Episode 693 - Ethan Hawke
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:The trumpet player Chet Baker, which is no easy task.
Marc:Chet was a at that point during the movie where the time it takes place, Chet was well into being pretty beat up and pretty strung out.
Marc:And it is sort of a love story.
Marc:I would say it is a love story, but it's a little dark and it's done in a very sort of creative way, moving in and out of a film that Chet Baker is.
Marc:was supposed to be in playing himself.
Marc:He may have shot some of it and, and real timeframe.
Marc:And it was, he did a good job and Ethan's a good actor.
Marc:He's a great actor.
Marc:And he's been, you know, he's been around since like, I feel like he's one of maybe a little, he's a little younger than me, but I feel like he's one of those guys where you sort of see grow up, you know, and he's done some great work and it was nice to have him in the garage and talk to him.
Marc:So look forward to that.
Marc:I mean, literally it's minutes away.
Marc:Could be quicker for those of you who got no patience.
Marc:Had enough of my shit.
Marc:Let's get right to that Ethan Hawke chit-chat.
Marc:Let's go over these dates again.
Marc:I'm going to be at the Mission Creek Festival at the Englert Theater in Iowa City on April 8th.
Marc:I'm going to be in Lincoln, Nebraska, April 9th at the Rococo Theater.
Marc:That might be sold out.
Marc:I'm not sure.
Marc:On April 10th, I will be at the Arvest Bank Theater at the Midland in Kansas City, Missouri.
Marc:That is not sold out.
Marc:So if you didn't get tickets...
Marc:In Nebraska, maybe you want to drive down six hours, whatever it is.
Marc:I know I'm going to be driving.
Marc:If I can do it, you can do it.
Marc:Was it four hours?
Marc:But either way, you can go to wtfpod.com slash calendar.
Marc:You can get to the links.
Marc:You can get the links for these shows.
Marc:And, you know, I'm working on new stuff.
Marc:You know, that's going to be a little mix and match of stuff.
Marc:I'm not going to go way back, but I'll go recent and I'll go new.
Marc:And I'll be happy to be in the Midwest.
Marc:I have not played any of these areas before.
Marc:I appreciate all the feedback for the reposting of the Gary Shandling conversation I had in 2011.
Marc:It is a sad time here in show business.
Marc:And I'm glad that I had that to give back to you people.
Marc:If you had not heard it or you wanted to hear it again, he was a lovely man.
Marc:And I was actually at the comedy store last night.
Marc:Before I get to that, the Al Lubel episode.
Marc:Many of you, you know, I posted the Gary Shandling thing because of the loss of Gary the day after we dropped Al Lubel's episode of WTF.
Marc:You should listen to that one because Al is a veteran comic.
Marc:He's an interesting guy.
Marc:He's introspective in a way that is not always great.
Marc:And it's sort of a touching story.
Marc:And I recommend that one if you missed it.
Marc:Now, getting back to the loss of Gary Shanley, last night I was at the comedy store and...
Marc:Bob Saget showed up to do a few minutes, and I talked to Bob in the parking lot, and he and Gary had gone back to 1978, and they met at the Comedy Store, and Bob felt compelled to say something.
Marc:He needed, for his heart and for his friend, he needed to go up on stage to try to say something in that room where they met.
Marc:at the Comedy Store in 1978.
Marc:And he just wanted to do a guest set.
Marc:He seemed a bit beside himself with grief on some level and just with loss and just a little jarred.
Marc:And it's always good to see Saget.
Marc:He's a great guy.
Marc:But he got up there and he did classic saga jokes.
Marc:And it was funny in a way.
Marc:And there's no reason for it not to be funny to see him try to transition on a Saturday night.
Marc:You're on a 1030 show, no less in the original room, which, you know, that's a real show where you got to do real shit.
Marc:And he was doing well.
Marc:He was killing with his dirty jokes and his bits.
Marc:But he wanted to say something about Gary that come from his heart.
Marc:And it was just interesting to see him for about 45 seconds struggling to make that transition and then making it, paying his respects to Gary Shandling in the room where they met and then telling a couple of his favorite Gary Shandling jokes and then go back to his dirty jokes.
Marc:So it was like there was this reprieve in the middle of the sagat filth
Marc:Which is, you know, I'm not being condescending at all.
Marc:I like his jokes.
Marc:But, you know, he's notoriously a little dirty.
Marc:You got your five, six minutes of solid, you know, saget patter, full-on filth, and then the sort of, like, heart-wrenching short but honest eulogizing of his lost friend, and then right back into the dick jokes.
Marc:It was good comedy and it was a great expression of comedic emotion that it became more... The difficulty of feeling the need to say something to honor somebody in a context...
Marc:that the audience doesn't know, but he obviously set it up well.
Marc:But it's a comedy show, and then to watch him struggle and then fucking do it, and he got off and he felt good that he did it, and I was happy that he did it, and it was great to see him.
Marc:It's hard, it's very hard.
Marc:As we get older and we start to see our peers passing, some tragically too early, which I would say is true for Gary.
Marc:It just becomes very, a thing that happens, man.
Marc:And I know it's easy to say it happens to everybody, but, you know, I'm no old man, but, you know, most of it's behind me now.
Marc:You know what I'm saying?
Marc:So, yeah.
Marc:Thank God for comedy.
Marc:Thank God for the comedy store.
Marc:It was a fun time there on Saturday night.
Marc:I get to go on stage more, and there really is this time after I get done shooting the show, and I think it's the same with anybody who does anything creative or just works in general.
Marc:is that when you want to find time to do the stuff that you're used to doing or the things that define you or make you feel the best, it's scary when you haven't done them as thoroughly in a while.
Marc:I'm like, how the hell am I going to write new material?
Marc:I got to do another hour.
Marc:When am I going to?
Marc:What the fuck?
Marc:And then I just start to get back to my life.
Marc:And what my life looks like, it's not great in my head, but that's just who I am, man.
Marc:I get up, and it takes me a long time.
Marc:I do a lot of organizing.
Marc:I do a lot of dishwashing and maybe some cooking before I do anything creative or get out here.
Marc:But all I know is that I was worried about doing stand-up, and having been doing it only once a week for months,
Marc:And now I'm back in it, and you just get your fucking legs back, and you just start to push out the new shit.
Marc:I don't ever think it's going to happen, but it always happens.
Marc:I mean, for fuck's sake, I've done five CDs, a few specials.
Marc:I've got hours and hours of material out there, and it comes.
Marc:But before it comes, there's that moment of like, is it ever going to come?
Marc:And then you just get on, you just have that one fucking night, man.
Marc:There's just that one night and Friday night, or maybe it was Thursday night.
Marc:Was it Thursday night?
Marc:I think it was Thursday night where these three pieces that I was sort of kind of thinking about together.
Marc:Just all actually, I wasn't thinking about them going together at all.
Marc:And they just wove together naturally.
Marc:And I realized, well, that's how, that's how I do it.
Marc:You got to get present, get engaged and, and make it immediate.
Marc:Like it has to be talked about.
Marc:And that's usually the way my brain works.
Marc:Like right now,
Marc:That's what happens on stage, and that's when the shit starts to happen.
Marc:And these three things just wove together beautifully.
Marc:I talked about a couple of them here, but not with the beats and figuring out how they live on stage and how to kind of expand them.
Marc:And it felt fucking great.
Marc:Because despite whatever I'm known for, whatever you know me for, whatever you think of me or my work or whatever, you know, I've been a comic a long time and that's how I identify myself.
Marc:I'm a comedian.
Marc:And when it works and when there's that portal where you're like, oh, I can make things funny and do another hour, no problem.
Marc:Because you just get that freedom of mind.
Marc:That's what comes back.
Marc:is the freedom of mind, which for me is wrought with a sort of torment and compulsive need to sort of poetically understand things and get those down on paper and get them out of my mouth on stage to see if people see it that way or are excited to see it the way I see it.
Marc:It's just been fun.
Marc:It's been fun.
Marc:It's fun to have a new bit, and it's like that's sort of working, and it's new, and it just makes everything okay.
Marc:Do you understand?
Marc:Am I making sense?
Marc:I'm coming back to life after doing some... I mean, I was alive before, but we had work to do specifically, but now I guess I'm coming back to what makes my freedom of mind and my creativity exciting, okay?
Marc:I went and saw Joanna Newsom the other night.
Marc:Yes, I did.
Marc:for those of you who listen to this show regularly or, or nerds about it or compulsive about it, have listened to everything.
Marc:I hit her husband, Andy Samberg was on the show and, and I didn't know who she was.
Marc:I felt bad.
Marc:And then people like, how can you not know who she is?
Marc:Certain people.
Marc:So then I got some of her records from drag city.
Marc:Um, they were nice enough to, to, to give me a couple.
Marc:And I listened and I'm like, I don't know if I can handle this.
Marc:It's a little to definitely, I got to sit down and do this.
Marc:Joanna Newsome business.
Um,
Marc:you know because it's very unique it's very um of her own and uh it you know it requires some multiple listening then i then i think it looks like i'm going to talk to her so i you know i went through i got her new record then i went through all the old records and then my my uh my girlfriend sarah kane the painter was buddies with joanna like a decade ago back in the day in the bay area and they they
Marc:hadn't really they haven't talked at all really since then so she knew a little about her and she actually had one of her self-released cdrs that you can't get on itunes so i listened to that so i got all up to speed and she was here at the orphan last night a couple nights ago friday and i went to see her and it was like she's from another planet man some magical shit
Marc:That woman is definitely touched.
Marc:She had a couple of cello players and a piano player and a keyboard player, and her brother was on drums, and she had a guy that played guitar, banjo, bass, and an oud or something, some unique-sounding, almost Renaissance-y instrument, and all of them kind of moved around and played different instruments.
Marc:She had her giant harp.
Marc:I was like, what kind of audience is here?
Marc:It felt like a Nerd Hobbit movie.
Marc:You know when people are a little too sensitive to really live out in the world, but they can't really show that?
Marc:They all came and almost like worshipped Joanna Newsom.
Marc:It was pretty stunning.
Marc:So that was just an experience I had.
Marc:Harp, though, doesn't look like a practical instrument to me.
Marc:Doesn't look like something you could be just like, hey, can I come over and jam?
Marc:I got to throw my harp in the car.
Marc:The thing was as big as a car.
Marc:But she was just magical.
Marc:And afterwards, her and Sarah were able to reunite for a few minutes.
Marc:And that was touching.
Marc:Almost made me cry.
Marc:You know, when you haven't seen somebody in 10 years, it was emotional for me.
Marc:Anyways, I'm rambling about Joanna Newsom.
Marc:eventually she will be on the show we will do that okay all right ethan hawk and again his film born to be blue uh where he plays uh chet baker is now playing in select theaters this is me and ethan
Marc:so i watched um the chet baker movie good job buddy thank you yeah that couldn't have been easy no it was not easy it was not easy it's funny um
Guest:I don't remember the day that I agreed to do it.
Guest:How the hell did I ever agree to sing My Funny Valentine on camera?
Guest:I don't know what possessed me.
Guest:And to do it like him.
Marc:Anyway, it's just one of those strange things.
Marc:It slowly happened to me, I feel like.
Marc:Well, I mean, whose project was it?
Marc:Because it's, you know, he was a pretty, like, I think he was a glamorous character, but by the time, like, in terms of, like, you know, he was smooth and sexy and handsome and all that, but by the time you pick up your story of him, he's pretty beat up.
Marc:All those days are gone, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it's like, you know, he's got no fucking teeth.
Marc:I mean...
Marc:Did you watch that documentary?
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, that documentary, Bruce Weber made Let's Get Lost the year I graduated high school.
Guest:And in a lot of ways, that movie was my first introduction, not only to Chet Baker, but I really didn't know anything about jazz at all.
Guest:And Chet, in a lot of ways, is a good entry point.
Guest:He's very accessible.
Guest:And like Nina Simone or something, it's easy to enjoy.
Guest:You don't have to have a sophisticated ear like you do with...
Guest:Right.
Guest:Coltrane or Charlie Parker or Miles Davis.
Guest:And so, you know, my relationship is actually kind of strange because Richard Linklater and I... I'll tell you the truth.
Guest:The truth is I was here in L.A.
Guest:one time and Brad Pitt apparently dropped out of some Chet Baker project.
Guest:This is about 15, 16 years ago.
Guest:And this producer calls me up and says, hey, would you be in a Chet Baker biopic?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, let me think about that.
Guest:And I called up Linkletter.
Guest:And Linkletter and I went down the rabbit hole about, I mean, he was, his brain was so interesting thinking about Chet and jazz.
Guest:Yeah, because Rick had this great immediate hit on Chet Baker of what was interesting about him.
Guest:And what was interesting about him is this detachment.
Guest:And that's like, what is cool?
Guest:Chet Baker is cool.
Guest:What is cool?
Guest:Cool is detachment.
Guest:And detachment has a positive manifestation and a negative manifestation.
Guest:And Rick was like, yeah, let's make a movie about detachment.
Guest:Let's make a movie about cool.
Guest:It'll be like Pull My Daisy and we'll set it in the 50s.
Guest:And it was awesome.
Guest:We got all jacked up about this movie and we got a script together and we were trying to raise money.
Guest:And it just slowly fell apart and never happened.
Guest:And we never got to make the movie.
Guest:And it left me with this...
Guest:uh strange disappointment because i had really worked hard on it and i thought worked hard on the research and and thinking about chet research makes it sound like i went to the library and but no but just getting into it in my imagination you know it's the kind of thing i thought about for a couple years all the time you're driving on it you're just thinking about i'm listening to music everything is an excuse to think about how i might want to inhabit that world and then it just went away it's really funny the the script we'd come up with was an idea of that um
Guest:uh a day in the life of chet baker the day before he tries heroin oh really that was the idea and finally one day i was at rick's house and and uh i started asking him questions well maybe we should go to a new line or maybe they'll give us some money yeah and rick's like how old are you pal oh no you think i'm too old for this part he's like
Guest:Too old?
Guest:For the script we'd written, it'd taken us too long and I got too old.
Guest:Well, okay, so that's the point.
Guest:Then 10, 15 years go by and I get another script and I open it up and it's called Born to be Blue and then here's Chet Baker again.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Only he's in his 40s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Toothless and screwed up and lost.
Guest:And I felt like this part was kind of chasing me down a little bit.
Guest:And I almost also felt like I was reading the sequel to a movie I didn't make.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:We started this.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I felt kind of compelled to make it.
Guest:And I met this filmmaker, Robert Boudreaux, who had written the script.
Guest:And it was clear to me that he was a little obsessed with this topic.
Guest:He'd made a short film about Chet.
Guest:He'd had...
Guest:several different versions of the script and he started giving me different versions of the script and i was able to to read all these different uh ideas that he wanted you to be part of the collaborative process yeah which is if you're gonna go down the rabbit hole with the really scary part right you want to be you don't want to be dictated to about how it's supposed to go you want somebody who's going to understand where you're coming from and
Guest:And I had, you know, Philip Seymour Hoffman had just died.
Guest:Were you guys close?
Guest:He was a real hero of mine.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We worked together on Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we met when I first moved to New York.
Guest:Phil was the guy, when you'd go audition for a movie, he was always the reader.
Guest:What do you mean he was the reader?
Guest:Oh, like my screen test for Scent of a Woman.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So Pacino's not there for your audition.
Guest:They hire some actor to read the lines.
Guest:And here it's Phil Seymour Hoffman, right?
Guest:That was his job?
Guest:That was his job, yeah.
Guest:He'd work for the casting agent?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he was so serious, this guy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he wanted... I had a little theater company, and he wanted me to do one of his plays, and I said no, because I had my hands full of mouths, and he said, I'll start my own theater company.
Guest:Right, what was that called?
Guest:I think I remember that.
Marc:Well, his theater company... Your theater company.
Guest:It was called Malapart.
Guest:Right, and that's...
Guest:And then Phil started his own.
Guest:But anyway, we were friends for a long time.
Guest:Then we did Before the Devil Knows You're Dead together.
Guest:And he was, if you care about the New York theater scene and you care about movies, there's actually only a handful of people.
Guest:I mean, he's a real, he was a real pillar of that community.
Guest:And he had just passed.
Guest:And so... Sad.
Guest:Sad.
Guest:The notion of what drives really talented and successful people to do such self-destructive pain management was really interesting to me.
Marc:What would you come up with?
Marc:I mean, I saw the performance, but intellectually, what do you think was the weight of it?
Marc:Because I think some people...
Marc:who are either blessed or cursed with talent or more sensitive than others and can't handle life as well as others.
Marc:But where do you come on?
Marc:You know, where do you fall into that spectrum?
Marc:You don't seem like a guy that would lose himself like that necessarily.
Guest:That's a big question because I know that I've had a lot of people in my family who've dealt with real issues of depression.
Guest:And, you know, from bipolar to schizophrenia to real serious issues.
Guest:And I have often felt, I remember...
Guest:thinking that sometimes the most beautiful and sensitive people that I've ever met, my stepfather was really touched with grace in a lot of ways.
Guest:He is a very... He's one of those people I almost... When I was a kid, I felt this way that maybe nature puts magical people every thousand people or something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But they're a little too sensitive for daily life.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:They're put there for special occasions when there's real need.
Guest:Because he's a poet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Phil was a poet.
Guest:And I think Chet Baker, in a way, in his own, his horn, he was a poet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think that's right.
Guest:This really, really sensitive soul.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think that's right.
Guest:They don't have the right sense of humor about certain things.
Guest:They're very earnest, usually.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think my hit on Chet is that I think what he really, really wanted was a jazz life, and he had an ethos that was a little bit different.
Guest:I don't think he really wanted to...
Guest:fit into society the way everybody else wants you to.
Guest:And what he really, really coveted was a life playing music.
Marc:And that was getting lost in the music.
Marc:There's that great scene in the dressing room with you and the manager, you know, where you're making that decision.
Guest:You know, and it's kind of a... What I love about the film is it hits... It drives to a central point, which is...
Guest:where you can have a professional triumph and at the same time is immense personal failure.
Guest:People often think that somehow people they see are successful or whatever, that somehow they're succeeding as a person.
Guest:And I made this documentary about Seymour, and it's about this 88-year-old pianist.
Guest:It's called Seymour and Introduction.
Guest:One of the things that Seymour talks about in a life in the arts is that if your art isn't integrated into your development as a person, then it's actually going to throw your whole life out of balance.
Guest:And whether you succeed or not, you may succeed, Glenn Gould being an example, Jackson Pollock, Marlon Brandt, all these different people where they're letting their art and their neuroses drive their life.
Guest:Because what's most important to them is their art, but they don't realize that if you...
Marc:succeed at it and lose yourself that is you know is it really success and and that to me is an interesting question yeah well that but in that uh in that equation is losing yourself actually becoming a transcendent artist and is it worth that risk is that what you're saying or is it losing i
Marc:I don't know the answer to it, but I know what you're saying.
Marc:Is it worth the risk?
Marc:If you look at someone like Chet Baker, because that's a question you have at the end of that movie.
Marc:It's like, all right, well, he did some of his best work after that, and he committed to a life of jazz and drugs.
Marc:But in retrospect, is he a sympathetic figure, or do we look at him as just a sort of tormented genius who gave us this great gift?
Marc:It's weird.
Marc:You look at it as a person and as an appreciator, it's a different thing.
Marc:it's a different thing if you look at it as a jazz fan it's one thing if you look at it as his son right you know his daughter what happened to that kid did you well he's he has several children and a couple ex-wives and yeah and i imagine that there's some hurt there of course and then like in that great thing in the movie see that's the other thing about sensitive people and i think that you actually possess some of this not in a destructive way that i can tell in watching your work but you know that relationship with his father you
Marc:where it's sort of the key into why he's like that, why the love deficiency can never be met.
Marc:Like psychologically, it's sort of answered there, right?
Marc:But it doesn't necessarily, because there's two ways to look at that shit.
Marc:If you're not an artist, you go to therapy and you try to figure out, you go to Tony Robbins or whatever to try to get your shit together.
Marc:But if you're fortunate enough to have talent, you can drag everyone else through your struggle.
Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:Come through my pathos with me.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:But, like, I noticed that about you.
Marc:That was the one thing that was, you know, when I watched Boyhood recently and I always watch Training Day when it's on because I love that fucking movie, is that somehow or another, whatever you've had your entire career, which is an access to vulnerability...
Marc:that you can bring to even the roughest roles is sort of an amazing thing.
Marc:Do you feel that?
Marc:I mean, like, because that role in boyhood, you know, we can come back to Chet Baker that, you know, that was a very human and very, you know, sort of, you know, a painful guy to play and how that, you know, he had to mature, you know, later than he should.
Marc:And that, you know, when it comes full circle and you're sort of a standup guy at the end, that was pretty sweet stuff.
Marc:Very heartbreaking.
Guest:Well, everybody likes to think this idea that we're like born done, you know, that we're somehow or that we even ever really arrive anywhere.
Guest:You know, I mean, what was interesting to me about boyhood is I felt like I was being offered a job that no actor had been offered before.
Guest:is to get to create a character.
Guest:There was really no script.
Guest:Rick was asking me to create a portrait of fatherhood and use time as clay.
Guest:You're going to get to use... You won't have to act all this stuff.
Guest:And I had this vision when he was talking to me about it in my brain of... Initially.
Guest:Initially, I'm talking about 15 years ago.
Guest:We're sitting in a cafe.
Guest:My son was just born.
Guest:He's telling me about this idea that he wants to make this movie and take 12 years to do it.
Guest:And I was like, well, I really pictured my father in my first memories, you know, like around the time the movie starts, six years old, first grade.
Guest:What does your father look like?
Guest:in those memories to you.
Guest:And for me, I have a very specific image of him that is very different than the image I have of the man who was at my high school graduation.
Guest:And when I try to look at those two, I realize that he was growing up as much as I was.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that became kind of Rick and I's journey with my character as part of that movie and what we were doing with this.
Guest:And this point that we're not finished...
Guest:Well, your parents were young, weren't they?
Guest:My mom was 17.
Guest:My father was 19.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Can you imagine having kids at that age?
Guest:I got a 17-year-old daughter right now, and I hope she wouldn't mind me saying this, but she really wanted a puppy this year, and I knew it was a bad idea, but my mother said this funny thing.
Guest:She said, oh, Ethan, let her get that puppy.
Guest:It's the big... If I just had a puppy, I don't think I would have had you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I needed something to take care of.
Guest:And so I was like, I got that puppy, man.
Guest:But where did you grow up?
Guest:Well, let's see.
Guest:I was born in Austin, Texas.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you're Texan.
Guest:Well, yes.
Guest:My father still lives there.
Guest:But I really grew up in high school traveling around with my mom.
Guest:And my mom, we moved to Atlanta.
Guest:We moved to Brooklyn.
Guest:We moved to Connecticut.
Guest:Was you looking for work?
Guest:Yeah, well, she was obviously clearly a young woman, right?
Marc:When did they get divorced?
Marc:How old were you?
Guest:I was around three.
Marc:Oh, so she was like 21.
Marc:21.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:So she's just a kid.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:She's still in college.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And...
Guest:So but yeah, I grew up with her.
Guest:She was as she kind of was finding herself trying on different jobs.
Guest:And yeah, we went.
Guest:She was a waitress at Stratton Mountain Valley Lodge for a year.
Guest:And for a year, I was like the greatest third grade skier you ever met.
Guest:And then we left there and went to Atlanta.
Guest:And then Atlanta was, you know, it was just you and her.
Marc:yep wow so you were a buddy yeah exactly yeah it's weird those relationships where you sort of got to stand in you know what i mean like i meant i because my mom was what 22 when she had me and my dad was never around so you get this weird i imagine extra emotional pressure to deal with the with the mom you really do i mean many a novel has been written about it yeah but uh so how'd you end up in new york
Guest:well let's see how i ended up in new york was that i was when i was graduating high school i really was pretty sure i wanted to be an actor or sometimes i wanted to be jack london i really wanted to be out in the writing about the wild yeah i don't want to be a merchant marine and have adventures and and and write about them and
Guest:And so I went to Carnegie Mellon for a hot minute to study acting, and that didn't go very well.
Guest:I was pretty unhappy there.
Guest:Why?
Guest:What happened?
Guest:You didn't like the system?
Guest:You know what happened for me is college is too much like high school.
Guest:I had this feeling when I finished high school that I was ready to be an adult, and I wanted to have adult experiences.
Guest:And I was just a freshman again.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I felt like I was just, I signed up on a dotted line.
Guest:I was supposed to be here then and there.
Guest:And I just, and you know, there was just the culture of,
Guest:everybody just drinking and um not that i don't like drinking but it just was just this haze of stupidity yeah uh and i wasn't that interested and i heard about these auditions for dead poet society this movie your mom was living in new york at the time no my mom was living in princeton new jersey well actually she was teaching school in trenton at the time in trenton yeah yeah my mom is a real kind of radical eleanor roosevelt type she lives in bucharest romania now working for gypsy rights and
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:She's really a bizarre person.
Marc:She did remarry because you said your stepdad.
Marc:Did she stay with that guy?
Marc:No.
Guest:She's split from him and I have a new stepdad.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:She has her eccentricities.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:The rotating stepdad.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that sec, that sec, that first stepdad, he was the poety kind of sensitive guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you still have a relationship with that guy?
Marc:I sure do.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Cause I, I don't, my parents stayed together till I was like 35 and then they bailed.
Marc:But, uh, so I don't have these relationships with stepdad.
Marc:This is interesting to me.
Marc:Cause you, and you have a relationship with your real dad.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Well, you only have one father, right?
Guest:There's only one that brings you into the universe, so to speak.
Guest:But you have a lot of guardian angels.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:You have a lot of mentors.
Guest:And for me, often...
Guest:people will either say it as a positive or they'll say it as a negative that I have tried a lot of different things in my life.
Guest:You know, I've written books and I've, you know, acted in plays and directed movies and done a documentary and tried journalism and I've tried all.
Guest:And part of that comes from my stepfather,
Guest:who had, he just didn't see any difference in the arts.
Guest:He really saw the whole thing like a big fist.
Guest:And, you know, like acting is one finger and music is another finger and painting is one and sculpture is another.
Guest:And they're all about this need to communicate with each other.
Guest:With a fist.
Guest:I like the fist metaphor.
Marc:There's a certain fuck you to it.
Guest:Yeah, it's like the Hunter S. Thompson six-finger fist, you know, right to your solar plexus.
Guest:And, you know, my stepfather had that...
Guest:exactly what you're talking about.
Guest:And, um, which is what I mean is a certain fuck you factor to it, which is that, you know, society, there's a lot wrong.
Guest:There's a lot of games people play and there's a lot of lies and there's an obsession with money and there's, uh, and he,
Guest:I kind of very beautifully would see through that.
Guest:But when I talk about sensitive, I'm not kidding.
Guest:It was the late 80s when I'm graduating high school.
Guest:And he's the type of person that you'd see all the starving children in Ethiopia.
Guest:Yeah, on TV.
Guest:And people feel bad or turn off the TV or they'd send in $30 or something.
Guest:Well, he flew to Addis Ababa.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's what he did.
Guest:He's like, I can't turn off this TV anymore.
Guest:I can't be this person.
Guest:I'm just going to go there.
Guest:And this is the guy that I was growing up with in the house.
Guest:And he was a really eccentric person, which is I mean, by that, he taught me to play football and he taught me sports, but he also taught me.
Guest:a real love of the arts that's an amazing thing and he i mean and but that's the thing is no difference music acting writing poetry i remember i was writing a uh this girl i had this question this girl senior year i was graduating and i i wrote her this uh little kind of love postcard thing that i'd left out on the thing
Guest:And he said to me once, this poem stinks.
Guest:He said, you've only got a few moments in your life to be 18.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you got to write a better poem than this.
Guest:He's like, you know, he's like, give her something good.
Guest:Write about her.
Guest:Don't write about yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, talk about her.
Guest:Why is this poem to her and no one else?
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I was like, that's a good idea.
Guest:Did you do it?
Guest:Oh, and it worked like gangbusters, man.
Yeah.
Marc:But that's sweet.
Marc:You're right about that, especially when I think that if you're your parents separate when you're younger, there's almost a craving like my dad was fairly absent, but there's a craving for that guidance.
Marc:And you're fortunate, you know, that you had another guy that, you know, came into your life that I mean, because that sounds like it changed your whole way of thinking.
Guest:It did.
Guest:And then, you know, you get to be, and I'm raising two kids, you know, my two oldest are, you know, I'm split from their mother.
Guest:And so I'm looking at this from both angles.
Guest:And I really feel like I was able, my real father is a very different man and has a lot to offer too.
Guest:What's his trip?
Guest:He's a mathematician.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's spent his life as an actuary and just really deeply kind, deeply humble person.
Guest:Organized.
Guest:Incredibly.
Marc:It's the opposite, emotionally, from your stepdad.
Guest:And so he's had to deal with this artist's son, which I'm sure has been challenging for him, but he would never let on that it was.
Guest:He's just very...
Guest:a person of a deep and substantive faith and that guides his life and he's really fun to be around because of it oh yeah he's grounded yeah very deeply grounded in that way and what is interesting for me is I've been able to pool from these different role models you know what I mean and that's what I hope that my kids can do too how they do them
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:When you're a certain age, it's a time to judge your parents by what they're not.
Guest:I'm at the non-judgmental phase of parenting because I'm being judged.
Guest:Right.
Marc:By the older ones?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I've got one graduating high school, and I've got one who's about to be a freshman in high school.
Marc:So you're taking the hit?
Marc:Taking the hit, man.
Marc:Dad is a phony.
Marc:It'll pass.
Marc:He'll come back around.
Marc:Do you get along with her, your ex-wife?
Marc:yeah please please move on yes i do oh good but also i imagine that given that you started acting because now we can come back around so you leave carnegie mellon you find out there's a advertise uh you they're casting for dead poets you hadn't done anything before dead poets really i had i'd done some child acting did this movie called the explorers when i was 13
Guest:yeah and your mom was into it she was cool with the she was not into it she was really busy and she just appreciated me being busy who took you into the city for auditions myself you took the bus i took the train oh yeah yeah when you were 13 14 remember you could do that
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's a little crazy.
Guest:My mother told me as long as it didn't cost her any money, she wasn't going to pay for headshots or pay an agent or anything like that.
Guest:But if I wanted to go on some open calls, I could.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had this friend of mine who lived down the street who had an agent.
Guest:And so I'd hop the train and hear about, you know, I'd hop the train with him and go on these casting calls.
Guest:And one of them was for the Explorers.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And, you know, we were kind of touching on Phil, but, you know, that's where I worked with River Phoenix.
Guest:In The Explorers?
Guest:In The Explorers and got to know him.
Guest:And this, I think when this script arrived on my desk, right after Phil had died,
Guest:It was hard for me to think about Phil without also thinking about River.
Guest:River was my first relationship to acting.
Guest:We were learning about acting together.
Marc:And you're both about the same age, huh?
Guest:Yeah, we were 14 when we made that movie.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:But so that had been a little glimpse of my life, like a tiny chapter that I'd almost forgotten about when I graduated high school.
Guest:It had just been this weird, strange summer camp experience that was different than the rest of my life.
Guest:I went and auditioned for Dead Poets Society, and I got the part, and that just kind of led me on the path where I find you today.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's the other interesting thing is that having these different role models as men in your life and your mother who you had...
Marc:you know you were sort of um i imagine if the relationship with your mother is like you had to be aware pretty early that you know she was busy dealing with her own shit and you know at least she gave you the opinion to the option to do what you wanted as long as you didn't get in trouble i imagine my mother placed a great value on independence yeah it was really like uh she had a lot of respect for
Guest:for me, if I just took care of myself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:She appreciated that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, if I just... Be a good kid.
Guest:Be a good kid.
Guest:She'd give me... I can't shit you none.
Guest:For Christmas, you know, she loved to give me... The tree would be lined with presents, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And you'd get under there.
Guest:They're all library books.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Stay home and read, kid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had to return them.
Marc:really that was your big test that was that she would always she'd get me she'd go to the library and get like 15 books and wrap them and put them under and you know i'd have a month yeah and did you read them or did you just take them back yeah some of them so after dead poets well that i guess that was the question is that now you're in this position to be having an experience with different types of role models like uh who you're acting with so i imagine when did you start realizing like that you know you could learn from the people you were working with or did you
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Because you're working with Robin, you're working with that whole cast of kids that are your age in that movie.
Marc:Was it more of a feeling of like, I'm just doing my job?
Marc:Or did you have moments where you're like, holy shit, that's Robin Williams and he's doing this thing?
Guest:For me, it felt like...
Guest:Peter Weir was the director of Dead Poets.
Marc:Brilliant guy.
Marc:Brilliant guy.
Guest:Okay, so he's made Year of Living Dangerously, which was one of my favorite films.
Guest:Hanging Rock, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Which is incredible.
Guest:He made Witness.
Guest:Oh, what a great movie that is.
Guest:He made The Last Wave, right?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:This is a major.
Guest:And when I was in the room with him,
Guest:It was my first experience with what it was like to be with somebody who is an adult artist.
Guest:And he was living his life in service of something larger than himself.
Guest:He was dedicated to telling stories and making movies and bringing out the best in others.
Guest:This is a major heavyweight human being.
Guest:And I felt like I was meeting...
Guest:You know, I'd studied Sam Shepard and I'd studied, you know, I'd read Tolstoy.
Marc:At that age?
Marc:Right, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that's the kind of stuff I was reading, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I felt like I was meeting an artist.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Like I'd heard about them in books and I'd read about them in the newspaper.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And this was a damn artist.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Here he was.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Real deal.
Guest:And we were staying at the Ramada Inn in Wilmington, Delaware.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he gave all of us kids... I mean, this is the start of my artistic life, is that he gave us a challenge where you had to write your character's biography, which I've later come to find out that this is a very common acting exercise, but I'd never been in an acting class proper.
Guest:And he said, you know, write your character biography.
Guest:You know, so I had to write, like, okay, well, I was born in this town, and this is my favorite color, and this is what... And you start collecting a subconscious that is a little bit different than your own.
Guest:That's the idea.
Guest:And he would say things like to Robert Sean Leonard, who was playing my roommate, he's like, okay, I need to believe that you two are friends, he'd say to us.
Guest:So I want to put a scene in the script that is going to be about your friendship.
Guest:And he showed us the schedule.
Guest:And on Wednesday, the October 17th, we're going to shoot this scene.
Guest:We're going to shoot it for four hours here.
Guest:And you are going to write it.
Guest:He said, you two are going to take, I need three two-page scenes about friendship.
Guest:About you two becoming friends.
Guest:And I will film it on this day.
Guest:I'm going to pick one of them and you guys write it.
Guest:And so...
Guest:Bob, we're 17, 18 years old, right?
Guest:And this is the heavyweight human being saying he's going to film a scene we're writing.
Guest:So we stay up all night.
Guest:We're working on what could it be?
Guest:What could it be?
Guest:Overthinking it.
Guest:Oh, overthinking it.
Guest:We hand him in these three different two-page scenes.
Guest:And he looks at him and he goes, okay, I like this one best.
Guest:We'll shoot that one.
Guest:And it goes on the schedule and there it is, scene 52, part B or whatever the hell it is.
Guest:And he films this scene.
Guest:And here's the funny thing.
Guest:It's not in the movie.
Guest:He completely cut it out, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:But we became friends.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And what I learned was a process that was going to become invaluable to me working with Richard Linklater.
Guest:People think when you get on a Linklater movie that, oh, rehearsal is like...
Guest:Play practice like it is in seventh grade or something.
Guest:Do you know?
Guest:And play practice with Richard is something deeper and more mysterious than that, which is kind of joining imaginative forces.
Guest:That the most important thing that really happens in rehearsal...
Guest:It's not that I plan to say this line when I put the coffee down on there.
Guest:It's that we're actually making the same movie and that we have this, we start a collective consciousness so that the same symbols mean the same things to me that we're on the same as they do to you.
Guest:When I make a joke, you laugh because we know what each other are talking about.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And then everything becomes easy.
Guest:It's classic teamwork stuff.
Guest:I mean, you learn this in baseball and football and teams that achieve in a high level.
Guest:serious nonverbal communication right and what peter weir was teaching me first of all he's teaching me how to write by giving me these biography lessons and uh and he was teaching me how to what a what a cinema experience can be because people love this idea that there's improvisation yeah and
Guest:And I've never improvised well when the cameras were rolling.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I can improvise really well in rehearsal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I can rewrite it and restructure it so that the movie has the feel of spontaneity.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:You know that when you know the bits that come out of improvisation, you're like, I'm going to hold on to that.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know which ones to get rid of.
Marc:Well, before I forget, quick question.
Marc:There were some weird things in the little moments in the new movie, in Born to be Blue, that I thought were great details.
Marc:Like, was you walking off with the plant, was that in the script?
Marc:No, no.
Guest:but you know i read this thing what i love i was what i was doing i was staying up all what i was so fun about studying a really interesting person like chet is like i could stay up all night reading weird books and weird and one of his friends was talking about one he was um you know like a lot of junkies he was just always on the prowl hustle yeah he's just hustling he tried to leave every exchange with the positive right so i thought this guy in the scene i'm asking a guy for a favor and he turns me down so i steal his
Marc:plant and then the line after that is genius where where like because like some parts of the movie with the romance it's it gets a little kind of like um romantic you know but the stuff like you know with the junkie stuff and that's not a negative thing but like i felt that some of the the details around what you did with the character was kind of interesting because then the manager guy goes is she really pregnant you go no and he goes well that's a start yeah like it's honesty yeah on some level yeah
Guest:I like those.
Guest:And see, that's interesting.
Guest:That moment you just picked, that was an improvisation that then we scripted and shot.
Guest:Because we were joking around doing the scene, and in the rehearsals, I was stealing the plant.
Guest:And then he ran and chased.
Guest:This guy, Callum, is a great actor.
Guest:This Canadian guy, Callum Keith Rennie, he's great.
Guest:And he started busting my balls, and we found a real moment.
Guest:And that's what you're always hunting for, is a real moment where it doesn't feel scripted.
Marc:That's weird, I felt that.
Guest:Yeah, and what you're talking about is...
Guest:I know what you mean when the movie gets into the more straight up romance.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:In a lot of ways, they could be anybody.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because men and women fall in love or men and women fall in love.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the one guy asking a girl to marry him is, you know, there's certain.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Losing.
Guest:It's what I love about Linklater's boyhood is he doesn't do any of those moments.
Marc:Right.
Marc:No.
Guest:You know, he just avoids any first kiss gone for losing Virginia gone.
Guest:It's all the same, folks.
Guest:We all know what that is.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, yeah, but still, the commitment to the character, like, you know, when Chet loses his shit and you realize how fucking painfully insecure he is, and that, you know, the whole struggle to figure out how to learn the horn again, you know, after he got his teeth knocked out, that just the depth of his insecurity and his own self-annihilation and how they were sort of hand-in-hand was good.
Guest:And see, I've spent my life around people like that, you know?
Guest:I mean, actors, actors, musicians, people who are so passionate and then quickly turn, you know, they turn on you.
Guest:And I've just I've seen that over and over.
Marc:Yeah, because we are looking for love.
Marc:And, you know, whether or not you can accept it or not, that's, you know, your whole other.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:But but most most performers, they want it.
Marc:yeah whether they can handle it when they get it that's right they do want it it's my life but let's like the the relationship with link letter why do you think because like not unlike uh you know scorsese and de niro and stuff you seem to be his guy you know in in in a lot of movies like he he likes working with you and we made eight films together i mean that's a lot of movies yeah so how did that that begin and why do you think you have this um this symbiosis with him
Guest:It's a little bit like any friendship or something.
Guest:If you ask too many questions about it, it kind of dissolves in your hands.
Marc:You think there's a Texan connection?
Marc:Do you think that there is?
Guest:Yes, I do.
Guest:I think that... But for whatever reason, there was a like-minded sensibility.
Guest:I mean, we're very different people.
Guest:I think that...
Guest:I really don't know.
Guest:I ask myself the same question.
Guest:I know that I'm extremely, I feel fortunate because it's a cool thing when you're young.
Guest:I mean, there's nothing I could wish for my kids more than to meet people of their generation that...
Guest:turn their brain on fire.
Guest:And I remember Rick, I had this theater company with this playwright, Jonathan Mark Sherman, we were doing one of his plays.
Guest:And Anthony Rapp was this guy who was in Dazed and Confused.
Guest:Now, Slacker had come out, but Dazed and Confused hadn't come out.
Guest:And Rick came to our theater company to see this play, to see Anthony Rapp in it.
Guest:And we were all really young.
Guest:You know, it's right around the day Slacker came out and then Reality Bites came out.
Guest:And so it was kind of interesting for us to meet because he was like the Gen X director.
Guest:I was like the poster boy of Gen X. So when we shook hands, it was like, God, I guess we're supposed to meet.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Does genetics mean anything to you?
Guest:Absolutely not.
Guest:Does it mean anything to you?
Guest:I don't even know what it means.
Guest:I didn't even read that book, and I didn't even know it was based on a book.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:And so anyway, we went out and hung out all night one night during that whole play, and I did have the feeling that I've had with certain women in my life and certain friends.
Guest:You know when you meet somebody, you're like, oh, I'm going to know this person for a long time.
Guest:You kind of...
Guest:You just click.
Guest:There's an understanding.
Marc:You just click and you just feel it.
Marc:Unspoken, yeah.
Guest:And I remember the wrap party for Before Sunrise, the first film we did together.
Guest:We were in Vienna and World Cup had been on.
Guest:It was summer.
Guest:It was gorgeous.
Guest:And I remember knowing when I left that wrap party that I wasn't done working with that person.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, that we were just starting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know why that is.
Guest:And I don't know, you know, there might be a time when, you know, he and I don't work together for a while.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I don't know what that'll be like.
Guest:But I know that the, I know the friendship has been mutually beneficial.
Marc:Well, I think, yeah, well, no, but I think he gets you clearly.
Marc:And it struck me, you know, after I talked to him for like an hour and a half or so, he's a pretty, you know, straight shooter guy and a very earnest guy.
Marc:And, you know, and he has a certain courage around how he wants to do things.
Marc:And he doesn't seem, he's a very no bullshit person.
Marc:And it just seems like he's sort of tapped into your, outside of your friendship, to your capacity to be open and vulnerable as a man on screen.
Marc:Because a lot of those roles require that.
Marc:And I think he's sort of like that.
Marc:And it's not really the standard way of approaching masculinity on screen.
Marc:Like there's an honesty to it that you don't see a lot.
Marc:And I think you can play it.
Marc:And I think he likes to really be honest about that stuff.
Marc:Does that make sense?
Guest:It does, and it's that honesty that feels like oxygen, doesn't it?
Guest:And he doesn't try to be cool.
Guest:He doesn't try to be tough.
Guest:He just tries to tell the truth, whether it's about a woman or being a parent or whatever.
Guest:He's just trying to hunt for it.
Guest:And one of the things I really like about him, and I think that other actors would love this too, because he's allergic to plot.
Guest:Well, that's good, though.
Guest:And I hate plot.
Guest:I remember I got to do a play with Tom Stoppard, right?
Guest:And Stoppard once said this amazing thing that plot is this contract you have with the audience that the audience thinks they want it.
Guest:Like when you think about your favorite movies or plays or things like that.
Guest:A lot of times you can't even remember what happened at the end.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Like, did Lawrence of Arabia win a big battle?
Guest:I have no idea.
Guest:Didn't he?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:But I love that movie.
Guest:What did you love about it?
Guest:His eyes.
Guest:Remember when he's standing on top of the train and his thing?
Guest:We remember moments, and that plot is this fake thing that we create that's like the illusion that dinner's coming.
Marc:Yeah, or that there's closure.
Guest:That there's going to be closure, because life never gives you any closure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It does at the end.
Guest:Unfortunately.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I hate that.
Guest:But the point being is that what we like is the experiences.
Guest:And it doesn't really matter what happens.
Guest:Whether it's boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl.
Guest:However, it's not what happens.
Guest:It's how it happens.
Marc:It's the process.
Marc:And Rick is just completely into how.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, yeah, and that's a tremendous risk.
Marc:And that's what's amazing that outside of the device of boyhood that it got the attention it got because it was all about those feelings and about the process and about life and about the moments that have no bearing on plot or anything else.
Marc:It was almost like a meditation.
Marc:I mean, when you watch that movie, it's kind of mind-fucking.
Marc:What was your experience watching the full film after 10 years of...
Marc:Yeah, 12 years.
Marc:It's bizarre to know that these characters are moving through this time in real time.
Marc:It's mind-blowing.
Marc:To watch yourself age?
Guest:Well, there's this lie we all tell each other all day, which is that time isn't happening.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's happening.
Guest:We're all dying this second and the next second.
Guest:And I'm already nostalgic for when we started this interview.
Guest:Well, that's nice.
Guest:Yeah, but here's the thing.
Guest:When I was going down the rabbit hole thinking about Chet Baker and listening to Miles Davis and listening to all this other stuff, I...
Guest:thought a lot about what they were going for with the whole idea of the discipline of jazz and the freedom of jazz right of what they're going for and that's what watching boyhood was like to me is that there's this immense discipline in the architecture of what rick's doing i'm going to take the grid the actual grid of high school first grade second grade and i'm going to make a movie about this grid but inside this grid is going to be this
Guest:just popping and popping.
Guest:I found one at 3 a.m.
Guest:online searching.
Guest:I found some interview with Chet in Norway, like in 1983, when he had a cold.
Guest:You can find this stuff.
Guest:It was a radio interview, and he was talking about how sad he is when he watches jazz musicians pretend to improvise.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That they do, oh, here's my solo where I'll improvise.
Guest:But it's the same.
Guest:It's like they've written it.
Guest:And he says what he really loves to do is go throw himself out.
Guest:Throw himself out and then find his way back into the melody.
Guest:And that it's this continual process of hurling yourself against the universe and trying to find some order.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Right.
Guest:and and i felt i really moved by that because i feel like that's what we're all doing every day right like okay i'm gonna like go get coffee today and see what happens yeah you know and um but not everybody looks at that at it that way a lot of people are just sort of like this is what i do every day and i hope the fuck that didn't that nothing weird happens
Marc:But then there are those of us who are like, I hope something weird happens.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Marc:Because they're getting a little tired.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He has this thing that I think is what is not the greatest singer in the world.
Guest:He's not the greatest trumpet player.
Guest:But when he plays, if you watch Almost Blue or you listen to his last performance live at Tokyo, he plays Elvis Costello's Almost Blue.
Guest:It's magnificent.
Guest:But you're not sure if he's going to live through the performance.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you're not, and a lot of times when you listen to him sing, you think, is this good?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or is this bad?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But whatever the answer is, you're moved.
Guest:It's real.
Guest:It's authentic.
Guest:It's real, and it's moved in.
Guest:I put a line in the movie that was a line of his when somebody was saying, in the movie, Dizzy says, hey, you got to stop this singing stuff, because people always said that to him, you know?
Guest:But he says, it's true.
Guest:It may not be good, but there's no lies in it.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:There's no lies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She had a lot of problems and a lot of, you know, but when he was performing, it was without, it was void of lies.
Guest:And that's, I think, just the fragility of it all.
Guest:It's almost like he doesn't pretend to even care.
Marc:You know, it's just, here it is, make of it what you will.
Marc:Yeah, there's some moments in that movie around drugs and around his decisions and around his stubborn commitment to just being the way he was.
Marc:It's going to be sort of jarring for some people to see you laying on the floor with a needle hanging out of your arm for a minute, not knowing whether you're dead or alive.
Marc:But the weird thing about that scene is that once you come out of it and you get the thing out of your arm, that she don't leave.
Marc:See, a lot of people don't understand that dynamic of sick relationships.
Marc:She was going to stay there and pull you out of that thing.
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:And then he used a device of meeting on the set of a movie about Chet Baker.
Guest:Well, it is a device, but that really happened.
Guest:Dino De Laurentiis approached Chet after he'd done this jail stint in Italy.
Guest:Would he play himself in a movie?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that's what got me on the hook of playing this part.
Guest:The idea that I could actually play Chet Baker playing himself.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That seemed very bizarre.
Marc:Well, there was another line.
Marc:There's these weird moments in the movie that sort of struck me as sort of strangely genuine where you're in the movie, within a movie, and you do dope for the first time.
Marc:And then there's a cut, and you go like, wouldn't I be throwing up?
Marc:I think I'd be throwing up.
Guest:This is so fake, man.
Guest:There should be puke everywhere.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Was that the script?
Guest:No.
Guest:I love it because what it does is it lets you the audience know hey look biopics are fake right okay what we're trying to get is that some truth that's beyond like if you want to study Miles Davis Dizzy Gillespie you can it's called Wikipedia you can find out exactly what happened we're trying to tell you a story that might be relevant I mean the dream is that will be relevant larger than just the facts of an individual's life you know I mean Chet Baker is not he didn't
Guest:change music he's not miles davis he's an interesting human being right who happened to be extremely talented but you know is did he create bebop no way you know nowhere near he kind of got labeled with the california sound yeah he got you know he he got that thing and he sold a lot of records because he was doing playing at a high level and he was white and gorgeous and it's accessible and
Guest:Yeah, he was accessible because he didn't play as fast.
Guest:He was really interested in melody.
Marc:And if you listen to Art Pepper, he was a horrible rat.
Marc:He'd throw anybody under the bus to stay out of jail.
Guest:That's what Art said about... Have you read Straight Time?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is it Straight Time or Straight Life?
Marc:Straight Time.
Marc:It's right there.
Marc:It's Straight Life.
Marc:That guy has such a good book.
Marc:Fucking insane.
Marc:And that guy can write.
Guest:I know.
Guest:There's passages in that book that are like blistering.
Marc:Yeah, I wonder how much of it was Laurie, because Laurie's still alive, his wife, and they wrote it together.
Marc:And what's funny about that book is it's by a sax player, a great sax player, but it's 350 pages about jail and dope and about 50 pages about sax.
Guest:You know, the pages on sax are so good.
Guest:I used to read them on set because Hampton Hawes has another Raise Up Off Me.
Guest:I always get the titles.
Guest:This is when you get old.
Guest:You forget titles.
Guest:But Raise Up Off Me.
Guest:Hampton Hawes, it's like straight time.
Guest:So good.
Guest:Is it straight life or straight time?
Guest:I keep saying it.
Marc:It's straight life.
Guest:I see it.
Marc:It's on the second shelf down right on the left.
Marc:Next shelf over.
Marc:Right there.
Marc:Second shelf down in the middle.
Guest:Straight life.
Guest:This is a great library you have here.
Marc:yeah a lot of those are aspirations yeah i know i'll take my library so let's let's move up a little bit and you know one thing is interesting is that you worked uh on midnight clear you work with pete berg who i actually was my roommate briefly in culver city before he started acting and now he's like yeah it's bizarre you know if i had to say okay i did a midnight and i hope pete berg listens to this because i think he'll find it funny
Guest:But I did A Midnight Clear.
Guest:Wonderful.
Guest:It was a really cool movie.
Marc:Interesting movie, yeah.
Guest:Interesting movie about World War II.
Guest:And it's with Gary Sinise, one of the founders of Steppenwolf Theater Company, one of my heroes as an actor.
Guest:Kevin Dillon, great Ari Gross, myself, Frank Whaley, and Pete Berg.
Guest:Of all those guys, we had a great time.
Guest:I loved those guys.
Guest:We had fun.
Guest:If the one I would pick at least likely to become a Hollywood big shot director, it would definitely be Pete Berg.
Guest:I've picked him to be like a knucklehead.
Guest:You know, he's such a jock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:He's a big personality.
Guest:Real bully.
Guest:He is a bully.
Guest:And Pete Berg once...
Guest:He threw me so hard across the room.
Guest:I mean, I literally thought I was dead.
Guest:I thought he broke my head.
Guest:He picked me up.
Guest:It was one of those things where you're like play fighting, and then he kind of hit me across the jaw, and I got pissed, and then I punched him, and then he picked me up and threw me across the room.
Guest:My head threw a wall.
Guest:I had to pay the...
Guest:some hotel, $15,000 because Pete Berg threw me through a wall.
Guest:But you know, it's fascinating, but he does, that guy has life in him, man.
Guest:Full of life, dude.
Guest:He has life, and I'm so proud of him.
Guest:And he's a good director.
Guest:Yeah, he's a good director, and he's out there doing, swinging his own, playing by his own beat.
Marc:Yeah, like he's, it's interesting that as a director, he definitely has a style.
Marc:I don't know what his relationship is.
Marc:But I just would have never thought, would you have thought that?
Marc:I knew him briefly.
Marc:I was living with Steve Brill.
Marc:You know Brill?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Me and Brill went to college together, and we'd done some writing together in college.
Marc:And I moved out here the first time in, I don't know, late 80s.
Marc:And I stayed with Brill in an apartment in Culver City.
Marc:And then Pete was Brill's friend.
Marc:And then Pete needed a place to live, so I got moved to the couch and eventually left.
Marc:But at that time, Pete was working on a doc.
Marc:Believe it.
Marc:He was doing some acting, but he wanted to make a documentary about Prince.
Marc:He had this big vision.
Marc:So he had a lot of things going on in his mind.
Marc:He did.
Marc:He always did.
Marc:He always did.
Marc:Let's talk about Training Day a bit.
Marc:Because that movie is a pretty astounding movie.
Marc:And the experience of working with Denzel and having to play off that, how did you prepare for that thing, man?
Guest:Denzel, to my mind, is one of the greatest actors of our era, and that doesn't even take into consideration the fact that he's had to overcome issues of race and deal with it.
Guest:I can speak to how hard it is to be a dramatic actor, and I don't have any obstacles.
Guest:I mean, studios don't want to make dramas.
Guest:And this guy is a world class movie star and a world class actor.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, it's really only the Brits that do that, you know, where you can be a star and also like a very serious actor artist.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Denzel is, you know, it's a hurricane.
Guest:It's a thunderstorm.
Guest:I mean, it's trying to keep your composure and create with him, you know, is hard because he's a real powerful force.
Guest:I studied his movies before I did Training Day because I just love his acting.
Guest:I just love it.
Guest:But I really noticed that...
Guest:He kind of blew everybody off the screen that he worked with, except Gene Hackman.
Guest:Well, Gene's amazing.
Guest:So I watched he and Gene Hackman, and I was like, okay, the trick is it's clear that Gene is not playing Denzel's game, and Denzel's not playing Gene's game.
Guest:And I just challenged myself.
Guest:You're watching game footage.
Guest:That's how I felt like.
Guest:I watched that movie, and I thought to myself, all right, here's the trick, man.
Guest:I have got to not care if this guy likes me.
Guest:You got to Gene Hackman it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just, I don't want to go to the Laker game with him.
Guest:I don't want to go out to dinner.
Guest:I don't want to be best friends.
Guest:I'm sure he's got a best friend.
Guest:I got a best friend.
Guest:It's fine.
Guest:I'm just going to do my job.
Guest:This guy, and he worked hard to get me that part.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I knew that, and I just put that in my hat, and I just tried to do, I just come on and not...
Guest:care if he liked what i was doing or not right um because that's the trick with the the trap with other actors often is that if you're doing what they want you to do what you're doing is making it easy for them yeah and if you're making it easy for them what you're doing is decreasing sparks yeah okay yeah you know you're actually it's like um people say this idea about like run lines with your scene partner i hate doing that
Guest:Because I don't want to get in some habitual reheated performance.
Guest:I want to have an actual creative act that you're witnessing.
Guest:And that's going to be interesting to watch.
Guest:So this idea that if you're making your scene partner happy that you're doing a good job, I don't think so.
Guest:I think that you want to have conflict.
Guest:And you have to stand up for the integrity of your person, and they have to do that.
Guest:And if the thing is written well...
Guest:sparks will fly.
Guest:So that was my work on that movie.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:Simply to try to hold your own.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I tried to take the, you know, I'd done this movie tape with Linkletter and I'd done Hamlet with Michael Amarita.
Guest:These two weird indie movies that year that I had a lot, because there was no stress, there was no budget.
Guest:They were low level movies.
Guest:I felt my confidence rising.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I, cause I didn't feel people judging me and I felt right.
Guest:And I chant, I try to play a trick on myself.
Guest:I just try to imagine that I was on set in one of those movies and, and,
Guest:denzel has an amazing quality you remember your senior year of high school like after you know like the last month of you're walking through the halls and you don't give a shit what anybody thinks about you yeah yeah it's a great feeling right yeah that's how denzel walks through life right right and i just tried to emulate it in my own way right right you know i feel like okay well on the set of tape i didn't care what anybody thought about me yeah you know yeah i said i was in charge so i'll be in charge here
Guest:I'll let it go and see how it goes.
Guest:Now, obviously, I'm not in charge, but at least I'll trick myself into having the confidence that I am.
Guest:It was good, right?
Guest:You had a good time?
Guest:I'm really proud of the film.
Guest:Yeah, it's great.
Guest:It's hard to make a mainstream Hollywood movie that also is a good movie.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:No, I can't not watch it.
Marc:I'll tell you that.
Marc:And I loved it.
Marc:I loved it.
Marc:There's that scene where he just tells you that you've got alcohol in your system.
Guest:You've got angel dust.
Guest:You're just fucked.
Guest:You think this is checkers?
Guest:This is chess.
Guest:And, you know, I just worked with Denzel and Antoine again.
Guest:We just did a remake of The Magnificent Seven.
Marc:Oh, I saw that on the IMDb.
Marc:That sounds fucking amazing.
Marc:Yeah, it should be fun.
Marc:It's all in the can.
Marc:It's done?
Marc:Well, they're cutting it now, yeah.
Marc:And how was the experience?
Guest:Well, it was a real swashbuckling Western.
Guest:I mean, we were sweating.
Marc:There's a lot of you.
Guest:It was a lot of us.
Guest:It was a lot of horses.
Marc:D'Onofrio too, right?
Marc:D'Onofrio, Chris Pratt.
Guest:He's a great actor, right?
Guest:D'Onofrio's a great actor.
Guest:Jesus, man.
Guest:So I had all these guys on set.
Guest:Those are two of my favorite all-time actors, D'Onofrio and Denzel.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And Antoine trying to manage all of our personalities.
Guest:I mean, you can be sure.
Guest:It's 104, and we're all dressed in wool and with loaded shotguns.
Guest:Who were you shooting?
Guest:Louisiana and Santa Fe.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Santa Fe's nice.
Marc:Santa Fe's nice, yeah.
Marc:I grew up in New Mexico.
Marc:So, now working with Lou May on the last movie, before the... Before the Devil Knows You Dead.
Marc:What did you take from that experience of dealing with that guy?
Marc:Because he's a real... He's an actor's director, isn't he?
Marc:Sidney, he was...
Guest:It was like, words fail.
Guest:I was in his last film.
Guest:He's 83 years old.
Guest:That film is the work of a young man.
Guest:That film blisters with rage.
Guest:It's angry.
Guest:It's weird.
Guest:He's such a great storyteller.
Guest:He's always in service of the emotion, not himself.
Guest:A lot of directors, they just want you to notice them.
Guest:He disappears.
Guest:And I have to say, if...
Guest:I could leave this interview with any one thing, is that everybody needs to watch Network again.
Guest:Again.
Guest:With the election that we're under right now, you cannot believe how prescient and relevant that film is.
Marc:You have meddled with the primal forces of nature!
Guest:It's an incredible film.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And Sidney was a great artist.
Guest:And getting to work with Phil and Marissa on a real New York movie with Sidney Lumet in the last days of his life was so exciting.
Guest:And I'll tell you one great story about him.
Guest:Phil and I went to him because we found out that he was in rehearsal.
Guest:We found out that he was going to shoot it on digital video.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we were so upset.
Guest:We're like...
Guest:He's a film guy.
Guest:He's like, when we went to Sydney and we said, hey, man, you know, let's shoot this on film, man.
Guest:Like your other films, you know, like, don't you want it to look like Dog Day Afternoon, you know?
Guest:And Sydney's like, what about Dog Day Afternoon?
Guest:Did you like the way it looked?
Guest:You know, it was so raw and
Guest:Real?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And you like that?
Guest:Yeah, you know.
Guest:And he goes, what you're saying is you want it to look kind of vintage.
Guest:Cool, right?
Guest:And we're like, yeah.
Guest:Wait 20 years.
Guest:It will.
Guest:I made Dog Day as cheaply and frugally as possible, just like I'm going to make this film.
Guest:And you trust me, live a little while, wait 20 years, it's going to look great.
Guest:it's gonna be so retro you won't even believe it that's hilarious and you know of course he's right they just Linkletter just screened Before the Devil Knows You're Dead as kind of a 10 year anniversary for the Austin Film Society and we watched it again and sure enough it looks badass and old school looks like a vintage LP you know right right that's hilarious
Guest:So what are you doing stage-wise?
Guest:Are you doing any of that?
Guest:I'm trying to work together a production of Night of the Iguana, to be honest with you.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Tennessee's a great, great play, and it hasn't been done in New York in about 25 years.
Marc:Big cast, right?
Marc:yeah pretty big yeah so when you when you start to put together I've been I've recently been uh seeing plays because um uh you know Scott Rudin has been sort of championing plays and he's he's sort of got me to interview Annie Baker oh cool and he's going to have me interview what's the guy's name Stephen Karam is that the guy's name who did the humans so I'm like sort of re-engaged a bit or maybe for the first time in my life engaged with you know current New York theater have you seen Hamilton
Marc:No, I got to see it.
Marc:Well, you got to see that.
Marc:It's really been great to go back to the theater and see quality stuff.
Marc:Anytime I go, I'm amazed.
Guest:Like the visceral.
Guest:You get beyond technology.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's so exciting.
Guest:I mean, it's like for five minutes, people aren't on their phones.
Guest:You actually have to be in a room and breathe the same air with another person and be together and laugh together.
Guest:When somebody comes up to me and they... It happened to me just the other day.
Guest:Somebody said, I saw you in...
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:They saw me in Coastal Utopia, they said.
Guest:And they remembered that there was a glitch with one of my props, that this thing was broken.
Guest:And I remember that day.
Guest:I remember that actual specific performance.
Guest:Whereas if you come up to me, say you like training day, it's meaningful to me, but I wasn't in the room when you watched it.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:When you see me in a place, it means we were there together.
Guest:We shared that moment.
Guest:We shared that moment.
Guest:And you remember the emotion of it.
Guest:I remember somebody, I was doing Henry IV with Kevin Kline, right?
Guest:And this amazing moment, which is that I had to be dead and Kevin Kline was giving this beautiful soliloquy above me.
Guest:And somebody's cell phone went off, right?
Guest:And he jumped a couple acts and said, is that the chimes of midnight?
Guest:We've heard the sounds of chimps.
Guest:And everybody laughed.
Guest:The problem is I laughed too.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I was supposed to be dead.
Guest:And so my armor is just shaking as I'm laughing.
Guest:And this person came up to me on the subway, and they were like, I was there.
Guest:And we both started laughing about that moment.
Guest:Great.
Guest:And that's theater.
Guest:And look, when you go see a great play, a real, look, there's bad stuff too, but when you see a visceral, alive work of art, and it's happening right in front of you, and it's only going to happen those few times, you're one of only a handful of people that'll see it.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:It's like seeing Neil Young.
Guest:at a tiny 100-seat house when he was not even supposed to go on.
Guest:He was just having a beer, and he came up, and I saw it.
Guest:You know, a great theater show is like that.
Guest:I mean, when I saw previews of Lin-Manuel doing this Hamilton, I saw it, and I literally didn't want to go.
Guest:It was when it was first and previews, and my wife was like, you got to go.
Guest:We're going with this couple.
Marc:It's a musical.
Marc:I hate musicals.
Guest:I said, this thing starts...
Guest:And you felt like something was wrong.
Guest:Like, it's not supposed to be this interesting.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Like, you can't, like, they must not really be saying the lines.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, like, kind of the feeling you had where you've noted, like, two moments in the Chet Baker movie that really were based out of improv.
Guest:Like, you feel that reverberation of, like, something, this is illegal shit I'm smoking here.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Then theater can do that.
Marc:Theater can do it like nothing else.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:It's amazing.
Marc:I had this conversation with somebody the other night.
Marc:I don't go to opera, and I don't go to a lot of musicals, but every time I go to a musical, if there's more than three people singing anywhere, I'm going to cry.
Marc:I don't even know why.
Marc:But with opera, I was talking to someone about opera.
Marc:I've been to maybe two in my life, and what people don't realize about opera is that it's just people.
Marc:It's not amplified.
Marc:You get this idea that it's a spectacle, but when you get there, it's like you can hear the wood and the instruments.
Guest:You can hear them step onto the stage.
Marc:Crazy.
Marc:And then you hear their voice.
Marc:I know.
Marc:And I saw Gary Sinise's production of True West.
Marc:Was it True West he did?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:On Broadway?
Guest:It was off-Broadway.
Guest:And that's the production that made me want to be an actor.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, both.
Guest:That production changed my life.
Marc:Because the night I saw it, you know that weird scene?
Marc:It wasn't True West.
Marc:That was at Cherry Lane.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Was it Daniel Stern?
Marc:With John Malkovich?
Marc:Oh, he played with Malkovich, right.
Marc:No, the one he directed.
Marc:Barry Child.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Okay, so I saw Sanisa, he directed Bury Child, and there's that scene where the guy comes in at the end with the corn.
Marc:And the night I was there, one ear of corn just started rolling down the stage towards the audience, and there was no stopping it.
Marc:And I was like, this is amazing, he's being upstaged by the corn.
Marc:I know.
Guest:But in the Pulitzer Prize, just for naught, the corn is rolling.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I was in that production.
Guest:You were?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Why don't I remember that?
Guest:Because I probably wasn't in it when you saw it.
Guest:I did the original production in Chicago.
Guest:No, I saw it in New York.
Guest:Yeah, on Broadway.
Guest:They moved it to Broadway and I couldn't come with it.
Guest:But that was one of the... That production... I loved it.
Guest:Oh, it's phenomenal.
Guest:Gary's one of the great theater directors of our time.
Guest:What's that guy that played that character?
Guest:Terry Kinney.
Marc:wow what an actor yeah how's he doing he's amazing i haven't seen him lately oh he's around all the time he directs a lot of great theater he's a he's an incredible guy like i remember really realizing that he was an actor in that that movie was okay but the the firm remember the firm yeah he's good yeah yeah yeah where he's just sitting out there in the sprinklers yeah yeah yeah his leg yeah you remember that image your whole life don't you i know there's a lot of movies like that all right well i gotta let you go because all right man that was great thank you for coming i had a great time thanks buddy
Marc:That was good.
Marc:I love that.
Marc:He lit up about theater at the end.
Marc:Lit up.
Marc:Good guy.
Marc:It was nice to talk to him.
Marc:Decent fellow.
Marc:Good stories.
Marc:Hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com.
Marc:See who's been on the show.
Marc:If you're curious, you can get hooked up with pal.fm for the archive.
Marc:You can email.
Marc:You can get on the mailing list.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Get some justcoffee.coop.
Marc:You can do whatever you got to do.
Marc:Should I play some guitar?
Marc:I didn't prepare anything.
Guest:Boomer lives!