Last August when I sat down with writer-director David Gordon Green to talk about his excellent existential comedy Prince Avalanche, I hijacked part of the interview to pry into his next project: an adaptation of the late Larry Brown’s 1991 novel Joe starring Nicolas Cage.

Joe follows Joe Ransom (Cage), a middle-aged former felon and work crew boss who has a taste for drinking and visiting brothels but is trying to keep his once-violent temper and distaste for authority in check. His path crosses with that of Gary (Ty Sheridan), an earnest, hard-working young man who’s trying to get out from under the fist of his own abusive, alcoholic father, Wade (Gary Poulter).

Written by Gary Hawkins (The Rough South of Larry Brown, 2002), the film is part of Green’s continued return to the sort of character-driven dramas like George Washington and Snow Angels that he made before hitting it big with comedies like Pineapple Express and The Sitter.

It’s also a terrific return to dramatic, brooding form for Cage, as well as another fine role for 17-year-old Sheridan (The Tree of Life, Mud).

Two other writers and I sat down with both Green and Sheridan last week to talk about Joe, capturing rural stoicism on-screen, and working with Nicolas Cage.

Joe opens today in select theaters nationwide.

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David, what drew you to Brown’s work and this novel in particular?

David Gordon Green: I was a production assistant on The Rough South of Larry Brown (2002), a documentary my college professor Gary Hawkins was directing. Through that experience I got to know Larry first then got to know his work.

I was really inspired by a guy who’d come from a non-traditional background, who started later in his life and tried to design a creative career for himself and had found nice success. Being a guy from Texas who didn’t know anybody in the movie industry or what my ticket in would be, it was great to have somebody say, “There are no rules, and any time they tell you there are, tell them to go fuck themselves.” That was basically Larry’s advice.

I read the novel Joe around that time and loved it and thought it was very cinematic. Whenever I read books, I imagine the movie version and who would act in it, and at the time I was picturing Robert Mitchum as Joe Ransom. Somebody who has this physicality, is curiously funny, and also has this intensity.

After Larry passed away in 2004, Gary, the director of the documentary, said he’d done an adaptation of Joe and asked if I would like to read it. He just wanted to bring some of Larry’s stories to life.

I read his script and loved it, fell in love with the characters, loved what Gary had done with the novel’s story and characters.

Joe was a very personal novel for Larry, based on people he know and situations he’d experienced – there’s a real Joe somewhere. So when I read it, I was drawn to its epic sensibility but also its sensitivity.

There’s a sadness to even the most demonic of characters, and I find myself as a writer and reader drawn to them. Even the most heinous monster has a connection to reality — if they could just clean themselves and make a sensible decision for once in their life.

Even Joe is a very questionable character in a lot of ways, certainly through his community’s eyes, but he has his own strong sense of ethic. I was really drawn to these themes of men struggling with themselves, who they are and what they want. It could be they live for a drink or they give their life for someone else.

This is really a return for you to the types of dramas you were making in the first stage of your career.

Green: This was certainly my most dramatic work since Snow Angels (2007). But dealing with really difficult subject matter is something I’ve gotta do with a sense of humor. Not to be disrespectful to the subject matter, but as I deal with the characters’ struggles, I have to find that.

If I’m going to have a character bludgeon another human being to death, I need to see that there’s thread of humanity in him somewhere. I need to see him popping and locking and break-dancing, see a little bit of humor.

I cast non-traditionally trained actors in this. Wade was played by Gary Poulter who was a break dancer on the streets of downtown Austin, Texas. He’s this funny, charismatic, happy guy drifting on the street who has a very tough life on him.

You cast people who have a sense of humor and have a sense of lightness and you can embrace the humanity in them. As difficult as a lot of this film’s themes are, we have to have some improvisation between Nic and Ty as they’re talking about making a cool face or flicking a lighter. Then we can, in a healthy way, go to the dangerous, dark places.

How did you approach the sort of surrogate father-son relationship between Joe and Gary?

Green: At the beginning of the film we almost tried to structure it as if it were a flashback, as if Joe were looking back on his own life, as seen through Gary and Wade. I wanted to take some leaps editorially and structure it in a way that almost gives Joe and Gary this spiritual connection.

As they get to know each other, Joe does start to see shades and shadows of himself in this young man and knows the path he’s on and the very thin line he’s walking down.

He see’s Gary’s family situation and knows this kid needs a dad, and that’s where the conflict starts: When do you get out of the car and help and when not to get your hands dirty in every little thing.

Ty, in Tree of Life, Mud, and now this, you’ve been playing boys or young men facing a certain loss of innocence.

Ty Sheridan: I’ve always wanted to play characters I was the same age as because there are certainly qualities you have a young boy that you only have one time and once you outgrow them, you don’t have them anymore.

My pet peeve is 25-year-olds playing high school roles – in part because I’d always go up for those roles and never get them because it was always the good-lucking, muscular kid getting cast. It pissed me off. [Laughs] Especially when as a kid I’d watch them in those roles and think it wasn’t real, that’s not honest about childhood. There’s a boyish curiosity that can’t be faked.

Your roles have also always been rural-set.

Sheridan: I’d like to do a lot of things, but rural dramas were all I was getting cast in for a while because that was the world I grew up in and those were the characters people trusted me to play.

But you change as you get older—my accent has changed, I’ve lost that Southern twang. Back home all my friends say, “You talk so different now!”

David, you worked closely with Nicolas Cage on this–did you feel he was deliberately trying to get away from the sorts of roles he’s been playing in recent years?

Green: We wanted to strip it all down and make it a kind of raw performance. Nic had never done a character like this before, but he told me this character was the closest to him that he’d ever played and that he wanted to bring himself to Joe and he wanted to trust me and give me whatever I wanted. What I wanted was a lot of ideas—I want it to be a conversation and collaboration. I want an actor’s contribution, not just their marquee value.

There’s a scene where Joe is at the bar and he’s talking about African wild dogs at a zoo that killed a young boy who fell in. We were at the bar lighting the scene, and I saw Cage was ready to go, so we started rolling and I asked, “What are you thinking about, Joe?” and that’s what Nic was thinking about—he’d read that horrible headline that morning. So as Nic was getting into Joe’s heavy headspace, he was thinking about that very negative headline in the newspaper.

But you can’t get that with every actor. Every actor’s process and privacy is different. Some are willing to play more than others, but Nic was game to roll up his sleeves.

What’s the challenge of presenting really stoic characters in a film?

Green: It’s very difficult because when you get a camera on someone in close up, you don’t want it to be boring. You don’t want it to look like the actor is lethargic or uninterested. All the emotional engineering is internal. That doesn’t mean it’s any less visceral, but it’s going to be more contained and restrained. It’s a different set of tools and challenges. You’re trying to get the actors to swallow words but feel those thoughts.

I do three types of directing of a scene. We start by running the script a couple times. Then we throw the script away and improvise dialogue and try new things. If we’ve been playing it dramatically, we play it comically or vice versa.

Then I do a take with no dialogue, where I tell them to hit the same marks, feel it in their heads, think exactly the same thing we’ve gone over before, make the same eye contact. Sometimes it’s just two characters pacing around each other.

Terrence Malick produced a movie of mine (2004′s Undertow) and he had me try those exercises. You end up seeing how often you don’t need to say any of it. You can say it with a look or a glance or a twitch or a scratching of the forehead — a physical gesture or that look in the eye when you know someone is really feeling something.