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 the woodsman interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Kevin Bacon on playing a paedophile. Walter is a convicted paedophile. Just released from prison into an anonymous American city, he gets a job in a lumberyard and quietly attempts to restart his life. If only it were that easy. His sister shuns him, his brother-in-law will visit but only warily. And a local detective won’t let him forget his crimes. Then there’s the young girl he sees on his bus home, whom he starts to follow…Typically, if a character like Walter is even put on film, he’s the unequivocal villain of the piece. So having Walter as the lead character and played by Kevin Bacon, himself a movie star, is a bold switch. Which, in Bacon’s view, is the point: “There’s an impetus in filmmaking to demonize a character like this, to make him into a monster as a tool for the hero to eliminate,” Bacon elucidates. “Which is a very powerful thing, because you can’t get a worse character than someone who does bad things to children. The reality is you can’t pick these guys out in a crowd. And, to me, the fact that they’re not monsters is a much more frightening thing.”  Based on Steven Fechtner’s play of the same name, director Nicole Kassell’s adaptation came to Bacon when, he claims, he was looking for something completely different, “Something funny or romantic or mainstream,” he notes. “But sometimes it feels like it’s out of your hands. It was like the movie picked me.” His subtle, introverted performance has given him some of the best notices of his varied career, opposite wife Kyra Sedgwick, who plays the feisty yet emotionally damaged co-worker that Walter becomes involved with. “I didn't even want to like it,” advises Sedgwick, remembering her husband first discussing the project. “But I read it and it was just one of the best scripts I’d ever read. I told him he had to do it.” She also had reservations over appearing as an onscreen couple (“I didn’t want to get in the way of Kevin being great in the movie”) but director Kassell managed to assuage her fears.  For Bacon himself there were bigger concerns. “I don’t really know any answers and I don’t think the film is saying this is what we need to do about this significant problem,” he considers. “But I do know that sweeping it under the rug, pretending it doesn’t exist, we’re kidding ourselves.”
Leigh Singer
The Woodsman, on national release 25 February 05.
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