Adam Goldberg: The Hollywood Interview

ADAM GOLDBERG: SHOOTING TO THE MUSIC
By
Alex Simon

Adam Goldberg first brought his unique brand of manic intensity to Richard Linklater’s ensemble classic Dazed and Confused in 1993 and has since been featured in such varied films as 2 Days in Paris, A Beautiful Mind, Saving Private Ryan, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Hebrew Hammer and I Love Your Work, which he also directed. An actor with a talent for mining the neuroses of his character for both comedic and dramatic effect, Goldberg also played recurring roles in “Friends” and “Entourage.” Goldberg's music CD, "LANDy, EROS AND OMISSIONS," hit shelves June 23 of this year from Nine Yards Records.

Goldberg’s latest film, (Untitled), is a satirical comedy that has him playing Adrian Jacobs, a brooding avant-garde composer who falls for the gorgeous owner (Marley Shelton) of a trendy New York art gallery. The quirky worlds of contemporary art and music are set on a hilarious collision course in co-writer/director Jonathan Parker’s film, which also features support from Eion Bailey, terrific as Goldberg’s self-obsessed brother, and Vinnie Jones, whose wild comedic turn in the film is sure to redefine his career. The Samuel Goldwyn Films release opens in a limited theatrical run October 23.

Adam Goldberg sat down with us recently to discuss film, music, and the savant-like genius of Steven Spielberg. Here’s what followed:

I thought (Untitled) was an interesting companion piece to I Love Your Work, with the former being about pretentious people in the art world, and the latter about that crowd in the world of indie film.

Adam Goldberg: (laughs) Yeah, that’s true, I guess. I think (Untitled) is a bit more dry in terms of its tone. I guess that’s what I responded to. It’s funny when you get a script for a small film; you never really know what its status is, in terms of financing. It can be pretty nebulous. But once I read the script, I didn’t care about those things. I wanted to make it, and help facilitate it in getting made anyway I could. I responded to the character and that the world is one that I’m somewhat familiar with, but had never really been in the middle of before. I also liked that it was so tightly-written and didn’t feel like it would necessitate a lot of improvisation, although many times that is how I look at a piece of material, in terms of what I might bring to it in that regard. But this script really spoke for itself and required me to adapt to the script and the character, instead of the other way around.

Adam Goldberg in (Untitled).

How were you familiar with the art world before?
My dad was kind of into it when I was growing up.

Is your dad an artist?

(laughs) No, he’s a wholesale food distributor, but he was an art lover, and we used to go to museums and galleries all the time, and was exposed to lots of modern art as a kid. As far as the musical side of it, I hadn’t necessarily known people who were doing things that were so minimalist or absurdist, but I’d always been a big Steve Reich fan, and enjoyed that sort of experimental music, so that’s where that element came from. So it appealed to me on many levels.

I thought the film was very well-cast, down to the smallest roles. You see Vinnie Jones in an entirely new light here.
Yeah, right? (laughs) He actually came in at the last minute, one of those little miracles that happen sometimes. He’s a really funny guy, which a lot of people don’t realize. They’re used to seeing him as an action hero.

L to R: Goldberg, Marley Shelton, and (Untitled) co-writer/director Jonathan Parker.

I was surprised to see that you were born and raised in L.A. I always figured you were a native New Yorker.
Yeah, that’s a common misconception. I was born in Santa Monica, but when my parents split up, my dad stayed on the West side, and my mom and I moved to the Wilshire/Crescent Heights area. I went to school at Oakwood, which was the fancy private school in North Hollywood. The tough kids from North Hollywood High used to beat us up.

When did the acting bug bite?

I started performing when I was really little, like six or seven. I did plays and things for my parents and their friends. I took acting lessons starting when I was about 14, then did school plays and Equity waiver plays, and it progressed from there. I also started shooting my own little movies around then. I wound up dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College and going to Cal Arts for film school, then dropped out of there after ten days, because by that point I realized I couldn’t stand being in school anymore. So making movies was always my goal ultimately, but then I started getting jobs as an actor.

Goldberg in a still from (Untitled).

But the prize you always had your eye on was making your own films?

Yeah, exactly. I thought I’d go into filmmaking through the front door, as opposed to the back door, which is what happened, I guess, just not to the extent I imagined. It’s more a function of how little I write. (laughs)

For someone who’s always aspired to be a filmmaker, you’ve gotten to work with some amazing directors.

Yeah, my first film was with Richard Linklater and then with Spielberg, I showed him my first film I made, and he helped hook me up with the head of post-production at DreamWorks to help me finish it, which was an incredibly nice gesture, but at the end of the day, I think it actually ended up costing us more money. (laughs)

Dazed and Confused holds up really well. What was the atmosphere like on the set?

It was a huge party, sort of like this super-condensed college experience that I never really had. It was six weeks of this group of 15 people, all staying in one hotel together, and having a blast, but also taking it really seriously. We all felt that it was going to be an important movie, even though the studio ended up dumping it, and it didn’t get the audience it deserved when it was initially released.

Goldberg in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, his film debut.

Now it’s sort of viewed as the ‘90s answer to American Graffiti.
Yeah, lots of comparisons were made between the two films, and I think Richard actually pitched it that way. But once it was made, it almost felt like it had been around for a while, which was strange. We all sort of knew it was going to be this cult thing, but were still really frustrated the way it was released. It was the beginning of the mini-majors. Grammercy was Universal’s art house distributor, and I think they’d only released one other movie prior to ours, and it would have been a fine release if they’d continued to platform it. They debuted it on something like 250-300 screens, and it was doing really strong numbers, so what they told Rick was that it would be platformed, and opened wider and wider, if it opened well, and they just never did. That was an example of great casting, although I don’t think anyone’s career really took off from it, except for maybe (Matthew) McConaughey, whose life literally seemed to change overnight after that film. There were a bunch of people, like Vince Vaughn, who auditioned for it and didn’t get it, but there was this amazing group of actors who were all about 21 or 22, and we got put together. Now when you look at it, it’s like a who’s-who. It was everybody’s first or second film. You could say the same thing about School Ties, which had come out just before.

Goldberg in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.

We have to talk about Saving Private Ryan.

At this point, everything seems to be like a memory of a memory, so I have to really dig to go back there. I feel almost disconnected from the experience, because it became so much bigger than our experience with it was.

I know that Dale Dye put you all through a truncated version of boot camp to start with.

Yeah, very truncated, because we were all big pussies and wanted to leave, and (Tom) Hanks sort of made us a deal to stay one more day, then we could leave early, because we were all ready to walk on the third day, not that we were allowed to. (laughs) We were just dying. We were all so sick and tired and freaked out because we were supposed to start shooting the day after we got out. We were just big pansies. Looking back though, it was an invaluable experience, and one of the more important elements of having done the film, to prove to myself that I could get through the kind of experience that otherwise I never in a million years would have subjected myself to. And it certainly helped me take a more subjective approach to the whole thing. I was also reading a lot, and watching lots of WW II documentaries.

What were you reading?

Oh gosh, anything I could get my hands on. Obviously Stephen Ambrose was a big guy in that department, and he was advisor to the movie, although I never met him till the press junket. There was just something about being with a group of people and being so totally sleep-deprived at the end of five days…I was really good friends with Giovanni (Ribisi) before the film, but by the end of that five days of boot camp, we weren’t allowed to call each other by our real names, and I’d look at him, and I wouldn’t even see him anymore as Vanni. I’d just see this look in his eyes, like “What the fuck are we doing?” and “How the hell are we going to get outta here?” We were so…it just made me really understand how the military worked. It was really surreal, the whole thing. It was done very fast for that type of movie, and was really exhausting, and you felt really worn down, and like you were really there. Also, just the machinations of how Spielberg shot, we were never near our trailers or the craft service table. We were just in the field, sleeping on our helmets. We were very disconnected from the fact that we were actors during the shoot. I remember we had to match our injuries from boot camp onto the shoot. We all had cuts and scrapes and things from boot camp that had to be reapplied with makeup as the shooting progressed. We were all really banged up.

Where did the boot camp take place?

It was across the street from where the production office was, in England on an old air force base. You could almost make out the production office from where we were. Vin Diesel and I kept having a conversation about making a mad dash for the production office and going AWOL. (laughs)

Did you actually bond with all the guys in your platoon?

At the time sure, absolutely.



Your death scene is still one of the toughest scenes to watch in any film.

Yeah, my mom was quite unhappy with me after she first saw the film. She said “If there’s ever another scene like that in a movie you do, don’t invite me to the premiere.” She was really upset.
Did you or the other actor actually get hurt? It looked like you were really beating the shit out of each other.

By that point, everyone was so tired and banged up anyway, we all felt like pieces of meat. It was great shooting that scene, really. It’s actually one of the best days I’ve ever had as an actor. I felt really euphoric after it was over. Anytime you do a big, dramatic scene there’s something cathartic about it. It was really rigorous and technically-complicated to shoot. I had this prosthetic body for a big part of the scene…There’s something about coming to grips with your mortality when you do a scene involving violence, same with the fight scene in Dazed and Confused. You’re no longer in your head as an actor, and stuff actually happens to you emotionally and physically. I’m not one of those guys who can turn things on and off. If it’s not happening, it’s not happening. I’d say 85% of the time, I’m in my head about things, but that’s one of those things where you can’t help but connect with the experience.

What was Spielberg’s process like?

There’s no way to really track what he did. He had the entire movie in his head. He didn’t storyboard it or shotlist it. There was no way to know what he was doing. (laughs) Plus, I was way too tired and way too into character to do anything observational. I’m sure, I hope, I picked up a little bit through osmosis. He’s such a different kind of filmmaker than the ones I use for my own frames of reference. He’s like some savant. (laughs) It’s almost impossible to trace what’s going on.

You know what’s funny? I just interviewed Matthew Modine, and he said the same thing, verbatim, about Kubrick.

I believe that. Yeah, there’s just no way to figure out what’s going on up there. There were so many cameras going, and he was just coming up with this stuff. It was great to see a guy who was known for being a very sort of “classical” filmmaker, operating on a very run-and-gun level and improvising, which is what he encouraged us to do. He kept referring to it as his “indie film,” which I guess, in a way, it was.

Let’s talk about what directing was like for you.

The first time I did it, it was a really small project. I Love Your Work was the same, actually, although I had a bigger budget than I did on Scotch and Milk, which cost 60 grand. To make a long story short, it just felt like what I’ve always been supposed to be doing, which is how it felt when I made those little movies throughout my life. It’s a similar feeling I get with my music, actually. It’s the thing I feel the most intrinsically able to do.

Goldberg and Marley Shelton in (Untitled).