From Brown to the big screen: How Tim Blake Nelson’s classics degree propelled a Hollywood career

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - In the decades since his time as a Brown University student, Tim Blake Nelson has built what may be one of the most versatile careers in modern entertainment. He has amassed more than 100 screen credits - including performances in the Coen Brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" and the Marvel movie "The Incredible Hulk" - and is also a writer, director and producer.

Nelson, a member of Brown's Class of 1986, returned to campus in late March for a conversation with Brown Arts Institute Director Sydney Skybetter and Brown senior Ilektra Bampicha-Ninou, held in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. Nelson discussed everything from his decision to pursue a classics concentration at Brown and the impact of studying Latin to what it's really like to work in Hollywood today.

"I love Brown - I had just an incredible four years here," Nelson said. "I can't imagine my life without it, and I didn't want to waste a moment here."

The event was part of the Brown Arts Institute's Ruckus Sessions series, which brings artists, researchers and leaders to campus to discuss contemporary culture. The following are excerpts from Nelson's talk.

On deciding to study classics at Brown:

It started in the eighth grade, when I took Latin. It just opened up a whole new way of thinking for me -this supposedly dead language, which to me was very alive on the page even though it wasn't being spoken anymore. I suddenly learned what they were trying to teach us in English by learning it based on another language that was organized into these extraordinary principles. You had this amazing combination where you would read in beginner Latin Caesar, Livy and Tacitus of this closed system that was rigorously logical, but it was being exploited by the creative enterprise of writing - in this case, accounts of war and accounts of history. But it was still a creative enterprise, and that juxtaposition really fired me in a way that no subject ever had. And so in the eighth grade, I decided I was going to study this forever as a student, and I just kept on doing it all the way through high school. I did two years of AP Latin and then came to Brown and loved the department here and just continued, even when I decided I was not going to pursue a career in academics.

Latin organized the way I think. And now, particularly when I write and direct, and then edit a movie I direct, I'm always thinking in terms of Latin sentence structure. It was that foundational organizing subject for me that just was the game changer, and it's with me on a daily basis.

On choosing to attend Brown:

[When I first visited campus], I just felt like, this is home. This is where I want to be. And when I arrived at Brown, I learned about the New Curriculum [now known as the Open Curriculum]. It wasn't until I had settled into my sophomore year and met people in the theater department and then also in the English department and the semiotics department and the classics department and the anthropology department - because I was taking advantage of the New Curriculum - that I found my people, and I think how I'm lucky, because I didn't really understand what was possible at this school until about a year in.

On deciding to pursue acting:

I had decided by my sophomore year that I wanted to pursue theater as a career and not go into academia, which had been my aim when I got to Brown. I decided that I wanted to go into acting because my mother encouraged me to go off to a summer theater [program] after my freshman year, and I realized I was even happier doing that than I was translating Virgil, and that was a pretty high bar.

When I came back [to Brown], I was welcomed into the theater community. I took my courses really, really seriously, and I took theater really, really seriously... I was always in a production from sophomore year to the time I walked off campus - up through graduation weekend. I was never not doing a show, and sometimes two at once, but I was not going to give up that classics major at a place like this, and I was not going to not take literature and society courses and [subjects like] Russian literature. And then I knew I was going to try to go to grad school [for acting]. I really needed it because even though I was constantly in shows, I was also pouring a lot of my energies into getting a great education.

On a multi-genre career:

The disciplines nourish one another to a very impactful degree, and particularly the disciplines within a single form… Being an actor helps me as a director, and being a director helps me as an actor. I also grew up taking pictures. I wake up every morning eager to tell stories in any way I can, and even in the most difficult days when it's not working out, it's invigorating. There's no place I'd rather be.