Carl Franklin’s crime-thriller One False Move, which just received a restored Blu-ray release from Criterion, is one of the great American independent films of the ’90s. Based on an original script by a then–barely known Billy Bob Thornton and his screenwriting partner, Tom Epperson, it follows two groups of characters from different parts of America on a collision course. On the West Coast, a trio of Los Angeles criminals kill several people in a pair of drug-related robberies, flee town, and are tracked by two detectives. The police investigation connects the fugitives to Star City, Arkansas, where one of them (Cynda Williams’s heroin addict, Fantasia) grew up. Star City’s sheriff, an affable good ol’ boy named Dale “Hurricane” Dixon (Bill Paxton), can’t wait for his regular phone calls with the Los Angeles Police Department, which he idolizes, and seems as excited as a kid on Christmas morning when it becomes clear that Fantasia and her two frightening travel companions are on their way to his jurisdiction. Intrigue, violence, and heartbreak follow, depicted by Franklin with a mix of cool-eyed observation and sudden moments of empathy, often for people who other movies tell us don’t deserve any.
In talking to Vulture about One False Move’s lasting resonance, Franklin took us on a tour of film and music history with particular emphasis on blues music, the American independent-film scene in the ’90s, the history of southern American race relations, and film noir, a genre Franklin also channeled in his follow-ups Devil in a Blue Dress and Out of Time. He reflected on his philosophy of filmmaking, which balances a careful attention to visual detail and an openness to sudden inspiration. (We talked freely about what happens in One False Move, too, so consider this a gentle spoiler warning for a 31-year-old movie.)
How did this movie enter your life?
Through Jesse Beaton, who had made quite a splash marketing Kiss of the Spider Woman, Bagdad Cafe, Mona Lisa, River’s Edge, The Trip to Bountiful, She’s Gotta Have It, Dark Eyes, and a lot of other movies. She and her partner, Ben Myron, wanted to start producing. She somehow became friends with Billy Bob Thornton, and Billy Bob had this script he’d written with Tom Epperson. Jesse had met with Larry Estes, who at the time was a rep for Columbia TriStar video. They were funding projects through I.R.S. Records with Miles Copeland, Stewart Copeland’s brother. Larry told Jesse that if I.R.S. Records found a script that they liked, an actor that they would approve of — hopefully a star — and a director that they’d make a movie with her. They had the script. Then Jesse brought me on as a director. Now we had to get the star.
Was Bill Paxton a star at that point?
No. But I always wanted Bill from the start because he just felt like the guy. Bill was this guileless person. If you ever met Bill Paxton, you know that what you saw was what you got.
I interviewed him back when One False Move came out, and I did get that impression. There was something genuinely warm and open about him.
That’s what he was. Bill was always a clear vessel. I just don’t think he was capable of lying. He said what he felt. But even though I knew Bill was the guy, we still had to go through the dance. They wanted us to see Tim Robbins, and he turned us down. Jeff Daniels turned us down. All these various people turned us down. Finally we came back to Bill Paxton, and they said, “Okay,” and so we were able to make the movie with him.
Was it complicated having one of the main cast members, Billy Bob Thornton, also be the co-screenwriter?
Never! He did some rewriting before we started shooting, and I’d done some as well, but there were never any issues when we were shooting. At one point, I remember going to him regarding something in the script, and he said, “Well, you know, I’m an actor now, man. You gotta do what you want to do,” which was great. Of course there were little things that we would do to enliven it as we went, because film is always alive, you know?
Can we talk about the frankness of the script’s discussion of race? It’s not just the use of specific epithets but the way race and racism are woven through the entire story. It’s the backbone of the script — and has to be, considering where everything ends up. Rewatching it again, I wondered if it would be possible to tell a story like that now in that way.
I wonder, too. There are certain things about that script, and certain things about that film, that we were lucky to have done even at that time. The level of violence in the beginning — if people had been really paying attention, I don’t think we would have been able to get away with that. The production company just didn’t have that many expectations for the movie, and I think it surprised them when it did as well as it did. But yeah, in this environment now, there’s so much tiptoeing going on — about everything. It’s a different world now. But I think the use of the N-word in the movie is necessary.
Like in the scene where Dale reflexively uses the word with a Black cop during dinner and his wife kicks him under the table?
Yeah. And then what his wife says afterward: “He just grew up talking that way.” That’s not something that is probably a suitable explanation today. But the thing is you have to see the whole context of the character in order for it not to be [offensive]. It’s very interesting that most Black people I know who’ve seen the film have never been offended by that scene. I’ve never heard any of them say they felt that the film itself was racist because of Dale’s use of that word.
The New Black Wave was in full swing back then, from the mid-’80s all the way to the late ’90s.
I would say there was a renaissance in film generally in the 1990s. We talk about the golden ages of cinema. I think there probably have been three. I guess you could say sometime between the late 1930s and the end of the ’40s was the first one. Certainly the 1970s was another. And the 1990s I think would qualify as well. I think especially in independent film, the ’90s really was a signature time.
Why then, do you think?
I don’t know. I think some of it was because society was changing. Art of that quality usually comes from upheavals in society, and there definitely was something going on. Hip-hop had hit the scene, and music was changing. I think because of that, there was a certain … uncertainty as to what was going to work and what wasn’t going to work in the cinema. In some ways, it was similar to what happened in the 1960s and ’70s when Italian neorealism as well as the whole British Invasion had affected the sensibilities of American filmmakers, and at the same time, the big blockbuster movies from the Hollywood studios weren’t doing so well. But then you got something like Easy Rider and, after that, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. These two small independent films did so well that it kind of made the studio have to think, Oh, let’s take a look at something else here.
Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It also helped to bring in a real interest in independent film in the ’80s and set up the 1990s, certainly for Black filmmakers. There had also been a lot of interesting imports from Brazil in the early ’80s and Germany, too. Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul was a film that also inspired people because of the small amount of money that he made that movie for and the big response to it. An adventurous, renegade spirit was starting to germinate among filmmakers then.
And yet, stylistically, One False Move doesn’t have a lot visually in common with some of those indie-film touchstones from the ’90s because it’s a very patient, formally controlled work. When I watched it again, I was struck by how few shots there are in it compared to a lot of movies being made now and even a lot of movies that were being made then.
Yeah! I don’t shoot a lot of film anyway. But we played a lot of things in one, as they say, because life is kind of more in one, you know? I was always looking for realism. With the advent of music videos, there had been a change in the appetites of young people, at least in terms of what film language was. They liked stuff where there were a lot more angles and brief shots — where it’s visually more energetic, I should say, as opposed to getting inside of a shot and riding the emotion of a shot. Me, I’m always looking for the subtext: What’s happening inside of the visual? What is it that we’re seeing, that we’re feeling, from the visual? That was part of what I was going for.
Speaking of that, a number of really important moments in the story involving a cluster of characters focus mainly on the reaction of one character without cutting back to the others. For example, when Sheriff Dale Dixon is in the restaurant and the two cops from L.A. don’t know he’s there and start disparaging him, you focus on Bill Paxton’s face, and you don’t cut back to the two guys at the table for quite a long time. Why did you do the scene that way?
Because what was important, both for that scene and the whole story, was his emotional response to hearing how they talked about him. He was a guy who had these dreams of being a big-city cop. He had this fantasy of leaving the small town, not just stopping bootleggers and going out and settling domestic disputes but getting involved in more significant crime. He was looking at it in a fantastical kind of a way. And here he was, hearing from the cops that he admired that that’s what he was doing: fantasizing. He’s coming face-to-face with his own reckoning, the destruction of his own dreams in some respects, because they were basically saying that he had no idea about the world he wanted to inhabit. That had to break his heart. In a moment like that, I’m looking for how to communicate the emotional and subtextual information to the audience, to illuminate the driving force behind this character. And the best way to show that is by staying on his face.
What regrets or anxiety do you experience when you, as the director, decide “This is who the scene is about, so we’re focusing on this one person, and we are not getting any footage of the cops back at the table”?
The only anxiety I feel about it is the flak I’m gonna get from the studio. That’s it. But I’m convinced because that’s where my compass comes in — and my compass has to do with what is really being said.
Could you try that philosophy out on a hypothetical scene to illustrate other ways that it might be applied?
You see a character who’s going to a job interview, and the woman doing the interview is very attractive to him. He’s there for the job interview, but he’s falling in love. Falling in love is what the scene is really about, as opposed to him just trying to get the job. Maybe that’s the thing that’s actually motivating him to try to get the job in the first place: the feeling of being incomplete somehow. Where do you place the camera to communicate all that? I would certainly look for those tics in his body, those inadvertent tells that let you know that somehow he’s feeling something other than just the need to get the gig.
Can we talk a little bit about film noir? You’ve made what I consider to be either straight-up neo-noirs or things that have a bit of a classic-noir feeling. Of course Devil in a Blue Dress is the big one. But, also, I think Out of Time fits as well because it’s got that intense, pulpy, compacted plot that older noirs like D.O.A. and The Big Clock have. What noir influence can be found in One False Move?
One False Move is similar to Devil in how it departs from noir. I never thought of noir when I was shooting One False Move. I thought crime-drama. But there are certain noir elements. Fantasia, the Cynda Williams character, becomes a femme fatale. But then again, maybe not really because she’s a victim herself. Maybe it’s a more complex kind of noir. The protagonist of One False Move, as in Devil in a Blue Dress, is not your typical noir character who is already jaded, already cynical, and the caper maybe offers, as in Chinatown, some redemption from the hero’s jaded view. In One False Move, you have Bill Paxton, who has dreams, and the cops who are coming to him are the cynical ones. Dale basically is not cynical. But in his quest to kind of become like his heroes, in his naïveté he ends up being exposed in a way that he hadn’t anticipated and all but being destroyed.
His illusions are shattered, and not just his illusions about being a big-city cop. It’s also that he had this false image of himself as a straight-arrow, honorable guy. He had an extramarital relationship with a 16-year-old who, though she was not legally underage in that U.S. state, was certainly inappropriately younger than him, and there was a huge power differential on top of it, and he never took responsibility for any of it.
No, he didn’t. And so he comes face-to-face with himself in some ways. That’s where the noir element gets turned on its head a little bit.
Many characters have to confront their failures in this film.
Yes, absolutely. The two criminals — Billy Bob’s character, Ray Malcolm, and Michael Beach’s character, Pluto — have robbed drug dealers and feel that this is their big score, but they also have come to terms with their own mistakes. And the city cops who feel that they are so much more capable of handling this crime than the little hick cop, as they’d like to think of him, end up finding out that that is not the case.
I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about the character of Fantasia. You mention that there is a little bit of a femme-fatale quality, but at the same time, she almost seems like a character out of a 1940s or ’50s melodrama. She’s a woman who left her small town with dreams of making it big in Hollywood, and obviously not only did that not work out, she’s degraded and has to limp back home.
I initially thought that Cynda Williams was not right for the role because she was so attractive. I thought that she was too pretty to be with these two guys. I was talked into casting her, and that was such a great gift because she was fantastic. I have a funny story about that, in fact, about that whole character and about trying to cast her. But at any rate —
You’re not gonna tell it?
I can, but I’ll have to use the F-word if I do!
That’s no fucking problem for me!
So, Fantasia was a role that had all of these colors, as you say: She was a bad girl, she was a good girl gone wrong, she was a mother, she was a sexual object in some respects because of her attractiveness, and she was aware of how attractive she was. She uses her wiles when she gets with Bill Paxton in the end to guilt him about something legitimate and get him to let her go. It was the best role for a Black woman at the time. It was just the best. And I saw so many actresses, and all of the young actresses wanted an opportunity to play this role.
So we were in preproduction, and we got a phone call from a woman who wanted to interview me for a magazine called Young Sisters & Brothers. There used to be a restaurant on Cahuenga called the House of Chan Dara. It looked like at one time it had been a residence. It was two small rooms. I met the interviewer at lunchtime to do this interview. It was full. And so she sets up her tape recorder — she’s a young attractive Black woman in her early 20s — and she starts asking me questions. She says, “What were the films that inspired you to make movies? Who were the directors that you were inspired by? What kinds of movies would you like to make? What kinds of statements would you like to make?” And so on. And then about seven or eight minutes into the interview, she stops, turns off the recording, and says, “It’s really important that you listen to everything I have to say,” and she starts doing a scene. She starts acting.
Oh my.
And it’s her audition! The scene that she chooses to do is the scene in the script where Fantasia is in the house with Dale trying to convince him to let her go. She’s saying the lines — and of course I’m not saying anything back because I’m shocked — and she moves on to the next line, and the next, and she’s at full voice in this restaurant, and she gets to the point where she says, “You have to let me go, Dale!” Dale’s next line is supposed to be “I can’t let you go because I don’t have the legal authority.” Well, I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything! And she goes on to say the next line after that: “Well, you didn’t have the legal authority to fuck me when I was 16 years old, but that didn’t stop you now, did it?”
Everyone in the restaurant has heard this, and I’m 40, and they’re looking over at me because they think that we’re having a fight about me having had sex with this young woman when she was underage! I got up and pretended like I had to go put some money in the parking meter because I was so embarrassed, man! You coulda bought me for a dime. I don’t know what happened to that lady. She sent me a basket of cookies. I don’t even know how she knew where I lived! It was a trip. I wish I did know what happened to her because she had a lot of guts — I have to say that.
Fantasia is my favorite Cynda Williams performance. There are times when it’s like she’s channeling the spirit of Billie Holiday or something.
She hadn’t had a lot of experience, but she was a natural. The thing that she was able to do was to be so idiosyncratic and private in the public environment, meaning in front of the crew and all of that. She just could get into the character and play the moments, and she was so beautiful and so sexy. So true, so connected with her emotions. I really look at that and I just think, Whoever forced me to cast her was absolutely on point because she was perfect for it. There’s a certain amount of insecurity and vulnerability that she has, and it explains why Fantasia was with these killers, as beautiful as she was.
How would you characterize the relationship between her character and Billy Bob Thornton’s character, Ray Malcolm?
Of course he would be sexually attracted to her, and I also feel she would be someone Ray felt he could control because she was needy, I felt, and not secure in who she was. I believe that kind of guy, that kind of criminal, is not going to want a woman who’s strong enough to stand up and be on an equal level with him. I don’t feel that she had a lot of agency in that relationship because the character was that kind of chauvinistic guy. But I think it’s symbiotic, too. I think they needed each other. She loved him, you know? Clearly, she loved him, because she chooses him over Dale in the end. He gets shot trying to get between them.
What was it like directing that scene in the hotel room where there’s this intense sexual energy between Ray and Fantasia and Pluto is right there? It almost felt like one of those classic Anthony Mann westerns, like The Naked Spur, where a hostage is trying to create jealous tension between the hostage-takers. At one point, she’s even looking at Pluto as she’s making out with Ray.
I think that there were a couple of things happening there. I think that on the one hand, because she knew Ray and Pluto were a couple — not necessarily a sexual couple but a couple in the sense of a unit — she tried to somehow make sure that they don’t unite against her. At some point, remember, they find out that the child is still alive. Billy Bob accuses her in the car, and we know that she did let the kid live. They felt that that’s part of what allowed them to be found out, though it wasn’t the case. She thought she could somehow control them with her sexuality, like when she goes to Pluto and says, “Don’t let him hit me anymore,” you know?
But there’s also a racial angle to it as well. Fantasia’s father would have been white, so her connection with a guy who is the closest thing to what her father looked like helps explain why she’s drawn to him.
Also, I think that she probably wants to play some of that stuff. Most people are trying to find the lever of power that they can grasp on to to get some control over their lives. We all are looking for that and not necessarily in an aggressive way: How do I navigate and find my equilibrium in this world that’s spinning and that I have no idea where it’s going? How do I somehow gain some control over my journey?
That’s also an element of noir in that description. One of the reasons film noir was popular with poor and marginalized audiences was because it felt like the films were speaking the truth: The authorities are corrupt and the economy is rigged for the privileged, so you might as well break the law or go for the big score.
That was because of the Eastern Europeans who came here who were behind a lot of the great film noir. A lot of them came during the whole march toward Nazism in the 1930s, and some came before that because of World War I. They were coming from places where there were really rigid social structures, where upward mobility was not much of a possibility. America was a place where a different ideal was projected and advertised. And they get here and see that, Oh, no — actually, it’s the same kind of power brokers running things in America. It’s the same kind of corruption; it’s just dressed differently. Yes, there’s mobility, but it’s not as egalitarian as we would like to think. The Europeans had another view of the country that we on the inside did not have.
Do you think sometimes it takes a foreigner to explain a country to itself?
Yeah. And also, sometimes it’s just like when you’re in love: You don’t see what’s really going on, you know? It takes somebody from the outside to tell you what’s happening! “Hey, brother, I don’t know if you realize this, but …” [Laughs.]
The one part of the movie where I felt like you went, for lack of a better phrase, “full noir” is the ending, when you bring in the super-low camera angles, fish-eye lenses, and Dutch tilts.
That’s because, at that point, it’s about to throw down. That feeling was there in the script; it had talked about High Noon. Even as we talk about One False Move feeling very neo-noir, I believe it also has a very western quality to it as well in that buildup to the climax. The ending you get has been promised since the L.A. cops discovered that Fantasia is from Star City, Arkansas. Actually, we know where it’s going earlier than that, when a child on the West Coast is crying and a baby in Arkansas hears it and wakes up. Somehow you know, even then, that a collision is gonna happen, bringing those opposing sides together.
There’s almost a folktale or a curse aspect to the story. Situations keep repeating, like the one you just mentioned. There seem to be forces at work that are not rationally explainable as well as a feeling that the same things keep happening over and over, with the details changed, throughout generations. People keep trying to escape where they’re from, who they are, what they’ve done, and reinvent themselves, and they can’t.
That’s interesting. There is a supernatural element to it with the call of the whip-poor-will that we hear in the beginning, the sound that Bill Paxton hears when his child has awakened him. And then what Fantasia says when they’re alone together in the house: “If you hear a whip-poor-will, it means that somebody’s gonna die.” That’s all part of that southern thing. The South, man! My family’s from Texas, and my grandfather’s wife is from Louisiana. There’s all of that superstition, even among the whites in the South. Oftentimes, I guess it’s been substituted with some of the more radical versions of Christianity with the rattlesnakes and talking in tongues and all of that stuff. There’s a haunt in the South.
I felt like there was a haunt in this movie.
I’m glad because that was one of the things we wanted to get across.
Related to the whip-poor-will, perhaps, is the harmonica player. When the harmonica player, who isn’t even a character, starts to play at the end, we go into the climax and the style of the film changes. Are the gods stirring the pot?
Yeah. And it reminded me of Howlin’ Wolf’s song “Smokestack Lightnin.’” You know that song, right? “Smokestack Lightnin’, don’t you hear me callin’?” I kept hearing that song when I was reading the script, and I continued to hear it when I started shooting it. Robert Johnson goes down to the crossroads and makes a deal with the Devil, and the Devil tunes his guitar and he sells his soul and he becomes the king of the Delta blues. There’s all those kinds of stories that come out of the South, and I thought One False Move needed to have that kind of feeling. It is a folktale in a lot of ways. Dale Dixon was trying to get away from who he was and then he had to come face-to-face with who he is at the end. There is a feeling that he and all the other characters are dealing with forces that are omnipotent — like Greek mythology, in that respect.
What’s the connection between film noir and American blues?
Film noir basically is an expression of ideas that started out with literature. The genre is an expression of corruption and — I don’t want to say fatalism, but — of what is wrong in the world. And blues is a lyrical, musical expression of that, too. There’s a line I love that kind of characterizes the blues: “If I didn’t have no bad luck, there wouldn’t be no luck at all.” That was a theme in some of the music of one of my favorite blues singers, John Lee Hooker, who had death in his voice. So, yeah, I definitely think there is a thematic connection between noir and blues.
I wanted to ask you about that final shot, in which Dale is bleeding out on the road and speaking to his and Fantasia’s son for the first time. It’s powerful in part because it’s played in one shot, from a medium distance, creeping in a bit, but it’s otherwise very plain. Was that shot specified in the script? Was it decided upon during the planning stages?
Originally, I thought I would be able to realize the emotional connection between Dale and his son by a big wide pullout shot that would reveal the land around them. When we first visited that location, there were cotton fields all around. I thought that because of the iconic nature of the cotton fields and the racial elements there, it would be great to see Dale and his son in the context of all that had happened in that part of the country.
Why didn’t you end the film with that shot?
Because when we got there to shoot, the cotton had been harvested! So the location no longer had that same value. And I thought, Oh man, how do I get to where I wanted us to be emotionally? And I realized the push-in was what I needed. He’s getting closer to this child, and we get closer to them. And that was where we improvised. We had the little boy ask him questions. I don’t remember those questions being in the script.
I didn’t want to tie it up to know whether Dale lived or died. My feeling is that he did live but that he wouldn’t get to be a police officer anymore. Because when you’re injured like that, that’s pretty hard to come back from. But I also felt that his reconciliation, the acceptance of the child, was the real culmination of the story — not just of him not only coming to grips with his child but also because, in some ways, the child is representative of his actions, of what he has brought forth, and of who he is.
It constantly amazes me how an element that ends up defining a film isn’t something the filmmakers spent months planning but one they cobbled together because they realized their original plan wasn’t going to work or that was suddenly added because someone got inspired.
The harmonica player was like that. He wasn’t in the movie because I’d gone in wanting to make a connection between noir and blues; he was in it because this guy came to the set one day, and he took out his harmonica and started to play it, and I thought, Shit, I wanna use that, because I’ve been hearing Howlin’ Wolf in my head. The thing is, to me, a movie is alive. When you’re working on it, it somehow will tell you certain things, and if you listen, it’ll let you know where it wants to go. Michelangelo used to say that inside of the stone is the artwork — it’s just a matter of getting rid of all that other stuff and getting to it. And I believe that.
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