David Gordon Green talks 'Manglehorn', working through the creative process with Al Pacino and more

“I was evacuating from a hurricane when I was working on that show, Eastbound and Down, and I was in in North Carolina,” Green said in a conference call. “I was lost and confused and was trying to find my buddy, and he asked me what street I was on. And I looked up and I said, ‘I’m on Manglehorn Street,' which is where I was, in the middle of nowhere. And I thought, ‘Man, that would be a cool name for a movie.’”

But he discovered it was more than just a cool name. Tucked inside the back of his mind, something stuck out about it. It was the beginning of the spark, though one Green wouldn’t realize until he met Al Pacino the following week.

“I was just talking to him, and I was thinking about this strange, very small, fragile, gentle, funny side of him,” he continued. “It was more the Scarecrow than the Scarface of Pacino. And then I thought, ‘That’s just a cool guy to make a movie about.’ It would be cool to make a movie with him called Manglehorn.”

So it began with Manglehorn, Green’s tenth feature film available now for purchase. His third independent project in a row preceding a string of studio comedies, including Pineapple Express, Your Highness and The Sitter, it brings the filmmaker back to his softer, quieter roots. Just like his preceding works, Prince Avalanche and Joe, it invites the director to explore and investigate his more introspective side — the same one that helped make his name with George Washington,  All the Pretty Girls and Undertow. It continues to serve him well.

Also starring Holly Hunter, Chris Messina and Harmony Korine, best known as the director behind Spring Breakers, Manglehorn centers on a lonely locksmith with a checkered past who contemplates the decisions he’s made in life as it approaches the end. Similar to how the rest came into place, the decision on our lead AJ Manglehorn’s profession developed when Green needed to change the locks on his house.  When he paid a visit to his local locksmith, he was taken aback by what he found.

“I went to his locksmith’s place and I thought, ‘I should make a movie in this locksmith’s house,” he said. “It looks really cool; it’s just a couple blocks from my house. I should make a movie with Al Pacino called Manglehorn here.”

Shortly thereafter then, he went over to see his neighbor, Paul Logan, gave him the idea and commissioned him to write the script. That’s how Manglehorn came to be.

“A little unofficial, but it worked out really great,” Green notes. Indeed, in his exploration of character, subtext and insight into “a strange man that — on the surface — was not very lovable, but once you peel back the layers begins to feel a little more complex and emotional human being,” as the filmmaker calls him, Green continues to search the humorous and the melancholy in everyday life, found in normal people and not, what makes them ordinary and extraordinary for simply being who they are, and how they’ve changed throughout their lives.

Using real locations barely surviving with rich history, he set out to find the rugged depth within his own backyard. Every location in the film is a walking distance from him in Austin, TX. They’re all remnants of small towns and lower income properties, and most have been demolished. Places like where Manglehorn lives no longer exist, moved over to become a duplex. Even the locksmith's house has been torn down. Everything comes to represent the ideology of the characters.

“We’re really filming dying locations that I thought were beautiful, said a lot about Austin history and characters and were a great backdrop for a story about characters who are a little bit out of time and try to struggle to keep up with the world around them,” he confessed. “Every now and then, we’d step back and see the skyline of Austin and, literally, the weirdest thing was that everything we filmed was like a 10 minute walk from downtown, and yet we still feel like we’re in this small town… It begins with inspiration from real places.”

It represents the flaws we’ve come to associate as commonplace in our lives, which can also include our handwriting, at least in this case. Representing the character’s internal anguish, Manglehorn spends a great amount of time penning letters to the woman who ripped away his heart, and Pacino found it important to put down the letters himself. But there was one problem.

“His handwriting sucks,” Green openly admits. “You can’t read a word of it. But it was important to him, and in the middle of the day, sometimes at lunch, sometimes at the end of the day, he would go to my trailer and he would record these letters. He’d write them, read them and then write them, and other times he would close his eyes and say what he’s feeling and improve things. Then we put together some things I thought were really interesting. Some things were what the screenwriter wrote, some things were what he wrote and some things he would just improvise.”

In doing this, he captures what often garners his work comparisons to Terrence Malick through his Southern lyricalness. It not only follows him throughout his career, but it’s deeply prevalent throughout this film. He’s not entirely sure why this is the case, but on the topic, he did find himself having dinner with the filmmaker alongside Pacino and Hunter at one point in production — which he naturally considered “incredible.”

“It was totally bizarre,” he said with a fair amount of giddiness. “I was getting stories about when Malick tried to convince Pacino to be in Days of Heaven and things like that — which was, oh man, so juicy for a guy like to me to be in on those dinners.”

But Malick has become an inspiration and a friend to the filmmaker, and he has found such comparisons to be inspiring and affecting, especially during his early days. In his mind, though, he considerably moved away from making such movies. But he can see Manglehorn come across as a return in some ways —especially with the strange and magical aspects found inside.

He imagines himself as perhaps a character actor would, by his own admission —seeing how he can disappear into something different, into a world he wants to live in for a year. Sometimes that becomes something like Prince Avalanche, with only 15 crew members, two actors and one location. Or sometimes it becomes as ambitious and comedic as Pineapple Express, Your Highness or his latest film, Our Brand is Crisis, starring Sandra Bullock, coming to theaters on October 30.

“I just shake it up and confuse my mother as best as possible,” he said.

When it comes to working with Pacino and Korine, however, there’s more than great volumes he’s gleamed by having worked with them. He regularly communicates with Korine via e-mail, and he considers both of them good friends and philosophical resources.

“As creative people, in making things that don’t necessarily go with the grain of the industry, we’re constantly there to reassure each other or challenge each other and call each other out on our bulls**t, and the more friends that you can have from the diversity of backgrounds, cultures, countries and generations, I think the smarter you can navigate what you really want,” he said. “Because we all get kind of confused with what we want — because you’re so driven by what money will get you, or what celebrities will achieve for you and how that makes your life easier or more complicated.”

“But sometimes it takes the reminder of these very strange friendships to get it; to get the pressures of a creative process that’s become a massive industry,” he continued.

In doing so, Green captures something distinct, heartfelt and very human by design. In having something become his own, however, he sometimes need to rely on the trust of others to help get by — including David Wingo and Explosions in the Sky, providing another original score for the new film, as well as his longtime editor Colin Patton.

The music helped bring harmony to Manglehorn, to show the energy and chaos inside his brain even when his body moves slowly. It helped bring an immersion into the film. He let Patton become the technician, only coming on half days to not feel like he’s constantly there to tell them what to do. When it comes to creating these collaborations, particularly for these indie films, he needs it to come down to not only personality, but those he can rely on to provide the goods in a pinch.

“Sometimes when you’re with a collaborative trust, you’ll know they’ll do cool s**t, and you’re excited to see what they do,” Green said. “It’s nice to have those creative collaborations, even when there’s conflict a little bit. It's good to know you have someone who loves the movie as much as you do — if not more so. When it comes down to crunch time, you know they're not just there to look at the clock but they want to make it as good as possible."