I interviewed Goodloe Byron earlier this week regarding his role in A Public Ransom and given below is an excerpt from our online conversation.
What was your approach to your role as Bryant in the film?
I have been familiar with this story of Pablo’s since I was sixteen, I think, though he didn’t write the one thousand word short story until nearly a decade later. But I remember the spot where he discussed the idea of A Public Ransom very well, as it is a few blocks from my current apartment. But there were never any characters, there was just the idea of some sinister creep who kidnaps people and ransoms them out to the public via graffiti.
So years later when Pablo said that we were going to make a movie out of the thing, I already had an idea in mind—not for the character per se, but of the gravitas of such an act. Pablo was taking a different tact with the script, so that the focus would be on the person who finds the ransom rather than the kidnapper. As it was written the character of Bryant (the creep) is more of a tool to investigate the primary character. Steven (the “protagonist”, for lack of a better word) is full of energy and talk, but at the core he is just very empty and inert. The Bryant character was written to have an energy and vivaciousness to match this, but to be someone who just had more “follow-through”.
But originally, the story he told me when we were sixteen, was about the kidnapper, a kind of Leopold-Loeb figure, except without the trace of innocence that marked those two little monsters. So I wanted to play it this later way. I wanted to strip out all of the energy, and really much of the familiarity of Bryant, and turn him from a counterpoint to Steven, make him a monster that was sitting just off to the side of the film. Continue reading “In Conversation with Goodloe Byron”
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