Chrystal’s Ray McKinnon

It’s not every day that your first film wins an Academy Award. Of course, not everybody is setting out to change the way people think about an entire region of the country, either.

A Southerner, from the tip of his drawl to the toe of his cowboy boots, Ray McKinnon is the opposite of the bad-ass film characters he usually plays. He speaks so softly I have to strain to hear him. He’s polite. And when I gush about Chrystal, his first feature film—which moved me, as both a critic and a Southerner—he is humble and gracious.

McKinnon’s first short, The Accountant, won the 2001 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. No stranger to the industry, however, he has appeared in dozens of films, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Apollo 13 and The Missing. He starred as the Rev. H.W. Smith on the acclaimed HBO series Deadwood. And he’ll continue to act, but he’s definitely found a vocation on the other side of the camera.

Chrystal received a standing ovation when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004. It went on to be selected by other major festivals around the country and Europe, including the Stockholm International Film Festival where Lisa Blount won the Best Actress Award for her performance as the female lead.

Like The Accountant, Chrystal tells a dramatic story about Southerners that’s both funny and tragic. It’s a skill to effectively combine the two, but McKinnon warns against too many literal interpretations, especially with Chrystal—something that’s bound to irritate certain critics. “We’re losing the ability to tell stories,” he explains, his voice filled with passion. “We’re getting so used to this literal explanation that we can’t see parables anymore. Even our television shows are reality-based. We’re losing our myths and our legends.”

Blount, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for her 1982 performance in An Officer and a Gentleman, plays Chrystal, a woman who has waited 16 years for her husband to return from prison. When Joe (Billy Bob Thornton) finally does come home, he finds an emotional wreck of a wife—a woman so devastated by the car accident that killed her child and sent her husband to prison that she’s searching for answers with teenage boys. Rather than despising Chrystal, however, we sympathize with her. She’s in terrible pain—physically, from the broken neck she suffered in the accident, and mentally, because she’s never been able to move beyond the trauma of her lost child. But she loves Joe, and she’s been waiting for him.

Before prison, Joe earned his living growing marijuana, which is why he drove them all off the side of a hill trying to outrun the cops. Now, the local kingpin is Snake (McKinnon), a stringy-haired addict with an ego bigger than his pickup truck. Snake wants Joe to pony up the pot, but Joe isn’t interested, so Snake takes things into his own hands.

Set in a hollow near Eureka Springs in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas, Chrystal’s cinematography is as beautiful as the land’s lush, rolling hills. The score—so central to the film’s tone it’s almost a character—boasts an a capella rendition of Roscoe Holcomb’s “Moonshiner,” Clarence Ashley’s “Coo Coo Bird” and a song by Harry Dean Stanton. Blount also sings a bluegrass number called “Sugar Babe.” “We wanted the score to not only reflect the heaviness of Chrystal and Joe’s world, but also the beauty that could be mined from that sweet sadness,” McKinnon says. “I wasn’t interested in the standard ‘hillbilly score.’ I wanted something more classical that would truly underscore the story.”

The story of Chrystal definitely stands out. Watching it, film festival audiences have howled with laughter and cried, McKinnon says. But not everyone has grasped what he’s trying to do. “Back in L.A., people just didn’t get the film, so we took it down South. And whether or not it was their kind of story, Southern critics say it’s real,” McKinnon declares, with no small amount of satisfaction.

Unlike most “Southern” movies, which are swathed in mythical moonlight and magnolias, Chrystal deals with real people—and real accents. Thornton was raised in Arkansas, and almost all the other actors are from the South, too. This wasn’t the initial plan, but became necessary when many non-Southerners showed up at the auditions using accents as far from the real thing as New Coke from Classic. “There’s a long tradition of Southern writers, and well-respected Southern writers,” McKinnon says. “And yet, for whatever reason, Hollywood has been very unwilling to let Southern filmmakers film Southern stories. Therefore, we get these hackneyed, badly-done Southern movies. Most of them don’t go beyond the surface of the Southern thing.”

It’s the reason McKinnon formed his own production company. Together with Blount, his co-star and wife of eight years, and Walton Goggins, who plays Chrystal’s cousin in the film, McKinnon formed Ginny Mule Pictures prior to making The Accountant. Their goal is to create top-quality films that present an accurate portrait of the South. “Part of our vision is a response to seeing too many Southern-themed films being made by people who didn’t know what they were doing,” says Blount, who co-produced the film with her husband and Goggins.

McKinnon echoes the sentiment. “In those films, I don’t recognize the characters as real people,” he says. “They feel slightly removed or almost real, like Southern Shakespeare—replete with British actors, no less. Who talks like that, anyway? Not anybody I know.” We grouse for awhile, about all the films that are supposed to be Southern but instead give us migraines from rolling our eyes so much, and I can hear the same frustration in McKinnon’s voice that I’ve heard from so many Southerners. “We’re talking about half a continent,” McKinnon says. “It’s not like it’s this small-genre movie type.”

When I ask him why he often plays evil characters, he sighs and enlightens me about the realities of the acting profession. “To pay my insurance and the mortgage, I’ve had to play some stereotypical Southern guys in my career,” he admits. “Generally they’re one-dimensional, and generally they’re bad guys, because that’s what you play as a character actor. You don’t get to play the hero.”

He saw Snake, on the other hand, as an entirely different kind of character. “I was interested in taking an archetype like Snake and making him really smart,” McKinnon says, “three dimensional. He’s an evil S.O.B., but a smart S.O.B. I also wondered what makes a guy like him tick, and it’s this huge ego. It was fun being able to play an egomaniac unapologetically.”

McKinnon laughs. “There were two ways I could go with his character. I could go against the stereotype of the hillbilly or just ratchet it up about ten notches, put him in overalls and get him steeped up on speed,” he says. “Snake’s partly making fun of the stereotype of his people. He understands that—he’s not a fool.”

In one memorable scene, Joe challenges Snake to a fight. “Just come on outside, after you get finished kissing on your sister,” Joe says. “You and I have business.” Instead of standing and raising his fists, Snake laughs. It’s a brilliant stroke of acting and directing that speaks volumes about McKinnon’s filmmaking. “Oh, yeah,” he says, agreeing that it lets everyone in on the joke. “So often you see Southern characters that don’t have a sense of humor. They’re the butt of someone else’s joke, but they don’t have their own sense of humor. And that’s a real putdown, to say that they aren’t bright enough to have a sense of humor about who they are, what they are and where they are.”

At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2001, McKinnon showed some of the feisty spirit that inspires so many independent filmmakers in his acceptance speech. “We’d like to thank the Academy for this wonderful honor in a category that still allows for a person who is just burning to make a movie, to load the camera in the back of his daddy’s old truck, gather up some talented dreamers and do it,” he said, holding up the golden statue. “And if the stars align and the fates conspire, that person might find themselves standing right here at the Good God Almighty Academy Awards.”

As someone who’s always wanted to reverse the cinematic stereotype about the South, Ray McKinnon is certainly answering the call.