion in the Dutchman (Yorick van Wageningen as Joost), and then Jimmy (James Nesbitt as Jack) of course, suffering from writer’s block, has no brain. And where do they discover him? In the haystacks.

The Camino is marked in yellow. So it just became self-evident that this was in fact the retelling of that. The tornado is a tornado in the emotional sense – in Tom’s life.

At one point the production designer, this really creative cat named Victor… he comes up to me and says “I don’t mean to offend you but, are we telling a tale?” Because we never discussed it, it was something we never discussed with the crew.

And I said “Well yes, we are.”

MS: The other thing is the crew were all Spanish, and none of them knew the Camino. Never been there!

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of our discussion with Mr. Estevez and Mr. Sheen!