Episode 969 - Kenneth Lonergan
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucksters what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast uh how's it going are you all right this is it this is the week the beginning of the holiday season this is where
Marc:We've already weighed whether maybe some of you still are on the fence.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:We've already weighed whether or not we're going to have people over.
Marc:We're going to have family over.
Marc:We're going to go see our families.
Marc:We're not going to see our families.
Marc:We're going to go to a thing at someone else's house who we don't really like that much, but we don't have any other plans and we can put up with it for a night.
Marc:They're OK people, but we don't really hang out with them any other time.
Marc:But it's nice to be around other people with families and whatnot if we're not going to
Marc:Go see our family.
Marc:Maybe you're doing that thing.
Marc:Or maybe you're just having a quiet night at home, avoiding the entire Thanksgiving event and situation.
Marc:Maybe you do that.
Marc:You just have like a sandwich, maybe a soda, and you kind of relish in the fact that you've turned your back on this family and...
Marc:national tradition, but yet you still watch the dog show the next day because that's something to be excited about, huh?
Marc:The grooming, right?
Marc:All those different shapes of dogs, purebreds, that's exciting.
Marc:The parade, not great.
Marc:Anyways, I guess my point is...
Marc:How are you fortifying your mind and heart in preparation for?
Marc:Yeah, I don't want to say confrontation.
Marc:Maybe some of you are just can't wait.
Marc:You can't wait to get to mom and dad's house or grandma's house.
Marc:Or maybe you've got kids and they're excited to see grandma, even though you don't really like her that much.
Marc:I don't know what your situation, but I know it's on your mind.
Marc:It's on my mind, but I'm focusing on food today on the show.
Marc:I talked to Kenneth Lonergan.
Marc:Kenneth Lonergan is a playwright and screenwriter.
Marc:You might know him from winning an Academy Award for Manchester by the Sea.
Marc:He also did the film Margaret, wrote and directed that, and You Can Count on Me was his film.
Marc:Several plays.
Marc:I just saw one of them in New York that's been revived, I think.
Marc:I don't know if it's called a revival, if it's just put up again.
Marc:Is it still a revival if it's not old as hell?
Marc:But the Waverly Gallery, which he wrote in 2000, is now up in New York.
Marc:It's got Elaine May in it.
Marc:Joan Allen is in it.
Marc:Michael Cera is in it.
Marc:Great writer.
Marc:And I was a little intimidated.
Marc:I always assume I'm going to be outgunned intellectually.
Marc:by people who write theater.
Marc:I don't know why that is.
Marc:I guess I have a place in my heart and in my mind that is threatened by people that have the wherewithal to write plays.
Marc:I guess I put a lot of stock in the possibility of theater.
Marc:And what it can do.
Marc:And I find that some plays are more abstract.
Marc:Those are the ones that always get me after.
Marc:I think it was early on when I started reading or seeing Sam Shepard plays where I'm like, where the fuck does this come from?
Marc:But I'm still sort of intimidated and and.
Marc:Nervous when I talk to playwrights, but Kenneth Lonergan and myself had a great conversation.
Marc:He came to the hotel in New York and we sat there and listened to sirens through the window and talked about New York and about plays and about all kinds of stuff.
Marc:It was actually an interesting thing happened after.
Marc:after with the conversation maybe i'll remember to tell you what that was uh there's a black friday sale at podswag.com which is where you can get all wtf merch i want to make sure you know this it's 40 off the entire site this friday so you can get discounts on items from lots of your favorite podcasts go to podswag.com that's p-o-d-s-w-a-g.com to check out
Marc:Everything that's there or go right to pod swag dot com slash WTF and get a new Draplin WTF shirt or some of the new signed posters or a signed copy of Waiting for the Punch.
Marc:It's all 40 percent off this Friday, November 22nd.
Marc:And I did put those posters in those hand screened giant posters from my Phoenix show.
Marc:Just got those over there.
Marc:Just signed a bunch of books.
Marc:So, yeah, do that.
Marc:So how are you preparing?
Marc:What's going on?
Marc:Thanksgiving's coming up.
Marc:I think I'll do a dispatch from Florida.
Marc:I haven't gone down there in a couple of years and because I've been shooting generally glow is not going to start shooting until after Thanksgiving this year.
Marc:So I get to go down and I generally cook and I'm making some changes this year.
Marc:It's a it's a big choice.
Marc:It's a big decision.
Marc:How will they how will they be received?
Marc:The changes to the menu that I'm going to incorporate.
Marc:And this is, I do think pretty heavily about it, about the food.
Marc:Because I haven't been eating much.
Marc:It's time to start eating again, by the way.
Marc:I'm glad I waited until Thanksgiving and I waited until the beginning of the glow season, the shooting.
Marc:I took off a bunch of weight.
Marc:I took off like, Jesus, as of today, probably around 15 pounds.
Marc:And most of it was just in preparing to start shooting again because those pants that I wear on Glow, the one pair of pants, I think we're integrating a second pair perhaps this season, but they get a little snug towards the end of the shooting.
Marc:There's just food all around.
Marc:I eat shit all the time over there.
Marc:I try not to, but then you end up eating.
Marc:I'll just have a half a donut.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:I'll have a quarter of a donut and then I'll loop back around.
Marc:I'll get that other quarter.
Marc:And if no one ate that other half, maybe I'll eat that.
Marc:Eating a donut in that way, it can take a half a day.
Marc:But so I'm ready to go eat Thanksgiving.
Marc:I know you're probably just wondering, well, how are you changing your menu, Mark?
Marc:What is it that you're doing?
Marc:I'll tell you.
Marc:The big change is that I generally do a sweet potato thing, just a standard kind of like streusel topped sweet, sweet potato thing.
Marc:That's almost like a dessert.
Marc:But I think I think that's out.
Marc:I think it's out.
Marc:And I know some of you are going to be like, why would you remove that?
Marc:I'm like, because there's a healthier and more interesting way to eat sweet squashy sort of sweet potato kind of shit.
Marc:I've come up with this, this recipe that I believe I invented.
Marc:And I'm going to share this with you because it's simple.
Marc:If you take that, how do you say it?
Marc:Kambucha?
Marc:Is it Kambucha squash?
Marc:Kabocha, maybe?
Marc:You know, the squash, it looks like a pumpkin that's fighting, turning yellow.
Marc:Kabocha, I believe, is a squash.
Marc:It doesn't matter.
Marc:Do you want me to tell you the recipe?
Marc:Do you want me to tell it to you?
Marc:Because this is what I'm doing.
Marc:I'm sharing a recipe with you.
Marc:That's something friends do.
Marc:So you take the kabocha, you cut it up, you gut it, you take all the seeds out, you clean all the stringy shit out of it, and then you slice it into little triangles.
Marc:I don't make them too thin.
Marc:I like them maybe two and a half inches on one side and then up to the point.
Marc:And then what I do, I'm telling you, it's good.
Marc:Get some ghee, get some clarified butter, make it so it's liquidy, and then put it in a little bowl and then just coat each piece of the kabocha squash with the ghee and then sprinkle all of it with garam masala.
Marc:which is an Indian spice.
Marc:It's got usually like cumin, coriander, some cardamom, cloves, black pepper, cinnamon, sometimes nutmeg.
Marc:And there's different versions of it.
Marc:But just do the ghee and do the garam masala and then salt them up and then roast them.
Marc:until they brown a bit.
Marc:And that's it.
Marc:It's like all those, like half of those spices, half of the Indian spices just happen to be Thanksgiving spices.
Marc:So you're kind of sneaking in something exotic with something that is also well-founded in the tradition of hackneyed Turkey Day stuff.
Marc:Am I making too much out of it?
Marc:Do you think that maybe my obsession with this squash as I head to Florida in the next couple of days to cook might be masking,
Marc:Some of the other feelings I might be having about going down to Thanksgiving and seeing my mom, my brother's coming down and flying him down.
Marc:We haven't been together with my mother in a long time for Thanksgiving.
Marc:My cousins, time passing, people getting older.
Marc:And it's Florida, too.
Marc:By the end of the week, it could be underwater or there could be chaos in the streets over some predicament.
Marc:Florida is a chaotic place that is sadly trending red.
Marc:But that red will be put out by the slow sinking of the state because of a denial that it's happening and that we have anything to do with it.
Marc:Water in the streets in Florida.
Marc:But I'm telling you.
Marc:The squash.
Marc:The squash is going to be the shit.
Marc:Don't be afraid to eat the skin.
Marc:Don't be afraid to eat the skin in life.
Marc:A quick email.
Marc:This one was funny.
Marc:I like to try to help out.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I'm not perfect in any way, but if I can help out, that's nice.
Marc:Marin drops F-bomb in my meeting.
Marc:That's the subject line.
Marc:Good day, Mark.
Marc:I drive to work every day and listen to your podcast as I snake through the shitty Sydney traffic that inevitably happens in the central business district where I work.
Marc:I finished listening to the Curve Vile episode and the Busy Phillips episode began to play.
Marc:As I pulled into my garage, it was only six minutes and 56 seconds into it before I jumped out of my car and went up to my office.
Marc:I was in my weekly sales meeting with all my offices across Australia on a video conference call.
Marc:and had my phone on the boardroom table as I was expecting an important call about a contract.
Marc:So it was within eyesight with the ringer switched off.
Marc:Just as my colleague in Melbourne was speaking, all that was heard from Sydney was, who gives a fuck?
Marc:Followed by, I fuck up the lead, who gives a shit?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:For some inexplicable reason, your podcast started playing on my phone by itself.
Marc:On speaker, what was creepy is that the phone was untouched for 30 minutes and some poltergeist shit went down as I scrambled embarrassingly to stop this tirade being confused as my own as I am Canadian and to an untrained ear, people around the other offices may have actually thought it was me swearing.
Marc:Coincidentally, you did actually say what I was feeling about my weekly meeting.
Marc:So thanks for that.
Marc:After the meeting, my colleagues in Sydney asked what the podcast was, and I told them WTF, you might actually get three more signups.
Marc:Well, I wasn't fired, and people saw the humor and what happened.
Marc:Thanks for breaking up the monotonous Monday meeting dread with a well-timed F-bomb.
Marc:Cheers, Justin.
Marc:Glad to help out, Justin.
Marc:Glad to help out.
Marc:There's one other one here.
Marc:Big ask.
Marc:Hello, I have a huge request to ask of Marc Maron.
Marc:I would be super grateful if whoever reads this could pass along my message to him.
Marc:Well, I'm reading it.
Marc:My mom is a huge fan of the WTF podcast.
Marc:She has a Boomer Lives mug that she proudly displays as her main coffee mug, and she's the one usually telling me about a new great episode.
Marc:She's been having some medical issues lately with her shoulder involving multiple surgeries, and she's really bummed out about it because her recovery is not going well.
Marc:This all being said, my huge request is this.
Marc:I was wondering if there was any way I could buy some merch as a present and have Mark sign it to her.
Marc:She's going in for further surgery in December, and she's been in a really sad place for a while.
Marc:And I just know that something like this would really help her spirits.
Marc:I know this is a huge ask.
Marc:And Mark, if you read this, thanks for even considering.
Marc:Sincerely, Phil.
Marc:Yeah, we can work that out, Phil.
Marc:But then you got to buy it and you got to send it to me.
Marc:And it's a long it's a long process.
Marc:So I then said, what's her name to Phil?
Marc:And he said her.
Marc:He said, thanks for the reply.
Marc:Her name is Rosanna.
Marc:I don't want to mention last names, but Rosanna with the shoulder issues.
Marc:It's going to be all right, all right?
Marc:It's hard to bounce back when you're older.
Marc:It takes time.
Marc:But you're lucky it's just a shoulder and not an organ or a brain or losing a foot.
Marc:Did that help, Rosanna?
Marc:Okay, all right.
Marc:So, Kenny Lonergan, Kenneth Lonergan.
Marc:I don't think I know him well enough to call him Kenny, but I think some people call him Kenny.
Marc:Kenneth Lonergan.
Marc:We talked in my hotel room in New York.
Marc:We had a nice conversation.
Marc:And before I talked to him, I made sure to catch up on some stuff.
Marc:I never watched Margaret.
Marc:And I know it was sort of a movie that got mixed response.
Marc:And I knew there was some sort of, I don't know if it was controversy, but...
Marc:But it was a difficult movie on a lot of levels.
Marc:I talked to him about it, but I watched it and I thought it was a pretty stunning film.
Marc:And what is what's my point about this?
Marc:OK, I'll tell you.
Marc:Kenneth and I had one of those conversations after the mics went off that I wish it was on.
Marc:But we were talking about we talked about Margaret during the interview.
Marc:But then afterwards, because Elaine May.
Marc:is in his play, Elaine May, who was in the very influential and famous comedy team, Nichols and May, but also went on to write many movies.
Marc:Elaine May directed The Heartbreak Kid, and I brought up The Heartbreak Kid after we turned the mics off, which is a great movie, one of my favorite movies with Charles Grodin, Sybil Shepard, Eddie Albert.
Marc:And I I just watched Margaret.
Marc:But we talked about the Heartbreak Kid being one of the great movies that really rides the line appropriately between tragedy and comedy in a way that's just painful and beautiful.
Marc:It's it's it's a stunning movie.
Marc:And then I asked him, you know, whatever happened, because Elaine May's daughter.
Marc:was in The Heartbreak Kid.
Marc:And I'm like, whatever happened to her?
Marc:And he was like, she's in Margaret.
Marc:And I'm like, who?
Marc:And she played a part in Margaret that was devastating.
Marc:Her name's Jeannie Berlin.
Marc:And I had no idea what happened to her.
Marc:And I just watched her in a three-hour movie be a genius.
Marc:And it was so thrilling, really.
Marc:I just love moments like that.
Marc:But sadly, we didn't have that conversation on the mics.
Marc:But kudos and respect to The Heartbreak Kid.
Marc:Anyways, I'm trying to introduce Kenneth Lonergan.
Marc:Elaine May is a genius.
Marc:Elaine May is great in his play.
Marc:OK, so this is me talking to Kenneth Lonergan in a hotel room in New York City.
Marc:His play, The Waverly Gallery, is now on Broadway with Elaine May, Joan Allen, Lucas Hedges, David Cromer and Michael Cera.
Marc:It's playing at the Golden Theater through the end of January.
Marc:OK, listen to us talk.
Marc:Nice to see you.
Marc:We've never met before.
Marc:Ever?
Marc:No, I don't think so.
Marc:I feel like, I don't know why, I guess I feel like I know you.
Marc:I don't know why that happens sometimes with people.
Marc:Maybe we have common friends.
Marc:It's possible.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I've talked to people in your movies.
Marc:I've talked to Casey.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know, for the movie.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I might have seen you at a award show of some kind.
Marc:It's possible.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:there were a lot of them last two years ago no kidding right oh yeah to start like I saw the play the older play that is up again Waverly Gallery last night oh yeah now who now how much when something like that is redone how much do you have to do with it
Guest:It depends completely on the production, but this one I was there a lot.
Guest:I didn't direct it.
Guest:Lila Neugebauer directed it, but I was there a lot, very involved in the casting and the whole process.
Guest:If you're the playwright, you can do as much as you want, really.
Marc:If you're around, they're like, yeah, let him come in.
Guest:Yeah, they like to have you around if you're not a pain in the ass, which I try not to be.
Marc:And what was different about staging at this time?
Guest:Well, it's different.
Guest:The first time it was staged in 2000, and the first time you ever do a play, it's a little more... Maybe you're a little more precious about how it's done, and it's a big deal.
Guest:This is a big deal, too, but I don't know.
Guest:Sorry, I guess you're just more...
Guest:Possibly a little less flexible if you're the writer.
Guest:But, I mean, you have to be flexible anyway because it's a cast and a director and it doesn't work.
Guest:Big sets, bigger sets?
Guest:Well, now, yeah, no, now there's bigger sets.
Guest:No, because it's on Broadway now.
Guest:It was on off-Broadway before.
Marc:So originally was it just one set?
Guest:It was one set with a turntable at the very end.
Guest:When I wrote the play, I wasn't really thinking too clearly about the sets.
Guest:It's a little awkward the way the set goes, because it goes back and forth between two locations until the middle of the second act, and then there's suddenly a hallway, and then there's suddenly a new apartment that we haven't seen.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it doesn't sound like a big problem, but it can be because you have to... In a smaller theater.
Guest:In a smaller theater, even in the bigger theater, that's still hard to solve because if you have one set, you've got this big space that you don't use until the last scene.
Guest:If you don't do that, then you have to figure out a way to introduce it in the middle of the action.
Guest:Also, it's a continuous thing.
Guest:They go from the hallway into the final apartment and you have to figure out... It's a design challenge because it's not elegantly thought out by the writer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That guy.
Marc:Now, it's very autobiographical.
Marc:Yeah, it is.
Marc:And you grew up here in New York.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Because I grew up
Marc:with some of that same Jewish history.
Marc:Where did you grow up?
Marc:I grew up in New Mexico, but my family's from Jersey.
Marc:So I had a communist great aunt in Fort Lee.
Marc:I had my grandma Goldie in New Jersey.
Marc:My grandma Eleanor in Bayonne, Asbury Park.
Marc:But I just find that...
Marc:That whole generation, that history, that somebody that has that proximity to the Nazis and to that kind of stuff, they're almost all gone.
Guest:Yeah, they're pretty much gone now.
Guest:I guess there's a few hanging on, but, you know.
Guest:My grandmother was born in 1903.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she was 80, in her late 80s, in the late 80s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, yeah, I mean, she'd be, you know, 115 now.
Guest:So, yeah, they're pretty much gone.
Marc:And it's like, is it like sort of this amazing gift to have to, like, I guess we're really the last generation of grandkids that were able to talk about that.
Marc:And even the way that the set is designed with that type of art, there's something very specific about that sort of progressive old school Jewish experience that really reads.
Marc:And Elaine May did a great job with it.
Guest:Yeah, she's amazing.
Guest:And the whole thing, you know, she's my grandmother and the character in the play is from a very particular demographic.
Guest:She grew up in Brooklyn.
Guest:Her parents were immigrants.
Guest:But then she quickly came to Manhattan and Greenwich Village and lived a kind of a bohemian lifestyle.
Guest:Right.
Guest:She was a soft American communist.
Guest:She was interested in the art scene.
Guest:She was mostly interested in socializing.
Guest:But she was very politically active, was a member of the American Labor Party and did all sorts of, went to lots of meetings with people like Dashiell Hammett and lived around the corner from Eleanor Roosevelt after FDR had died and used to see her walking her dog in the park and she kind of knew everybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and really kind of exemplified the Greenwich Village scene in the 40s and 50s.
Marc:Do you still live in the city?
Marc:Yeah, I do.
Marc:I live in Soho now.
Marc:Do you find, like, are you experiencing, because some of that, there was some nostalgia involved in looking at the way they projected some of the film pieces onto the set.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Does your heart sort of break for what was the city?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it does.
Guest:I mean, it's very much so.
Guest:And I mean, the city's never stayed.
Guest:It's always been in flux.
Guest:It's always changing.
Guest:That's part of the play.
Guest:Yeah, it is part of the play.
Guest:And it's hard to miss New York City in the 1970s.
Guest:It was such a sewer.
Guest:But it now seems to me to be kind of getting back to that.
Guest:It's dirtier.
Guest:It's noisier.
Guest:The construction's gone insane.
Guest:It's horrible.
Guest:And the whole city's been taken over by these buildings and all these construction projects.
Guest:The subway's a disaster.
Guest:It's really gotten...
Guest:the infrastructure is breaking infrastructure is a disaster uh but am i wrong in noticing that like uh it feels like i don't really know who the people are here anymore well i don't feel quite that way i feel like it's still the same balance there's still a balance of native new yorkers people who come in from the outside and then commuters are coming in and out you know there's not as many can live here no it's much more expensive to live here yeah no it is i mean
Guest:My grandmother wasn't wealthy, but she bought a building.
Guest:She always had some money because her father was pretty well off.
Guest:And they bought a building on Washington Place in 1940, I don't think, for a lot of money.
Guest:And she was a landlady to a small eight-unit apartment building.
Guest:What happened to the building?
Guest:It's been sold.
Guest:And now they're redoing it.
Guest:I'm sure it's been under construction for about a year and a half, maybe two years.
Guest:And I know it's going to be some...
Guest:$20 million single residence palace.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, those people.
Guest:Where are they coming from?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I think a lot of them are foreign.
Guest:I think the building was sold to a German corporation of some kind, and I don't know who they sell it to.
Guest:I don't know who could afford those rents.
Guest:You look at the apartments for sale in New York City, it's like $20 million, $7 million for a little one.
Guest:I mean, it's really gone...
Marc:Crazy.
Marc:I can't ever tell that because I spent time here.
Marc:I lived here for many years and I can't tell if I'm being like old and sort of like, well, back in the day it was this or that and the people were different.
Marc:But it just feels like the tone of the city has gotten it not.
Marc:Maybe it's because there seemed to be a more vital art scene.
Marc:I don't know where you came up in Playwriting I'm here.
Guest:I mean, I I think this art scene is I think everything that's in it is still here except for the middle-income people who are able to live in Manhattan, but Which is a huge difference but
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and will create traffic problems when it's done, because people have to go somewhere.
Marc:They're not going to stop making people, and they're not going to stop making cars.
Guest:No, and they're not going to stop building these buildings.
Guest:It's literally like the face of greed, these fucking buildings.
Guest:I just hate them.
Marc:I don't know what fills them.
Marc:Every time I'm in a hotel like this and I just look across the way at people working during the week, I'm sort of like, oh, my God.
Marc:What's happening over there?
Guest:A lot of them go bust.
Guest:I mean, NYU, for instance, is building this enormous... They keep building and building and building in the village, and they can't... It's just the people who are...
Guest:I don't know a lot about it, but the people who get the contracts and provide the contracts are making a fortune.
Guest:The school is not able to put enough students in these dorms.
Guest:And it's not a money-making proposition in the end, except for the people who skim off the top when they're being built.
Guest:So that's kind of who's taken over the city.
Marc:It was always just empty buildings.
Guest:They're just, they, yeah, I think so.
Guest:And ghost vessels, but, uh, it's not for the people who live here.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And New York has never been in totally for the people who live here, but now it's just, there's no sense of public life at all.
Guest:Uh, it's more like, it's kind of like the whole city is like a big fuck you to the people who are here.
Guest:Cause you cannot get around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, it's just, and I've lived here my whole life and it's you,
Guest:Part of living in New York, as you know, is always complaining about how different it is and how it's gotten worse, but it really, really is.
Marc:So it's the same evolution that's in the play.
Guest:Kind of, yeah.
Marc:Except now what it's turning into lacks any real character.
Guest:Yeah, in these neighborhoods.
Guest:I used to live in the village and now I live in Soho, Bleecker Street, even during...
Guest:the big changes in the sixties and seventies was still local businesses that have been there for a long time.
Guest:In the last 10, 15 years, they've been wiped out.
Guest:Ralph Lauren and, and, um, all these designer stores.
Guest:And now they're all shut cause no one, not even Ralph Lauren could pay those rents.
Marc:And now they can just buy online.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, so bleaker street, they wipe out the local businesses and then they collapse under the weight of their own, uh, expenses.
Guest:And then they don't, then, then they don't, uh, they're not certainly not going to sell those spaces to local businesses anymore.
Guest:So what does the future hold?
Guest:It's more of this, I think.
Guest:It's like, I mean, honestly, you walk around here, it's like a dystopian society.
Guest:It's a whole country, a whole world.
Guest:I know, you cannot believe what's out there.
Guest:Just getting to the theater, I live a pretty, you know, exalted lifestyle compared to most people, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not super rich, but anyone who's, you know, doing well is doing better than everybody else.
Guest:And my God, you get to, just going back and forth to work is like, it's like a marathon of garbage noise and...
Guest:And honking horns.
Guest:We've been here for 10 minutes.
Guest:We haven't heard the sirens stop once.
Marc:Well, I'm trying to figure out.
Marc:I watched Margaret last night because I hadn't seen it.
Marc:I've seen the other movies, and I've seen the one play, but I don't get to the theater a lot because I don't live here.
Marc:And when I was watching the play and realizing that you're half Jewish, half Irish,
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I found that there was sort of a like I could see a balance in the writing, you know, that in the sense that, you know, you seem to be existentially Irish and intellectually Jewish.
Marc:Well, I don't know about that.
Marc:No, but I mean, it's the message because of the character that Elaine made plays your grandmother.
Marc:is naturally sort of buoyant and engaged and intelligent and charming and funny.
Marc:Even in the middle of her losing her mind, there's sort of a comedy there.
Marc:There's a pace to it.
Marc:And with Michael Cera as well.
Marc:There is a deliberate sense of comedy there.
Marc:But there is no escaping the bleakness.
Guest:No, there really isn't.
Marc:And I guess that's an honest way to look at life, but it seems fundamentally Irish to me.
Marc:Oh, I see.
Guest:Yeah, I guess so.
Guest:Shoulder it.
Guest:Well, you know, I think the play is supposed to be somewhat of an argument against sentimentality.
Guest:We all go through these difficult and terrible things, not all day long and not every day and not every year, but when you do, it's, I don't know, I think it's worthwhile to be frank about it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But also, I feel like... But the interesting thing about... There was never an argument in the play.
Marc:And even when you wrote it, it seems that even at that time, there was sort of a natural sort of... Let's put her in a home.
Marc:But, you know...
Guest:Yeah, they didn't, I mean, it didn't work that way.
Guest:And in the play, in my life, my mom just didn't want to put my grandmother in a home.
Guest:And she also, it's a little hard, you know, the problem with all elderly people who are not doing well is that you have this terrible, you can't leave them alone.
Guest:Most of the time they don't live in the same family, most of the time they don't live in the same house as the rest of the family.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it's difficult to take care of them at home, especially if you don't have the income to pay for help.
Guest:If it's a working family, you can't leave them alone at home.
Guest:You move them with you, it's very much of a strain.
Guest:And then the alternative is to put them in a nursing home, and anyone who thinks that anyone enjoys that is just fooling themselves.
Guest:So...
Guest:And very few people are out of it to the point where they don't know where they are.
Guest:So it's a terrible dilemma.
Guest:And my mom solved it by taking the burden onto herself.
Guest:But on the other hand, she couldn't have done that if she didn't have the income to pay for help.
Guest:No single person can take care of someone who's demented and wandering around all day long.
Guest:It's not possible.
Marc:So it's not sentimental, but it is sort of responsible and loyal and with a certain amount of love that this has done and an incredible amount of tolerance and patience.
Guest:Yeah, that's yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's a lot of people do it.
Guest:I mean, a lot of people figure out a way they move back home to take care of their parents.
Guest:They.
Guest:And sometimes they just can't, you know, that's not because they don't love them as much.
Guest:They just don't have the capacity to care for them properly.
Marc:But also in the in the in the character that represents you and in terms of the what's his name?
Marc:Daniel, like you were able to at the end, you know, process this stuff that you can hold both memories in your mind.
Marc:You have that how she ended and who she was.
Marc:Yeah, it's one continuum.
Marc:And to make sure you remember the other part may not be sentimental, but it's necessary.
Guest:Yeah, I think it's, I hope it's the opposite of sentimental.
Guest:I mean, to me, sentimentality is a way to avoid real emotion.
Guest:It's kind of looking at yourself having the emotion rather than looking at the situation that is difficult.
Guest:And I think it's a way to soft pedal just to make it more tolerable.
Guest:You have this sort of sweetsy saccharine bullshit.
Guest:It's all okay in the end.
Guest:It's her time.
Guest:You know, all that crap.
Guest:Nobody...
Guest:Nobody thinks it's their time.
Guest:Nobody wants to go.
Guest:People hold on to very, very little because it's worth being alive.
Guest:And they, not to quote myself, but people really want to hang around and be functioning and have a life.
Guest:And it's kind of easy for people who are, for those of us who are not in the hot seat to kind of at some point let them go and this is life.
Guest:But if you're the one who's on your way out, it's not something you want to do.
Guest:And I think there's a certain amount of respect you can give to you can try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who's really going through something you're not and try to behave towards them as you would like someone to behave towards you when you're in trouble.
Marc:Is it sort of an aesthetic mission of yours to to to completely make sure that sentimentality is put in its place?
Guest:partly yeah i just hate it i think it's such a lie it's such a filthy lie and i don't and i think it makes people feel isolated sirens more sirens um there's something about it's also incredibly self-centered i guess if you explore it the way you just did with me there is just that it's something we do to relieve ourselves from a certain amount of emotional responsibilities
Guest:Yeah, and it's a lie, you know.
Guest:It's a lie that everything's okay.
Guest:And I don't believe in rubbing people's noses and the fact that everything's not okay.
Guest:But there's something about the common experience of things going badly.
Guest:I've had a lot of people...
Guest:to my surprise come up to me you know back then when we first did the play and now like just say that was really it was really rough but it's it's there's something there's something good about seeing your experience reflected back to you accurately you don't feel so alone a lot of times when people especially in this culture when people are in trouble
Guest:everybody's been in trouble, but you're kind of pushed off to the side.
Guest:You're relegated to a role in the margins.
Guest:It's not really woven into the way we live to take care of each other.
Guest:And people do privately, but it's not a communal experience.
Guest:Maybe it shouldn't be, but there's something that's very isolating about you have your friends and your family, hopefully, but there's something you're not, it's almost as if you're not
Guest:You're a downer and you're not in life with everybody else.
Guest:And of course you are.
Guest:But anyway, so I think there's something valuable and just being frank about it.
Guest:And there's something valuable about just just in itself, just trying to be truthful.
Marc:I thought out loud about the fact that I think that, you know, most of us are built to shoulder.
Marc:Or to sort of at least be able to show up for other people in a fairly present and honest way without it collapsing us.
Marc:But it seems that because of the pace of technology and emotional selfishness that people dismiss people.
Marc:But I do think that we're naturally able to.
Marc:to sort of show up for people that in the worst of situations and it takes less than you think definitely and people really look out for each other in a really great way innately and that's something you see in this city it's like at the beginning of margaret even with that horrible accident in new york i mean there's going to be 100 people trying to help out without a second delay no i think that's true and i think it's very it's a really good thing and that's partly what the play is about too it's how you know
Guest:But I don't think I think it's, you know, both as a play and in life, you know, this also works better dramatically.
Guest:But, you know, if you don't sugarcoat how rough the experience is, you're giving more value to the effort people make to deal with it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:See, it's a balance.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, there's a balance.
Guest:Adversity does often bring out the best in people.
Guest:You have a friend in the hospital just walking through those grimy little halls and seeing all the open doors with all the relatives sitting in these chairs.
Guest:It's depressing to see people sick and in so much trouble, but it's kind of... I don't know what the right word is, whether it's comforting or warming or inspiring.
Guest:There's something beautiful about...
Guest:all those families sitting around visiting and just sitting there and trying to help out I just feel like life at its best is rough enough and so the fact that people that it's so easy to make it worse is a real problem yeah and and I think you know the fact that people you know I don't know if it's anybody's fault but
Guest:There are not multiple generational homes here anymore.
Guest:I was talking to somebody.
Guest:I had a friend who's passed away now who, when she was older, she said to me, if I could, I'd move to Ireland because it's charming to be old in Ireland.
Guest:And I met a woman from Africa last night who was talking to me.
Guest:We were talking about the play, and she said...
Guest:We were having a similar discussion to the one we're having now, and she said to me, you know, in Africa, people like to get old because they have all the authority.
Guest:Everyone waits to get old so that they can be in charge and be the most respected person in the room and be the most, just the person in the room who everyone looks to, and it's completely different.
Guest:And so when people get ill, there's this huge support system because...
Guest:You're the most, yeah, just because you're, if you're the oldest person, you're the person at the top of the food chain.
Guest:You're the most wisdom, or even if you just have some respect because you're older, and it's...
Marc:It's sort of the opposite here.
Guest:It is kind of the opposite.
Guest:You just pushed off to these communities that are all older people, which is sort of a false community to live in.
Guest:Everyone's the same age.
Guest:You're put in assisted living facilities, nursing homes.
Guest:You're just not involved in life in the same way.
Marc:And your past is erased in a way.
Guest:Yeah, and your past is erased, and it's really valuable for everyone.
Guest:It's really interesting, and it's valuable.
Guest:It's enriching.
Guest:To know what happened before you were here really informs your intelligence and your insight about what's happening now.
Guest:People who have no sense of the past don't have a very accurate sense of the present.
Guest:They think this is it.
Guest:This is all that anyone ever, you know, when they have ideas, they think they're the first ones to have them.
Guest:When they're morals, they think they've hit the pinnacle of morality because they happen to be alive now.
Guest:And they don't realize that in 10, 20 years, everyone's going to be looking back at them, appalled at their behavior.
Marc:At morals in general.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, and it's just, there's also like different colors from the past.
Guest:I mean, it's a tremendous, it's just a stupendous amount of stuff, like the cultures and the personalities and the way people walked and talked and dressed and the music they listened to and the ways they thought and the ways they addressed problems.
Guest:It's this incredible treasure trove of anything you might want to look for.
Marc:And I also thought, too, that, you know, in balancing that the honesty of the comedic element of somebody becoming repetitious or losing is a real thing.
Marc:And I think that it's an interesting line to sort of ride that there is humor in it and there has to be humor in it.
Guest:How would you even deal?
Guest:I've said many times, you've got to laugh.
Guest:And also, people are just funny.
Guest:There are no joke zones in life, plenty of them, but in normal life, they're not that common.
Guest:There's usually somewhere, there's something funny happening somewhere.
Guest:Always.
Guest:Almost always.
Marc:Yeah, and laughter, because I do stand-up, there's different qualities of laughter.
Marc:There's laughter that should be crying, which is a fine, valid laugh.
Marc:There's laughter because people are shocked and uncomfortable.
Marc:And then there's the nice sort of turn-of-phrase laughter, where they're impressed with the... But it serves a lot of different purposes.
Marc:I prefer the laughter that could be crying myself.
Guest:Yeah, I like most of it.
Guest:There's a nervous laughter, which I don't like, but you get used to, like when you do what I do, you get used after a while, like younger writers or directors are like, why are they laughing at that line?
Guest:And I don't like it when people laugh when something bad happens, like they have a nervous reaction.
Guest:But I know they're doing it because they're having some kind of emotional reaction, and you kind of get used to it.
Guest:It's a little bit of a weird thing.
Guest:But, like, the most dreadful thing will happen in the play and one person will go like, and you're like, what the fuck are you laughing about?
Marc:That's the one that should be crying.
Marc:That's the one that, like, I don't know how to process sadness.
Marc:And, you know, I'm uncomfortable and this is challenging.
Marc:And, you know, I'm going to go ahead and laugh for a second.
Marc:It's involuntary.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't like aggressive laughing.
Guest:I don't like when people laugh to prove they're not in it or to prove that you're no better to prove.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think it's, I think it's mostly morning radio or to show off to their friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's another one I don't care for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Fake laughs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The three films you made, not big laughs.
Guest:I think I've heard some hearty laughs at those.
Guest:In a group, those movies get laughs.
Guest:But you're not going for laughs.
Guest:Sometimes.
Guest:I mean, sure.
Guest:I try to.
Guest:I never think there's any difference, really, between comedy and drama.
Guest:I think it's all the same thing.
Guest:in a way uh it's you know almost more than two sides of the same coin i just like i think you know one thing that i think comedians tend to do when they do serious work is they drop their sense of humor completely and they become quite grim and dull uh you know when they do serious roles they're just kind of trying to prove to everyone that they're not only funny yeah and i find actually uncomfortable and a little insecure
Guest:Yeah, but they think they're they think their gift is not worth as much as they don't think they don't think so much of what they can really do.
Guest:And I don't think there's much and I get a lot of real life value from comedians through comedy.
Guest:And I don't think it's in any way a less valid way to react to react to life or to.
Guest:To channel your experience through your own perceptions and your own ability to put it back out in the world in some interesting way that no one else can.
Guest:And I don't I don't know why.
Guest:I mean, I do know.
Guest:I think I know why they do it, but I think they're mistaken because.
Guest:Why they do what?
Guest:Why do they drop their senses of humor?
Guest:Not why they do serious roles.
Guest:Why they do serious roles so utterly humorlessly.
Marc:Can you give me an example?
Guest:Oh, I don't like to trash anybody specific.
Marc:Well, I mean, it's a rare occurrence that comedians act in serious roles.
Marc:It doesn't happen all that much.
Guest:No.
Guest:Some like to do it, and they kind of flip back and forth, and you're just dying for them to be serious.
Guest:Well, okay, I'll give you an example.
Guest:Like when Woody Allen did his first serious movie, it was called Interiors.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And his balance is now shifted, so his sense of humor is laced through even his more serious films.
Guest:But that first movie he did, which did have some good things in it, only Maureen Stapleton had any sense of humor in the entire film.
Guest:And the rest of them were just grim, looking out the window, bleak, humorless.
Guest:And it was kind of dead because of that.
Guest:But he had to find the balance.
Guest:He did have to find a balance, but his first instinct when he did a serious movie, part of his energy went into proving he didn't just have to be funny.
Guest:And I think it's a sort of a... There's no need for that.
Guest:It's not something you need to turn away from.
Guest:Most of the time, I think, when people are doing some form of...
Guest:art or anything really to make a statement a defensive statement in some way it never quite works because nobody else is having no one else really is bothering to think no one's thinking oh he's only funny yeah you know only he is and it's made him insecure somehow in that example yeah where he had to prove himself in some other way kind of yeah and he's not the only one i just pick it because it was a long time ago what i've noticed about about comedic people uh in acting is some of them
Marc:They're so deeply funny that they can't rid themselves of it.
Marc:And then you get what you're talking about.
Marc:You get someone who is so dug in comedically that even when he's doing a serious role, there's that essence that enables them to either through your recognition of their past work or just who they are, that they're still kind of funny somehow.
Guest:Yeah, sometimes.
Guest:And there's some actors who can go back and forth, and there's lots and lots of actors who have no sense of humor.
Guest:They're no good in comedies.
Guest:They do the same thing in a funny way.
Guest:It's the inverse.
Guest:They're really good, serious actors, and then they do a comedy, and they drop their whole sense of reality, and they just kind of mug and wink and overdo it, and they're terrible.
Guest:Because they don't think that's... They somehow, whatever insight they have into human behavior, drops out because they're trying to be funny with a capital F. Just like...
Guest:Comic actors who are too grim are trying to be serious with a capital S. Right.
Marc:Well, I guess the reason I bring it up in terms like obviously there's funny parts in the movies that are very serious that you've written.
Marc:But I mean, knowing that you wrote Analyze This, which which is like I love it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a movie I watch repeatedly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I've never seen it.
Marc:But you were writing straight up comedy.
Guest:Yes, but again, you try to... You've never seen it.
Guest:I've never seen it.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because it was rewritten.
Guest:It's a stupid... It's a stupid... I don't know who I'm trying to...
Guest:I mean, it's funny because Jane Rosenthal, who produced the film, is a really good friend of mine.
Guest:She's been very good to me.
Guest:It was just rewritten.
Guest:It was one of my first Hollywood experiences, and I wasn't surprised at all because I knew what I was getting into, but it's been rewritten.
Guest:It was rewritten by 14 people.
Guest:It's not really a word of mine left in it except the title.
Guest:The idea behind it is mine.
Guest:Originally, the kind of humor that's in it is mine.
Guest:So I take some credit for it, but it was just rewritten totally out of my... Oh, so I can't even hang any of it on you.
Guest:No, not really.
Guest:But I've seen bits of it, and it does seem very funny to me.
Guest:But yeah, even when you're writing straight-up comedy, even like the Marx Brothers, who don't have a serious moment in the whole film, there is something...
Guest:there's a genuine emotion in those films and the emotion to me is how much they like screwing around and how much they like mayhem and how much they and they really like it and that's a real reaction to the world you know they don't like anything too stuffy they don't like and it's not they're not just out there to knock down you know social pretensions they really just like they just love to be insane and stupid and silly and they're really good at it and that's to me a genuine feeling
Guest:It comes strictly through their being funny and it's just as valuable a reaction to the world as anybody else's.
Marc:So have you turned your sort of has your because, you know, they obviously reeled you in to do a couple of big Hollywood comedies that analyze this and that.
Marc:And I guess Bullwinkle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that was an assignment.
Guest:I mean, you got to make a living.
Marc:So have you turned your back on that?
Guest:No, I mean, I still do rewrite work.
Guest:I haven't lately in the last couple of years, but up until two years ago, you know, that's how I make a living for the most part is being a script doctor because I haven't made a lot of money off my own movies.
Guest:because the more money that gets put into a film project, the less creative control you have.
Guest:Now I probably would have more than 10 years ago.
Guest:So I've tried to keep those things separate.
Marc:So they give you scripts to give it a little doctorate up a little bit.
Guest:Yeah, because you always get fired.
Guest:So you can't get too precious about it.
Guest:You can't get too attached to the material.
Marc:When they give it to you, are they sort of like, can you make this a little more real?
Yeah.
Guest:Sometimes they'll say, can you make it more funny?
Guest:Sometimes they'll say the characters are no good.
Guest:Sometimes they'll say both.
Guest:Usually when I do a rewrite, they are after better dialogue and better characterizations.
Guest:And then I do my best and then they fire me and someone else rewrites it.
Guest:intellectually though when when somebody says that about a character like when because where'd you come up at what theater did you come up in at the playwright where did you start writing uh i started writing in high school um theater yeah i had a really good theater program in my high school and uh i started getting i was interested in writing plays in ninth grade and i really liked it and that's what i always wanted to do
Guest:And then I went to NYU, the dramatic writing program in NYU, but I only went there because I thought the homework would be easy because I was already writing a lot anyway.
Guest:And my parents wanted me to get a degree and I didn't care about that so much.
Marc:What's your parents were?
Guest:Well, my father was a physician.
Guest:He was an internist and a geriatrician.
Guest:He was a doctor doctor.
Guest:My mom and stepfather are psychoanalysts.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And you have brothers and sisters?
Marc:Yeah, I have this large extended family.
Marc:You do?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And being in the household with psychoanalysts, because my first wife was a kid of a psychiatrist, and they sort of get a bad rap sometimes as oddballs.
Guest:Yeah, my parents are not oddballs particularly at all, I would say.
Guest:And they don't practice at home or anything like that.
Marc:What did you feel you got out of that that would have been different than other people?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Self-investigation?
Guest:No, I think, you know, there's a general interest in the house and personalities and different kinds of people.
Guest:But I can't say that doesn't exist in other kinds of homes.
Guest:But that certainly existed in my home.
Marc:Because it seems that in order to be someone interested in creating theater, you'd have to have those interests.
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:But who knows?
Guest:I mean, I'm the only person with a professional artistic bent in my whole family.
Guest:I have three step-siblings, a brother, half-brother, and adopted sisters.
Guest:And my adopted sister is a storyteller and writes, but the rest of them are doctors and lawyers like that.
Guest:And maybe they're just afraid.
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:But everyone's, you know, I have two brothers who play the piano, and everyone's got artistic interests.
Guest:It's just different when you're doing it for a living.
Marc:Right, so you start writing in high school and you go to NYU.
Marc:When did you start producing plays?
Guest:After that, I joined a theater company called Naked Angels, which was a bunch of actors and writers coming out of NYU.
Guest:Who was in that that I know?
Guest:Oh, probably a lot of them.
Guest:Fisher Stevens, Rob Murrow, Nancy Travis, Matthew Broderick, Robbie Bates, Joe Mantello.
Guest:A lot of these are theater people.
Marc:Yeah, Joe Mantello.
Marc:Yeah, and they all did okay for themselves.
Guest:So when's your name?
Marc:And that was a situation where you'd write and you'd workshop?
Guest:Yeah, that was like they had a little space on 17th Street.
Guest:And we'd do one acts and sketches and evenings of short pieces and some full productions.
Guest:And it was a great place to be.
Guest:There were a lot of young theater companies in the area.
Guest:late 80s and 90s um and you know like atlantic theater which is a really nice theater went on to become a legit off-broadway that's mammoth place yes he he was involved in starting and he and he still has a relationship with them it's weird i talked to him and i uh yeah i heard that interview it was really good i thought it was challenging because like i find him a fascinating guy but i don't love his approach to actors
Guest:No, I don't either.
Guest:I think it's a misstep.
Guest:It's very strange to me.
Guest:I mean, again, it's the way he works, and there are many things that are great about him, but I don't understand the idea that only the writer comes up with characters, only the writer has a...
Guest:point of view about the people in the show and that everyone should just say the lines flat i don't i don't understand that at all and i don't think it works i don't either and he's another one i think i mean again i don't like to talk badly about people who are alive and working to say critically but critically speaking or you know well i mean who asked but i mean i think he had an incredible talent for dialogue probably better than anyone's and i think he took it
Guest:a bit for granted like it didn't mean that much and he started to explore other areas I think because he just thought anyone who can write anyone can write dialogue or if you can write dialogue it's just a gift and it's not worth that much and I don't agree I think he had a tremendous insight into the culture into people's behavior into all the things he's interested in and it was through his incredible ear and I think it's something that's worth cultivating and hanging on to although it's not my business to tell anyone what to do and
Marc:And I would imagine he's not the kind of guy who's going to take any advice either.
Guest:No, of course not.
Guest:He's got his own stuff he wants to do and more power to him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But your dialogue, you also have the gift for it, but it's so dramatically different.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, well, I'm not really trying to make a point.
Guest:I don't really have an agenda to push.
Guest:I don't mean that he does, but I think what I try to do, what a lot of people try to do is explore certain areas.
Guest:look at different aspects of things that I'm interested in or that I might have an insight in that somebody else because they're not me might have might not have and I and I you know I don't feel like it's my job to answer questions or to decide how people should do things or just I don't know how the world should go or what people should do and I
Guest:I have my opinions and I'm sure they seep into my work, but I mostly think it's a question of part of what you do is look at patterns that you happen to see because you're the only one looking at things from your point of view.
Guest:If you can find some of the patterns and connections in life that are interesting to you and that you have some insight about and get them into a dramatic form, that's something worth doing.
Guest:It's fun to do too.
Marc:Well, I think that's what I was trying to come around to in terms of your evolution is that when somebody says that there's a problem with a character, I mean, when you approach a character or where you're exploring a character, because like Margaret is a genius movie and as a character study of a teenage girl, that like because it's so fresh in my mind and like I'd heard about it and I didn't see it and I knew there was some sort of problem with the movie, that you had a problem with it.
Guest:Yeah, well, there was a long editing struggle.
Guest:I'm very happy with the way the movie turned out.
Guest:You are.
Guest:If you watch the extended edition, I don't know which one you watch.
Guest:There's two.
Guest:There's the theatrical release, and then there's the longer extended edition, which is much better.
Guest:I watched the one on iTunes.
Guest:I don't know which one that is.
Guest:I hope it was... They're both available.
Guest:Well, they're both long.
Guest:One's really long, but it moves much faster.
Guest:It doesn't feel as long.
Marc:I don't know if I watched the right one.
Marc:Well, I don't either, but... But my question is that...
Marc:We have something like that where you have this teenage girl as this character who has conflicts that are not necessarily unusual outside of cradling a dying woman in her arms at the beginning of the show.
Marc:And outside of that, divorce, daddy issues, whatever.
Marc:But in order to support or to build around this character and the behavior...
Marc:What is the process of taking that character, building it out, and then surrounding it, what you surrounded it with?
Marc:How does that start to construct itself?
Guest:Well, that was an interesting, really fun to write.
Guest:And I think I just started out with this girl who had...
Guest:My first idea, which didn't really make it into the final film quite, it did, but in a very adjusted form, was this girl who, you know, she causes and is right there for this terrible accident in which a woman is killed in a bus accident.
Guest:And the first idea I had was that this bad, terrible thing happens that's very traumatizing that she's also partly responsible for, and she lies to protect herself and also the bus driver just on the spur of the moment.
Guest:And then she...
Guest:My first idea was that she would then go to all these adults and ask them what to do, and none of them would have an answer for her.
Guest:And that idea, when I tried to write it, turned, collapsed.
Guest:Because I, you know, if you really think, you know, I try really hard to think what would really happen if this was real.
Guest:And I thought, well, of course adults would have advice for her.
Guest:Like, they might not have the right advice, which is where I, when it ended up, she, she, she,
Guest:Nobody had a solution that really was complete, because there is no solution that's complete, and that's what she goes through.
Guest:And then that slowly built into this idea of, I don't know how, but it built into this idea of...
Guest:Living in a city where everyone is somewhat connected and everyone is not.
Guest:And just the simple idea of like we're sitting here and there's probably 5,000, 10,000 people walking around very near us.
Guest:And they're all having a very different experience from the one we're having.
Guest:And some of them are...
Guest:going through really serious things and some of them are playing frisbee and it's it's i just got very interested especially in a city like this where everyone's in such close proximity and that's how you shot it that these scenes where yeah you see like she's a person among people whether it's in an audience or walking down the street
Marc:There was a lot of focus put directorially on there are all these people.
Marc:On everybody else.
Guest:One reason this film was so much fun to write and to shoot, I wish it had been as much fun to edit, but that got into political struggles with the studio and the producer.
Guest:But...
Guest:was that, you know, it's a little hard to describe.
Guest:You have, you know, Werner Herzog says his ideas are like burglars who come into his house.
Guest:He doesn't really feel responsible for them.
Guest:They just occur to him and he doesn't know where they come from.
Guest:And I feel that way when things are going well.
Guest:You kind of have, you have, you have, quote unquote, have an idea and then, but it's like this idea interests you and it's almost the way another movie would interest you.
Guest:But it doesn't exist and you have this
Guest:impulse you want to put it on paper you want to put it out there and make it you want to create it you want to have it you want to give it some shape and then if you have an idea that's really exciting and interesting to you to me let's just talk about myself uh you
Guest:Then you try to follow the trail of what your interest is without even necessarily knowing what it is.
Guest:And you have other ideas that strike you as right.
Guest:And then you have ideas that strike you as wrong.
Guest:And you don't always know why.
Guest:But if you kind of trust that there's something inside you that's trying to get out and you try to listen to those signals.
Guest:You try to listen to when you're bored and when you don't think it's any good and you try to listen to when you're interested and intrigued.
Guest:And then later on you find all these themes cropping up or all these storylines or all these ideas that are connected to each other.
Guest:So one of the things in that film is the whole idea when you're a teenager your life is very serious and dramatic and part of it is very sincere and deeply felt and part of it is this big show you're putting on.
Guest:Because you sort of feel like you're in the middle of a TV movie.
Guest:At the same time, teenagers are very passionate.
Guest:They're not inured to life.
Guest:They're just discovering it.
Guest:And Elaine May actually said to me, you know, this girl is trying to right this terrible injustice that she's caused and that nobody else is.
Guest:You know, she goes to the police, she goes to these lawyers, and she can't get anyone to acknowledge that what she did and what this bus driver did is something that should be recognized as a terrible thing and dealt with in some form of justice.
Guest:And she struggles very hard to find some kind of... Anyway, so then Elaine May said to me, she said, only a teenage girl could think she could affect the world that much.
Marc:Didn't you have a teenager at the time you were writing it?
Guest:No, I have one now.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:Not quite as vigorously anti-parent as the character in the film, but it's, you know, that's, again, it's one of the areas the film looks at is the way kids can be so, you know, your first move into independence is to decide your parents are hypocrites and phonies and shallow, and eventually you kind of circle back and realize they're just
Guest:they're just grown up kids and they're just trying to figure things out the way the way you are and that you're no better than they are really yeah unless there's something unusually wrong with them when you're trying to solve problems of character do you realize these nuances specifically yeah I mean part of it is instinctive and part of it is following this hidden trail right part of it is once you once the trail is revealed to you you then follow it up more consciously um
Guest:But a lot of that, there's a sort of a half conscious state you get into when you're writing.
Guest:And the really smart, insightful part of everyone is not necessarily the part that's on the surface.
Guest:You know, there's something that connects you to other people or to your own ideas that's a bit more unconscious.
Guest:And I think, you know, I kind of like to compare it to an athlete.
Guest:Like when they're really in the zone, they're not thinking about every, you know, a basketball player who's playing really brilliantly is not
Guest:thinking about every shot he's not thinking about where the ball's going he's just in some kind of groove that nobody understands and when you're writing well and acting well and playing music well I think you get into a similar groove and no one really knows what that is it's not magic it's a very powerful and consistent side of being a human being but nobody quite knows what it is
Marc:But it's also like within the craft that you've chosen that, you know, you keep trying these things out and you put things on stage and you process it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And when you don't, when it's not happening, it's really awkward.
Guest:And you're trying to like, you know, you have a great scene and scene A is great, scene C is great, scene B sucks.
Guest:And you're just like, how in the fuck?
Guest:How do I get from A to C without fucking everything up?
Guest:And then becomes like math, emotional math.
Guest:A little bit.
Guest:But part of it is thinking, well, what really would happen if scene A was real, really true?
Guest:What would happen after that?
Guest:And would they, in fact, go into the, would they go get a cup of coffee?
Guest:No, they're fighting too much.
Guest:If I write this big fight scene, in order for them to then have a cup of coffee, as I've written in scene B, something has to change.
Guest:I may have skipped the scene.
Guest:There may be a scene where they reconcile or they have an appointment.
Guest:Something concrete has to happen to get you from one point to the next if it doesn't make logical sense the first time you write it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So it must be easier to think about that when somebody sends you an already thing.
Marc:You didn't write the original, and you're looking at these characters, and you can just say things like, as an observer.
Guest:Yeah, it's a little easier to do it with someone else's.
Guest:And sometimes I think it'd be better to kind of adopt that kind of journeyman attitude towards my own work.
Guest:It might come a little more easily.
Marc:Like if you're able to detach from the first draft.
Guest:A little less precious about it and not trying to dig so deep all the time because it doesn't always work.
Guest:Sometimes your more shallow characteristics carry you through better.
Marc:Let's talk a little bit about directing about Manchester by the Sea.
Marc:You've done these three movies and they're very specific.
Marc:I can't remember where You Can Count on Me takes place.
Marc:It's a small town in upstate New York.
Marc:And then in Margaret, that's here in the city.
Marc:And then like Manchester by the Sea.
Marc:And I spent a lot of time in New England.
Marc:I started comedy there.
Marc:I went to college there.
Marc:It's a very specific type of life and person.
Marc:Yeah, it sure is.
Marc:So why there?
Marc:I mean, what is the seed of that?
Guest:Well, that was a little arbitrary.
Guest:That was more like an assignment, which you're given something, and then you just dive into that point.
Guest:The idea of the film was Matt Damon's and John Krasinski's, and they came to me with this idea.
Guest:They wanted me to write a script.
Guest:from and it was their first idea was this story takes place in manchester by the sea where i'd never been uh it's a small town north of boston just next to gloucester um gloucester and uh i said sure they said put it anywhere you want i said that sounds good to me so it was it was a sort of a backwards well but then it became mine very quickly but it was a kind of a backwards process it started with a
Guest:place and then I learned more about that place I'd been in Gloucester a few times and I have some relatives in Massachusetts so it wasn't totally alien to me but there was a certain amount of research so what was the story they said to you that this guy causes the death of his kids in a horrible accident run with it yeah they said well their idea was it's kind of he's kind of a town character and he accidentally his daughter he's taking care of his daughter and she chokes to death while he's out putting out the trash she's in a high chair which is pretty grim and
Guest:And then he leaves town and then when his brother dies, he comes back to take care of his teenage, his young nephew and they form a relationship and it's kind of his redemption is to come back and take care of his nephew.
Guest:So that was the bare bones.
Guest:Now I threw out quite a lot of that.
Guest:And I actually made the accident that happened worse than what they had imagined.
Guest:And I tried for a while to write him as a town character and it didn't work at all.
Guest:So I had to switch out his personality completely before I could go forward.
Guest:Then he becomes this town myth.
Guest:Then he's a town notorious in the town for having been somewhat responsible for another film where there's a...
Guest:accidents the main character is responsible for but this is worse then I it's not totally dissimilar there's a certain some I thought it was a really good idea right away and then there was a certain amount of material that I that they had suggested that I didn't didn't do anything for me so I but I had this assignment I had to write it and I
Guest:i needed the job at the time and i liked the idea and i love matt and i i like john who i don't know as well and i really wanted to do this so i kept fishing around till i found other material that that connected to their idea which i liked as much as if it had been my fishing in your head yeah yeah i was like well i don't like the main characters i've written he's very flat i don't he doesn't do anything for me i don't really see who he is i don't and uh
Guest:And but I had written a brother character for him who I really did like, who seemed like a real guy in my head.
Guest:And to me, he was a real person.
Guest:So I got rid of the main guy and I switched the brother to being the main character just in my head.
Guest:And then I was like, OK, then I felt like I had something more robust to work with.
Guest:And then I gave him a different yet a different brother.
Guest:And then I had a little family that I believed in.
Guest:And I was able to proceed.
Guest:It's kind of like you're following clues that are coming up for your own mind.
Guest:And that's something I've, over the years, that's, if I have any kind of technique, that's my, that's what I try to do is follow my interest.
Guest:And if, if, if I like character of Lee instead of the character of John, who it started out as, then I know that's, that's, that's going to yield something valuable.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I just I find it so interesting that like, you know, in specific, I guess my it's not really a question, but I just I don't know how it happens.
Marc:Maybe it's just an acute empathy or perception of human nature.
Marc:But, you know, the codependent relationship of the brother with the heart condition with that woman and her character.
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:It's a very specific and I think a very disturbing and real thing.
Marc:And that just happens for you in your mind?
Marc:Because it seems psychologically sound.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also Casey's character with alcohol.
Marc:That there's something about that.
Guest:Yeah, well, I hope it is.
Guest:I mean, it's certainly supposed to be.
Guest:Yeah, it is, yeah.
Guest:I mean, but that's what's interesting.
Guest:I mean, I've had people say lots of nice things to me, and one nice thing people say is, I like how your characters are not good or bad.
Guest:And my feeling is...
Guest:First, thank you.
Guest:And then second, like, who do you know who is all good or all bad?
Guest:Like, I don't know anyone who's like that.
Guest:There's some really rotten people in the world, but even they have friends and relatives who think they have shitty friends or shitty relatives or they're nice to their dog.
Guest:You know, I mean, it doesn't exist, someone who is like in the movies.
Guest:There's no...
Guest:A person sitting back cackling.
Guest:Yeah, it's sentimental to think a villain knows he's a villain.
Guest:He doesn't.
Guest:You know, the most villainous people in the world think they're right.
Guest:Or they're aware that they don't care about anybody else and they think that's fine.
Guest:We have a president.
Guest:Yeah, but he's sure he's right about everything.
Guest:Everyone is.
Guest:That's what's so maddening.
Guest:Also, this is not just to be... It's more dramatic to have two people who think they're right arguing with each other.
Guest:When I see a movie and the villain is cackling...
Guest:laughing because he's so evil I'm like this doesn't do anything for me it's weak he's not real it's much more frustrating to deal with somebody else's alternate reality than it is to deal with someone who agrees with you that they're no good and so it makes for better drama I think
Marc:And when you're directing, as a writer, what's your approach to directing?
Marc:Because it's straight ahead and it's beautiful and you do have an appreciation, obviously, of the environment.
Marc:But is it there to service the writing and the characters in a basic way?
Marc:Or do you approach direction with some sort of craft in your head?
Guest:You know, my whole goal was to make it as vivid and lifelike as possible.
Guest:Whatever the story may be, that's that's what I enjoy doing.
Guest:So, you know, to me, the environment is really it's such a presence everywhere you go, like the room we're in now or just like.
Guest:drive up here just when when we go out into this noisy horror outside i don't know what the hell's going on out there it's just well it's just daily life now but like or but if you get in a car and drive an hour you're suddenly in the some you're out of new york there's a sky opens up you could be in one of these depressed little towns in new york state you could be in the hamptons where it's
Guest:And it's just suddenly different and the environment really seeps into everything.
Guest:And I'm really, you know, for some whatever reason, I'm always really interested in the physical environment that the characters are in.
Guest:So that's one way to kind of bring the material to life.
Guest:Also, you know, life is very specific.
Guest:There's no real such thing as a generality in the world.
Guest:Everything is very concrete and specific.
Guest:So sometimes so my way into these stories is to be as specific as possible.
Guest:It means doing a certain amount of research and thinking as accurately and vividly as you can about the people and what's happening in the room between them.
Guest:And some of it comes to you as if by magic, even though it isn't.
Guest:And some of it you have to work on and figure out and kind of plod through until you come up with something that you like.
Marc:And what's your approach to actors?
Guest:Pretty much the same.
Guest:I have an idea of the story that I think works because I wouldn't have considered the script finished until I do.
Guest:And then when we're working on the scenes, you kind of tell them your version and hope they can use that as a jumping off point.
Guest:And most of the time they can.
Guest:And then there are things that I know are happening in the scene that if they don't pick up on, I will point out to them.
Guest:And then there are always things that they know that I never thought of.
Guest:And that's the fun of working with actors is that they bring so much to it, so much more.
Guest:to it than i could so it's fully collaborative in your mind very much so yeah they're not i mean they're without them there's nothing um and uh it's one thing to imagine all these things happening and all these people and it's another thing to actually embody them and become them and you know they what they have to do is is tremendously difficult and interesting and i just try to
Guest:you know like for instance if there's a couple and i've written them as insulting each other and they're meant to get along well uh sometimes people who are not naturally sarcastic and mean like i am will make a little smile after they insult their their imaginary spouse or brother or sister or parent right in a scene and i will say listen i think you're close enough that you don't have to make
Guest:You don't have to make it clear that it's a joke.
Guest:You've known each other for 10 years, and when you kid around, there's no need to soften it by smiling.
Guest:And to me, that suggests a greater intimacy.
Guest:And that's something that anyone can understand, and they'll stop smiling, and something will spark between them that wasn't there before.
Guest:So that's the kind of thing I might say.
Guest:And then other times, if it's going well, I don't say anything.
Guest:And Casey wasn't the original guy?
Guest:No, Matt Damon was going to play the lead, and then his schedule got too tight.
Guest:And we could have either delayed for two years or gone ahead with Casey.
Guest:And Matt and I both agreed Casey was a great idea if Matt couldn't do it.
Guest:So we offered it to Casey, and luckily he was able to do it.
Marc:It's kind of hard to imagine it any other way.
Marc:They're both great actors.
Guest:Yeah, that's the funny thing that happens.
Guest:You write it, and you can put various people in your head, and then when someone really comes and embodies it, it's hard to imagine anybody else doing it.
Marc:When you're shooting those scenes, I'm sure the one scene that you probably talked a lot about was that scene with Michelle Williams when they first see each other after all those years.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, when you're on set and you see that thing unfold, it had to be more than anything you could have ever imagined.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:And they're just both so good.
Guest:I think about it.
Guest:I get choked up.
Guest:It's a great scene.
Guest:And I like the writing in the scene, but the performances are what makes it.
Guest:And it's just really, they're so alive.
Guest:And the situation is so painful.
Guest:And they're trying so hard to...
Guest:Again, you know, I think the scene would have been less good if one of them, you know, one thing people like to write a lot is fights, arguments.
Guest:You watch TV and they're always, or any movie, you know, they always start out, they're snapping each other, they're always arguing.
Guest:And it's just easy to write a fight scene.
Guest:And I think that people don't fight that much or that openly in real life.
Guest:They do, of course, but they do a lot of other things, too.
Guest:These two characters are really trying to be nice to each other, but they're at terrible odds and they can't connect.
Guest:She's desperate to connect and he's desperate not to, so they can't.
Guest:But another thing that's happening is they're both very conscious of not trying to hurt each other.
Guest:And I think that's kind of what makes the scene so...
Guest:so strong because they're both they're both the way they both perform it is so there's the the conflict between what they want to do and how they're trying not to wound each other and doing it is impossible to sustain and he eventually has to walk away I think it's I think it's great I love how they do it yeah and it's very exciting on the set to watch that happening how many times did you have to do it
Guest:We did a few takes.
Guest:We had two cameras.
Guest:We scheduled it for half a day because we knew it was a big scene.
Guest:That's a long time for a movie like that.
Guest:And we did, I think we probably did about five takes.
Guest:So you'd have one over Michelle's shoulder shooting Casey and then also a two shot at the same time and then the reverse.
Yeah.
Marc:I feel bad for what I said about comedy earlier because I realize that when you say that there's not that much difference or any difference between drama and comedy is that in a piece of work that if there are laughs in something like you do, they're earned and they're completely within context.
Marc:Where you write something like Analyze This or whatever, you're writing jokes.
Marc:But when I think about the relationship between...
Marc:Casey's character and his brother's son.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There's a lot of comedy there.
Guest:Yeah, there is.
Guest:But it comes... Yeah, I hope there is.
Guest:Yeah, no, definitely.
Guest:But you look at somebody like Scorsese who makes these films about these very violent, extreme... But he loves extremity and behavior.
Guest:And his movies are incredibly funny.
Guest:People are so far out.
Guest:Even if they're these ruthless murderers, it's really funny somehow because he's so...
Guest:enamored of extreme behavior you look at Stanley Kubrick whose movies are not thought of as being particularly funny except for like Doctor Strangelove which is a flat out comedy he's got this incredible sense of humor I don't know what it is it's a sense of irony or just this strange like I don't know but so a lot of people do this you know Pedro Almodovar the great Spanish director movies are incredibly funny and incredibly moving and there's just it doesn't it's not that thing where it's funny and then there's a serious scene and then it goes back to being funny it's all woven in together it's not shtick
Guest:No.
Marc:Which sort of makes sense that Analyze This got so far away from you, because there are scenes in there that are so shticky that I have to respect them as shtick.
Guest:Yeah, there's nothing wrong with shtick.
Guest:I love it.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:But look at a show like The Honeymooners, which is the single greatest television show ever, in my opinion.
Guest:And it's really funny, but their relationships in it are very real.
Guest:The characters are great, and they're really...
Marc:believable even though it is essentially a sitcom and I think it all it all goes together very well so what was your experience with the you know in terms of where you're at now and what you can do with with the accolades you have
Marc:Well, an Academy Award's not nothing.
Guest:No.
Marc:But in terms of, like, I'm curious about the experience.
Marc:What held up Margaret so long?
Guest:It's a very long story.
Guest:It's not very interesting.
Guest:But it was essentially... It was a very difficult movie to edit.
Guest:It would have been anyway.
Guest:It's a very different kind of movie.
Guest:It has a really unusual structure.
Guest:And the length is...
Guest:It really needed to be longer than it was contracted for.
Guest:And that was the fulcrum of where the conflicts were.
Guest:And they basically didn't believe I was going to get it to them at the right length or that it would be good at the right length.
Guest:They wanted me to get it in on schedule at the right length, which was two and a half hours, and have me be happy with it.
Guest:And I tried really hard to do all three things and I couldn't.
Guest:And I was able to keep it on schedule.
Guest:There was a series of contracted extensions, but that sounds stupid because it took five years to do, but it was all mutually agreed upon delays.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it just got, it just built up from there.
Guest:We didn't trust each other.
Guest:We didn't like each other.
Guest:They didn't give me the leeway I needed to complete the film because they didn't trust me.
Guest:And I couldn't understand that they, that that wasn't something they wanted to do.
Guest:Because my feeling was if they just leave me alone, I would get it done and it would be really good.
Guest:the one thing they didn't want to do was leave me alone.
Guest:They tried everything but that.
Guest:And even after we'd been fighting for two years, they'd say, what can we do?
Guest:I'd say, leave me alone.
Guest:And they'd say, why would it be different now?
Guest:I said, because you've never tried it.
Guest:And so it just, nobody would back down.
Guest:It was impossible, as it turned out, to give the film to them at the length they wanted and have it be any good.
Guest:I didn't know that when I started.
Guest:They thought I was conspiring the whole time to give it to them at a longer length.
Guest:It wasn't.
Guest:And it just built on from there, and there are many chapters to that story.
Marc:But you're happy with the director's cut?
Guest:I'm very happy with the extended version.
Guest:It's still not exactly what I would have wanted.
Guest:There's some music there that I don't like.
Guest:There's some edits there that I don't like.
Guest:It's much, much better than the other version.
Guest:It's much closer to what I wanted.
Guest:It's about, I'd say, about 80% of what it should be, and usually I like to get up to 90%, 95%.
Marc:So Manchester by the sea is a 95%?
Marc:90.
Marc:90.
Guest:I think it's about 10 minutes that could come out of it, and there's a couple of things in it that I don't love, but mostly I think it's really pretty much what it is.
Guest:Why are those things in it?
Guest:Because you lose, it's hard to, you know, you have to finish it.
Guest:You know, you can't keep tinkering with it.
Guest:First of all, you can't, if you keep, there's a point at which you get to where your fixes start to make it worse, and you don't understand why, but once that happens, it's really time to,
Guest:To lock it down.
Guest:It was further along in earlier cuts than I realized.
Guest:I spent about six months making really minute changes that didn't make it better.
Guest:And then after that six months, you have to release it.
Guest:There's a release date.
Guest:You can't keep screwing around with it forever.
Guest:And you're not confident that your fixes are going to make it any better.
Marc:So that 10% is inexplicable to you.
Marc:You don't know what the solution is.
No.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, that's an acceptance.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That it's out of your hands.
Guest:It's out of your hands to a certain degree.
Guest:When it was in your hand.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's the same with writing a script.
Guest:Like you can see where it needs work.
Guest:You keep working on it.
Guest:And then at some point, the balance tips and you see that you're making it worse.
Guest:So you have to stop, even though some of it's still not satisfactory.
Marc:So there's no being satisfied.
Yeah.
Guest:No, I'm very sad.
Guest:I think I'm more satisfied with most of my work than most of my friends who do the same thing.
Guest:I'm really happy with, you can count on me, I'm really happy with Manchester.
Guest:I have a couple of little quibbles with it.
Guest:You can count on me, I have two quibbles with it exactly.
Guest:There's just two scenes that I'm not crazy about.
Guest:yeah i cut one scene that i should have kept in and i changed one shot that i should have left the way it was but you don't wake up at night thinking no but i i i'm always annoyed when i watch it when it comes on yeah but i'm very happy with my plays i don't think they're perfect but i think they're mostly really good and and i i like the way they've been performed so i'm pretty satisfied i'd love to see a production of a lobby hero but i haven't
Guest:Yeah, it was a really good one last year.
Guest:Yeah, I don't think it's possible to be completely satisfied, especially over time when you get a little better, hopefully, at your job or you're a different person.
Guest:And it's just, you know, working on this stuff is like a question of stepping in and stepping back.
Guest:And eventually, you know, you're up close working on it and then you step back to look at the whole thing and you see it a little differently.
Marc:But at some point as you get older...
Marc:You accept what you've done and you can see that that's where you were in your life and that those issues, has it ever happened where you've had issues with something and you realize, well, no, it actually is okay.
Guest:Yeah, many times.
Guest:Yeah, you kind of, these details start to loom very large in your mind and then you realize, all the time, I mean, that's partly why it's difficult to edit because your mood changes.
Guest:So you look at one scene and you're like, this is a disaster or you're worried someone else is going to think it's a disaster and then you look at it a week later and you're like, oh, it's fine.
Marc:But as a playwright, I mean, if you wanted to, you could go in and in this new production of the Waverly Gallery, you could change it.
Guest:Yeah, you can.
Guest:I mean, there are three or four things I would cut from this script, but I'm not that confident I'm right.
Guest:And part of that's because you're different when you're really connected to it to the point where you're able to work on it.
Guest:And it may be superstition and it may be wrong.
Guest:But I have, for most of my working life, tried to respect what I was doing at the time and understand that I couldn't do it now.
Guest:Just because I was at a different place psychologically.
Guest:I was really in the groove of whatever that project was.
Guest:And I maybe don't know as much now about it as I did then.
Marc:The feelings are different.
Guest:The feelings are different and the insight is different and I have a different view of it because now it's different.
Guest:It's not something I'm working on by myself.
Guest:Other people have been involved.
Guest:Other people have seen it.
Guest:It's become a different animal.
Marc:And what was your involvement with Gangs in New York?
Guest:That was a really good time for me.
Guest:They had been through three writers.
Guest:The last guy who'd worked on it, his name is Hossein Amini, who's a really good writer, and he was only able to come in and do some patchwork on it, and then he had to go off, and they asked me to come at the very last minute and rewrite some of the characters and dialogue.
Guest:And I just got married.
Guest:They flew my wife and I to Rome, my wife and me to Rome.
Guest:And we lived in Rome for three months.
Guest:And I went to the studio in Chinatown every day and worked with Scorsese and Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Guest:And it was really fun.
Guest:And I love period stuff.
Guest:I'm really interested in the Civil War.
Guest:the whole set was just incredible to be on as blocks and blocks and blocks of this reconstruction of 19th century New York City slums it was just incredible and we just had a really good time everybody else was freaking out about the movie and I was having a blast yeah it's like uh exciting yeah it was really exciting yeah I now in in those moments because I'm I'm shooting I have a very small part in the Joker movie so oh yeah so I'm going over this first time I've met De Niro and
Marc:of course and I'm doing a scene with him for like 40 seconds but it's something else but even in watching them work was something planted in your brain about that process and about working with actors and about directing or were you just so thrilled to be there that you weren't looking at it that way
Guest:No, a little of both.
Guest:I mean, you can't help but absorb what's happening around you.
Guest:You know, this was a big, big movie.
Guest:And to watch him, Marty, like, I call him Marty.
Guest:Everyone calls him Marty.
Guest:I'm not showing off.
Guest:I haven't seen him for a while, but we got to be pretty friendly.
Guest:Yeah, he's been really, really good to me.
Guest:And I just, I love him.
Guest:To watch him manipulate all the elements of this enormous production and to keep his eye on it and to not just the production, but the people and the whole thing.
Guest:And to design these shots.
Guest:I didn't get to see him working with the actors too much because he would basically go off and talk to them quietly.
Guest:So I never knew what he was saying to them.
Guest:But kind of watch him...
Guest:riding the performances from the monitor in the editing room later and um it was fascinating and uh just watching the different way the actors approach the parts and uh the process of doing the rewrites was interesting um
Guest:Well, I'd mostly done rewrites.
Guest:I'd never done rewrites on the set.
Guest:I was rewriting about two weeks ahead of the schedule, which was pretty intense.
Guest:And he just had this really good system.
Guest:I'd meet with him and the actor involved, and we'd all talk about the scene and what was wrong with it and what they wanted.
Guest:Was Daniel Day Lewis in character all the time?
Guest:He did that voice all the time, but he seemed to me to be very nice, and the character isn't very nice.
Guest:And on the weekends, he dropped the accent, and he told me later that he had two, I don't know if his first or second son had been born yet, but he had a kid at home, and he didn't want to come home and be this sinister Bill the Butcher, which he would have done before he had children.
Guest:So he said it was the first role he ever did.
Marc:Just put his wife through that.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Just put his wife through it.
Guest:So anyway, so we'd sit there and we'd talk about the scene.
Guest:And then I'd go off.
Guest:I'd show it to Marty.
Guest:When Marty and I were happy, we'd show it to the actor.
Guest:And then it was just sort of a very good system of circulating everyone's notes until everyone was happy.
Right.
Marc:So what areas of your brain are sparking now in terms of what you're writing now?
Marc:Where are you headed?
Guest:Well, I have a screenplay I'm interested in, and I'm trying to get off the ground, and I have a play.
Guest:An original one?
Guest:An original screenplay.
Guest:I have a play that I would really like to write.
Guest:I have no idea if I can or not, because it would be quite a challenge to try to put it together.
Guest:It's a...
Guest:If I ever write it, it's a historical piece.
Guest:What period?
Guest:Fourth century.
Guest:I don't know what that is.
Guest:It's the late Roman Empire.
Guest:It's the fourth century AD, and I don't have any idea how to put it on a stage, and I probably won't be able to do it, but it's a period I've gotten really interested in lately.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Why?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I was always interested in history.
Guest:I was always interested in Roman history, among many other periods, like medieval history, like 19th century history.
Guest:You're going to write in that dialogue?
Guest:You can't write dialogue.
Guest:I can't write 4th century Latin or Greek, so no.
Guest:But that's one of the problems, is how do they talk?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One of the many, many problems.
Guest:I don't think I can do it, but I'm learning a lot about the period.
Guest:What kind of human story can you place then that you can't place now?
Guest:Oh, well, it's a totally different world.
Guest:It's like saying what kind of human story can you place in the deep south that you can't place in Soviet Russia?
Guest:I mean, you can...
Marc:They play Shakespeare in all kinds of different environments.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Maybe it has to be done in a modern way.
Guest:I really have no idea.
Guest:I don't even want to say it's early in the process because I don't know if there's going to be a process.
Guest:What world is the screenplay in?
Guest:The truth is I'm a little uncomfortable talking about stuff I haven't written because I don't want to talk it away.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:That happens, right?
Marc:It does happen.
Marc:You keep talking about it.
Marc:It's like it's done in your head.
Guest:Yeah, there's nothing left to do.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what do you do during the day?
Marc:Just write?
Guest:I try to write.
Guest:I do crossword puzzles.
Guest:I read.
Guest:Do you freak out?
Guest:Sometimes.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:In an internal way.
Guest:How are you handling the world?
Guest:It's horrible.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't know what to do about it.
Guest:It's quite, I think about it a lot.
Guest:Probably not as active about it as some people.
Guest:I don't know what to do about it.
Guest:It's pretty bad.
Guest:It's a little hard to know how bad it is.
Guest:It's one scary thing about it because, you know, I have a friend who we had an argument, pretty casual argument, because I said, I'm not so sure.
Guest:He said, this is the worst administration.
Guest:This is the worst presidential crisis we've ever had.
Guest:And I said, I'm not sure that's true.
Guest:It's happening to us right now.
Guest:I don't know how bad it's going to get.
Guest:It's very bad now, but I don't know if this is going to, you know, if you think about if you had been, you know, if we had been alive and grown up in 1969, 70, the world looked pretty grim then.
Guest:We had this terrible war.
Guest:The whole country was a series of assassinations.
Guest:terrible problems, riots every summer, bombs going off everywhere.
Guest:It must have looked like a complete collapse to people at the time.
Guest:And he said that he didn't agree.
Guest:He didn't think Nixon was as bad as Trump.
Guest:And I don't know if he's right or not.
Guest:We're not in a war.
Guest:We're not in a major war.
Guest:There's all these smaller, horrible conflicts all over the globe.
Guest:We're not in a big, major war.
Guest:We're not in the middle of an economic crisis.
Guest:We're not having riots and race riots and all kinds of other riots.
Guest:We don't have we don't have the police gunning down union workers who are, you know, there's a lot that's not happening that has happened.
Guest:It doesn't mean that it's not going to get very bad, but I don't know.
Guest:And the other thing is, I was going to say, like.
Guest:You also look at the most extreme example you can think of, the rise of the Nazis and their consolidation of power.
Guest:You say, why didn't the Jews leave as soon as Hitler came to power?
Guest:Well, they didn't know how bad it was going to get.
Guest:It happens in increments.
Guest:So you don't really know what we're up against yet.
Marc:So you're saying it's going to be hard to know when to leave?
Guest:it's hard to know what to do or how I mean I think the thing to do is to agitate and try to vote vote out the right rabid conservative cynics that are in power now and you've got to try to find some way to find some kind of civilized accommodation with all the people who violently disagree with each other I don't know how to do any of that but and it's got to be done but I in terms of just prognosticating about how bad things are going to get or how bad this is in the big picture I don't really know it's quite bad
Marc:but as an artist like right there what you said like you know like it would seem that on some level it doesn't necessarily seem that this is your starting point for for creativity but you know bridging the gap between you know these ideological tribes yeah seems to be rich territory and obviously a lot of people talk about it yeah and and i guess some people would say well i'm going to
Marc:To confront that or explore it through characters.
Marc:And that's not the way your brain works.
Guest:You know, you can only write about what you can write about.
Guest:You might want to write about lots of things.
Guest:But, you know, there's some things you're better at and some things you do more naturally.
Guest:And I don't know.
Guest:You like to think that any kind of connection that people make through fiction with other people is valuable.
Guest:Even if it's just to give people...
Guest:I think there's a value in entertainment.
Guest:Some people think it's a narcotic, and I suppose it is, but I think people need to have something to watch on TV when they come home or to read about or to go to the movies or to go to a play.
Guest:It's arguably too much.
Guest:I know, but it's not something you'd want to do without.
Guest:You want people to think and...
Guest:have a real experience at least i do when they go to see my work uh and i don't know how i do think there's some value in trying to understand somebody whose point of view is totally different from yours i don't know that you get that a lot in entertainment i think you get a lot of you know where's where is the right wing point of view in the entertainment world it simply doesn't exist and i'm not some fallen stars on twitter who people assume have gone bad
Guest:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Guest:I mean, I've wondered for many years, way before Trump, what I had this idea of putting on a really right-wing oriented play in New York City and seeing how tolerant all my tolerant friends were to another ideology.
Marc:Like a totally jingoistic play?
Guest:I don't know, just something that presented a conservative point of view as reasonably as possible.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I know they'd go insane.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I think there's a lot of...
Guest:a lot of stretching that needs to be put on both sides i do think you're right i think this is a tribalistic aspect i mean frankly none of us want trump to do well at anything we just want him gone because he's so awful so we're i i would bet that my most of my friends including myself you know i assume you have the same yeah since you're in show business i assume you have a similar political ideology but like the fact is i get a little depressed when i read how good the economy is because i don't think about all the benefits is it that are accruing for people i think it's going to make him more
Guest:popular.
Guest:The bad one is winning.
Guest:That's a really unhealthy attitude.
Guest:He would agree with you.
Guest:It is unhealthy.
Guest:People on the left are every bit as knee-jerk and regimented in their thinking as people on the right.
Guest:They're not as disciplined and they're not as focused and they don't have a long-term view that they engage.
Guest:That's correct.
Guest:And we hope that our values are better, but so do people on the right.
Guest:I'm not a relativist.
Guest:I don't think it's all the same thing.
Guest:But people on the right can't understand why...
Guest:how we can feel that we're moral when we're against every single thing that he does.
Guest:But to us, I think he's not something that should be tolerated.
Guest:He's a very, very bad guy.
Guest:He's a pathological liar.
Guest:I mean, I don't have to go into all, for this audience especially, I don't have to go into the whole story, but...
Guest:So how tolerant should you be of McCarthyism?
Guest:Not at all is the argument.
Guest:But then you're accused of picking on everything poor old Joe McCarthy says.
Guest:But he was a self-serving, climbing liar.
Guest:He didn't even believe anything he was saying.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So none of that conversation that we just had.
Marc:you know, including putting on this play that's empathetic and sensitive to a conservative viewpoint, you know, engages you enough to rise to the occasion?
Guest:I think about it all the time.
Guest:You know, as I say, you can only write what you can write about.
Guest:I'm not, I don't,
Guest:I have not seen very many plays, movies, or read very many books that have a specific political message that they're trying to convey that are any good.
Guest:To me, I think that's journalism, essays, speeches, conversation, people.
Guest:I'm not here to make a point.
Guest:Because if I'm making a point through the medium of a drama or a comedy...
Guest:unless I'm very clever I have a really good point to make I'm essentially using the people in the story as puppets to to disguise the fact that I'm putting forth some kind of particular ideology right I understand that and if I have something to say that's that's
Guest:That's a declarative sentence.
Guest:I'm better off just saying it instead of spending two hours pretending some other people are saying.
Marc:Making up a shallow character.
Exactly.
Marc:Well, it was great talking to you, man.
Guest:Oh, you too.
Guest:Thanks a lot.
Marc:Yeah, thanks for doing it.
Guest:My pleasure.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:That was good.
Marc:I enjoyed talking to that man.
Marc:Again, his play, The Waverly Gallery, with Elaine May and others, is playing at the Golden Theater through the end of January.
Marc:Guitar, sure.
Guest:Boomer lives!