- I challenge anyone to find a great performance
by any actor ever that doesn't start, really, with text
and understanding the text of the thing they're doing.
What are its intentions?
What are its goals?
What are the layers that are gonna make this person up?
[upbeat music]
"Primal Fear".
I'm gonna put a caveat on everything
from here forward that my memory
of some of these things is elusive.
Your own relationship to the experience
is different from people who enjoy the film
because they may have a more present tense sense of it.
I remember weird things.
I remember having not had that much experience
working in film realizing that you could
play a very intense scene when they're
doing the coverage in the other direction
and realize that you're out of gas.
I remember in one of the final courtroom scenes
where feeling like I'd overdone it
when it was shooting Laura Linney or something
and running to the craft service guy
and going, just get me some caffeine,
and I figured I'd better jack myself back up on something.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- Those are the rookie mistakes you make.
- That's it no more [beeps], no more games!
Everybody thinks you did this, everybody!
I'm the only one who believes you,
and I am that close.
So, I want it all out, all of it, right now, right here.
- Working with Richard Gere it was the luckiest
first dance partner I could've had.
He was like veteran.
Like the movie "Training Day".
He was such a real comrade in saying this is great
but then, you know, in the subtlest of ways
just, you know, little pointers,
little guidance, little support.
He was, I can't say enough great about him.
He was so kind to me on that.
There was a lot of consternation in that film
about whether he needed to end up winning.
Whether this was okay that the end of the film
was this body blow.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- You know, of getting sideswiped by this kid.
He was the one who, forcefully, argued.
He was like what is better than me getting hammered.
And he goes that's what makes this work.
He didn't wanna, he didn't wanna win.
He didn't wanna
He knew in a weird way that part of the pleasure
of the end was the smug, polished guy getting sideswiped.
"Rounders".
You know it was one of those things
you look left and you look right
what was the last real good poker movie?
- [Interviewer] Yeah, it's the poker movie.
- Yeah, and there wasn't one then.
And also sometimes you just get this thing of like
Matt's doing it?
Well, that'll be fun.
He's great.
What Turturro's gonna do it?
What Malkovich is gonna do it?
Like c'mon, Martin Landau's gonna do it?
Oh my god, you know.
It's like we're hanging out on the corner on 8th Avenue
and listening to Martin Landau tell stories.
That's as good as it gets.
- Hey Worm, do allow people like you in places like this?
- You know what, Zagosh when you get yourself
a job then you can be my [beeps] PO.
How 'bout that?
Worm, I think, has lots of literary ancestors.
Worm is like Johnny Boy in Mean Streets.
Worm is like the friend that if you didn't
have roots you wouldn't be friends with him now,
you know what I mean?
It's like he's, in Shakespeare he'd be Puck.
He's mischief, he's trouble.
"American History X".
The film was
Like even the poster was iconic.
It was a Shakespearean type of a story by design.
It was tragedy.
That's how we talked about it.
That's how when David and I worked
on the script for months, months, months,
we were taking this incredible scenario and this idea.
To imagine him as a latter-day Venice Beach Macbeth,
you know, an Othello.
Here is this person who, like a lot of those
great classical tragic heroes, has enormous gifts.
He's not some cracker.
He's smart.
He's forceful.
He loves his family.
He has qualities of leadership.
He doesn't suffer fools.
He's got like, we used to say,
he has the qualities of a general.
You can see within him the things he could have been,
but he's overtaken by rage.
Our kind of ambitious idea at the time was
if what those plays, Greeks and Shakespeare
were trying to do is say,
hey people can learn a lesson,
literally a cathartic lesson,
from the fall of Macbeth because of ambition,
Othello jealousy.
Let's look at someone who ruins all
of the potential in his life because of rage.
Who lets rage destroy everything
that could've been good in his life.
- I don't think that the tape showed that at all.
- You didn't think so, huh?
And what you're an authority, Ma?
- Murray, what do you think?
- Well, I did think that the police
used their clubs rather excessively.
- Who are you to say what's excessive?
I think it was totally appropriate.
I loved working with Beverly D'Angelo and Elliott Gould.
Those things at the dinner table
were incredibly visceral and verite and improvisational.
And you have to create a special kind
of a sense of alliance and trust.
Everybody know we're telling this story for a reason.
We have an objective with this.
We have a message with this that's, we hope,
a humanist one like a thing
because you're gonna go to some places
and you don't wanna be self-conscious about it.
So, for me being the one who was having to,
obviously, almost improvisationally rip
at with these horrible, rage-filled tirades at people.
When you have actors, and when you feel a sense of
a safety zone of support,
a safe zone in which to explore all that,
it's important.
This isn't our [beeps] neighborhood it's a battlefield.
We're on a battlefield tonight.
Make a decision.
Are we gonna stand on the sidelines,
quietly standing there while our country gets raped?
The guts of the whole thing where David McKenna's
great, great writing.
Nobody swans in and starts making up
a character from some intuitive level.
You have to, there's a text.
There's a script.
There's a director with
There's an idea, there's a whole set of ideas
and you have to engage from the point of view
of what is this piece?
What is it saying?
What is it doing?
What's the tonality of it?
Is it highly stylized?
Is it super-naturalistic?
What are the layers that are gonna make this person up?
And sometimes, honestly, wardrobe can become
The right set of boots will find you
a character's physicality faster than
any sense memory exercise, you know what I mean?
It's very
There are many, many, many, many triggers
to the process of finding what becomes,
quote unquote character, I think.
"Fight Club".
Fincher one time said that it was
a film about a serious subject made
by deeply unserious people.
Which is sort of true.
Honestly, it was a marathon
but it really was characterized by a lot of laughter.
I think my abiding memory of the whole thing,
whatever, was quote unquote hard about it
is that we were just having a ball.
Fincher is funny.
Brad is funny.
Helena is really funny.
Andy Walker who came in and did
a lot of great rewrites on it.
There was a lot of funny people on that movie.
And there was a fun, dark sensibility
of sticking a fork in things, you know,
and it was fun.
What the hell are you doing?
I don't know that I've ever been
involved in a situation where a text
was better suited to a director's very unique talents.
I mean, what he did on that movie technically
was just a jaw-dropper to watch on a day-in-day-out basis.
He was doing things that were just so off-the-wall
and impressive, and innovative.
The way that Fincher's technical capabilities
enhanced the discombobulation of the experience
which is what the film is about.
It just all, it was all snowballing in a way
that was really impressive to watch.
When we saw it together, finished for the first time,
and I think we were just
It's just one of those things you just go,
wow, we'll always have this one,
you know what I mean?
It was great.
You hope you get a couple of those in a whole career,
you know what I mean?
"The 25th Hour".
Spike Lee was one of the reasons I got
serious about making films because
"Do the Right Thing" was, to me, one of the definitive
films of my coming of age.
It had an enormous, enormous impact
on literally what I thought was the reason to make movies.
It changed my aspirational target.
And I'd, literally, written Spike fan letters.
I mean, I thought "He Got Game" was an absolute
friggin' undeclared masterpiece.
I thought it was just great
and I think I wrote him a letter about that.
And then, when I saw him somewhere sometime
he came running over and we got into it,
and then we started looking for something to do.
Send those Enron assholes to jail for [beeps] life!
You think Bush and Cheney didn't know about that.
Give me a [beeps] break.
I think Spike was not gonna make that movie
in the aftermath of 9/11 and not deal with
the melancholy that was sitting on his town.
Spike makes films about the moments he's living in.
He makes films about the tensions in his neighborhood.
He makes films about what's the moral challenge
of the moment that we're living in.
And I think Spike just was drawn to "The 25th Hour",
as we all were, just 'cause it's a great morality tale.
It's like does responsibility for someone's
decisions ripple out?
Are others responsible for someone falling?
I think we shot "The 25th Hour" in 26 days.
I think it was the shortest schedule
I've ever shot a film on.
It was the shortest schedule I've ever shot a film on,
and it's a function of Spike's preparation.
He's one of the most prepared directors,
and part of that is rehearsal.
He rehearsed it like a play.
Five or six weeks, nine to five everyday, like a play.
And Phil and I were in heaven.
We were like this is everything we love, you know.
"Motherless Brooklyn".
It's based on a novel called "Motherless Brooklyn"
by a great Brooklyn writer named Jonathan Lethem.
It's a story about a very unusual underdog.
He's a guy who is afflicted with Tourette Syndrome
and obsessive compulsive disorder.
And he has a place in the world within
a detective agency in Brooklyn,
and a mentor, Bruce Willis, who sort of understands him
and understands that he has many strange gifts
within this condition of his affliction.
And when something bad happens to that one friend and mentor
who gives him his place in the world,
it sets him off on this journey of revenge
and also puzzle solving to figure out what happened.
And it sort of leads him into this vast world
of power brokers and the social history
of what was happening to New York in the 50s.
It's in the traditions of noir, I hope,
like "Chinatown", or "Big Sleep",
or many of the things that look at the underbelly
of how things really happened in American life,
but at the same time it really is a character portrait,
it's a character study about an underdog
finding his way into his own kind of empowerment, I think.
I got something wrong with me.
That's the first thing to know.
I got threads in my heads.
I got threads in my heads, man.
I twitch and shout a lot.
Eh.
The thing about directing and acting
is that you get to be the sculptor of your own performance
which is great.
With something as tricky as a character
with Tourette Syndrome where you're gonna want,
as an actor, to feel liberated to try a lot,
you're the ultimate arbiter
of the calibration of your performance.
That's very nice.
There's a certain bubble of illusion
that actors like to maintain together
even though there's all this technical distraction
going on around them.
And when you're a director you're part
of that technical distraction
so you're kind of bursting the bubble
that as actors you like to create together.
And probably my biggest anxiety about directing
and acting was the way I would compromise
the experience for the other actors of acting with me.
But the answer to that is to get stone-cold pros.
People who are trade craft professionals
and really bring intrinsically to it
more than you could ever hope for.
More than you even imagined.
Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe,
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones,
Michael K. Williams, I mean, and it keeps going.
There's a lot.
I went to, with the exception of Gugu,
who's my British import because she's such
a liminal new talent,
she's just, I think, emergent into people's consciousness
which is what I wanted in my lady of mystery,
my figure of mystery,
but the large bulk of everyone I went to on this
was kind of my cadre of New York theater actors
that I know, have worked with, have relationships with.
And who I think have a certain kind of a New York shorthand,
if you will.
- You remember what I said.
- She doesn't know.
She doesn't know.
- What don't I know?
- It's a total consumption.
It's a total creative engagement.
It's very, very, challenging.
And I love so many of the dimensions of storytelling
from photography to music to sound.
It's such a rich opportunity to play
with all these little creative compartments of your brain.