Billy Bob Thornton

He walked funny.

He talked funny and everything.

So Carl is largely based on a combination of.

This guy, Ed, in our town, and Frankenstein, Frankenstein and the kid and the sort of not knowing any better.

And it's like, well, I was told by the parents in the Bible, it says, if you see some, like sex is bad or whatever it was, he sees his mother with his cat.

Jesse Dixon, and he kills her.

She told him to do that.

So that's where it all came from.

And I started doing it as part of a one-man show in the theater back in the late 80s.

From that one-man show, that whole character was born.

And then I wrote a short film, and we did that.

And that's why I got Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar was from that.

It wasn't...

I mean, it was my original screenplay, but it was adapted from my own thing.

And so that's how that came about.

At that time, when I was doing it in the theater, I didn't think much beyond that.

A couple of years later, I started thinking about it.

And I thought, that's the story.

And I knew the story before I ever wrote it.

I wrote it in nine days.