As Ed Harris strode into the Art Institute of Chicago last week, he was completing a circle that had begun 15 years ago. That’s when the actor-turned-filmmaker’s father, Robert, who lives on the North Shore and was working in the museum’s bookstore, mailed him a biography of the painter Jackson Pollock.
“He sent me this book in 1986: Jeffrey Potter’s `To a Violent Grave,’ ” Harris said. “Yep, it’s all his fault.”
The book sparked the 50-year-old actor’s interest in a way he couldn’t shake. Eventually he channeled his obsession into his work, so for nine years Harris toiled on a film about the tormented, mid-20th Century American painter, whose abstract early pieces and groundbreaking drip paintings reflected an inner turmoil that eventually destroyed him.
Not only did Harris star in the film, as he always intended to do, but he also took the directing reins for the first time. At some points he felt like a tormented artist himself, but now his work is done: “Pollock” opens nationwide Friday after its end-of-the-year pre-Oscar runs in New York and Los Angeles.
His Art Institute trip last week was his first museum visit since finishing the movie — and thus the first time in nearly a decade that he could appreciate art masterworks without an eye toward “Pollock.”
“It’s really nice actually right now,” he said, taking his time to marvel at paintings. “It’s a much different experience. It feels much more relaxed.”
Harris wore a black ski cap, which matched the rest of his wardrobe, and round, wire-rim glasses through which his piercing hazel eyes gleamed. His gaunt face showed no trace of the 30 pounds he had added to play Pollock’s final years.
And as in movies as varied as “The Right Stuff,” “The Abyss,” “Apollo 13” and “The Truman Show” (the last two earned him Oscar nominations), his no-nonsense air commanded your attention.
The destination this day was the far end of the modern-art gallery where two of the Art Institute’s three Pollocks dominate a wall. Harris ascended the museum’s large staircase to be greeted by the striking sight of Gustave Caillebotte’s classic “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” which introduces the main collection.
“To your right,” directed Art Institute associate director John Foley Hindman.
“Wow,” the actor said, glancing back as he continued walking. “It’s hard to just walk by all these paintings.”
He strolled slowly from room to room as works by Magritte and Miro quietly beckoned for his attention. “Hey, here’s John,” he said, stopping to admire a painting by surrealist artist John Graham. “He really had an influence on Pollock. Helped him get out of the whole [Thomas Hart] Benton thing.”
“I’ve liked Dubuffet too,” Harris added, moving on to the adjacent painting. “He’s one of my faves, I think.”
The connected rooms ended in a gallery where the back wall showcases Pollock’s “Greyed Rainbow,” a 1953 explosive, mostly black-and-white drip painting, and “The Key,” a colorful, swirling abstract work painted in 1946, just months before the artist moved to his famous drip style.
“Pretty humbling, really,” Harris said, taking a close look at the thick layers of paint that make “Greyed Rainbow” seem to ripple off the canvas. “Not humbling. It’s just [freakin’] great.”
He moved over to “The Key.” “I’m more familiar with this one than I am with that one,” he said. “I think this may be the one, at least in the film, where he makes the decision to go work in the barn, clean the barn out because he’s running out of space.”
The director-star took up painting for the film so that the scenes of Pollock at work would appear credible. (Another artist provided the Pollock copies seen on screen.) Harris said he hasn’t painted much since he finished the movie, but he’s curious what kind of style would evolve if he did.
“I don’t want to force myself to paint, but if I get the urge and find the need to, I’d like to see what I’d do, not looking toward playing Jackson Pollock,” he said. “See if I have anything to say.”
As an actor Harris expresses himself with an intensity that seems to cut through any artifice, no matter whether he’s performing in a stark character study such as Victor Nunez’s “A Flash of Green” (1984) or a turn-off-your-mind Hollywood action flick like Michael Bay’s “The Rock” (1996). Part of what got under Harris’ skin was Pollock’s extreme dedication to his art.
“It has to do with his personal relationship to his work, what it meant to him in terms of defining him for himself — and the need he had to do it,” Harris said. “I’m not Pollock or anything like that, but when I began to study acting, I made this decision to learn about it, and that need to do that — finding something like that that means something to you on that deep a level — that was something I felt a kinship with on some level.
“If anything, I learned that one of the big differences is that I have a family, I have a daughter, I have a wife [actress Amy Madigan], I have very supportive parents, and I’m not driven like that. There’s a part of me that wishes I was. I was driven to make this film, but in terms of living and dying with my art, I have other priorities in my life. Pollock did not.”
Harris also related to actors’ and painters’ common struggles to remain true to themselves.
“I can be in a film that’s a highly commercial kind of deal, and part of me even feels stupid about doing it on some level as an actor who takes his work probably a little too seriously,” he said. “But there’s always the moment of revelation, the moment of being on the camera and take one or take two — that’s still my deal. That’s still my time to unveil or to challenge myself, to not copy myself or somebody else and to try to discover something new. And so that’s the way I look at it, even if I’m in `Milk Money.'”
As much as Harris said he regrets his lack of control in the movie business, he doesn’t envy the life of painters.
“Well, painters — what a way to go through life,” he said. “Most painters paint because they have to, and to even get your stuff shown is a miracle, and to have anybody buy it is another one. And then when they do, I’m sure the temptation is, `Well, they bought that; I guess they’d buy another one similar to that.’ And people start painting the same [stuff] over and over again, because that’s what they can sell, which is not why the person started doing it in the first place.”
No one could accuse Harris of making “Pollock” out of commercial motivations. This film biography was never going to be a mass-market crowd-pleaser, as the director-star didn’t try to prettify his title character.
“People either really dig the movie or they just think he’s such a creep that they don’t get it,” Harris said. “Yeah, he was a [jerk] at times, but the film’s not about somebody who’s being a [jerk]. The film’s about somebody who’s trying to do something, trying to live a life and make something out of it despite a lot of obstacles.”
Although Harris originally considered co-directing with “Hill Street Blues” actor Charles Haid, he eventually realized he had his own way he wanted to present Pollock.
One of his tasks turned out to be working with writer Susan Emshwiller to pare down and straighten out Barbara Turner’s original script, which Harris said was 267 pages.
“She never wrote a linear script,” he said. “She was trying to write the film the way he painted, and I just couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to embark on something that didn’t make sense to me.”
Harris said he tried to tell the story as straightforwardly as possible, partly because he didn’t want to overreach himself as a first-time director and partly because he wanted the focus to remain on the characters, not the fancy filmmaking.
“It’s not about what the camera’s doing,” he said. “You’re watching what’s happening on the screen, hopefully.”
Harris has expressed particular admiration for Nunez and Agnieszka Holland, who directed him in “To Kill a Priest” (1988) and “The Third Miracle” (1999). Was Harris the filmmaker he thought he would be?
“No, I thought I’d be a lot more gracious,” he said without a hint of irony. “It was a very intense thing. It was not a relaxed kind of `Oh, now, let’s do this shot.’ We were like under pressure every day to get this stuff. A little frustrating at times, but everybody knew how much it meant to me, and they were pretty tolerant. But it was slightly out of hand sometimes.”
The pressures, he added, were the kind that routinely face independent filmmakers — sticking to a realistic budget and shooting schedule.
But now all that was past, his project was about to be released, and he could go back to viewing Pollock as an artist, not a mission.
Harris took a last lingering look at the two paintings.
“You gotta hand it to the guy, you know?” he said, shaking his head and finally tearing himself away.
