Some teachers rely solely on the spoken word to help guide their students, and others employ visual aids to hopefully touch the hearts of those they are mentoring. For Greg Townsend, a social worker at Ridge View Academy in Denver, Colorado, he uses a different method that some might call unorthodox: a bicycle. For more than two decades, Townsend has helped inspire at-risk youth through cycling, taking them on long journeys across the country to learn about life’s obstacles, teamwork, and themselves. His uplifting story, and those of the kids he’s helped, is the subject of director RJ Daniel Hanna’s new film, Hard Miles.

Stepping into the role of Greg Townsend is Matthew Modine, a Hollywood veteran of more than 40 years. MovieWeb recently caught up with him to discuss what it was like to portray a man who has touched the lives of so many people and the advice he gave to his young co-stars. Along the way, we also touched on Stanley Kubrick and how it felt to team up once more with Daniel Hanna, whom he’d worked with in the past.

A Great Honor to Portray Greg Townsend in Hard Miles
Hard Miles Release Date April 19, 2024 Director R.J. Daniel Hanna

Matthew Modine is no stranger to stepping into the role of real-life characters. From playing Vannevar Bush in Oppenheimer to financial executive John Thain in Too Big to Fail, the 65-year-old Modine has seemingly done it all over the course of his lengthy career. This time, he finds himself in the privileged position of portraying a man who has done a tremendous amount of good for young people who might otherwise be overlooked by society if it were not for Greg Townsend. Modine calls it “a great honor.”

”
It’s absolutely a great honor
. My grandparents, my mother and father, they taught me how important it is when you see someone who’s slipped or fallen to be able to offer your hand and help them up. That when you see somebody that’s on the side of the road with a flat tire, how important it is to pull over and help them to change it. We never know when our fates may change, and we’re the person on the side of the road with a flat tire or, or we’ve slipped and fallen.”

Modine would elaborate further, saying, “What Greg Townsend has done for so many hundreds of young people with his program of rehabilitation and helping people to build bicycles and go on long rides to learn to work together as a team… it wasn’t just a great opportunity for me to act in this film, but it was a great opportunity for me to learn, and to give me an opportunity to be a better human being.”

While some actors get a limited amount of time to spend with their real-life subjects in order to study their movements and mannerisms to help inform their acting choices, Greg Townsend was on set every step of the way as his story came to life in Hard Miles. “Greg was with us every mile of the journey,” Modine says. “Where we would all pile in the van and go to the top of a mountain or go head out to the desert, he always rode there.”

“He would wake up an hour, hour and a half early to make those journeys on bicycle. So while we were doing dozens and dozens of miles over the course of a day, Greg, by the time he got to work and had his cup of coffee on set, he may have already done 100–150 miles.”

Modine on Stanley Kubrick and Reuniting with Daniel Hanna

Shot in various locations, including the sweltering heat of the Arizona desert, it wasn’t unusual for the mercury to top 108 degrees on the set of Hard Miles. The production also faced challenges from local wildlife, and at one point, actors and crew bore witness to a mountain lion attacking a coyote right in front of them, causing them to flee to safety. The shoot was reminiscent of another challenging film Modine appeared in, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, but Modine remarks that the experience and the direction of Daniel Hanna are incomparable.

“They’re incomparable. What I say about directors is they all make love, but they all do it a little bit differently.
Daniel is a very different person than Stanley Kubrick
. And I don’t think that he’s trying to be the next Stanley Kubrick. I think he’s trying to be the next Daniel Hanna. Do the best job that he can with the opportunities he’s given and the scripts that he writes. I love Daniel, and I love Stanley Kubrick. I learned a lot.”

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Modine goes on to say, “I was 25 years old when we were making that film [Full Metal Jacket], and we were together for two years. So it’s difficult for me to compare the experience of working with Kubrick with anybody else. But Daniel and I… this is our second film together. We made a movie called Miss Virginia… and I had such a good time working with him. It was easy for me to say yes to Hard Miles.”

The Advice Matthew Modine Gave to His Young Co-Stars

Throughout his career, Matthew Modine has had the opportunity to work with several talented young actors. Stranger Things and the cast there is one project that comes to mind, but while that saw him mainly share the screen with Millie Bobby Brown, Hard Miles sees Modine paired with several gifted actors, including Jackson Kelly (Chucky, Lucky Hank), Jahking Guillory (The Chi), Damien Diaz (Shameless, Runaways), and Zachary T. Robbins (Bloodline, School Bus Diaries). For Modine, it was a chance to impart the wisdom he’d built up over the years.

“They liked hearing my stories. You know, because I’ve been in the business now for four decades and made hundreds of movies and television shows and done plays. So it was wonderful to be able to share the stories, and hopefully, the advice I gave was beneficial
and helps them to be able to avoid some of the pitfalls
that exist in the motion picture industry.”

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Modine’s advice was sound, as he reminded the young cast that whatever they do on and off-screen carries weight. “Always remember that when you come into someone’s home on television, when you’re projected onto a motion picture screen bigger than life, or when you’re standing on a stage in a theater, that people are looking up at you,” he says. “So the things that you do and the things that you say will have an impact on their lives.”

He finishes by saying, “It’s an important thing to always remember when you’re performing. The things that you do and the things that you say have significance and power. That’s awesome, but it can become a tool of propaganda… or it can be a tool that helps us find joy and amusement and sometimes even live better lives.” You can catch Matthew Modine’s wonderful performance as Greg Townsend when Hard Miles hits theaters on April 19, 2024, from Blue Fox Entertainment.