Episode 1280 - Kenneth Branagh
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc: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:It's quite a ride today.
Marc:I got to be honest with you.
Marc:I got to be honest with you.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:Are you okay?
Marc:Really buckle up because this episode, it was surprising to me.
Marc:It was surprising.
Marc:It's Kenneth Branagh.
Marc:All right.
Marc:He's on the show.
Marc:OK, he wrote and directed this new movie, Belfast, which is a semi autobiographical coming of age movie about growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Marc:Did you know that?
Marc:I didn't know that.
Marc:I have to be honest with you.
Marc:I had prejudged Mr. Branagh not knowing anything over my life.
Marc:I'm not talking about today.
Marc:I'm not talking about when I talk to him.
Marc:I'm talking about my life.
Marc:Over my life, I decided at some point, probably very near the start of once we started to know about Kenneth Branagh, that he was sort of a high, highfalutin dude, like maybe a snobby kind of earnest.
Marc:I don't know what I thought, but it had something to do with Shakespeare.
Marc:It had something to do with his seeming demeanor.
Marc:And maybe as a younger man, he was different.
Marc:But I had no idea he was this Irish kid from the bad part of town.
Marc:It wasn't really the bad part of town.
Marc:It was a poor neighbor.
Marc:But I had no idea about any of that stuff.
Marc:But that wasn't what shifted things.
Marc:I mean, what shifted things was...
Marc:It was just like he got here.
Marc:We had a few exchanges, but I just didn't know anything about him, really.
Marc:And we got into it.
Marc:And it was an exchange of ideas and feelings.
Marc:And we moved through things.
Marc:And there was moments during this show where he was acting stuff out and I was watching him act it out.
Marc:And it was almost Shakespearean.
Marc:We talked about, you know, whether or not he should do Lear.
Marc:Yeah, I'm advising Kenneth Branagh on whether he should do Lear.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:What do I know if he's going to take my advice?
Marc:But what do I know in general?
Marc:And I didn't make him do Shakespeare, but I felt the Shakespeare... I felt the Bard's presence.
Marc:And I'm not a Shakespeare guy.
Marc:But it was the general pace...
Marc:I mean, I thought I was on a ride with this dude and I didn't expect that at all.
Marc:You know, sometimes I get in my seat and people sit across from me.
Marc:I have no idea what's going to happen.
Marc:I just found this one kind of electric.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I had no experience of him talking to anybody.
Marc:I didn't watch anything, didn't know anything.
Marc:Just saw the few movies I've seen, knew what he looked like, had a sense.
Marc:I watched Belfast, which you can see now, and I wrote it out.
Marc:I wrote it out with this guy.
Marc:And again, not unlike when Sir Ian McKellen...
Marc:Did Shakespeare to my face because I was being like, you know, I was like, no, I don't know.
Marc:Is Shakespeare that good?
Marc:You should go listen to that.
Marc:Ian McKellen did Shakespeare.
Marc:Sir Ian McKellen did Shakespeare to my face.
Marc:A kind of off the beaten path Shakespeare.
Marc:The Sir Thomas More, a monologue from that about immigrants to my face.
Marc:And I got it.
Marc:It sunk in.
Marc:He delivered it.
Marc:I understood it and I knew why it was amazing.
Marc:I think I've always known why it's amazing.
Marc:But not unlike lyrics to music or rap lyrics or lyrics in general.
Marc:I have a hard time listening to them all.
Marc:After a certain point, it's like I can't follow.
Marc:I can't follow.
Marc:I can listen to plain talk.
Marc:But sort of anything with a groove, with pentameter, with a lot of adjectives, like I started to get lost.
Marc:A plus B equals C. I can get that arc.
Marc:But with Shakespeare and some rap tunes, I'm like, wow, man, I can't follow it.
Marc:I'm tired.
Marc:My brain hurts.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I enjoy the music, though.
Marc:I enjoy the actor.
Marc:I like watching the actor talk.
Marc:I like hearing the beats.
Marc:But again, I had a fairly in-depth conversation with
Marc:about Shakespeare with one of the great Shakespearean actors of all time.
Marc:And I felt understood and I felt like he understood me.
Marc:And I had some reasonable things to say, being the dolt that I am when it comes to Shakespeare.
Marc:I don't know if it's some ADHD.
Marc:I don't know what it is.
Marc:But I have a hard time with scripts.
Marc:In terms of like, where is this guy going?
Marc:What's the stage direction?
Marc:Where are we now?
Marc:What happened in between this?
Marc:I just can't hold it in my head.
Marc:I can't see it.
Marc:In the same way I can see it when it's described in a book.
Marc:It's really an obstacle for me.
Marc:And my excuse for not being able to lock in with Shakespeare.
Marc:The stage direction.
Marc:That's my issue right there.
Marc:I get lost because of the stage direction.
Marc:Breakneck pace coming at you.
Marc:Kenneth Branagh on a manic tear.
Marc:And the emotions...
Marc:When he talked about his father, like he was acting it out right here, like a Shakespearean man.
Marc:And he did some stuff, I believe.
Marc:I think he did some stuff from Lear.
Marc:Gave him some advice about, you know, whether he should wait to do Lear.
Marc:I'm the guy to ask if any of you Shakespearean actors are wondering how long to wait to do Lear.
Marc:Kenneth Branagh asked me, so maybe you should ax me too.
Marc:Ha ha.
Marc:Ask me anything about Shakespeare.
Marc:And I'll bullshit right through it.
Marc:I do understand the scope.
Marc:It's all in there.
Marc:I know it's all in there.
Marc:It's like Visions of Joanna by Bob Dylan.
Marc:Everything's in there.
Marc:He didn't need to do any more after that.
Marc:And you can parse it all you want.
Marc:It's all right, Ma.
Marc:I'm only bleeding.
Marc:It's all in there.
Marc:It's all in there.
Marc:Shakespeare did a lot.
Marc:Dylan did a lot.
Marc:I don't know why I'm comparing the two all of a sudden out of nowhere.
Marc:I'm just saying.
Marc:There are some things that contain it all.
Marc:And that thing will evolve with you.
Marc:As you get older, any of the great art will grow with you.
Marc:As your eyes get old, you will see it in new ways.
Marc:This part of life.
Marc:As your eyes get old, the light will shine through the art that has carried you through your entire life.
Marc:It will always be there for you.
Marc:It will evolve with you.
Marc:It will reveal itself.
Marc:As you get older, it will reveal itself in new ways that bring a new way to look at things.
Marc:As you start to shuffle off this mortal coil, art will be there for you.
Marc:The music you love, the movies you love, the theater you love, the poems you love, the literature you love, the paintings.
Marc:As you shuffle off this mortal coil, art will be there for you.
Marc:And you should keep it with you.
Marc:Stay connected to it.
Marc:It's brain blood.
Marc:It's brain food.
Marc:I've said it before.
Marc:Art should punch you in the brain and it should stay punched.
Marc:That's the beautiful trauma of art.
Marc:It's how it impacts you.
Marc:And also, again, to say thank you to all the people that came to see me at town hall last Saturday.
Marc:I appreciate your support.
Marc:I appreciate you coming out.
Marc:It was great to see everybody.
Marc:It was a special show in that it'll never happen again.
Marc:Not unlike many of my shows.
Marc:Stuff happened there that will never happen again.
Marc:Big chunks of stuff.
Marc:I like that.
Marc:That's the only thing that makes it worthwhile for me is when a big chunk of stuff happens.
Marc:I don't know where it came from.
Marc:I don't know why it happened.
Marc:I don't know who delivered it to my brain.
Marc:But I like to think that if my brain is punch drunk from art.
Marc:That maybe sometimes I stutter out some pretty good shit that I have no control over.
Marc:It's the gift.
Marc:It's the portal being opened.
Marc:It's the keeping an open mind and keeping a little fire in there.
Marc:I got fire because I'm unresolved.
Marc:I'm an unresolved person.
Marc:I don't know what's going to give me closure or peace or stop me from doing dumb shit.
Marc:But I talked to Kenneth Branagh about life and we're going to talk about it.
Marc:You're going to hear it.
Marc:And we're going to talk about the new film Belfast that he wrote and directed.
Marc:And it's a beautiful movie.
Marc:Belfast is now playing in theaters.
Marc:It's kind of beautifully constructed.
Marc:Anyway, we'll talk about it.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Strap in.
Marc:This is me and Kenneth Branagh.
Marc:Yeah, it's very interesting and exciting to see you in person.
Marc:Oh, well, thank you very much.
Marc:Right here in front of me.
Guest:Pull that mic in.
Marc:Pull it in like you've done a few voiceovers in your life.
Guest:Pull it in like you're in show business.
Guest:You can move it to your... This is brilliant.
Guest:I just like it.
Guest:No, I'm loving it.
Guest:I'm loving the multi-dimensional movement possibilities of this.
Guest:It's making me very excited.
Guest:But it's unusually weighted, I would say.
Guest:I've got to tighten it up.
Guest:It's fine with me.
Guest:No, are you loving it?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Don't they have this kind of stuff at the BBC?
Marc:Not really.
Guest:BBC, you bring your own in.
Marc:Come on!
Marc:So, well, you don't live here at all, do you?
Guest:I don't live here, no.
Guest:You don't have a place here or nothing?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I have one sort of more or less two-year period about a decade ago.
Guest:I lived down in Manhattan Beach, and that was my extended period.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:I must have absolutely loved it.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, I did.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:We came at the beginning of 2009.
Guest:We were making Thor for Marvel.
Marc:Oh, so that wasn't long ago.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:But we really liked it.
Guest:My wife really liked it.
Marc:Thor with Taika?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I directed the first one.
Guest:You directed the first Thor?
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:Is there resentment against Taika?
Guest:Deep-seated resentment that I didn't get.
Guest:There's now 15 of the Thors, aren't there?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Thor 22 now, I think.
Marc:Not my world, man.
Marc:I haven't seen any of them.
Guest:Well, listen, it's all ahead of you.
Guest:You've got exciting, exciting things to come.
Guest:I mean, that's the box set of all box sets, the MCU.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And I think I'll do it as I'm going out.
Marc:When I'm bedridden with whatever gets me, I'll go, maybe it's time.
Guest:But then what if you want to go back and see things again?
Guest:I know.
Marc:Don't leave it too late, my friend.
Marc:You're right.
Guest:Because there's Easter eggs in there that you're going to really enjoy.
Marc:I've spoken out publicly against it.
Marc:I've been verbal against the consolidation of the entertainment.
Marc:Why are we all being infantilized?
Marc:You know what I'm talking about.
Marc:You'll see.
Marc:You'll put this beautiful movie about your childhood out there, and people are going to be like, no superheroes.
Guest:Well, actually, there is a little Thor comic in there.
Guest:I know, yeah.
Guest:Which I did read way back in Belfast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You'd never been persuaded that there is a sort of greater depth or there's a sort of greater range of things that you might like might be found in there as well.
Marc:Yeah, I guess so.
Marc:I guess so.
Marc:But like I and I'm sure I would enjoy some of them.
Marc:But, you know, I'd rather not.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, there's just and I was in The Joker.
Marc:I have one scene in The Joker with Robert De Niro.
Marc:But that's a that's DC.
Marc:So that's proper work.
Marc:Kind of.
Marc:It's a rationalization.
Marc:But I mean, I wasn't going to.
Marc:When Todd Phillips called me and said, do you want to do a scene with De Niro?
Marc:I'm like, you know what?
Marc:I'm not a comic book guy.
Marc:Who did he say his name was again?
Marc:Bob who?
Marc:What would I have seen him in?
Marc:He's a famous guy.
Marc:So I've got my two lines of Robert De Niro.
Marc:And, you know, and I had to take the hit from the Marvel people.
Marc:Like, you know, being a hypocrite, I'll take it.
Guest:Well, yeah, exactly.
Guest:I did a film with Robert De Niro years ago.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:John Cleese was in it, Frankenstein.
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:John Cleese insisted on calling him a Robert De Niro for the whole of the show.
Marc:He played the monster, right?
Guest:He did, he did.
Marc:He was a good monster.
Marc:Yeah, I thought he was.
Marc:A human monster.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:He brought a humanity to it.
Marc:I think he did, yeah.
Guest:And how did you find working with him?
Marc:He's a nice guy.
Marc:He's a quiet guy.
Marc:He's a quiet guy.
Marc:Seems like the kind of guy that's probably got a group of friends where he cuts loose around, but it's not going to be you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's, yeah, that's interesting.
Guest:Did you, yeah, that people, I mean, are you like that out in the world?
Guest:I mean, I know you have your personality, they might say, but do you, is there a little group that you go, well, this is the real me, this is the only me?
Marc:I think I'm pretty, I'm pretty relatively transparent in all of my endeavors and to better, for better, for worse.
Marc:You know, if you are who you are, wherever you are, then people, then when they go like, when they feel like they know you, they kind of do.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But then what about when you want to get away and just sort of, is there a sort of secret bit of yourself?
Guest:I mean, I admire and like comedians enormously because I always think it's, I know you do many more things than this, but comedy, you know, it's such a sort of dangerous thing.
Guest:And I've always, always, I catch them in repose, comedians, and people who are very funny, basically.
Guest:And I see the thousand yard stare.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just the sort of then the eyelids go and they just go to a very secret place.
Guest:Then the sadness comes.
Guest:Well, I'd be tempted to say the sadness or the doubt, but sometimes it's just like a preoccupation.
Guest:Sometimes maybe it's just thinking I want to think about the next funny thing.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:Yeah, well, sure, sure.
Marc:It's like they're like, all right, I did my hustle.
Marc:I've made my money for tonight.
Marc:Now I can crawl back into my hole.
Guest:I've asked you a question about that because what do you do?
Guest:Maybe it's an obvious question.
Guest:But when it has gone well, not well, but particularly when it's not gone well, how long do you obsess or analyze?
Guest:A little, a lot, not at all?
Guest:Because you've got to do it again.
Guest:Yeah, now.
Marc:Well, I mean, that's changed over the years.
Marc:I think I was fueled by the constant self-flagellation.
Marc:I wouldn't know if it went well.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Okay, because you're just looking for stuff.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Looking for stuff to analyze.
Marc:Now, I think as you get more professional in whatever you do, you can sort of take it apart how you're going to take it apart, right?
Marc:So if it didn't work out for the entire show, you've got to figure out, well, that couldn't be my fault.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Always the right answer.
Guest:I think always the right answer.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, this whole idea that there are no bad audiences, that can go fuck itself.
Marc:I don't know who made that up, but you've been on stage enough to know, like, ugh, this one's bad.
Guest:Oh, God, yeah, when they just aren't.
Guest:You really want, you think, well, I don't know why you spent your money doing this, because really there must have been better reasons to do this.
Marc:And I think theater has got to be the hardest.
Marc:I mean, look, with comedy, I know when they're bad, and I know when they're just not, they don't have the energy, you can't bring them all together.
Marc:What are you going to do?
Marc:So,
Marc:As time goes on, you realize the professional liabilities that you may not be responsible for and you don't take it as personally.
Guest:Do you get out quickly if you know it's like going bad?
Guest:Did you go right?
Guest:I'm cutting 20 minutes.
Marc:No, you kind of got to do your job, don't you?
Marc:I'm one of these people that like if it's going bad, I might just lean into it and sit up there for a while.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I don't want if if they're if they can leave saying I tried.
Marc:yes yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like do you fess him out with it do you say you do you do does the story become why it's not working kind of sure i'm not afraid to do that some of the old jewish guys would say that's unprofessional you should just take the hit suck it up and you know do your i just remember one time i did that in front of freddie roman uh you know sort of a kind of one of the uh the sort of mid-level borscht belt guys he's like you never bring you don't draw attention to the bombing
Marc:And I'm like, really?
Marc:I was saving face.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Who are you?
Guest:And do you, when you, when that goes well, when the attention to the bombing gets some good material, do you say, right, I'm going to take those three lines.
Guest:I'm putting those in the back pocket and I'll have that escape patch stuff.
Marc:With repetition, you know, like you, you kind of develop lines that, I mean, I don't use any, you know, hack lines, but like there's one I'm using right now because like, I'm fluctuating.
Marc:I'm doing this new hour, hour and a half.
Marc:But there's one chunk of it that's fairly, you know, political and a little in your face and a little, you know, intense.
Marc:And then towards the end of it, I go, look, if you don't like this tone, it's a character I'm working on.
Marc:It's called Me Half the Time.
Marc:Ah!
Guest:so i think i could use that anytime no this is good this is good you never did stand up uh no no and i uh well i've always been fascinated by i always like to go and i was uh for me it's it's it's very very scary i get vicarious thrills and chills and spills you friends with any uh yes and i uh my admiration for the ones who the ones particular in any gig but the ones who hold the big gig and the big audiences yeah
Guest:That seems to me terrifying.
Guest:You're talking earlier on about, you know, theater being tough.
Guest:But of course, if you're in a play and it's not going well, you can just doggedly get to the end and you can live with their indifference.
Guest:But just that aching, aching, you know, tumbleweed of fuck, it's not, it isn't, they're not laughing.
Guest:That's, you know, that's when I want to run for the hills.
Guest:And when they stay, you know, whether it's through belligerence or just know I'm doing the material regardless.
Guest:Well, yeah, you got it.
Guest:It's pretty exciting.
Guest:It's terrifying.
Guest:It's just so sweaty.
Guest:You're up there with them.
Marc:That moment when you're dying, you're like, I'm really alone.
Marc:It's kind of a freeing, horrible moment.
Marc:When you're tanking and you just delivered something that should have gotten a laugh and there's nothing, it's not just silence.
Marc:There's a suction to it.
Marc:There's a vacuum to it.
Marc:And you're just sort of like...
Marc:they're just waiting.
Marc:Yes, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I'm supposed to do something now.
Marc:That moment, it's sort of like, what a horribly beautiful loneliness this is.
Guest:And I'm right here in front of everybody.
Guest:I like that beautiful loneliness thing because there's also the, it's a rhythmic thing as well, isn't it?
Guest:When you haven't, when somehow it's gone off, it got missed, it got missed.
Guest:And getting them back, lassoing them back, you're going to have to start all over again and you're already feeling discomfort, boredom, teensy bit of aggression.
Marc:Sure, I'll go a full aggression sometimes.
Marc:Yeah, I just start like, you know, like I think it's gotten a little tempered over time and I don't think they take it as seriously, but I'll I'll tell them to go fuck themselves.
Marc:Let's you know, let's do like what's the matter with you.
Marc:But but usually it's just sort of like I kind of get off on the idea that I think there's something to be said with it when you have a certain amount of self-belief that if they're not with you, it's like and you know, it's not your fault.
Marc:Just keep going, man.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:You know, usually you're going to get like a handful of them.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I agree about that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then I'll just go like, it's interesting that four of you left out of 200.
Marc:And I just, I want you all to know that those people are right.
Marc:They're correct in this situation.
Marc:So don't look at them judgmentally.
Marc:Look inside.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:i like the keep going thing i think that is such a simple but necessary one foot in front of the other it makes you want to cry man yeah it's just like yeah well it's just you mean in general or in general in comedy in sport i love it it's effort it's just that always makes me cry yeah it's just it's just effort when it's just it's inglorious and no one else they won't know until 30 years from now when they're running the video with
Guest:with the sappy music and everything.
Guest:And so, you know, he was great.
Guest:And this was a wonderful moment in his life.
Guest:You know, the one we didn't pay any attention to at all that broke him spiritually.
Guest:That, just that grit of people getting on with it.
Guest:I love that.
Marc:Carl needs to do a bit about the introduction montage.
Marc:to the old Wide World of Sports show.
Marc:You know, the victories, it was like the victories and the defeat.
Marc:It was like, I don't know if it was Cosell, but it was at the beginning of the Wide World of Sports, which was a show, like a sports highlight show back in the day.
Marc:And they'd show guys winning, but there was this one shot of this guy doing a Nordic jump, the skis, and he just like,
Marc:has the worst wipeout in the world.
Marc:And he's sort of like, I'm sure this guy's happy this is on every week.
Marc:It's like, Hans, Hans, you're on again.
Guest:It's your bit.
Guest:Come and see.
Guest:You know the bit when you break your face?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:It's so funny.
Marc:So comedy aside, well, I don't know.
Marc:This movie's, I want to talk about Shakespeare, though, for a minute.
Marc:Because it was interesting.
Marc:I watched the movie.
Marc:I enjoyed the movie, the Belfast movie.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:It was very good, the black and white thing.
Marc:That's not always a surefire thing, but I thought you had a nice tone to it.
Marc:I don't know what you shot it on or how that worked.
Guest:We shot it digitally.
Guest:We used old-fashioned lenses.
Guest:We actually used the anamorphic lenses that we used on our Shakespeare film of Hamlet years ago.
Marc:That was the big one for you.
Guest:Yes, it was.
Guest:It was.
Guest:And actually, those lenses were used in Lawrence of Arabia, you know, 35 years previous.
Guest:David Leans lenses?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You got Leans guy to get you the lenses?
Guest:I got the Leans lens.
Guest:I got the Lend Leans.
Guest:You try saying that.
Guest:We made it into a speech exercise.
Marc:Leans lenses.
Marc:But yeah, the Shakespeare thing, like, and I, what's interesting about watching
Marc:this movie Belfast and, and knowing it's about you and that you made it, it's sort of like at the end of it, when you leave to London as a kid, there's part of me, it's like, then what happened?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Like that kid doesn't look like he's going to learn Shakespeare.
Guest:You bet he doesn't.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But my parents had no, I mean, we didn't have, I guess you, I don't know if you, we may, well, I guess we do make a point of it in the, in the thing.
Guest:There weren't any books in the house, you know, now there's,
Guest:not too stupid people remotely but they just they got all you know sort of all culture came in uh orally and all they read newspapers uh but um or we went to the library i remember the first book i ever bought i bought a book in woolworths yeah reading which is where i moved to about 40 miles outside london right uh 25 pence or five shillings um so quite a bit of my um pocket money bringing it back and my father being really shocked he said well what do you want to buy that for what are you going to do
Guest:with it you read it now yeah yeah right now what do we do with it yeah exactly now what we do with it i said well we keep it on the show still they got libraries for that why would you why would we pay taxes for you to go and borrow them from the library you can take them back and you won't get you know get stuck with them where are we going to put them right well we'll you know maybe we can get a bookcase it was it was a like a a mystery five person mystery the lone pine the lone pine adventures it was like a just a gang you know right you know like a hardy boys yeah exactly right a kid's book
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Well, that's interesting.
Marc:It seems like, you know, this taxes seems to play a very heavy and important part in your childhood.
Marc:There's not a scene in this fucking movie where taxes aren't involved.
Guest:Well, the arrival of the brown envelope was a scary thing.
Guest:You know, my father worked in the building trade and there was something in Ireland at that time called a lump, which was a sort of system for, in theory, helping the difficult to account for, you know, groups of
Guest:lads all over the country doing building projects and stuff, and it wasn't easy pre-digital age.
Marc:Some international as well, right?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And the idea was that people paid their taxes appropriately, but in practice, it was a little more fluid than that.
Guest:And he got caught out a couple of times with the contention that he had not been entirely accurate with the way he'd filed things.
Guest:Anyway, they got him.
Guest:They got him and this thing made for quite the household issue because it seemed like he was never done paying with taxes.
Marc:But it was all very interesting to me in that I'm an American and I'm not dumb, but historical stuff, I don't know.
Marc:I don't know how the trouble started.
Marc:I don't know what that looked like.
Marc:I love Ireland.
Marc:I never shut up about moving there.
Marc:I don't know why.
Marc:I don't know why I think they're going to embrace the aggravated Jews.
Marc:But there's part of me that thinks it's such a beautiful country, but I know nothing of the history.
Guest:What is it then that attracts you?
Guest:Is it that it's green?
Guest:Is that they have lovely music?
Guest:Is that it's a small island?
Guest:Is it the storytellers?
Guest:What is it?
Marc:I just like the weight of it.
Marc:I'm not sure.
Marc:You know, there's a greenness to it, but there's also an integrity to the people.
Marc:And there's something that is so symbiotic between the people and the land and what my notion of the poetry and history of the place.
Marc:You know, these are heavy cats.
Marc:You know, but they they've they've they've kind of got a fairly good disposition around it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now, what do you feel about the thing in Ireland that always strikes me is that I'm with you on all those things and I find it beautiful, but also it's a small island and there are, you know, great cities, Dublin, Belfast, to name but two.
Guest:But they can kill you with kindness.
Guest:You know, it can be it can be very it's it's something we say in the film about, you know, as she says, we know everybody in every house and every street, you know, whether we like it or not.
Guest:I like it.
Guest:Some people do.
Guest:Some people don't.
Guest:As an aggravated Jew.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you like as we're being in a world where sort of everybody knows your business, as it were?
Marc:Oh, I don't know.
Marc:Like, I don't know if I was there long enough for that.
Marc:So, like, these are reasons why I haven't moved there.
Marc:Very good reasons, I think.
Marc:You know, I talked to Flanagan over at Largo.
Marc:He runs a club here and he's Irish and like, he's like, don't, don't, don't buy a house.
Marc:He's like, you know, he said that, what's his name?
Marc:Riley, John C. Riley bought a place there.
Marc:down by Cork.
Marc:And he's still a Yank, man.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:He'd say, I'm Irish.
Marc:I'm like, no, you're not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, there's something.
Guest:The Americans particularly respond to their Irish heritage, though, don't they?
Marc:I guess so.
Guest:That sort of seems deep-seated, yeah.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:What I did notice about Ireland is I spent a lot of years when I started out doing comedy in Boston.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And the Boston Irish used to scare the shit out of me.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah, because they're hardened, mean people.
Marc:The Irish that came to America and cut their path here, that's rough stuff, man.
Marc:They're tough guys.
Marc:Yeah, they're tough guys.
Marc:And then you go to Ireland and you see guys who look exactly like them.
Marc:I'm like, oh, God, I'm in trouble.
Marc:Hey, how you doing?
Marc:What the hell's going on here?
Marc:Oh, this is what they're really like.
Marc:This is the indigenous Irish attitude.
Guest:And were they like times 10 Boston Irish or were they divided by 10?
Guest:Who was the toughest, the real McCoy or the ones who'd come over?
Marc:No, the real McCoy, you know, they're in their environment.
Marc:Their burden is their history.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a good phrase.
Marc:Right?
Marc:I think that in America, the burden was like, you know, fuck with us.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:You know, we came here and you shit on us, and now this is our turn.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So you're like, all right, man.
Marc:Okay, I'm good.
Guest:If you were Irish, would you give yourself a new name?
Marc:I can just flip a letter.
Marc:My last name's Marin.
Marc:So if I just throw the O and the A, switch them up, Moran.
Marc:I'm American.
Marc:Or Oman.
Marc:Moran.
Marc:Moran.
Marc:Yeah, that's Irish, right?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Very.
Marc:In the movie, this is really your life.
Guest:Well, it's lots of incidents from my early experience, yeah.
Guest:And it was basically around going back to visit this time where violence erupted.
Guest:It came to our street.
Guest:It came to many streets.
Guest:What year is that?
Guest:That was 1969, August of 1969.
Marc:That's when it all started?
Guest:Well, it all started in our street.
Guest:The civil rights movement that had been part of what was sort of, you know, going around the world, actually, riots in Paris in 68 over here, Summer of Love and everything, a lot of social, political movement, a lot of drugs, et cetera, et cetera, and a sense of kind of cultural shifts and everything was bursting out into the street.
Guest:Violence was on the streets, and it came to us in August of 2018.
Guest:1969 in North Belfast.
Guest:And the film is about the story of what happened from the moment we realized that was going to be a big, deep, divisive, unsettled time to the moment when we decided, do you move?
Guest:Do you change or perish?
Marc:Oh, in terms of once the Catholic purge happened?
Guest:Well, after that, it wasn't just the Catholic purge, although that effectively completely reordered our street and how we lived.
Guest:So all that stuff that happened on your street, the barricade?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:New lines drawn out of what were, you know, civil rights issues that became moved into new allegiances inside historically existing organizations.
Guest:And it was that the period that we experienced was more of a, at least to the nine-year-old boy that I try and see the picture through the eyes of, was more of a sort of wild, wild west scenario, kind of free for all.
Guest:Where at the beginning of that period, some of the people who look to fill like miniature power vacuums just in the local streets.
Guest:Suddenly, you know, tin pot Hitler's as it might be.
Guest:Thugs.
Guest:Yeah, who basically who aren't necessarily anything to do with political organizations and who sometimes had, you know, grouses or, you know, kind of grudges against people who.
Guest:were already there.
Guest:There was a moment before, in a way, the struggle became absolutely defined politically.
Guest:It became much more opportunistic in terms of... Local... Yeah, opportunities, power plays.
Guest:And for a while, of course, there was a big question mark about are these people coming back?
Guest:The Catholic displacement was the biggest displacement of people in Europe in a single city since the Second World War.
Marc:And that was 1969, 1970?
Marc:That's one of those things historically where we talk about things
Marc:being not that long ago, whether it's the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, slavery, voting rights.
Marc:In Ireland, the idea that they're pushing Catholics out in 1970, and also it's relevant.
Marc:That's the other thing that really dawned on me is that when you're really talking about domestic terrorism, which is something we're dealing with here in a profound way, that some of these issues resonate.
Guest:Yeah, basically the polarizing element of the decision, the invitation, this idea that if you're not with us, you're against us.
Guest:It's now time to join a tribe.
Guest:You may have informally been a part of it.
Guest:I would call us nominally Protestant.
Guest:And I'd say the Catholics on our street were nominally Catholic in as much as it provided a sort of structural identity, but it didn't stop any of that kind of normal interplay.
Guest:There were some things that we were fascinated by on the other side, but we basically got on.
Guest:We basically got on.
Guest:And then a line was drawn that says, well, you're not allowed to get on.
Guest:You're not allowed to get on.
Guest:We'll make it very difficult for you to get on.
Guest:You'll have to be...
Guest:an outspoken independent if you want to do that.
Guest:But still, while we were there, it was still people, the battle lines hadn't quite been drawn.
Guest:And I think that's part of what underpins the movie is that my parents were trying to understand and analyze whether this was one of the few times when you could get out, basically.
Marc:And also, it was the idea that how do you know when to leave?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I mean, you know, there's a lot of people that ask that.
Marc:Like, you know, sometimes I ask it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know, like when you think about Germany.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:It's like some people are like, it'll be okay.
Marc:This Hitler's not terrible.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But what happened in the film was really that, you know, that your fathers or the character of the father...
Marc:is in this situation where he reacts to violence and does what he has to do, and then the threat of it is going to hang over him.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And also, there's an economic opportunity, which might be the tipping point.
Guest:The real tipping point for us was...
Guest:something that really happened which was uh i got involved sort of ad hoc as i recall as i remember anyway it was literally being dragged into a crowd and then carried along by a crowd to what turned out to be the looting of a shop so it's a supermarket very near us and that happened and that happened for sure that happened and when the crazy thing that happened was having gone in there and feeling i what do you do i felt like i had to do something you know people around are grabbing things they knew what they were doing i had not been in a looting before so right and you're
Guest:You were like nine.
Guest:I was nine.
Guest:So I'm trying to work out what he'd do.
Guest:So, you know, some bit of me was mentally going, oh, this is where the young buck, the young person of the tribe goes out and brings back an antelope or something.
Guest:Much meat for winter.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And instead, I said I could get a family pack of washing powder because I thought, well, that seems sensible.
Guest:I couldn't even be a proper sort of looter.
Guest:And I didn't go for, why don't I get like half a dozen bars of chocolate, you know?
Guest:But I bring that back.
Guest:And I swear to God, I couldn't even get the door open.
Guest:She saw my mother.
Guest:She knew what was happening.
Guest:She came after me.
Guest:She came after me.
Guest:She caught me up the street and just dragged me straight back.
Guest:And we went back into that supermarket.
Guest:And that was the tipping point.
Guest:Because after that, she realized...
Guest:She just got caught up in the madness that whatever this adrenalized, furious mob activity was doing to us all, suddenly she was back in a place where we were.
Guest:I mean, guns were being fired.
Guest:Stones, glass.
Guest:It was dangerous.
Guest:And she was out of control.
Guest:We were out of control.
Guest:And that, I think, for her was the tipping point because if it could happen then, it could happen again.
Guest:She was just about to be pregnant with my sister.
Guest:Well, she just was.
Guest:Little did we know.
Guest:And so the volatility, basically that volatility.
Marc:And your dad had the offer for the job.
Guest:Yes, he had the offer for a job.
Guest:Nobody really wanted to go.
Guest:We had the big extended family.
Guest:We had the sort of it takes a village to raise a child idea.
Guest:We lived it, whether we liked it or not.
Marc:Around the block, like your grandfather was there.
Guest:Yeah, but we knew everybody.
Guest:We knew everybody in the street.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:You just did.
Guest:You just did.
Guest:And the thing that I remember so clearly about that time was that you couldn't get lost.
Guest:We were going to football matches.
Guest:I played football for the school.
Guest:You'd go to the other side of Belfast.
Guest:You're coming back on a bus on your own.
Guest:There was no school runs.
Guest:We were walking to school when we were five years old through the
Marc:park right you know and on our own and this was completely normal you know because if anything had happened to you like 50 people would go would shout and your mom would know about it in like you know before you even got home yeah yeah yeah so and that was pre-digital pre-phones and stuff yeah so i thought you captured that really well i think the neighborhood element and also you know the tone of of you know the the beginning of the of the strain but the family strain then the music was really nice a lot of sort of irish pop songs and yeah yeah mr van
Guest:morrison sure a little bit you got to do that right yeah yeah he's belfast boy he calls himself a corner boy you know he grew up on the street and he when i was uh at this age we all i knew was there was a guy called van morrison who was one of ours who just had a hit with a hit it was like a like two year chart success with astral weeks you know was which he'd written that's great 25 26 great it's a great
Guest:album yeah it is with with belfast characters in it also yeah yeah yeah taken to the world characters like madame george from the streets of belfast yeah amazing swim so slider i love that one that last one it's so sad i don't even know why it's sad i didn't know what's going on in the song but it's sad he well he always went his own way does he always goes his own way and he well i remember it like 13 14 15 uh hearing uh rave on john dunn i couldn't believe it so
Guest:Rave said we were doing the metaphysical poets at school I didn't even know what metaphysical meant but sure we had to study them and John Donne was one of them and I knew that he had nothing to do with rock music or pop music yeah and here was a van Morrison in this kind of meditative introverted reverie this incantation of an Elizabethan poet yeah from the guy from down our way who who who was could have was was was in the well it was in his own slipstream I mean his own Celtic kind of Twilight
Guest:Um, and I, I, I was very drawn to the, uh, just the, you know, individual artistic journey.
Guest:I wouldn't have known to put it in those terms then, but just this is a guy who always followed his own nose.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And also like, he's like, you know, he's obviously getting something out of this thing I have to do.
Guest:And he has to do it.
Guest:He was here at Belfast.
Guest:We premiered the film at Belfast last week, and he was there.
Guest:And we were talking about touring.
Guest:He said, no, I don't enjoy it.
Guest:I don't enjoy performing at all, he said.
Guest:But I have to do it.
Guest:I have to do it.
Guest:I mean, and he said it like there was no spin.
Guest:He was not being charming or, oh, listen to the quirky facts of my life.
Guest:It was just no.
Guest:It had to be done.
Guest:And you'll know if you've seen him.
Guest:Often people say, Christ, I went to see Van, and he literally never turned and faced us the whole of the show.
Guest:He was just, he turned away, and he was in his own...
Guest:relationship to the music.
Guest:He's still a weirdo.
Guest:He's an individual.
Guest:He's highly individual.
Guest:He's also experimented with all those musical personalities as well.
Guest:I know what a great muso you are.
Guest:Do you...
Guest:Do you find that your musical personality has changed?
Guest:In terms of what I like?
Guest:Yeah, in terms of what you like, but also how you like to play and what you like to play.
Guest:Do you make yourself do that?
Guest:Do you make yourself take those turns?
Marc:For me, I'm no great player, but I think that if I can do it honestly, and that evolves, a certain confidence and what I get out of it and different tones and things.
Marc:But with music that I listen to, the music's a magic thing because you have a lifetime relationship with it.
Marc:And I think I guess I'm imagining not unlike Shakespeare that, you know, whenever you approach these things that you love, either whether it be music or those plays, you know, as you age, they evolve with you.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So that this sort of the that I think is the true essence of of genius is that, you know, you can approach something that you're familiar with at different points in your life and find something totally different in them.
Guest:So do you find then with music that it's actually quite, it's sort of, it's a narrow field, but you go deeper and deeper and deeper.
Marc:I do.
Marc:Like with Van Morrison, like, you know, I went through a period for, I'm not a huge Van Morrison fan because like he's, he's, he's kind of a lot to deal with, but like, they're like certainly Astral Weeks and some of the them stuff.
Marc:Like I, I know I listened to that, you know, I listened to Astral Weeks a lot.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Not really that long ago when I, when, when I sort of realized, well, this is, this is the one.
Marc:Yeah, how interesting.
Marc:But I thought that in the film, like when you were, you decided to do it in black and white, and you kind of fade into the black and white from the beginning, from modern Belfast, and then you pull out into modern Belfast.
Marc:But in these memories, there's even a moment where it seems poignant and obviously intentional.
Marc:And from your point of view as the child in the theater, where you do sort of a fairly unusual close-up for the film of the actors.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I'm like, I get it.
Marc:This is where he kind of realizes this is a thing.
Guest:Well, I'll tell you what I realized was how amazing.
Guest:I mean, we watched films, big widescreen saturated Technicolor films, which blew my mind with all the color.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that felt like going to the moon.
Marc:The Chichidi Bang Bang scene is very funny.
Guest:Yeah, well, it made a big difference to us.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But when we went to see a live theater, in this case, the piece in the film is from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I just couldn't believe that they were really on the stage.
Guest:We could see you could reach out and touch them.
Guest:So suddenly that was the beginning of going, well, if they're there and we're all in Belfast, but they're at the other side of those footlights, a little slow penny drop and go, maybe I could do that.
Guest:Because I know I can't be in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Guest:I know we can't go to America.
Guest:I know you can't make films because I've been looking around the back of the telly to try and find where the little people live and they're not there.
Guest:And you've proved.
Guest:that wrong exactly exactly so so it was like well there must be i guess these guys turn up don't they they arrive they've come to the same building as i have there was this slow dawning well that that's what's gettable that's what's maybe achievable not consciously then but it's a human undertaking yeah it's a human undertaking as opposed to flying to the moon which would be making films sure so
Marc:But I thought, you know, all in all that, you know, the moments you chose in the narrative you chose in the arc, that how long did you sort of like have to piece together the script to decide which of these?
Marc:Because it is a series of of of scenes that, you know, they they seem they're they're they're all continuous, but they they almost seem unto themselves until you kind of go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One thing that I absolutely told myself I would do is to follow my instinct about it.
Guest:So, you know, I've been involved with a lot of films, a lot of script development, where there's so much talk about conventional or unconventional structure, story arcs and narratives and acts, three acts, five
Guest:whatever it is.
Guest:And you develop it trying to sort of deconstruct those things or perfect them.
Guest:And in this case, I knew it was a memory piece.
Guest:I knew I wanted to go through with incidents.
Guest:So I did a sort of low-tech version of just endless cards with specific incidents in it.
Guest:Right, that's right.
Guest:And I played around with where they might go and what might put it together.
Guest:An original draft of the screenplay had the older buddy.
Guest:He had him looking back.
Guest:It was a bit more like the structure of a film like Cinema Paradiso, where at the beginning, an older character finds out somebody who was very important to him has passed away.
Guest:And he goes back to that town and revisits it.
Guest:And we go with him and we go into the past with him.
Guest:I tried that.
Guest:It didn't work for me in a way.
Guest:In a way, I was kind of anti-structure.
Guest:I was anti-formality.
Guest:I was anti... For me, it was going to be something that just had to satisfy me in some way.
Guest:And in a way, back to the Irishness we were talking about, if it was whatever, you know, quasi-poetic or whatever you might just call it, if it was just...
Guest:faintly stream of consciousness, that was going to be okay with me, too.
Guest:If it was impressionistic, if it was about waiting outside that girl's house, or if it was about, you know, food, some scenes that got dropped from the movie that laughed things we had to eat.
Guest:But it was about, yeah, the...
Guest:The memory in this thing that I read a line that the psychiatrist wrote about, you know, the facts of our lives are less important than how we remember them.
Guest:So I felt coming into this, you know, I'm going to worry less about facts or structure, but I'm going to write down what I remember.
Guest:I'm going to see if any of it goes together, if any of it falls together.
Guest:And the modern structure that I tried to impose on it fell apart when it became clear that it was about...
Guest:And understanding as a now 60 year old guy, an incident that happened when I was nine that I began to understand without being sort of tragic about it or sort of martyrish had dominated the rest of my life.
Guest:A relationship to a place where I felt so secure and leaving it, turning into something else across decades and decades.
Guest:amazing journeys i don't know how i would have arrived at shakespeare if i had stayed there i don't know maybe i would have done in a different or better or whatever way but although those journeys and those adventures i relish i felt that in a place that is so sort of dominated by a sense of your relationship to home ireland ireland has the relationship to home as a kind of building block of the dna yeah so and yet at the same time nearly everybody from there ruptures it
Guest:By leaving.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And, you know, going all points north, south, east and west.
Guest:And I'm one of those people.
Guest:But the call of home in the Irish culture is so strong and so striking.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That in a way it took me until we went back to Belfast, you know, the end of last week, first night at the Belfast Film Festival, 1,400 people watching this film together who all knew the story that I felt like I had landed back where I knew I was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Without getting all sentimental and, you know, because I still sound different and I've still been away and all the rest of it.
Guest:I still don't live there.
Guest:So how can I be saying this?
Marc:But they still they probably own you.
Guest:They do own.
Guest:They own this film now as well.
Guest:And it does own you.
Guest:What's your relationship to home like that?
Guest:Do you feel do you feel?
Marc:Well, I don't know that I have that same type of thing.
Marc:Because when I was a kid in New Jersey, my family was from Jersey, but I remember my grandmother.
Marc:I remember that house.
Marc:I remember feeling that community and all the relatives were around.
Marc:And my family, my mom and dad moved to Alaska because my dad was in the service from New Jersey.
Marc:So all of a sudden we're separated.
Marc:We're in the ice cold.
Marc:And then we moved to New Mexico.
Marc:So I don't know if there was a longing, but I always stayed connected to Jersey and to that.
Marc:But then my home became New Mexico.
Marc:But I was talking to somebody else about it.
Marc:Bill Pullman was here.
Marc:Even the air in the place where you grew up, when you go back there, it's integral to your development.
Marc:The sense of the ground you're walking on, the tone, the feel, the smell of the air.
Marc:It's just a very odd thing.
Guest:What would be the words that come to mind?
Guest:If you had three words that came to mind about New Jersey and New Mexico, I'd love to hear the difference.
Marc:Well, I think like the words that come to mind for me about New Jersey is just, you know, my grandmother and, you know, like melon balls.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And humidity.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And what about New Mexico?
Marc:Well, New Mexico, well, that was different.
Marc:Just, you know, a big sky.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, a feeling of...
Marc:I wouldn't say spiritual space, but an expanse that allowed my, you know, my brain to feel sort of free.
Marc:That's so interesting.
Guest:I know New Mexico, a little bit of work there a few times, and I was very, very, I loved being there.
Guest:And Big Sky is exactly what I carry away from that.
Guest:And this feeling, all I'm saying is that the power of environment on the spirit, you know, is tangible.
Guest:And there is a spectacular extreme example of a kind of expansion.
Guest:I felt different things when I was down there.
Guest:I loved exploring there.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:And I did some pilgrimages down there up to Taos, New Mexico.
Guest:D.H.
Guest:Lawrence sort of migrated there.
Guest:He did this sort of global search for an ideal community.
Guest:Yeah, and then Dennis Hopper.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Well, everybody was looking.
Guest:So that particular part of the world has something special, but its space is unique.
Guest:I went to Hopper's grave the last time I was there.
Marc:I found it.
Marc:It's in this strange little Mexican cemetery that looks like a parking lot.
Marc:And it's like one of these kind of like, you know, kind of very...
Marc:almost like rough kind of grave.
Marc:And people travel there to leave things.
Marc:But it's like a traditional kind of Mexican wooden cross, no frills, just there.
Marc:You gotta look it up to find it.
Marc:I went twice.
Marc:Yeah, I understand that.
Marc:And then people, and it's like, right, it's off the beaten path and outside of Taos.
Marc:And like, and I just spent a few days in Taos.
Marc:I was in a profound amount of grief and I was just like trying to, you know, kind of figure out how to ground myself.
Marc:And I just went on hikes every day and it was stunning up there.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I didn't spend much time there.
Marc:I used to ski there when I was a kid.
Guest:I went there to sit under the same tree as I saw D.H.
Guest:Lawrence sit under when he was composing his book Mornings in New Mexico.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Mornings in Mexico.
Guest:And so there's a famous, he was outside a cabin that Mabel Dodge Lewin had provided for him.
Guest:She was part of that Georgia O'Keeffe artistic community.
Guest:With Stieglitz in them?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that ritual of going to places like that, a little while ago.
Marc:It's so funny, you go for D.H.
Marc:Lawrence, I go for Hopper.
Guest:Well, they say two mavericks, two real mavericks and two controversialists.
Guest:I mean, Lawrence was there partly because nobody else would have him.
Guest:He'd been chased out of Britain.
Guest:He'd been accused of pornography with the rainbow and Lady Chatterley's lover later on became a great cause, celebre.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, he was and he was a restless guy like I imagine Hopper was.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:So talk about itchy feet.
Guest:So, I mean, you can do a world odyssey following Lawrence and trying to work out what he was trying to find in the countries that he went to to settle this unquiet heart.
Guest:What did he find?
Guest:Well, there he found sort of, you know, artistic companionship.
Guest:He had a sort of patron.
Guest:I think he was always looking for somebody to say, Bert.
Guest:Everybody called him Bert.
Guest:He's David Herbert Lawrence.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And working class guy, you know, but very sort of ethereal, very poetic.
Guest:And I guess he wanted somebody who would let him get on with the work that he was doing that he knew he was doing.
Guest:under the almost certain threat of early death because he was thin and tubercular and he lived with that kind of thing.
Guest:So I felt going to Taos that I just, I was in that world of, it reflects back on you, your own searches for peace of mind.
Guest:And here was somebody trying to find it.
Guest:For a minute, in a beautiful picture, it looked like he'd found it under this tree.
Guest:So I went to try to the source.
Guest:I wanted to go to the source of that and see if I felt different.
Guest:Now, I had a beautiful experience.
Guest:I don't know if I got any quieter in my own mind, but it was a beautiful thing to do.
Guest:I did it recently in England with the grave of Thomas Hardy, the great novelist Thomas Hardy.
Guest:And again, like you say, you go to these churchyards, and I don't know, maybe the universe works it out.
Guest:In both cases, nobody was around.
Guest:I know you roll up in a weird way.
Guest:You have your profoundness.
Marc:moment with dh lawrence or thomas hardy and and it's uh i don't know it's it's very helpful in some weird way oh yeah i i mean i went to lowell to see the grave of jack kerouac yeah you know and then yeah for whatever that was worth but yeah there's a lot i would think i think so i i do think so but you know taking you're taking your relationship to kerouac there aren't you sure but like but you know this is a romantic idea
Marc:It's a romantic idea to go and to have it, because I've been in those situations where you're like, I want to feel this thing.
Marc:But ultimately, what you feel if you let that feeling kind of play itself out is loss.
Guest:Yes, I would agree, but also processing that is good, but you are also honoring.
Guest:Yes, of course.
Marc:You're honoring this passion for this person.
Marc:Right, but you're not going to become them.
Guest:No, you're not going to become them.
Marc:But there's part of you that's sort of like, this will feed me.
Guest:I think it does.
Guest:think you kind of kiss the hem of their spiritual garment okay and you say thank you i say you i think you are you are saying thank you this you know this this movie is about sort of in a way honoring my parents without but well without sort of self-righteousness or sort of po-facedness it just i wanted to say to them and i wanted to say to the nine-year-old me well done thank you very much very imperfect uh but you know you this simple phrase always rings with me you know you
Guest:When you're in trouble, you're finding life difficult.
Guest:You look at somebody who's annoying them, but Jesus added you say when you find a way of saying you are doing your best and so is everybody else.
Guest:That's what you somehow have got to have in your mind.
Guest:I wanted to go back and find out and understand that I was doing my best.
Guest:My parents were doing the best because I think there's basically an enormous amount of guilt about having left.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:There's a scene in the film where the kid is crying on the sofa.
Guest:I don't want to leave Belfast.
Guest:He didn't want to go.
Guest:For me, that was also, I don't want to go.
Guest:I don't want to grow up.
Guest:I don't want to accept exactly what you were just talking there, which is the sort of center of this film, loss.
Guest:How do we deal with it?
Guest:How do we deal with loss of identity, loss of family, loss of nation, and then critically, powerfully, awfully, loss of loved ones.
Guest:This was the beginning of wrenching us into this moment, this crossover, the moment, if you like, when you know that Santa isn't real if Christmas and Santa is in your life.
Guest:And so this idea that the grandparents just weren't going to be around, that as a way of organizing the human condition, I wanted already to go, God, please, there has to be another way of doing this, doesn't there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Tell me that I'll see him again sometimes, will you?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Or there'll be a place, or that we can talk, or tell me how to understand what'll seem like trite remarks for a long time about, but they'll be in your heart.
Guest:You'll carry them with you everywhere.
Guest:I remember a friend of mine put his arms around me the morning after my father died, and I was in a state, of course, and he said-
Guest:46 or something, you know, and my mother had died two years previously.
Guest:And I remember one of my dearest friends who'd driven me faster than any car.
Guest:He drove me and my wife when they got the call.
Guest:We'd just been at the hospital.
Guest:We just got back to the house and the hospital rang and they said, your father is very ill.
Guest:Would you care to reattend?
Guest:What a phrase that was.
Guest:Would you care to re-attend Christ?
Guest:So immediately I got on the phone to my sister.
Guest:I said, I think he's going.
Guest:We've got to get there now.
Guest:This friend drove me.
Guest:I swear to God, we leapt over.
Guest:I mean, we nearly died getting there, but we got there and we got there and he was there and he...
Guest:We were able to let him go.
Guest:And I said, you can go, Dad.
Guest:I love you very much.
Guest:And you heard that death rattle.
Guest:And it was an amazing thing to see.
Guest:The next morning, I'm still trying to process it.
Guest:My sister got there just too late.
Guest:My brother's just flying in from Australia that day.
Guest:That's going to be a horrendous thing to be outside that fucking arrivals hall.
Guest:But this friend put his arms around me and he said, it's all right.
Guest:And I remember screaming, it's not fucking all right.
Guest:And I went outside and I just howled and howled and howled.
Guest:I didn't know what to do with my body.
Guest:I'd leant down and I knelt and I couldn't even literally put myself in a physical position that dealt with what this thing was that was being dragged out of me, which is just the impossibility of accepting that it was going to happen.
Guest:I had been incomplete.
Guest:Complete denial about it through the whole, he had lung cancer in the end.
Guest:And I just, as far as I was concerned, it could always be solved.
Guest:It could be solved because we get the thing, we do the thing, we get the new education, we did the thing, we get the whatever, whatever.
Guest:And just the beginning of that was back in Belfast, was somehow, that was the beginning of, you know, going, it was the beginning, it's like films like Frankenstein and stuff, where a man is trying to create something in order to defeat death.
Guest:It's films like Hamlet, where it's all about, what the fuck?
Guest:does this mean yeah um and and and you know the the some somehow i wanted to go back and sort of look at the moment where the the kid was sort of going well here we go here we go let's go human let's go human i've done nine years i've been fine i'm all settled i thought it was fine yeah and
Guest:No, it isn't going to be.
Guest:So let's get ready to cope with all the all the, you know, salt and pepper and seasoning.
Marc:But, you know, it was fascinating.
Marc:That was an amazing journey that you just described to me.
Marc:But like in the film, you know, after he has that fit.
Marc:that when he does have whatever that nine-year-old version of understanding and acceptance of the change, you know, it's earned.
Marc:And there is a tangible sense that he understands his parents' fear after that thing that happened in the street.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That like that, you know, no matter how much he loved his grandparents or anything else, he could feel the danger.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that thing, that was what was so true of times like that.
Guest:It was true in the Westerns I saw, but it really was true on the streets there and in those societies.
Guest:If somebody said, you know, they're coming for you, don't you?
Guest:They're going to come.
Guest:There's no question.
Guest:That's not, that's not like a, that isn't like a line from a movie that's horrible, awful in the middle of the night, you know, or not, they don't even knock.
Guest:It's just, it's, and you know, there's a litany, you know, 3,700 dead in those 30 years of trouble.
Marc:So, but like, you know, in listening to you, it seems that whatever this quest is where, you know, your sort of, your sensitivity and, and, and your, you know, disquiet,
Marc:spiritually like i always sense that about you when i watch you i'm like you know i there there was an earnestness to the trajectory of your career there was an ambition to it but there was always the concern to me is like i don't know if this guy's ever going to find it yeah yeah well i think um my mother said you know you could never sit still that's what she said you can never sit still and i think that the that's hard emotionally and spiritually isn't it yeah psychologically
Guest:Yeah, but I think there's something to what you say about a sort of something, again, without sort of aggrandizing yourself, because a trillion people do it in different ways, being a seeker.
Marc:Right, sure, sure.
Guest:But you don't know what it is.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:I meditate and I've read every self-help book under God's heaven.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I mean, there's something to seeking.
Marc:There's one thing about seeking.
Marc:There's a lot of ways to do it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But if you've got that existential itch where you're like, how is this not enough?
Guest:Well, it's not about being enough.
Guest:I think it's about how do you – I think you do this very well because you kind of live in the process.
Guest:You live in sometimes the rage.
Marc:You live in the – Well, I think what it is for me, it's like how do I feel like, you know, okay with myself.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And where we're more often than not, you can take breaths or moments or minutes or hours where nothing's going on, but nothing, you know, where there is a kind of positive middle of your experience.
Marc:I tried to admit it.
Marc:I was doing meditation for a while.
Marc:I can quiet it down.
Marc:But to what end?
Marc:It's not like, OK, now I'm going to start my day.
Marc:I meditate for 15 minutes and then I start my day.
Marc:And how is that helping me?
Guest:Well, I think it allows other things to come in.
Guest:I guess.
Guest:It's a mental tidy.
Guest:Yeah, I get it.
Guest:Somebody described it to me, interestingly, as, have you ever been on a retreat?
Guest:I said, no, I haven't.
Guest:He said, how do you fancy going on a retreat twice a day?
Guest:That's what meditation is.
Guest:You just go and stop for a bit.
Marc:Is it working for you like that?
Guest:Well, I think you give the mind a rest.
Guest:You go and sleep at night.
Guest:How long have you been doing it?
Guest:I've been doing it 20 years.
Marc:Like TM or just another thing?
Guest:Another thing with a mantra, and it's half an hour each day.
Guest:And it works for you.
Guest:I would say that it's essential to me.
Guest:I don't know that it works for me all the time.
Guest:I think that there's no bad meditations, however.
Guest:I think that sometimes the best ones are the ones where that racing mind has been talking the whole time.
Guest:But you do slow it down.
Marc:I do, yeah.
Guest:And for me, it's helpful.
Marc:For me, it's helpful.
Marc:I do that with guitar.
Marc:But it strikes me.
Guest:Yeah, you're in the zone with guitar.
Guest:You've got another place that nothing else is.
Guest:You're in flow, as it were.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:But like, I mean, it has to be something.
Marc:I mean, when you do leave Belfast.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So what is it?
Marc:Is England as scary as your family was afraid of?
Marc:Were you treated like, you know, like these Irish mutts?
Marc:Were you like when?
Marc:How did you lose the accent?
Marc:Does it come back when you go to Ireland?
Guest:No, it doesn't.
Guest:I think that the- Too young.
Guest:Yeah, well, too young and also too, I kind of, I feel as though somehow that, I've never been one of those actors.
Guest:I know a lot who are, who are, as soon as you're in another place, you start being the other, you know, you pick it up, you start sounding like where you are.
Guest:And I felt as though I had to sort of find a new person that wasn't – because I felt so bereft from the attachment and the security of being in the extended family.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That once we, as a family, we went in on ourselves.
Guest:We were, I think, quiet, protected.
Guest:We wanted to keep our head down.
Guest:We were living in a place that had a lot of families with sons in the army, a lot of them who were over where we'd just come from, a lot of them who were under the cosh in terms of the violence, a lot of people who died.
Guest:So we wanted to be quiet, or at least I did.
Guest:And I think it was super tough for my mother.
Guest:She got very bad post-matal depression after she had my sister.
Guest:There was a lot of family dramas.
Guest:And my brother had a lot of, kind of as she said about my brother, who's a wonderful guy, she said he rolled around the playground.
Guest:By which it meant, you know, he's in a fight every day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he found his way.
Guest:But we just quietened down.
Guest:It became I became solitary and I started to say less.
Guest:And then when I started to ultimately across two or three years, I just wanted to fit in.
Guest:So you start sounding a little bit English and then a lot English.
Guest:And then you you know, you just get on with that.
Guest:And you've you've acquired what you think is in relative terms, an authentic sort of process.
Guest:position and you maintain it when all the family come over good son in english now so well i'm here now you know i'm here now i'm trying to fit in um and whatever 9 10 11 12 years old and everything uh but uh and when does the acting start well the acting starts at about about 16 i guess um i knew you know we had three i went to the careers interview at school i was at a comprehensive school which is a public school for you guys uh
Guest:And they said, three careers available to you here in Reading.
Guest:Insurance, British Rail, or the Army.
Guest:What do you fancy?
Guest:I said, well, I'd like to be an actor.
Guest:And they handed me a piece of paper.
Guest:And it was just one side of A4.
Guest:And the opening sentence was, an empty theater is a lonely place.
Guest:You no longer hear the sound of applause.
Guest:It was basically 80% of the profession are out of work at any one time.
Guest:Is it really what you want to do?
Guest:They have us prepared?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:they haven't prepared clearly they clearly back then in 1977 they were saying jesus don't don't send any more you know to to the circus we don't need more of that so uh but i was loving school plays and amateur dramatics and beginning to realize that um there were places that you could go to learn to do this thing and of course i ran to it because plays were families plays were were groups of people where and i felt happy in in those groups those larger extended groups um
Marc:But it seems like for a guy like you giving this quest of whatever it is, that to not only have that family thing, but to have a full character, especially something like Shakespeare, where all the answers are given to you.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And to immerse yourself in that must have been almost like transformative.
Guest:You're right about this.
Guest:There was something about filling what would have been a life where you plugged into every dimension of your family and it would be utterly immersive.
Guest:And I basically had gone into myself to the point where in my adolescence, my parents regularly sat me down with my brother and said, why don't you ever bring any friends around?
Guest:Do you have any friends?
Guest:They were really worried about me.
Guest:And I didn't see it that way.
Guest:I saw it as kind of protecting myself.
Guest:But yes, when I became interested in acting, the focus, even I, when I look back at it now, it was an unbelievable focus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A local Amsterdam guy gave me a box of copies of a magazine called Plays and Players.
Guest:I read them encyclopedically.
Guest:I mean, and for probably a good 20 years in this business, I could have told you who played the third butler in the fourth episode of Cold It's on television.
Guest:I could have said, you know, I could have...
Guest:You know, told you he was in every production of the National Theater in England through the 1960s when John Lennon's play was on there in his own right.
Guest:1966, a triple bill that Laurence Olivier presented and they all showed up at the Old Vic.
Guest:And then Anthony Hopkins' first thing, Anthony Hopkins understudying Laurence Olivier going on.
Marc:Did you see them live, all those guys?
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:I didn't.
Guest:But I was told about the night when Anthony Hopkins was announced and they said, ladies and gentlemen, remember, Laurence Olivier was a god, a legend.
Guest:He ran the National Theatre in England.
Guest:He was about to play in a play called The Dance of Death by Strindberg, dark psychological Swedish drama.
Guest:And man comes on worst job in the world, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid that due to the indisposition of Sir Laurence Olivier.
Guest:goes to the crowd the part of Edgar in tonight's performance of the dance of death will be played by Anthony Hopkins so I was so I would I had found my outlet I had found my outlet and Shakespeare and your people
Guest:Yeah, and Shakespeare was it because for me it was a detective hunt.
Guest:I didn't understand it.
Guest:We'd never heard of it.
Guest:I didn't know how to say it.
Guest:And yet, in the Irish bit of me that loves language, it got the hairs on the back of my neck going.
Guest:So I got my Sherlock Holmes coat on, as it were, and I said to the school with a clarity and a determination I'd never done before, listen, I'll do extra work, but will you let me off on Wednesdays, please, so I can see two matinees.
Guest:I can see Albert Finney playing Macbeth in the afternoon.
Guest:wednesday at the national theater and if i queue up i can get the student standby and the student standby seats are actually in the front two rows so i would be able to see mr finney very very close up i could see the whites of his eyes and this is shakespeare of course sir so that would be mind broadening wouldn't it well all right okay but you are gonna have to do the extra essays so i was like um i was so uh focused i saw king richard recently the movie with will smith about the the the william sisters which is a wonderful film and yeah they are all brilliant and it will is fantastic
Guest:That determination to go from humble beginnings to a long way down the track was for me something that started but had with it.
Guest:What I loved about it was that I had absolutely no expectations.
Guest:It didn't matter to me.
Guest:There was no, oh, got to win an Oscar, oh, got to win a Laurence Olivier award, oh, got to play this part, whatever.
Guest:It was just, I want to be in this world.
Guest:I want to be doing Shakespeare.
Guest:I don't care if I'm watching it.
Guest:And there's a great book called Hamlet's Dresser about a guy who taught Shakespeare to octogenarians in New York.
Guest:It's a beautiful book.
Guest:And his childhood has him staying overnight and sleeping and being summer camp at the Shakespeare Theater in Connecticut.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And for me, that would have been fine, too.
Guest:Just watching.
Guest:Just watching would have been fine.
Guest:So I just knew that, in a way, I'd died and gone to heaven when I found this guy's work and when I found the theater.
Guest:Film was still a trip to the moon.
Marc:But for somebody like you, it's like there's a whole universe.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's almost, it seems unending.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I'm spinning on my own particular rock in space through that universe.
Marc:But also it addresses all of the questions that anybody has about life over and over again.
Guest:It doesn't answer them except that you go through experiences.
Guest:It just asks really better questions.
Marc:See, this is the older you after coming through it.
Marc:Yeah, I looked at all of it.
Yeah.
Marc:I've done it all.
Marc:No answers.
Guest:No answers.
Guest:Really good, really good questions.
Marc:So that's why I'm meditating and I'm sitting under a tree where D.H.
Marc:Lawrence was because Shakespeare just didn't deliver it.
Marc:In case I missed something.
Guest:Well, do you know what?
Guest:Well, of course, for me, the profound experience of doing Hamlet was to, if you look at his, the most famous speech in Western literature, perhaps, to be or not to be, that is the question.
Guest:A man apparently considering suicide, why is life worth living?
Guest:And he lays out the reasons why, perhaps with all the whips and scorns of outrageous fortune, it is not.
Guest:Uh, so he asks the question to be or not to be, which we do by the end of the play, um, when he knows he's going to die.
Guest:Um, and, uh, and, and Horatio says, you don't have to take part in this rigged jewel, by the way.
Guest:Um, you know, we can get you out of it.
Guest:You don't have to die.
Guest:We know they're going to, it's, it's a, it's a fixed fight.
Guest:You will die.
Guest:Um, and he, and, and, and, uh, Hamlet says, uh, uh, not a wit.
Guest:We defy augury.
Guest:There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
Guest:If it be now, it is not to come.
Guest:If it be not to come, it will be now.
Guest:If it be not now, yet it will come.
Guest:Let be.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the big answer is leave it alone.
Guest:Leave it alone.
Guest:To be or not to be, you know what?
Guest:Don't overthink it.
Guest:It's all rigged.
Guest:We die.
Guest:It's a fixed fight.
Guest:Life is a fixed fight.
Guest:The promoters are the only ones who are going to walk away from this with any cash.
Marc:Yeah, that's amazing.
Marc:Well, I think that movie...
Marc:Well, I mean, look, it just seems like I talked to Benedict Cumberbatch yesterday.
Marc:You know that guy?
Marc:I do.
Marc:Yeah, he's a wonderful actor.
Marc:Yeah, but do you look at him like, the young gun.
Guest:Here he comes.
Guest:Listen, I'm too long in the tooth now.
Guest:I can genuinely say, good on him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Good on him.
Marc:Well, that's good.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Well, he didn't go to the same school.
Marc:He went to the other school, right?
Guest:He went to a public school, went to Harrow, yeah, to Harrow.
Guest:Winston Churchill School.
Guest:And then he went to Lambda.
Marc:Lambda, right.
Marc:Lambda, not RADA, yeah.
Marc:And you're in the other one.
Marc:I'm in the other one, yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Now, but by the time you get there, you're already obsessed with Shakespeare.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:You're already doing it.
Marc:You're already engaged in an almost sort of an obsessive endeavor.
Marc:Yes, yeah, yeah.
Marc:They must have been open arms, like, you know, well, he's got a 16-year-old who's, like, losing his mind over Shakespeare.
Marc:How often does that happen in the 70s?
Guest:Well, you know, one of the things that really drove me that the Belfast movie is also partly about is that I wanted to understand and I wanted to bring back.
Guest:I wanted to bring back the Shakespeare to my mom and dad to that house that didn't have any books in.
Guest:And I wanted because I knew they could perfectly well understand and experience it and have a view on it.
Guest:But I just didn't want all the things that get in the way between them working class people and so-called elitist or high art.
Marc:I think that's what that movie did.
Marc:Was it Henry V?
Marc:Henry V was the beginning.
Guest:That was, I think, where the story had such a sort of, to go back to story structure, it had the kind of great sports movie arc.
Guest:Because I have a hard time with Shakespeare.
Guest:I can't wrap my head around it.
Guest:Sometimes it's like the pursuit of literal understanding is sometimes a waste of time when intuitive experiential response to it is fine.
Guest:Do you like classical music?
Guest:Yeah, kind of.
Guest:I don't know anything about it.
Guest:I don't know anything about it either.
Guest:I made one opera.
Guest:film and that's really the only opera I know and when they ask me to do it I just listen to it obsessively obsessively obsessively so I could probably talk to you about the magic flute but nothing else about Mozart sometimes I feel bad because people I know love it and say my god you're missing something but it just it doesn't I don't find my way into that means of expression and that's okay but sometimes I am just overwhelmed by something sublime that I can't explain in a piece that I might hear and that's fine too so we can't all like everything you
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I know.
Marc:But like you.
Marc:But yeah, I guess I always think.
Marc:But this is my issue.
Marc:This is my relative to your particular kind of discontent or discomfort or feeling of incompletion or whatever the fuck it is.
Marc:It's like I always feel like, you know, I'm missing something.
Marc:You know, there's got to be a depth here.
Marc:Like, no, if I don't get it, like if I see something that's complicated or it seems like, whether it's classical music, I know classical music, I'm missing something because I don't know anything about the context of it.
Marc:I don't know anything about the composer.
Marc:It's like, sounds pretty.
Guest:Well, give me an example of what in another field that you're very familiar with.
Marc:Well, I'm watching the film.
Marc:I'm watching a film that Benedict's in, you know, the new one, the Jane Campion movie.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And it's like at the beginning, I'm like, all right, so this is paced in a very poetic way, you know, and then I watch a little story and it's provocative and it's and it's sparse, but it's clearly a piece of art and it's clearly poetry.
Marc:And I understand the feelings it's giving me.
Marc:But when I see something like that, I always assume someone knows what's going on.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But what for you, like in music or some other area of your life, do you go, oh, no, this is everything.
Guest:I'm understanding.
Guest:And I'm the one who's getting.
Guest:I'm the one who's getting.
Guest:I'm having.
Guest:Are you looking for, from that experience or from Shakespeare, an epiphanous moment, if that's a word, where it all comes together, a sublime thing?
Guest:You're lost.
Marc:You're transported.
Marc:Well, that's the problem with me is I think I expect that from everything.
Marc:Like, I used to do a joke about that.
Marc:Like, every book I have is a self-help book.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But they're not self-help books.
Marc:Any book to me is a self-help book.
Marc:I'm reading a Led Zeppelin biography and I'm like, I have to see myself in here.
Marc:There's going to be some sort of wisdom that's going to make my life better.
Marc:So I'm sort of half looking for that type of catharsis from anything.
Marc:But as I get older and, you know, I get more intellectually confident, I can have my own opinions.
Marc:And I argued with Cumberbatch yesterday about his character.
Marc:Like I said, like, you know, because what happens to that character?
Marc:And I'm like, he said that guy was about to change.
Marc:I'm like, how do you know that?
Guest:He played the guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and we we argued about it and uh but you know i i had confidence to do that i imagine it's going to sound pretty dumb because he's like he knew what was going on no i'm the i i would say that that's a you know if i want to be grand about it you say that's a function of art isn't it so right if you you might have sort of brackets quote missed something but the resultant questions are maybe you know quite elevating and interesting keep speaking keep speaking yeah that's the thing that you
Guest:out of what to happen yeah it's like yeah it's my own insecurity like i didn't get it but i did get it yeah yeah you got it you got it because you got the you got questions this is something i was talking about my parents all the time they always thought there was something that they had to get and i thought that's always been a part of what's driven me is this uh high art low art thing you know and not you know being a um
Guest:And being from a working class background, but people assuming if they heard about who I was at some point when the Shakespeare thing had kicked in, they assumed that I was from, as it were, an Ivy League university.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And steeped in all this stuff when I'd come from entirely the opposite direction.
Guest:But I wished without diminishing or diluting to make...
Guest:my now specialist subject the interpretation of this stuff available to all right i believe that this was a good thing and there's always been but there's a tension both ways sometimes at the higher end of that uh you know an elite group don't want that to be the case and at the other end of it i kind of um you know my my parents would sometimes feel as though they were ill-equipped or you know that kind of stuff's too highfalutin for us or too fancy or whatever but like you they'd come and see
Guest:They came over.
Guest:We had an amazing trip to see Hamlet in America.
Guest:They ended up going to the White House because I was involved with the Kennedy Center honors.
Guest:And we got to we got to go in.
Guest:And I was part of a tribute to Jack Lemmon, who was president.
Guest:It was the Clintons.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and as we were going in, you'll appreciate this having seen this film as we were going in.
Guest:My mother turned to me and said, my God, this is a long way from York Street, which is where.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We'd grown up.
Guest:But that night we had a premiere of the film.
Guest:Jack Lemmon was there.
Guest:Charlton Heston.
Guest:Tony Bennett came.
Guest:I remember Alan Alda.
Guest:I mean, amazing sort of group of people.
Guest:And my father and a ton of drama students as well had come.
Guest:And my father, in the end, it's like two o'clock in the morning.
Guest:He's talking to them about what Hamlet means.
Guest:You know he now has an opinion about it, right?
Guest:You know basic things like you know You look at a play like Hamlet man is visited by ghost of his father says I was murdered you need to revenge me.
Guest:It was your uncle Yeah, why does he not do it?
Guest:You know and like the basic question you have to answer in the middle of the play Okay, so he's now spent three acts proving that he did kill him so now he knows he comes upon him praying the villain and
Guest:The murderer of his father is in front of him.
Guest:He's got his back to him.
Guest:He's praying.
Guest:Now I could kill him.
Guest:Why doesn't he kill him?
Guest:This is the question you have to ask.
Guest:My father was sat there talking to 20-year-olds who were equally passionate back about that question in Hamlet.
Guest:But you might say it's a question about...
Guest:You were talking earlier on about where people don't know when to leave.
Guest:And sometimes, you know, obviously murder is an incredible thing to even consider.
Guest:And even if it might be a sort of righteous act, you might say, in this drama, it's still very difficult for human beings to come to that conclusion.
Guest:Sure, of course.
Guest:Steel inserted into flesh is not an easy thing to do.
Guest:Is that from the play?
Guest:Sorry?
Guest:No, but it could be.
Guest:It could be.
Guest:I think the musical version, steel into flesh, not a cool thing.
Marc:You just said it with the same kind of delivery, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It had a little iambicness to it.
Marc:Iambic improv.
Marc:Well, that's amazing.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:I mean, I don't know.
Marc:Do you still enjoy doing Shakespeare?
Guest:I do.
Guest:What I don't enjoy is, again, the slightly rarefied thing that can continue to go with it.
Guest:I still feel it needs to be shaken up.
Marc:But they've been trying to do that forever in every different way.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So maybe I should just get over that.
Guest:And sometimes, and I kind of resist, and I know I disappoint people who expect me to be some sort of guru about that and lavishing in my guruness or whatever.
Guest:I'm just a guy who practiced a lot.
Guest:You play the guitar.
Guest:I do a lot of Shakespeare practice.
Guest:Does that make me an expert on Shakespeare?
Guest:In my view, no.
Guest:Does it make me an enthusiast?
Guest:Enthusiasts, most certainly, yeah.
Marc:But as an artist, as an actor, because of, I think, what I'm identifying as this, well, we talked about it.
Marc:I mean, when you do it, even if you do a monologue, even though you do know it, do you feel it?
Guest:Yeah, what you said earlier on is exactly right.
Guest:You get older.
Guest:I mean, a play that I went to see, we did it at school when I was 16 years old, and it was one of the first Shakespeare's I went to see, King Lear.
Guest:And in the program, I opened it, and in this kind of blasted font, like it was like Mount Rushmore writing, was a phrase from the play, when we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Now, that hit me between the eyes.
Guest:Don't know why.
Guest:Why should that mean anything to me?
Guest:I'm 16 years old, but I don't know why it hit me, but it did.
Guest:So now I'm 60 years old, and when I read that line, when I feel that line, it does something very different to me.
Guest:So now I'm arriving, if I'm allowed, if the universe sort of sets it before me in some way, I'm arriving at the point where I would like to do...
Guest:I would like to play that part.
Guest:I would like to experience that.
Guest:I would like to embody those lines.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because from another line of Shakespeare, Jaques and As You Like It, he talks about to someone who suggests he's become something of a curmudgeon.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He says, yes, I have bought my experience.
Guest:And he's paid a mighty price for it.
Guest:So I would say, yes, I have bought my experience.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now I can probably, you know, go for that King Lear and find the way to inhabit it.
Guest:But I always challenge it with, you know, the why.
Guest:Why are you doing something?
Guest:Now, sometimes it's good enough that you're an artist, you practice, this is what you do, you offer it up, and you're a vessel anyway.
Guest:Listen...
Guest:It's for other people to consider King Lear.
Guest:Some will be coming to it for the first time.
Guest:In that sense, you're doing a good deed in a naughty world.
Guest:And for other people, they can go, oh, it's my 50th Lear.
Guest:No, he's rather interesting in the third act, but in the second act, it's rather boring.
Guest:And then he goes for the full despair in the fourth act, which is always a mistake, should be fifth act, last scene.
Guest:Those guys.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:They're ruining it for everybody.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So...
Guest:But I kind of now, I'm rather gingerly around.
Guest:I was talking the other day about a great friend of mine, Brian Blessed, an actor who's been in a number of my films.
Guest:He's a dear friend.
Guest:I see him every week.
Guest:I meditate with him every week.
Guest:We walk the dogs for a long time.
Guest:He doesn't like walking so much these days.
Guest:He's not as ready to do all that.
Guest:But we talk all the time.
Guest:He's a big, big boxing fan and a great aficionado of acting, big sports guy.
Guest:And he talks about boxing and seven fights, seven great fights that you've got in you, seven fights when it can all come together.
Guest:And he feels the same way about acting.
Guest:In between those ones where you give everything, you just are spent, where it's all gone.
Guest:In between those, you'll duck and dive and you'll box clever and you'll find a way to survive.
Guest:You get through it, you might enjoy something.
Guest:You might land a few punches.
Guest:But basically, you've got to get ready for the seven that you're capable of.
Guest:And so, you know, I feel that for me, that's been a sort of useful metaphor.
Guest:And I'm kind of cagely walking around...
Guest:King Lear and the immersion into that because now I know what it costs.
Guest:And my wife would tell you about what I would call the bleed.
Guest:The bleed is the way in which even with the most sensible or I leave it at work kind of attitude to artistry, the bleed into your own life is so taxing.
Guest:And I'm the least kind of, oh, you know, I became so dark because I was playing the dark part.
Guest:But it happens.
Guest:It just happens.
Guest:It's like practice.
Guest:You practice a guitar, you get better in the guitar.
Guest:If you practice playing a dark part because you do it a lot, it goes in.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, that's my recent comedy, my new hour.
Marc:I ran it up in, you're going to like this, I ran it in Portland, Oregon.
Marc:I did the hour, 15 minutes.
Marc:And a guy, a friend of my opening act, he comes up to me and goes...
Marc:God, that was great.
Marc:I'm sad.
Marc:I'm like, I did it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you did the sad, and if it was brilliant, then you're going to be taking some of the sad home with you, aren't you?
Guest:Or are you getting the sad out?
Marc:But I had to wrestle with it.
Marc:I don't want it.
Marc:Why is it like that?
Marc:Because I'm not registering it quite like that.
Marc:I can't see myself clearly.
Marc:This is the way I'm looking at the world.
Marc:Am I sad?
Marc:I'm not debilitated.
Marc:I'm trying to process things that are dark and heavy.
Marc:But I feel like that's kind of my job.
Marc:I'm not a song and dance man.
Marc:No.
Guest:We're trying to do the big work here.
Guest:And it's yin and yang, isn't it?
Guest:You know, you need to, you know, the old colleague Gilbraith thing of your joys and your sorrows.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:The balance, yeah.
Marc:The balance, yeah.
Marc:The film balances it.
Guest:Well, this film is, as somebody said to me, heartbreaking and heartwarming.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But definitely heartbreaking.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you cannot get away from, you cannot get away from.
Marc:But heartbreaking in a way that everybody can relate to.
Marc:Having to move, having to confront crisis, having to change, people passing.
Marc:It's not unnecessarily heartbreaking, and it's heartbreaking in a lot of ways from the nine-year-old's perspective.
Marc:So you do know that that kid's going to be okay.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:So it's all tempered with that.
Marc:And I think because so much of it was shot from his point of view, that innocence is fully felt.
Marc:And so whatever heartbreak or darkness there is there, it's really kind of held up by the spirit of that kid.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And it makes it kind of a beautiful thing.
Marc:It's sort of like when you were talking about the way you pieced it together.
Marc:There is a feeling of a Truffaut movie in there a bit, isn't there?
Guest:Well, trying to find these snapshots of vulnerability and also these moments where you literally see the kid's face light up and understand that some other significant piece of human understanding he has now signed up for.
Guest:Um, so it's, I felt watching the kid that you were watching or almost watching the beginning of bruises appear, um, you know, which is the, but we all knew he was going to end up, you know, doing Henry doing it.
Marc:Everyone in the room is like, this guy's going to be all right.
Marc:Greatest Shakespearean actors of our time.
Marc:But like when he put like Judy Dench in there, there's there, do you feel like that's your family?
Um,
Guest:Yes, this was a huge, huge part of it, that if you wanted to talk about family, then you needed to have people in there with whom you had.
Guest:And, you know, not just Judy, almost everybody on that street I've worked with before.
Guest:Before, we gave like 12 kids from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where I'm now president, their first job.
Guest:That's family to me because I'm very involved with that.
Guest:And when I look at them, I see myself back at that time.
Guest:And yes, so there was an utter artistic family.
Guest:All of the crew, you know, half of them we'd worked with.
Guest:Before Harrison Balucos, our cinematographer, is a great, great friend.
Guest:And so that had to go into this film.
Guest:The creative family had to bleed into the real family.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So in closing, when are you going to do Lear?
Marc:Are you going to wait 10 years?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:What's your advice?
Guest:Did you see Olivier's?
Guest:I did see that, yes.
Guest:He did it early, and then he did it maybe too late, I think.
Guest:The thing is, it's not a very rewarding part, many actors say, because some would say, well, he's an egotistical idiot in the first act, and he learns understanding and insight only when it's too late and when he has been diabolically cruel to his children.
Guest:who in turn are ungrateful.
Guest:So somebody described it, somebody like John Dryden described it as his least good play, his greatest piece of work.
Guest:Because dramatically, it isn't nearly as thrilling as Macbeth, who's got a real thriller plot.
Guest:You don't have the nice jealousy, revenge, jealousy plot of Othello.
Guest:You don't have the revenge drama of Hamlet.
Guest:You've got a silly old man
Guest:who decides, you know what, I'm going to leave the job, I'm going to leave the job, but you know what, here's all you've got to do, all you've got to do, you've just got to, stay with me, all you've got to do, you've just got to tell me how much you love me, and do it publicly, tell me how much you fucking love me, I'm serious, I'm serious, you're not getting the fucking kingdom until, no, I'm really serious, tell everybody how much you fucking love me, well then fuck you, well fuck you, fuck off then, fuck right off.
Guest:And you think, really?
Guest:That's it?
Guest:Mature king?
Guest:You were going to give up?
Guest:And that's it?
Guest:And that's it?
Guest:And in a minute, you silly fuck, the entire nation is going to crumble because what happens in the drawing rooms of the rich and famous, unfortunately, waves itself out.
Guest:It's going to involve that by the end of this play, the power structure in this country is going to change.
Guest:You're going to ruin the lives of so many people because you're an irrational, immature asshole.
Guest:And then you're saying to the audience, you've got to feel sorry.
Guest:for this guy haven't you well not not so easily you know so that's the guy that's our hero that's our hero and then and then finally and then and then and then in the fourth act with with with Gloucester you know having Gloucester's lost his eyes Lear's lost his mind and his daughter and his home and his clothes that's when he gets to say when we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools and
Marc:Well, it seems like the challenge then that you may be up to is the challenge of creating an empathetic leer, right?
Guest:Enough.
Guest:Enough.
Guest:I think you're exactly right.
Guest:You're exactly right.
Guest:It's finding the way to have the audience have, yes, some empathy, understanding, not necessarily sympathy, and not to do love me, love me acting up front, but to just find a way to... Because it's not so...
Guest:reasonable but in a sense to do it like olivier did like the second one was cheating because he was old as fuck yeah yeah this is key i think this is key i think you need a vigorous guy right leo there's so much of a a kind of uh sort of sense of him as you know captain of industry still got it right sure still get it up all men that yeah exactly exactly so you know
Guest:Yeah, because the ridiculous thing, he says, you've still got to call me king, by the way.
Guest:I mean, I'm splitting up the company.
Guest:But you've got to call me king.
Guest:And I'll do, you know, I'm not going to do Mondays.
Guest:Not going to do Mondays, no.
Guest:I'll come in second half of Tuesday, work all the way through to Thursday lunchtime, and then, you know, I'm gone.
Guest:In those hours, I will do it.
Guest:And, yeah, you can all do, you know, I'm going to be involved, you know.
Guest:But I'm still king.
Guest:But I'm still king.
Guest:And that's, of course, when the kids go, well, that's lovely, Dad.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, or at least as soon as it's signed.
Marc:As soon as it's signed.
Marc:I think you got to do it now.
Marc:Next couple of years.
Guest:I'm feeling that you should do it when he also has the rage.
Marc:I think that for some reason I feel that you always have access to that.
Guest:But rage and sort of danger, I suppose.
Guest:The thing that, of course, he is so outraged by is the ingratitude, that thou shouldst know how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.
Guest:I gave you all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To which they reply, yeah, and in good time you gave it.
Guest:Yeah, right, right.
Guest:Fucking arsehole.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, man, man.
Guest:What a guy.
Guest:What a guy.
Guest:What a guy.
Guest:What a guy.
Guest:But, of course, I mean, he's a sort of bastion of male insecurity.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Ego.
Guest:And, you know, maybe it is the time to do it because, you know, well, we'll see.
Guest:We'll see.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:Swirling around.
Marc:Well, I mean, the thing is, it's like, you know, it's time those guys take a hit.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:No, this one.
Guest:The price he pays for personal knowledge and self-awareness is so titanic, you know.
Guest:That's ultimately what is tragic.
Guest:And then, of course, just again, back to the basics, having done all that, the one thing that he understood was that the girl who refused to say how much she loved him in public is the one who's most like him, as stubborn as him.
Guest:That's why she couldn't do it, and she's the one...
Guest:he loses at the most heartbreaking moment.
Guest:So back to, you know, and then Shakespeare does this thing about loss, just says one word five times about will she come back?
Guest:Never, never, never.
Guest:Never, never.
Guest:It's as if it's like a rivet going into a piece of wood, this clanging bell of certainty and depth.
Guest:That's what I felt when I was nine years old leaving Belfast.
Guest:That's what I felt the morning after my dad passed away, is just running up against the brick wall of never, never, never, never, never.
Fuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, you gotta do Lear.
Marc:I think maybe you just did it.
Marc:Maybe that's all you need.
Marc:Maybe that's all we need.
Marc:Well, I'm glad we took this journey.
Marc:It was very nice talking to you.
Marc:Yeah, great talking to you.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Marc:Thanks a lot.
Marc:That's it, huh?
Marc:Fire.
Marc:That's a D word.
Marc:Fire.
Marc:I'm using it.
Marc:Belfast, the new film is now playing in theaters.
Marc:Here's some dirty licks.
guitar solo
guitar solo
Guest:boomer lifts monkey mafonda cat angels everywhere
Guest:Thank you.