Episode 1283 - Bill Pullman

Episode 1283 • Released November 29, 2021 • Speakers detected

00:00:00Guest:Lock the gates!

00:00:09Marc:All right, let's do this.

00:00:11Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?

00:00:12Marc:What the fuck, buddies?

00:00:13Marc:What the fuck, Knicks?

00:00:14Marc:What's happening?

00:00:15Marc:I'm Mark Maron.

00:00:16Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.

00:00:17Marc:Welcome to it.

00:00:18Marc:How's it going?

00:00:20Marc:Did you get everything cleaned up?

00:00:21Marc:Throw it away.

00:00:22Marc:Throw out the leftovers.

00:00:24Marc:Come on, man.

00:00:25Marc:It's Monday.

00:00:26Marc:I mean, that was what?

00:00:27Marc:Friday, Saturday, Sunday?

00:00:28Marc:That was four days ago.

00:00:30Marc:Get rid of it.

00:00:31Marc:Did you freeze the pie?

00:00:32Marc:What are you doing?

00:00:34Marc:That turkey's not getting any better.

00:00:35Marc:Just throw it away.

00:00:36Marc:You're not going to eat the potatoes.

00:00:38Marc:Get rid of it.

00:00:39Marc:Get rid of it.

00:00:40Marc:I'll be on a nice Thanksgiving at my mother's house.

00:00:43Marc:The leftovers get thrown away fairly quickly.

00:00:46Marc:Bill Pullman is here.

00:00:48Marc:You know him from Independence Day, Sleepless in Seattle, The Accidental Tourist, The Equalizer and every other movie.

00:00:56Marc:lost highway right lost highway that's what it was yeah he's been in everything he's currently in the fourth season of the usa network detective show the sinner bill pullman i was very excited to talk to him a lot of people get mixed up with bill paxton who passed away also who had on this show great guy both of them great guys great character actors i guess you would call them character actors uh but he's here and i'm going to talk to him look some business

00:01:24Marc:Some business at the top, as they call it.

00:01:26Marc:There's a Cyber Monday sale going on at podschwag.com slash WTF.

00:01:31Marc:Go get some WTF merch and you'll get free domestic shipping with the code free ship.

00:01:37Marc:All right.

00:01:37Marc:That's today only.

00:01:39Marc:You hear me?

00:01:40Marc:Podschwag.com.

00:01:42Marc:The Christmas sweater sweatshirts are there.

00:01:44Marc:The Hawaiian shirt with me and Booster and Smushy on there.

00:01:49Marc:Yeah, it's all there.

00:01:51Marc:Now, also, this is important because I don't want to butcher the interview that's going to happen on Thursday.

00:01:58Marc:It's Benedict Cumberbatch this Thursday.

00:02:01Marc:And I want to give you a heads up on that because his new movie, The Power of the Dog, starts streaming on Netflix this Wednesday, December 1st.

00:02:09Marc:Watch it.

00:02:11Marc:I don't want there to be spoilers.

00:02:12Marc:And our conversation is too deep.

00:02:15Marc:and too nuanced to butcher.

00:02:19Marc:So watch the fucking movie, and don't blame me for spoilers, or wait to listen to Cumberbatch until after you watch the movie.

00:02:26Marc:I'll give you a heads up before the interview as well.

00:02:30Marc:What can I tell you?

00:02:31Marc:It was a very good conversation about the movie, all right?

00:02:34Marc:So if you want to check it out before you hear us talk about it, Wednesday is your chance.

00:02:40Marc:You hear me?

00:02:41Marc:Power of the Dog, Netflix.

00:02:43Marc:Great movie.

00:02:44Marc:Real poetry, that one.

00:02:46Marc:Now, here's something else.

00:02:48Marc:Now the big news.

00:02:49Marc:Is this big news?

00:02:50Marc:I've got tour dates for the this may be the last time tour.

00:02:55Marc:All right.

00:02:56Marc:That starts in January.

00:02:58Marc:A fan presale starts tomorrow, November 30th at 10 a.m.

00:03:03Marc:local time.

00:03:04Marc:The presale code is time.

00:03:08Marc:Time.

00:03:09Marc:General ticket sales start Friday, December 3rd.

00:03:13Marc:Here are the cities.

00:03:14Marc:You ready?

00:03:15Marc:Listen for the name of the city near you.

00:03:17Marc:In California, Santa Barbara at the Libero, San Luis Obispo at the Fremont, San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts, and Napa at Uptown.

00:03:27Marc:Those are January 27th through January 30th.

00:03:29Marc:I'm doing smaller theaters because they make me happier.

00:03:33Marc:I enjoy them more.

00:03:35Marc:Oh, more California dates.

00:03:36Marc:One more.

00:03:37Marc:San Diego at the Observatory, North Park, February 11th.

00:03:41Marc:Now...

00:03:42Marc:east coast new haven connecticut college street march 9th troy new york music hall march 10th laconia new hampshire at the colonial theater march 11th burlington vermont at the flynn center march 12th atlanta georgia at buckhead april 1st providence rhode island the columbus theater april 15th boston the wilbur april 16th portland maine at the state theater april 17th wisconsin

00:04:10Marc:Madison at the Barrymore Theater and Milwaukee at Turner Hall Ballroom, April 27th and 28th.

00:04:17Marc:Chicago at the Vic Theater, April 29th.

00:04:19Marc:Minneapolis at the Pantages, April 30th.

00:04:22Marc:Pittsburgh at the Carnegie of Homestead, May 12th, that haunted place.

00:04:27Marc:Cleveland, Ohio, the Mimi Ohio Theater, May 13th.

00:04:30Marc:Royal Oak, Michigan, the music theater.

00:04:33Marc:Isn't that the music box theater?

00:04:35Marc:May 14th.

00:04:36Marc:Washington, D.C.

00:04:38Marc:at the Kennedy Center, May 20th.

00:04:41Marc:Red Bank, New Jersey at the Count Basie Center, May 21st.

00:04:45Marc:Philadelphia at the Keswick Theater, May 22nd.

00:04:48Marc:North Carolina, Durham, the Carolina Theater on June 17th.

00:04:52Marc:And Charlotte, the Night Theater at Blumenthal on June 18th.

00:04:57Marc:And Charleston, South Carolina at the Charleston Music Hall, June 19th.

00:05:02Marc:Again, pre-sale tickets at all those venues.

00:05:05Marc:Go on sale tomorrow at 10 a.m.

00:05:07Marc:local time.

00:05:08Marc:All right.

00:05:09Marc:Oh, man.

00:05:12Marc:Wow.

00:05:13Marc:I'm happy to be home.

00:05:15Marc:I was in Florida a long time.

00:05:17Marc:I went out there Monday.

00:05:18Marc:I did it differently.

00:05:19Marc:Different attitude, different approach to the cooking.

00:05:22Marc:I didn't freak out.

00:05:23Marc:Everyone getting weird.

00:05:25Marc:Everyone's getting weird as they get older.

00:05:28Marc:I got John.

00:05:28Marc:Mark, Mark, let me tell you a story.

00:05:33Marc:When I was younger, I worked at Schraff's.

00:05:38Marc:I used to sell, on the street, I would sell eggs and cheese and other proteins in Harlem.

00:05:44Marc:i'm sorry if i'm being repetitive it was a different time i sold eggs you sold eggs i sold eggs and cheese on the street you just yes in harlem why you got to be a wise ass i'm not it's just like where's the rest of that story i mean that as it is is good but wait i can't talk to you you sold eggs and cheese was a different time on the street different time

00:06:10Marc:So he's he's remaining the same.

00:06:13Marc:My mother is fine.

00:06:14Marc:I had a nice time at a good state of mind.

00:06:16Marc:I had a nicer low key hotel and had to rent a car.

00:06:20Marc:I saw my brother, spent time with him, his girlfriend, Julia.

00:06:24Marc:My niece came down, Eden, who I never see my nephews there, shy and cousins.

00:06:31Marc:And I got to spend time with everybody.

00:06:32Marc:I had a nice time.

00:06:33Marc:That's all I'm going to say.

00:06:35Marc:Got no complaints.

00:06:36Marc:There was no arguing.

00:06:37Marc:My uncle is a little kooky with the watching too much Fox News.

00:06:42Marc:I don't even know if he's a Republican or if he's conservative.

00:06:44Marc:He just sort of reels off of these things.

00:06:46Marc:But, you know, I find that a lot of that stuff is fairly shallow.

00:06:51Marc:It just emboldens a disposition, an anger.

00:06:55Marc:But once I pressed through, it was like, whatever.

00:06:57Marc:You know what I mean?

00:06:57Marc:It went away.

00:06:58Marc:They think they win arguments.

00:07:01Marc:I don't know.

00:07:02Marc:I don't know what it is.

00:07:04Marc:He was always sort of a...

00:07:06Marc:difficult i'm gonna be diplomatic because i told him it's funny i told him i'm doing a bit about john on stage he goes i said you're next he goes yeah well i sue i'm like okay relax buddy it ain't that important i sue that's the kind of guy he is i sue do you how deep are your pockets motherfucker how deep are your fucking pockets

00:07:31Marc:They're getting older.

00:07:32Marc:Everybody's getting older.

00:07:33Marc:The Rolling Stones are getting older.

00:07:34Marc:My mother's getting older.

00:07:35Marc:Her boyfriend's getting older.

00:07:36Marc:My aunt and uncle are getting older.

00:07:38Marc:Everybody's getting older.

00:07:39Marc:And I got to be honest with you.

00:07:40Marc:I don't like it.

00:07:41Marc:I don't like it.

00:07:42Marc:But I got along pretty good with John.

00:07:44Marc:And also, like, I was talking to my uncle, the difficult uncle.

00:07:49Marc:You know, I've got I just asking him about restaurants down there.

00:07:51Marc:And I was like, are there any good restaurants here?

00:07:53Marc:Because wherever I'm going with my mom, with my mom and John, I don't know, man.

00:07:57Marc:I don't think he's good.

00:07:58Marc:I said, I don't think people remember what good food is.

00:08:02Marc:After a certain point, you're down here long enough.

00:08:04Marc:They don't remember.

00:08:05Marc:He's like, that's true.

00:08:07Marc:And he said, all they want is for the guy at the restaurant to know him.

00:08:11Marc:And I'm like, I did a bit about that.

00:08:13Marc:That's all it is.

00:08:15Marc:You know, big servings, and when they walk in, they want to hear, like, there he is.

00:08:19Marc:We got your table right over here.

00:08:21Marc:Here he comes.

00:08:22Marc:How are you?

00:08:23Marc:Good to see you.

00:08:24Marc:Regular table, that makes up for everything.

00:08:26Marc:You can give them a plate of garbage.

00:08:30Marc:But then they come over and go, how's the garbage?

00:08:32Marc:Good?

00:08:32Marc:Was the garbage good tonight?

00:08:34Marc:We always take care of you with the garbage.

00:08:36Marc:Loved it.

00:08:37Marc:We're happy you come.

00:08:38Marc:How's the table?

00:08:39Marc:Good?

00:08:40Marc:Yeah, we love it.

00:08:41Marc:Thanks for the garbage.

00:08:42Marc:They know me at the place.

00:08:44Marc:Hilarious.

00:08:46Marc:Hilarious.

00:08:47Marc:So happy to get home and cook my own food.

00:08:50Marc:Holy shit.

00:08:51Marc:That tour, I didn't even realize it.

00:08:53Marc:It's actually happening.

00:08:54Marc:I agree to these things, and I don't know they're going to happen until it's on paper.

00:09:00Marc:This may be the last time.

00:09:01Marc:That's the name of that tour.

00:09:04Marc:All right.

00:09:06Marc:Buster and Sam, you're fine.

00:09:08Marc:Everybody's fine.

00:09:09Marc:There was some dry puke on the stairs.

00:09:11Marc:I'll take care of it.

00:09:11Marc:See, I'm putting it off.

00:09:12Marc:I'll get to it.

00:09:13Marc:So I don't, you know, it's not in my path.

00:09:17Marc:That's gross.

00:09:20Marc:Pow!

00:09:21Marc:Look out.

00:09:22Marc:Just shit my pants.

00:09:24Marc:JustCoffee.coop.

00:09:25Marc:A classic ad from back in the day.

00:09:28Marc:It was a different time.

00:09:30Marc:Different time.

00:09:33Marc:Folks, Bill Pullman is here and the season finale of The Sinner airs this Wednesday, December 1st on USA Networks.

00:09:40Marc:You know him from a lot of other movies.

00:09:41Marc:I'm not going to list him.

00:09:42Marc:Go look it up and go see Power of the Dog.

00:09:44Marc:He's not in that, but I want to speak freely about it Thursday.

00:09:48Marc:But right now, Bill Pullman is here.

00:09:50Marc:And as I said, the finale of The Sinner airs Wednesday, December 1st.

00:09:58Marc:And I enjoy talking to Bill.

00:10:01Marc:So why don't you do that now?

00:10:07Guest:How long have you lived up there?

00:10:14Guest:Have you been here the whole time?

00:10:16Guest:91 is when we moved in there.

00:10:18Guest:I had found an old place that we were looking for a place that had some slope behind it so I could build an orchard up there.

00:10:27Guest:And we were lucky to find it in that little, one of the little canyons.

00:10:32Guest:Oh, so you knew you needed slope to build an orchard?

00:10:35Guest:Well, yeah, I had been in Silver Lake, and there was a little bit of a slope at that house, but I just thought I was starting, I really, the thing that grounds me in L.A.

00:10:45Guest:is this, that I can grow things here.

00:10:47Guest:Yeah.

00:10:47Guest:You know, I'm from Western New York State originally, and it was a cold climate, and this is like, we grow anything from around the world here.

00:10:54Guest:Yeah?

00:10:55Marc:So what do you grow?

00:10:56Marc:Are you still growing things?

00:10:57Marc:Still growing things, yeah.

00:10:59Marc:And what do you spend time, you go out into the garden, and you...

00:11:02Marc:Well, you know, I'm not really a gardener.

00:11:06Guest:That's, you know, the orchard is more forgiving.

00:11:09Guest:You know, that's something that doesn't require, you know, the kind of intense thing that I can't be there all the time.

00:11:16Guest:It has to take some brutal neglect.

00:11:18Guest:They're trees, though.

00:11:20Guest:They can handle it.

00:11:21Guest:As long as you keep water on them.

00:11:23Guest:Yeah, so what do you got with fruit?

00:11:25Guest:Well, right now, I should have brought some.

00:11:27Guest:Persimmons are really... The hard ones or the soft ones?

00:11:31Guest:Fuyu are the harder ones.

00:11:33Guest:What do you do with them?

00:11:34Guest:Well, you know, right now, sometimes I let them go until they're really soft.

00:11:39Guest:Yeah.

00:11:40Guest:And then you can kind of make a lot of- Like jam and stuff?

00:11:43Guest:Jam.

00:11:43Marc:But isn't there a kind of persimmon that doesn't get soft?

00:11:47Guest:Well, Fuyu, you eat it crisped.

00:11:50Guest:Yeah.

00:11:50Guest:But if you wait long enough, you get it soft.

00:11:51Guest:The Hayachu is the one that, you know, gets softer and that you can only eat soft.

00:11:57Guest:Oh, okay.

00:11:58Guest:Okay.

00:11:58Guest:I always love that word.

00:11:59Guest:They apply it.

00:12:00Guest:It's astringent.

00:12:01Guest:Astringent.

00:12:03Marc:They'll suck the moisture out of your mouth.

00:12:05Guest:Yes.

00:12:05Guest:I thought, that's a word only to fruit.

00:12:07Marc:People don't apply it to people, but maybe it would work.

00:12:11Marc:Yeah, and they're astringent emotionally.

00:12:13Marc:Emotionally astringent.

00:12:15Marc:You suddenly feel like you're getting sucked out.

00:12:18Guest:Exactly.

00:12:19Marc:You don't want to be around emotionally astringent people.

00:12:22Marc:Right.

00:12:22Marc:So it's weird.

00:12:25Marc:There is some sort of cross-wiring.

00:12:27Marc:I don't know if you've had to deal with it your whole career, but you know why?

00:12:33Marc:See, now it's happening again.

00:12:37Marc:Paxton.

00:12:38Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:12:39Marc:The Paxton Pullman problem.

00:12:40Marc:Yes.

00:12:41Marc:I interviewed Bill not long before he passed, and what a great guy.

00:12:45Marc:But I don't know if you guys knew each other or what, but there is a cross-wiring that happens between the two of you.

00:12:51Marc:Yeah.

00:12:52Marc:Is that something I'm making up?

00:12:55Marc:No, no.

00:12:56Guest:You know, I think it's the plosive sounds.

00:12:59Guest:Oh, is that what it is?

00:13:00Guest:Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton.

00:13:03Guest:Yeah.

00:13:03Guest:There's something like that.

00:13:05Guest:Did you know him?

00:13:06Guest:Yeah, I did.

00:13:07Guest:I really was.

00:13:09Guest:We were always fond of each other, you know, and his wife knew a little bit, but mostly from the early days in L.A.

00:13:18Guest:We made a movie together.

00:13:19Guest:Which one?

00:13:20Guest:It's called Braindead.

00:13:23Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:13:23Guest:It was a Roger Corman movie.

00:13:24Guest:A classic.

00:13:25Guest:Yeah.

00:13:25Guest:A Corman classic.

00:13:27Guest:A late Corman classic.

00:13:29Guest:And, yeah, it actually had a little kind of underground crowd that liked it, but I still had a Polaroid picture from that thing that I kept at my workshop, and it was...

00:13:45Guest:I was playing a character who was undergoing surgery and my head so that at a certain point I could dig my own fingers into the sutures of my head and curl back the top of my head.

00:13:59Guest:Right.

00:13:59Guest:Black butterflies came out.

00:14:01Guest:Nice.

00:14:02Guest:And I was in a hospital outfit and Bill was playing a doctor in the thing.

00:14:09Guest:And the two of us are hanging out together.

00:14:11Marc:Right.

00:14:12Guest:It's like my favorite memory.

00:14:14Marc:What happened to that writer?

00:14:16Marc:The guy with the black butterflies?

00:14:17Marc:That seems kind of... Charles Beaumont.

00:14:21Marc:Oh, really?

00:14:21Guest:You remember the guy?

00:14:22Guest:Yeah.

00:14:22Guest:Well, he was kind of a famous writer for the Twilight Zone episodes.

00:14:27Guest:He wrote all the original Twilight Zones.

00:14:29Guest:And the director of the film, Adam Simons, Corman said, go into the... He had shelves with all these scripts on that he owned that are all these kind of weird ideas.

00:14:40Guest:And Adam went through and found this old Charles Beaumont script.

00:14:44Guest:and shot it.

00:14:45Guest:It was called Paranoia.

00:14:46Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:14:47Guest:But that was not marketable to the foreman.

00:14:49Guest:What was it, Brain?

00:14:50Guest:Brain Dead.

00:14:51Guest:The opposite of Paranoia.

00:14:54Guest:It was strange, but I guess Brain Dead was the way to go in that kind of scene.

00:14:58Marc:Yeah, wow.

00:14:59Marc:So you really got, that was your baptism into the film business?

00:15:03Marc:No, well, it was early on, you know.

00:15:06Marc:It was... Oh, yeah, I guess you did that after Accidental Tourist.

00:15:11Guest:Yeah, yeah, but...

00:15:13Guest:I don't know when it got released or what happened with it.

00:15:17Guest:But, yeah, it was also a lot of actors that I had been hanging out with anyway with the Actors Gang.

00:15:24Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:15:25Guest:Oh, with Tim Robbins?

00:15:26Guest:Tim Robbins' group, yeah.

00:15:27Guest:And so there was a bunch of it.

00:15:29Guest:I came to L.A.

00:15:30Guest:to do a play, you know.

00:15:32Guest:At the Actors Gang?

00:15:33Guest:LATC, the Los Angeles Theater Center, which was 85.

00:15:38Guest:Yeah.

00:15:39Guest:And it was just, it's this multi-theater complex that's downtown.

00:15:43Marc:Yeah.

00:15:43Marc:It's not, because now they've got the Mark Taper down there, right?

00:15:47Marc:Yeah.

00:15:47Marc:And there's several theaters there.

00:15:49Marc:There's the Mark Taper Theater, and then there's the Red Cat Theater, which I did a special, and it's like the black box one.

00:15:55Guest:Oh, that's a great theater.

00:15:56Guest:It is, man.

00:15:57Guest:Really.

00:15:58Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:15:58Guest:The sound is great.

00:15:59Marc:Sounds perfect, very intimate.

00:16:00Marc:Yeah.

00:16:01Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:16:02Marc:Were you doing a... I recorded a stand-up special there.

00:16:06Marc:My last one in 2000 and whatever it was, 20, it came out.

00:16:11Marc:I shot it there.

00:16:12Marc:We were going to shoot it in like an older theater in Boston, but the director...

00:16:16Marc:Lynn Shelton could not do a shot she wanted, so we just moved it over there.

00:16:22Marc:Wow.

00:16:23Marc:That's specific.

00:16:25Marc:Well, it was like, yeah, well, some of those old theaters, they don't want to start pulling seats out so you can put a dolly in or a boom or whatever you need, so it was a hassle, so fuck it, you know what I mean?

00:16:34Marc:Yeah, whereas the Red Cat is... Do whatever you want.

00:16:37Marc:Yeah.

00:16:38Marc:Open that thing right up.

00:16:39Marc:You know what the thing, though, is with comedy, though?

00:16:42Marc:That place has a sort of... Those kind of theaters have a kind of dramatic expectation.

00:16:48Marc:You know, when it's just that intimate and that kind of crisp, you're expecting intensity.

00:16:56Marc:You're not expecting to laugh.

00:16:57Marc:You're expecting to listen, I think.

00:16:59Guest:That's really... Yeah, true, I think, yeah.

00:17:02Guest:It's also a broad stage.

00:17:04Guest:Yeah.

00:17:04Guest:But I guess with comedy, you can keep in the center.

00:17:07Marc:We were shooting it, so we built around it.

00:17:09Marc:Oh, that's right.

00:17:10Marc:You know what I mean?

00:17:11Guest:Just build a set.

00:17:12Marc:Yeah, and you create something on there.

00:17:14Marc:Yeah.

00:17:15Marc:So you came out for theater.

00:17:18Marc:So 85.

00:17:19Marc:How old were you in 85?

00:17:21Yeah.

00:17:21Guest:that's in my 30s oh really yeah so 32 or something i um kind of a late starter late starter movie business i had a lot of other adventures i guess if you think of the movie business is the only thing that you're gonna get to but i thought for so long i had no thought that i was gonna get to any movie business and you grew up where western new york state oh like what like near rochester oh rochester

00:17:46Marc:Springfield.

00:17:47Guest:Springfield, Mass.

00:17:48Guest:Mass.

00:17:49Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:17:49Guest:I went to school near Springfield, Mass.

00:17:51Guest:I went to UMass at Amherst for a graduate degree.

00:17:54Marc:Oh, man, that's a nice little kind of a cozy liberal arts college.

00:18:00Marc:Or no, Amherst University.

00:18:01Marc:UMass, Amherst is big.

00:18:02Marc:But then there's Amherst University, which is sort of a little kind of a hippie school.

00:18:06Marc:And then there's an actual hippie school out there.

00:18:07Marc:Which one was that?

00:18:08Marc:Reed?

00:18:08Guest:Hampshire.

00:18:09Marc:Hampshire.

00:18:10Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:11Marc:So you're running around the little tri-college area.

00:18:14Marc:five college that was five oh my god you're yeah good time did you spend time up there i was in boston oh like i started i went to boston university but i also went back and started my comedy career in boston driving around everywhere so i do gigs places but i've been out to amherst sure yeah yeah you don't have much of a boston accent i didn't grow up there i just went to college there my family's jersey people oh there it is and i grew up in new mexico

00:18:40Marc:So it's all over the place.

00:18:41Marc:But there's some Jersey in there.

00:18:42Guest:Yeah.

00:18:43Guest:What do you got?

00:18:45Guest:You know, I think this Midwestern thing of Western New York State has popped up.

00:18:50Guest:People say, my wife particularly, when I get close to being back in my turf, you know, I start...

00:18:57Guest:Well, Larry Kasdan, when we did external terrorists, we were doing looping and he said, do you know what you said?

00:19:02Guest:Yeah.

00:19:02Guest:And I said, what do you mean?

00:19:03Guest:I had a line about it's hurt, you know, looking in his refrigerator and I say, all you got is some Cokes and some cans of penis.

00:19:12Marc:yeah you know that midwestern thing where you drop the consonants at the end of words and he said we're gonna have to loop that it's not good for the story it's uh yeah it's peanuts yeah peanuts not not peanuts penis that's right you had to work with hurt in in sort of the peak of his thing yeah the intensity of hurt the intensity of hurt the hurt of hurt

00:19:38Marc:But wait, so Rochester, I'm trying to remember.

00:19:40Marc:I've been to Rochester.

00:19:41Marc:That's the land of the garbage plate.

00:19:43Marc:Macaroni and cheese and potato salad.

00:19:46Marc:You ever heard of that?

00:19:47Marc:Yeah.

00:19:47Guest:The garbage plate?

00:19:48Guest:It's kind of a version of the poutine.

00:19:51Marc:Like the Canadian thing is a garbage plate.

00:19:54Marc:Kind of, but that's like gravy at least and fries.

00:19:56Marc:Yeah.

00:19:57Marc:I've worked in Rochester.

00:19:58Marc:There's like Rochester, Albany, Troy.

00:20:01Marc:There's sort of like these weird kind of cities scrambling back trying to.

00:20:07Guest:Yeah.

00:20:07Guest:Yeah, we're like an hour and a half south of there, so it's a really rural part of New York State.

00:20:15Guest:It's Steuben County, which is... Hornell is the town that I grew up in, and it's in Steuben County, and I think it's the highest deer take in New York State, so it's wild out there.

00:20:26Guest:Really?

00:20:27Guest:A lot of Lyme's disease.

00:20:28Marc:Yeah, it's starting to be more and more as it comes up from the south.

00:20:33Marc:And why was your... So it's weird.

00:20:35Marc:People don't realize in upstate New York that it's like literally Appalachia.

00:20:38Marc:There's like definitely a hill people contingent.

00:20:41Guest:Yeah.

00:20:42Guest:Yeah.

00:20:42Guest:We used to have a Vista volunteer in our town that would help to...

00:20:46Guest:what civilized things oh really what is a vista volunteer that was like the domestic peace corps oh that existed oh really 60s and i think it ended in the 70s what was going on in upstate new york that required them to hang out well you know it's just that in rural parts and it's still the true you know there's no economic engine that's happening sure people are living um

00:21:09Guest:off the grid the grid and my father was from brooklyn and he went to university of rochester med school and when he finished his residency he wanted to be close to school he drove south till he hit hills yeah so that's where he dug in that's where he dug in yeah what kind of doc was he he was a general practitioner with a he had an internal medicine specialty oh so he was like uh just a blood and guts blood and guts but like uh could do anything

00:21:36Marc:Internist.

00:21:37Marc:Was he internist?

00:21:38Marc:Internist, yeah.

00:21:39Marc:Right, so he was like a town doctor.

00:21:42Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:21:43Guest:He took care of a lot of the people that had diabetes.

00:21:48Guest:Diabetes is an affliction that a lot of people have in that area.

00:21:52Guest:He would be the one to initiate them into it.

00:21:54Guest:you know how to how to eat to give themselves insulin oh yeah right how about uh house calls did you do house calls did you have the big black bag yep i did have the big black bag that stood outside our kitchen door yeah it was the one thing that we didn't have access to that's right had the little lock on it no just you know don't go in there oh the code you know of our of our family i guess was you know don't get oh don't go in there because there's syringes and medicines and all that yeah my dad was a doc he was an orthopedic and he had a

00:22:24Marc:But he had one of those black bags, I guess from medical school.

00:22:27Marc:I don't know that he made many house calls, maybe when he was doing his residency, but house calls were a thing of the past.

00:22:34Marc:But they did them.

00:22:35Marc:Did you ever go on one with them?

00:22:37Marc:No, but I went to the hospital.

00:22:39Marc:I used to go on rounds with him and stuff.

00:22:42Marc:I got taught a lesson about motorcycles when he introduced me to one of his patients in traction.

00:22:47Marc:He said, you know, you sure you want to ride a motorcycle?

00:22:49Marc:Let me introduce you to somebody.

00:22:51Marc:This guy had pins in both his legs.

00:22:53Marc:I'm like, all right, I get it.

00:22:54Marc:I get it.

00:22:55Guest:My brother's a doctor, and he says to my son, he says, oh, you got yourself a donor cycle?

00:23:02Marc:Uh-huh.

00:23:04Yeah.

00:23:04Guest:It's nothing like the hard truth from the medical community.

00:23:08Marc:A donor cycle.

00:23:09Guest:What kind of doctor's your brother?

00:23:10Guest:He also has a general practice, but he's an infectious disease doctor in Butte, Montana.

00:23:16Guest:Busy year.

00:23:18Guest:Yeah, busy year.

00:23:20Guest:A lot of trying to sort things out.

00:23:23Guest:He keeps a low profile in it all, but it's been quite interesting.

00:23:29Marc:We're in Montana?

00:23:30Marc:In Montana, yeah.

00:23:31Marc:Well, what's the vaccine rate in Montana?

00:23:34Marc:There's a lot of pushback?

00:23:35Guest:Yeah, Montana's been a little bit of a slide in that department.

00:23:42Guest:There's some very vocal people that are resisting it, and they're getting more attention than they should.

00:23:52Marc:So you're in upstate New York.

00:23:56Marc:And how do you decide that this is the life for you?

00:23:59Marc:I mean, what was the evolution of... What's the Pullman evolution?

00:24:03Marc:To get to being on Raymond Street here?

00:24:06Guest:Yeah, all the way over here, yeah.

00:24:11Guest:At a certain point, I realized that...

00:24:13Guest:I was finding the theater thing was kind of like my own health, I think.

00:24:20Guest:Probably like comedy for you.

00:24:21Guest:Once you find your voice in something, you've just got to have it no matter how you get it or whatever version you have.

00:24:27Marc:Yeah, no matter how hard it is and horrible, you've got to keep doing it.

00:24:31Marc:You have a calling.

00:24:32Marc:Yeah.

00:24:33Guest:So you did theater when you were younger?

00:24:35Guest:No, I was dialing up a lot of different possibilities for myself when I was 17.

00:24:43Marc:How long did you think you were going to be a doctor for?

00:24:44Guest:You know, that's the one thing I never really did.

00:24:50Guest:Most of my family is in some kind of version of medicine, but I just never did have that inclination.

00:24:59Guest:I think about what they...

00:25:01Guest:the culture that they have, you know, being kind of humanists and being generous.

00:25:08Guest:And I tried to, you know, various times follow that model.

00:25:14Guest:But in terms of being an actual practitioner, no.

00:25:17Guest:But I was in building construction.

00:25:21Guest:I was in a two-year college for building construction.

00:25:23Guest:Really?

00:25:24Guest:To be a contractor?

00:25:26Guest:I wanted to build old houses and barns and restore things at a certain point.

00:25:34Guest:But I was dialing up careers at this point.

00:25:38Guest:Then a month later, I wanted to go to urban planning.

00:25:41Guest:Wow.

00:25:41Guest:I had a lot of different things, but I got into a play.

00:25:44Guest:Very charismatic guy, Bill Campbell, who was the drama director there, and he was just about five years older than me.

00:25:55Guest:What school?

00:25:56Marc:And Sunni Delhi.

00:25:58Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:25:58Marc:I feel like I've heard that name before.

00:26:00Marc:Bill Campbell.

00:26:01Marc:Bill Campbell.

00:26:01Marc:Was he the guy in the drama department?

00:26:03Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:26:04Guest:He went on to stay in there, but he was very, very, you know, at a certain point, you need somebody to just say, look, you should do this.

00:26:16Marc:Sure.

00:26:16Marc:Somebody's got to be like, ah, that's what, you know, has to turn your lights on in a way.

00:26:21Marc:Yeah.

00:26:22Marc:Yeah.

00:26:22Marc:Yeah, and that was the guy.

00:26:23Guest:And I was willing to go wherever somebody pointed that says, look, you could actually, you know, do pretty well.

00:26:29Marc:So you gave up the urban planning dream?

00:26:33Marc:You gave up the reconstructing the barn dream?

00:26:36Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:26:38Guest:And then, you know, he, but then, you know, that looked like, well, basically, he said, you know, Pullman, you should do what I did.

00:26:47Guest:I went to a college 22 miles away from Delhi called Oneonta.

00:26:51Guest:Yeah.

00:26:51Guest:Get a degree in theater and then get some kind of graduate degree and then come back and teach at a place like Delhi.

00:26:58Guest:It's good life.

00:26:58Guest:You'll do well here.

00:27:00Guest:And I went to Oneonta and then I was in graduate school when he called me.

00:27:04Guest:He said, Pullman, come and take my job.

00:27:06Guest:Campbell.

00:27:07Guest:Yeah.

00:27:07Guest:Campbell said, take my job for a year because I need somebody I can trust and it's not going to fuck me over.

00:27:13Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:27:13Guest:Because I want it back.

00:27:14Guest:I want it back some point, and I did.

00:27:16Guest:I went there, did it, and then he came back, and he took it, and they've been great friends all my life.

00:27:27Guest:He still remains one of the most interesting people.

00:27:30Guest:Really, that's great.

00:27:31Guest:Yeah, so you taught.

00:27:33Guest:I was thinking, well, it was a student activities position, so I just directed the plays and the sets.

00:27:41Marc:Oh, okay.

00:27:42Marc:So you weren't like a professor.

00:27:44Marc:It was like the non-drama school drama people.

00:27:50Guest:At that point, I did get to go to graduate school, and then I was thinking I'll go to New York at some point, but I was in Montana.

00:27:59Guest:Montana?

00:27:59Guest:Wait, how'd you get there?

00:28:01Guest:I jumped there because I was wanting my graduate advisor at UMass at Amherst.

00:28:08Guest:I said, I'm not going to do any theater this summer.

00:28:10Guest:I'm just going to go west.

00:28:12Guest:Yeah.

00:28:12Guest:do it well why don't you go west and do a play i met a guy who runs a theater in montana tours all around montana yeah so it's called montana shakespeare in the park so i the guy that runs that took me in and i doing shakespeare in montana shakespeare in montana yeah touring around to towns that are too small to have a hotel and you're staying in people's homes really yeah do they come see the shows they came to see the shows ranchers and yeah that's

00:28:40Guest:As an old tradition in the West, you know, love of Shakespeare, you always see it in some Westerns.

00:28:46Marc:Yeah, yeah, I guess that's true.

00:28:47Marc:I guess that's true, yeah.

00:28:49Guest:You read like Roughing It, you know, that Mark Twain book about his experiences in the West.

00:28:53Guest:There's a great sequence in there of him encountering a Shakespearean company.

00:28:58Marc:Right, right.

00:28:59Marc:I don't know if I read that book, but they're kind of ruffians, right?

00:29:02Marc:They're kind of like the Shakespeare guys are kind of unique somehow.

00:29:08Guest:Yeah.

00:29:09Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:29:09Guest:But greatly revered.

00:29:11Guest:They could travel through with a book of Shakespeare.

00:29:14Marc:And a lot of cowboys would carry some Shakespearean plays in those days.

00:29:20Marc:I can't wrap my brain around it usually.

00:29:22Marc:It's a lot.

00:29:24Marc:Yeah, it's a mix.

00:29:25Marc:Do you like doing Shakespeare?

00:29:27Yeah.

00:29:27Guest:You know, I've had good certain kinds of engagement with it.

00:29:31Guest:I don't think I'm like really the best person for most Shakespearean productions.

00:29:36Guest:And I find it one of the hardest things in the States to pull off.

00:29:41Guest:But I've had a few encounters with him.

00:29:43Guest:Yeah.

00:29:43Marc:So how do you get from Montana to Hollywood?

00:29:47Marc:I mean, it sounds like that wasn't the... I don't know.

00:29:51Marc:What did you think your plan was?

00:29:52Marc:Just a Wild West Shakespeare guy?

00:29:54Guest:Well, at a certain point, I realized I just kind of took the job in front of me.

00:29:59Guest:It was teaching, and I thought, wouldn't it be good to make a living for a little while to put some money in the bank before I go to New York?

00:30:09Guest:And so I taught for two years.

00:30:11Guest:Yeah.

00:30:11Guest:Learned a lot, you know, when you teach, when you first are out there.

00:30:15Guest:I was really doing some things where I was trying to develop plays that were Montana-specific and not... Writing them or programming them?

00:30:27Guest:Version of documentary theater or devised theater, you know, where we were using resources that were from Montana history just so that people weren't doing...

00:30:36Guest:Neil Simon plays Plaza Suite.

00:30:38Guest:Sure, sure.

00:30:39Guest:That's what was on their minds.

00:30:42Guest:Yeah.

00:30:43Guest:So we did.

00:30:44Guest:The guy, John Dahl, the film director, he was a student of mine in Montana.

00:30:49Guest:The guy directed The Last Deduction.

00:30:50Guest:Yes, yes.

00:30:52Guest:And he put you in that.

00:30:55Guest:He did.

00:30:56Guest:I knew him in Montana, and then eventually I left there to go to New York and start in theater, and I thought, that's going to be the thing, New York theater.

00:31:06Guest:And then I got a play out here in LA at the Los Angeles Theater Center and came out to do the play, and then I realized,

00:31:14Guest:Maybe I will take that.

00:31:18Guest:You can get a job on a TV show for a day and you make some money there.

00:31:22Guest:I'll do that.

00:31:23Guest:I was on Cagney and Lacey.

00:31:25Guest:So you had an agent?

00:31:27Guest:At that point, yeah.

00:31:28Guest:I had a pretty good agent.

00:31:30Marc:So in Montana, when you started putting up shows, you didn't want to do Neil Simon in Montana.

00:31:37Marc:You wanted to do something more that they could relate to.

00:31:39Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:31:41Marc:And did you know, was there any proximity?

00:31:44Marc:Wasn't there some great writers up there?

00:31:46Marc:Wasn't Jim Harrison a Montana guy?

00:31:47Guest:Yes.

00:31:48Guest:Did you ever have an encounter with him?

00:31:50Guest:No, no.

00:31:50Guest:You?

00:31:50Guest:I did a movie that he wrote with Tom McGuane, who's another great Montana writer.

00:31:56Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:31:56Marc:McGuane's great.

00:31:57Marc:Nobody's Angel and 92 in the Shade.

00:31:59Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:00Marc:He's having a great renaissance with his short stories.

00:32:05Marc:McGuane is?

00:32:06Marc:McGuane, yeah.

00:32:07Marc:Yeah, my buddy's a novelist, and he corresponds with him sometimes.

00:32:12Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:32:12Guest:But you knew those guys?

00:32:14Guest:Yeah, knew those guys.

00:32:15Guest:We did a movie that Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane wrote it in 11 days.

00:32:20Guest:Which movie?

00:32:21Guest:It's called Cold Feet.

00:32:23Guest:And it's with Tom Waits and Sally Kellerman and Keith Carradine.

00:32:28Marc:I know Sally.

00:32:29Marc:Do you?

00:32:30Marc:Yeah, she played my mother in my show on IFC.

00:32:32Marc:I wonder how she is.

00:32:33Marc:And that was a few years ago.

00:32:36Marc:Yeah.

00:32:36Marc:Yeah, I don't remember seeing that movie, but it was interesting because that was like... I don't think people realize that Waits was foraying into acting that early on.

00:32:48Marc:Because he's become sort of a character.

00:32:50Marc:When you see him in a movie, you're kind of like, nah, it's Waits.

00:32:53Marc:But back then, it was a little goofy, right?

00:32:55Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:32:56Guest:Definitely really a great energy.

00:33:00Guest:Something I had really very different than an actor's energy.

00:33:04Guest:Sure.

00:33:05Guest:More like just raw energy.

00:33:06Guest:His character.

00:33:07Guest:Character act.

00:33:08Guest:Yeah.

00:33:09Guest:Yeah.

00:33:10Guest:He's in Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie.

00:33:13Marc:I know.

00:33:13Marc:I'm going to a screening of it next week, I hope.

00:33:15Marc:Yeah.

00:33:16Marc:Did you see it?

00:33:17Marc:No, I haven't seen it yet.

00:33:18Marc:No, I always like seeing Waits.

00:33:19Marc:He's good in that Coen Brothers thing with the five stories, the Scruggs, Buster Scruggs, the Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

00:33:27Marc:Yes.

00:33:27Marc:His vignette, his piece, his story, Waits' was great.

00:33:31Marc:Yeah, the gold miner.

00:33:31Marc:The prospector.

00:33:32Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:33:33Marc:It's great.

00:33:33Marc:No talking.

00:33:34Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:33:35Marc:Just very little, but to himself.

00:33:37Marc:To himself.

00:33:38Marc:Yeah, he's always good, man.

00:33:39Marc:He's good in rumble fish.

00:33:41Marc:How many summers I got left?

00:33:44Marc:Yeah.

00:33:46Marc:But Jim Harrison, though, what did you think of that guy?

00:33:50Guest:Yeah, very, very live wire cook.

00:33:54Guest:You know, they were Livingston crowd, which is just out on the east side of Bozeman, east of Bozeman.

00:34:02Guest:And there was an enclave of, you know, interesting people there.

00:34:05Guest:And he definitely, you know, great books, you know, really, really great.

00:34:12Guest:And he was, you know, dedicated to Montana for quite a long time.

00:34:17Guest:Yeah.

00:34:18Guest:And so that experience was, you know, they were, there's a bunch of writers in Montana now that I think are really doing interesting things.

00:34:30Marc:Yeah, McWane.

00:34:32Marc:He's great, man.

00:34:34Marc:He has one of my favorite quotes.

00:34:35Marc:I paraphrase it all the time.

00:34:36Marc:He said, the mind is not a boomerang.

00:34:38Marc:If you throw it too far, it will not come back.

00:34:42Marc:Yeah.

00:34:44Marc:That one's helped me through life.

00:34:47Marc:You've been tempted to give it a heave, huh?

00:34:49Marc:Well, sometimes you don't know you're throwing it so far.

00:34:53Marc:Right.

00:34:53Marc:Until you go looking for it, and you're like, oh, fuck.

00:34:56Marc:It must be in these bushes somewhere.

00:34:58Marc:Where's the steering wheel on this thing?

00:35:01Marc:I'm in trouble.

00:35:02Marc:So how do you get out of there?

00:35:05Marc:Okay, so you come down here for the play and then you do Cagney and Lacey.

00:35:09Guest:Well, just a little bit of, I got cast in Ruthless People really was the thing in L.A.

00:35:16Guest:that I went to L.A.

00:35:19Guest:in 85 to do the play and then got cast to do

00:35:24Guest:You know, by 86, I was already, you know, I'd gotten, did the Ruthless People thing and then was in Spaceballs.

00:35:32Guest:You know, we shot that in 86.

00:35:34Guest:Right.

00:35:35Marc:So that would have been after the Cagney and Lacey experience.

00:35:38Marc:I thought so.

00:35:39Marc:And you're doing theater in New York.

00:35:41Marc:So that was, so you really were kind of like, you thought that, I mean, but did you always know you were going to act?

00:35:46Marc:Because it does sound like in Montana that like the acting, it wasn't acting.

00:35:49Marc:Was it acting?

00:35:50Guest:uh no it wasn't really and i think i just kind of drifted away from it because i was doing the teaching thing and then i had always acted all through these university academic theater things and then uh just realized that there was i hadn't given myself permission to to do that you know and so to really just say i'm now gonna pursue some acting were you afraid

00:36:15Guest:You know, I think I just was trying to, you know, eat the hot dog in front of me.

00:36:20Guest:And that was the, it was teaching.

00:36:23Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:36:23Guest:Right.

00:36:24Guest:You know, I did that.

00:36:25Guest:It was good enough.

00:36:26Guest:It was like playing a part.

00:36:27Marc:Yeah.

00:36:28Guest:You know, can you be 25 years old and be a professor?

00:36:32Guest:I don't think so.

00:36:32Marc:I don't know.

00:36:33Marc:I mean, you got to start somewhere.

00:36:34Marc:You got to believe it.

00:36:35Marc:Yeah.

00:36:36Marc:That's half of it.

00:36:37Marc:Oh, so you were that young.

00:36:38Marc:Yeah.

00:36:39Marc:Yeah.

00:36:39Marc:24, 25.

00:36:40Marc:So when do you, what year was it when you were like, I'm going to do it.

00:36:43Guest:I'm going to act.

00:36:43Guest:I think it was after teaching for two years, and I realized I can't.

00:36:48Guest:It was nice.

00:36:49Guest:It was Montana State University, beautiful campus, and people were dying to teach there.

00:36:54Guest:They'd take docs and salary to teach there, and I was lucky to have a job there, but I also thought if I don't leave now, I'm never going to get out of here.

00:37:02Guest:You know who I also had met during that period was...

00:37:06Guest:Robert Persig, you know, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

00:37:10Guest:Oh, really?

00:37:10Guest:And if you, that book, you know, he makes the journey to outside of Bozeman, Cottonwood Canyon, stays with this family, the Dweezes, and climbs the mountain and that whole epiphany.

00:37:22Guest:And I was friends with that artist couple that had the house in Cottonwood Canyon.

00:37:29Guest:And I thought, you know, they had offered, why don't you live out here?

00:37:33Guest:You know, we have an apartment out here.

00:37:35Guest:And I just thought,

00:37:36Guest:I really loved him a lot and I thought that would be really, it's a beautiful spot and I could see myself more and more putting in roots here.

00:37:46Guest:Yeah.

00:37:47Guest:I better not, you know, I better go.

00:37:49Marc:You didn't want to be part of the sort of hippie intelligentsia of Bozeman, Montana?

00:37:56Guest:Right.

00:37:57Guest:Yeah, it was tempting though.

00:37:59Guest:Was Broadigan up there too?

00:38:00Guest:Richard Brodigan was there, yeah.

00:38:02Guest:He used to come to the Shakespeare plays.

00:38:04Guest:We'd see him in Livingston.

00:38:05Guest:He was a Livingston guy.

00:38:06Guest:No shit.

00:38:07Guest:And I'd see him out at the edge of the audience standing there, you know, coming to see this outdoor production.

00:38:12Marc:Judging it.

00:38:13Guest:Yeah.

00:38:15Marc:Wow, man.

00:38:16Marc:So you're young.

00:38:16Marc:You're in your 20s, and you're just seeing all this, like, weird hippie royalty.

00:38:22Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:38:23Marc:Really a very... That generation of writers that came... Those are, like, all important guys.

00:38:27Guest:Yeah.

00:38:28Marc:Yeah.

00:38:28Guest:yeah you know uh harrison mcgwain broadigan the motorcycle maintenance guy i mean those are big books yeah really um and they were you know ranging around and montana felt like you know kind of like a little bit of a uh stopping spot and away from it oh you could just you could be that guy you could still be teaching

00:38:51Guest:Yeah, could have done that.

00:38:52Guest:For your whole life, you'd still be there.

00:38:54Guest:Could be in urban planning, you know.

00:38:59Marc:But you didn't.

00:38:59Marc:You committed to acting, and you went back to New York, and is that what happened?

00:39:04Guest:Well, yeah, went to, and then out here, it just started in with, you know, I did think I was always going to be an East Coast person, but I've come to really like L.A., you know, and

00:39:15Marc:Yeah, most people do eventually.

00:39:17Marc:It's weird.

00:39:18Marc:Initially, you're like, I'm not going to – I know what those people are like.

00:39:21Marc:But then you get out here for a while and you're like, nice here.

00:39:24Marc:It's not bad.

00:39:26Marc:Do you ever miss the deciduous woods or anything like that?

00:39:29Marc:Well, I mean, I grew up in New Mexico, so I do miss it a bit.

00:39:33Marc:There's something about home –

00:39:35Marc:that the environment even the air where you go back it's it's it's like it's like uh it's part of your your child it's part of your life so like you know to reconnect with it i mean i don't need to do it for long you know i could i could go like you know yeah this is part of me for a few days and then come back yeah yeah that's what part of new mexico albuquerque oh my gosh yeah yeah well i mean it's weird people who act

00:40:01Marc:who have this impression of Albuquerque, you know, in the last decade.

00:40:04Marc:You know, like, it's very different because it's gone through some, it's kind of a beat up place.

00:40:08Marc:But when I was growing up, you know, it was just the town I grew up in and there was a university and everything happened for me there and it was beautiful and you'd drive up into Santa Fe and all that shit.

00:40:16Marc:But people generally that I talk to now who act are like, you know, ugh, I was there for a month.

00:40:21Marc:It was terrible.

00:40:22Marc:You know, like they just have these weird feelings about it.

00:40:26Guest:I always thought it was really haunting because, you know, Route 66 goes through there.

00:40:30Guest:Sure, yeah.

00:40:31Guest:There's still vestiges of those kind of old periods.

00:40:34Guest:Oh, yeah, for sure.

00:40:35Guest:And I treasure that.

00:40:36Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:40:37Guest:Have you shot there?

00:40:38Guest:Shot there a bunch and definitely have young people that I know that are living there now and making an interesting life.

00:40:46Guest:You know, certain young people in their 30s are moving there.

00:40:50Guest:Doing what?

00:40:51Guest:In the business?

00:40:53Guest:You know, they're doing a lot of different things.

00:40:55Guest:It's a young woman and her husband.

00:40:59Guest:She's a therapist, an equine therapist.

00:41:01Guest:Equine therapist, sure.

00:41:03Guest:A horse therapist?

00:41:04Guest:Horse therapist.

00:41:06Guest:All that renovation is happening around the old town, which I could walk there, staying in a hotel near, kind of near there, and talk about, you know, sketchy, dodgy turf, but I guess it felt like really interesting to me.

00:41:21Marc:I'm glad that you have a nice impression of Albuquerque.

00:41:23Marc:I've thought about going back there, but I don't know what I do there.

00:41:26Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:41:28Marc:I mean, they have garages there.

00:41:29Marc:Sure, but you're not there.

00:41:32Marc:It's going to be hard to pull the guests.

00:41:33Marc:I've got to wait until someone's shooting a Netflix show out there.

00:41:36Marc:How many people on Better Call Saul can I interview?

00:41:40Guest:My son was just there.

00:41:42Guest:Young son is an actor.

00:41:44Guest:He was there January through July, and they were shooting a TV series called The Outer Range.

00:41:51Guest:Always the question is, are you going to base yourself in Albuquerque or in Santa Fe or in Las Vegas, where all those westerns are sets and things are up there.

00:42:03Marc:Las Vegas, New Mexico?

00:42:04Marc:New Mexico, yeah.

00:42:05Marc:Well, that's a schlep, you know, it depends where, you know, like Santa Fe is great.

00:42:08Marc:I thought, you know, I feel like I missed a boat on like buying a house to rent, you know, because like all the show business is moving there.

00:42:14Marc:I mean, yeah, Netflix set up shop there as a permanent production facility thing.

00:42:18Marc:They got huge downstages, right?

00:42:20Marc:Yeah.

00:42:21Marc:So I got, well, me like an idiot, like should have bought a house a decade ago and just like rented it.

00:42:25Marc:Yeah.

00:42:26Marc:But no, now you can't find one.

00:42:28Right?

00:42:29Marc:Yeah.

00:42:30Marc:There's one for sale up behind the mountain.

00:42:32Marc:There's part of me that's like, why don't you just... There's like 44 acres for sale.

00:42:36Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:42:37Marc:Up between Santa Fe and Madrid, the ghost town up beyond Old 14 in Cerritos.

00:42:42Marc:I love that.

00:42:42Marc:Yeah, but then I think about it, it's like, well, if I really want to go, I'll just go Airbnb or something.

00:42:51Marc:How often am I going to go out there if I'm not shooting?

00:42:53Marc:You're just going to go sit in the mountains for what?

00:42:55Marc:How long?

00:42:55Marc:Do you need to own the house to do that?

00:42:57Marc:I don't know.

00:42:58Marc:Do you have another house somewhere?

00:42:59Guest:Well, yeah, in Montana.

00:43:01Guest:How often do you go?

00:43:03Guest:Well, it's different periods.

00:43:05Guest:I have had this ranch with my brother for 30 years.

00:43:09Guest:So he's up there all the time?

00:43:10Guest:Yeah, he's the doctor.

00:43:11Marc:Oh, that's right.

00:43:11Guest:So he lives up there.

00:43:12Guest:And they live on the ranch.

00:43:14Guest:They live on the ranch.

00:43:15Guest:Is it a working ranch?

00:43:16Guest:Yeah, it's a working ranch.

00:43:17Guest:His wife really is the rancher of all of us.

00:43:19Guest:What are you ranching?

00:43:21Guest:Cows?

00:43:21Guest:Cows.

00:43:22Guest:They have Angus cows.

00:43:23Guest:Oh, meat cows.

00:43:24Guest:Yeah.

00:43:25Guest:So we have pastures up in the mountains and the cows get driven up there in the summer.

00:43:30Guest:Is it like high-end meat?

00:43:32Guest:uh it's you know i think i've stepped back about six seven years ago oh yeah now i'm just in charge of my keeping fences up and irrigation up and things like that up there and the persimmon tree and back here back here yeah yeah i have my egg too mark doesn't she have a fruit tree on this place there's a lime tree right there and it's just like there's too much pressure

00:43:58Marc:Well, that counts.

00:43:59Marc:I mean, just- Yeah, but it's just there, and then you're sort of like, what am I going to do with all these limes?

00:44:04Marc:I don't drink.

00:44:05Marc:I can't make margaritas.

00:44:06Marc:How much ceviche can I make?

00:44:09Marc:How many lime sodas can I make?

00:44:11Marc:It gets a little bit- But then you start to realize, look, man, they're not animals.

00:44:16Marc:You just throw them away.

00:44:18Marc:Put them in the compost.

00:44:19Marc:Right, yeah.

00:44:20Marc:It's just fruit.

00:44:20Marc:Right, it's fruit.

00:44:21Marc:You don't have to eat all the fucking limes.

00:44:23Marc:But in LA, I mean, everybody has fruit trees.

00:44:26Marc:Yeah, sure.

00:44:27Marc:They're around-

00:44:27Marc:Lemon trees.

00:44:28Marc:You just see lemons falling on the ground everywhere.

00:44:31Marc:But I still buy fucking lemons.

00:44:34Marc:I'm an idiot.

00:44:35Marc:Because I'm like, I don't have a lemon tree, but I could drive around a bit and go pull some off a tree somewhere.

00:44:39Marc:But I don't do it.

00:44:42Guest:What other trees do you have?

00:44:43Guest:Well, you know, I was always impressed by how many trees aren't being picked.

00:44:47Guest:And so 11 years ago, we started a thing called Hollywood Orchard, which was gleaning fruit from trees that are not being picked and then having a volunteer pop-up kitchens.

00:44:59Guest:And we do... So you're half the time...

00:45:01Guest:You get volunteers there that show up, and then half of them go pick, and the other half goes in a little cul-de-sac we have, and we have pop-up kitchens, have chefs advise.

00:45:12Marc:What are you getting?

00:45:15Marc:You're getting lemons, limes, avocados, persimmons?

00:45:19Guest:In a way, it was an exercise in community more than really.

00:45:23Marc:So like all citrus-based dishes?

00:45:25Guest:There's another organization started at the same time called Food Forward that does that in a huge way.

00:45:31Guest:They're gleaning trees from all over L.A.

00:45:34Guest:and bringing the food to people that need it.

00:45:37Guest:That's good.

00:45:37Guest:But you're not making preserves?

00:45:40Guest:Oh, that's a big part of my life.

00:45:43Guest:Yeah, I like being in the kitchen.

00:45:45Guest:Me too.

00:45:46Guest:I love cooking.

00:45:46Guest:Yeah.

00:45:47Guest:So a big part of your life is making.

00:45:48Guest:Putting up fruit.

00:45:49Guest:Yeah.

00:45:50Guest:You know, so that I can have it later.

00:45:51Guest:Yeah.

00:45:52Guest:We had mangoes.

00:45:54Guest:Actually, I've been, I was in Nova Scotia for five months.

00:45:58Guest:And so I just came back really.

00:46:00Guest:What were you doing up there?

00:46:02Guest:We shot the fourth season of the center there.

00:46:04Guest:Oh, in Nova Scotia?

00:46:05Guest:In Nova Scotia, yeah.

00:46:06Marc:You didn't even know that was going to be a series, did you?

00:46:08Marc:No, no.

00:46:10Marc:I didn't realize.

00:46:10Marc:It's like the surprise career boost.

00:46:13Guest:Yeah, I guess.

00:46:15Guest:I never really thought of myself as like... The detective guy?

00:46:22Guest:Well, maybe I...

00:46:24Guest:I played a detective, I realized more than I thought I had, you know.

00:46:28Guest:Cagney and Lacey was a detective show.

00:46:31Guest:It all comes around, Bill.

00:46:32Marc:It all comes around.

00:46:33Guest:It all comes around, yeah.

00:46:34Guest:I think like Zero Effect was this movie.

00:46:38Guest:Sure, yeah.

00:46:40Guest:And that was a detective, you know.

00:46:42Guest:So I realized, oh, noir and everything is, you know, policiers, as they say in France.

00:46:49Guest:Do you like doing it?

00:46:51Guest:i think that's an interesting turf you know because there's always this sense of what betrayal is you know and what lying is and you know that yeah i think it's been a you know doing the center i think has been a level of both you know have to provide a lot of story yeah keep the thing going you know right and all that but inside that isn't is a kind of deeper

00:47:14Guest:commitment to psychology what's going on in people why did they do what they did you know and I think that made me made it like I really like doing it yeah because I never thought I would say I really like doing a show that came back year after year I thought I would not I'd wither on the vine you know sure throw my mind and it wouldn't boom boomerang back just like just sit there on the set yeah yeah without you yeah

00:47:42Marc:You're just going through the motions, being one of those guys.

00:47:48Marc:But it doesn't seem like there's any real shame anymore in doing the work like that.

00:47:54Guest:Well, I think there's so much more interesting work, I guess.

00:47:58Marc:Yeah, everything's kind of evolved.

00:48:01Marc:But I like that idea, though.

00:48:03Marc:The thing that makes it interesting is how complicated people are.

00:48:08Marc:Yeah.

00:48:09Marc:Because as an actor, I mean, you've got to you've got to put some meat on the bone for yourself.

00:48:12Marc:So you got the character.

00:48:13Marc:So like, how does that guy, you know, remain compelled?

00:48:17Marc:Yeah.

00:48:17Marc:Right.

00:48:18Marc:Yeah.

00:48:18Marc:And so the writers have to keep churning out these things that make you as your character going, hmm.

00:48:24Guest:yeah well i think the the premise always is is it's built into the you know why done it yeah so you see some crime has been committed usually yeah and or something is a violent act has happened and then uh you're trying to peel back the onion and so you know that in itself derrick simons is this uh the creator of it and very interesting guy jungian yeah so he's

00:48:49Guest:His mind always needs those kind of anchors, too, about what philosophically is going on now that we want to include and weave into the story.

00:48:59Marc:I talked to another guy yesterday about Jungian.

00:49:02Marc:Jungian's come up twice in two days.

00:49:04Marc:Oh, yeah?

00:49:05Marc:Was he talking about dreams?

00:49:07Marc:Yeah.

00:49:07Marc:I was talking to Benedict Cumberbatch yesterday.

00:49:10Marc:Uh-huh.

00:49:11Marc:And what did he say?

00:49:11Marc:And he was talking about The Power of the Dog, that Jane Campion movie.

00:49:15Marc:And she had him go to a dream analysis.

00:49:19Marc:a youngian dream analysis to to to do some preparation for his part did he say he got a lot of it well you know he he said that campion told him some of her dreams and they were very amazing and explosive and exciting and his were more just panic driven sort of like you know simple things but he found it interesting yeah you so we did that you did yeah because uh derek actually derek simons is a showrunner he's a

00:49:45Guest:He's trained as a facilitator in dream analysis.

00:49:50Guest:Jungian dream analysis.

00:49:51Guest:Jungian dream analysis.

00:49:52Guest:So you did it.

00:49:53Guest:Not with him.

00:49:53Guest:He wanted to do it, particularly last season was involving quite a bit of that.

00:50:00Guest:So I did it for the first time.

00:50:02Guest:He had done it with...

00:50:04Guest:Jessica Biel on the first season and I was like nah I'm kind of busy I do my own prep in my own way and really know what it was and he was not you know forced get out of my head man I got this right don't afraid

00:50:19Guest:Probably.

00:50:20Guest:But yeah, and I think at a certain point, a lot of people think they aren't dreaming anymore, especially as you get older.

00:50:27Guest:Yeah, you do.

00:50:28Guest:Yeah, they're there.

00:50:29Guest:Maybe you don't remember them or anything.

00:50:31Guest:But I thought I had stopped dreaming, and that's a very good facilitator that Derek set us up with.

00:50:37Marc:So you did it?

00:50:38Guest:yeah we did and what'd you did would it freak you out or was it interesting or did you really um was it revelatory revelatory yeah it was something and you know because we were also i had the thought that it might integrate into what the season was and what my character was that there were uh right away because i said to her you know the first we did a three-day workshop yeah first day you know you do these exercises and then she said

00:51:05Guest:you know, we'll see what, you know, come in tomorrow with a dream.

00:51:10Guest:And I said, I don't think so.

00:51:11Guest:You know, I can't just dial it up like that.

00:51:13Guest:It's not going to happen.

00:51:14Guest:She said, well, just before you go to bed, think, you know, I'd like to remember this dream and bang, you know.

00:51:19Guest:You did?

00:51:19Guest:Yeah.

00:51:20Guest:Wow.

00:51:21Guest:Really.

00:51:21Guest:And that dream ended up fueling the whole world.

00:51:25Guest:arc of that season come on yeah the one you just shot no it's the third season that one yeah and it was just for you but not in the story but in terms of your character i mean you used it in your prep somehow yeah i had never gone to the location that was my character's house for that season which ended up being an old stone uh

00:51:47Guest:house in upstate new york and i but i'd seen location shots and i'd forgotten that i'd even seen it yeah but in all of a sudden there i was in my dream i was in this house huh and i encountered right away richard gear uh-huh and i never dream about celebrities or you did a couple movies with him

00:52:06Guest:Yeah, so I know him, but I haven't run into him recently.

00:52:09Guest:There was nothing that was saying- That's a long time ago, yeah.

00:52:10Guest:Why Richard Gere?

00:52:12Guest:And then a five-year-old girl came out of a room with a tiara on her head.

00:52:17Guest:She came and grabbed my hand.

00:52:19Guest:We walked down a long hallway, and at the other end was-

00:52:22Guest:door to and in the back was a pond and she was kind of mirthful and saying come on into the pond yeah and i'm we were both immersed in the pond yeah ducks at the other and then these ducks started to come towards us yeah as if they wanted to communicate with us and then they flew off yeah and that was the end of the dream and but the analysis of that is what you know that sounds like a random thing and yeah like a dream and

00:52:49Guest:Yeah, but when you're doing these facilitated workshops, all of a sudden you start with, like, what could that mean?

00:52:58Guest:What are you seeing when you see what's your gear?

00:53:01Guest:What are you seeing?

00:53:01Guest:Does he want to be paid for appearing?

00:53:04Guest:Right?

00:53:05Yeah.

00:53:06Guest:well and then the second you know another part of it is what does richard gear see when he's seeing you yeah and what does the little girl what'd you come up with well you it's a whole set of it's a cosmology you start to create around it and around your past around my past around the how i'm fused with the aspects of the character yeah you know and uh

00:53:27Guest:That sense of, you know, what it is to be spontaneous and was kind of at the core of it was this investigation about, you know, being available to thinking about, you know, just living in the moment more with this five-year-old girl with the tiara, you know, releasing that aspect of me.

00:53:46Guest:Because basically all these elements are you.

00:53:49Guest:Richard Gere is me, a version of me.

00:53:53Marc:I hear that, and I've heard that before about dreams, that they're all you, but I can't quite figure it.

00:54:00Guest:Well, maybe it's a metaphor.

00:54:02Guest:I've also heard that about plays, that every character in the play is a big aspect of the writer.

00:54:08Marc:I guess so, but I don't understand why that's helpful.

00:54:10Marc:Because to me, like, if I was just, I don't know you, but like, you know, you worked with Gere twice.

00:54:15Marc:He was a big movie star.

00:54:16Marc:You were a supporting actor.

00:54:18Marc:You know, there has to be, whether it's you or not, you know, that to me is a portal into whatever that dynamic was at that time in your life.

00:54:27Marc:Right?

00:54:27Marc:You know, whether, you know, you were... You know, he has his spiritual side.

00:54:33Marc:Yeah, right.

00:54:33Guest:He's a Buddhist guy, right?

00:54:34Guest:Buddhist guy.

00:54:35Guest:And I think that was maybe... And you knew that.

00:54:38Guest:I had known that.

00:54:39Guest:I followed that a little bit.

00:54:41Guest:And so I think there was some aspect of that was more.

00:54:46Marc:There's a lot of ways you can go.

00:54:47Guest:Yeah.

00:54:47Marc:A lot of reasons why there is in your dream.

00:54:50Marc:And then you work with guys like, you know, you work with David Lynch, what, twice?

00:54:54Marc:Mm-hmm.

00:54:54Marc:Yeah.

00:54:55Marc:And that guy's like, you know, he's making dreams.

00:54:57Marc:Like, he builds from dreams.

00:54:58Marc:Yeah.

00:54:58Marc:Like, I mean, I saw, what was it?

00:55:00Marc:It was, were you, Lost Highway?

00:55:02Marc:Lost Highway.

00:55:03Marc:Saxophone guy.

00:55:04Marc:Mm-hmm.

00:55:04Marc:Right?

00:55:05Yeah.

00:55:05Marc:didn't you have a saxophone yeah yeah yeah and robert blake showed up it's just his face a few times yes yes saying i didn't kill her i didn't kill her no kidding right that's what he says uh in real life but um how'd you get that relationship with lynch well he you know i had known his daughter jennifer a little bit uh there was a um

00:55:27Guest:There was a movie called Boxing Helena.

00:55:28Guest:Yeah.

00:55:29Guest:It ended up being made.

00:55:30Guest:But for a couple of iterations before it got made, Jennifer wanted to cast me and Madonna in it.

00:55:38Guest:And I got to know Jennifer during that period.

00:55:42Guest:The money didn't come through right at that point.

00:55:44Guest:And then by the time it did, I wasn't available.

00:55:48Guest:But she was the one who said to David, you know, check him out for Lost Highway.

00:55:53Marc:Yeah.

00:55:53Marc:Now, when you do that, I mean, you weren't doing any Jungian work there.

00:55:57Marc:So when you get a script for Lost Highway, is there part of you that's sort of like, the fuck is this?

00:56:03Guest:You know, I was the opposite.

00:56:05Guest:Everybody was saying, you're going to read this, or the agent, you know, say, I don't know.

00:56:10Guest:You read it, see what you make of it.

00:56:11Guest:And I think I understood it pretty well.

00:56:15Guest:I think maybe because I was used to reading strange plays and things like that.

00:56:20Guest:Oh, yeah, right, right.

00:56:21Guest:And I didn't need a lot of psychology that was obvious in order to make it potent.

00:56:26Guest:I'm trying to remember it.

00:56:28Guest:Well, it really starts with a musician in the basin of L.A., saxophone guy, is living in a pretty good environment with a wife who's blonde, Patricia Arquette.

00:56:40Guest:Right.

00:56:41Guest:And she's got some things that maybe he's worried about and it's not going well that there seems to be some trouble in their relationship.

00:56:50Guest:And then suddenly these videotapes start appearing.

00:56:53Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:56:53Guest:and they realize that someone is videoing their own house while they're in the house.

00:56:58Guest:Wasn't Robert Blake-faced in this, or am I making that up?

00:57:01Guest:Well, eventually he appears, yeah.

00:57:06Guest:Yeah, he comes in to see him at a party, and that's a great scene where he says, I'm in your house right now, and I say...

00:57:15Guest:no hey are you fucking crazy man yeah yeah and one of my favorite lynch lines yeah yeah and uh then he says i am call me and i get my phone i call and he picks up the phone on the other end while he's watching me at the party and he starts laughing it's like a dream

00:57:34Guest:Yeah, really.

00:57:35Guest:That's fucking like a dream.

00:57:37Marc:Really like a dream.

00:57:39Marc:But you're used to it.

00:57:39Marc:I mean, you seem like kind of a meat and potatoes kind of guy, but you're dug in with the theater.

00:57:44Marc:You know what the trip is.

00:57:45Marc:You know weirdness.

00:57:47Guest:Yeah, abstractions, I guess.

00:57:50Guest:Abstractions, maybe, that have... Sometimes that's an easier thing to discern the truth and more realistic things.

00:57:57Guest:Well, you've done Albie plays.

00:57:58Guest:yeah i mean that you know those are like you know that stuff like that's that's some open-ended shit i mean you don't know what the hell i mean yeah multi multi-level but it's just tough to work with comics you know i think in terms of really understanding where they're coming from comics comics yeah so you you know now there's so many people who are acting good actors yeah that come from comedy yeah and that is a different impulse than how i started i

00:58:24Marc:I guess so, but you, like, early on, you were in the middle of all of them.

00:58:27Marc:I mean, you did Spaceballs.

00:58:28Marc:I mean, that's like, they were all there.

00:58:31Marc:Yeah.

00:58:31Marc:Surrounded by clowns.

00:58:32Guest:Yeah.

00:58:33Guest:But how they go about their day when they're working on a set is so different than what I ever thought.

00:58:39Guest:Really?

00:58:40Guest:Like how?

00:58:41Guest:Well, you know, it's so much in the moment, so much given to like and and and having a slant, you know, on things and having having a delivery and having, you know, thinking of the kind of and very verbal, you know, really.

00:58:58Guest:What do you do on set?

00:58:59Guest:I think I come at it in terms of more like a circumstance that I'm thinking about or I have all this different kind of sense of what I'm doing to the other person.

00:59:12Guest:But I think that there's a lot of really interesting actives come about with all those Will Ferrell and Steve Carell and all that are really interesting.

00:59:23Guest:I worked with, did Battle of the Sexes with Steve Carell

00:59:27Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:59:28Guest:You know, just watching that process work, Adam McKay style, you know, which really comes born.

00:59:35Guest:I mean, that's some of the most, when you look at succession, that's really, really sophisticated, integrated work that feels.

00:59:42Guest:But the process of working with him, you know, comes from.

00:59:45Guest:With McKay?

00:59:45Guest:Yeah, I think he developed that with Will Ferrell, and I did a part in what became Vice, and he offered it, Adam had offered it to me, and I said, yeah, I'm not gonna do it.

01:00:00Guest:It's a small part that's probably gonna be cut, and oh no, he wants to talk to you, so I talked to him, and he said, no, come and do this.

01:00:10Guest:And he said, I can't guarantee anything.

01:00:13Guest:But I can tell you one thing, you're going to have a good time on the set.

01:00:17Guest:I did.

01:00:18Guest:I went there and I had a good time on the set and I was cut.

01:00:23Marc:So how does he work that you say that's unique?

01:00:25Marc:Wow.

01:00:26Marc:Is it improvising?

01:00:27Marc:Yeah.

01:00:28Guest:So, you know, he, I was playing Nelson Rockefeller, who does not appear in Vice, but was a part of, in the middle chunk of it, you know, when Cheney and Rumsfeld were doing their mischievousness, you know, part of the first, one of their first, you know, trophy prizes was they took out Nelson Rockefeller.

01:00:48Guest:He was going to be running for president.

01:00:50Guest:Right.

01:00:50Guest:They wanted a more conservative person and they got Bob Dole.

01:00:53Guest:Right.

01:00:54Guest:Then, you know, that,

01:00:54Guest:went from there but that journey of Nelson's was you know kind of a critical little linchpin but with Adam you know you're you're in a spot and he's on a God mic you know so he's saying now say this now say this

01:01:13Guest:Now try this.

01:01:15Guest:So you're in the modality of being in the scene, but you're hearing these ideas and pretty much lines.

01:01:24Guest:So it's very immediate?

01:01:25Guest:Very immediate, very discardable.

01:01:27Guest:You don't get hugely invested so that you can just throw up a lot of stuff and then choose from the best.

01:01:34Marc:That's interesting.

01:01:34Marc:So is that the only time you've worked with a director on the God mic like that?

01:01:39Marc:Yeah.

01:01:41Marc:I did a little part in Pete Berg's movie.

01:01:45Marc:You worked with Pete Berg on The Last Addiction.

01:01:47Marc:I did whatever the Spencer for Hire, whatever that movie was, I did a little part in the Wahlberg thing he did.

01:01:53Marc:Spencer Confidential.

01:01:55Marc:And he works like that.

01:01:57Guest:Isn't that interesting?

01:01:58Guest:Because he's an actor.

01:01:59Marc:Comes from acting.

01:02:00Marc:A bit.

01:02:01Guest:A bit.

01:02:04Guest:How did you feel?

01:02:04Guest:Acting and being kind of... Everybody's hearing it.

01:02:08Marc:But if you're in it, and you're okay with your character, that's part of... It's almost like...

01:02:15Marc:more fun to have that exchange and make different choices.

01:02:22Marc:If someone's like, try it like this, you're like, great.

01:02:25Marc:Okay, I can do that.

01:02:27Marc:I mean, how committed are you in general as an actor where you're like, nah, this is the way it's gonna be?

01:02:32Guest:Well, you know, I mean, some of it is just how your brain gets interrupted.

01:02:37Guest:You know, if you're used to not being a lot of that external thing.

01:02:41Guest:Yeah.

01:02:41Guest:And if you're in a play, you can't be allowing a lot of interferences.

01:02:45Guest:You're not waiting for somebody to tell you something.

01:02:47Guest:So you're kind of bred to not be really that flexible.

01:02:51Guest:But in comedy, I think like that, it kind of makes sense.

01:02:55Marc:Right.

01:02:55Marc:But it plays different also, but shooting TV or movies, I mean, you're just burning through takes.

01:02:59Marc:You're going to be on that camera at one angle or another at least two or three times.

01:03:04Marc:Yeah.

01:03:05Marc:But plays, that's real life.

01:03:07Marc:I mean, you're in it.

01:03:08Marc:Yeah.

01:03:08Marc:There's no turning back.

01:03:09Marc:But when you're doing 20 takes of two lines, you can do a lot of variations.

01:03:15Guest:I guess you're looking for something authentic.

01:03:17Guest:Yes.

01:03:18Guest:There's a level of like, not just, you know, you're, if you're in a zone and as I realized with McKay and watching everybody do where you, you'll say, okay, I have to say this line.

01:03:30Guest:I'm just going to do a series.

01:03:31Guest:Yeah.

01:03:31Guest:Right.

01:03:32Guest:So you're stopping.

01:03:33Guest:Yeah.

01:03:33Guest:You're talking to a person who's off camera and you're just, you know, generating self-motivating about five different versions of the line.

01:03:42Guest:Yeah.

01:03:42Guest:So you're just saying, yeah, I'm crazy to be here.

01:03:45Guest:Yeah, it's really crazy.

01:03:47Guest:And you're throwing out a lot of improv kind of moments that are, you know, that's very intoxicating.

01:03:54Guest:So there is a side of it that I really, really like a lot.

01:03:57Guest:And you work with both Kasdans?

01:03:59Guest:Yes.

01:04:00Guest:Father and son.

01:04:01Guest:Father and son.

01:04:02Guest:I've worked with both David Lynch and Jennifer Lynch.

01:04:06Guest:Yeah, it's really interesting when you see generations coming through, you know, feel that way.

01:04:13Guest:Did you work with Burt Lancaster?

01:04:14Guest:Yes.

01:04:15Guest:Towards the end?

01:04:17Guest:Last film.

01:04:18Guest:Really?

01:04:18Guest:The Rocket Gibraltar.

01:04:20Guest:Was that amazing, though?

01:04:21Guest:It was an amazing experience.

01:04:22Guest:Yeah.

01:04:23Guest:Just to be around him.

01:04:24Guest:I was very, you know, always aware of who he was.

01:04:27Guest:Sure.

01:04:28Guest:But by the time we're making Rocky Gibraltar, you know, there's people who younger generation didn't know Burt Lincoln.

01:04:36Guest:Wow.

01:04:37Guest:Yeah.

01:04:37Guest:You know, just watching him move through the world of, you know, somewhat becoming, you know, he was a little bit not recognized in public situations and things at that point.

01:04:48Guest:Yeah.

01:04:49Guest:Yeah.

01:04:50Guest:And but still such a bearing and such generosity, you know, real poise as a person.

01:04:57Marc:Great actor.

01:04:58Marc:I mean, he was a huge movie star.

01:05:00Guest:Oh, yeah.

01:05:00Marc:A huge movie star.

01:05:01Marc:So huge.

01:05:02Marc:And he's so good.

01:05:03Marc:Yeah.

01:05:03Marc:I like watched his first couple of films recently.

01:05:06Marc:And just astounding.

01:05:07Marc:Because he could do anything.

01:05:09Marc:Yeah.

01:05:09Marc:Like any type of role.

01:05:11Marc:Yeah.

01:05:11Marc:He's just one of those guys.

01:05:12Marc:Yeah.

01:05:12Marc:He could play heavy.

01:05:13Marc:He could play a lighty.

01:05:15Marc:Right.

01:05:15Marc:You know.

01:05:16Marc:Right.

01:05:17Marc:The Swimmer.

01:05:18Marc:The Swimmer.

01:05:18Marc:It's a crazy movie.

01:05:19Marc:Crazy movie.

01:05:20Marc:It's such a sad, weird movie.

01:05:22Marc:Yeah.

01:05:23Marc:That guy's swimming home.

01:05:24Guest:Yeah.

01:05:25Marc:Through the pools in his community.

01:05:27Marc:Really?

01:05:28Marc:And then he gets to the house, right?

01:05:30Marc:And it's empty and his wife is gone, right?

01:05:33Marc:Yeah.

01:05:34Marc:Oh, my God.

01:05:34Marc:It's an Achiever story, I think.

01:05:37Guest:I think he knew, you know, he treasured talking about what things he really liked.

01:05:42Guest:You know, he was part of some director's vision that he really admired.

01:05:46Guest:You know, it wasn't about him.

01:05:48Guest:Right.

01:05:48Guest:It was about being in, you know, working with somebody who was, you know, creating this world that he got to be part of.

01:05:56Marc:In general or that movie?

01:05:58Guest:I think in general.

01:05:59Marc:Yeah.

01:05:59Guest:You know, went to a couple of dinners with him.

01:06:02Marc:Oh, yeah.

01:06:02Marc:And he talked about it.

01:06:04Guest:Yeah.

01:06:05Guest:But and I realized that, you know, and then he said, you know, I would had my own production company.

01:06:11Guest:So I would do what was really popular with my own production company to make the money, you know, the pirate movies and things like that.

01:06:18Guest:And then that would allow him to work with other directors that he really admired.

01:06:23Marc:Yeah.

01:06:24Marc:I mean, I think that's when you talk to actors.

01:06:25Marc:I mean, the ones that understand that and appreciate that, that they are this sort of like they are part of this storytelling process.

01:06:32Marc:That is the director's vision.

01:06:34Marc:Yeah.

01:06:35Marc:It's kind of a... That's the job in a way, right?

01:06:37Marc:Yeah.

01:06:38Marc:I just watched a big... I watched an old documentary about Kirk Douglas.

01:06:42Marc:That guy was an animal.

01:06:43Marc:I mean, he did a million movies.

01:06:44Marc:Yeah.

01:06:44Marc:You really think about Kirk Douglas and that intensity?

01:06:47Marc:Yeah.

01:06:47Marc:And they worked together a lot.

01:06:49Marc:I mean, Kirk and...

01:06:50Marc:And Bert, you know, they were friends.

01:06:53Marc:Yeah.

01:06:53Marc:And Michael's in it.

01:06:54Marc:And it's just, it was so touching.

01:06:56Marc:You forget that these guys made 100 movies.

01:06:59Marc:Yeah.

01:06:59Marc:Really huge.

01:07:02Guest:You've made a lot of movies.

01:07:03Guest:But, you know, that's the thing about television.

01:07:05Guest:When you talk about, you know, do you do the God Mike and that kind of thing.

01:07:10Guest:You know, there's a part of television that really is I'm not wired for, which is I'm used to a director.

01:07:17Guest:Right.

01:07:17Guest:I'm used to one vision.

01:07:18Guest:And on television, you know,

01:07:20Marc:directors can be subordinate.

01:07:23Marc:Right, right, because they come and go, but the show already has its look.

01:07:26Marc:That was laid down by the first director.

01:07:28Marc:Yeah.

01:07:28Marc:So they're honoring a template.

01:07:30Guest:Yeah.

01:07:31Marc:And it's sort of a by-the-numbers kind of thing a lot of times.

01:07:34Guest:It's really challenging.

01:07:36Guest:I have a lot of empathy for them on the set because you realize...

01:07:39Guest:I always think of that Bertrand Ruff little thing about critics, the eunuchs at the party.

01:07:44Guest:He's just like, wow, do you get fun?

01:07:47Guest:Does this fun come in to do this?

01:07:49Guest:And you have to be so obedient to other people.

01:07:53Guest:To the producer, right?

01:07:54Guest:Yeah.

01:07:54Guest:But some people have a knack for it, you know, and I've come to really appreciate the ones that really can come in, see the limits that, you know, they know where they go off the road.

01:08:04Guest:They stay on the road and they stay on the road and they have their own investment in it and they find their own territory that they can own.

01:08:12Marc:Yeah, yeah.

01:08:13Marc:Some of them are clever like that.

01:08:14Marc:I mean, like in the sense that like if they're not going in thinking like, eh, it's just another gig.

01:08:20Marc:But if they're sort of like, how can I find a few little areas where I can do what I am building for myself?

01:08:28Marc:But there's a lot of broken, washed up people who are just kind of going through the motions.

01:08:34Marc:And they've been carried along by the business for years.

01:08:38Marc:That's a big machine, Toby.

01:08:39Guest:yeah my father used to say you know oh yeah there you're gonna you know you get on television you're selling soap yeah that was you know yes and i you know it's changed a lot from those days but still there's something corporate about it yeah absolutely and i and i guess with some movies there is too in the bigger budget movies but but still like as an actor you're still able to kind of focus on your thing

01:09:04Guest:Yeah.

01:09:05Guest:Yeah.

01:09:06Guest:Yeah.

01:09:06Guest:You do those like Bert, you know, do those and then you get to do the more esoteric.

01:09:10Marc:Yeah.

01:09:11Marc:So outside of the center, are you?

01:09:14Marc:But you also work.

01:09:14Marc:Yeah.

01:09:15Marc:You like.

01:09:15Marc:It's interesting that that's baseball thing is because I don't think, you know, you can do comedy, but you don't do a ton of it.

01:09:21Marc:right but you were like with Candy and you know Moranis and all those guys yeah right at the beginning of your career I mean was there a moment where you're like yeah I can't do any more comedy or were you like or were you like I'm gonna do comedy yeah I always I think you know I think I like Lynch because there's some humor in there oh yeah you know there's just so much and I love that mix yeah yeah yeah you got some kind of twinkle going on right right right yeah yeah and it's odd too yeah yeah yeah

01:09:51Guest:But Mel Brooks is different.

01:09:53Guest:Yeah, that was like working with a whole genius level of creativity.

01:10:02Guest:I think of his power naps.

01:10:03Guest:When he would come out of power nap with the ideas, talk about dreaming.

01:10:07Guest:I don't know whatever he would do in those 10-minute naps, but he'd come out of it loaded for bear.

01:10:12Marc:Yeah, his brain's on fire.

01:10:14Marc:Yeah.

01:10:15Marc:Yeah, yeah.

01:10:16Marc:It's like the entire history of Jewish comedy...

01:10:19Marc:flowing through him at all times.

01:10:24Guest:Just in terms of words, I mean, talk about just all I could do was just do whatever he said.

01:10:30Guest:But he would do line readings.

01:10:32Guest:But I just loved his line reading because you know that he wasn't asking you to do it exactly like that.

01:10:39Guest:He would do a very Jewish version of it.

01:10:43Guest:The Mel Brooks version.

01:10:44Guest:The Mel Brooks version.

01:10:47Guest:And I think I'd get so distracted by it because I'd so intrigued.

01:10:51Guest:Like when he would do the Druish princess, you know, Daphne's part, he was so brilliant, you know, with attitude and like arrogance.

01:11:01Guest:And he'd throw it all in in one lining reading.

01:11:05Guest:But he was like a big learning thing because he was saying, Pullman, you're just taking too long.

01:11:09Guest:You know, you got to commit to something.

01:11:12Guest:You know, you're going to be doing press for this in Japan.

01:11:14Guest:You're going, that's how I should have done that line.

01:11:16Guest:It was like...

01:11:17Guest:Know why you're going to do the line.

01:11:19Guest:Wow.

01:11:19Marc:It was really interesting training for me coming out.

01:11:23Marc:And also people like Candy, who was like an established, like he knew who he was comedically.

01:11:28Marc:Yeah.

01:11:29Guest:But I think he was also a little scared.

01:11:32Guest:Oh, yeah?

01:11:32Guest:Around to be, I mean, both he and Rick had come from such different comedy.

01:11:36Guest:Right, right, right, right, right.

01:11:37Guest:They were committing.

01:11:38Guest:They were box office fans.

01:11:40Guest:jeffes yeah and mel was actually on the skids you know right so at that point yeah yeah just and it was a challenge for mel to you know just say i'm going to work with these other new comics and i'm going to allow them to do whatever they want but if as much you tell there would be you know a little friction tension sure sure like yeah i do it this way

01:12:02Guest:Yeah, don't get in my face.

01:12:05Guest:John's so gentle.

01:12:06Guest:His whole comedy was just these small little grace notes that would be just bubbling along.

01:12:11Guest:You could squash them in a second.

01:12:13Guest:Oh, right.

01:12:14Guest:It was very sensitive, huh?

01:12:15Guest:Very sensitive, yeah.

01:12:17Guest:That's too much.

01:12:18Guest:But he always looked out for me, John.

01:12:21Guest:So he knew he had power, but he just was not comfortable always to assert power.

01:12:27Marc:Oh, right, right, right.

01:12:28Marc:So he made sure you didn't get crushed?

01:12:31Guest:Well, he did what he can.

01:12:32Guest:He consoled me, you know.

01:12:34Guest:So, you know, I used to go to his trailer to have his Pritikin diet lunches, you know, and then he would always, you know, we'd drink this real gruel, you know, just thin, brothy kind of thing.

01:12:48Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:12:49Guest:this is kind of good and then we and then his driver Frankie was always with him bring in a dozen donuts you know finish up with donuts but he was like you guys would come down from the Melbrook storm together yeah yeah I think so you know it's just kind of yeah you'd say come on in here I'll you know just let's hang out let's hang out yeah and talk about other things yeah that's nice that's nice that you have you met all these guys good times

01:13:17Marc:So now what are you going to be doing now?

01:13:19Marc:You got theater on the horizon?

01:13:22Marc:You know, I'm going to try to just clear the dockets for a little bit.

01:13:28Marc:Do some canning?

01:13:29Guest:Yeah, might be just get back into the orchard for a little while.

01:13:34Guest:Got a few things going on in L.A.

01:13:38Guest:So I'd like to stay in L.A.

01:13:39Guest:for a little bit, you know.

01:13:40Guest:yeah it's been it's been lucky to get a lot of work even during covid sure so yeah did halston which is oh yeah that's right that's right i haven't watched that yet that's with uh mcgregor and yeah ewan mcgregor people like it i think it's an interesting journey and was and but uh but right now i think it's going to be good to just kind of wait and see for a little bit yeah why not yeah relax hearth yeah yeah you got how many kids you got around three and they're all in town

01:14:10Guest:And your wife is in the business?

01:14:12Marc:No.

01:14:14Marc:Well, that's good.

01:14:15Marc:It's nice to be around the family.

01:14:17Marc:I go into New York for a few days, and I'm sort of like, oh, God.

01:14:23Marc:You guys who act, because I do some acting, but I get offered stuff.

01:14:27Marc:Small movies and they're like, it's like six weeks in New Orleans.

01:14:30Marc:I'm like, I don't live that life, man.

01:14:32Marc:Yeah.

01:14:32Marc:It must be hard for you.

01:14:34Marc:How do you break your rhythm?

01:14:36Marc:Well, that's it.

01:14:37Marc:But if you're an actor, you're used to that.

01:14:39Marc:I mean, you get offers.

01:14:40Marc:It's sort of like, this is going to be like six months.

01:14:42Marc:Yeah.

01:14:43Marc:You're going to hear that.

01:14:44Marc:Here's maybe you can see your family.

01:14:46Marc:You know, you know, you know, all you're worried about is, like, am I going to be comfortable?

01:14:50Marc:But you have to go away.

01:14:51Marc:I go nuts.

01:14:52Marc:Yeah.

01:14:52Marc:I've got cats.

01:14:53Marc:I'm away for four days.

01:14:54Marc:I'm like, what the fuck are the cats going to do?

01:14:56Marc:But I'm a lunatic.

01:14:57Marc:I almost didn't move out of my old house because the cat was comfortable outside there.

01:15:00Marc:So.

01:15:02Marc:I've got to refigure.

01:15:03Marc:I think I'm surrendering a little too much power to these animals that don't give a shit.

01:15:12Marc:But yeah, I mean, it's a weird job acting.

01:15:15Marc:You got to be willing to, you know, like, all right, this is part of it.

01:15:18Marc:I'm going to go to Ireland for a year.

01:15:21Marc:Yeah, yeah.

01:15:22Marc:Which I would love, actually.

01:15:23Marc:That would be great.

01:15:24Guest:Yeah, yeah.

01:15:25Guest:I'm ready to get out.

01:15:28Marc:You're ready to leave the cats.

01:15:29Marc:This place is going down.

01:15:31Marc:It's time to find another land.

01:15:36Guest:I see your neighbors are Halloween people.

01:15:40Marc:Do you do Halloween?

01:15:41Marc:Do you give out candy?

01:15:43Marc:We made a couple pumpkins, carved a couple pumpkins.

01:15:45Marc:Yeah, I gave out candy.

01:15:45Marc:It was crazy this Halloween.

01:15:47Marc:It was nice because last year it was just sad.

01:15:50Marc:But this year they were out with a vengeance, parents with their little kids coming over.

01:15:54Marc:Yeah, I bought like four bags of candy and I went through all of it.

01:15:56Marc:I didn't even get to stash any for myself.

01:15:59Marc:Oh, yeah.

01:15:59Marc:I almost pre-stashed it.

01:16:01Marc:That was like, I'm like, I'm going to put this in the freezer for me.

01:16:04Marc:But then they kept coming.

01:16:05Marc:I'm like, nah, fuck.

01:16:06Marc:I guess I bought it for them.

01:16:07Marc:But it is the gift of L.A.

01:16:13Guest:that you could be at Glendale.

01:16:14Guest:You have this neighborhood.

01:16:16Guest:I love it.

01:16:16Guest:So you have a sense of community.

01:16:18Marc:I love it.

01:16:18Marc:Yeah, I know my neighbors.

01:16:19Marc:Yeah.

01:16:19Marc:He's in the business, the guy with all the stuff on his yard still.

01:16:23Marc:I think he's at Disney.

01:16:24Marc:He does something.

01:16:24Marc:But every year with the Halloween, he had a whole operating room set up out there.

01:16:28Marc:This year is Oregon.

01:16:30Marc:He does a thing.

01:16:31Marc:It's his thing, man.

01:16:32Marc:Yeah, it's beautiful.

01:16:34Marc:Keep it up.

01:16:35Marc:It's nice.

01:16:35Marc:It was great talking to you, pal.

01:16:37Marc:Well, good to talk to you, Mark.

01:16:39Thank you.

01:16:44Marc:Bill Pullman, The Sinner, the finale.

01:16:47Marc:This Wednesday, December 1st on USA Network.

01:16:50Marc:Okay, here, here.

01:16:52Marc:I'm going to play my banker custom Karina Explorer.

01:16:58Marc:Yeah, straight into the dirty old man amp.

01:17:04Marc:I'm not the dirty old man.

01:17:05Marc:The amp is.

01:17:06Marc:The amp is.

01:17:08Marc:I have my moments.

01:17:42guitar solo

01:18:14Thank you.

01:19:06Guest:boomer lives monkey lafonda cat angels everywhere