Lightning Mcqueen With Owen Wilsons Lips Funny
IS THAT HIM?
There's a guy hovering over the asphalt, way, way down the street, a head with a ball cap and sunglasses. When you can see his whole body, it turns out he's riding a bicycle, which was why it looked like he was hovering. He's half standing on the bike, one leg straight, lips pursed to the relative wind, like a kid cruising to the bike racks at school. The bike maintains speed even though he's not pedaling. He wears long pants, though the weather is warm. This could be the start of the article, I'm thinking.
But what's this? There's another guy hovering behind him, on another bike. Two people. So maybe it's not him? Except now that he's closer, it's almost definitely him: craggily handsome face, blond hair shagging down from under the ball cap, really cool plaid shirt.
And if it is him, and we're supposed to have breakfast, should I have been waiting in that long line? Or does he not have to wait in line, because he's famous? Maybe this is his regular breakfast spot—they know him, and he has a special table—so waiting in line would make me look like an amateur.
Or maybe everybody knows that as soon as you arrive at Blueys, you better get right in that line. He's going to wonder why I'm standing out here by the parking lot, waving.
Who's this other guy?
IS THAT HIM?
He looks nervous. I guess he thought it was shorts weather. This is the writer? So pale. He's kind of shifting from foot to foot. I'm glad I brought the Allen wrench for the other bike, because he's kind of tall, and we might need to adjust the seat. I also hope this sore throat goes away. It's a cold coming on, I think. I wonder if we should have pushed this interview to later in the day.
There's a line. There wasn't a line the other time. Maybe there's usually a line and me and Paul just got lucky that time?
That's okay. Maybe this is a good beginning to the story.
This writer looks nervous—if that's who that is. Now he's waving.
"There's a little bit of a line," Owen Wilson says, his voice low, as if these might be the first words he has spoken today.
It's a warm Saturday morning in June, and we're at Blueys, a restaurant in an industrial part of Santa Monica. Owen has just pulled up on an electric bike with a guy on another bike who says hello, gets off his bike, and vanishes. The other bike is for me to use after breakfast. "Do you want to go somewhere else?" I ask, and immediately regret it.
With calm in his voice, Owen says, "Well, hold on . . . I think . . . let's just . . ." and walks toward the door, scoping it out.
You order at a counter, then they bring you your food at one of the outside tables. Earnest California food—you can substitute soyrizo for chorizo in your breakfast burrito, and there's bulletproof coffee, that kind of thing. Locals recently awakened from a yearlong slumber are draped over the furniture like Dalà clocks, clutching latte mugs with two hands.
We walk inside, then back out into gray light filtering through a cornflower- blue sky. The employees smile at us, but no one speaks. "Here, maybe we can just go over there and sit down," Owen says. He walks toward an empty picnic table around a corner, shaded from the sun. People sit at all the other tables, but for some reason not this one, tucked back in the alley.
But then he changes course! He walks over to a shortened school bus parked on the outskirts of the restaurant seating. They're selling vintage clothing out of the bus. Owen looks at a bright-yellow windbreaker that says camaro z/28. He peers into the back of the bus. A brown T-shirt hangs inside, commemorating the 1987 Iditarod.
"Do you know what the Iditarod is?" he asks me.
I do, I tell him.
He eases his jaw forward into an Owen Wilson smile.
"Let's sit down," he says, his hand on my shoulder.
We haven't ordered. We don't have food yet. We don't have coffee yet. Just talking. Waitstaff whir around, trolleying quinoa bowls and acai.
The scene sends Owen's memory to another restaurant, which makes him smile. He and Wes Anderson were writing The Royal Tenenbaums, the 2001 movie for which they were nominated for a best-original-screenplay Academy Award, and as part of the backstory, they made up a restaurant called Sloppy Huck's, which Royal Tenenbaum (played by Gene Hackman) used to take his kids to when they were little. "It was this place with peanut shells on the floor and an odd menu with stuff like rhubarb pie and corn-fritter casserole," he says. "There were those jukeboxes at each booth, right on the table, that you could flip through. And bullet holes in the window, because bad guys had tried to rob the cash register a couple of times, so Sloppy was always alert."
This article appeared in the September 2021 issue of Esquire
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He's fifty-two. His skin is tanned and healthy—ruddy—and he has enviable blond hair that always looks like he went swimming in the ocean a half hour ago and it dried in the sun, annoyingly perfect. The blue eyes are as blue as they are in the movies, or bluer. His ball cap has a logo of a half doughnut, half taco, a totem from a recent movie shoot in Saratoga Springs, New York. (A man who owned a taco-and-doughnut shop gave it to him.) He does not place his phone on the table, the way most people do. He answers questions not as if he's being interviewed but rather as if he's standing in the corner at a party, chatting and telling delightful stories.
I'm starting to wonder, How long do we have for this breakfast? Will he have to leave soon? Are we going to ride the bikes?
"Sloppy Huck's didn't make it into the movie," he says, smiling down.
He asks questions. He is well-read. Very well-read. We parse the divergent narrative styles of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He tells me about a book his brother Luke gave him recently: a biography of an obscure Swiss writer named Robert Walser. He mentions picking up a copy of The Snow Leopard not long ago, a book he says means a lot to him.
I, meanwhile, am asking him the normal interview questions, not yet getting where he is going. What exactly is the story going to be?
I bring up Loki, the smart, fun Marvel series he starred on for Disney+ as agent Mobius, with Tom Hiddleston. "We did a press junket for that yesterday," he says.
"What did they ask you?" is my probing inquiry.
"They asked me a lot about—'It sounds like you had to be convinced to do this.' I don't know where they're getting that. That isn't true. The director just called me and told me the idea, and I wanted to work on it. But somehow what seems to be in their press notes, maybe, is that I know zero about the MCU. I don't know a ton about it, but I know—"
He pauses.
"Actually, yeah, I probably don't know that much about it. I kind of know about Iron Man. I've seen Aquaman. He's swimming in jeans. No one can swim in jeans! That was my argument with the kids about Aquaman."
(Speaking of Loki: Owen is known to improv lines on set, and in one scene in the first episode, Loki is acting very self-important during Mobius's interrogation. Mobius simply says, "You're just a little pussycat." "All Owen," Hiddleston tells me.)
It's not that Owen is uninterested in talking about this stuff, but pretty soon he's drifting away from it, telling me about when he was in Atlanta filming Loki and he made up a leaf-catching game for himself and his kids. "We play that you have to catch it with one hand and run," he says. "It's nice because it gets you looking up."
He bobs his head almost imperceptibly, squints and smiles almost imperceptibly, and almost whispers: "Yeah. The Leaf-Catch Game."
The digital recorder sits on the table in front of him, its red signal light a tiny beacon.
"Do you have to think of, like, an angle for the story?" I try to, I say. An angle, an idea.
He nods with purpose. Deeper than a normal nod.
"Did you have a particular sport, growing up?" he asks.
"Yeah, I ran track."
"What'd you run?"
"Hurdles."
"You think you could beat me in a race?"
I look at him, stammering, the question hanging. "What?"
The smiling blue eyes, fixed on me. You heard me.
"Do you think you could beat me in a race?"
I think this is what Jennifer Aniston, who has made two movies with Owen, means when she tells me, "He's disarming."
Leaf catching. Running races. Is this a thing? I ask Owen. Does he challenge people? Does he make up games?
"Yeah, well, my brothers would say I make up rules."
"It goes back to childhood and continues up to yesterday," says his brother Andrew, older by four years. Owen's crowning achievement in game invention is called Tip Horse, a basketball-based combination of 21 and horse, at which he is so commanding that while playing it he refers to himself as Professor Tippins. "There's a whole slew of rules, and even with every rule there's an addendum, and also every rule is negotiable," Andrew says.
Everyone seems to have a story: During the filming of The Grand Budapest Hotel in Germany, Owen invited Adrien Brody to go bowling one night. Owen claimed he had never bowled. Brody took the first two games, and there was a round of beers with each. Owen then announced that the winner of the next game would cover the drinks. "And he murdered me!" Brody says.
"There was a lake in the neighborhood that we went to as kids," Luke says. "One summer, Owen tried a thing where, in order to be in the group, everybody had to do a new trick every day at the lake. So you found yourself just going higher and higher, up into this tree, and it kept getting more and more dangerous, and I remember thinking, I'm gonna die trying to hang out with these guys."
Ben Stiller: "One night maybe twenty years ago, Owen and me and Anthony Kiedis were challenging each other to a footrace around the Hollywood Reservoir—there's a nineties story for you. I don't think the race ever even happened, but Owen was the one who brokered that it was going to happen." Stiller says Owen loves "connections in life." That's the root of his incessant invention of competitive games, I think: Games are fun, and when people have fun together, they stay connected.
They stay friends.
"Here comes your man," by The Pixies, comes on. "They also play great music at this place," he says, as if suddenly revealing an unseen truth.
I mention that, in my rental car, I've been listening to 80s on 8, the SiriusXM channel that plays eighties music exclusively. "I sometimes can't listen to that, because it's too heartbreaking," Owen says. "I would listen to it driving home, and it was like, I can't take this song right now. I listen to, I think it's channel 73, 40s Junction or something. I love that."
"Me too. That one sounds like the soundtrack to a Woody Allen movie—hey, there's a great movie," I say.
"Yeah, Midnight in Paris. I remember talking to someone before doing it and saying, 'Wouldn't it be great if this was like a Vicky Cristina Barcelona, one of those Woody Allen movies? Like a good one?' And I remember sitting through the screening at Cannes next to Rachel McAdams and thinking, Well, it's definitely not one of those! What a disaster. But then it has been one of those! So it's strange, isn't it? That you can't process something like that while you're doing it. Because now I can see it and go, 'Oh, yeah, it's good!' "
Owen can seem like a man who's rolling through life, as if he stumbled along from a previous century and will eventually wander off down the road, into the future. Or, to put it a slightly different way, a goofball. But people who know him well say that while, yes, he is those things, he's also more formidable than that. "He's deceptively intelligent and sometimes even hides his intelligence and how well-read he is," Wes Anderson says. "He surprises you in the course of getting to know him. People might underestimate him sometimes."
But he is also undeniably just good to have around. "People are drawn to him. If kids were picking teams, he might be good at whatever the sport is, but I think he'd be picked even quicker than his talent at the sport would suggest, just because people want him on their team," Anderson says.
On Marley & Me, Aniston tells me, "Owen and I volleyed back and forth really well together. I remember laughing a lot, and I love nothing more than someone who can make me laugh. It's the key to my heart."
Andrew acted with Owen in Bottle Rocket, the first movie Owen wrote with Anderson, the first movie Anderson directed, and Owen's first time acting at all. Owen plays Dignan, a quirkily charming outsider with amateurish aspirations to a life of crime. "There's this scene where my character is really mean to his," Andrew says. "I make fun of this jumpsuit he's wearing and then drive off. And Luke, who plays his friend, tries to reassure Dignan and says, 'Did you see what he was wearing?' and Dignan says, 'Yeah, it was pretty cool.' I think you're seeing a little bit of Owen there."
The French Dispatch, the seventh Anderson film in which Owen has appeared, is the kind of film he calls "handmade," a compliment he applies to the work of filmmakers like Allen, Wes Anderson, and Paul Thomas Anderson, with whom Owen worked on Inherent Vice. French Dispatch is a triumph of visual storytelling—watching it is like reading the best issue ever published of a great magazine, which is what the movie is about. The way Owen talks about it, with a lilting voice, you can hear happiness, not only to be in this film but to be at this place—at this place in his career, at this place for breakfast, in this town where he's lived for twenty-five years and it's a beautiful day and his kid has a soccer game later. All of it.
"I don't know. I've been in sort of a lucky place of feeling pretty appreciative of things," he says, seeming almost surprised. "I know everything's kind of up and down, but when you get on one of these waves, you've gotta ride it as long as you can. I've just felt—yeah. Feeling pretty grateful. Well, grateful's one of those words that get used all the time. Appreciative. Of, you know, stuff."
A butterfly carries his words off into the flowers of a nearby jacaranda tree, and he looks up and says, "How's our line doing?"
We're sharing pancakes he ordered for me after seeing other people order them. They're warm and made with squash, and there's some kind of cool avocado mash between each layer of the stack, and oaten granola with berries and maple syrup on top. A meal in a dream.
"Isn't that interesting? A vegetable," Owen says. "Is that guacamole in there?" All of the waitstaff at the restaurant wear pastel-colored T-shirts that read on the back, wish you were here. "Is that really what the T-shirts say here?" Owen asks. He's laughing, in disbelief, looking around. "Did we get hit by a garbage truck? Is this heaven? Because one minute I've got a sore throat. And you're—" He's chewing.
"I don't know where I am."
"You don't know where you are! You're jet-lagged. Standing out in the parking lot waving."
"I was looking for you, but there were all these menacing signs about where you could and couldn't park, and I got nervous."
"Don't quit before the miracle. You were so ready to hit the eject button! Like right when I first saw you, you go, 'Should we go?' And I said, 'Nuh nuh nuh, let's see.' And I knew I had someone who was panicking on my hands. 'We're losing this cadet!' I could feel it. I knew I couldn't put you in the line—there was no way I could do that to you. Let's just get him relaxed for a little bit. And then very gently I said, 'Has the line gone down?' And you were up [claps] like a shot!"
We eat in silence for a few minutes. I revert to my interview questions: Does he cook?
"I don't, ahh, cook," he says slowly, stifling a grin. "I make pretty good sandwiches."
"What kind of sandwiches?"
"Well, it's really like a peanut butter and jelly," says Owen, smiling now.
"Crunchy or smooth? This is what people want to know."
"I think I prefer the crunchy. Although I actually use almond butter, but I call it a peanut butter and jelly."
Here Owen pauses, dabs his mouth with the napkin, nods his head as if he's come to a conclusion.
"It would be nice to not feel any pressure with this story—the way I sometimes feel with movies—to do set pieces. Just to have a story be . . . I wouldn't say boring, because I don't find it boring. A movie that's just this. Where we don't have whatever burden you have with an article, where we gotta do something. We were kind of kidding about how this is the stuff people want to know: 'No, it's not crunchy peanut butter. I use smooth, but actually I use almond butter in place of peanut butter.' See, I do find that interesting!"
I sip the dregs of the watermelon smoothie he recommended. A few flecks of chile dust survived the smoothie's journey to the bottom of the glass. The last sip is the best. "Stuck in the Middle with You" is playing.
"This place," I say, shaking my head.
Owen, as if clutching my shoulders with his hands, grins and says, "Now do you get it?"
The biography is not the story.
Owen Wilson grew up in Dallas, the middle child between Andrew and Luke, three years younger. Both parents were originally from Massachusetts. Owen's father, Bob, was a TV executive and an advertising man who graduated from Dartmouth and loyally raised money for the college even after all three of his sons were rejected by the admissions department. Bob was a great dad, the kind of guy everybody liked to be around. The Wilson boys grew up comfortable and got along well, playing football and doing the required homework. Their mother, Laura, a photographer, cooked the family dinner almost every night, and there were no sugar cereals or soft drinks in the house. Owen was expelled from a private high school due to various incidents of prankery, wisecracking, and charming but irritating insubordination. He ended up attending a military school in New Mexico that Andrew had heard about from a college friend. He did one year at USC before transferring to UT Austin, from which he did not quite graduate but where he met Wes Anderson in a playwriting class. They wound up becoming roommates and cowriting a short film called Bottle Rocket, which in 1996 they made into a feature, somehow getting James Caan to play a supporting role. Other cast members included Dipak Pallana, who owned an Indian café where Owen played chess; Dipak's father, Kumar, who played a safecracker named Kumar; and Stephen Dignan, a friend from home, whose last name was used for Owen's character. Owen bought a house after Bottle Rocket that he intended to flip but still lives in today. He later got a place in Maui, too. Like millions of other people, he has battled depression and in 2007 had the wrenching experience of the world hearing reports that he had attempted to take his own life. He recovered from that awful episode with friends and family supporting him daily, wrapping their love around him, sleeping by his side.
He's always declined to talk publicly about that, but he's made a lot of good, and some great, movies since, like Marley & Me, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Hall Pass, Midnight in Paris, The Big Year (a bird-watching movie with Steve Martin), She's Funny That Way (directed by legend Peter Bogdanovich and Owen's second film with Aniston), Inherent Vice, and Lost in London (written and directed by Woody Harrelson, and if there's one movie on this list you've never heard of but manage to see, let it be this). Plus Loki (not a movie but fantastic) this year (season 2 is in the works), along with the magnificent French Dispatch (opening October 22) and the delightful Marry Me (opening February 2022, in which his love interest is Jennifer Lopez). He has two young sons, ten and seven, by two different former partners—everyone lives nearby and gets along, and Owen has the boys on a single-dad schedule. The other evening, he was trimming the younger one's fingernails, and the boy was getting upset and saying, "Don't go below the line!" and Owen was saying, "Just relax!" and the whole scene was fraught with tension. Afterward, Owen said to his son, "What do you say?" and the boy said, dutifully, "Thaaank youu," and then muttered to his brother, "for nothing." Owen heard it. "It's funny how we get cast in these roles, because it seems like just yesterday I was the one muttering 'for nothing,' and now I'm the person in this role. Once you're an adult, you think childhood was so innocent and beautiful, but you forget. That's why I liked in Last Tango when she's talking about how beautiful being a kid is, and Brando says, 'Is it beautiful to be made into a tattletale? Or be forced to admire authority?' That's a big part of being a kid: being broken . . . . It's like Cool Hand Luke—I'm breaking him. And then he says, 'For nothing.' [Smiles.] That was me. That's how you wind up at military school, all those 'for nothing's."
We ride the e-bikes to a sportsplex of a half dozen turf ball fields, kids and parents everywhere. As we go to the fence, Owen hollers, "Hey, buddy," and his older boy, warming up, shouts a quick "Hey, Dad!"
We dally around, and Owen outlines the rules of a bike game he and Woody Harrelson made up on Maui: "You see who has to put their foot on the ground first. You can use your hand on a pole, or a car, but the first person to put their foot down loses. You'd be surprised: You can do this for hours, and it's pretty fun." I try to resume a normal interview. What music did he first love as a kid?
"The first concert I ever went to was Rolling Stones, 1981, Tattoo You. At the Cotton Bowl."
"That's a good first concert. Mine was Chicago."
"Chicago! Wow," he says, his first Owen Wilson wow of the day, a full two-plus syllables. "You know what Chicago song I love, though? The one in the park."
"Saturday, in the park . . ."
"That's kind of our day today! People laughing and a man selling ice cream. Just the way we've salvaged this."
"Was it going south?"
"It was. In fact, if we're being honest, I was reversing it. I was panicking when I saw that line at Blueys. So it becomes a Rashomon story. First it was you freaking out, but now the truth is, I was panicking. When I had come to that same restaurant a few days ago, it was empty. But then it seemed like we're in a Hunter S. Thompson sort of thing where there's ghouls everyplace and this strange Charles Manson bus pulls up."
"HEY! YO!" I SHOUT.
He stares across the street at me and waves. I'm on the phone with my wife, and I apologize to her for yelling into the phone. I tell her I have to go now because Owen just pulled up on his bike across the street. I'll call her later.
"HEY! YO!" HE SHOUTS.
What the . . . ? Who's screaming? Oh, wow, Ryan's yelling at someone on the phone. I wonder who it is. Man, he's still antsy, I guess. Maybe the hydration will help.
The nurse slides a needle into Owen's arm first, then puts one into mine.
Owen's still trying to kick his cold, so we're at the Hydration Room, part of a small chain of pristine storefronts where medical professionals hook you up to an IV and fill you with rejuvenating fluids and various cocktails of vitamins and nutrients. You feel fantastic afterward. We lie on cushy lounge chairs for about a half hour while the fluids fill our veins. We're both speaking in low, librarian tones. I ask questions like "Where did you film Behind Enemy Lines?" That gets Owen talking about the in-water survival training he did for the movie, which gets him talking about An Officer and a Gentleman ("great water stuff"), which gets him talking about fight scenes.
"That's gotta be one of the best fight scenes ever in a movie," he says of Richard Gere's brawl with Louis Gossett Jr. in 1982. "Two great fight scenes, because there's also a fight scene when he leaves the bar and the local guys start messing with him, which doesn't go very well."
"Top five fight scenes in movies?"
Immediately Owen says, "Well, I would definitely say Officer and a Gentleman. That counts as one. And I guess Billy Jack is a great fight scene. Did you ever see the Billy Jack movies? God, I used to love those as a kid—"
The nurse comes with a syringe and gives us each a shot of something. Owen laughs like a dude who just scored some great drugs.
"Whoa-ho, this is the good stuff. See you on the other side! Here we go!"
I ask the nurse what it is. "Vitamin B-12," she says.
"That could be another element," he says. "We make top-five lists, but we're kinda lazy. We get to two or three, then we move on."
We sit in silence for a few minutes, B-12 coursing through us, a chill-out song playing through the Hydration Room speakers. The IV bags are empty of their fluids, and the nurse appears again and disconnects us with great agility: needles out, gauze pressed firmly to the skin, bags removed from their hooks, lines coiled neatly.
"I felt like they just turned on the lights in the bar," Owen says. " 'Whoa, is it 2:00 already?' " He shuffles back toward the restroom, and when he reemerges, the nurse presents him with a small book and says, with pride in her voice, "You forgot this the last time you were here."
He holds the book, runs his hand over the jacket, as if over a smooth stone. It's called Ten Poems to Change Your Life. Finally, he speaks:
"I did?"
The nurse nods, pleased.
"But I haven't been here in maybe two years," he says.
"We kept it for you."
He looks across the room at me, smiles that mischievous, teeth-together smile, and shakes his head at the magic of it all.
"You see?"
I wonder whether I do. I think I do. Several times, Owen has used the term "magical realism," a literary genre in which the writer writes something unreal, or surreal, as if it were absolutely real. Owen seems to be always in search of making reality appear magical. Or making the magic of life more real. Or something.
Referring to the zany plot of their new movie Marry Me—pop megastar pulls a stranger out of the crowd and marries him—Jennifer Lopez says of Owen's performance, "He plays both with and against the absurdity of it all," which is actually a pretty good way to describe Owen. In fact, it describes exactly why he can be so hard to describe, even after magical breakfasts, bike rides, and intravenous hydration sessions. Stiller—who hired him for 1996's The Cable Guy, has made more movies with Owen (fourteen) than anyone else, and had dinner with him the week after we met—tells me, "He lives this life that's kind of mysterious in a way. I find it mysterious. I don't think you could ever fully know him."
Luke remembers when Owen went away to military school, an experience that gets at what J. Lo is talking about: "After he'd been expelled from our high school and he went to New Mexico Military Institute, my dad and I went to visit him. It's just barren desert and this fortress out there, and to me it seemed like The Lords of Discipline. But then seeing Owen out there—buzz cut, uniform, his room and his locker, and how they had to walk in straight lines—he embraced all that. The last thing you'd think he would have taken to. But I guess there was just so much material there. He got a kick out of it."
Hampton Fancher, who wrote and directed The Minus Man—in which Fancher cast Owen as a serial killer after seeing Bottle Rocket—says, "He's a comedian, in the same way Jimmy Stewart was a comedian. Only he's funnier than Jimmy Stewart. He's existentially funny. He can tell a story, and it's oftentimes about the secret of things being the opposite—the joke of death."
Then he talks about the challenge of trying to capture the real Owen on film, reminding me a bit of Stiller's comment about the impossibility of really knowing him. "His face has this Germanic quality," Fancher says, "like Oskar Werner or Dennis Hopper, this kind of purity. Piero della Francesca, the Renaissance painter, paints that look. There's beauty there. I tried to capture it—that was my main failure in Minus Man. I wanted to capture that creamy, angelic thing in Owen's face, almost the way a kitten is. And I couldn't get it. I tried. He's formidable. He's got a tricky mind."
Homeless encampments line some of the gridded streets in Venice, California. On one block, from inside a blue camping tent, an old woman shouts to a man in the next tent, "Shut up. You're not my friend!"
Owen walks a few paces and whispers, "God, no one wants to hear someone say that. Takes you right back to middle school. 'You're not my friend anymore.' " He asks about my life, which has been difficult lately. The world knows something of his darkness, because he's famous, and I tell him something of mine—the chronically sick boy at home, which Owen knew about from an article I had written previously; the sudden, unexpected death of my brother five months earlier; the impossible task of raising children who have suffered trauma.
"As a kid, there's a lot of things that you think about," he says. "Death—that kind of landed with me when I was about eleven. And I don't remember ever talking with my parents about it. Although I do remember one time saying to my dad—and I remember exactly where in the house—saying, 'I worry about dying,' and seeing my dad turn away and catch himself. And I was surprised to see that reaction. But who knows, maybe that was part of why I said it."
The sidewalk buckles with broken, weedy stones as we trample on. I ask Owen about coming out of a dark place—how one does that, exactly. He doesn't talk much about his own close encounter with death, but he does tell me that Andrew stayed in his house with him after that, rising with him each morning and writing up little schedules for each day so that life seemed at first manageable and then, at some point, a long time later, actually good.
I'd think back to that a few weeks later when, in an email about something else, Owen offered a view of life through movies: "Sometimes it seems like life is being played by Gene Hackman in Hoosiers. Tough but fair. He's going to demand a lot, but if you play as a team and do your job, things work out. That's a good feeling. Things make sense. But of course sometimes life seems to be played by Tom Hardy in The Revenant, some nightmarish guy trying to kill you, where even if you get the upper hand, he's still going to be there at the end whispering, 'This ain't gonna bring your boy back' or your dad back or any good times from your past back. Or whatever. And when life's being played by that guy, you just gotta hang on and wait for it to pass."
The restaurant we're heading to appears, an open gate in a long wall, with string lights inside, a warm welcome. Owen's lips curl into a smile.
"I like this place," he says.
We sit in the immortal light of the Santa Monica dusk, plates of food scattered, picked at, around the table—the remnants of a summer squash, a slice of Key-lime pie with spoon-shaped carvings up and down it, a quarter of a bottle of wine.
Owen looks at me, hard and cold, and asks: "Did you order that Key-lime pie?"
I did, I tell him. His face lights up.
"I thought I imagined that. I thought I was just thinking, What could be more incredible right now? And I thought I was sort of like a ventriloquist who'd thrown that into Ryan's mouth. 'Key-lime pie, please.' Because it's just been—even now with this twilight, is this not like we're in One Hundred Years of Solitude? Aren't those guys the masters of that magic realism? And isn't there a famous Esquire story, the New Journalism? 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold'? Have you read that?"
"Of course," I say. "Maybe it's 'Owen Wilson Has a Cold'!"
He looks at me.
"We're not in the same place we were when we sat down."
I look at him. All along he's been trying to write my story, or at least describing an alternative story. Mine is a magazine profile. Something good and a little revealing, I hope, but a magazine profile. Owen is after something else, something more fascinating, or fun. Something different, and yet something that's a thousand years old. He loves nothing more than a good story, I think. Loves to hear them, which is why he asks so many questions. Loves to tell them, which he does better than anyone. Loves to act in them, whether it's a story about a fucked-up family named the Tenenbaums, or about Starsky and his friend Hutch, or about an American magazine in France that employs a blond travel writer with a beret affectation.
The best stories in his life right now, he says, are the ones he tells to two little boys in their pj's, the way his dad used to make up stories for him and Andrew and Luke that often featured a recurring character named Crazy Maggie and her terrifying, mirthless laugh. "Sometimes telling the stories at night, you do take a little pride that these guys are into this story! One of them even said, 'Dad, you should do something with this. This is a really good story!' It was about this little pack of boys in a postapocalyptic world, and there's a pack of dogs—I play to my audience. There was a moment in the story where the girl that the one boy likes, he sees her with another boy, and he thinks they're holding hands"—he's speaking slowly now, and in his distinct accent the word hands is hee-yands—"but they're just playing that game, you know that game? You hold your palms out faceup, and the other person puts their palms on yours, and you have to slap the top hand really fast. And the kid sees that from afar and thinks they're holding hands, but it's actually the game. So sometimes, little things like that, you think, That's a pretty good little element for a story. A good little detail."
The sun continues its retreat. Owen is sipping his tea, legs outstretched, his feet shod in leather loafer-type shoes and crossed at the ankles.
"Maybe I should write this as a screenplay," I say, joking. "The whole story."
Owen arches his eyebrows and says, "Probably be better. Because then we could actually get into some of the stuff we're talking about."
Ext. - Restaurant Courtyard - Dusk
OWEN and RYAN are seated at a round table at the edge of a sprawling stone patio with just a few tables. The check sits in its billfold, unpaid. A digital recording device sits on the table.
RYAN
Although sometimes that stuff can feel a little masturbatory.
OWEN
True—movies about the movies, or a writer writing about writing. But I always liked that part in Hearts of Darkness where he says, "Everyone says, 'Oh, this is just Francis; he'll figure it out.' Well, I'm not! I'm not gonna figure this out! I'm flunking this!" And what he says is, the worst thing you want to be accused of as an artist or a creative person is being pretentious. Or what you said, masturbatory. Same thing. But I just think that sometimes to do something—to say something—you have to risk people saying, "Oh, that's kinda bullshit, what that guy did." Sometimes you have to just walk through that fear and just try to tell it.
[beat]
Because, yeah—maybe that would be better.
RYAN
Better as in closer to who you are?
OWEN
Better story. I mean, it wouldn't be a crisis for Esquire. Would you get in trouble if you said, "Look, we're not gonna do this article. We're gonna do this other thing"? Could they get someone else for the cover?
RYAN's face shows that he realizes OWEN is suggesting that they abandon the article altogether and write an actual screenplay instead.
RYAN
I mean, I wonder if maybe we could do both?
OWEN
Isn't that what Esquire used to be? Who's the famous editor who did the Ali with the arrows? [He leans in close and lowers his voice.] Because maybe that's part of it, too: There's nothing on the tape. Because it was in here. [Points to his heart.]
RYAN
Did you sense me panicking again today?
OWEN
Well, you were shouting on the phone across the street when I saw you at the hydration place. That made me nervous. You were arguing with someone on the phone. I didn't want to ask what was going on, so I thought, Let's just get an IV in him.
RYAN [confused, trying to remember, then realizing]
I was shouting at you!
OWEN [smiling, confused]
You were?
RYAN
Yes! I was having a nice conversation with my wife but then shouted hello to you!
OWEN
I thought you were shouting at someone on the phone! See, that's life. A "Gift of the Magi" situation. I think you're yelling at some poor underling who had screwed up the reservation, but you were actually just gleefully shouting across the street to me.
RYAN
Want to go jump in the ocean in our underwear? See, I'm trying too hard again. A set piece.
OWEN
No, it's a good idea. Who knows, after I've been fortified by the tea, that might be our ending. Kind of a Coming Home–type ending, where we go for a swim, and one of us just keeps going. That's where the dramatic tension is. It isn't an existential, sad thing, but one guy's just decided: I'm going for the horizon.
Dissolve To: Int. - LAX Terminal - Day
RYAN sits at an airport bar, sipping hibiscus water and eating a cheeseburger, trying to think of something funny to text OWEN as a way of checking in. He types into his phone, and it appears ONSCREEN as a text bubble:
The last thing I remember is that IV going into my arm . . .
A few minutes later, OWEN writes back:
Really? Are you okay? You remember us bodysurfing at least? We brought ol' man Pacific to his knees last night. I still remember seeing your tearstained face staring out of an avalanche of white water just laughing. You had a big streak of aloha painted right down the middle of your back. By the time we got to Sloppy Huck's for last call, it was gone.
RYAN, texting:
I thought I dreamed that. Or maybe we had the same dream?
OWEN, texting:
Maybe it's like the Aztecs say: "We come only to sleep / Only to dream / It is not true, it is not true / That we come to live on this earth"
[beat]
And stay hydrated!!!
Dissolve To: Int. - Photo Studio - Night
Two weeks later. OWEN, in the New York studio of a renowned photographer, is changing out of an expensive outfit he wore for the magazine photo shoot, which is wrapping up after a long afternoon.
Various assistants and production people rush around, breaking down equipment, packing up clothing. OWEN checks the time—he has a dinner to get to. He looks tired. He just flew in from Los Angeles last night, and from Maui to Los Angeles the night before that. At 7:00 a.m. tomorrow, he flies to France to help promote The French Dispatch at the Cannes Film Festival. He is mid-conversation with RYAN .
OWEN
When I was a little kid, I wanted to know what caused thunder—
An assistant pokes her head in the door.
ASSISTANT
Owen, your car is downstairs.
He's late. He suddenly rushes, putting on his belt with one hand, stepping on the heels of his shoes. RYAN rushes to hold the elevator. OWEN thanks the crew, and there is clapping.
Suddenly the hold button on the elevator has reached its limit, and the door starts closing, and it will not be stopped.
RYAN
Owen! Quick, it's closing.
[Slow-motion] OWEN turns and runs to the door, his blond mane fluttering behind him, belt hanging from his waist, face gripped with determination, teeth clenched, bound for glory. At the last second, he thrusts a hand through the narrow opening before the door closes, grabbing RYAN's forearm really freaking hard—and then, by force of nature, OWEN wills the door open and almost falls into the elevator car, barely steadying himself to avoid colliding with the rear wall.
As the elevator descends, he runs a hand through his hair, lets out a deep breath, and cracks up laughing. Then he stops, raises his eyebrows, and smiles.
OWEN
Well, there's our ending.
The door opens.
FADE OUT
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Source: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a37227718/owen-wilson-interview-2021/
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