Academy Award winner Billy Bob Thornton is our front cover feature for FAULT Issue 13: the Contrasts Issue. Billy Bob was photographed by Dove Shore.

Billy Bob Thornton’s upcoming film, Jayne Mansfield’s Car, is not strictly speaking autobiographical but, given that he’s written, directed and starred in the Dixie-based family drama, it does offer some of the industry icon’s reflections on his own past. After years of dealing with the Hollywood gossip bandwagon, it is good to hear Thornton speaking as an artist in his own right once again.

Billy Bob occupies a unique place in contemporary film culture, he’s long been a standout square-peg fixture in fishbowl field. He’s the oddball in the  counter-culture corner, the gumshoe southern-fried savant, the virtuoso music-maker more reliant on big ideas than big budgets. And yet he’s also put together an enviable and lengthy cache of credits with films like Monster’s Ball, The Man Who Wasn’t There, A Simple Plan, Love Actually, Friday Night Lights and Bad Santa. Thornton has managed to leave his gritty prints all over Hollywood for over two full decades without bowing too much to conventions. Now, sixteen years after writing/directing/acting in Sling Blade, the movie that won him his first Oscar, Thornton is back operating under the same successful trifecta in his new film, Jayne Mansfield’s Car.

“It’s a  film about how war and tragedy affect people and how they manifest themselves in families”, Thornton explains.
Jayne Mansfield’s Car is a southern-gothic tale about a Western family colliding with a British family due to a family tragedy. The  film mirrors much of Thornton’s “small-town” childhood in the deep south, elements exactly paralleling his own relationship with his father who died when Thornton was only 18. The film, in part, appears to be a
veiled reckoning with his father…

Read more in FAULT Issue 13, out now:

FAULT MAGAZINE ISSUE 13 (WINTER 2012-13) – THE CONTRASTS ISSUE – IS  NOW AVAILABLE TO ORDER

…Or get your copy digitally via Zinio! 1 year’s subscription = just £12. Get your single issue digitally this January for just £6

Be sure to also check out our Behind the Scenes Exclusive with the Hollywood legend – 5 Questions with Billy Bob Thornton is out now on Vimeo and Youtube: