Christian Slater: The Hollywood Flasback Interview

Christian Slater: The Hollywood Flasback Interview

Winona Ryder  

I interviewed actor Christian Slater in November, 2008 for Venice Magazine. Having long had a reputation as an "enfant terrible" in his youth, Slater surprised me somewhat with his calm, measured demeanor and thoughtful outlook. He was promoting his well-reviewed, but ultimately short-lived, TV series "My Own Worst Enemy," which we discussed a bit, but Slater was eager to reflect on his entire career and life, which he did with aplomb. My other memory of the chat is that during our dinner, the power went out in the restaurant or hotel where we met (the location of which has been lost to time) and the halogen streetlights outside casting our talk in a strange, other-worldly glow for a good 30 minutes. All these factors made our meeting a memorable one. Slater can currently be seen on the new USA Network series "Mr. Robot," which is also being lauded critically, and will hopefully be gifted with a longer run than "My Own Worst Enemy."


CHRISTIAN SLATER IS HIS OWN WORST ENEMY
By
Alex Simon


Christian Slater first entered the public eye with his turn in the genre-shattering classic Heathers in 1988, playing a teenage rebel who evolves from smokin’ in the boys room, to bumping off his sadistic classmates, to becoming a homegrown terrorist by the film’s conclusion. Slater was instantly dubbed “the new Jack Nicholson” by press and public alike, and soon found himself to be not only in demand as an actor, but also fodder for the tabloids, a fate that hasn’t been kind to many young actors throughout Hollywood history, particularly in the past year. However, Christian Slater decided he was a survivor somewhere along the line, and has grown into an actor of range and skill after successfully navigating the rocky road of early success.

Born Christian Michael Leonard Slater on August 18, 1969 in New York City, Slater is the son of actor Michael Slater (aka Michael Hawkins), and casting director Mary Jo Slater. Growing up surrounded by the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd rubbed off on young Christian, who was discovered by veteran Broadway director Michael Kidd and cast in a revival of The Music Man in the late ‘70s. He scored his first major film with The Name of the Rose in 1986, and has also appeared in such lauded titles as Tucker, Pump Up the Volume, True Romance, Interview with the Vampire and The Contender. Slater was part of the ensemble cast of Emilio Estevez’s critically-acclaimed Bobby in 2006, and has kept busy doing stage work recently, including a heralded turn as McMurphy in the London revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Christian Slater brings his unique brand of talent to television this Fall with NBC’s new series My Own Worst Enemy, where Slater does double-duty as Henry Spivey, a seemingly-ordinary suburban dad and husband who also leads a secret life as intelligence operative Edward Albright. The catch: neither personality knows about the other, until both find their single life very much in danger. The show premieres October 13th on NBC.

Christian Slater sat down recently to discuss his career past, present and future. Here’s what was said:

My Own Worst Enemy marks your first TV series as a star. Is it a different process than working on a feature?

Christian Slater: Well, the primary difference is the speed at which you work. You work much faster in television. We took 14 days shooting the pilot, and we’re creating this whole new world here, so it was just this incredibly creative environment. When the pressure is on, great ideas tend to spring forth, and I think they have in this case. We’re close to finishing the second episode now, and I’m just having a great time, one of the best times I’ve had in my career, actually. It’s edgy, it’s interesting, and they’re delving into some really interesting areas. We’re all getting comfortable around each other, and becoming creative together on the set. It just feels like there’s a real focus, and the train is rolling out of the station now. It’s just going to be crazy. It’s a crazy, crazy show.

A lot of the actors I’ve spoken with in the past who have gone from features to television, say that the idea of doing a weekly series is really comforting, because you never lose that little voice in back of your head that every job could be your last.

You do have that fear and anxiety, no question. But being part of this particular show with this network (NBC), their support has been amazing. The Olympics alone gave us such amazing publicity that it really helped put wind in our sails. I should thank Michael Phelps for keeping it all so interesting, and keeping people tuned in as they were! So when you have that kind of support from “management,” so to speak, going into it, it lessens the anxiety—a lot!



Not only is shooting a television episode more time-constrained, but you’re playing two completely different characters who are in virtually every scene. It must be exhausting as well as exhilarating.

I never stop, and there’s not much time to myself, that’s for sure. It’s me talking to myself from one angle, then me talking to myself from another. We should also be clear that it’s not two different guys. It’s just me! (laughs) There’s sometimes some confusion that there’s a twin, or a clone or something. It’s all me: two guys in one body. There’s a microchip in my brain that separates the two personalities.

I’d imagine one advantage from an acting and a writing standpoint is that since with TV you’re really making a series of short films, rather than a single feature, it allows you to go much deeper into the characters and situations than you would in a traditional movie.

God, yes! Each episode really ends on a cliffhanger, and goes into the next episodes. I hope they keep that formula going. The other great thing is that I get to live in two worlds: one normal world, and then this world of incredible adventure.

You’re basically living out every boy’s fantasy: what boy didn’t grow up wanting to be James Bond?

Exactly! And some of the scenarios are really wacky and out-of-control, where I get to live out some of those fantasies.

It’s kind of like the ‘60s all over again: James Bond gave birth to great shows like Man From UNCLE, I Spy, Mission: Impossible, and now the reinvention of the Bond series and the Bourne films have really given new life to the whole spy genre, that’s transferring over to television.

Yeah, we’ve been talking about that quite a bit on the set, especially I Spy because Robert Culp and Bill Cosby had such great chemistry. We really let ourselves sort of go crazy and play. This is definitely one of the more fun sandboxes I’ve ever gotten to be in.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in New York.

Yeah, my dad’s an actor, he was the first Jack Ryan on Ryan’s Hope and was a pretty big soap star. My mom’s a very well-known casting director. I would make my dad take me to work with him when I was little, and watch him do his thing. He was creative, and funny, and just this wild actor. He had a real command of the stage.

It’s in the DNA, you could say.

Yes, absolutely. I started auditioning for things and got discovered by the director Michael Kidd, who saw me on The Joe Franklin Show, and cast me as Winthrop in The Music Man.

Was there one particular moment you knew that you were an actor? Was there one play, or movie or performance you saw that crystallized it for you?

This might sound strange, but it was probably more recently that I realized I was really an actor, when I was doing some stage work in London, on the West End. As a result of making some choices to work with a teacher, it really brought a lot of things to light for me. For years, I felt like I was just kind of winging it, and that any moment this committee was going to show up and discover that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I worked with a great acting coach named Larry Moss, who’s just the best, and I learned a lot and rediscovered what a gift it is to be an actor, and that it really is a lot of fun. You get to escape from your own life for a couple hours a night when you’re doing a play.

The play was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, right?

Yeah. I played McMurphy, at the Gielgud Theater. It was like doing a rock concert for eight months, really amazing.

Slater (center) with the London cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

So you got to assume the mantle of McMurphy, the role which most people would argue made Jack Nicholson, whom you were often compared to right after breaking out in Heathers. Was it tough to play a part that’s so heavily identified with one iconic actor’s interpretation of it?

It was tricky, and obviously I was scared of unconsciously imitating Nicholson’s performance. So I stayed away from the movie. I’d seen it of course, but not in years. I read the book, and that really provided me with my own source material for that character, and it’s a great character. Plus the book and the play are quite different from the movie, in terms of it being from the Chief’s point-of-view. I realized after doing it that Jack Nicholson has built a career out of doing that character. And why wouldn’t you? The guy’s heroic, he’s funny, he’s incredibly smart, just a great character.

What was your interpretation of him?

I didn’t play him as a lunatic, certainly. I played it more like it was all a big misunderstanding, and he was in this situation and trying to make the best of it, but he was in a totalitarian scenario, and his passion and ability to rally the troops and get the guys on his side was the thing I really identified with, and his ability to take on the system created a great sense of passion. The guy just wanted to have fun, and there was someone constantly standing in the way. He’s also a Christ-like figure who’s got his disciples and has to be sacrificed at the end in order to get these guys to rally.

It’s especially topical for the times we’re living in.

Oh yeah! It’s a universally identifiable story, and you can’t help but get caught up in it. We’d have nights where the audience would get so caught up in it that they’d be cheering for us to watch the World Series! One night people got into fights in the audience. Everyone really got into it. There was a sense of reality. Once the lights came up, I think they all felt like they’d been in the asylum with us.

Slater and Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose.

The first film I saw you in was The Name of the Rose, where you got to play opposite the great Sean Connery. Heady stuff for a kid?

Sean Connery was great. I grew up watching the Bond movies, and working with him at 16 was like having a master class in acting, life, all sorts of things. He’s an incredible professional, a real gentleman, a man’s man. He also didn’t take any shit from anybody. He had earned his right to be who he was, and things moved along according to his plan. He was concerned about every element and how everything was treated on the set. He didn’t even want to see the horses mistreated. There was a horse wrangler on the set, and Sean didn’t like the way the guy had hit the horse with his riding crop. So he grabbed it from the guy and said (in Connery’s voice) “Don’t hit the fucking horses!” (laughs) I watched the film recently on cable, and really got emotional because it took me back to that time, and everything I was going through. It really is an absolutely astoundingly beautiful movie. The work that Jean-Jacques Annaud did…I don’t think I had a clue then what a special film it was. Every once in a while there’s a special project you get to be a part of, and that was one. I was always a sensitive kid, and I remember that wrapping that film was really hard for me. It was five months in Germany and Rome, and it was hard to say good-bye.

You got to work with Francis Coppola soon after on Tucker.

Another great experience. Francis was great, and Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen…God, those cars were amazing! I got to drive one of the Tuckers on this track where we were shooting. We were shooting on these stages at Paramount, and I walked around and saw some of the other things that were being filmed. I walked onto this one stage, and there was the Starship Enterprise! Only it was little. It was tiny. It was in a weird shape, and I was like “What the hell is this?” And it turned out they were building the ship for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Then they were filming the ending of Witches of Eastwick, and they had that animatronic Jack Nicholson there, which was really weird and scary to see, and just thinking “God, the movies are cool!” (laughs) I also remember working with Fred Forrest on Tucker. Fred’s got a real laid-back, kind of Nicholsonian drawl, and I remember being very aware of that, and really liking that. He was a big influence on me, Fred Forrest. Really interesting guy. The whole film was like a big family. Coppola sets that kind of mood. It was another instance of me looking around, age 18, thinking “Jesus, what the hell am I doing here?” (laughs) It still amazes me when I look at some of the films I’ve been a part of, and some of the people I’ve gotten to meet and work with. I also look back sometimes and realize that I was lucky to have lived through them and even to have survived them, at times. It’s certainly a testament to whatever I have in me that has that instinct.

I can imagine at that age, and through your early 20s, it was like sensory overload at times.

Yes, exactly. The overwhelm of being in these places, as exciting as they were, and dealing with different personalities, the intensity of this business, and the egos involved, dare I say it. It’s wild to be a kid and have those kinds of experiences.

Slater as pirate DJ "Hard Harry" in Pump Up the Volume.

But you also had two parents in the business who could help put it in perspective for you, certainly more so than if your dad had sold insurance and your mom was a schoolteacher.

Absolutely true. They certainly are passionate people, as well, and are colorful in their own ways, but they were always there to answer questions. As I said before, my dad was always the kind of guy who was willing to take me with him to work, and my mother being okay with that and with me being introduced to that life, it says a lot. My mother was casting Hair when I was about six, and I remember being downtown with that whole crew, and watching everybody rehearse, and just being involved in that world at that age was pretty rich. I remember that was the year of the big blackout, and we had to figure out how to get out of there in the dark…there were some really cool moments.

Heathers was the movie that changed everything for you. 20 years later you look at it, and you realize that nobody realized how fortuitous a film it was ten years before Columbine. It seemed so far out at the time, and now it plays much more disturbing than funny.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. As time goes on, perceptions change. Everything’s changed, particularly after 9/11. It’s scarier and sadder, and not that I claim to know anything about politics, but certainly the last eight years have been difficult for everybody, and confusing and scarier than they were the previous eight years.

When we were growing up, there were certainly bad things that happened in the world, but nobody ever thinks they’ll look back on their childhood as being times of innocence, and now I feel like we really did come of age in a more innocent time.

It’s true. It was pretty simple. Reagan was this sort of father figure, and the ‘80s were a fun time, and now we’re in this warmongering period. I can only have hope for the future, that things are going to move in a more positive direction.

Slater with Winona Ryder in Heathers, his star-making turn.

Did you all feel at the time that Heathers was exploring uncharted territory for a “teen” film?

I think we all felt that it was pretty interesting and unique, yeah. I think everything works in retrospect. You don’t really know what you’re working on when you’re working on it. You have ideas what you’d like it to be, what it could be, but you never know until the end result. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie. (laughs) It was actually a really creative, fun shoot.

All the Nicholson comparisons started after that film. I’m sure it was flattering to an extent for you, but it must’ve gotten old eventually, especially considering I’m sure you were just being yourself.

Well look, if you’re going to be compared to someone…(laughs) Like I said, Fred Forrest has a lot of Nicholson qualities, as does my dad, so I’m sure a lot of that rubbed off on me. I’d seen Easy Rider and thought Nicholson was the coolest guy on the planet. When I saw Witches of Eastwick being shot, I just identified with Nicholson, and thought he was the greatest. When I read the script for Heathers, I guess I saw some qualities in the character of Jason Dean that I could identify with, and everything just kind of jelled into something that allowed people to make that kind of comparison. I was certainly playing a character. If they’d shot Jason Dean’s room in the movie, he probably would have had a poster of The Shining or Easy Rider because he was just that guy. So were there qualities in that character that were Nicholsonian? Absolutely!

L to R: Michael Rapaport, Patricia Arquette and Slater in True Romance.

Another groundbreaking movie we have to discuss is True Romance.

At the time I got the script, nobody had really heard of Quentin Tarantino. He’d made this little independent movie, Reservoir Dogs. I saw it with Patricia Arquette at the CAA screening room. It really affected me. I laughed, I was horrified, it was something new. I thought Quentin was great, and loved him and his passionate personality. The cast just kept getting bigger and bigger with more and more interesting people. The scene between Dennis Hopper and Chris Walken was one of the first scenes that was edited together, and Tony Scott showed it to us on the set, and we were all just blown away. So yeah, great experience, great script but again, you never know what a film is going to be until you see the final product. In this case, it was another one of those really special experiences that resulted in an equally amazing movie.

Slater in Interview With the Vampire, playing the role originally intended for the late River Phoenix. Slater donated his entire salary to charity.

In Interview With the Vampire, you took over the role that River Phoenix was originally cast. Did you know him at all?

Not really. We’d met before and I respected him, and his work tremendously. That was so tragic, and it was really awkward to be stepping into that kind of scenario. But I think I eased my own discomfort by not accepting money for it and donating my salary to his charities. It was great to work with Neil Jordan, and Brad Pitt was great, and that was the second time we’d worked together, of course, after True Romance.

Slater in John Woo's Broken Arrow.

You got to work with the great John Woo twice.

Amazing filmmaker. He’s a very cerebral man, very sweet, but very quiet, much in the same way Neil Jordan is. I don’t know where John’s English is today, but at that time, he didn’t speak English that well, so our communication was limited. Basically, he told me I was supposed to be playing Steve McQueen and I forget who he said John Travolta was supposed to be, but that was all the direction I really got. (laughs) But what a genius he is, a real master of the medium. Also, when I did Windtalkers, it was a real treat to work with Nic Cage. He’s one of our greatest actors. Everything he does, every choice he makes, it just blows my mind. I just watched Face/Off again the other night. What an unbelievable movie that is! And Nic and Travolta are amazing in it. I could watch that movie all day.

Slater and Heather Graham in Emilio Estevez's Bobby.

Recently you were in Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, which I thought did a beautiful job of capturing a time and place in history.

Yeah, it really did. Emilio did a phenomenal job and to be a part of that incredible group that he assembled…I mean Anthony Hopkins, William H. Macy, Sharon Stone, Martin Sheen, Harry Belafonte. It was like a who’s-who of talent. Everybody showed up on that giving 150%, we were all so proud of Emilio who, in my opinion, knocked it out of the park. The audience reaction was amazing in Venice, where it premiered. There was a ten minute standing ovation. What’s even more amazing, is that the film wasn’t even produced by Americans, but by Russians! In terms of acting, it was fun to sort of immerse myself in that character, who was so part of another time, and another mindset. Being on the set of the film was like going back in time. It was really powerful, very realistic, especially recreating those last moments. It’s funny, we shot at the Ambassador Hotel, where it all happened, right before they tore it down, and I’ve shot a couple other things there, including True Romance, and it was a really creepy place. But I’m very happy we got to shoot the film there while it was still standing.

You mentioned River Phoenix earlier. In the past year, we’ve lost a couple talented young actors tragically. You’ve been through a lot professionally and personally in this business, and you’ve survived. Is there an outlook one has to adopt to be a survivor or is it just something you choose?

What can I say? It’s a wild world. It takes a certain amount of denial sometimes just to wake up and get through the day. (laughs) But we try to show up, do our best, do our job, and try not to be an asshole in the process. If you can do that, then you’re ahead of the game.

That’s the magic word, isn’t it?

Amen, brother.

Dennis Hopper: 1936-2010

Dennis Hopper: 1936-2010

Roger Corman  

Dennis Hopper: actor, artist, filmmaker, Hollywood survivor.

Today, May 29th, marks five years since Dennis Hopper shucked his mortal coil. Hopper had been on my short list of "dream interviews" during my tenure at Venice Magazine. When I was lucky enough to finally sit down with him in November of 2008, I was thrilled, and didn't know quite what to expect.

What I found while smoking cigars with Hopper in his Venice home-studio, was a thoughtful man with a gentle demeanor, who spoke in measured tones and loved telling stories. Gone was the wild-eyed, cannabis-toking "enfant terrible" that Hopper had made his name playing, and sometimes living. What I saw instead was a man who seemed to be at peace with himself and his life, who loved his children, art, film and new ideas. Sometimes when you have seen life at its ugliest, as Hopper surely had, you're able to come out the other side and drink in its beauty. I hope this was true.

Rest in peace, and thanks for it all.


DENNIS HOPPER IS RIDING EASY
By
Alex Simon

The Hollywood landscape is littered with tragedies, broken promise and self-destruction. Many promising artists stumble once and never recover from that initial fall. In the history of American film, there has never been a phoenix-like story of survival and rebirth quite like that of Dennis Hopper, who has gone from Warner Bros. contract player in his late teens, to Hollywood outcast, to renowned artist, photographer and art collector, to the man who brought independent cinema into the mainstream with Easy Rider, to being outcast again and nearly destroyed during a period of heavy drug and alcohol abuse. There are single incidents of self-destruction in Dennis Hopper’s life that most human beings could never walk away from in one piece, and by his own admission, Hopper repeated these incidents dozens of times over decades, until getting sober for good in 1985.

Hopper has also had a Zelig-like ability to have been surrounded by some of the film, art and political world’s most significant players: James Dean, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Martin Luther King, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Miles Davis, and dozens of other legendary names that could fill every page of this blog and turn it into a history book. Few Hollywood players have led as rich, and varied a life as that of Dennis Lee Hopper, who was born May 17, 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas. Hopper has appeared in 200 films and television productions since 1955, with 2008 showcasing “Dennis the Menace,” as he was nicknamed in his enfant terrible days, in no less than eight feature films, the best being Isabel Coixet’s superb Elegy, with Hopper in a masterful turn as Sir Ben Kingsley’s best friend and confidant, and the lead in the Starz network’s first original series, Crash, based on Paul Haggis’ Oscar-winning film, telling a tableaux of tales about the disparate denizens of Los Angeles. Hopper scores big again with his manic portrait of a legendary record producer who seems to be constantly teetering on the precipice of madness or epiphany.

A long-time Venice resident, Dennis Hopper has been named one of the top 100 collectors of modern art in the world, and was recently honored by the Cinematheque Francais in Paris with a retrospective of his work. Mr. Hopper sat down with Venice Senior Editor Alex Simon recently over a cigar, and discussed his life as Hollywood’s greatest survivor. Read on…

You’ve had a busy year. Let’s start by talking about Crash.

Dennis Hopper: I had just gotten back from the Cannes Film Festival, and my agent called and asked if I’d like to do a TV series. They said it was an incredible part and based on the film Crash, which won all the Academy Awards. The kicker was I had two days to decide! (laughs) But I’m glad I did it. It’s been a lot of fun and we’re working very hard: sometimes working sixteen hour days, but nobody’s complaining because the scripts are so good. We have no restrictions in terms of what we can say or do, and in many ways we have more freedom than we would on film, because we had a commitment for thirteen episodes. Then two days after I shot the first episode, I was in France where the cinematheque in Paris had spent three and a half years working on a retrospective of my work and some of my art collection and took the fifth floor of the Frank Gehry building, where the cinematheque is located and built this virtual reality installation with twenty different screens that showed all the films I’d made, commercials I’d done, experimental films I’d made with Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner. It covered my entire career up till now, and it was really amazing.

Every time I’ve been in Paris, Easy Rider seems to be playing somewhere.

Yeah, it played in one theater on the Left Bank for twenty years. It was a very narrow, long little theater. I kept seeing this woman who grew older and older over the years at all these film festivals. She’d walk up to me and say “It’s still playing!” (laughs) I felt like a jazz musician in France, when jazz went sour in the States, the Europeans all sort of took over the jazz movement. I guess if you’re a big enough failure, they really take you to heart! (laughs)


Hopper as Billy in Easy Rider.

You really do have the greatest Hollywood survival story, ever.

Yeah, and this is not a place where you want to try and survive. (laughs)

Well, one could argue that Hollywood is a living metaphor for social Darwinism at its most twisted.

True, very true.

Watching your character in the first episode of Crash, I thought to myself ‘So Frank Booth survived the gunshot to the head in Blue Velvet and became a record producer.’

(laughs) Yeah, right!

Who else would call someone an “eyeless fuck” but Frank Booth?

(laughs) Yeah, yeah. My first conversation with my penis in the limo with the young woman driver, it’s pretty hairy. When I hire the new driver, who’s black, and say “Gorillas in the mist, that’s what the LAPD call you,” he has no stop switch, my character. He says everything and insults everybody. He just goes for it.

Which at one time could have described you.

Yeah, probably. I guess so. It was so long ago now, I can’t remember. (laughs) Phil Spector and I had an office together for ten years, and people have asked me if I’m doing Phil Spector in this and I said ‘No. I’m doing me!’ (laughs) The office was right up on Sunset before you go into Beverly Hills. David Geffen was in there for a while, too.

I know you’ve done TV work before, going back to its infancy in the 1950s. How is working in TV a different process from doing a film, or is it?
Well, you have more time to develop a character, first of all. Instead of an hour and a half, you have thirteen hours, in this instance. Doing regular television you have lots of restrictions, but doing cable you have no restrictions and can push the envelope a lot farther. That said, you have more time to do a feature than you do a television series itself, because we’re constantly under the gun, working twice a week with sixteen hour days. I have so much dialogue, though. I have all these speeches to memorize which really, if you look at them, mean nothing at all! (laughs) They’re just these stream-of-consciousness rants. I’m like a little kid sitting in the corner memorizing this stuff all day and all night. We’re shooting it all in Albuquerque because (Governor) Bill Richardson is giving us such a good deal to film there. There’s probably more movies being shot in New Mexico than anywhere else in the States. It’s a drag because I have to leave my family, but the work is good.

Hopper and Sir Ben Kingsley in Isabel Coixet's Elegy.

You also have a terrific part in one of the year’s best films, Isabel Coixet’s Elegy.

That’s a brilliant film. I hope they get some awards so they’ll mass distribute it. Penelope Cruz gives one of the best female performances I’ve ever seen. I’m very proud to have been part of that.

How was working with Sir Ben Kingsley?

Sir Ben is great, man. All my scenes were with him, really. He’s so comfortable to be with. He’s such a good actor, you could just play moment-to-moment reality with him all day long. It’s a pleasure to work with an actor who’s that good. I had a ball with him, and he’s very funny. He just gives and never pushes and is really there for you, has a great rhythm.

Let’s start at the beginning: you were born in Kansas.

Dodge City, Kansas, 1936, which makes me seventy-two years-old. A guy who never thought he’d live to be thirty, who had a real shock when he made it to thirty-one.

Is there a secret to being a survivor? Does it come down to genetics, to luck, to having a specific outlook?

I think it’s probably a combination of all three. I had such a bad drinking problem, and it took a lot to get me sober.

And you knew from a young age that you liked mind-altering experiences. I remember hearing you tell a story about snorting gasoline from your grandfather’s truck…

Yeah, and I looked up at the clouds and saw clowns, until I ODed on the fumes and smashed up his truck with a baseball bat, thinking it was a monster, smashing out the lights. (laughs) I was about seven. (laughs) Not good, but that was the end of my gas-sniffing.

What did your parents do?

My father served in the OSS during World War II and came back and went to work for the railway mail. So we moved from Dodge City when I was nine, and moved to Kansas City, where I lived until I was thirteen, then we moved to San Diego. My father ended up managing the San Diego post office, and my mother, who had managed one of the largest outdoor swimming pools in the country—she was the backstroke champion of Kansas, and was on her way to the Olympics when she became pregnant with me—and then she managed a swimming pool in a suburb of San Diego called El Cajon. I started acting at The Old Globe Theater in San Diego when I was thirteen.

When did you know you were an actor?

I wanted to be an actor from the time I saw my first films, which I think were singing cowboy pictures like Roy Rogers.

What else do you remember about that time?

It was the dustbowl, so I had to wear a gas mask to school five days a week, and my grandmother would open the door and five inches of dust would blow inside. There were bread lines and soup lines, and it was really bad. The whole middle of the country had blown away. My grandmother used to fill her apron full of eggs and we’d go into town. She’d sell the eggs and we’d go to the movies, while my grandfather would be out working on his wheat farm. I got my first Sheep Dog from the Clutters, the family that was murdered years later that Capote wrote about in “In Cold Blood.” When I was eighteen years-old I came to Los Angeles, went under contract to Warner Bros. and did Rebel Without a Cause, my second movie.

Hopper, second from left, in Rebel Without a Cause.

I know both Nicholas Ray and James Dean were profound influences on you.

Yeah, Dean made a real impression on me. I thought I was the best young actor around, and then I saw him. I’d never seen anybody improvise before. I’d always been doing Shakespeare and other plays where everything was a preconceived idea, preconceived gestures, how I said a line…and here he was differently every scene, adding things to the script. It was really confusing to me, initially. I grabbed him one night, and said ‘What are you doing?’ And we talked for a while, and I asked ‘Should I go back and study with (Lee) Strasberg?’ He said “No, no, no. Just start doing things, but don’t show them. Don’t indicate, or presuppose what you’re going to do. Live in moment-to-moment reality. Instead of playing drinking your coffee, just drink your coffee. Just smoke your cigar, don’t play smoking the cigar. You’ll find the simplest things become very difficult the first time you get onstage or in front of the camera, but eventually you’ll get through all that. Just live in the moment.” So that was the beginning of it. We did Giant together next, and he used to watch me on that picture and critique me afterward. When his character got older, he started asking me to watch him in those scenes and to tell him if I thought he seemed old. That was basically our relationship. We weren’t great buddies who went out drinking or anything like that. He was five years older than me. That was quite an age difference at that point. Also, we thought of him as a kid because he’d done Rebel, but in point of fact, he was older than Elizabeth Taylor, who was considered an “adult.”

Didn’t he also encourage you to pursue photography?

No, but he saw me taking pictures and said “If you’re going to take pictures, don’t crop them.” I said ‘Why not?’ He said “Because you’re probably going to want to direct films someday, and you can’t crop film, so learn how to frame full-frame, full negative.” So from that day on, I didn’t crop my photographs.

Had Dean lived, would he have survived the ‘60s?

Oh yeah, I mean he was…first of all, Paul Newman, who was a good friend of mine and a great man, had made a film called The Silver Chalice which Paul took out an ad apologizing for, because it was so terrible, the two parts that made Paul a star: Somebody Up There Likes Me and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, had both been cast with James Dean before he died.

Do you know the book Suspects by the film critic and historian David Thomson?

No.

He takes famous movie characters and tells you what happened to them after the credits rolled. He did a similar piece on what happened after James Dean “survived” his car crash, with one of the punch lines being that Paul Newman kept losing parts to him and eventually moved back to Cleveland, where he became a successful car dealer.

(laughs) That’s so cool! Wow…

What are some of your memories of Mr. Newman?

Well, I’d been friends with Paul since I was eighteen years old. When they lived out here in California, he and Joanne (Woodward), I’d be at their house a couple times a week, then when they moved back East, we lost touch for a little while, but there was a five year period where I was with them every week. He was a terrific guy, very generous with all his charity work, and just had a huge heart, from day one. He was one of the most unselfish people I’ve ever known.

Hopper, bottom left, with Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, and many other actors who would go onto fame in the egg-eating sequence of Cool Hand Luke.

The two of you were in Cool Hand Luke which, like Rebel, had a who’s-who of young talent that went onto bigger things.

Stuart Rosenberg directed that, his first feature, and he’d had us all in various television shows he’d directed for years. I’d starred in about five different shows he’d directed. I don’t think I had one line of dialogue in that whole picture. I had some interesting physical business I did. Babalugats was the character’s name. I just sort of mumbled a lot. (laughs)

What was the atmosphere like on the set? I’ve heard that you all became pretty tight.

We did. We shot it all up in Stockton, California. We wore our chains and prison clothes all night. We’d go to sleep in this motel with our chains on, go into the restaurant and this little nightclub there, and we’d all be in our chains. (laughs) If a lady wanted to dance with a “prisoner” she could. (laughs) It was a fun shoot. Rosenberg was always fun to work with.

Director Nicholas Ray confers with James Dean on the set of Rebel Without a Cause.

And back to Rebel. What about Nicholas Ray?

Well Nick and I had a long, long relationship. He came and lived with me for a while. He showed up at the Cannes Film Festival when I was showing Easy Rider and asked to borrow $500, which I didn’t have at the time. He said “C’mon, you can get $500.” I said “I’ve been sleeping on the floor of a borrowed pool house for the last year editing this movie, being paid $140 dollars a month. I don’t have any money.” He said “Well go to (Bert) Schneider and ask for the money.” So I went to Schneider and borrowed the money and gave it to Nick, who came back an hour later and said “I need another 500.” I said ‘What you talking about?’ He said “I lost it in the casino across the street.” So he ended up living at my house in Taos, New Mexico for about six months, until I got him a job teaching. He ran up a phone bill that was unbelievable, looking for Howard Hughes to convince him to back his next movie. But during Rebel, Nick was very open to what were then, in the ‘50s, very new techniques of acting.

You became one of the first collectors of pop art. When did you first discover Warhol, Lichtenstein, Ruscha and the pop art movement?

I met a lot of the key figures at a place called Stone Brothers Printers, which was a place where they made mailers and did a magazine called Semina, which Wallace Berman put out. There was an old Chinese man named Mr. Chang who would dress in a Confederate General’s uniform and perform Shakespeare, very badly, in a heavy Chinese accent out on Hollywood Boulevard, and would put his hat out. James Dean was a big fan of this guy, and would throw quarters at him. (laughs) He was having a poetry reading at Stone Brothers, so we went there, and that night I met Walter Hopps and later he and Ed Kienholz started The Ferus Gallery on La Cienega, which is where Andy Warhol had his first show, and he then went to the Pasadena Museum where he gave Marcel Duchamp his first retrospective in 1963. So, in 1962 everybody was talking about “the return to reality.” I was a third generation abstract expressionist, which we all were, really. We were looking at a lot of the Bay Area painters, but really felt that they were just rehashing a lot of the old stuff, it wasn’t a return to reality. It was nothing new. I walked into the Ferus Gallery one day, and Irving Blum, who was running the gallery said “Dennis, I want to show you something.” He showed me two slides, one of which was of a soup can, and the other was a cartoon. It was Andy and Roy Lichtenstein. I went crazy, started jumping up and down and said ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ Irving said “That’s what?” I said ‘That’s the return to reality!’ Irving said “What are you doing tomorrow?” So we went to New York the next day, went to Andy Warhol’s studio, and met Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, I saw the whole thing. That was it. I bought a Roy Lichtenstein called “Sinking Sun” for $1100, which I later lost in a divorce. A year and a half ago it sold for $17,870,000. I bought one of Andy’s soup cans out here and I’ve been collecting since. That was a very exciting time in Los Angeles, in the early ‘60s, and that’s when I had my first shows.

Andy Warhol's 1971 portrait of Hopper.

It’s interesting, because I think most people view pop art as an East Coast movement, not that it was born here.

Yeah, and all the East Coast guys came out here for the Duchamp retrospective. We were all so backward; we had a great thing to fight against: around 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum, one of the curators bought a Jackson Pollock. The board of directors got together and were furious, and refused to show it in the main museum, calling it “Communist propaganda.”

Where the hell did they get that?

Who knows? That’s how backward we were! Then Kienholtz did “Backseat Dodge” which was this sculpture made out of wire, of two people that looked like they might be making it in the back seat, and they closed down the whole L.A. County Museum because of this. Around the same time, the LAPD came in and busted Wallace Berman’s show at The Ferus Gallery and destroyed all his pieces out in the alley because he had a nude picture of his wife on display. But it was a great thing if you were an artist to be sort of underground.

Hopper's 1961 photograph "Double Standard."

When you paint a picture, or shoot a photograph, is it a different process from when you act, or are you tapping into the same vein?

I think they’re all different disciplines, but working with Strasberg, we worked with our senses, and brought back emotional recall and so forth. So I think you work with the same instrument, and just apply it to different disciplines. I was born in Dodge City, Kansas and am really just a middle class farm boy at heart. I really thought acting, painting, music, writing were all part of being an artist. I never thought of them as being separate. I could never play music, but I’d always loved music, and I tried to apply that. Easy Rider was the first film to use “found” music that was popular at the time. Prior to that, most movies were scored with an orchestra. Colors was the first million-selling rap album, and I produced Miles Davis’ last album for The Hot Spot. When I went under contract to Warner Bros., it allowed me to have a cultural life, instead of having to get a “normal” job bussing tables, or putting on a suit and tie and going into the office. I just never stopped painting, taking photographs, writing. There was no pressure to “put that childish stuff away.” It allowed me to continue to be a child.

Hopper with then-wife, actress Daria Halprin, in Taos, circa 1971.

You had a seminal experience with the director Henry Hathaway on a picture called From Hell to Texas.

(laughs) Yeah, that was in 1958, with Don Murray, Diane Varsi and Chill Wills. I got into a lot of trouble on that. I was loaned out from Warner Bros. to Fox, and I didn’t want to do the part, but Hathaway kept insisting. We had the most wonderful dinners, just a delightful, wonderful guy at dinner, and a screaming, yelling maniac on the set. (laughs) But I ended up working for him more than any other director, did three films for him by the end.

Director Henry Hathaway, Hopper's nemesis and reluctant mentor.

But he was the antithesis of what you responded to: an old-school director who carried a riding crop.

Yeah, yeah, and he’d tell you exactly where to move, how to walk, how to talk. He’d give you line readings. I was now trying to “live in the moment” and doing things without preconceived ideas, and I walked off the picture three times on location. He’d beg me to come back, and we’d have a wonderful dinner where he’d be utterly charming and I’d say ‘Mr. Hathaway, tomorrow I’d like to try the scene this way.” And he’d say “Sure, sure kid. Whatever you say.” And the next day on the set, he’d be screaming and yelling again, and I’d say ‘Mr. Hathaway, last night at dinner, you said I could try this.’ He’d scream “That was just dinner talk, kid, dinner talk! We’re makin’ a movie here, now get the fuck over there and hit your mark and say your lines like I tell ya!” (laughs) If you really wanted to drive him crazy, you’d put a paper cup in the scene: “Paper cup in a fuckin’ western! They didn’t have fuckin’ paper cups in the old west, goddammit!” So the last day on the picture, I came on the set at 20th Century Fox, and he said “Hey, good morning. See that over there? Know what those are?” I said ‘Well, those are stacks of film cans, Henry.’ He said “That’s right. I’ve got enough film there to shoot for four and a half months. Did you know that I owned 40% of 20th Century Fox?” ‘No, I didn’t know that, Henry.’ “Well, I do. See that over there?” ‘Yeah, those are sleeping bags.’ “That’s right. We’re gonna do this scene till you do it my way,” and it was a ten line scene, “and we’ll send out for lunch, for dinner, we’ll sleep here for four and a half months, then we’ll send out for more!” So we started about eight o’clock in the morning. Around eleven at night, after 85 takes, I finally cracked, and said ‘Okay, tell me what you want to do.’ I did it, then I walked out. It wasn’t like somebody sent a black ball around after that, but word got around that I wasn’t somebody you wanted to work with. Soon after that, I was dropped from my contract at Warner Bros.. I went back to New York and I studied with Strasberg for five years. I didn’t have another major role in a studio picture for nearly ten years, until Hathaway hired me again for The Sons of Katie Elder in ’65.

Around the same time, you cut your teeth directing for Roger Corman, directing second unit on The Trip. What was it like stepping behind the camera for the first time?

Well, Roger was the kind of guy who wouldn’t give us any money, but would let us take cameras and equipment out on the weekends and shoot. Jack Nicholson had written the screenplay for that picture, and it was a wonderful screenplay. The stuff on Sunset Boulevard, and the acid trip and the stuff in the desert was all stuff that I shot, because we didn’t feel that Roger would have the inclination to shoot that stuff, so we did it all on weekends.

You got to work with some of the great directors throughout your career, from day one. Who are some of your greatest influences behind the camera?

I’d say George Stevens, and Henry Hathaway, strangely enough. (laughs) Even though I fought with him a lot, he had a great leanness to his work. Nick Ray, on Rebel, was a big influence, just watching him allow Dean to do what he did on that film. I’ve worked with so many top directors, John Sturges was another great one. You learn something from everyone, even if they’re terrible directors. A lot of directing is really like being a floor manager of a department store, where you’re just managing all these different divisions, and time is your worst enemy.

I heard that during the filming of True Grit that John Wayne chased you around Paramount with a loaded gun?

(laughs) No, that’s not quite how it happened. He used to arrive on the lot via helicopter from his mine sweeper that he had moored in Newport Beach. He’d have a .45 strapped on his side, wearing army fatigues, and that’s the way he’d arrive to work every day. This one day he arrived, and he wanted to know where “that Pinko Hopper was hiding.” I was actually in Glen Campbell’s trailer, hiding from him. He was screaming “My daughter was out at UCLA last night and heard (Black Panther) Eldridge Cleaver cussing, and I know he must be a friend of that Pinko Hopper! Where is he? I want to talk to him!” So he wasn’t literally running around with a gun looking for me. He was walking around with a gun at his hip, but I think he wanted to have a political discussion, as opposed to committing actual manslaughter! (laughs) Anyway, nothing ever came of it. That was just Duke.


The legendary opening sequence of Easy Rider.

Let’s talk about how Easy Rider was born.

Peter Fonda and I were doing motorcycle movies: I did one called The Glory Stompers and Peter did one called The Wild Angels. Jack Nicholson did one called Hell’s Angels on Wheels, all at American International Pictures. Peter had read I thing I wrote with Stewart Stern called The Last Movie, and I’d wanted to make it as my first film. Peter loved it and went around trying to raise money to make it, but wasn’t successful. We’d promised each other that if we were going to do a movie, that it wasn’t going to be a motorcycle movie. So we wrote a screenplay together with a standup comic named Don Sherman called The Yin and the Yang, a comedy, and we couldn’t find financing for that, either. Around three o’clock in the morning, Peter called me. He was up in Toronto promoting The Trip at the film festival up there. So Peter says that he’s just talked with James Nicholson, no relation to Jack, and Sam Arkoff, who ran AIP, and I told them this idea for a movie: these two guys sell a bunch of marijuana in Mexico, then buy these two beautiful, gleaming bikes and ride cross-country to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, where they have a great time, then they go into Florida to retire, and are shot by a couple of duck hunters. Peter says “They said we could both act in it, and you could direct. What do you think?” (laughs) I said ‘They actually said they’d give you money for that?’ “Yeah.” So I said ‘Terrific, man. If they really said they’d give you the money, it sounds great to me.’ So that’s how it started. Then when it came time to really do it, they pulled back and said I could act or direct, but not both. So we went to see Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, because they’d just finished doing The Monkees and our friend Michael McClure, a poet from San Francisco, he had a project called The Queens he wanted to do which was a satire about LBJ and Dean Rusk, and all these powerful Washington insiders dressed in drag, eating live lobsters, talking about how they assassinated President Kennedy. It was going to be a 20 minute short. We decided to pitch it to Rafelson and Schneider, Peter couldn’t help but talk about what was then called The Loners, and by then we had a full outline. Schneider left the room, the Rafelson left, who came back and said “Can I see you in my office?” So we went in and he said “Call Schneider at home tonight. I think he’s going to give you the money and let you act in it and direct it.” And Schneider said “Yeah, it’s a go.”

And it was groundbreaking on so many levels: the first movie to really address the counterculture seriously, not in an exploitative way. The first to show people openly using drugs. The first to show some of the serious social problems that were happening in the country, particularly in the Deep South, where you actually shot some of it.

Yeah, and like I said before, it was the first time found music was ever used. At that time it was so much cheaper. All I had to do was go the artist and ask their permission to use the music.

So was the decision one that was based more on economics than on creativity?

No. I went out and shot the movie in five and a half weeks. Laszlo Kovacs said it was the best-organized picture he’d ever shot. When we spoke at AFI a few years before he died, he said “People talk about how crazy the shoot was, but there was nothing crazy about that shoot.” The thing was, after shooting the film I came back to eighty hours of footage that I hadn’t seen, because in those days there was no way for me to see my dailies out on the road. I had an editing job that was just horrendous, took me over a year. And driving on the way to the studio to cut the picture, I’d hear all this great music on the radio: Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds. I heard all these songs and cut the picture to picture, and not to sound. Then when I put in a song like “Born to be Wild” it just fit perfectly. But when you see the movie, the story is told through the music, not the dialogue. It was just one of those things that worked.

Has MTV ever acknowledged you of being an early inventor of music video?

(laughs) No, I don’t think so.

Easy Rider changed Hollywood.

Yeah, it certainly showed them that they could make independent films. You had to get an I.A. union stamp on your film to get released in those days, and we didn’t have that stamp. Bert Schneider’s father Abe was Chairman of Columbia Pictures and paid off the unions, gave them $25,000 so we could release the movie, which broke the code, and other studios saw that they could do the same thing: make a non-union film and then make a deal with the union to distribute it. Cassavetes was really the only person in the U.S. who’d been making independent films up to that point, because he was a from a well-to-do Greek shipping family that allowed him to finance his own low budget films. But he could never really get them distributed, because the majors wouldn’t distribute them.

I read a quote attributed to you, and maybe you can tell me if it’s accurate: “There are moments that I've had some real brilliance, you know. But I think they are moments. And sometimes, in a career, moments are enough. I never felt I played the great part. I never felt that I directed the great movie. And I can't say that it's anybody's fault but my own.”

Well, I could agree with everything but the last part. It wasn’t all my fault.


Hopper on the cover of Rolling Stone issue 56, April 16, 1970.

You don’t feel that Easy Rider is a great film?

I do. I do, but after that I should have made another great movie and Colors is an alright film, but I don’t know, I just never felt I directed the film I really wanted to direct after Easy Rider. I know I never did. But I don’t think it was my fault that I wasn’t allowed to. I had a lot of help on this end. It may have been my behavior that caused the rift to happen, but once it happened, it wasn’t my fault. I could’ve brought them a ship full of gold, and they wouldn’t have let me direct a picture after my fallout with Lew Wasserman over The Last Movie. He wanted me to re-edit it after The Venice Film Festival. I had final cut and said ‘no.’ He said “Then it will never be distributed.”

Let’s talk about Apocalypse Now. What are some of your memories of being in the Philippines doing that?

I was there for four or five months. When I arrived I was signed to play a CIA agent. There was no script. So I started out in a clean uniform being told by Francis (Coppola) that I was going to be second-in-charge to Marlon Brando’s army he had in the jungle. I was with these guys about three weeks and we were training with these Green Beret guys who’d just gotten out of Vietnam, playing war games. We had mortars that we’d play with that were full of powder, and if you got any of the powder on you, that meant you were dead. We had all these war toys we’d play with at night. We’d be assigned to hold a bridge. Would they be coming by the sea? Would they be coming through the jungle? We’d play these incredible war games and just had a ball. Finally Marlon arrived and everything was shut down for a week because he realized Marlon hadn’t read “Heart of Darkness,” so Francis went out to read Marlon “Heart of Darkness” and 900 people, the cast and crew, just sat and waited! (laughs) We called it “the million dollar week” because Marlon was getting paid a million dollars a week. When he came back he said “Marlon and I agreed that your part should be as large as his, or maybe larger.” When you read “Heart of Darkness” you never actually see the Kurtz character, you only hear about him being talked about by this Russian-Jewish trader, who comes out with shrunken heads and thinks he’s such a great man. So Francis wanted me to play that part, and made him a photojournalist who carried a lot of cameras instead of shrunken heads. So we started there, and wrote a little bit in the morning and then would just improvise off of that.

So those scenes between you and Martin Sheen, when he was locked in the bamboo cage, were largely improvised?

Yeah. I mean, it was improv that came out of writing.



And you and Brando were never actually on the set together, right?

Yeah, he’d shoot one night, then I’d do another. I came in one night and Francis said “Marlon called you a ‘sniveling dog’ and threw bananas at you.’ So I had this prop man throwing bananas at me all night long. (laughs) And that’s how we worked for a couple weeks. It was Marlon’s decision for us to work separately and at the time, I was sort of offended by it, but looking back, I think Marlon did me a big favor. If you’re improvising something, and he suddenly started reading “Hollow Man” by D.H. Lawrence, you really can’t get something going if you have two people vying for (the director’s) time. In the end, it worked out really well.

In 1986 you had a renaissance in your career with three amazing movies: River’s Edge, Blue Velvet and Hoosiers, the last of which earned you an Oscar nomination. It marked a real comeback in your career, and you haven’t stopped working since.

That was my first year of sobriety, too. I’d been out of rehab like two months when I went into do Blue Velvet, then I went straight to Indiana and did Hoosiers. I didn’t do anything but get a haircut and put on some different wardrobe, then came back to Los Angeles and did River’s Edge. It’s funny because I play a drug addict in one, an alcoholic in the other, and a drug dealer in the third! (laughs) So my first year of sobriety was a test. (laughs)



We have to talk about the character of Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. I read an interview with David Lynch where he said you called him after reading the script and said “David, you have to let me play this part because I am Frank Booth.”

Well actually, he’d already cast me, but I did call him after he’d cast me, and we’d never met at that point, and said ‘You haven’t made a mistake, because I am Frank Booth.” So supposedly he went back to the table with Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern, they were all having lunch together, and said “I just got off the phone with Dennis Hopper, and he said that he was Frank Booth, which I guess is really good for the picture, but I don’t know how we’ll ever have lunch with him.” (laughs)

How were you Frank Booth?

I’d come out of a heavy drug life, and had known a lot of people like Frank. I didn’t mean that I was literally Frank Booth, but I’d certainly run into characters like Frank, and understood him. A big discrepancy came the first day we were shooting the big scene where Kyle is hiding in the closet and I come in demanding my bourbon and tell Isabella to spread her legs, and then this sort of horrendous rape scene occurs against her. None of us had met at this point and that was our first scene. (laughs) David had helium on the set, because in the script, the tank that Frank was constantly taking hits from was written as helium, which makes your voice really high, like Donald Duck. But it doesn’t disorient you in any way, it just makes you talk funny. So I said to David, ‘You know I always thought of this as being nitrous oxide or amyl nitrate or something.’ He said “What is that?” I said “Something that disorients your mind for a few minutes. I’m also having trouble acting with my voice sounding like this. So could I just show you what it would look like with the other stuff?” And I did, and David said “Oh, that’s great!” So we went with that, and I said ‘If you want to put the (helium) voice in later, in post, we can,’ and of course, we didn’t. So that was the only real contribution I made to that film, I guess. (laughs) David had written a great screenplay, and there wasn’t any reason to change anything else. Years later I was sitting, thinking about it, and I thought how really weird it would be if Frank Booth had only used the gas to change the sound of his voice, that it didn’t affect his mind at all, and what a cold, calculating kind of guy that would be. The Observer, in England, and Film Quarterly gave me an award in Paris as the outstanding villain of all-time for that film, which is pretty heavy, because that means I beat out Sir Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast and Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. (laughs)



Which brings us to True Romance and the scene between you and Christopher Walken, which has gone down as one of the great scenes in movie history. At the time, Quentin Tarantino was unknown. Did you know upon reading the script that a completely original voice had arrived?

Oh yeah, that was apparent immediately. I thought it was a terrific script and terrific movie, and it just died at the box office. All the buzz came out of tape and DVD. It was strange because I never saw it with an audience where it didn’t get a standing ovation at the end, at Toronto and other places. It just didn’t connect with mainstream audiences. Maybe it was the title, who knows? It’s such a great, popcorn eating movie, you know? (laughs) Tony Scott is a terrific director. The day we did that scene, we did the whole interior of my trailer here at the studio in Los Angeles. First of all, you don’t see speeches like this as an actor in film anymore. It was just pages and pages of this great dialogue. Tony started lighting, was going to shoot with two cameras, and was going to shoot Chris Walken first. Chris came in and saw it, and Tony approached me and said “Chris just said he didn’t want to go first. Would you mind going first?” I said ‘I don’t mind going first, but you’ve been lighting for two and a half hours, man!’ (laughs) Tony said he didn’t mind, and reversed all the lighting and went on me first, and that’s how we did it and it was just wonderful. The only improvisation in the whole thing, because Tarantino’s script was so good, was the bit about the eggplant and the cantaloupe. Walken and I went out later, selling the piece as a team. And someone said to us “Oh, you guys are great actors!” And Walken says “I don’t know if we’re great actors or not, but I started out as a dancer, and Hopper and I partner real well together.” (laughs) And I thought that was a great line.

We touched earlier on your being a survivor.

I think it was genetics. I think it was luck. I think it was attitude that got me through a lot of it. I believe in miracles. It’s a miracle that I’m still here. And I plan on being here a while longer.

Samuel L. Jackson: The Hollywood Interview

Samuel L. Jackson: The Hollywood Interview

Star Wars  

Samuel L. Jackson in John Boorman's In My Country.


SAMUEL L. JACKSON: B.M.F.!
BY
ALEX SIMON

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2005 issue of Venice Magazine.

No actor since Michael Caine has had as diverse, or as numerous, a body of work as Samuel L. Jackson. With 84 film credits since making his big screen debut as “Gang Member No. 2” in Ragtime (1981), Jackson has played everything from philosophical hitmen to Jedi masters during his remarkable career. His commitment to working consistently and his instinct for choosing quality work earned him a rare distinction in January of this year: Samuel L. Jackson is now the highest-grossing actor in film history, with his films earning over $3 billion worldwide in box office receipts, surpassing the previous record held by Harrison Ford. Not bad for a kid born into poverty in Washington D.C. December 21, 1948, as Samuel Leroy Jackson. Raised by his maternal grandparents (and later his mother) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jackson was a child of the 60s, discovering his social conscience early by taking active part in the civil rights movement while still in high school. After graduating from Atlanta’s Moorehouse College with a degree in drama in 1970, Jackson toiled for years in New York as a stage actor, gradually establishing a reputation as one of his generation’s finest actors, but still doing jobs like working as Bill Cosby’s stand-in on TV’s The Cosby Show to pay the bills.
As the 80s progressed, Jackson became a more familiar face on the big screen, with bit parts in films such as Coming to America, but it was Spike Lee who really gave Jackson his big break in 1987’s School Daze, followed by scene-stealing turns in his classic Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo Better Blues (1990) and finally in Jungle Fever (1991), playing a crack addict (just weeks after getting out of rehab himself for a long-time drug and alcohol addiction). The role earned Jackson the Best Supporting Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival, the first time a supporting acting award was ever given at the legendary fete. Finally, in his early 40s, Jackson found Hollywood calling him for work. Jackson has averaged 4-5 films per year ever since. As his career as a character actor took of with supporting roles in hits such as Goodfellas, Patriot Games, Jurassic Park, True Romance, Menace II Society, Fresh, and Against the Wall, stardom was just around the corner.
Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 landmark Pulp Fiction not only was the seminal film of the 1990s and the most influential film since 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde, it also earned Samuel L. Jackson a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and international stardom with his portrait of hitman/philosopher Jules Winfield. Since that time, Jackson has seemed to appear on movie screens everywhere. While there is no doubt that some of the films have been better than others, Jackson’s undeniable talent and screen presence have been a consistent factor throughout. This year alone, Jackson has five films hitting cinemas around the world: Coach Carter, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, XXX: State of the Union, The Man, and John Boorman’s In My Country, in which Jackson portrays an American reporter covering the truth and reconciliation trials in South Africa. Co-starring the luminous Juliette Binoche, Brendan Gleeson, and Menzi Ngubane, the Sony Pictures Classics release hits American screens March 11.
Samuel L. Jackson sat down with Venice recently, wearing his trademark Kangol cap, to discuss life, politics and his love of cinema. Here’s what transpired:


In My Country deals with post-Apartheid South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that the new government held. Tell us about what drew you to the project.
Samuel L. Jackson: I was drawn to it because when I was in college in the 60s I had classmates who were from South Africa. And we would talk about their country, about Apartheid, how they got away from it and what it was like for them to be in the United States during the Civil Rights movement. As I got in the world, I met more and more people from South Africa, people like Hugh Masekela, and I kept up with what was going on there, particularly during the truth and reconciliation trials, which was like page eight news in this country. I also kept in touch with many friends who went back to South Africa after Apartheid ended, who would tell me all about the changes happening in the country. I just felt like this was a very important story to tell, because it’s one many Americans don’t know about. We know that Apartheid ended and that Nelson Mandella was released from prison, but for most of us, it stops there. We believe in vengeance. They believe in reconciliation and forgiveness. It’s a tough concept for Americans to understand, I think.

You shot the film on location in Cape Town, South Africa. Was this your first trip there?
No, I’ve been there several times before, doing promotional tours and things for my films. I also have some relatives who live there.

What have been your impressions of the country during your visits there?
Well you see, I’d never been to Cape Town. Joburg is kind of like the wild, wild west. As soon as I got off the plane, I was surrounded by five bodyguards: great, big Boer guys. The leader was like “I’ll always be in front of you. This man will always be behind you. This man will be to your left because he draws from the left. This man will be to your right because he draws from the right. The guy behind you will always be watching our backs. If we try to take you down, just let us take you down.” I was like “Uh, okay…Where am I?” (laughs) I just got off the plane. Nobody said “hello.” We got in the car and they were doing evasive maneuvers the whole way, it was crazy. I wanted to go visit Soweto, and they said no. They said if they took me there, I might have to watch them do what they really do, and they didn’t want that. They would screen people who came to my room. It was bizarre. Cape Town is totally different. It’s like a resort. I could walk around, had no bodyguards. It’s a totally relaxed atmosphere. There’s shantytowns everywhere, but there’s not much crime to speak of. The biggest tension there is between the Africans, the blacks, and “the coloreds,” who are the mixed people. The black people came in (after Apartheid) and started to do all the menial labor, and the colored people lost their place. They never had to have pass cards and could come and go as they pleased. Now they don’t know where they belong. It’s very strange.

Tell us about working with the great John Boorman.
I had been reading this script for a couple years, and they kept trying to find a director. When John came on board and started talking about it, it was the first time it made sense to me in terms of where I thought the film could go. John’s got such an amazing body of work, particularly in dealing with the intricacies of relationships, he was able to make the film about much more than the truth and reconciliation hearings. He made it about two people who had to discover their own truth, and reconcile their lives. John brought a great deal of humanity to the film, I think.

Tell us about Miss Binoche, who I love.
Yeah, me too! (laughs) She is so passionate and so driven, that it was hard to believe some days that she wasn’t South African. She really absorbed herself in the country and culture. She did intricate research. Being with her in a scene is pretty incredible. She gives of her whole self the whole time. She’s very attentive to detail. We really enjoyed being together. There was a time when a scene was over, and we needed to laugh, to relieve the tension, and we were able to do that quite easily. There were a lot of people in the film who were part of the truth and reconciliation hearings and survived Apartheid, so it wasn’t uncommon for people to break down after a scene was over. So having some laughter in there was very healthy.

Your body of work, nearly 90 films since 1981, is varied but has one common thread, and that is a tremendous social conscience. What are the roots of that, do you think?
I grew up with segregation, in Tennessee, so all my life I felt a disparity for inequity, and how I saw people treated, especially my grandparents. I used to go to work a lot with my grandfather. He was a maintenance man for a real estate company and worked in a hotel. My grandfather always looked like an “older person” to me, although he was only in his mid-50s at the time. All the (white) guys who worked in the office would call him “Ed” or “Edgar.” Whenever white people would come to our house, they would call my grandmother “Pearl,” and she would call them “Mr. Smith,” “Mr. Venable,” and so on. That was confusing to me for a very long time, because I was always told that younger people addressed older people as “Sir,” “Ma’am,” or “Mr.” and “Miss.” That never happened with them, no matter where they went if the people were white. If they didn’t know their names, they would call them “boy,” or whatever. Then there were places I couldn’t go. Things I couldn’t do. There were white kids who would ride the bus to school every day while we walked that would unscrew the lightbulbs from inside and throw them at us, yelling “Nigger!” And there wasn’t shit we could do because they were on a moving bus! (laughs) So I lived with that for a very long time. When the sit-ins started in the early 60s, I took part in them. I didn’t tell anyone at home about it. But I would participate, sit at the lunch counter, and when the police would show up, I would just run! I didn’t want to go to jail, either. I reached a point when I got to high school, I would read a lot more than the people I hung out with, and was pretty worldly about politics, because that was one thing I always knew in my heart: that I was not going to spend my life in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so everything I did was geared towards escape! I even applied to colleges that were so far away from home, like University of Alaska, that my mother said “You must be out of your mind, if you think you’re going there!” (laughs)

Then you went to Morehouse College in the mid-60s.
Yeah, 1966, at the height of the black power movement. It was so bizarre, because there were some older guys, in their early 20s, who were part of my freshman class. They were Vietnam vets, going to school on the G.I. Bill. We’d be up all night, drinking, raising hell, and these older guys would come in, really pissed because they were trying to study. They said “You guys need to study, pay attention and get serious! There’s a war going on. We just came from it.” We were like “What fuckin’ war?” “Vietnam?” “Where’s that? Let’s get the map. There’s no place called Vietnam on this map!” “Right there, Indochina. That’s Vietnam. We’re in a war over there. My friends are dying there. Your relatives are going to be dying there!” Sure enough, a month and a half later, my cousin was killed in Vietnam. He’d just joined the army, shipped out, and was killed almost immediately. So that really woke me up, and started reading up on it, and thinking “Wait a minute, the French were there all that time and got their asses kicked. What makes us think we can win this war?” “Well, we’re the United States.” “No, they fight guerilla style, kind of like what the Indians did using the terrain and nature to fight back against the French and the English when they came over here.” So it was a very “fight the system” mentality where we learned to question everything our government was doing, something that’s really missing in younger people now, I think. These kids today have no idea what they’re going to inherit once all this bullshit’s over.

Yeah, it’s very disconcerting. They should be raging against the machine, but if anything, they’re bigger conformists than even my generation, Generation X was, at their age.
It’s comfort, man. Playstation, hip-hop, there’s so much alcohol out there right now that I’ve never even heard of! It sure wasn’t around when I was still drinking. It’s like “What? You drink something called Hypnotic?!” (laughs)

You have a daughter that age who just graduated from Vassar. What do you guys talk about when these issues come up?
Well she has a very strong social conscience. When I was on my way to South Africa to make the film, she was in England and taking part in all the anti-war demonstrations that were going on. So she inherited that same political awareness of what’s going on in the world, that if they don’t do something, everything’s going to get out of hand. The 22 year-olds, for the next 20 years it’s going to be their generation that’s going to have to run things. Believe me, we’ve entered into something that we weren’t a part of before, but now we’re going to be a part of forever, because when you look at history, anyone who gets involved with a war against Islam, winds up fighting them forever. Their attitude is “You killed my great, great, great, great grandfather in 1503, so now I have to do something because my family honor is at stake!” To which I say “No, motherfucker! You weren’t there!” There’s no reasoning with people who think that way. So we have to figure out a way to rationalize with them in a way they can understand. The problem is, we’re not fighting for the right cause. We’re fighting for profit, profit which doesn’t trickle down to the ordinary American citizen.

I really think, though, on the one hand that Bush and his cronies really do believe in what they’re doing, which is empire building. They’re brining white, Christian, “democratic” values to the pagans of the Middle East.
Only because they keep saying it, over and over again. I think they really know what their raison d’etre is.

Chaney, Rice and the rest of the Hitler youth, maybe. But I think Dubya really believes in what he espouses.
(laughs) You know what, I think he has fooled all of us into believing he’s this sort of dim-witted puppet. The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world believe he didn’t exist. This is no fool. He’s been playing the fool for so long, that we bought into it. You can’t come from the background that he does, with his dad being the biggest drug dealer in the world when he ran the CIA, and not have some of that rub off.

Let’s get back to your film work. Probably the most socially conscious filmmaker you’ve worked with is Spike Lee, whom you worked with three times. In fact, the first film I remember seeing you in was School Daze.
Spike was like our savior when we were all struggling actors in New York. Every summer we knew we were going to go to Spike Lee’s summer film camp, and make enough money to get us through to Christmas. He had a great core group of people and we’d make a film. Being in those situations with those people, there was a strong sense of family. And because all the actors had worked together so much in the theater, we had a way of coming in and taking what Spike had on the page and giving it a different kind of life than what he gets out of his films now. We had been connected for a very long time. Me, Fish, Giancarlo, Bill Nunn, Ossie and Ruby, who brought a wealth of experience and whom we respected so deeply.

Tell us about Mr. Davis, who recently passed.
Working with him on Do the Right Thing was a fascinating experience because I was always in that radio station, watching him through that was. I grew up in a very similar neighborhood in Chattanooga, and knew what the neighborhood drunk was all about. Ossie really embodied all those things in playing that role. He also was like the heart, soul and conscience of that community in being there. We were all pretty crazy during that time, and Ossie was sort of our balance. It was also pretty dangerous shooting in Bed-Stuy at that time, because we’d wiped out all these crack houses to shoot there, and the dealers and users were pissed off. They were always trying to reclaim the territory at night or intimidate during the day. There were some guys they could intimidate, but there were others of us that were like “You know, I just happen to be an actor, but I used to be the same kind of guy you are, so when you talk about fuckin’ me up, you think I’m just gonna stand there and let you fuck me up? That’s not gonna happen.” So Ossie was just sort of a calming influence during all that and he really helped to keep things cool.

Speaking of that, you were just a few weeks sober when you played Ossie’s junkie son in Jungle Fever.
I was two weeks out of rehab. It was great that I had Ossie and Ruby there, especially during the scene when Ossie shoots me. When my character died, it was almost like I was killing off that part of my life. It was very cathartic. As soon as I wrapped that movie, I suddenly started getting all these other jobs. I ran into Spike about three days before he took the film to Cannes. He was like “Probably gonna get an award at Cannes.” I said “They don’t give supporting awards at Cannes. But, I’d still love to go with you. Are you gonna take me?” “No, no. John’s going and Annabella and Wesley…” And then they called me to tell me I had won Best Supporting Actor, the first year they gave the award out. Boy was I pissed he didn’t take me! (laughs) And it took me almost a year to get the award from Spike! One day not long after, I called my agent and I’d always joke with her, asking ‘So, did Hollywood call today?’ And she said “You what Sam, amazingly, they did!” And that’s when I got White Sands, which was my entrée into Hollywood.

You made it as a working, supporting actor in your early 40s. But you didn’t become a bonafide star, playing leads, until your mid 40s. What helped you keep the faith during the lean years?
Interestingly enough, I used to have this idea about how acting jobs worked. When I was going to college getting my theater degree and learning all this stuff, I would go to New York and jump into this huge actor pool, and I figured that theater was like the mail room. I’d toil in there for a while, then I’d get a TV job, which would be like getting my own desk, hanging around in the office. Then I’d get big in the TV world, which would be like becoming a supervisor. Then I’d get discovered and start doing movies, which would be like being at the top of the food chain! (laughs) That’s how I thought it worked. Then the more I did work, the more I realized it was about breaks and timing. As I started to do more and more plays with different directors of greater and greater magnitude, with directors who would challenge me more, I got so caught up with that and the audience’s appreciation every night, that I forgot all about that other stuff and it became for me, all about the craft and becoming a better and better actor. I was so happy with what I was doing, I forgot all about being a movie star. By the time I did go into rehab, I had absorbed all those lessons already. When I came out and did Jungle Fever all those things I had done just crystallized in that particular moment. Rather than playing Gator as an “addict,” I played him as a family manipulator, because that’s what I was. I used up all my friendships, in a whole lot of ways. I had so many people tell me how cathartic it was to see that film because, it seemed, everyone had a crackhead in their family. When I was in rehab, I remember doubting if I could be an actor without using drugs, because I’d never done anything without drugs or alcohol before. That was the first thing I’d done substance-free. So it never occurred to me that it was going to happen, but I knew that I just couldn’t give up on the acting thing, because it’s just who I was, and who I am. I still have lots of friends in New York doing plays, making a living. And if I hadn’t had the breaks that I’ve had, I’d probably be back there with them.

You really hit paydirt with Pulp Fiction, earning an Oscar nomination as Jules Winfield, the philosophical hitman. You’ve gone on to work with Quentin Tarantino 1 ½ more times (Jackie Brown and a bit in Kill Bill). Tell us about the universe of Q.T.
There’s so much to say about Quentin: the passion, the knowledge, the joy and enthusiasm while he’s working, the sheer cinematic encyclopedia that he is, is just joyful. The poetry of his words is infectious. I love speaking his dialogue. It’s so much fun being on his sets. It’s all about the collaboration. He makes us go to dinner together, to form relationships. He has big beer busts for the crew on Friday. He has film nights where he’ll show some quirky films he wants everyone to see. He’s also open to suggestions all the time. I’d walk through fire for Quentin.

How did you feel when a lot of the black community in Hollywood got upset by Quentin’s frequent use of the “n word” in his films?
To me it was total bullshit. Even the Hughes brothers came to me with that shit. I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I was in Menace II Society. I know how many times you said “nigger.” So it’s okay for you to say that, but Quentin can’t?’ That doesn’t fly with me. We’re talking about art here. We’re not talking about censorship. For Spike to say it, that his wife ran out because she was offended, probably right after I said that six nigger sentence in Jackie Brown, then he turns around and does Bamboozled, and in the first eight minutes, he said “nigger” like, 80 times! So you can’t have it both ways. If you use it in the proper context and you know what you’re doing, then I don’t see the problem. Quentin grew up watching blaxsploitation movies because this black guy who lived downstairs took care of him, so he knew what he was talking about. So they have to know that Quentin uses the word not for the excitement or titillation of it, but for the reality of what’s going on, especially a character like Ordell. I probably added the word about 30 more times than Quentin wrote it. I did what I had to do to make the character real. I grew up with people like him and grew up being him to a large extent.

You got to work with the late John Frankenheimer on his comeback movie, Against the Wall.
To actually meet somebody like John and be part of his resurgence in film was a real honor. He was a real actor’s director. He would place the camera after he watched us rehearse, and made sure it wasn’t in our way instead of framing the shot first, and then putting the actors in it, like a lot of directors do. They just put you on a spot, and you have to act on that spot. He offered a lot of creative freedom for us and what he was able to capture on film. The results were a lot more dynamic than what most ordinary directors were able to get. I think coming from live television like he did, he really appreciated what actors brought to the table, as opposed to what he was bringing. He felt it was his job to capture our work, instead of the other way around.

Another great you got to work with was Martin Scorsese in the classic Goodfellas, along with De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta.
That was an interesting shoot. I was frankly the only person of color around there and we were shooting in some sort of mob connected neighborhoods and there would be guys hanging around the set who actually knew Stacks Edwards, my character, and gave me a lot of insight into who he was. They would kind of stash me in people’s houses that I would use as my dressing room. I would spend a lot of time with these Italian families in Queens, eating dinner with them, watching TV, and hanging out. I didn’t get to talk to De Niro at all during the shoot because my character didn’t interact with him. Bobby didn’t really deal with people he didn’t have to deal with. We got to be friends later, on Jackie Brown, though. Joe and Ray were the guys who talked to me the most on set. My part was essentially an improv, even the morning Joe came to kill me. We kind of made up that whole dialogue and tried to come up with ways Joe could kill me. Marty got concerned about the blood spatter and kept saying “No, no. More, more!” So I took about eight showers that day while Marty kept upping the amount of blood and brains he wanted flying across the room. (laughs)

A few years later you worked with another legend: Steven Spielberg, on Jurassic Park.
That was an interesting way to watch a guy work. I actually auditioned before they had a script, so I read from a book. He would say “Faster.” And I’d read it faster. Then he’d say “Faster” again, and I’d do it faster, and he did this a few times. When I left there I was like, ‘Gee, I’m not sure if I got that part, or what that was all about.’ But when I did get it, it was only the second time I was working on a studio lot, the first being Patriot Games. Steven had what I thought was a comic book, but it was really a shot list. And sometimes he’d even get behind the camera and operate. He was meticulously prepared. He’s both a technical director and an actor’s director, which is a rare combination.

What was it like working with P.T. Anderson on his first feature Hard Eight AKA Sydney.
Paul was kind of brand new at the time, and I really liked the script because it was very gritty and my character had a lot of issues. Gwyneth (Paltrow) I knew from doing some Shakespeare stuff in New York, plus I knew her mom. And John C. Reilly I knew from before, so it was a cool group, our small ensemble. We went to Reno and had a great time. Paul is sort of a degenerate gambler and we’d hang out at the tables and spend our per diem!

How’d you do?
Really well! I actually won a lot of money while we were shooting that film. Paul had a great sense of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. It was cool to help out a young director like that, who hasn’t hired me since, I might add! (laughs)

I heard that he wanted you for Boogie Nights but you weren’t available.
Yeah, that’s true. And that’s the last time he called me.

He’s still a young man. I’m sure there’s another job in your future there.
Okay, I hope so. (laughs)

Now we have to talk about George Lucas and being part of the legendary Star Wars family.
Wow, it all started so long ago. I was in the first audience the first day Star Wars opened in New York, back in ’77. I remember being totally caught up in it, wondering where the auditions were held for this, and how to get into it, since I was so far away from it at that point. Eventually I ended up on a talk show somewhere in London, and the host asked me if there were any directors that I still wanted to work with, and I said ‘George Lucas. I’d love to be in Star Wars.’ Somebody who worked for George saw it and told him about it. I went back to Sonoma, where I was shooting Sphere, and I got a call and went over to Skywalker Ranch and met with George, and I said I didn’t care what I had to do. I was willing to be a Storm Trooper and wear one of those white helmets just to walk across the screen and be in it! George was surprised that I wanted to be in it, based on my past work, but said he’d think about something for me if I really wanted to do it. So a few months went by, and I got a call saying that George wrote a part for me, and that I should come to London to start work. I said ‘I’ll be there.’ Mind you, I hadn’t seen any script pages, and didn’t know what sort of character I was playing. So I went to London, and the first thing I did was go to a costume fitting. And they brought in these boots, and this tunic and big brown robe. And I was like ‘Wait a minute, that’s a Jedi costume! I’m gonna be a Jedi?’ Then some guys open up a Halliburton case, and there’s three light sabers there, and they tell me to pick one! I’m about ready to pass out now, okay? (laughs) So the next day they give me some pages, and my first scene is with Yoda at this funeral, and I was like ‘Oh my God, I’m talking to Yoda!’ (laughs) That’s when I knew it was official: I was part of it and it was working out. Being part of the Star Wars family is a very cool thing. George creates a very familial atmosphere and is very open to suggestions, like my suggesting the purple light saber that my character has. He’s not as close-minded as people would have you believe. It’s a very important and kind of inspiring feeling to know that when I’m gone, I’ll have that as part of my filmography.

Is it true that the prop department carved the initials “B.M.F.” (a homage to his character’s wallet in Pulp Fiction that read “Bad Motherfucker”) into the handle of your light saber?
Yeah! Isn’t that cool? They did that after episode III wrapped and they gave it to me.

Was it tough doing all the green and blue screen acting in the Star Wars films?
No, not at all. For me, it was like going back to my childhood. I was an only child, and I spent a lot of time fighting imaginary monsters and things in my room when I was growing up. So it was really an extension of that.

You made an interesting comment a few years ago about rappers-turned-actors that may, or may not have been, misinterpreted by the press. Would you care to comment or clarify that statement now?
They only wrote that part. Here’s what I said: I know there are young actors out there doing what I did every day: trudging, pounding the pavement, studying. And if you take someone from another venue, and just hand them that job, and then say to me “act with them,” and I have credentials and people respect the things I do, then I’m condoning the fact that they allow this to happen. If I do that, I invalidate all the things I did and all the things these young actors are doing, and I just refuse to do that.

Let me follow that up with another question, then. I have a very close friend who’s a brilliant, classically trained actor, who is very frustrated by the fact that he’s always losing parts to people like LL Cool J, Ice Cube and Mos Def. What would you say to him, and to other young actors who are in the same spot?
I’d say to keep doing the things they’re doing. Your work and focusing on the craft is more important than that particular job. You’ll start to work when it’s your time to work. I had that same feeling when all the stand-up comedians were getting the jobs. They were hiring athletes, occasionally there’d be someone from the music world. The same thing happens over and over again. Stop focusing on the goal, and focus on the craft.

Any final thoughts before we wrap?
I think that the world of cinema is changing in a very healthy and interesting way. The fact that Jamie (Foxx) and all these other people were nominated for Oscars this year, the fact that we’re doing stories now about African tragedies, that people are watching movies like House of Flying Daggers and Hero means that audiences are expanding their interests. That’s the world we need to be a part of, not the cold world it’s always been. The studios have to embrace a new way of thinking in terms of who the audiences are, and what they can appreciate. I think that’s a great thing. Diversity is always good.