What interested you about Jesse James's story? 

I knew the folklore image of Jesse James as this Robin Hood kind of character and I knew that it was later uncovered that he was quite dastardly. But it wasn't until Andrew [Dominik] brought Ron Hansen's book to my attention that I got really taken with James and with the deconstruction of the myth that surrounded him and the anatomy of his assassination.

Your Jesse James isn't a conventional hero. Was it more interesting to play a real man rather than a legend?

Absolutely. Since we pick up the story in the last year of his life, everything he became known for is already accomplished, so we bypass the myth. And it was much more appealing to me to try to understand this mercurial character who seems to know he is approaching the inevitable end. He's trapped by his celebrity, tired of being an alias and consumed by this growing paranoia. Equally, I love the way the story takes apart this idea that Robert Ford was a coward. I think you get to see that the forces that are at play against Jesse James are the same forces that fanned Bob's actions.

The end of the film even hints that James courted death and set up the circumstances that allowed Robert Ford to kill him. Is that what happened?

There are these are two curious incidents that historians argue about. Jesse gave Robert Ford the gun that was used to kill him days later. He couldn't have been ignorant of what he was doing. Whether it was conscious or unconscious is the question. This other fact is that he took his gun belts off in Robert's presence, which is something he never usually did. The two theories are that he was either taunting Ford or that it was a premeditated act of suicide.

Did you come to your own conclusion?

I wanted to keep it ambiguous and I think you can draw either conclusion from the film.

The film also makes you wonder what Jesse James got out of his relationship with Robert Ford beyond hero worship. What was it?

It's a good question and another thing that's argued about and makes this version of the story so interesting to me. I think James was fascinated and repulsed by Robert Ford at the same time. So, did he keep him around to inflate his quickly evaporating ego or did he keep him around as whipping boy to take out his frustrations on?

Did you end up actually liking Jesse James after you played him?

Well, yes, because I got an understanding of him, though I don't want to be him [laughs]. I'm fascinated by him and I think it's more important to be fascinated by a character than to like him. You know, I think of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull as the prime example of that. He doesn't have to be likeable to be fascinating.

Do you consider this film a Western?

No, I really find the Western label misleading when describing the film. The backdrop is Western, but it doesn't operate as a typical Western film. Andrew calls it a gangster film and to me it's more of a psychological drama.

The film also looks at the whole cult of Jesse James and the frenzy that surrounded his death, with people snapping up photos of his dead body and crowding in to see the spot where he died. It doesn't seem that different from today, does it?

Well, I was surprised to see that even then tabloid journalism was at play, that so much was manufactured and sensationalized and had little basis in reality, and that this notion of celebrity existed back then just as it exists today. And it's a two-way thing. You have this guy, Jesse James, who's trapped behind his celebrity and a young kid, Robert Ford, who's obsessed with celebrity and sees celebrity as a way to make himself feel worthwhile and yet is destroyed by it in the end.

Given your own fame, was this aspect of the film particularly interesting to you?

I guess the point is that fame or celebrity is very rarely what you would expect it to be, if you even thought about, which I certainly never did. 

Some of your films, the Ocean's series for example, seem to be a lark for all concerned. Is a film like Jesse James that much more difficult?

I would say no. To me, so much of acting is finding the tone of your character, the timbre of the character, so the approach is always serious and demands research and discovery, but I had a couple of advantages on this. First, because I was one of the producers, I'd been working on the script for a year and a half by the time we started shooting, so I was already intimately involved in the story. Second, the fact that it takes place in southern Missouri, which is my stomping grounds, where I was grew up, added to feeling well prepared going in.

As we discussed, the relationship between Jesse James and Robert Ford is such an intense and complex one. Does that make your performance particularly dependent on the performance of your co-star Casey Affleck?

Without a doubt filmmaking is a team sport. So much of it is the volley you send across, but it's also the shot that comes back at you. So, I was delighted when Andrew chose Casey to play Robert Ford, especially since, given the scope and scale of it, it was such a coveted part. I've been great friends with Casey since the Ocean's films and I knew he was capable of much bigger things because he's so bright and extremely witty and well read. I think there's been a whole bunch of us rooting for him the last few years.

Andrew Dominik, the director of Jesse James, is an Australian and this is his first Hollywood film and a very American film at that. How does he measure up?

I went after him when I saw his first film, Chopper, because I thought that movie was Mean Streets good. Whatever story he takes on, Australian, American, whatever, he always has an amazing focus on the psychology of a situation and the undercurrents that propel us to behave like we behave. I think he's gifted that way and for me that's what really separates his first film and this film from most of what's out there.

What was your reaction to the finished film?

For me, this is a movie that sits with you and resonates for the next day or two. It's true that it's not in line with the current zeitgeist of fast-paced, in-your-face kind of filmmaking, but it's a slow burn. I also think that it's lyrical and poetic and has a real breadth and a depth to it. It's my favorite kind of film.