Oscar Winner Jon Voight Talks About His New Film THE PAINTER!

Introduction

In The Painter, an ex-CIA operative turned painter is thrown back into a dangerous world when a mysterious woman from his past resurfaces. Now exposed and targeted by a relentless killer and a rogue black ops program, he must rely on skills he thought he left behind in a high-stakes game of survival. Charlie Weber (How to Get Away with Murder), Academy Award-Winner Jon Voight (Coming Home), and Madison Bailey (Outer Banks) star in this edge-of-your-seat thriller.

The Legendary Jon Voight

Jon Voight achieved stardom with his portrayal of the street hustler Joe Buck in the groundbreaking film Midnight Cowboy (1969) and went on to have a successful career taking on challenging leading and character roles in a wide range of movies and television shows.

Voight began acting while in high school and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He moved to New York City and studied under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Voight made his Broadway debut in 1961 in the role of Rolf in The Sound of Music.

He continued working in theatre through most of the 1960s and in addition began making guest appearances on such television shows as Naked City, The Defenders, Coronet Blue, and Gunsmoke. Voight’s first film appearance was in the title role of the low-budget Fearless Frank (1967). He also had a small part in John Sturges’s Hour of the Gun (1967) before he was cast in the Academy Award-winning Midnight Cowboy. He garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance.

Voight appeared in Mike Nichols’s war comedy Catch-22 and starred as an angry young man in The Revolutionary, both in 1970. He delivered a memorable performance as a city businessman forced to fight for his life in Deliverance (1972), and he portrayed the writer Pat Conroy in the film memoir Conrack (1974).

Voight’s later films included Holes (2003), National Treasure (2004), and Transformers (2007). In 2017 he appeared as the gruff father of an art dealer who befriends a homeless man in Same Kind of Different As Me, which was based on the best-selling memoir of the same name. His movie credits from 2018 included the family drama Orphan Horse. In addition, Voight played the father of the title character in the TV series Ray Donovan (2013–20), for which he received Emmy Award nominations in 2014 and 2016; he also appeared in Ray Donovan: The Movie (2022).

In 2019 Voight was awarded a National Medal of Arts, cited “for his exceptional capacity as an actor to portray deeply complex characters.” (Britannica)

Interview

Cinema Scholars’ own Glen Dower recently sat down with Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight to discuss his new feature film, The Painter. They talk about playing the mentor role, the importance of good casting, and turning down the lead in Love Story, among other topics.

(Edited for content and clarity)

Glen Dower:

Mr. Voight, how are you, Sir?

Jon Voight:

I’m good, thanks, Glen. Good to see you.

Glen Dower:

You too, and Happy New Year.

Jon Voight:

Thank you!

Glen Dower:

We are here to talk about your new movie, The Painter, of course. What can you tell us about your character Byrne?

Jon Voight:

Oh my gosh. Well, we’ve got to be very careful about what we say about this film because what the film is, it’s a journey and it’s full of ups and downs and surprises. So I don’t want to tell you the story of my character because there are a lot of those adventurous moments in this film where his character is revealed at different places. And so I don’t want to go through too much of it. I know he’s been associated with the CIA and he has this person who he’s kind of raised, that he deals with in the film.

And the person who he’s almost raised, as I say, is an operative who is extremely gifted as a kind of a superhero person who deals with violence and he can handle himself very well. They send him into impossible situations and he can handle it. So that’s part of the fun of the movie he’s sent into these places. And you think, how can any human being survive this? And he just has the gifts and that’s why they call him the painter. They also call him the painter because he does paint, but there are two meanings to that word associated with this fellow that Charlie Weber plays.

Glen Dower:

We can say the rule is very layered, which must be part of the appeal as well. We can tell from the opening scene, you’re having a lot of fun. Your introduction is not exactly dressed to the nines, perhaps not as glamorous as your Midnight Cowboy introduction.

Jon Voight:

Good!

Glen Dower:

You are playing the mentor role, so to speak. Why do you think we as an audience love the character of the mentor, the father figure, and the guide? Do you think it’s because we love The Hero’s Journey so much, or do we love the mentor roles because they are usually played by fantastic actors like yourself? Why do we love mentors so much?

Jon Voight:

I think we all need mentors. We need wisdom as a god. And when a mentor turns out to be not so wise, that’s a tragedy because we look up to all the mentors as teachers. If a teacher is teaching and we’re facing that situation continuously, we see teachers are not taking care of the kids. That’s a terrible thing because the kids look up to these teachers and they’ll do anything to appeal to the teacher or give the teacher credit for knowledge that perhaps he or she doesn’t have. And so mentorship is a big deal. We tend to rely on people if somebody says that’s the best, and so you go, oh, okay. Then you give part of yourself over to them. That’s a good question. That’s a good area to investigate. What’s the responsibility of mentors and what makes a proper mentor? A Guru?

Glen Dower:

A guru. What a great word. With this role, it would seem a lot of areas or facets of your career have come together: the lack of vanity, as you are in disguise so often, but you also have that leadership/authoritative role you have played so convincingly before. Do you think past roles have led to roles like this now, Mr. Voight? Where you can play dress-up, shoot some guns, carry heavy exposition, ‘I got this!’

Jon Voight:

Yeah, that’s very good, Glen. That’s very good. All the stuff that, the danger zones, right? I think casting is everything. And if you get the right person who can play a mentor, some people can play that because of what they’ve done in the past and because of their personalities, whatever it is. And when you get to my age, maybe you can do that a little bit so people feel comfortable with me playing a role like that. But I understand, I’m always looking at casting myself. When I look at something, I say, well, is this role right for me? Is that something that I should be playing?

And I haven’t turned down too many things, but I have occasionally turned down something. I mean, I famously turned down Love Story for instance, as a movie. And Ryan O’Neal passed away very recently, so I’ll give my tip of the hat to Ryan. They’d come to me before Ryan, I was a hot item because I was coming out of Deliverance or something like that. And they offered me the part and I said, no, I can’t do this part. And they said, why? I said, I’ll complicate it, I’ll make it too complicated. And that’s a very astute thing for a young actor to say, do you see? I said I think I’m not the right guy for it. I’m too cerebral, I’m too this and whatever it is. And I think I was right.

I think Ryan was just the right tone for it. A good American fellow, a straightforward kind of character. And he’s a good actor. Ryan O’Neal was a wonderful actor and he was a movie star. That’s another thing, he’s a movie star. I remember when Al Pacino was introduced to someone, Richard Gere, I think it was, and they said he’s the next Al Pacino. And Al watched some of his work, which was very impressive I must say and he said, he’s a movie star. That’s amazing. First of all, Al is one of my friends. He is a dear friend of mine. And I’m always amazed at his insights. And that was a good example. He’s a movie star and he was a movie star.

And I think that I would say the same thing about Ryan O’Neill. He’s a movie star. I am an actor a little more complicated. I’ll go in different directions. Not that I didn’t have some clout as a movie actor, but I was mostly an actor. Interesting. The way everybody’s got their role, I think everybody’s got something, once they find it, they become special in our eyes, right? Everyone. So you just have to look and see what the gold is in there and encourage it. And anyway, so I, I’m very fortunate to, had such a long career and have had so many opportunities to express myself in a way that was satisfying to me and impressive to others.

Glen Dower:

Superb. Let’s talk about the director, Kimani Ray Smith, and this is his sophomore directing feature. You have worked with Oliver Stone, Brian de Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann, Michael Bay, and Ben Stiller. How does Mr. Ray Smith rate?

Jon Voight:

I’m glad you mentioned Ben Stiller in that group. It’s very funny.

Glen Dower:

Definitely! Can I just say your tiny cameo in Tropic Thunder still makes me fall off my chair!

Jon Voight:

That’s funny. Well, Ben’s an enormous talent and I’m glad I was in Tropic Thunder for a moment because I think that movie is great. What a great movie. Well, Kimani is, he’s used to being a director, and has nothing but problems. That’s what a director is. The guy said, well, we don’t have the so-and-so for the stunt, we don’t have this whatever, so can we shoot it? So-and-so getting some snow a little later on, we better get that done. What are we going to do? And the director has to handle all those problems. That’s part of it.

Now, the artistic side of it is also very demanding. He’s got to tell the story. The director is the conductor of the orchestra. He’s got to tell the story. So with Kani, he had been a stunt coordinator, which meant that he participated in the storytelling to the degree that the event of the piece required certain stunts. And he had to figure out what was appropriate to the different characters he was and the event of it. So he’s used to making decisions and he’s good with the athletics of stunt work because those guys are athletes. Also, there’s a dangerous aspect in stunt work. They say, well, we’re going to throw the guy out of the building and he lands on a truck. Oh my God, how do you do that?

Well, these stunt guys, they maybe negotiate for the salary of such an event, but then they have to do it and they have to shoot it the proper way. So it looks a certain way and all of that too. Anyway, a stunt coordinator has a lot of things to do with the film and they’re making decisions, story decisions, and they’re making decisions for the security of the film and the effectiveness of the film. So he’s partly a director anyway. Now he wanted Steven Paul who produced this film, and I say Steven really, he’s a producer of the old school. He’s like one of the old moguls. He picks the script, he picks the cast, and he goes on that journey with people like a casting director and looks at different things.

And then he watches all the film and all of this stuff and chooses, and he develops the script with writers, chooses this story, develops the script, sees it on its way, and then at the end he comes in and he supervises the editing and chooses the music and finishes up, does the mix in the end too. I mean, he does everything right. Anyway. He said to me about Kani, he said, we worked with him as a stuntman on some of the earlier films. And he said Kani knows the story very well. He is a story guy. Well, that’s a big one. That’s the big one. The guy who can tell a story.

So with that information, with that assessment of Kimani, Stephen Paul allowed him to direct this film. And because it has so many stunts in it, it’s so filled with very demanding fight sequences that you need somebody who understands that it’s probably better than the director does it. But anyway, in this case, it turned out to be real that he did these fight sequences magnificently and Charlie Webber turned out to be a terrific athlete and terrific at these fight sequences. He was wonderful. So anyway, that’s how he comes to it. And he, he’s the real deal. He’s a good director. I got along very well with him and we collaborated on things and he’s good energy. So anyway, I’m very glad for him. He’s the real thing. And he’ll do other movies now.

Glen Dower:

‘He’s a real deal’. Mr. Voight, of course, I could talk to you for hours.

Jon Voight:

I was going to say the same thing!

Glen Dower:

But my time is up…I’ll write that down on a T-shirt. But thank you so much for your time, Sir. It’s been a real honor and a pleasure.

Jon Voight:

Great, Glen. God bless, kid.

Directed by Kimani Ray Smith and starring Charlie Weber, Madison Bailey and Jon Voight, The Painter from Paramount Global Content Distribution is in Select Theatres Now and Available to buy digitally on January 9, 2024.

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