Episode 1066 - Edward Norton
Guest:Lock the gates!
Music
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fuck, nicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:Edward Norton.
Marc:Edward Norton is on the show today.
Marc:I talked to Edward Norton.
Marc:He's got a new movie coming out.
Marc:Motherless Brooklyn.
Marc:Comes out Friday, November 1st.
Marc:It was good to talk to him.
Marc:Intense guy.
Marc:How is everybody?
Marc:You okay?
Marc:You okay?
Marc:I just drove in from San Francisco.
Marc:I made the drive.
Marc:I drove up on Friday thinking that I would have a meditative, nice drive, maybe go up the coast, maybe stop for lunch in Big Sur, maybe take it in, go back in my mind to the times where I...
Marc:Thought that that beautiful Northern California coast was the answer to all the problems, was the poetic beauty.
Marc:Maybe stop at Esalen and do some time travel, maybe an encounter group or a flotation tank of some kind.
Marc:But did I do that?
Marc:I did not.
Marc:I did not do any of that.
Marc:I took the five straight up and I took the five straight down.
Marc:The five, the world's most heinous drive.
Marc:It makes five hours seem like nine.
Marc:The coast would have taken too long and I was just worried.
Marc:I didn't know if anything was on fire.
Marc:The road would be blocked up.
Marc:I just took the straight shot, but I had big plans nonetheless.
Marc:There's something about that city and I did have some, I did say I had some ghosts to reckon with.
Marc:And I think I did.
Marc:I think I did, folks.
Marc:Before I get into that stuff, there's a couple of things.
Marc:The WTF merch store is fully loaded with new items, including stuff people have asked us for forever, actually.
Marc:We've got new shirts with the sweet-ass draplin design and metallic ink, WTF hoodies, a ringer tee, a ladies muscle tee, tumblers, water bottles, travel mugs, keychains, and hats.
Marc:Start your holiday shopping early.
Marc:Go to pod swag slash WTF or click on merch at WTF pod dot com.
Marc:As we head into this week, I did want to help.
Marc:Well, not help, but I wanted to bring attention to a couple of my pals.
Marc:A couple of my pals are doing shit.
Marc:If I could.
Marc:Chris Garcia.
Marc:who's open for me a few times.
Marc:He's been on this show, uh, before.
Marc:He's a very funny guy.
Marc:And a lot of his act, if you've seen him or heard him on NPR, a lot of his act revolved around his, his father's battle with Alzheimer's, his dad, Andre, uh,
Marc:And it was a lot of what Chris was sort of involved with in dealing with his father and sort of the humor that could be found in that, you know, without making fun of his father, obviously.
Marc:But for the past two years, he's just been pouring his heart and soul into recording this podcast.
Marc:called Scattered.
Marc:And it's really about his father and his father's past, you know, coming up through, you know, moving from Cuba, you know, being in a labor camp in Cuba, you know, transitioning to the States and stuff that haunted his old man that, you know, interspersed with Chris's relationship with him through his disease.
Marc:But
Marc:You know, it's quite a work.
Marc:It's a passion project, and it's deep, and it's funny, and it's moving, and it's produced by WMIC, and you can get it.
Marc:I imagine where you can get everywhere you can get podcasts.
Marc:It's called Scattered, and that's my buddy Chris Garcia.
Marc:Now, my other buddy, Dean Delray, who you know, he's just had his 500th episode, and he got Paul Stanley on there.
Marc:Paul Stanley.
Marc:The guitarist and lead singer are kissed, and Dean's very excited.
Marc:So there's a couple of podcast wrecks recommending.
Marc:Not paid plugs, just friends.
Marc:Chris Garcia's Scattered podcast and Dean Del Rey's 500th with Paul Stanley.
Marc:But back to the trip to San Francisco.
Marc:So I get up there.
Marc:Now, I don't know how many.
Marc:I lived there for a few years, a couple years.
Marc:I talked to you about it before I went up there.
Marc:I had all those posters.
Marc:That's the primary reason I drove up to schlep the posters.
Marc:And I got to Square.
Marc:So I sat there, like me and Luke Schwartz, who did a great job opening for me, and some people who work at the theater, at the venue.
Marc:I'm just sitting there...
Marc:kind of sticking the credit cards into the machine doing the numbers you know I just haven't done that a while but I had a very long line of people and we came up literally out of the 98 posters I brought just five posters short you know there's a couple hundred people were waiting online to meet me and take pictures and buy the posters but we moved all of them and I cut a deal with those last five people and
Marc:I don't need to tell you what it is.
Marc:I don't want anyone to get jealous, but I worked something out with them because they were waiting around for like a fucking hour and I worked something out.
Marc:It was great meeting all the people.
Marc:It was a great show in San Francisco.
Marc:The Masonic was sweet.
Marc:It wasn't scary to me.
Marc:This is the second Masonic
Marc:auditorium that I've worked at.
Marc:And again, I believe I transcended, you know, usually I think there is a Masonic ritual that they need to, that needs to happen in the Masonic space at some time during the spaces history, which I fulfilled the last time I was there.
Marc:I came in second in the Boston comedy competition, thus, you know, sort of
Marc:inadvertently playing out the failing of the Jew ceremony, which is a secret Masonic rite ritual that was in the book.
Marc:It used to be something they would bring a Jew in, but they can't do that now, and they just hope it happens coincidentally.
Marc:So I actually served that purpose back in 93.
Marc:So the failing of the Jew ritual was done, and the space was thus sort of initiated.
Marc:Now I needed to transcend that.
Marc:And I had the order wrong of who won and who lost with that 93 competition.
Marc:Carlos Alzaraki was first.
Marc:I was second.
Marc:Stephen B. was third.
Marc:Rick Kearns was fourth.
Marc:Patton Oswalt was fifth.
Marc:So I went in there knowing that I had to transcend.
Marc:I had to transcend a few things.
Marc:That city has always been kind of a haunting mindfuck for me, but not in the same way that Boston was, just more of it in a different way, man, in a loopier way.
Marc:But I went in there to the Masonic, fearless.
Marc:What if we what if we all talk like our president?
Marc:Wouldn't that be unbearable?
Marc:I'm not going to begrudge him.
Marc:Well, yeah, I will.
Marc:Yeah, I'm glad that the U.S.
Marc:military did their job and, you know, over a period of time was able to track down and kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, one of the leaders of ISIS, one of the leaders of the caliphate.
Marc:They got in there and I imagine...
Marc:I'm glad they were still there because a couple of weeks ago, this president wanted to wasn't he taking all the troops out of Syria?
Marc:And I imagine that the Kurds probably did a lot of the groundwork for this attack.
Marc:I guess we'll hear about that.
Marc:Perhaps remember the Kurds who we abandoned because of this president.
Marc:Well, I guess he lucked out this time on the timing.
Marc:Man, it's good.
Marc:I'm glad that guy's dead.
Marc:But the way that President Trump takes credit, the fact that people still enjoy or look up to him or look to him for leadership.
Marc:What if everyone talked like him?
Marc:How can people not see how annoying and embarrassing and fucking horrifically insecure this fucker is?
Marc:I just don't get it.
Marc:I'm going to go ahead and talk about my set in San Francisco.
Marc:like our president, because we should be able to look up to the president and model ourselves after him.
Marc:And I hope that a lot of Americans are doing that and I hope their children are doing that.
Marc:So I'm going to do that now.
Marc:So I performed in San Francisco.
Marc:I had probably the best set ever, not just for me, but I think for any comic that has ever performed anywhere.
Marc:I think it was really the best set, you know, and I am really the best comic that ever lived ever.
Marc:And I'm not even making this up.
Marc:This is just the truth that it was probably the best set of comedy ever performed anywhere ever.
Marc:There's been many sets before.
Marc:There's been plenty of very funny people, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, all these people, but there's no one doing it as good as me at this point in time.
Marc:How fucking annoying is that?
Marc:What if people you knew in real life talk like that?
Marc:Jesus.
Marc:So, but, you know, to be honest with you, I did have the best set of comedy ever in San Francisco.
Marc:I just want to put that out there.
Marc:It was perfect.
Marc:It was a perfect set.
Marc:It was good.
Marc:It was good.
Marc:And all the people were great.
Marc:And I was happy to see everybody.
Marc:All right, I mentioned Edward Norton is here.
Marc:Did I mention it?
Marc:So I drove back down from San Francisco on Sunday, yesterday.
Marc:And man, it was just like there was smoke and dust hanging over all of it.
Marc:Just driving through that cow stinky part, just that flat five.
Marc:And I don't know what came over me.
Marc:And it's sort of like I had another...
Marc:Fuck it, but you have to, man.
Marc:I had to do it.
Marc:I was driving down from San Francisco and I went to In-N-Out Burger, had a double-double in fries.
Marc:You know, it's like, I posted a picture of it on Instagram because I do that sometimes.
Marc:People are like, fuck, it's not that good.
Marc:It's like, and those fries suck.
Marc:It's like, it's not, I didn't say it was gourmet.
Marc:It's In-N-Out.
Marc:It's always the same.
Marc:It fucking nails it.
Marc:It was good.
Marc:And I felt bad about it, but it was good.
Marc:And if you eat the fries fast enough, they're good.
Marc:And now I like to squirt my own ketchup.
Marc:And so I did that.
Marc:That was pretty exciting.
Marc:And then for some reason, I stopped at McDonald's and got a McDonald's coffee.
Marc:And this all happened today because I'm recording this on Sunday.
Marc:And right now I'm fucking kind of whacked out of my brain on fast food products.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes, I am.
Marc:All right, look, let's get into this then.
Marc:It's all right.
Marc:I'm okay.
Marc:You okay?
Marc:Are we all right?
Marc:Perfect.
Marc:Everybody okay?
Marc:Edward Norton came by and we talked about his, a lot of things actually, but he's got this new movie, Motherless Brooklyn, which comes out this Friday, November 1st.
Marc:And, you know, we did it.
Marc:You know, I was excited to meet him.
Marc:He sat down and we just started going.
Marc:And this is that.
Guest:Do you hear me?
Marc:I hear you.
Marc:Oh, there you go.
Marc:Do you hear you now?
Guest:You hear my gravelly affectation.
Marc:I have had Nick Nolte in here.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:I have a feeling that.
Guest:That is impossible for you to understand what I'm saying.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It has gone.
Guest:It has gone.
Guest:It has gone beyond self-parody and into actual, like... Space.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Outer space, man.
Guest:It's like... Did you work with him?
Guest:I did.
Guest:On which movie?
Guest:I worked with him on a movie that then he busted his knee on and had to drop out of.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And so we got a much more rational and sane actor in John Boyd.
Guest:What movie was this?
Guest:It's a New York cop film called Pride and Glory.
Marc:When you work with those guys, do you see yourself as part of some sort of film tradition?
Marc:I mean, when you work with Nolte, does it affect you?
Marc:Are you like, that's Nick Nolte?
Marc:Or do you not register it?
Guest:It's funny you said that, because I used to have this conversation with Phil Hoffman, who was my friend.
Guest:We came up in New York together, starting theater companies.
Guest:I remember one time saying to him, do you get the sensation that we're just really square?
Guest:Compared to these guys that these guys that we're like kind of like just theater nerds.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Who kind of came up and got an affect of being cool in one way or another.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the truth is these guys are just authentically weird as shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in a way that we're just not, and he said, it feels like I think about that all the time.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Because we had both done things with De Niro.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we had both done things with like Harvey Keitel.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, and I think Bob and Al Pacino and Robert Duvall.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Nick and just these, a lot of them, they either...
Guest:really took too many drugs and there's like a residual effect or joking aside, I kind of, I do have this thesis that like the first generation of American film actors post Brando, I think that it's very hard for people today
Guest:what happens with people like Brando is that it gets reduced into a really small narrative and people end up, they end up losing an authentic sense of what the scale of the impact of something was in the context of that moment.
Guest:And I think that
Guest:If you talk to anyone who was young when he hit the screen, it wasn't like a new cool star.
Guest:It was such a seismic.
Guest:It was a before and after moment for American film acting.
Guest:Like in Streetcar, right?
Guest:Yeah, and for youth, for young men.
Guest:It was like that is it.
Guest:That is the godhead.
Guest:That is what we aspire to.
Guest:The wild one.
Guest:Yeah, but also the thing is, again, it gets people like Brando in the tank top and Stanley Kowalski, but Brando had this incredible, he had such a feminine, within his masculinity, he looks like a Roman, he was so things, but he has
Guest:this kind of weird marble-mouthed sensitivity.
Guest:Same with Montgomery Clift, too, a little, right?
Guest:A little bit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For me, Montgomery Clift and James Dean, these were like Nicolanti brandos.
Guest:I really don't think they were anywhere in the class of the kind of deeply strange, poetic,
Guest:instincts that he had.
Guest:But I think that if you talk to Nicholson, De Niro, Meryl Streep, the people who came in the next wave, especially the men, it was all about him.
Guest:He was like this enormous gravitational thing.
Guest:And all these people who had never seen themselves as...
Guest:even aspiring to be within that, all these people went out of non-traditional kind of pathways into this new idea of a naturalistic, you know, method, the method, these things.
Guest:And I think like the greatest generation of American film actors
Guest:came to it because of Brando and it happened right at that moment of the counterculture and so you got like Jack and Pacino and Morgan Freeman and Robert Duvall and on and on and on and on but I think they were a very different sort of people than the people who kind of get into theater in high school and come up you know come up to bring it back around yeah you know what I mean like I think um
Marc:And so I always... But they were all like that.
Marc:I mean, like Brando too, you don't get a sense that that culture even existed.
Marc:I mean, like you're a little younger than me, but like the idea that, you know, you did high school theater and then you kind of pursue theater in New York and you do whatever, that whole thing is post-Brando.
Marc:A little bit.
Guest:There's a romantic...
Guest:Yeah, a little bit.
Guest:I mean, don't forget, like, his mother was an actress and his sister was, too.
Marc:In Nebraska?
Guest:Yeah, and he kind of followed them.
Guest:He followed them to New York kind of for the teenage bohemian dream of just being an artist, really.
Guest:He didn't know what the hell he wanted to do.
Guest:He told me once that he was...
Guest:He was never happier than when he was selling lemonade in Washington Square Park.
Guest:He told you that?
Guest:Yeah, he worked, you know, he played bongos with his friends.
Guest:I think what happened to him had, in a way, was kind of a tragedy for him in some dimensions because he was a person who, like, deeply, deeply loved his anonymity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the experience of being able to be a kind of a wandering bohemian and all that evaporated by the time he was 25 years old.
Guest:Gone.
Guest:Gone.
Guest:And he had such a deep conflict about that that it created a negative love-hate relationship with the work itself.
Marc:I mean, it feels like you kind of must have experienced a bit of that, too.
Marc:You sort of felt that going in, you know, coming up as quickly as you did, that this would rip you apart publicly or that you would be denied a public life if you weren't careful.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, I think, but you know, in a funny way, by the time we all got into those experiences, honestly, I think there was more wisdom about it.
Guest:I think there were more people to convey to you.
Guest:Be careful.
Guest:Yeah, and aspects of it, and to be totally honest, like, there were pole stars to look to that they didn't have back then.
Guest:Like, I think one of the other figures, Dylan, like Brando, there really is before Dylan, after Dylan, there wasn't,
Guest:There wasn't that kind of zeitgeist voice of a generation before him.
Guest:But I'd go back and watch Scorsese's doc, you know, the No Direction Home one.
Guest:Every couple years just because it's so amazing and inspiring to me to see a guy at 20, 21 years old facing this like wall of reporters
Guest:putting all this shit on him.
Guest:You're the voice of your generation.
Guest:And he's just going, that's nothing I can relate to, man.
Guest:You know, and they're saying, what does it mean?
Guest:Unpack it for us.
Guest:And he goes, I wrote it.
Guest:I don't know what it means.
Guest:What do you think it means?
Guest:But for 20, really stop and think about the experience that we've all gone through and it's only intensified in kind of the modern world of social media and podcasts and everything.
Guest:Quick bait.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, but the expectation is that things can only be enhanced by talking more about them today.
Guest:And there's this kid.
Guest:He's 20 years old, 21 years old with the world throwing adulation at him.
Guest:And he has the sense.
Guest:The density at that age to not just be skeptical, to know that if I let you inside it, you will ruin it.
Guest:I will be ruined.
Guest:And everything I'm trying to do gets destroyed by answering your fucking question.
Guest:that's an it's incredible it actually every time i watch it it actually kind of amazes and and moves me because when you look at like john lennon later right right going bonkers in the shea stadium concert and just playing the keyboard with his elbows because no he knows no one can hear right and just saying we're never playing live again like like it even them it took them a while to realize like this is going to ruin our lives and they by the way they break up the beatles over it they're like
Guest:We want to have lives.
Marc:But Dylan sort of maintains that disposition today.
Marc:He maintains a sort of mystery, a mystique around how he engages with the press and with the public.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And I love that he's eternally said, I'll talk about the musicians I love.
Guest:I'll talk about anything, but I'm not going to unpack what I'm doing.
Guest:However, I do think what's incredible about that doc, and if you look at the new one,
Marc:Did you like that moment in the new doc where he gets off stage?
Guest:The Rolling Thunder one?
Guest:Oh, it's incredible.
Marc:He performs at the first show, and the guy with the camera goes, how do you feel?
Marc:And he turns around and goes, about what?
Guest:No, it's just the best.
Guest:But then what I think is amazing in these things Scorsese made about him...
Guest:are that somehow he has gotten him now as a man in his 70s to say, if you really watch it, he says in the first one, he goes, look, I was looking at what was going on around me and I was interested in Woody Guthrie's idiom and I took it and ran it through that, but I wasn't going to talk about that.
Guest:He literally says, yeah, I constructed it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah, it was conscious.
Guest:Yeah, it was a character.
Guest:But I'm not going to break it down at the time.
Guest:And what I love about that is he does it a little in the Rolling Thunder thing, too.
Guest:He says, hey, man, we've been singing.
Guest:He basically says, we were singing all this Kumbaya shit, but we had Vietnam and Watergate.
Guest:And it was like, we better notch this shit up.
Guest:And that one bit in that film where he's playing hard rain,
Guest:Tom York and I were talking about it when we were working on the music of this film.
Guest:I didn't even really ever make Tom for a Bob Dylan fan, per se.
Guest:I didn't really know that he wasn't.
Guest:But he literally said that's one of the most punk rock things I've ever seen, playing, taking those folk songs and basically going, no, man.
Guest:Like this isn't working.
Guest:Make a menacing.
Guest:We got to be.
Guest:What's going on?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's incredible.
Guest:There are so few.
Guest:And I think Scorsese has really caught something, which is that this guy, he always was focused on.
Guest:What do I need to do that keeps me on edge about the whole thing and feeling like I'm out there on the bright white line actually doing something no matter what anybody says, no matter whether they get it now?
Guest:You know, he was such a, like...
Guest:I'm going over here.
Guest:Once you get comfortable with what I'm doing, I'm going over here.
Guest:And you're going to scream and yell and go, don't plug in.
Guest:Don't play electric.
Guest:But, you know, if you don't... Go fuck yourself.
Guest:Go fuck yourself.
Guest:And if you don't come, if you don't come now, you're going to come later.
Guest:You'll be here.
Guest:You'll get it later.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the confidence...
Guest:as a very young person, to basically go, if you get this later, if you get it now, I really don't.
Guest:That's not what I'm here for.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm here to do it.
Guest:It's why he's authentically worthy of, like, the mystique.
Marc:Did you take this in, this assessment you have as a younger person, or is this something you're looking at over life?
Guest:It came, it came, I mean, I...
Marc:Were these lessons for you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought, I mean, but there were people, there's other people that have an affect on you who you realize are either by design or because they're wisely reticent about ruining the very bubble of illusion they're creating by going out there and blathering.
Guest:Oh, no, I had in the wrong way.
Marc:I had John C. Reilly in here or the other garage.
Marc:You know, he agreed to do it.
Marc:And he sat down and he goes, I don't want to talk about myself.
Marc:I don't want to ruin my mystique.
Marc:And thank God we, you know, he saw a clown painting in my house because we talked about clowns for 20 minutes.
Marc:But eventually he started talking about himself.
Guest:Can I tell you something?
Guest:I think.
Guest:But but let's be clear.
Guest:Like Dylan did.
Guest:a radio show, which is a great, it's one of the great musicology things, and all those riffs like, we're gonna talk about coffee, Joe, Mountain Black, all that stuff, and you go, it's kinda like his biography, which is one of the weirdest
Guest:I love it.
Guest:It's incredible.
Guest:But he doesn't ruin anything because what he does is go, hey, there's a lot we can connect through.
Guest:There's a lot we can riff about and find common ground in, and there's a lot that I want to share.
Guest:But think about how much value that has to have.
Guest:Because of what you love about his own work, he goes, hey, you don't want to know about my marriage.
Guest:You don't want to know about this shit.
Guest:Let's talk about great songs about mothers.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And you go, just...
Marc:He's also he's sort of this weird, almost vaudevillian curator of things, too.
Marc:Like he has this new persona of the guy that's just going to die on the road, you know, in his Western jacket is really kind of impressive in a weird way.
Marc:He's just going to he doesn't have to do it and he needs to do it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's a ghost on the highway, man.
Guest:I respect it.
Guest:The yin-yang to that is people who are not afraid, and there are very few, to go, hey, you know what?
Guest:I've done this gig.
Guest:I've done my thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm not tapped into the main vein of what people are needing right now.
Guest:And also, I just want to be a human being.
Guest:I want to go back to quiet life or whatever it is.
Guest:I'll make furniture.
Guest:I want to like... You respect them.
Guest:A lot.
Guest:Well, I think it's very... It's dignified in a way.
Guest:Well, you know, like what Tennessee Williams called the bitch goddess of success is very, very hard...
Guest:For people to say, do I want to die having done the same, a version of the same thing over and over.
Guest:Now, some people are real, like, tradecraft, like Dylan is.
Guest:And maybe he does, like, want to die on the road.
Guest:I wrestle, I do relate to the...
Guest:the kind of restorative sensation of just not doing these things.
Marc:I respect, like, when I hear somebody that I know or somebody, like, who is in comedy or whatever in show business and I haven't seen them in a while and they've gotten out somehow, I'm like, congratulations.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:Good for you.
Marc:I talked to Bruce Dern, dude, in there.
Marc:He was sitting right there, too.
Marc:I don't know what that means to you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I worked with Bruce.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's completely out of his mind.
Guest:And absolutely out of his mind.
Marc:But great memory, though.
Marc:Great memory, but out of his mind.
Marc:Remembers everything.
Marc:I challenge that.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I think my experience with Bruce was that he remembered with vivid detail an extremely narrow set of experiences and that actually there was enormous blank space from decades.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's Dennis Hopper one time.
Guest:He told me once that he didn't remember large portions of the 20 years from 65 to 85.
Guest:He didn't literally have any memory of... Things get lost, even if you don't do drugs.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I mean, haven't you lost some things?
Marc:I don't have that sensation yet.
Marc:But speaking to your point, Dern said about Nicholson that he's basically retired because his reasoning is he doesn't want to do anything if it's not as good or better than what he's done before.
Marc:That's reasonable.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I know it's a weird reference, but I was really struck by this thing I heard the Dalai Lama say that he... He's good at that.
Guest:Striking thing.
Guest:Yeah, he is.
Guest:He's funny, too.
Guest:But I saw something where someone said, selfishly, what do you still hope for yourself in the remainder of your life?
Guest:And he said, I hope I have the courage to actually crawl into a cave
Guest:and be a monk again and lick my wounds for a period before I die.
Guest:And I was like, that's incredible for him.
Guest:No, for someone to say, I need time to go back to being like me.
Guest:Humble.
Guest:Or just alone and actually with myself and not have the burden of this thing that I am to other people.
Marc:Well, how are you with that, with being with yourself?
Marc:Are you any good at it?
Guest:Yeah, I love it.
Guest:The longer I do it, the more the other voices slip away, and the dopamine hit that comes from some sort of bullshit affirmation.
Guest:No, the affirmations of the work.
Guest:The work is always fun.
Guest:I always find the work great.
Guest:Everything else that comes around it messes with your head, and you've got to really, really...
Guest:work at keeping your head and eye fixated on the target that had substance.
Guest:Who you are too, right?
Guest:Or even for the work.
Guest:You go, why did we do this?
Guest:Why did I go at this?
Guest:And whatever we're doing, can we retain the focus on the path
Guest:to achieving what we were trying to achieve with it in terms of what it does for people watching it, not what anybody says about it, not what gets conferred on it in the short term, not any of these other, this matrix of agendas that... Noise and publicity.
Guest:Yeah, and you can't be immune to it.
Guest:You can be the toughest sort of, you know, I don't give a shit.
Guest:I don't believe that anybody's automatically...
Guest:immune to like the just the constant chorus of voices trying to get you to pay attention oh my god to worse now yeah to how things are performing outside the the direct conversation you're trying to have through what you did with people right and yeah and I think like I have to think a lot about
Guest:Clinically, if I look and go, well, here's things I did that there's no question we hit the target of what we were going for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For our tribe, for our people, the people our age, our friends, our experience, things.
Guest:It connected.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Actually, many of them failed on many of the other metrics that other people.
Guest:What are we talking about specifically?
Guest:Well, like if you take a movie like Fight Club, which I would say, looking back and where it sits, it went right on through to the people we made it for.
Guest:And it says what we wanted it to say.
Guest:Great movie.
Guest:And it was about the things we wanted it to be about.
Guest:But it was a huge flop initially at the box office.
Guest:Very, very big.
Guest:Did you like the movie?
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:I was overwhelmed by it.
Guest:I love the experience of doing it as profoundly as anything I've worked on.
Guest:And I've been lucky and had some really good experiences.
Guest:But I also, I remember going to something with Brad and the gang and...
Guest:I remember him giving me this funny look and going, he said, how do you think this is going to go?
Guest:And I said, I think it's going to go very badly.
Guest:And he said, I do too.
Guest:Let's get high.
Guest:And he had a joint, which he always did then.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I remember we went to this thing at some film festival and people booed it.
Guest:It got booed.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:And some people walked out.
Guest:And we sat in the back and we watched it.
Guest:And there was all this negative feeling in the room.
Guest:And he turned to me in the dark and he goes, that's the best movie I'm ever going to be in.
Guest:And I said, I think so, too.
Guest:And we were hugging each other, kind of like weepy.
Guest:We were really happy.
Marc:Was it the first time you saw it in an audience?
Guest:It was, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was kind of like straight out of the movie itself.
Guest:It was like, we're failing.
Guest:We're not men.
Guest:We're like we're like all the all the wrong things are happening.
Guest:And we were kind of like enjoying it.
Guest:Connected moment.
Guest:But I think but I think that many, many, many of the things all of us would point to as.
Guest:things that have mattered to us.
Guest:I saw something once of all the critics who panned Raging Bull and then 10 years later put it on their best of the 80s list.
Guest:And you just want to like, you just want to put your middle finger up and just go like.
Marc:Well, let's go back though.
Marc:When you're sitting there with Philip back in the day,
Marc:I mean, what were your goals?
Marc:I mean, how did you come to New York, you know, to start to do this?
Marc:And, you know, like you're like because he's he was another sensitive, amazing artist that sort of buckled under the weight of something.
Marc:But what were you guys, you know, what were your dreams at that time?
Marc:Just to do theater?
Marc:I mean, what were you really thinking about?
Guest:I mean, yeah, I think if you went to New York in that period, I think there was still an allure of- What years are we talking?
Guest:Like the early 90s.
Guest:Where'd you come from?
Guest:You went to Yale?
Guest:I went to college, yeah.
Guest:And I used to go down to New York all the time from New Haven, see plays.
Guest:It was undergrad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I studied history and Asian studies.
Guest:And did you have a plan?
Guest:No, I had a dim, unconfident sensation that I wanted to go to New York for the theater.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I had a hard time just sort of owning that, embracing it.
Guest:And I kind of went there with sort of a generalized sense of I just want to be in New York.
Guest:You know, I want to be in New York.
Guest:Was your family into it?
Guest:My family is great.
Guest:My parents were real lovers of the arts in general.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They weren't artists in any way.
Guest:They're aficionados of everything.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Loved music, loved theater, loved movies.
Marc:So the household was filled with that kind of stuff?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, that's nice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And one of my uncles is a great musician.
Guest:One's a painter.
Guest:And my mother taught Shakespeare and...
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:You know, went, took us to plays, and my father was an opera buff and a theater buff.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Where'd you grow up?
Guest:Near Baltimore.
Guest:So all this stuff in D.C., so you had all the free museums and you had the opera.
Guest:We had a lot, yeah.
Guest:It was, Baltimore had a... Were you close to D.C.?
Guest:We were close to D.C., too.
Guest:Yeah, it was easy to go right around.
Guest:So we had, like, you know, Center Stage was a great regional theater in Baltimore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But then D.C.
Guest:had, obviously, like, the National Theater and things like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it also had, like...
Guest:There was the 930 Club in DC was the great, because in that era, you know, Baltimore really only had like metal.
Guest:It didn't have like an alt music scene.
Guest:It was like you were either into like Springsteen.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or you were like 80s.
Guest:Metatica.
Guest:Yeah, but then there was this mid-Atlantic alt-rock station called WHFS that was incredible, and that had all the Britpop, the Clash.
Guest:Yeah, DC had a pretty good punk scene, Fugazi.
Guest:Yeah, Fugazi and Minor Threat, and I had an older cousin who played me R.E.M.
Guest:I was affected by that.
Guest:It's funny, Spike Jones and I realized that I used to go shop for BMX parts at the Spike store that he worked at when he was like 14.
Guest:In D.C.?
Guest:In Rockville.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, in that area.
Guest:So you think you crossed paths?
Guest:When he said that, he said, you know I used to work at this thing.
Guest:It melted my mind.
Guest:I had this sensation of like, could I have bought my Shimano cranks from Spike?
Guest:Well, you know, when we were both like 13, 14, it was crazy.
Marc:Well, it's weird because you don't seem like that you would have fallen into the angrier zone of that world.
Marc:No.
Marc:He seems pretty sweet, too.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah, Spike's the sweetest.
Guest:I think I just felt alienated.
Guest:I mean...
Guest:I don't trust people who don't feel alienated in high school.
Guest:Springsteen had a big effect on me, even though that wasn't the hip thing.
Guest:People forget, though, if you were from that East Coast corridor, the narrative of getting out, just the narrative of getting out.
Guest:And I talked to him about this once.
Guest:Darkness on the Edge of Town was such a cinematic.
Guest:That record really filled my head with... Great record.
Guest:Even more than... I mean, Born to Run is incredible.
Guest:It has really evocative... Yeah, but Darkness is... But Darkness on the Edge of Town is like a noir movie.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:It has really... It's like film scenes.
Guest:you really feel it's like film scenes of people you talk to him about it yeah yeah we did when it was the 30th re-release of that I got to do I did this I interviewed him about like darkness and noir and oh wow yeah I talked to him at his place you know for just the general show yeah it's a heavy chat man I mean you know like when you're around Bruce and I wasn't a Bruce fanatic but yeah I respect the guy and I love the records but when you're around him you're like this is weighty
Marc:man.
Guest:That book, I mean, I think his book is one of the greatest books ever written by an artist about his own life.
Marc:I think it's... What was surprising to me about it was how hard on himself he is.
Marc:I mean, Jesus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Are you like that?
Guest:No, not like that.
Guest:No.
Guest:I think he dealt with this all in that Broadway show, which was also one of the best things I ever saw.
Guest:I think...
Guest:I think it's very rare for someone of his stature to have the instinct and the capacity to dig that deep into what his own metamorphosis was from pain and poverty and fear.
Guest:Where it comes from.
Guest:Yeah, and to unpack it in a way that has value for other people so that they can continue to see themselves in him now that even though he's...
Marc:He's wise and he's older and he's coming to terms with his own demons.
Marc:And because of his stature, he's sharing that.
Marc:And it strengthens people and makes people feel less alone who are similar to him and never assume that they were like that.
Guest:And by the way, he says it.
Guest:He says at the beginning, I've been working this kind of illusion, this sleight of hand thing.
Guest:And we've been doing this together for a while.
Guest:I've been doing this so that we could feel these things together.
Guest:But now I got to deal with my ghosts and we're all hitting the age.
Guest:It's like he just keeps taking you into like...
Marc:Well, that's the amazing thing about him, though.
Guest:Into a new level.
Marc:Right.
Marc:When I talk to him, though, and I'm sure you notice this as well, is that his public persona is pretty smooth.
Marc:Like, you know, it's real kind of, hey, man, I'm just, you know.
Marc:And he's got this thing, and it seems real earnest and real genuine, but just right around the corner from that, it's like...
Marc:You know, like it's like dark, it's heavy.
Marc:And it's like, how are you going to get into that?
Marc:And I got him at a good moment because I think that's ultimately what he started to share was, you know, that balance that he has to ride between that.
Marc:I don't think that his public persona is disingenuous, but it's what got him through.
Guest:I agree.
Guest:I think that his conviction that doing the work and finding things
Guest:the themes is saving his life as much as it's saving everyone else's life.
Guest:To me, that's the only way you can play stuff you wrote when you were 25, 40 years later, with the kind of conviction, an actual, almost spiritual, religious conviction,
Guest:I think he honestly feels it saved my life.
Guest:It continues to save my life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm in it with you, therefore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's why people have a thing with him, which, again, it's like it's a different.
Marc:It's the only place he feels comfortable is on stage.
Marc:He said it to me.
Marc:Like, it's the only place where he can trust and feel OK and, you know, not feel afraid.
Guest:You know, I think from people like him.
Guest:I've never met Dylan.
Guest:I'm not sure I would ever want to meet Dylan.
Guest:I knew David Bowie a bit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We lived around the corner from each other in... Where, New York?
Guest:In New York, and I used to have coffee with him sometimes, and he was incredibly valuable in a different way, but also because he would sit with you like this, and he would look at you like David Jones, and just be like, hey, yeah, he would talk to you as the guy just like us that does the work, builds the thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:puts it out there and retreats back into a very healthy place on the whole.
Guest:He was very, very great, I think, at saying not everybody has to live in the thing.
Guest:It doesn't have to be a thing you walk around in all the time.
Guest:I didn't.
Guest:And you think about him, you're like, that's right.
Guest:He didn't.
Guest:He was like the king of the... He was the guy... Shapeshifter.
Guest:Yeah, shapeshifter.
Guest:Absolutely the guy who was like, hey, I stand for the freaks and the weirdos and everyone outside.
Guest:That's why people were crying on the floor when he died because people were like, that guy...
Guest:you know.
Marc:He made it okay for us.
Guest:The weirdos are cool.
Guest:Yeah, weirdos are cool.
Guest:Like no one else.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then if, you know what I mean, he'd say, you build it and you can hang it on the hook and walk away from it and be yourself.
Guest:Because sometimes, you know, you're like, you're doing your thing.
Guest:You are who you are.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And not every actor is gonna have an affect or a, you know, some do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think what I'm always kind of,
Guest:more and more, I don't know, weighing, meditating on trying to like not keep acting by remote.
Guest:Don't pursue a path on remote control or on cruise control where you're like, well, I should do another movie.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And working less may actually have
Guest:a double value of letting me be me more within a path that's your own interesting for completely other reasons other endeavors not public other parts your brain personal reasons personal or even just doing other types of work that feel like the beginning sure you know what i mean uh that feel like a different set of muscles and then
Guest:You know, have the privilege if you're like, I'm pretty lit up about this.
Guest:I can't get this out of my head.
Guest:This is that thing that I need to do.
Guest:I want to do.
Guest:Or I've got something to say.
Guest:Go back and do it.
Guest:And it won't be less good because you haven't been, you know, knocking out your one a year.
Guest:It'll be better.
Marc:Well, I feel like I haven't seen you in a while.
Guest:Good.
Guest:You know, I mean...
Guest:You were like sentimentally breaking out Death to Smoochie.
Guest:You're like, I need a dose of him.
Guest:Where's that Norton guy?
Guest:Where's he been?
Guest:Fuck, I haven't put on Death to Smoochie in a while.
Guest:Is that the one?
Guest:No, I'm kidding.
Guest:I love Death to Smoochie.
Guest:It's a very telling thing when it's a real barometer if a person comes up and that's the first, I'm like, you're my, I like you.
Marc:When people go, I loved you in Death to Smoochie?
Marc:So you're in New York and you're doing that thing.
Marc:You started a theater group too?
Guest:Sort of, yeah.
Guest:My friend Jim Houghton created this thing called the Signature Theater Company that was a brilliant idea.
Guest:He was kind of like, everybody gets retrospectives except playwrights.
Guest:What if we just did a theater company that did the body of work of a playwright?
Guest:That was each of its seasons.
Guest:And he enlisted...
Guest:great playwrights really early on because nobody treated them that way right nobody said hey Edward Albee guess what we're gonna do a whole thing and and you curate what you feel didn't get understood or done right and everything and they flocked to and I I got involved very early on as an actor and it was my like my first paying gig but then it was it was such a singular and cool thing I I sort of joined that company and so you got to work with Albee and other people like that
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:They would come in and do it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:We did seasons with every great American playwright who's alive.
Guest:And then later, Jim and I, many years later, Jim and I built this huge performing arts center on 42nd Street.
Guest:What's it called?
Guest:Signature.
Guest:It's three theaters.
Guest:Frank Gehry designed it.
Marc:I don't know if I've been there.
Guest:I'm sure you've been there.
Guest:Great little intimate theaters.
Guest:Is that where Annie Baker's play was?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:She was one of our writers in residence.
Guest:Yeah, great.
Guest:For three or five years.
Guest:I think I saw John there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:I was there.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Marc:Well, I mean, that must have been mind-blowing.
Marc:I mean, what a gift of coincidence and time to be involved with something like that, to meet Sam Shepard and to work with them personally, and Albie as well.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Horton Foote, I mean, Jesus.
Guest:No, many of the greats, Maria Irene Fornez, Agent Kennedy.
Guest:Where'd you study?
Guest:Where did I study?
Guest:I did some drama stuff in school, but I studied with a variety of people in New York.
Guest:I trusted very few people.
Guest:I thought most people were.
Guest:Most people, especially the ones attached to legacy name acting programs without getting into it.
Guest:They were like tail end of someone else's legacy, trying to hold on to a cult of personality.
Guest:They were creating dependency between themselves and actors.
Guest:They weren't actually generally trying to empower actors to be professionals.
Guest:Trying to keep the cult going.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And basically the constant, you're not ready.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This guy, Terry Schreiber, was a truly, he was like, to me, a great carpenter.
Guest:He would say, you need a lot of tools in your kit.
Guest:You should know about this idea of how to approach things, but that won't work in everything.
Guest:You should know about this.
Guest:And I thought that was the right thought, because I remember thinking at the time, actually, early on, I did this film, you know, my first film, I did this film, Primal Fear, but then I was doing this Woody Allen.
Guest:The second film I did was a Woody Allen film.
Guest:You're dancing around.
Guest:And it was a musical.
Guest:Yeah, I saw you dancing.
Guest:Yeah, it's like, so all your sense memory is gonna be really like a great help, you know, when you're doing like a dance in Harry Winston.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:It's just like the notion, I still think that the notion that there's an idea about acting that's encompassing, it's ridiculous.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:It's completely ridiculous.
Marc:Now, to go from Primal Fear to the musical, I mean, was that like some, like when Primal Fear breaks and it's exciting and big and, you know, everyone's lit up about you,
Marc:and you get offered a musical, I mean, were you like, I'm just going to try that?
Marc:I think dancing would be fun.
Guest:It wasn't like that.
Guest:I made that before the first movie even came out.
Guest:I made The People vs. Larry Flint before... Primal Fear came out?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:We were just finishing it up when it came out.
Marc:So you did sort of a rush of movies.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, which was wonderful.
Guest:It was an incredible time.
Guest:I still feel it was a very heady, but by the way, not for the reasons that become complicated of people going, blah, blah, blah, it's so great, but more because nobody's bothering you, nobody's saying these things, but you're working with Milos Forman.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And who to me was one of the, like probably in the pantheon of the top 10 musicians
Guest:people in film that I would have fantasized about working with and I'm getting to sit at his feet and watch him do it.
Guest:It affected me forever.
Guest:And it was unencumbered by bullshit.
Guest:Because no one knew who you were.
Guest:And he was having me go off and work on the script with him.
Guest:It was like, wow.
Guest:He's validating me, and it's not in a... He's validating me saying... It's collaborative.
Guest:Yeah, saying, let's work.
Guest:Let's dig in.
Guest:Let's do the thing.
Marc:Oh, and that sort of set a standard, huh?
Guest:Yeah, what could be better?
Marc:And you thought that, like, this is... Because rarely do people work like that.
Guest:Yeah, he was very unique in the sense that he had this baked-in, what I would call healthy perspective, because, you know...
Guest:He lost his parents to the Gestapo when he was nine.
Guest:He lived the war out as an orphan and then comes of age under the communist Iron Curtain system, has to become an artist up and through that navigation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and then gets trapped out by the Soviets cracking down in Prague, makes a movie in the U.S.
Guest:It doesn't do well at all.
Guest:And he told me he considered suicide.
Guest:He said he thought, I can't go home.
Guest:I have no career.
Guest:I have nowhere to go.
Guest:And then he made Cuckoo's Nest, which, by the way,
Guest:Nobody wanted, but they made it independently.
Guest:All the studios passed on it.
Guest:Every single studio passed on it.
Guest:And they spent months shepherding it around to critics.
Guest:Michael Douglas.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And because of, he said, Michael Douglas said, you go take a vacation.
Guest:I got this.
Guest:And Michael, you know, muscled that movie around to critics until there was such a weight behind it that they got this like low end deal from United Artists.
Guest:But again, to me, here's a guy who's just like, hey, everything that's great feels half-baked.
Guest:I mean, I remember him saying to me, like, I was nervous.
Guest:I was like, there's things about this I don't understand.
Guest:And the way he worked was so different from life in theater.
Guest:Things about the relationship with Flint or the character?
Guest:Yeah, the script, the movie.
Guest:What was he going for?
Guest:How is it?
Guest:Things.
Guest:The way he worked was so fluid and so unstructured.
Guest:He would crisscross cameras so that if anything happened, he got it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He would let improvisation between actors go on and on and on.
Guest:Do you like to improvise?
Guest:I do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I sometimes where I was at the time coming from theater, I I found myself going, well, we're supposed to be doing a given thing today.
Guest:And if if we don't see it happen as though a well-performed play.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It can't possibly have been gotten.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he would sort of go, no, you know, I got this little bit and that little bit.
Guest:And I began to realize that he was he was just pulling clay out of a cliff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He wasn't even remotely attempting to sculpt.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The thing he he was he had this meter for.
Guest:And did that go against everything you believe?
Guest:Well, it was incredible.
Guest:That's what I was talking about.
Guest:Like, yeah.
Guest:When you talk about learning and other things, his sense of the plasticity of film was amazing.
Guest:He believed in casting and editing, and shooting was just filling up a gas can that he was going to assemble a machine around later.
Guest:That was incredibly eye-opening to me.
Guest:I think his films had been nominated for as many as anyone in history or something like that.
Guest:He was like, every single one that I've done felt like this is a very half-baked idea or we're way out on a limb, we're failing, everyone's telling us we're failing, no one wants to see a movie about Mozart.
Guest:No, you know what I mean?
Guest:These things.
Guest:And when you get downloaded from people who have done the shit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You're like, this is like the forever stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you realize that for them, it felt beyond risky, not on the rails.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's a very important thing.
Guest:To learn.
Guest:To learn.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because then you just...
Guest:you're going to get into the weeds on anything you do that has ambition.
Guest:You're going to get into the weeds.
Guest:And the only way to not panic and in a way to actually lean in is to go, this is how these go.
Guest:This is how these go.
Guest:The sensation of disaster is pretty intrinsic to many of the best things.
Marc:And, I mean, I imagine you experienced that on a few movies.
Marc:I mean, I hear Fincher's, like, really demanding and kind of hard to work with in terms of takes and whatnot.
Guest:Yes, but the thing that I find myself always wanting to, like, call bullshit on is, like, people will say, you read Reductive, Edward's challenging, he challenges directors.
Guest:Like, Fincher's challenging, he's demanding.
Guest:It's like,
Guest:Yeah, but the idea that we don't like that is ridiculous.
Guest:Who, actors?
Guest:No, that we all—this is even before clickbait.
Guest:Clickbait makes it worse, but the manufacturing of antagonistic stories is a load of shit.
Guest:It's like great things come out of people pushing each other hard, and Fincher pushes everybody hard, and he's revered by everyone who works with him for it.
Marc:You want to hear something funny?
Marc:I interviewed him and we did like two and a half hours and he decided it wasn't complete and he wants to... But isn't he... And you say like, oh, he's a hard ass.
Guest:I couldn't release it.
Guest:He's the funniest.
Marc:No, no, I didn't say he was a hard ass.
Marc:I just hear he does a lot of takes.
Marc:That's all I've heard.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:No, and he is a hard ass and he says kind of purposely extreme things to get a... But he's the funniest motherfucker.
Guest:I mean, he's so funny.
Marc:And he's got vision.
Marc:I mean, you know, what are you going to do?
Guest:I only had to watch two of that guy's movies and go, whatever he's doing to get that, I want to crawl inside and experience what it is.
Guest:It doesn't mean it won't be difficult.
Guest:And it doesn't mean that you won't say, hey, what about this?
Guest:What about that?
Guest:That's how things that are good get done.
Guest:And the thing is, the people who are chasing those things, when you get it done, you're locked in for life.
Guest:You have that experience together for life.
Marc:And you also have the evidence of the work.
Guest:When also it's like Fincher's not like exerting ego or domination.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Although he'd probably go, yes, I am.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, but he's not.
Guest:He's trying to make something great.
Guest:If you go for the ride and at the end, you're not even just shaking hands.
Guest:You're like- We survived that.
Guest:Yeah, we did it.
Guest:We went to hell and back.
Guest:Yeah, we did it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Fuck around.
Guest:Yeah, we didn't come here to cruise control.
Guest:We came here to see if can we do anything interesting.
Guest:And when people work hard or push hard or have opinions that are about the thing, nobody who's serious goes, what an asshole.
Guest:Because it's when people are making it about them or it's all about friction having to do with peripheral things to the thing itself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, nobody.
Guest:That's just noise.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, because that's it.
Marc:Well, from what you're saying and from the guys you work with in the training, you sort of got on the job with Milos Forman and Fincher and even Woody Allen to a certain degree that, you know, it seems that what was set inside of you in terms of who you respect.
Marc:And this is going back to actors, too, is that, you know, we're here to do the best thing we can do.
Marc:And if I'm in a situation where I don't feel that's happening, I'm going to have to step up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'm just trying to reconcile whatever this reputation you mentioned is about you being challenging.
Guest:Well, it's also that there's not a lot that gets done that really messes with your head in any number of ways that isn't a tricky beast.
Guest:And when you're doing it, finding those things, it's tricky.
Guest:It means it's elusive and you're
Guest:You're out on a limb in a creative sense.
Guest:And it's almost to me like it's very hard to imagine something that's really good that wouldn't be hard to do on some level.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Most of the pictures of Fight Club, in fact, Fincher just sent me this.
Guest:He just sent me this thing.
Guest:Some magazine wants to do the 20-year thing of it.
Guest:And he said, hey, there's a bunch of pictures from the set.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Here they are.
Guest:We're going to send them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was looking at him and I was just, first of all, we're all laughing.
Guest:We're all just, we're all laughing in all these pictures or we're being absurd.
Guest:And I just, I was kind of looking at these pictures, I was filled with
Guest:It made me laugh.
Guest:I was filled with a feeling of affection, bordering on longing.
Guest:I was like, this was just great.
Guest:We were like, you know.
Marc:Well, because you kind of go through a whole thing together.
Guest:Yeah, and we were unencumbered and we were swinging.
Guest:Like a family, right?
Guest:Yeah, it's great.
Guest:And I think...
Guest:There's this world, there's this filter world that tells stories about these things that sound good because they have conflict within them.
Guest:It happened when we did American History X. But I worked hand in glove with Tony Kay.
Guest:We were running and gunning and gorilla.
Guest:We shot that thing like true gorilla style.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We would almost be in tears at the struggle.
Guest:When we would get through stuff, we were hugging each other.
Guest:What was the struggle of that movie?
Guest:Down the road, it actually had very little to do with me despite the bologna.
Guest:Tony is a very passionate artist, very passionate, and he's a great photographer too, which is not being reductive.
Guest:He shot that film, shot and operated it.
Guest:And he gets deep inside it.
Guest:I think he struggled literally to let go of a thing that had a lot of density to it, a lot of intensity, a lot of density.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:nuance that we all felt.
Guest:You want to get this right.
Guest:This is saying some stuff and you want to make sure the balance of the kind of visceral impact of these very negative antagonistic ideas, anger, rage, that it resolves out into the tragedy that you need it to be for it to have a redemptive message or a healing matter or any kind of thing, right?
Guest:And those are balances and I understood his anxiety.
Guest:It was an important piece of work to him.
Guest:And he wanted the process to go on and on and on.
Guest:And there became these like logistical realities with the studio that when it reached a certain point, they mostly just put a cap on like, this is as far as it can go.
Guest:And then what I would call the performance artist of Tony came out, who has done really funny things over the years, these kind of performance art, provocative pieces.
Guest:And he kind of started turning his relationship with the studio.
Guest:And I got kind of like...
Guest:kind of pulled into it by default in a way.
Guest:Because me and my friend David, David had written it.
Guest:We had rewritten it.
Guest:It was kind of our story in a way.
Guest:So I was involved in it fundamentally.
Guest:But ultimately, he turned his argument with the studio into just kind of a performance art piece.
Guest:And that made it seem...
Guest:Honestly, like something more negative than it was when in truth, they just didn't understand Tony.
Guest:Tony is a provocateur.
Guest:But if I saw Tony today, I know for sure we'd run up to each other.
Guest:I haven't seen him in years.
Guest:He knows we made something really terrific.
Guest:I've heard from other people.
Guest:I know he's proud of it.
Guest:The way we did it together was...
Guest:It was balls out.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:It was absolutely great.
Marc:Now, do you feel like in retrospect, honestly, this is a personal sort of thing for me in the sense, do you feel like you dodged a bullet with not having to be the Hulk for your life?
Guest:It's not like that.
Guest:I saw within this theme of kind of the manufacturing of... Problems.
Guest:Yeah, problems.
Guest:I don't think I dodged a bullet because that would sound like I have a negative view of... Are you relieved that you're not the Hulk today?
Guest:Not even relieved.
Guest:I think it's what I would call a win-win.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:No, and I really mean it.
Guest:Like, really mean it.
Guest:First of all,
Guest:Let's go real wide.
Guest:That character is, I grew up on that.
Guest:I grew up on the comic book and the Bill Bixby show.
Guest:You know, I loved it.
Guest:You're a comic book guy.
Guest:Yeah, totally loved it.
Guest:And subscribed to, you know, half the Marvel titles.
Guest:All of it.
Guest:Loved it, loved it.
Guest:Bill Bixby is a terrific actor Eric Bana is a terrific actor there's me and Mark Ruffalo is like one of the best actors in my generation you know and it's like that should be telling instead of like it's like good people this character has a
Guest:something so mythic in it that people of substance have taken wax at it, like Hamlet.
Guest:I mean, it's like, you know, I mean it.
Guest:I mean it.
Guest:And the idea that being part of that's fantastic.
Guest:I love it.
Guest:I love that my kids one day will see it.
Guest:It's like being part of the tradition of people who have done something good.
Guest:I got into, Louis Leterrier and I were really trying hard
Guest:Marvel hired me to rewrite the script, which I did, and I actually wrote a two film.
Guest:They weren't into this whole thing yet of this merged Marvel universe.
Guest:That wasn't happening at that time.
Guest:And when I went in, when they came to me and said, I said, listen, I'd do it if we could take this on.
Guest:Sort of the way Chris Nolan took on Batman, that we were talking about that at the time.
Guest:I was like, long, dark, and serious.
Guest:I kept saying, long, dark, and serious.
Guest:And I went in and kind of pitched a two-film thing of Hulk Rising and Hulk Rex.
Guest:That was my idea, was that one is the origin story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:really understood as kind of a person not able to manage a hallucinatory trip in a way.
Guest:And the idea that in the next one, he's coming into his capacity to like be a conscious dreamer in a way or be, you know.
Marc:Be able to control his weird power.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was literally like the flicker at the end of the movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we had things, my deep love of the comic, we were incorporating things
Guest:characters, Samson and things that were a really deep part of the tissue of that mythic story.
Guest:And Louis and I were really turned on by the idea, not to sound like heady about it, but of actually kind of like I think Nolan did so successfully.
Guest:With the Dark Knight?
Guest:Yeah, with the Dark Knight.
Guest:Going into that one's a different kind of a vigilante thing.
Guest:The Hulk is the myth of Proteus.
Guest:It's like the guy who reaches for a fire of the gods and gets burned and carries that burn and has a moral quandary.
Guest:That's why we love the Bill Bixby show because he's seeking escape.
Guest:He's seeking a redemption from the curse he's put on himself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and that's what we were really turned on by.
Guest:And I think, you know, ultimately, though, initially enthused about a certain I think there was in retrospect, there was an idea about a tonality of this thing that was going to maybe all emerge and come together.
Guest:It scared people or it was one of those things, a difference of opinion in a tonal direction, in the total weight of seriousness and adult complexity that it should bear.
Guest:we diverged, you know what I mean?
Guest:And with all humility, it wasn't, it ultimately, it was their call and it became more of one thing than another.
Guest:Not ruined, but I think a lot of people really enjoy it.
Guest:And there's many aspects of it in any way.
Guest:I think people really dig it.
Guest:And I'm glad they do.
Guest:I was disappointed.
Guest:I was disappointed only because the aspiration I thought we had
Guest:Been taking aim at.
Guest:Felt a little short change to me.
Guest:And without at all throwing it under the bus.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I loved Louis Lutari.
Guest:I thought he was like a wonderful person and a really good artist and everything.
Guest:And the truth is to the degree I felt disappointed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or a little bit angry.
Guest:It had to do.
Guest:There was people who were long gone from Marvel.
Guest:who had kind of sold me I felt the bill of goods yeah that's what we want right that is what we want what you are saying yeah that's what we want and then it wasn't which sometimes leave you going hmm you know I wish been a little straighter about like what the depth of tolerance was for what we wanted to go for right and let me say this there's the guy who runs more Kevin Feige yeah
Guest:I got on with him like a house on fire.
Guest:I thought he was a great guy, real comic fan.
Guest:I thought there was people running the shop at that time who were not comic fans, who actually did not totally get what the Hulk was about.
Guest:But when you take the measure of the whole thing, look, I had a blast.
Guest:I did a different kind of movie than I've ever done.
Guest:It's a part of this great tradition.
Guest:A thing was being engineered much larger than it itself.
Guest:It put me in a weird position.
Guest:In a way, I was like, well, if they offer me so much money that I can't resist.
Guest:But ultimately, the right thing happened, which was not...
Guest:had no negative emotion for me in it which was which was it's like you know what you're going in a way in a direction and that's great and number one i saw some stupid thing oh mark and edward i think mark ruffalo is like one of my dearest friends in the business he's one of the i mean yeah we came up at the same time yeah i am he's one of my absolute favorite actors in
Marc:Oh, they tried to pitch you against each other in an article?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Yeah, people.
Guest:It's like this thing.
Guest:And it's like nothing could be better than being in the club with Mark.
Guest:It's the funniest thing.
Guest:We laugh about it.
Guest:He has kids.
Guest:It's the greatest.
Guest:It fit with what he was wanting to do at the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And by the way, I pursued things that were priority for me.
Guest:I got to make Birdman.
Guest:I did Grand Budapest.
Guest:And most importantly, I really focused on writing a thing that's been in my head, Motherless Brooklyn, and made it.
Guest:And it was hard to make.
Guest:It was hard to get the resources together.
Guest:It needed my focus.
Guest:It's been two years since we started shooting it.
Guest:It was five years before that trying to get the money together.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, and it was difficult, and it was very deeply felt, and I wanted total focus.
Guest:Like, if I could not have done the work as an actor, I wouldn't have been able to do Birdman at the time, which is one of the great creative experiences of my career.
Guest:Yeah, it was great.
Guest:And I wouldn't have made my own film that's been a passion project of mine for a long time if I'm in that.
Guest:So I am thrilled.
Guest:And Mark is great and has a great thing, and it's all done great.
Guest:And by the way, this is the crazy thing.
Guest:It's like Kevin Feige, the guy who ran this thing, that guy has, as a comic fan, the execution on that vision of the film
Guest:It has to be one of the most successful things that's ever been pulled off in the movie business, in the trade.
Guest:This integrated thing, there's nothing like it ever.
Guest:The Marvel Universe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In terms of following an idea and a plan that was very true to the world of the comics and the way they all came together, they annihilated it.
Guest:I mean, they killed it.
Guest:I get that.
Guest:Do you think it's a culturally good thing?
Guest:As an artist?
Guest:That's a different discussion, which, again, people can really misinterpret a thing.
Guest:The fact that I might... Oh, I know, I know, yeah.
Guest:The fact that I might... I think you, as a Disney shareholder, you're like, these guys are doing what they were charged with doing.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And look, it has a lot of joy in it.
Guest:It has a lot of the humor and offset thing.
Guest:But, you know, I...
Guest:I have my concerns that have nothing to do with Marvel per se.
Guest:I worry about, let's put social media at the top of the danger zone to me.
Guest:I think Spike Jonze's movie was really on to something heard.
Guest:It's like people are descending, I think, dangerously.
Guest:into this vortex of narcissistic self-narrative.
Marc:And fantasy.
Guest:And fantasy.
Guest:And the fantasy component of it that I think is, if you want to say socially dangerous, is that it's sort of like high fructose corn syrup.
Guest:It's in everything.
Guest:It kind of makes everything taste good and addictive, but it ain't making you healthy.
Guest:It's not helping you be a healthy physical human being.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The dopamine gets sort of jacked, but not only is nothing required of them, no challenge, no provocation to no raising of questions.
Guest:No raising of questions like what am I supposed to think facing the problems of the world?
Guest:What am I supposed to do?
Guest:What is my morality?
Guest:What is these things?
Guest:And you look at our country and you worry maybe just generally speaking, what are we doing that's creating activated people who don't think that superheroes are going to drop out of the sky and fix stuff, but where their view of what is heroic is...
Guest:is actually formed by a sense of being proactive, being themselves a person who as a human being with a lot of daily battles and fucking problems and everything is going to get up off their ass and do something about anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:a lot of what we're doing is not cultivating those people.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that, let me put it this way, this matrix of social media is, to me, I don't even think we've begun to take the measure of the damage being done by the turbocharging within it of all of the worst demons in our nature.
Marc:Yeah, and also just the onslaught of information, the pummeling every day.
Guest:I think if we, you know, we like, you say we're the first TV generation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you look at like, I remember when Nirvana was hitting and people were going, you know, why so dour?
Guest:Why so things?
Guest:All the baby boomers were kind of going like, what is all this?
Guest:Like, whatever, never mind.
Guest:Like, where's your, where's your, and you're just like, hey, just like, just buzz right off, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We got a lot more information a lot younger than you had, a lot more reason for skepticism.
Guest:To me, I don't even think you can measure the multiple of intensity that social media and the distortion that the intensity of that information flow, which now is highly untrustworthy too, and manipulated.
Guest:By outside actors to mess with- Brains.
Guest:Brains and to mess with people's sense of civic connection to each other.
Marc:And the truth.
Guest:Yeah, the truth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We got literally Russia working to antagonize us against each other.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we're falling for it.
Guest:People are falling for it.
Guest:And we're falling for it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that that is scary.
Guest:And like you combine that with the things that I would say deactivate people, you know, act as a high fructose opiate, whatever you want to call it.
Guest:It's I do think like.
Guest:you know, what the Wachowskis like put this idea of people as copper tops, like the plug doesn't have to be in the back of your head to be getting dangerously close to where you're being turned into an addict of the things that separate you from your money.
Guest:Yeah, consumer sell.
Guest:Yeah, and in many ways a pawn in these games of like they talk about the mass manipulation of crowds, you know what I mean?
Guest:I mean, there's things that...
Marc:Yeah, your nihilism has been mined to use you and your anger as a sort of part of an ideological momentum that you might even give a shit about.
Marc:You might not give a shit about it at all.
Guest:I wouldn't even say your anger.
Guest:You know, it's your fear.
Guest:What's getting mined is your fear because all human beings have anxieties.
Guest:The world is just an anxious place, and our brain...
Guest:is literally formed by millions of years of evolution to have a very strong, there's a strong loop, there's a powerful loop between the imaginative power of our mind and its ability to concoct
Guest:anxiety.
Guest:And fear, it activates our adrenal system.
Guest:It perks us up.
Guest:And the things that just tweak that in ways that amplify fear and amplify what I would call the negative reaction to fear or the self-defeating reaction to fear, which is essentially
Guest:anger, enmity, sense of conflict, sense of the faceless other that is part of what you should resent, be afraid of, whatever.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:All of that's deactivating the harder thing, which is to say, I am anxious.
Guest:I'm afraid of a lot of things.
Guest:And I got my own deep well of daily grind, struggle, whatever.
Guest:But what is it that gets you sort of to go, I've got reserves.
Guest:There's stuff I can do.
Guest:I can be a part of it.
Guest:And I can pay it forward positively.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:This is like...
Marc:And engage with other people in real life.
Guest:Engage with other people in real life and try to cultivate positivity and live in the world and be an actor in the world and everything.
Guest:The funny thing is this film that I made.
Marc:Motherless Brooklyn.
Guest:Yeah, it actually took me... It's in the detective, you know, kind of... Yeah, I saw it.
Guest:Oh, you got to see it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, it's great.
Guest:It took me a while to get around, in my own way, to embracing that what we're talking about was a big part of it because the character that I play, he's afflicted.
Guest:And in his affliction, he's kind of gone down into this hole of...
Guest:of isolation and marginalization he's not really a moral person which like most noir you know detective characters aren't they're like the person who takes you through the shadow world like they take you into the shadow world that's under this rosy American narrative right and that's what's great about the best of noir it is like hey sunny California the place where you go to change your life make the American dream guess what
Guest:built on the theft of water and incest.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Or whatever.
Guest:It's like the crime.
Guest:That's Chinatown.
Guest:Yeah, the crime under the... Here's the American story we're telling and here's what's really going on, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So it's always had a healthy...
Guest:I don't think it is just cheap genre.
Guest:I think it's got a real.
Marc:It reveals the dark id of America.
Guest:But usually those characters aren't necessarily moralists.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:And a lot of times.
Marc:They're antiheroes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a lot of times all they are is that very American thing of going, hey, you're trying to put one over on me and I don't like it.
Marc:Yeah, now some of them end up dying.
Marc:I mean, you know, Fred McMurray ends up dying.
Guest:Yeah, or, like, Nicholson ends up, like, repeating what he did in the past where he tried to help someone and ensured they got hurt in the worst way, and he's, you know, he's just muttering to himself as little as possible, as little as possible.
Guest:Like, it's, like, the ultimate bleak nihilistic, like...
Guest:And I kind of like had this moment where I thought maybe this Tourettec detective who's been abused by so many people and isolated.
Marc:Because they didn't know what it was then either.
Guest:And unseen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Unseen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Has basically said to himself, you know what?
Guest:I really don't I really don't give a shit about the forces of history.
Guest:Leave this girl, you know, leave her alone.
Guest:And and that's enough for me.
Marc:Yeah, that was an interesting turn.
Guest:But as I got going further... Is that from the book?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:The book takes place in the 90s.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:It's a very liberated adaption of the book.
Marc:Interesting.
Guest:But I started feeling a lot of what we're talking about.
Guest:I was like, I...
Guest:I felt actually that the character that Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays, who is a moral and ethical person, who's a black woman, who's in the 50s, who's really a lawyer and is seen as a secretary, she's fighting.
Guest:You know, she's fighting.
Guest:And when she hears about his problems, she kind of says, she's sympathetic, but she goes, we all got our daily battles.
Guest:And it registers on him that she's,
Guest:She's on the barricades, in a way.
Guest:Doing a real thing.
Guest:Yeah, and in the end, I think, I realized that I wanted to break away from that kind of darker thing.
Guest:And in the end, have him be affected to the degree that he realizes, like...
Guest:it's all pretty monolithic and faceless and big, but I'm going to take a swing.
Guest:I'm going to stick a knife in it in some way that I can.
Guest:I'm not going to be passive.
Guest:I am going to get off my ass and pick a side.
Guest:I felt for a long time, the character was great in this novel, Motherless Brooklyn.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:It's an instantly kind of memorable character, and I felt kind of greedy about it in a way.
Guest:I was like, that's a five-course meal for an actor.
Marc:This sort of like underdog Tourette's gumshoe guy.
Guest:Yeah, he's funny.
Guest:And he can be funny in a very interesting way.
Guest:Yeah, it's real, but it's also just off the wall.
Guest:It's a lot of things, and all these paradoxes.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:But I've always been interested in what went on in New York in the 50s.
Guest:I felt that.
Marc:That was all your construction.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because it's interesting that the Alec Baldwin character is, you know, it obviously resonates now.
Marc:He is sort of a Trumpian character in a way.
Marc:But not as, I think he's smarter.
Guest:Yeah, Trump is a moron.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And he's an amalgam of people who are actually geniuses.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:But the power element.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Marc:And the ego around power.
Guest:Yeah, right in the middle of the post-war period of like Leave it to Beaver and great things happening in America on the rise.
Marc:I love that all these guys, that's your device that all these guys were in the foxhole together in some way or some of them went to war.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, because you don't see that enough about that generation actually coming home.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the way that things did, you know, things changed a lot between the depression before the war and what America was after the war.
Guest:This kind of is expressed in the film.
Guest:But it's like we went from a country that was totally focused on on helping each other rise out of difficulty.
Guest:to a country where power essentially became the currency of the realm.
Guest:Power became the value.
Guest:And we built this military industrial complex and this global presence as a superpower.
Guest:And for all of our talk, we became the bully in some ways
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That we, you know, it's like, did you watch Ken Burns' Vietnam?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Mind-blowing.
Guest:Absolutely shattering.
Guest:I had no idea.
Guest:Did you?
Guest:Yeah, I had studied.
Guest:My father was a veteran.
Guest:He's a Vietnam vet.
Guest:He's a Marine.
Guest:And I had studied and read in college.
Guest:He was there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he was in 67 and 68 in the DMZ.
Guest:But the thing in that that's...
Guest:all the waste, all the pain, all the everything.
Guest:But you go back into the beginning of that and I thought Ken really illuminated in a way that is so important for people to take in that like Ho Chi Minh was reaching out to the United States specifically and saying,
Guest:Now that we have fought this war with you, fought the Japanese, you know, we are you.
Guest:We are you in 1776.
Guest:We want to be free people.
Guest:We want to come out from under the yoke of European imperial, you know, colonialism.
Guest:We are you.
Guest:You are our beacon.
Guest:help us become you.
Guest:I mean, literally, they were saying that and writing that to us.
Guest:They wanted us, not like a general, they wanted us leaning in to help them become more like us.
Guest:And we power brokered away.
Guest:We said to our pals, you know, who we bailed out of World War II, go back in and build your French colonial plantations, enslave these people again.
Guest:And then when they get pissed off and feel betrayed and they reach out to people we are anti.
Guest:China.
Guest:Yeah, China and the Soviet Union.
Guest:And you think about the magnitude of the miss on that.
Guest:You think about the magnitude of how horrible it is that we sent all these young people to lose their lives and killed three million Vietnamese and shattered
Guest:shattered our country, shattered lives, basically to bully and try to put down people who came to us saying our impulse is to be you.
Guest:We want to be like you.
Guest:Independence, yeah.
Guest:like everybody in America should see that film because there's like this notion that it's not, like flag waving patriotism without looking at what is the delta, where do we, you know, what's the delta between, like Langston Hughes said, the America we're trying to be, the America we're still trying to be and what we're doing.
Guest:You can't call yourself a patriot if you don't say we are going to revisit these narratives
Guest:an account for our misses.
Guest:Have you talked to your father about it?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, yeah.
Guest:I mean, he thought it was one of the best things.
Guest:My dad didn't watch Vietnam stuff.
Guest:He read, and he's a historian, a scholar, but I think it might have been...
Guest:I think only Ken Burns could have gotten him to sit down and re-marinate in all that in a way.
Guest:But it's a masterpiece.
Guest:I agree with you.
Guest:When I saw it, I couldn't stop watching it.
Guest:It blew me away.
Guest:It's a masterpiece.
Marc:How much he talked to the North Vietnamese, where did he find some of those guys?
Guest:It was mind-blowing.
Guest:Every American should see that film.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:So how did this inform what there was work on?
Guest:Well, because in the 50s, New York City, which was becoming the capital of the world, essentially, was under all the narrative of what we think led New York to become the modern city it is, the truth of it is,
Guest:New York City and state were run by an authoritarian autocrat with absolutely uncontested imperial power who was a racist and who literally baked his racism into the infrastructure of New York.
Guest:Modern New York and the segregation of New York, the creation of what became actual slums, the projects,
Guest:was a function of the racist will of like one person who never held elected office and completely overwhelmed all of the democratic institutions designed for progressive ideas to be able to move forward.
Guest:And nobody knows this.
Guest:Like, I mean, people know it.
Guest:But very few people understand the degree to which like, you know, if you look at New York in the 50s,
Guest:The susceptibility of the American system to hacking by the impulse toward brutal authoritarian racist control was it was like on sharp display in New York in that period, even as this guy was trumpeted as one of the great public servants and a man of the people.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was literally doing things like building great public beaches and then setting overpasses at a level that a public- All that stuff was true in the movie.
Guest:All true, yeah.
Marc:So you really set out, because I said that.
Marc:Right when I saw it, I called my producer.
Marc:I said, it's like the Chinatown for New York City.
Guest:I mean, that's flattering, I think.
Marc:But no, the complexity, the plot, like because it's, you know, you know, I watched a whole movie.
Marc:I was completely engaged.
Marc:I was like engaged with your character.
Marc:I was engaged with the unfolding of the narrative.
Marc:I didn't know who the bad guy was.
Marc:I got a feeling after a certain point.
Marc:And, you know, it's one of those kind of movies where it's clearly a period piece.
Marc:It's a noir.
Marc:But right from the beginning, you're like, I got to pay attention there.
Marc:You know, there's things going on.
Marc:Yeah, and then this is going to really come together in a lot of different strands.
Marc:And it really, it held me the whole time.
Marc:And then I realized that now that I know it's true, I must be a moron to not know the deeper history of New York.
Guest:No, but by the way, something you said is really important to me because I, you know, sometimes you read...
Guest:I really think that sometimes critics, there's this tendency, and I do think it's an affect of the residual effect of watching the kinds of passive experience movies that we're talking about.
Guest:There is an assumption that audiences are tired, jaded, not interested in sophistication or complexity or narratives that they feel behind.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the idea that an experience of a story that's convoluted and that you're not sure where it's going and you're not even sure you're clear on exactly what is going on is an unpleasant experience is so ridiculous.
Guest:It's like people...
Guest:I think people get very checked out when they are ahead of a story.
Guest:When you get ahead of a story- Well, it's what turns your brain into mush.
Guest:It's what you were talking about.
Guest:There's no- Yeah, and I think that, but also comprehension is not
Guest:the goal of all great art.
Guest:Bob Dylan ain't looking for you to comprehend what the hell Tangled Up in Blue means or whatever.
Guest:And to me, if you come away from a film like Motherless Brooklyn having drifted through an aesthetic experience and a character that carries you through it in the same way that Forrest Gump takes you through the history of
Guest:America and after the war.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:If you come through it and you go, I felt empathy.
Guest:It pulled on my empathy because this guy is an underdog and I want to support the underdog and I have had an experience of being made to empathize.
Guest:That alone is positive.
Guest:But if on the second level, you kind of come away with...
Guest:just an essential sense that like, did these things really happen?
Guest:Is this the history of New York?
Guest:Did this happen to us?
Guest:Was the city built this way?
Guest:Were these things done?
Guest:Then that to me is a success because you have provoked the question.
Guest:You've provoked, literally if anyone walks out of the movie and says,
Guest:Did they really do that?
Guest:Did they put bridges too low for buses to keep blacks and Latinos off of Jones Beach?
Guest:Like I showed an early cut to like Chris Rock and George Wolfe, the great theater director.
Guest:And Chris said to me, is that is that true?
Guest:And I was like, he goes, that melts my mind.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like, and I think that that's success.
Guest:I think.
Marc:Well, what you created, too, because of the period piece and the way you shot some of it, it does at times feel like a mythical landscape.
Marc:Like you're looking at that old city at New York and for what it was and you found these beautiful shots and it's shot so nicely and the light is so nice.
Marc:And, you know, when you come up on that on the authority building, you know, there is a sense of sort of like, is this is this real?
Marc:Because you do create the power of that guy, Alec Baldwin's character.
Marc:as being representational of sort of unbridled power.
Guest:Yes, and the reality that power centers are not where we are told they are.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We're in this era where, you know, as we're assessing, like, the legacy of the Koch brothers as they go to their, you know, great reward, like, you know, it's like all you have to do is read the obituary of one of these guys and realize, like,
Guest:modern American conservative politics has essentially been engineered and dictated by these guys from the energy business who figured out a very complex machinery for distracting you with all kinds of social arguments while they screwed you.
Guest:And I think it's like that idea that power is not only not where you think it is in American life,
Guest:But that people who have amassed that kind of power tend to be the ones who are also expressing that in this Me Too era in ways that we have only really begun to fully account for and corrupt, you know, and hold to account.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And again, like you want people going.
Guest:Shit, you know, how much of this are we willing to tolerate?
Guest:Like what is great about Chinatown is that I challenge anyone, you know, things become a classic.
Guest:I think if you wiped a person's hard drive and they watch that film, there's nobody who watched that film for the first time.
Guest:who has any idea what's really going on eight-tenth of the way through the movie.
Guest:You have no idea what's going on.
Guest:And if you asked 100 people who say it's one of the best films of the last 50 years, what happens, they couldn't narrate that.
Marc:Well, that was the whole joke of it is that he gets his nose cut.
Marc:The snoop gets his nose cut.
Marc:You're finding out when he does.
Guest:The number of people, not one in 100 could say,
Guest:They're dumping water during the drought to drive prices down on that thing so they can pick up things under the names of old people through this thing called the Albuquerque Club and make fortunes.
Guest:Nobody remembers that.
Guest:They remember that L.A.
Guest:'s corruption is that it stole its water and that fortunes were made and that the people who are doing that were also fucking their daughters.
Guest:Literally, that's the kernel of what you take.
Guest:And because, to your point, that is this monolithic romantic vision of L.A.
Guest:It is the L.A.
Guest:aesthetic.
Guest:It is the dream L.A.
Guest:with the seamy stuff going on underneath it.
Guest:And because Nicholson is his version of the most compelling film.
Guest:with this great American sense of like, you know, people's screenwriting classes, what's the motivation?
Guest:Nicholson's got no motivation in Chinatown.
Guest:He just, he goes, someone put something over on him.
Guest:They pretended to be someone else and hired him and made him look like a fool.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:He's like, I don't like being played.
Guest:That's the whole, and eventually, it's his thing to John Huston of like,
Guest:How much is enough?
Guest:How much do you really fucking need?
Guest:How much better can you eat?
Guest:And it's just to the point, for its era, it's like saying, how much of this are we going to get subjected to before we just get pissed off enough to do something about it?
Guest:That's all that really that movie is about.
Guest:I don't think it's coincidental that that movie hits...
Marc:at the end of the Vietnam War and as Watergate is kicking off, it's... And the funny thing is that even with the reaction of the Vietnam War and even with whatever social progress we've made, we're sort of back there again or we might not have ever left.
Guest:Yeah, and that's, I think, to me, the value of going to the 50s.
Guest:It's like saying, hey...
Guest:This is kind of intrinsic.
Guest:This has been, you know, Trump and these guys want to talk about the deep state.
Guest:It's like, but the truth is that the scariest thing in America is the way that power centers form and essentially own and manipulate our politics.
Marc:And stay dug in no matter what, despite the fact that the world is ending.
Marc:Even though they're like, you know, whether or not they're evil, they're relatively intelligent people that are willing to deny a certain amount of sophisticated intelligence in the name of power and capitalism.
Marc:It's a hell of a gamble, isn't it?
Guest:Yeah, it's a nihilistic.
Guest:It is the definition of a nihilistic.
Guest:Burn it all.
Guest:You know, it's like burn it all down.
Guest:I'll be gone.
Guest:I mean, it literally is.
Guest:I will be gone.
Guest:So this is what I've been doing.
Guest:This is what we've been doing.
Guest:This is what we're going to keep doing.
Guest:And there's a moment in the film where Alec Baldwin, who is, I got to say, like, I think it's one of Alec's, like,
Guest:I think he's as good as Alec's been in a long time.
Guest:I mean, if you like Alec Baldwin in Glen Ross, like the hefty Lee J. Cobb, you know, Alec, he's on fire in some parts of his film.
Guest:I was riveted.
Guest:I'm riveted when I watch him in it.
Guest:But he has that thing where he's giving that speech and he says, you know, he literally says, like, I look around this room and I don't see a lot of bright boys or goody-goody progressives with their paralyzing ideals.
Guest:I see, you know, the people of my tribe who get things done.
Guest:And that's the romance, the notion that ideas and ideals are in the way of enterprise.
Guest:Right, might is right.
Guest:Yeah, that knowledge is something to be poo-pooed at.
Guest:And that just the enterprise of getting things done is its own value.
Guest:And it's like, this is, you know, 60 years after the era of this film.
Guest:we're hitting the endgame.
Guest:We're hitting the endgame.
Guest:And it's weird.
Guest:There's this one Walt Whitman poem where he talks about how everything is the same, that he's 200 years thinking forward to us and that fratricidal war.
Guest:He says these things, these incredible riff on disease and the horrors of fratricidal war and all these things, they're weighing down on me too and they're weighing down on you reading this.
Guest:In the future.
Guest:Interesting, yeah.
Guest:But I really do think the difference of the age we're living in is what you said.
Guest:We are in the end game because all our geopolitical and social arguments are going to end up looking like people who were squabbling at a dinner table while their house literally burned down on top of their heads.
Guest:Because there's no like you can say like we fought the Civil War and we're still fighting it.
Guest:We fought World War One and we didn't really resolve.
Guest:We fought World War Two.
Guest:And these things are still playing out.
Guest:Communism and democracy and all the dialectic of these things are working themselves out.
Guest:But the environmental collapse does not have in human time frames a resolution.
Guest:It doesn't have a snapback and a recovery that we can survive.
Marc:And that's the byproduct of pure industry.
Marc:Pure.
Marc:That other stuff is almost a distraction.
Marc:It's a total distraction.
Guest:That's why it's so violently amoral right now.
Guest:I used to think about my granddad's generation.
Guest:He was in the Navy in World War II.
Guest:And this perceived threat of kind of a totalitarian...
Guest:racist ideology rises up.
Guest:This idea of not just Nazism but basically totalitarianism rises up and people say this is like an authentic threat to the idea of a humanist like world and we're like people
Guest:all over the world rise up and like give their lives to fight it.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I think that there's a moral equivalence to the people now essentially doing the violence to the idea of, you know, a sustainable future on the planet.
Guest:The people, the end gamers,
Guest:the Luddites, the capitalists with short-term balance sheet pressures.
Guest:Just fanatics saying we care so much about who's on the Supreme Court and the upending of Roe v. Wade that we will align with these false prophets, these false Christians.
Guest:We'll throw everything that actually defines the value system
Guest:To focus on these things, and we will permit and celebrate the moral lie that what humans are doing is not creating an unlivable world.
Marc:Right, but I talk about this on stage right now.
Marc:The problem, and you're right, but the deeper thing around that in Christianity is that in order for Jesus to come back, the world has to end.
Marc:So on some level, they're gunning for it.
Guest:There are probably people with what I would politely say is such a misguided intensity on the end of times narrative that they are willing to abandon the actual tenants of Jesus.
Guest:who never spoke to end of times, other than to say that a rich man will have a harder time entering heaven than passing the eye of a needle, they've abandoned all the core tenets of care for the least of people.
Guest:All of it in favor of nihilism, a nihilistic Old Testament vision of these things.
Guest:But worse to me is we are at this point, I think, where corporate interest, the violence that corporate interest is doing to the planet that we live on is approaching
Guest:I actually personally feel a moral equivalent to the violence that was affected by totalitarianism on the planet and on people.
Guest:We are moving into where it's not even a false equivalence to say the number of people affected
Guest:at threat of their lives to the climate crisis that we're engineering is equivalent to the millions of people dislocated and killed by totalitarianism in World War II.
Guest:Millions of people are going to be displaced, dislocated, forced out of homes, fires.
Guest:It's like...
Guest:And the people who are perpetuating that, the system that's turbocharging this, I have a hard time not like, people talk about not demonizing one side or the other, I think.
Guest:people who are under the sway, people who are being hoodwinked and bamboozled, 100%, you've got to talk to each other.
Guest:You've got to talk to people whose fear led them to vote for a charlatan.
Guest:And also to not believe...
Guest:Science.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And also to believe that there's no journalistic integrity or facts to be had.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, there's there's all.
Guest:But you've got to.
Guest:I mean, I sometimes think that, like, it's almost like you need Malcolm X's message for marginalized whites.
Guest:You need to say you are being hoodwinked.
Guest:You are being bamboozled.
Guest:A real leader would be nice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You are.
Guest:But but who says.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You are being played.
Guest:You are being played.
Guest:You are hardworking, patriotic American citizens, and you are being played and ground into the machinery of corporate interest over your interest.
Guest:It's ending the world.
Guest:You are being hoodwinked.
Guest:You are being hoodwinked.
Guest:And even if you don't believe in climate change, literally your health care is going to be taken away.
Guest:Your taxes are not going to go down.
Guest:You are going to pay for billionaires and oil companies to get richer and richer.
Guest:At the expense of the planet.
Guest:And at the expense of you and your children.
Guest:And it's just like, and it's like those people you have to talk to, but the, you know, and you can say like there were German military officers who were Nazis, right?
Guest:But the people who are perpetrating these things are, they are the totalitarian.
Guest:They are the fascists of our era.
Guest:And like, I think the idea that we're going to be passive about that is terrifying.
Guest:Yes, I agree.
Guest:And I hope my film is a lot of fun.
Marc:Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
Marc:But the movie's good.
Guest:No, exactly.
Guest:But by the way, like... It is about power, but it's also about... It is about these things, but I think...
Guest:It's funny because, you know, Eric Roth wrote Forrest Gump.
Guest:I don't know if you've ever... Yeah, I don't know.
Guest:He's like one of the greatest writers in modern Hollywood.
Guest:And he wrote Forrest Gump and I love him.
Guest:And I always... It's funny because Forrest Gump gets this like...
Guest:I don't know, it gets like a rep.
Guest:You relegate it in your head to maybe something a little cheesy.
Guest:When you go back and watch it, it's a pretty toothy, politically ironic.
Guest:It's like this lovable guy with his limitations.
Guest:He's floating through when you watch him navigate.
Guest:And it is fun.
Guest:It's fun and it's funny.
Guest:But it's also like about America eating itself.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And lying to itself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And how he is able to sustain a pure sense of care for someone else.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Through it.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a much more grown up movie than I think.
Guest:A little darker than we remember it.
Guest:Than you remember it.
Marc:We watch it.
Marc:But I mean, I liked your movie a lot.
Marc:And I'm glad we talked about this.
Marc:I think we should end on an up note because we can drive it right into the ditch right now.
Guest:No, it's true.
Guest:So if you love Forrest Gump, you'll love Mother's Forgling.
Guest:Thanks for talking to me, man.
Guest:Yeah, pleasure.
Thank you.
Marc:Okay, Edward Norton, his new movie Motherless Brooklyn comes out this Friday, November 1st.
Marc:That was a good conversation.
Marc:Oh my God, my phone is transcribing.
Marc:Okay, what I was saying in a text to somebody.
Marc:Not necessary.
Marc:I'm fat now.
Marc:Here's some guitar.
¶¶
guitar solo
guitar solo
Guest:Boomer lives.