Matt Dillon gives out a low, vibrating rumble of a chuckle. “I know a little bit about drinking,” he says, when asked about the preparation for his role as an alcoholic ne’er-do-well with a literary soul in “Factotum.”
The film, based on an autobiographical novel by the heavy-drinking Los Angeles writer Charles Bukowski, opens Friday in Denver. Bukowski, who died at age 73 of leukemia in 1994, acquired a cult following in the 1970s for his tough poems, short stories and novels about his hard life. Like the book, the film uses the author’s alter-ego persona of Henry “Hank” Chinaski as a device to portray him as an impoverished younger man already set in his literary ambitions and alcoholic ways. Lili Taylor plays opposite Dillon as Chinaski’s on-again, off-again lover.
There is a bright, cheerful confidence in Dillon’s voice – a touch of braggadocio – as he talks about alcohol. His eyes gleam beneath his dark brows.
“I heard that Richard Burton – he drank all the time – said the only time he didn’t drink was when he played a drunk. That was the case with me; I never drank on the job.”
At age 42, Dillon is in a great place. His career had been perceived as slipping until his supporting performance as a racist but redeemable cop in last year’s “Crash,” which won a best picture Oscar. And he was the only cast member to receive an Oscar nomination. It was his first and reminded many of the promise he showed as a conflicted, rebellious drug addict trying to get straight in 1989’s independent hit “Drugstore Cowboy.”
Now, he’s able to use some of his more mature attributes, such as that gravelly voice given to dropping an “r” here and there, and an ability to be frighteningly gruff yet also warily introspective, to play characters completely unlike himself.
But at the same time, he’s still as tall, dark, handsome and lean as he was when, as a New York high-school student, he was cast in 1979’s “Over the Edge.” Dillon subsequently attracted idolatrous attention in a series of late-1970s and early-1980s films like “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish.”
He looks young enough – and stylishly attractive enough – to get cast in the romantic dramas and comedies for which he’s become most well-known lately, like “Beautiful Girls,” “There’s Something About Mary” (with former girlfriend Cameron Diaz), “Wild Things,” and this summer’s “You, Me and Dupree.”
“It’s funny how that works,” Dillon says of his “Crash” nomination. “I don’t think it’s my best work. I think it’s good, there’s nothing wrong with it, I’m comfortable with what I did. But that’s the sort of randomness of the way the business works. That was the movie people recognized me for in that way.”
Personally, Dillon says, cautioning that this is not meant as a criticism of “Crash,” he tends to like a different kind of movie. “The films that are my favorites have a tendency to not be emotionally manipulative in any way, like film noirs or films that are harder, usually.”
“Factotum” is that kind of movie, he says. And Bukowski certainly has a hard edge. Dillon first had read his fiction when in his 20s and admired the author’s iconoclastic nature.
Bukowski came to the U.S. from Germany as a child. While he published his first story at age 24 in 1944 and kept writing, he also kept drinking and eventually developed a literary mystique for his boozy ways. Bukowski wrote a screenplay for an earlier film modeled on his life, 1987’s “Barfly” with Mickey Rourke, and was the subject of the 2003 documentary “Bukowski: Born Into This.” Ben Gazzara also played a character inspired by him in 1981’s “Tales of Ordinary Madness.”
Norwegian director Bent Hamer (“Kitchen Stories”) chose “Factotum” for his first English-language project and wrote the adapted screenplay with producer Jim Stark.
“Matt Dillon is not the first one you think about,” says 49- year-old Hamer, his English a bit halting. “Matt was brought in by Fisher Stevens, the guy who plays Manny (with whom Chinaski bets on horses). … For me, the immediate reference wasn’t 15 years of romantic comedies, it was back to the earlier Matt which I liked so much.”
In “Factotum,” Dillon has gotten good at playing downbeat. He’s mastered a quizzical facial expression, a restrained and often-hushed sense of world-weary confusion and even depression.
“He’s a maintenance drinker. Drinking is a part of who he is,” Dillon says. “He’s an unrepentant drunk. It’s his muse in an odd way.”
With “Factotum” following “Crash” in re-establishing Dillon’s credentials as a serious actor, it’s become accepted wisdom to say he’s revived a career. But he doesn’t feel that at all and points out that people who say that don’t realize he spent time in Cambodia as the director, star and co-writer of a little-seen 2002 film called “City of Ghosts.”
“Right around when I got nominated, actors came and asked me, ‘Wow, did you drop out of the business? You must have hated Hollywood because I haven’t seen you around,”‘ Dillon says. “And I’d say, ‘Honey, if you knew where I was, you’d understand.’ But nobody knew because the film really didn’t get out. It didn’t get any kind of release. So nobody understood where I went. But in many ways it was one of the greatest moments for me as a creative and professional person.”
