Filmed in the town of Benton outside Little Rock, Sling Blade drips with local colloquialism and personality it’s as much a portrait of life in a small Southern town as a character study of Karl. In the feature-length film, Thornton’s laconic but lovable Karl befriends a young boy, played with preternatural grace by Lucas Black, whose mother’s abusive boyfriend (a daringly despicable Dwight Yoakam) reignites the anger that drove Karl to murder in the first place. As he listened to “The Maker,” he later recalled, he realized: this is the movie.īased on a short one-man play and a character created and performed by Thornton, Sling Blade follows an Arkansan with intellectual disabilities as he reenters society after spending most of his life in a mental hospital for carving up his mother and her lover with a kaiser blade (“some folks call it a sling blade”) in his youth.

It was 1996, and he needed a composer for his film-directing debut. Message and melody coalesced into “The Maker,” a modern prayer that anchored the album Acadie, Lanois’s debut as his own singer-songwriter.Ī few years later, actor Billy Bob Thornton, who had relocated from his native Hot Springs, Arkansas, to the Pacific Palisades, was sitting on the floor with his son Willy on his lap and listening to that album through headphones. That’s where Lanois produced the album Yellow Moon for the Neville Brothers and Oh Mercy for Bob Dylan, and where he set up Kingsway Studios in an old mansion on Esplanade Avenue in the French Quarter. In that moment came the lyrics: “Oh deep water / black and cold like the night / I stand with arms wide open / I’ve run a twisted line / I’m a stranger in the eyes of the maker.” He found a searching tune for those words, sung over hymnlike chords, after he moved to New Orleans in order to soak up some of the music traveling on the heavy Southern air. “Sometimes it is two inches from spilling, and that’s when I looked into it one night and I saw the blackness of the water, and it had my reflection in it.” “If the Liffey spills over the edge, it spills over the rim-as if it’s a teacup,” says Lanois.

The Liffey divides Dublin’s north and south, and the water’s route through the ancient city is lined with a proper brick levee as opposed to, say, the Mississippi’s muddy riverbank. He was in Ireland producing The Unforgettable Fire for U2, during the phase of his career when he was a mostly invisible but vital musical presence on great albums by much starrier artists than himself.

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