Country Strong Director Talks Garrett Hedlund

Vanity Fair: For The Greatest, your first directing project, you had an amazing cast—I mean look at what Carey Mulligan has gone on to become—it’s just so exciting.

Shana Feste: You know, I had a great casting director, and we just got so lucky. When I worked with Carey, she just finished doing An Education, and I hadn’t seen her in anything. I hadn’t even seen her in the footage from that movie—she just kind of came in and auditioned. There was just something immediately very special about her, and I felt very much the same way about Garrett [Hedlund] when I first met him. There was something very special about him.

And did you always think that when you met him that he was right for the character Beau?

You know, he didn’t sing, he didn’t play the guitar, he had only done a lot of action-driven films, and I had never seen him play a love interest. And we took a huge gamble with him, and it completely paid off. He took four months off, he took guitar lessons, and he came to my house to do monologues and scenes—I would get my video camera and would video tape him doing scenes. I mean, he was so incredibly dedicated. So many young actors just come in and are like, “O.K., I have my lines memorized. I’m here. I’m ready to do the scene,” and they think that’s all that it takes. Garrett is just up to do the work.

I really liked him in the movie, and we have him in the issue this month, actually. It feels like it’s his Brad Pitt moment in the movies, where you see him and you’re like, “Who’s this guy??”

That’s what Gwyneth said, too, after working with him.

Oh really?

Gwyneth was so taken aback by him, because there was a scene that they did that was just a very tender, sweet scene. It was in Dallas when they say goodbye to each other, and we were shooting Gwyneth’s side first. So every single take, every single angle, the camera was only on the back of Garrett’s head—and Garrett cried for her performance. I didn’t even know he was doing it, because the camera wasn’t even on him. Gwyneth afterwards was like, “Oh my God, that was so amazing, I loved everything you were doing—Shana, Garrett was crying in every single one of those takes.”