After a short stint as a contract killer in Sin City, Josh Hartnett has headed to the City of Angels to take hard-edged noir to the extreme for The Black Dahlia, playing a postwar detective who becomes entangled in the still-legendary murder of Elizabeth Short—and if the dead girl doesn’t bring him enough trouble, he’s caught in a triangle between his partner’s pouty paramour (Scarlett Johansson) and a shadowy sex siren (Hilary Swank). Hartnett trades jabs with Hollywood.com as he reveals the rigors of mixing fight training with three packs of cigarettes a day:
Hollywood.com: What was the bigger allure of this film for you, the James Ellroy novel or the fact that Brian De Palma was at the helm?
Josh Hartnett: Well, Brian came onto the film about two or three years after I got involved. It was a different director at the time, and they hired me. I was hired to play Bucky when I was much too young to play Bucky—I was 23. I recognized how great the material was, though, and I wanted to stick with it. So when the other director dropped out and Brian came on, he hired me just right off the bat because I was still attached to it, which was great, and then I went to talk to him. He didn’t seem to have any interest in talking about the character or anything. We just kind of sat down and had a cup of coffee and looked at each other and said “This is going to be fun,” and told a couple of jokes and that was it. That’s kind of how my relationship has stayed around him. I love him for that.
HW: Were you surprised at how this story dealt with the film noir conventions of the femme fatale and the damsel in distress?
JH: Who is the damsel in distress in this movie? Man, if Madeline Linscott [Hilary Swank] is a damsel in distress, than I am as well. [Laughs] No, I think that it’s the inclination of noir films to pose that question, and then turn it on its head. I think that’s what was part of the intrigue about the films back in ’40’s and ’50’s. It was so opposed to the way that people were used to viewing the family back then. I think that also the kind of Postwar era where people came home and moved to the suburbs and had their families living in a kind of seclusion from these grittier details of life made them lust for it a little bit. That turned Hollywood on its head in a way. Noir was kind of opposed to what Hollywood had kind of grown to expect and market and believe would do well, but people were kind of lusting for that darker side of life, when they were living in such sort of seeming isolation from that darkness.
HW: Bucky and Kay’s relationship is very complex—intimate on one level but also with a lot of distance and cautious circling of each other. How did you and Scarlett approach that—was it an instant collaboration, or did you, too, circle each other at the start?
JH: Well, because of the book the characters are so well-defined, and because the scenario is so clear, it’s almost like all we had to do as actors is develop a shorthand with each other. I think that it was the same with all the actors and their relationships with Brian [De Palma]. We just developed a sort of understanding of each other so that we could move through the , because I think that Ellroy has done most of the work for us with all of the back story and we know how we’re feeling about each of the other characters at any given moment, because it’s in the book. So as actors we didn’t have to manipulate the situation in a way that sometimes you have to. We just had to act.
HW: Being in your twenties, were you allowed much of a voice in things, or did Brian just count on you to trust him because he knew the era in which the film is set?
JH: Working with directors, because I feel that this is such a director’s medium, there are certain points of negotiation, but for the most it’s going to be their movie. So you either get in line with them or you end up disappointed. I have seen, I think, pretty much everything that Brian has done, and I felt like his work made him the perfect person to adapt this book for the screen. That’s all it’s about. It doesn’t matter the age really. Maybe because he’s a little bit older he had a better understanding of this era than a younger director might, but I just felt that his sensibility was right in line with Ellroy‘s sensibility in the novels. There’s a certain dark, wry wit about the whole thing. I felt that his sort of operatic, filmic sense played right into the era and the kind of grandness of the whole situation.
HW: James Ellroy has said recently that he saw a lot of himself in the way that you portrayed Bucky Bleichert. How’d you respond to that—was it intentional on your part?
JH: Well, he didn’t tell me that until Venice, so for me that’s a compliment if he sees himself in what I did, but it was kind of obvious that he had written from a personal perspective, because his first person narrative and because he had said many times that this film or that this book was written in a way to sort of exorcise the demons that were haunting him through his mother’s death—The Dahlia and his mother’s murder were inextricably linked for him. So I assumed that there was some sort of autobiographical tendency to the character, but my job is just to take the work that is on the page, because if I tried to play James in this film it would’ve been a wild film…We spoke once before the film started, and then I believe we didn’t speak again until about three quarters of the way through the film. We didn’t talk about the character that much until after the filming was completed, but you learn about life through guys like that just by watching them and trying to figure out how they do it.
HW: Talk about the preparation for the boxing scenes in the film.
JH: I spent way too much time boxing for this really. I didn’t need to, but I knew that I wasn’t going to need to. I knew that there was only going to be one scene in the film, but Ellroy makes a direct correlation between the way that Bucky acts as a fighter and the way that he acts in his life. He’s Mr. Ice in both, and the way he takes part an opponent is very similar to the way that he takes apart a case. So I got into it. When I got into the ring I felt that I was really starting to understand the character, and so I spent seven months boxing five days a week, four hours a day.
HW: How good did you ultimately get?
JH: It was like they were training me to actually have a fight, and then I would run for an hour everyday. I mean, it was intense as intense could be. My trainers were really into it. They were killing me, and the first few days they put me in the ring to just spar a little, to just show me that it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, and I think that I made it less than a round before I was just passing out. You start hyperventilating. You don’t know how to keep your cool and you don’t know how to pick apart your opponent and you don’t know how to defend yourself. By the end of it I was going seven rounds with thirty second intervals for time off—you usually have a minute off in a normal bout of a full ten round fight—so I was tip-top. But it all just kind of helped me understand the character because it was all about being able to take my time and pick my opponent apart and act precisely at the right moments, and not until then.
HW: How were you able to train so intensely and smoke as much as you do in the film?
JH: That was the hard part. I didn’t smoke through all of the training, and then I when I got to set and had to start smoking again it just tore me apart. I just had to do it. You can see it in the movie. I look sallow. I look sick through a lot of the film, because I am. I’m working 12 hours a day and going to the gym for as many hours as I can, and I actually started eating meat while I was there because the Bulgarian doctor didn’t know what else to do with me. He said, “Do you eat meat?” I said I didn’t, and he goes “Eat meat.” It was literally like I couldn’t walk, I was like anemic or something. I was smoking two packs of Camel Straights a day, plus when I got off of work I was so nic’ed out that I would smoke another pack of like Camel Lights. It actually made me quit smoking for a long time.
HW: Was it hard to quit smoking after you finished the film?
JH: Oh, yeah, yeah, but it was necessary. I could see myself getting older. I could feel myself getting older. It was immediate, because it was so much smoke.
HW: Any secret to kicking the habit?
JH: It hasn’t stuck completely and so no. I can’t give any advice.
HW: Many have said that boxing can be seen as a metaphor for life and how you deal with it. What did you learn about yourself from your training?
JH: I was so focused on the character that I haven’t even thought about that yet. I suppose that it taught me that I’m capable of more than I thought I might have been. I guess that I had never heard that the way you act in sports is a metaphor for the way that you act in life, except through the character. I thought that it had a direct correlation. I wasn’t thinking about me personally. I did push through and I did persevere and I did pretty well. So I’ll take that as a compliment to myself—that’s pretty weird. [Laughs]
HW: Did you and Aaron Eckhart ever accidentally trade real blows?
JH: We ended up hitting each other a couple of times. Aaron got me at that point twice, and that was a pain in the ass. I wanted to get him back, but, you know, we survived it.
HW: And did you ever go a couple rounds in the ring with little Miss Million Dollar Baby herself, Hilary Swank?
JH: No. Apparently someone said that she challenged me to a fight, but I wouldn’t take her up on it. She looks pretty good.
