Garrett Hedlund (Country Strong) was interviewed by Details magazine for his upcoming movie, On The Road, which, actually, is that even “upcoming”? Why are people still talking about and getting interviewed for that movie? I feel like it’s been “upcoming” for two and a half years and no one was particularly interested in the first place. In any case, in the interview, Garrett Hedlund revealed that working on the movie got him a big old bite from the Writing Bug! From Details (via Celebitchy):

He funneled all that residual On the Road energy into what became a lifelong writing habit, in freewheeling Kerouac fashion. “I spill it out as fast as I can,” he says. “I don’t really edit.” Just about everything that’s happened to him as an adult, from the “uninteresting” to the “wonderful,” has found its way onto paper—in stories, in poems, in journal entries. “In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages,” he ticks off. “In London, 80 pages.”

I’m not sure that you can call something that started a year ago “a lifelong habit,” but what I do know is that every great writer measures the value of his work in page counts. This is the true mark of an artist. It’s also pretty exciting that Garrett Hedlund doesn’t edit himself. Can you imagine striking even just one word from the 80 pages he wrote in London? The whole thing would be ruined. Would you edit Picasso’s diary about Brazil? Oh but and then Garrett Hedlund RECITED SOME OF HIS POETRY TO THE INTERVIEWER:

“Everything you ever knew seems to slowly be forgotten,” he quotes from a poem of his, an assault against the resignation of maturity that he wrote years ago in Mexico. “All the good nights are just nights, all the good mornings are just mornings, all the dots in the sky are the same dots you’ve been looking at all your life . . .”

AN ASSAULT AGAINST THE RESIGNATION OF MATURITY THAT HE WROTE YEARS AGO IN MEXICO. Can you even imagine? Do you know what it is like to be a writer for a magazine? It’s terrible. You do not make a lot of money and you have to content yourself with the incorrect feeling that proximity to the occasional celebrity adds some kind of meaning to your life. But then one day you have to interview Garrett Fucking Hedlund and he starts RECITING HIS POETRY TO YOU? It’s amazing there are even any magazine writers left. I know guns are kind of a touchy subject these days, but isn’t there at least rope, or exhaust pipes in closed garages? IF YOU WANT TO KILL YOURSELF, YOU STILL CAN, MAGAZINE WRITERS! Garrett Hedlund also tells some story about how he basically would have a Stanley Cup except that he decided to make On The Road instead. I won’t spoil it. I’m sure it’s going to be the subject of his incredible first novel (6,000,000 pages).