Caleb Landry Jones: running with the big dogs.
The Lounge digital cover. Image: Paul Grandsard/Getty.
Award-winning actor Caleb Landry Jones was born and raised in Texas, where he formed the band Robert Jones. After a couple of years gigging and recording in between acting jobs, he moved to LA, soon achieving fame for films such as Get Out, Nitram and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. He has continued to write and release music throughout his award-winning acting career, with his fourth album Hey Gary, Hey Dawn out tomorrow.
Recording was fitted in around the film work that financed it. “I wrote the album over COVID. A year out of COVID I got into the studio and recorded it. I went to go do DogMan. Did DogMan, came back, finished the mixes. Went to Scotland and made a movie. Came back and went to Austin to put a band together.” Jones admits that his working method has made recording unnecessarily expensive in the past. “One guy in a giant room with a keyboard for a month, smoking who knows how many joints, and coming back and then saying to start over who knows how many times. It’s not the most productive way of working. So I’ve only been able to make music because of films. The label put something in too – it just goes away so fast because of the way I do it.”
The team in the studio was the same as for his previous albums, The Mother Stone and Gadzooks Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, so it took less time to work out “the temperament of how you and the engineers are going work, where everyone’s headspace is, are we on the same planet? This is the fourth record with the same guys, so all that stuff gets faster with each album, just like making a movie; there’s a shorthand that gets better and better.” However, with producer Nic Jodoin recovering from a serious car accident, more of the recording work fell to engineers Franky Fox and Travis Pavur, with Jodoin coming in to check out the mixes. The other big difference this time around was that the album was conceived with a view to live performance. “We keep making the records differently, so each time we’re giving ourselves a new set of challenges. We tried to make it more naked and more so that other folks could play it.”
Jones then assembled a band to join him during a month-long residency in Austin, Texas earlier this year. “We had eleven folks: three horn players, two singers, bass, two guitars, drums, a keyboard player and me. But we just had a little stage, so it probably looked like twenty-something.” Hey Gary, Hey Dawn is released on 5th April with cover artwork by Jones. “All of those drawings were made while working on the DogMan movie. Any time I wasn’t working on DogMan, I was drawing and drinking the free bottle of champagne that the hotel would give me. So there’s a lot of drawings of people singing and performing, and some wigs and stuff like that – I’m sure Douglas very much had something to do with that.”
“I was trying to fight for no lines, but Virginie [Besson-Silla, the producer] on the day said, ‘You should say something.’ I was so angry, but she was so right. I was so nervous of not knowing what to say, or not saying the right thing.”
Douglas is the eponymous DogMan of Luc Besson’s 2023 thriller, in which Jones stars alongside over one hundred dogs. “The script was wild, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out, especially with real dogs. But just to play it, I didn’t know where to start, didn’t know how to go about it.” Jones says that he deliberately seeks out scripts that unsettle him in this way. “This dread or this feeling of fuck. If that feeling comes then something is good – there’s something that you’re drawn in by, but also something that you’re not sure how it’s going to work.” It was his first time working with Besson and getting to know his oeuvre and method better. “Before we started, the last film of his that I’d probably seen was Lucy [2014] in the theatre with the girl I was dating; she wanted to go back and see it twice. And then two weeks into filming I watched The Family [Besson’s 2013 black comedy] – different to what we were getting into, and yet I was starting to see some of the similarities. The more I’m getting to know him, the more you’re remembering his work, and seeing other work, and you’re also seeing the work in the work you’re doing. It’s pretty fascinating.”
A key moment of the film is when Doug tracks down his former drama teacher, Salma, hoping she will reciprocate his love, only to discover that she’s already in a relationship. “He meets this angel who shows him magic, and through magic it feels like there’s a reason for his life. He really thinks deep down that once she sees him, she will fall in love with him again, if she hasn't been in love with him this whole time. So there’s this delusion that gets shattered, and then without that he’s got nothing left.” He found Besson a considerate director, whose careful planning meant that even for such crucial scenes Jones was not expected to do more takes than absolutely necessary. “He positioned the cameras to get that in very few takes, not asking me twenty-seven times from fifteen angles, like some other folks would.” He also took time to talk things through with Jones. “We discussed almost everything. The only thing unplanned was, what was Douglas going to say at the end of the picture, what were those lines going to be? I was trying to fight for no lines, but Virginie [Besson-Silla, the producer] on the day said, ‘You should say something.’ I was so angry, but she was so right. I was so nervous of not knowing what to say, or not saying the right thing.”
Image: CTK
It was important to Jones that Besson filmed real dogs, with their trainers appearing on screen during the stunts. He rues the decline in creativity that comes from a heavy reliance on special effects, although he believes a few directors, such as Matthew Vaughn (who directed him in 2011’s X-Men: First Class), are still taking an inventive approach to action sequences. “But it’s getting harder and harder to do because of special effects. I love how much of everything in DogMan is practical. I think there’s a little CGI under my eyes to make me look a little younger when coming to see Salma, or to fix the pinkie from getting shot, make that look a little better. But other than that, everything is, and it’s so nice to see.”
In between DogMan and the Austin residency, Jones was in Scotland shooting the forthcoming historical drama Harvest, which left him with a lingering Scottish accent – “It wasn’t going away even though I knew we were done, I kept saying ‘Aye’ all the time” – and next month he’ll rejoin Besson on the set of his adaptation of Dracula. “That’ll be in Paris. Second unit, we’ll get to be flying around, get those Carpathian Mountains at some point.” Jones has not yet had time to start building out his character, but he’s looking forward to the process. “Like with DogMan I’ve got some idea, and I’m sure it’s going to be extremely different, but I’m sure there’ll be some purple, I’m sure there’ll be some blue and red – there’ll be a lot of red. It’s the year of the dragon, so it’s perfect timing.”
Hey Gary, Hey Dawn is out 5th April. DogMan is now available for streaming.
Author: Rachel Goodyear