Yahoo had an eight-minute movie interview with Bruce Greenwood on his portrayal of JFK in Thirteen Days. It seemed to be an interview exclusively for Yahoo, not pulled from any other interviews and clearly not from a press kit.
WHAT DID YOU LEARN?
Well, I had only the most cursory understanding and appreciation of who he was -- that he was a Prince...who presided over Camelot with alacrity and grace and ease....And I realized later after beginning to read that he was really driven intellectually...A voracious reader himself and [he] felt very deeply about many issues. And he wasn't just a great looking entertainer and chief.
RESEARCH:
I read voluminous amounts and when I tired of reading, I'd watch tape or film and then when I went to bed I'd listen to cassettes.
STUDYING:
Once you start studying it's just patently obvious that man, you better read every second, because you can't even read it all -- even about this fortnight. No....[I] never stopped studying....
RELATIONSHIP WITH KENNETH O'DONNELL
Very honest, I think. They'd been friends for 15 years. And O'Donnell was known to be an opinionated guy, who was willing to share his opinions regardless of what anybody thought, so I think JFK had a great deal of respect for him in that regard. Because when a president -- I gather, people tend to want to tell a President what he'd like to hear. There were many instances of that in the research I did. And O'Donnell was quite clearly not made of that kind of stuff. He was very willing to...
THE ACCENT:
Some accents are easy for me and this one wasn't particularly; it was a bit elusive. And it's not really up to me to say whether I succeeded or not. Everybody will have a different opinion of that, I'm sure. But I worked at it a lot. Steven Culp and I spent a lot of time together in the early days before we started shooting, speaking at one another in our own accents to try to avoid having them drift into the same territory. So we could each be....different.
THE JFK LOOK:
They experimented with some false teeth...When Steven put them in, people went, "Oh, that's interesting." When I put them in, people went "Oh....leave the room, man. This is terrible." I looked absurd with the teeth in. And we toyed around with the hair a lot. And we tried to get away with just using my own hair, but I haven't got the great clops of hair that he did. So they eventually brought in a little tail of hair that they glued to my forehead.
THE MOST DIFFICULT SCENE
There's a scene that's not in the movie that I worked really hard on, where I give a speech, the Pulaski Day speech in Buffalo to 500,000 poeple. It doesn't make any sense now because, of course, it isn't in the movie, so you can't use it as a reference. But I worked very hard on it, just to get the energy to where I thought it should be. I watched an incredible amount of tape and cobbled together more of the speech than was originally in the script.....'cause I loved it so much. And then Roger let me do the whole thing. And then, when I watched it, it was rushed...it was rushed.... In a sense I'm kind of grateful it didn't get into the movie beause I worked so hard on it and it didn't quite....hit it....All the way throught the movie, of course, there's stuff as an actor ......[where I say] I could have done that differently
