Ed Harris scored two Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations for playing it cool — first as a steely man from mission control in Apollo 13 (1995), then as a remote, controlling TV producer in The Truman Show (1998). His third is for turning up the temperature as Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist who reinvented modern art by splattering vast canvases with rhythmic webs of slashes and loops. He was a blazing talent and an early flameout, and inasmuch as Pollock is Harris' labor of love — a directorial debut more than 10 years in the making — the film glows with passion too.
Harris, 50, discovered his subject in 1986, when his father sent him a Pollock biography as a birthday present. A few years — and two more bios — later, he started putting his movie together. ''It wasn't like I was setting out to make a film about a painter,'' he says. ''He wasn't Pollock to me. I became more interested in him as a man than as an artist, to tell you the truth. But then again, I don't think you can separate the two.''
The movie follows the myth created by LIFE magazine and Pollock himself: The brawling, hard-drinking visionary roars out of the West, conquers American art, and dies in a drunken car crash a few years after having hit his peak. Harris steps humanely into the Pollock persona: He manages not to chew the scenery even as he's flipping it over; the eyes emitting a tough-guy taunt also offer a view of his insecurity; booze binges end in babyish whimpering. Most impressive of all, the actor captures the fluid power and jazzy grace of the painter at work. ''I think acting's very similar to it,'' he says. ''It's about trying to not lie, to not make a false move, to not make a line on the canvas that you don't need.'' Even playing an outsize, agonized hothead, Harris doesn't waste a single motion.
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