(upbeat music)
- He's just like the least cynical guy
maybe in history.
Is it actually harder to play someone that nice
than to play a villain?
- They're the same exact beast.
Granted, Mr. Rogers is not Iago,
but they have their principles
and they have their mission statement.
The story in the movie is really about
the journalist that is very cynical about
who Mr. Rogers is, and finds out that he was wrong.
And there's no nefarious motivation between
what Fred Rogers did for a living.
He viewed it as his ministry and that's kinda like
looking at some combination of Mother Teresa,
or somebody that is hellbent for doing just good
in the spirit of which they operate.
And the cynic walks into that and says,
"What's your racket here?
"What are you trying to pull here?"
And if it's actually just well we're trying to
feed the homeless people some soup
so they get a hot meal once a day.
No it's gotta be something more to that.
It's not.
And Fred Rogers was an ordained minister
and his principle was such that everything
that got at him through his daily behavior
and his creative output was based on
making people feel safe and a part of something
bigger than they actually were,
in his case two and three year old kids.
But he never ever said the word God.
Not in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of hours of television.
(upbeat music)
When we were doing "Captain Phillips"
and we were in this life boat.
The script had all these great moments
where Rich Phillips looked through the porthole
at the lifeboat and as the sun was going down
and he's thinking of his family at home
and whether or not he's gonna see them.
So you can sit around in Malta,
and where we were shooting is oh that's gonna be
a powerful moment 'cause...
(laughing)
I'm gonna line up on the porthole
and it's just gonna be like this.
It's gonna be really great.
And then you go to work and there is no porthole
in the lifeboat.
(laughing)
So you gotta take away, it's almost as though
you cannot prepare, you can only just be there.
- Could you ask them to put a porthole in there?
- Well and here's, you know what the thing was,
is that I felt as though that I was relatively calm
and experienced enough that I didn't do this.
Is there anybody who could've told me
there's no porthole here?
Could someone have put in the script
there was a lack of portholes in this lifeboat?
(upbeat music)
- I'm sure you know this anecdote,
dying is easy, comedy is hard.
True or false?
- Can you be funny if you grew up with
a built in swimming pool in your backyard?
I don't think you can.
If you grew up being able to swim any time you wanted to,
you experienced none of the shortcomings of life
that you'd turn into self deprication.
- [Jamie] That's right, that's tough.
- Can you play tragedy though, if you have it easy?
Doesn't it all come from some inner pain, angst?
- Yeah sure, you bet.
Look, it's like Burt told Breckman,
the whole thing is a struggle
and there's where you find a tribe.
The thing about that will kill us all at some point,
is it's three o'clock in the morning
and you have something very specifically
that you know, you've known for months
you're gonna act this beat with this scene.
Now it's three o'clock in the morning
and could be anything from rain birds going off
to you know, taxi cab drivers or something like that,
honking horns.
And it's like all right, the movie is now
upon your shoulders.
Don't fuck this up.
And then they sit back and you wait
and you gotta go there, man.
You just gotta.
Tragedy, comedy.
- Is there a moment you can think of
where that's just a taste, an example?
- It happens 10 times a week sometimes, you know.
- You played a comedian in the movie with Sally Field.
- Oh, Punchline, yeah.
- Hey the Safdie brothers told me to tell ya
that they love Punchline.
- [Tom] Is that right?
- They love, they watch Punchline a lot.
- Playing a guy who's supposed to be funny,
the only way to do that was to go out
and develop funny material.
And I probably did six appearances or something
where all I really did was jump up and down on a trampoline.
I had no sense of anything.
- You, because--
- I put it together.
- I saw you training.
I was a young comedian at the Comic Strip,
and you used to come in and go up there
and Barry Sobel used to come in.
- Yeah yeah, Barry and I, we...
But I ended up--
- Was he good?
- That night, not if you saw me at the Comic Strip.
- No I saw you a couple times and you were good,
you came up right away where comedians were mad
that you were calm on stage and cool
and you were being yourself.
- It took a while to get there.
But the best I can describe it is you just have to go there.
When I was in junior college taking acting classes
and there's 10 of us there and we've all been
to the American Conservatory Theater performances
of certain things.
We usually look at comedies going,
"Ah yes, that's very funny.
"Oh, I appreciate the work behind that joke."
But the assignment for one day was
okay on Wednesday everybody's gonna come
and you're gonna be funny and you're gonna
make each other laugh.
And it was stone, nothing.
No one could do anything funny
because that was the task at hand.
So, comedy is hard, because you know instantaneously
whether or not your soup is good food.
(upbeat music)