Billy Bob Thornton

You know, Jerry was telling his life story.

Right.

I mean, it wasn't Taylor wrote something there for him, you know, because he'd heard the story before from Jerry.

But.

If it had been written and Taylor said, you gotta write, you gotta say these words, Jerry probably wouldn't have done it, been able to do it.

But the fact that Taylor said, just tell that story you told me.

It's his story.

It'd be like if I ask you, tell me your life story.

You can do that.

And if you get a person who's not an actor to be themselves, they're better than actors.

I've always found that.

I've cast people in movies that have never been in one before.

I just don't tell them we're rolling.

I really don't.

In Sling Blade, the guy Rick Dial, who played the guy that ran the fix-it shop, the kind of big guy, I went to school with him since the third grade.

And I always thought, this guy could be an actor, you know.

And when we did the first scene with him there in his shop, when Jimmy Hampton brought me over there and said, this is Carl, he's going to work here, all that stuff, you know, I just went to Rick and I said, dude, and Brent Briscoe, who played Scooter, the guy that could never fix anything, and I said, look, Rick, the camera crew, they don't have their shit together.

You know, I said, they're going to have to get some marks and do a bunch of stuff, so this is not on us.

So we're going to run this scene, but we're not really filming it, just...

Say the dialogue.