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).

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Matthew Modine: The Hollywood Interview

MATTHEW MODINE: BETTER ANGELS
By
Alex Simon

Matthew Modine has been something of an iconoclast most of his working life. After being groomed for ‘80s teen idol status in early films such as Private School and Vision Quest, Modine was also one of the first actors of his generation, along with Sean Penn, to take on riskier projects, such as Robert Altman's Streamers, Alan Parker’s Birdy, Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel, and Alan J. Pakula’s Orphans. It was his lead role as the cynical Marine Private Joker in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket that put Modine into the pantheon of young actors who were more than just pretty faces and knowing winks at the camera. This, after all, was the young man who turned down the lead in Top Gun, arguably the prototypical ‘80s blockbuster, due to its cold war politics. From the beginning, Matthew Modine carved his own path.

Born March 22, 1959 in Loma Linda, California, Matthew Avery Modine was the youngest of seven children born to Dolores and Mark Modine, who ran a string of drive-in movie theaters across the United States, prompting the Modines to pull stakes during Matthew’s formative years with great frequency. Contrary to some reports, the Modines were not “a close-knit Mormon family.” Mark Modine briefly joined the Mormon Church during a job stint in Utah, and was advised to join the flock for the betterment of his business.

After being bitten by the acting bug as a child, Modine dropped out of college and headed to New York in his late teens, studying with legendary acting coach Stella Adler, and landing his first television role in 1982 on an ABC Afterschool Special. More than sixty feature films later, including one (If…Dog…Rabbit) as a director, Matthew Modine’s latest turn is in the romantic comedy Opa!, featuring Matthew as Eric, an uptight archeologist who lands in Greece, hoping to unearth a cup that may have touched the lips of Christ. When a comely islander (Agni Scott) enters the picture and catches his eye, Eric finds his rigid value system being altered (and seduced) by the woman and the island’s charms. The Cinedigm release hits theaters in limited release October 16.



Matthew Modine, who lives with his wife on a 100-acre farm in upstate New York, spoke with The Hollywood Interview during a recent L.A. stopover. Here’s what transpired:

Opa! reminded me of an old-fashioned romantic comedy that could have been made in the late ‘50s with Jimmy Stewart playing your role, and Sophia Loren playing the Greek girl.

Matthew Modine: Yeah, we were joking during the shoot that it was a Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn movie. I like those kind of movies. I don’t like comedies that are, like, dick joke comedies. I like things that give me the opportunity to reinforce things I’m trying to figure out or believe in. One of those things was the idea of a Western man--and we think of Greece as being part of the West, but it’s really Eastern—and him arriving in Greece and these two mindsets butting heads: a conflict between materialism and spirituality. I thought my character really represented that, that kind of materialism. This cup that he’s seeking out won’t make anybody’s life different if he finds it. It’s just a thing, and the fact that he doesn’t appreciate that what’s important about it is maybe Jesus Christ drank from it. The taverna that rests over the cup’s burial spot now is sort of like the cup: a place where people have been sharing stories, dancing, gathering to share food. We live to work in the West, whereas in a place like Greece, they work to live. And I loved that, and taking a film like that gives me the opportunity to examine something that I’m struggling with in my own life, and being on an island with a couple of thousand people and seeing how they help one another to get by.

Matthew Modine and Agni Scott in Opa!

I remember reading about your being an iconoclast in terms of your values system, going back to the ‘80s. After all, you were the guy who turned down the lead in Top Gun because of its politics.

Yeah, I really do believe that people want to be good. I think we have a violent history, a violent past, and this struggle that began in Greece thousands of years ago of logical thought, of empirical truth, of moving away from the mythologies, of “don’t tell me what you think. Tell me what you know.” Where is the scientific evidence? Not to discount the strange, unknowable spirituality of space, the vastness of the cosmos, but the idea of really solving the problems that exist before us where, if you have a different way of thinking, how do we sit down across the aisle from each other and share thoughts. It’s not about conservatism and liberalism. They really go hand-in-hand. They should support each other. If we didn’t have liberal thought, we wouldn’t have had the abolition of slavery, or women’s right to vote. These are things that are progressive ideas. Our country was founded on liberal thought, but that’s not to say that there aren’t great things about conservatism. One thing that we know about life on this planet is that it evolves, and when we wake up tomorrow we’re going to be another day older, and we’ll be evolving. So I’m digressing, as always (laughs), but I like to find movies being made by like-minded people. I’ll tell you a story. I went to Turkey last year for a film festival. And they asked if I wanted to go to Tiramisus, which was the town that Alexander couldn’t capture. It’s on the top of this hill, and is really amazing. You have to climb up this mountain on this little trail, and you get to the top of this mountain and see this city that Alexander couldn’t conquer, because it was too well fortified, and he said “To hell with it. Destroy it,” which meant to cut down their olive trees and burn them, because that’s what made the town rich. 2,000 years ago they made these miles and miles of terra cotta pipes that would carry the olive oil down into the port, where it was put into drums, loaded onto ships, and sent all over the world. You wander all over this town, and you just feel it’s so alive, then you walk into this amphitheater that was carved into the side of a mountain. And that’s how important theater and art is to our culture, going back that far. As we struggle through our lives, the people who tells stories and sing songs help give us a sense of who we are. Some of us don’t have time in their lives to think these things, that’s why there are some people, like myself, who are retarded enough to become actors, writers, directors that have this strange desire to do this, and those people come together to help give context to our lives. When I was up in that ancient theater, it really humbled me to think that I was part of that lineage. I never celebrate Matthew Modine in the arts. It’s not about me. I might happen to be on the poster of the film, but it’s really about those people sitting around the fire for thousands of years, telling stories. And we’re part of that thing that helps people figure out what the fuck they’re doing here.

Modine at Pvt. Joker in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.

Absolutely, and I think that’s something you’re born with. You had some help growing up because your dad managed drive-in movie theaters. Apparently you had your epiphany while you were watching a documentary about the making of Oliver!

Yeah, that’s right. I looked at the kids, watching them learning the songs and the process, and I just knew that’s what I was supposed to do. It wasn’t because of fame, or celebrity. I just knew that I was supposed to be doing that. It wasn’t about vanity at all. In high school I thought ‘Wow, this is kind of great because you can get laid.’ (laughs) Stella Adler, who I studied with in New York, said “If you came to my class to be a movie star, you can get up and leave right now. I don’t teach that. I teach you to be a human being.” That’s the final thing I say in my play “If I’m lucky, I’ll teach you how to be a human being,” and that’s why the Top Gun thing happened the way it did. I was in East Germany. I was at the Berlin Film Festival, and they asked me if I wanted to go into the Eastern bloc. I said ‘I can’t go into East Germany. I’m an American.’ They said “No, you can. Germans can’t go there, but you can.” I went over there and met Russian soldiers who were my age who gave me pins from their uniforms and we shared cigarettes. They were no different from my brothers who went to Vietnam. I thought ‘Wow, they’re just people, and who are the people who are telling me that the Russians are the bad guys who want to destroy the world, and who are the people in Russia who are saying that the Americans are the bad guys?’ These lies are being told by somebody. I learned that if you follow the money back to the source, you usually find the people who are perpetuating the lies, and if you can get to that cause, it’s the start of the solution.

Well, that was Watergate: follow the money.

Follow the money. Follow the money.

You got to work with two of my heroes: Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, whom you worked with several times. Let’s start with Kubrick. I read your “Full Metal Jacket Diary,” and I know that working with Kubrick was a major intellectual, sensory and emotional experience. Tell us a bit about his process.

Well, the process was a mystery, and now will remain so forever. I think that you discover when you read the diary that the search that he was on and the discovery of the film that, while premeditated and thoroughly planned was like jazz music, or like a battle, was something that had to be improvised. Things changed over the course of the filming. Discoveries are made. Weaknesses are found, and so you have some performers who don’t fulfill what you imagine the film to be or you have some extraordinary surprises, like in the case of Lee Ermey, that becomes a major chord in the symphony that you’re trying to put together of filmmaking.


The diary contains a lot of great photos, as well as very revealing anecdotes about Kubrick himself.

Yeah, in fact I started a website for the book: www.fullmetaljacketdiary.com. There’s a link where you can register your book. I was just curious to see where it ended up. All the information is confidential, if anyone’s worried about that. It’s just kind of cool to know…I mean, Oliver Stone owns the book, so that was really exciting for me to find out. Probably I should have a forum on the site where I can answer questions about the book, too. But getting back to Kubrick, I think there was this perception about Stanley that everything was so premeditated and planned out, and I don’t think that was the case. He was very improvisational and all that preparation that he did in preproduction—if you look at “The Stanley Kubrick Archives”—it has to be subject to alteration. You start to play the notes. The thing that is exciting for me—and I thought of this recently when I saw an exhibition of Picasso’s work that he did toward the end of his life—was that a man like Picasso or a man like Stanley Kubrick, up to the final moments of their lives were still trying to uncover something, were still searching for something. I worked with Arthur Miller on one of his final plays, called “Finishing the Picture,” which was aptly titled because it was about the end of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe while they were making The Misfits, and “Resurrection Blues,” which Robert Altman directed at The Old Vic in London, where Kevin Spacey is the artistic director. And up until the end of his life, he was trying to solve this bizarre marriage he had with Marilyn Monroe, and with “Resurrection Blues” he was trying to come to terms with the uncertainty of life and the mystery of life, and God. Arthur was close to 90 when he did this play. Picasso was throwing gasoline on these final paintings and watching them melt. He was still trying to bend the form and find something hidden within it, just as he’d done with Cubism. I think that those three men are great examples of people who keep searching, who keep trying to find something. For me, Eyes Wide Shut, the reason that Kubrick had wanted to make that film for so long, before Full Metal Jacket even, there was something about that story that was very personal to him. Kubrick’s father was a doctor and Tom Cruise’s character was a doctor. As Jack Nicholson’s character says in A Few Good Men “You can’t handle the truth.” I think that was a big part of what that story was about and a big part of what many of Stanley’s films are about is telling the truth. When people start to tell lies, there is deception and there is mistrust, and from mistrust comes violence. Whether it’s The Shining or A Clockwork Orange or even 2001: A Space Odyssey, there’s an underlying story about the importance of telling the truth. Once people start to lie to one another, like in Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman’s character had this fantasy of fucking some sailor and was honest with Tom Cruise about it, and he couldn’t handle the truth.

Modine and Heather Prete in Arthur Miller's "Finishing the Picture."

You raise an interesting question: what’s been the ongoing question or theme of exploration in your life, thus far?

Trying to understand that big mystery: what are we doing here? That’s what drives me with the choices I make. What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life? What I do know is that when I have my final breath on this planet, I don’t want to be gasping for another one. I want to feel that if my time came today, I could smile and exhale and say ‘Ah, that was good,’ because I didn’t harm anybody to live my life and achieve the success that I’ve had. There are a lot of people who step on people’s throats in order to be successful. There is that nature in all of us, like puppies at their mother’s tits. You don’t want to be that run shoved to the back on the back tit. You want the motherlode. (laughs) That’s instinct. But I think if we imagine ourselves to help one another when we’re suffering, that’s what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said “To summon up our better angels,” to summon up the better side of humanity.

You got to work with Robert Altman three times, twice on the screen, and once on the stage.

The thing about working with Bob was, it wasn’t just those times working with him on the set, unless you’re a schmuck, you become a part of his family. You’ll meet with him, have dinner with him, and you became a part of his life. Oftentimes you work with people on a film and then once you’ve wrapped, you never see them again. Altman chose people that he enjoyed spending time with, and fortunately I was one of those people that became a part of his extended family.

And in terms of his working process, apparently he was someone who really gave his actors a lot of latitude in terms of what they did in front of the camera.

Yeah, I’d say he gave those people latitude because he was careful about who he picked to work with, whether it was Shelley Duvall, Meryl Streep or Warren Beatty. He picked people because he was looking for people who understood the role. I had a big monologue in Streamers when we were making that in Texas and I wanted to talk to Bob about the monologue I was going to do. I was very nervous because I hadn’t had a role of that size before, and I was very nervous about the interpretation of what I was saying. He kept postponing and postponing our conversation about the monologue and finally the day came where he said “Okay, we’re going to shoot. Modine, you go first.” I said ‘Bob, I’ve never had a chance to talk to you about this.’ He said “Let’s just shoot it.” We shot it, did two takes, maybe three, and he said “Good. Let’s move on to Mitchell Lichtenstein.” And I was really upset. He sat down on the bunk with me and said “You see kid, if I was interested in my interpretation of the role, I would’ve played it. I hired you because I knew you were an actor who understood it, and could play it. My job is to be like the conductor who says ‘A little bit softer.’ ‘A little bit louder.’ Your job is to interpret the role.” And it was such an important lesson for a young actor to receive from such a masterful director that the responsibility of interpretation is mine, just like if I was a cellist or a violinist, I wouldn’t expect the composer to teach me the song. He would want me to know the song and come in, and play it. The way that a conductor looks at a musician looks at a musician when they’re playing, you can see in the conductor’s face what he wants the musician to do, and you could see the same thing with Bob. He was very much a masterful conductor.

Modine and Julianne Moore in Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

By the time you did Short Cuts in 1993, you were a veteran actor, as opposed to a neophyte actor. Did you find the experience of working with him different at that point?

Yeah, in the sense that I had enough confidence to say to him in the scene with Julianne Moore where she takes her pants off and wanders around the house. I said ‘Bob, I know it says in the script that I’m chasing her around the house, but I don’t think this is the first time they’ve had this conversation. The difference is, today is the day when he’s going to put a period on this conversation, and get to the bottom of it. He’s going to sit in his chair, have his cocktail, and chase her around the room with his words and his thoughts.’ And Bob said “Fantastic. That’s what you’ll do.” That’s how he’d start every conversation on a set: “Okay Modine, what do you want to do?” And I think that created a much more powerful scene.

Any final thoughts?

I’ve been lucky enough to reach that point in my life, at 50, where there are so many tremendous roles that open up. When you’re young you get by on charm and looks, and when you’re middle aged there are some amazing opportunities that you have. I just hope all this work I’ve done over the last 30 years has prepared me for it.


The first ten minutes of boot camp from Full Metal Jacket.

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Take "The Parallax Test"

Alan J. Pakula's 1974 masterpiece The Parallax View is a film that just gets better with age, and is correctly regarded by film scholars, critics and cinefiles alike as the greatest paranoid political thriller ever made.

Warren Beatty plays a washed-up reporter from a third-rate Oregon newspaper who stumbles upon the story of the century: all the high-profile political assassinations of years past have been masterminded by the shadowy Parallax Corporation, headhunters, if you will, for sociopaths, societal deviants and misguided idealists, all of whom are equipped with the perfect psychological baggage to be killers-for-hire.

This sequence, the one that is still talked about 35 years later, is a montage of images that comprise the Parallax Corp's "test" for potential candidates. As reporter Beatty infiltrates the Parallax HQ in downtown L.A., we the audience get to take the test with him. It's one of the greatest montages in film history, and is sure to get under your skin and stay with you long after you've navigated elsewhere. Enjoy...and do let us know your test results!


Buy The Parallax View now at Amazon.com!

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'70s Blaxsploitation Horror: JD'S REVENGE, BLACULA, ABBY, and SCREAM BLACULA SCREAM!

With Halloween almost upon us, we at the Interview found ourselves compelled to post these relics of high camp and bad taste from the mid-70s. Groovy, baby...



Buy JD's Revenge now at Amazon.com!





Buy Blacula at Amazon.com!





Buy Abby at Amazon.com!






Buy Scream Blacula Scream at Amazon.com!

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Electric Arcade--October 2009

ELECTRIC ARCADE—OCTOBER 2009
By
Allen Gardner

Microsoft/Bungie release the long-awaited HALO 3: ODST (Xbox 360), a two-disc set that offers Halo players a new hero fighting the good fight in the year 2552. The Covenant is in control of the city of New Mombasa, searching for something beneath its darkened streets. Your character, an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, must gather your scattered squad, join forces and escape the occupied city. Oh yeah, and please kill, maim and blow up as many Covenant scumbags as you can!



Eye-popping graphics, sound and gameplay make this a worthy successor to the previous two Halo titles, and is sure to generate uber-hours of gameplay, even for the most jaded console hounds.

Package features a second disc, THE COMPLETE HALO 3 MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE, which has the complete Halo 3 collection of 24 maps, including the customizable Sandbox and three brand new maps, culminating in Heretic, the highly-anticipated return of Halo 2’s Midship. One of the best multiplayer games currently on the market.


Features: 1-4 players. Co-op 2-4. System link 2-16. HDTV 720p/1080i/1080p. Optimized for hard drive. Online multiplayer 2-26. Content download. Voice. File sharing.

Rated M for blood, language and violence.

Microsoft and iNiS release LIPS: NUMBER ONE HITS (Xbox 360), a lip-synching/karaoke-style game that allows players to sing along to 40 genre-spanning hit songs from diverse acts such as Culture Club, Coldplay and Kanye West. In addition, LIPS players can customize a “Number One hits” set list with a song pack of their choice containing five additional songs, available to download for free from Xbox LIVE.


Equipped with an Xbox 360 wireless microphone that is equipped with motion sensors and lights, the mike responds to players’ actions and can be used as percussion accompaniment. Microphone is also compatible with other music games such as “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band.” Other features include Avatar Integration which allows the player to literally get into Lips. Avatar Rewards lets players earn accessories including a hat, shoes and even Lady Gaga’s shades for your Avatar by scoring the right notes and sharing them with all your friends on LIVE.

Great fun for young and old alike, and an ideal party game, whether you’re drinking Hi-C or Stoli (or both!).

Features: 1-4 players; Co-op 2-4; 4MB to save game; HDTV 720p/1080i/1080p; Xbox 360 Wireless Microphone; Content download; Leaderboards; Avatar in-game rewards.

Rated T for lyrics, mild cartoon violence, sexual themes and tobacco use.

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THE HOLLYWOOD LINKS - 11/10/09

- Rachel McAdams may be playing the Black Cat (above) in Spider-Man 4. Will she go with the ghost-white hair? - Mania.com

- The very cool poster for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, directed by Terry Gilliam. - InContention.

- Brothers, directed by Jim Sheridan, has arrived, starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman, and is starting to receive well-deserved Oscar buzz. - Jeff Wells

- The Ladies of "The View" don't seem to know much about Sir Ian McKellen. The guy was both Gandalf and Magneto, dammit! Respect! (Thanks to Jay West for originally pointing it out.)- The Los Angeles Times

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THE HOLLYWOOD LINKS - 11/6/09

(Bridges and Gyllenhaal in Crazy Heart, above.)

- Some very valid questions about why the hell Robert Zemeckis keeps making these motion-capture films. At Hollywood-Elsewhere.

- Interesting thoughts from David Poland on Precious. At The Hot Blog.

- Drew McWeeny takes on the "Best Worst Movie," of all time, aka Troll 2. At HitFix.

- Kristopher Tapley gives major kudos to Crazy Heart and the performances of both Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal in the same. At In Contention.

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Lifting the Lid on W.C. with Liam O Mochain

(Julia Wakeham and director/actor Liam O Mochain in WC, above.)

by Alan Kline

When I first visited Irish filmmaker Liam O Mochain ten years ago on the set of his debut feature, The Book That Wrote Itself, one of the first things I noticed was that he had managed to pull together production elements that would have been difficult for a film with ten times the budget. On the first day, he had managed to get the City of Dublin to give him a double-decker bus, complete with driver, to shoot on throughout the city. I, and a few dozen other tourists, had just paid the equivalent of $20 each for a tour on a similar bus, just the day before. Later in the production, he visited the Venice Film Festival with a small crew, attended a press conference, and asked a variety of celebrity luminaries questions, in character as Vincent, the lead. The big names included George Clooney, Melanie Griffith, and director Bryan Singer. And now O Mochain had those people in his film, playing themselves, although they didn't know if for awhile. Mind you, this was at least a half-decade before Sasha Baron Cohen started using similar techniques to get marketable, and equally unsuspecting, public figures into his films and television shows by combining a non-fiction style set-up with a fictional character. Something that also occurred to me at the time was that O Mochain was so resourceful and determined to succeed that he would probably already be running a small country while wearing a general's uniform, had he been born into a different set of circumstances and had picked up a gun instead of a camera at a young age.

The Book That Wrote Itself, a charming travelogue-style comedy, which starred O Mochain and the luminously beautiful Antoinette Guiney, went on to screen at some 30 different international film festivals, was released worldwide on DVD, as well as theatrically in a number of cities. O Mochain's second feature is entitled WC, and while he's working with a somewhat larger budget now, and a lot more experience with a number of shorts and producing projects under his belt, he still had to scramble to get the most bang for his buck. But because this is O Mochain, for the price of a studio feature's coffee budget, we've got high-end locations, from a prison to a rollicking night club complete with jazz band, along with aerial shots of Dublin. No celebrity cameos this time, but he does have a bang-up cast of Irish and UK actors.

W.C. centers around one night in the life of O Mochain's character, Jack, who has just gotten out of prison for a robbing his own father's night club. He reluctantly takes a job working as a washroom attendant at that same night club, where he agrees to stay until he pays off his debts to his family. Also working in the washrooms is Russian émigré Katya (Julia Wakeham of “The Tudors"), who has just recently escaped a Dublin-based sex slavery ring. Both are stuck working in the washrooms and form an unlikely friendship.

In addition to O Mochain and Wakeham, WC also stars Adam Goodwin of My Boy Jack, Julie Hale of Ash Wednesday and My Left Foot, Mary Murray of The Magdalene Sisters, Karl Shields of Batman Begins and Eden, and Rory Mullen of Hunger.

WC had its premiere at last year's Dublin International Film Festival, and then had its International Premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival. The film also screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Galway Film Fleadh, the Zimbabwe International Film Festival, the Portobello Film Festival in London. It won Best Foreign Film at the Las Vegas Film Festival, and screened in Competition at the Cairo International Film Festival. It was also the closing film at the recent Arizona International Film Festival in April 09. It won "Best Feature Film" at the Waterford Film Festival.

The Hollywood Interview: Did anything in particular inspire the story of WC?

Liam O Mochain: I was working on another movie which didn't happen. I spent three-four years working with, or I thought I was working with, the Irish Film Board. I was working on the project, and they were working on the project not happening. That took 3-4 years. And when eventually, after 6, 7, or 8 times of me back and forth with them, and realizing it wasn't going to happen, because they kept saying this would happen and that would happen….I realized finally that they had no intention of doing it. I was just being strung along. I had wasted years on it, and I needed to make another film. I had done The Book That Wrote Itself previously, and at that point, it was 6 years since I had shot a feature. If you only have one film done in a certain number of years, you know, you sort of need another one to keep yourself current, and also, to just do something.

There was a news show on in Ireland about people working in low-wage jobs, and I thought that this was very, very interesting. It hadn't really been tackled that much in movies in Ireland, or the UK. I also didn't have a lot of money, and I needed to think of somewhere, or somehow, I could make a film that wouldn't cost that much money. And when you're making a film, if you're traveling a lot or you're moving locations a lot, that can cost you a lot of time and money. The film Phone Booth, with Colin Farrell, had just come out, and that was set in one location, with the general public around it. So, that was sort of an inspiration. Then I went and did research and found that no one had ever done a film set in toilets! [laughs]

While writing the film, did you visit many public toilets purely as research?

[laughs] I did spend a good while going into different toilets across Dublin, getting very strange looks when I was trying to find a place to set it, and possibly also to shoot it.

Was it taking pictures that motivated the strange looks?

Yeah, I went and took pictures in 70-80 toilets. I would just show up at a bar, or a night club, and I say, “May I see your toilet?” [laughs] They would just look at me, and think, “This guy is crazy!” So, I'd have to get the manager and explain what I was really doing, and while you're explaining, there are always like 10-15 people listening. Once they hear that it's a film, they're more interested. But that experience wasn't as strange as it was assembling the opening credit sequence, in which I took photos all around the world of different types of toilets, sinks, wash basins, and stall doors. I'd be taking a photo of a stall door and then somebody would come out of it [laughs], and I'd have to pretend that I wasn't taking a photo, but I was, and it looked even more suspect because I had a camera in my hand.

(O Mochain's Jack lays down the law with some rambunctious patrons in the women's toilet.)

How long did it take to find the right toilet to shoot the film in?

We had to look at many places, because there was something that was very specific for me in terms of location: I wanted to have the guys' toilet door and the girls' toilet door pretty much right next to each other, so that you could have the guys' toilet attendant and the girls' toilet attendant come out and talk to each other easily. And also, you could have people congregating in the hallway where the toilets were, before they went in and out, so we could do scenes there. I didn't want one toilet on one level, and another on a different level, I wanted to keep it all together, so it would be very intense and keep the drama central.

Production-wise, you also have to find toilets that are big enough to get all of your lighting equipment, the cameras, and your actors inside, with room to work.

Yeah, that can be tough. We sometimes had 20 crew people in the toilets while we were working, just sitting in the different cubicles. 4-5 people per stall, sitting on top of each other, trying not to make any noise. And they're not big toilets [laughs]. You find ways of doing it, but it's worth it because you do get a different vibe shooting at an actual location, then you would if you chose to build the toilets yourself on a set. I didn't have the budget to make that choice anyway, but it worked out.

You shot at a night club, which was functioning at night but basically closed during the day.

Right, we found a place which wouldn't open until 11 at night. We'd sometimes be in there shooting at 7 in the morning, sometimes right until 10 at night.

It must have kept you on a tight schedule, because you couldn't go too long on a shooting day as the club had to open.

And things would be moved in the toilet each night, so we'd sometimes have major continuity problems trying to figure out where a particular bar of soap was left, or if somebody had smudged the mirrors during the night, we'd have to find out how it looked the previous day. The fact that the film is set during one day….the toilets all have to look the same, all the time. The one-day setting was good in that it saves you time and you don't have to move, but you have other headaches at the same time.

Rough things happen in night club toilets at night too. I'm having images of showing up to the set in the morning and there being puke on one of the toilets.

That didn't happen, but you might find glass on the ground, things like that. The first day of shooting, the two kids who were playing the lead characters as children, they came in to just have a look around, and one of them slipped on a piece of glass. That was just a half-hour before we did our first shot. You know, well, if this is how it starts, then this is how it starts [laughs].

(Julia Wakeham, after a rough night in the WC, above.)

You have a cast filled with various well-known actors from the Irish acting community. You knew that you were filling one of the lead roles. How did you go about getting the rest of these actors?

I'd say about half of them I picked from people who I had seen in other things, and whose work I found interesting. Julie Hale was in Ash Wednesday and My Left Foot, and I had also seen her in a lot of TV stuff. And Mary Murray was in The Magdalene Sisters. For the main characters, I had written one part for myself. In The Book That Wrote Itself, I had played this character who was completely manic and just wouldn't stop and kept talking all the time [laughs], and so I wanted to do something this time where I barely talked and was more laid back, so I wrote the character that way. For the Russian character of Katya, I auditioned loads of people from all across Europe, and then this girl (Julia Wakeham) who came in from South Africa….I had lots of girls come in previously and say that they could do the Russian accent, and I thought, “Oh, here we go again…” but she was fantastic. She nailed the accent. But to get back to your question, half the people I cast were from auditions and half the people were people whose work I knew previously.

Ten years ago, when you shot The Book That Wrote Itself, you were one of the few Irish filmmakers really doing guerilla-style work at a feature length. Has that changed in the decade since the advent of digital, and are there more Irish filmmakers doing real low-budget, indie filmmaking?

Yeah, and actually, last year, we screened at the Galway Film Fleadh, and they had set up a section called The Wild Card, which were basically films by filmmakers who weren't being funded by traditional institutions such as the Film Board. And there actually more films last year, and this year, in that particular section, than there were films that were funded through the government. And now, it looks like the Irish government isn't going to be funding Irish films from here on in. Partially because of the economy, this is one of the areas that the government can cut back on. And so, I think you're going to see a lot more filmmakers having to go out there and do it themselves, which I suppose, in essence, means that people will have to start thinking more on their feet. Necessity sometimes equals creativity, you know?

I remember when I came to the set of The Book That Wrote Itself, I was blown away by the fact that you had managed to get the City of Dublin to donate a double-decker bus to be shot on for the day, complete with driver. Stuff like that would be hard for a low-budget filmmaker to pull off in the States. People just aren't that receptive to helping in that manner, particularly in a city like Los Angeles where the studios pay top dollar for services such as vehicle rental. Do you find that type of willingness to help filmmakers is common in Ireland?

Yes, and you might recall that I also got use of a train on Book [laughs]. On WC, I got to shoot on the new tram system, which was just built. And not only did they give me sponsorship, they also gave me funding as well. We also managed to get helicopter aerial shots of Dublin into the movie for free. You know, I think if you just want something really badly and you ring up and make a case for it, and if they have it available, and it's not going to cost them anything, and you're willing to give them something in return such as PR…..they are willing often. Sometimes, other people are just afraid to ask, I think. If you don't ask, you don't get.

The film partially focuses on the sex slave trade in Dublin. Is that something which has been a problem in Ireland for a while, or is it more recent?

I actually based a lot of my writing on cases I had researched in the UK. It was during post-production and during the festival tour, that more stories have started to come to light in Ireland. It was only a week ago that there was girl from Romania who was found in an apartment in Dublin, and she had been promised the job of a cleaner. And of course, the job never existed, similar to one of the main characters in WC. She had been here for awhile and had been a prostitute.

Did you find that people in Ireland reacted to that plotline in the film in the manner of “That could never happen here,” or was there more pre-awareness of the problem?

It's strange. Some of the press wrote great stuff about [those plot elements] in Ireland. Others said, “That just doesn't happen. That type of story is in the past.” Some of them were actually quite insulted by it. So, you either get a good reaction or you get a bad reaction. And both are quite good reactions to get, if you know what I mean, because the story is making people think.

How did you handle the challenges of both starring in the film and directing it, all on a low-budget?

I rehearsed like a play and shot it like a documentary. With a play, you usually get around three weeks of rehearsal and with most films, you don't really get rehearsal. So, I put aside three weeks of rehearsal so I could become very familiar with both the material and the other actors, so we could work out a sort of short-hand. And I also had around five weeks of preproduction running concurrently with the crew. The more prepared you are, the easier it is. Not that it's ever easy.

How had your directorial mindset changed during the time between Book and WC?

Well, my crew was a lot better on WC [laughs]. Most of the crew on my first one were right out of college. Some knew that they didn't know that much, and others thought they knew more than they did [laughs]. It wasn't fun to really navigate between that. Thankfully, I had come right from directing and producing a lot of TV shows, and lots of theater and radio, so I was used to just sort of picking up the camera and doing it. It was sort of a baptism of fire though. Whereas, on this one, I decided that I needed people who had a lot more experience and better credits, and work where I actually could see what they had done, you know? I knew what they were going to bring to it in terms of creativity and style. So, in that sense, it was a big change. But still, not having money…I still had to spend a few months in post-production to try and get the sound right and the picture right…whereas if you had a bit more money, when you were actually shooting it you could take more time and maybe have better equipment.

Let's talk about the distribution schedule for the film. You're doing a simultaneous VOD (Video-on-Demand) and theatrical release in the U.S.

We're releasing theatrically on Nov. 13th in the States, in a limited release in cinemas. We're starting in Tucson, Arizona and then moving on to Minneapolis, and from there, we'll be going to other cities across the States. At the same time, pretty much, we're going out on VOD via Cinetic's Film Buff channel. As far as I know, they're in 30-40 million homes already and will be in more by the time we go on their VOD channel in late October-early November. The DVD will come out after that. That will possibly be in January. It will also be available for downloads on Itunes and Hulu and other spots.

It really is a completely different world from when you traveled around the world with a 16 mm print of Book.

It is. I went to a lot of festivals with Book. We didn't have a major distributor, and we went through three different sales companies and distributors. We learned a lot. A lot of what not to do the next time. I had quite a few sales companies interested in WC, but they were all quite small, and I decided that I didn't want to have the same experience of trying to get the movie back from people after 3-4 years and they had done very little with it, or they made money and you hadn't seen anything from it. In the last year, of course, things have completely changed. Many of the major independent distributors are gone - New Line to Warner Independent - and there are very few people out there left to buy movies. So, you have to go down a different route. Lots of movies aren't even going to theatrical - they're going right to VOD. Then, DVD is being squeezed of course and TV isn't paying as much as it used to be. So, everything has completely changed. A lot of people are seeing VOD as the way to go. I suppose we will see in time.

(O Mochain's Jack, above, deals with the end results of a night's festivities.)

What are you working on next?

A couple of months ago I finished the “Making Of” documentary on WC, called “Lifting the Lid.” [laughs] That will go out worldwide in a few months. I'm also producing a lot of radio still, and I have two short films I've been working on which will come out next year, then I'm going to make another short, and I've also been given a little bit of funding to make a feature film in Gaelic, the national language of Ireland.

WC will be released theatrically in the US in cinemas beginning on November 13th. It will be available on VOD (Video-On-Demand) in North America from the end of October for two months, and on DVD in the UK beginning on Monday October 26th. The VOD release is being handled by Film Buff, the new independent film channel just launched by Cinetic. New York-based M&L Banks are the distributor for North America. Cinetic are handling the worldwide digital rights for the film.

More information on WC can be found at:
http://www.wcthemovie.com/
www.myspace.com/wcthemovie

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ERIC ROBERTS: The Hollywood Interview

(Eric Roberts in "Crash," above.)

Rediscovering Roberts

Eric Roberts never really left, but 2009 audiences are learning (or relearning) the charms of the actor Mickey Rourke has called the best he ever worked with.

By Terry Keefe

(This article is currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.)

“Eric Roberts is the [expletive deleted] Man,” proclaimed Mickey Rourke at this past year’s Independent Spirit Awards, while accepting his trophy for Best Male Lead, at the very beginning of a speech which then saw him singling out Roberts, his one-time co-star in 1984’s The Pope of Greenwich Village, as someone who was worthy of a comeback like Rourke had with The Wrestler. From the audience, Roberts himself watched his friend at the podium with what looked to be a combination of embarrassment at being mentioned and some pleasure at the same, finally throwing it back at Rourke by shouting good-naturedly, “Accept your award!” For the viewers who remembered Roberts and Rourke as a young pair of acting dynamos back in Pope, it was a nice burst of nostalgia, as well as a reminder that there was another actor out there who is one great role away from being discussed as the comeback of the year. But the truth of the matter is that Roberts has already been in the middle of a definite return to prominence for a few years now, albeit one that has been quieter than that of Rourke (and after watching some of Mickey’s speeches, how could it not be?) It seemed to begin in 2005 with his casting as the stylish pimp who vied with Brandon Flowers for the affection of a prized courtesan in The Killers' video for their song “Mr. Brightside,” directed by Sophie Muller, who used Roberts’ ruggedly handsome, but slightly dangerous, looks to full advantage. Roberts can do more with a leer than most actors can with a page-long speech, and he appears capable of devouring the baby-faced Flowers throughout. There was also a knowing nod to film fans by the casting of Roberts, sort of similar to the way Fatboy Slim made Christopher Walken the focus of the video for “Weapon of Choice” at the start of the decade. It was saying, in a sense, “These actors are cool. We’re hip by casting them. And you should know why.” Soon, Brett Ratner had cast Roberts in the Mariah Carey videos “It’s Like That,” and “We Belong Together.” More music video spots followed in songs for Ja Rule and Akon. Last year saw Roberts in a leading role on “Heroes,” and this Fall, he is starring in the second season of “Crash,” in a part that is being featured as prominently in promotions as that of costar Dennis Hopper. Roberts plays a billionaire businessman and developer named Seth Blanchard, who is determined to bring a new football stadium to Los Angeles, no matter who he has to bulldoze to do it, until he has a life-changing collapse in a strip mall parking lot. Roberts is also part of the cast of The Expendables, opposite star and director Sylvester Stallone, and a group of actors who are the action hero version of what the cast of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World was for comic actors back in the 1963, in that practically every action star from the past three decades has a role, including Jet Li, Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, and Dolph Lundgren.

Roberts received his first big break in 1978’s King of the Gypsies, in which he starred opposite Sterling Hayden, Shelley Winters, Judd Hirsch, and Susan Sarandon, earning him a Golden Globe nomination. His work in 1983 for director Bob Fosse in Star 80 as Paul Snider, the real-life con man/pimp who murdered Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten, is perhaps his career finest, and a reminder of what Roberts is capable of as an actor. The film was considered a financial bomb when released, and Roberts received another Golden Globe nod, but not the deserved Oscar nomination, for bringing to life all the self-loathing, ambition, and snake-like charm, of this failed Hollywood hustler. Much more public recognition followed for his 1984 starring role in The Pope of Greenwich Village as Paulie, the live-wire best friend of Mickey Rourke’s more level-headed Charlie. And in 1986, Roberts would receive a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for his work as Buck in the 1985 release of Runaway Train. In terms of both critical and commercial success, Roberts’ career then entered a down period for much of the next decade and a half, although he never stopped working and those years were not without their bright spots, including his starring role in the 1996 feature It’s My Party, which was a Sundance selection and indie circuit success.

These days, Roberts appears happy with what he is doing in terms of work, but also just as much with his family, who he enjoys speaking about. His daughter Emma Roberts has followed him into performing, and is a major rising star, with leads in the series “Unfabulous,” as well as the feature films Nancy Drew and Hotel for Dogs. The next year will see her starring in films with a bevy of big names, including Ed Harris and Jennifer Connelly, amongst quite a few others. His stepson Keaton Simons (with wife Eliza) is a successful musician who has just released his first album on CBS Records and is currently touring (http://www.keatonsimons.com/). His stepdaughter, Morgan Simons, is a prominent chef and caterer in the Los Angeles area, running A Catering Company (http://www.acateringco.com/), which also provides personal chef and meal delivery services. Roberts’ career is managed by his wife Eliza Roberts, who is also a successful casting director and actress.

In addition to their obvious passions for acting and their family, Eric and Eliza are deeply involved in The Natural Child Project (www.naturalchild.org), which Eric describes as “an organization and a philosophy” and which promotes the use of programs of empathy and understanding, rather than violence, to raise children. Says Eliza about The Natural Child, “It’s kind of neat that Eric is playing this philanthropic character on ‘Crash,’ because people often ask what Eric is interested in, in real life, and this encompasses it all.” Eric elaborates, “The bottom line is, if a child is never scared or struck, there would never be war ever. So we have to start it
at the grass roots to kind of spread it through mankind.” Not a bad way to use your career heat.

Hi, Eric. Let’s start by talking about your new role on “Crash.” Executive producer Ira Steven Behr was brought in to sort of retool the series in its second season. How much of his new vision for the show did he share with you when you came on board?

Eric Roberts: He told me where my character was going. He didn’t tell me where I’d end up, but he told me where I was going. And he told me why he wanted me to do the part, and what he was after. He was very clear, very direct, and he’s very actor-friendly.

One of the trademarks of “Crash,” both the series and the original film, is that the characters start in separate storylines and then begin to interact. Did you pay much attention in the early episodes to what the other storylines were, or did you prefer to wait and be surprised when the other plot threads collided with yours?

Oh no, I’ve become a “Crash” junkie [laughs]. It’s like my grandmother would call soap operas “her stories”? The “Crash” scripts are my stories.

Did you watch much of the previous season?

I didn’t, because I was told it was going to be another show. So I left the first season alone.

Ira said something interesting where he compared your character of Seth Blanchard, not so much to the expected real-life counterparts of Richard Branson or Donald Trump, but to Bobby Kennedy. In that Kennedy was someone who was far more hard-edged a personality, until JFK was assassinated, whereafter he seemed to really find his soul and become more a man of the people. Was that comparison something you and Ira spent much time discussing?

Yes, yes, it was. See, the hard thing about playing Seth Blanchard for me, was that this is a stone-cold killer. When you approach him, you only get what he wants you see. And that’s not very much, and it’s not very friendly, and it’s not very warm. But you’re on a TV show, so you have to play him as accessible and you have to understand what’s on their mind. So, to have all of that, and to then go through the epiphany that he goes through, was one of the two or three biggest challenges for me as an actor that I’ve ever had. And I went through severe sleep deprivation the first almost 3-4 weeks of this show. I was doing nights in New Orleans on The Expendables for Sly Stallone, and I was doing days in New Mexico on this. And I was only seeing the scripts for this [show] when I got here. So, it was incredibly hard. But I had this incredible first director here, Andrew Bernstein. Incredible guy. And, it doesn’t get talked about a lot, but the heart of any series is your crew. This crew took this actor who was sleep-deprived and just there for the work, and they led me by the nose and they just took care of me. I haven’t had a crew take care of me like this since 1982 when I worked with Bob Fosse on Star 80. I’m serious. It was miraculous what they did for me, all of them.

What were some of the things the crew did to help?

The camera guy, or the script supervisor, would say, “You’re slurring your speech again.” Because when I got tired, I would slur, and I’d say to everyone, “You’ve got to tell me when I’m slurring my speech” and everyone would let me know [laughs]. They were all my pals, you know?

You’ve known a few moguls over the years, I’d imagine. Was there anyone in particular you based your interpretation of Blanchard on?

There are two individuals that I have based him on the most, but honestly, it’s more on what Ira has told me. Again, what he said about Bobby Kennedy is that he was sort of a dark character and connected to kind of negative people, and then really changed. And if you go on the contention that you can’t get that successful, 28 billion dollars [in the case of this character], without being somewhat unscrupulous…..a real mo-fo, you know?

You’ve wrapped now on The Expendables. Looking at that cast, it’s two generations of stars and action stars. What was the atmosphere like on the set when that group of guys got together?

It’s just a bunch of bored guys [laughs]. Here we are!

It seems like there’s the potential for some serious ego wars with that many stars together.

That didn’t happen at all though. Not a one.

One of the early promotional shots from The Expendables shows you and Steve Austin leaping away from an explosion. That appears to really be the two of you in that stunt.

Yeah, Stone Cold Steve Austin and I met, and then five seconds later, we had to jump through a fire-bomb together [laughs]. Steve and I bonded over that. He’s my new best friend. He’s one of the smartest, funniest guys I’ve ever hung out with. I love him. My wife Eliza and I are his new acting coaches. We can say that officially now.

(Roberts and Stone Cold Steve Austin vs. a fireball in The Expendables, above.)

I know the general story of The Expendables involves a group of mercenaries on an insane mission. What’s your role in the yarn?

I’m not one of the mercenaries. I’m on the other side of the fence. I am a rogue CIA operative, and I basically run a general, who runs a country. That’s what I do. And I decide that I want the whole shebang for myself [laughs]. I am what you might call a bad guy [laughs]. But not in my own head. Bad guys always think they’re good guys.

In the last few years, you became the hip guy to have in a music video. Let’s talk about how it started. Did you actively pursue the music video work or did it sort of just happen?

They came after me, and then the Killers video went number one, and the Mariah Carey video went number one, and the Akon video went number one, and I just became the guy to have in your video [laughs]. There were 14-year old girls saying, “Hi, can I have your autograph?” It was kind of mind-blowing. It changed my life a little bit.

Another way you’ve been introduced to a younger generation of fans is through “Entourage.” Your appearance on the episode where the guys go to you to get mushrooms is, on one hand, cool for your image because you’re sort of presented as the hippest guy in Hollywood. At the same time, you’re also the guy they go to for the drugs. Was there any hesitation in playing yourself on the show in that context?

You’re not playing yourself on “Entourage.” Are any of those guys really like that on “Entourage?” [laughs] Not at all. But, about the fourth time I heard them say my name on that show, because I’m a big fan of the show, I called my lawyer because he also handles the writers on “Entourage.” “If they’re going to keep talking about me, have them put me on the damn show, dude!” [laughs] And so he called me back in five minutes, and he said, “They want you on the show but they’ve got a question for you.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Will you do mushrooms?” And I said, “I will certainly pretend to!” And he said, “Okay, then they want you on the show next week.” That’s kind of how it happened. Those guys are so much fun to work with! And you know, I’ve always been a fan of Jeremy [Piven], but now I would bend over backwards for the guy.

How did you become involved in Dark Knight in the role of the crime boss Salvatore Maroni? Was it offered to you, or was an audition required?

I had to go earn that one. That was a weird experience, in that I got the audition, and James Gandolfini wanted the part. So, they were holding auditions, but they probably were going to go with him. I went in and auditioned and I didn’t hear anything for two months. And then I heard, “Hey, you got the part!” I thought it was long gone. It was a shocking and wonderful experience to watch them burn 200 million dollars.

I wanted to talk a little bit about your family. Your daughter Emma has obviously followed you into acting. Her first big role was in Blow, starring Johnny Depp. She was very young at the time. Did you give her any acting advice?

Not at all [laughs]. Just don’t look in the lens! That was it.



(Emma Roberts in Wild Child, above.)

Keaton is a musician whose album just came out in June. Did you introduce him to any particular music growing up?

I was always a rock and roll nut, and I was his mentor to around the ages of 14 and 15, and then I went by the wayside, and he became his own self.

(Keaton Simons, above.)

And Morgan, has become a top chef and caterer.

You are what you eat, and at 53 years old, people always ask me, “How do you stay looking like that, dude?” [laughs] It’s because of what I eat. Because of Morgan Simons. She can cook for whatever you need in life, and I need to be healthy, fit, and body beautiful without having to work too hard [laughs]. And I eat high protein, pre-cooked meals, that I drop in a boiling pot of water, and I have a gourmet meal.

Let’s go way back and talk about your first major feature role, King of the Gypsies in 1978. You were a very young guy suddenly starring opposite the legendary Sterling Hayden. What was that experience like?

[laughs] It ended up being one of the best experiences of my life, because it became a relationship. We became very good friends, and we stayed friends right up until his death. Sterling was just a winner, as a human being. He loved you if you were whatever you were. And if you pretended to be whatever you were, he had nothing for you. It was as cut and dry as that, and that’s all there was to it. That’s how you were, or you weren’t his friend. One quick story for you. I had only been working for the better part of three weeks, and he came for his first day, which was a night shoot. And the Second AD came to get me and said, “Mr. Hayden would like to speak to you, Mr. Roberts.” I said, “Cool! I’ll be right there!” So, I go running over to his camper and knock on the door. I hear, [does Sterling Hayden voice] “Come on in!” and I open the door. Whoosh! Big cloud of hashish. [laughs] And I say, “What’s happening, Mr. Hayden?” He says, “Have a seat, son. Close that door behind you. You smoke dope?” I replied, “Not when I work, no sir.” He says, “Well, I do!” [laughs] “What are we shooting tonight?” I said, “Scene 87.” He says, “Yeah, I know the number. What the fuck happens?” I said, “It’s a pivotal scene, blah-blah-blah-blah -” And he says, “How are you at improvisation?” [laughs] I said, “I’m okay -” He said, “Good, because that’s what we’re doing tonight!” [laughs] That was my first Sterling Hayden experience, and I loved him ever since.

(Roberts in his first big film role in King of the Gypsies, above.)

I feel that your performance as Paul Snider in Star 80 was one of the best of the decade. In developing that performance, were you interested in imitating his mannerisms as exactly as you could reconstruct, or was it more about getting a sense of his general essence?

Wow, that’s a big question, but no, what I did was, I just discovered what I thought was the core of his kind of energy, by my talking with people who liked, and also disliked, him. Also, through photographs - how he stood, whether his shoulders were up or down, and stuff like that. Small stuff, which I could see through pictures of when he was at the [Playboy] Mansion. I realized that he was wound very tightly, and he was very self-conscious, and he was very…from another era, almost. Once I got that, that was the core of his physicality, I just had to find his morality. And once I had that, I had this very pathetic man, and I popped him out there. One story from Star 80 I wanted to share - while I was working on the film, I got the most personal direction I’ve ever gotten from a director, and that was Bob Fosse. I was doing a scene one day and I was having problems with it. He asked to speak to me in private and he takes me aside and he says, “You’re playing me if I weren’t successful. Do you understand?”

(Roberts as Paul Snider in Star 80, below.)

What a great acting note. Was that typical of Bob Fosse’s directing style? Very specific notes?

Real specific, which flowed into passionate, manic lunacy. It would go A-Z, A-Z, A-Z, but always very specific.

In developing your character of Paulie in The Pope of Greenwich Village, was the manic nature of the character something that was alluded to in the script, or was it something that you brought to him?

It was something that I brought to the guy. You know, that guy was kind of written as a tough, dumb thug. I basically took him off the page and made him a would-be-tough momma’s boy. Because it’s more fun to watch, and also, I’d seen a lot of tough thugs on screen before and I didn’t think I’d be the best one.

At the end of the film, Paulie and Charlie walk down the street together, but you know they’re headed for more trouble. Did you and Mickey ever discuss whether they stayed alive?

[laughs] Many, many times. You know, we just got the go-ahead for Pope, Part 2. So we have to decide where they walked off to. I would like to open Part 2 in Miami. On the beach. All I know right now is that it’s me and Mickey, and we’re reading a script.

(Roberts and Mickey Rourke in The Pope of Greenwich Village, above.)

You’ve remained friends with Mickey over the years. Neither of you ever went away, but you’re both having career resurgences at the same time.

You know, every career does this three or four times, if it lasts. That’s how it goes. Once you get over the first dip, you’re okay. At first, it’s just like, “Wait a minute! Whoa! It’s going down. It’s not supposed to go down!” [laughs] But that’s what happens. Once you learn that, and realize, and you see that all the other actors once went through it, and all the younger ones are going through it now, you’re like, “Oh, okay, this is what we do. It’s all good. Hi, guys!” [laughs]

What did you think of Mickey’s speech at the Spirit Awards?

I was caught off guard, and I just wanted to crawl under a chair [laughs]. Because I was just so shocked. It was just so sweet, and so endearing, and I’ll never forget it, and I just want to kiss him for it. But it’s just embarrassing [laughs].

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