Al Pacino

31:32Because money and me like the book, you know, I mean, what a fool in his money is soon parted. So that's always, of course it was. Francis has that himself too. He has a feeling about it. He had the big business man, part of him. But I sympathize, let's put it that way. His whole idea of money and wealth and all is very interesting. It's not first.

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33:43Tell me the story of your Scarface. How did that movie get made? Well, at that time I was doing very well in terms of where I belonged in the world of films. And it was okay. I had something I was doing a film here by accident as all these things and I'm passing the Tiffany theater which was way back when on sunset and I see up there on the marquee sky face and I was a group a few people walking and I said wow I remember first my grandfather talking about it and Claude George Rafft flipping the half -a -dollar in Scarface became a real thing. And Paul Muni was the lead, a great actor at Paul Muni.

34:47And I said, and I knew Bertolt Prak love the gangster films of the 30s. And he inspired him to do a touroui, which is a classic. And I did a touroui, I did it in downtown in 2000 with a great cast. And anyway, I went in and I saw it with my friends. It was Howard Hawks and directed. It was amazing. And all I wanted to do was do it and imitate Paul Newton. You know, I was so inspired by this performance and this film, and I thought it was so great. So I went out and called Marty Gregman. Marty Gregman, another big part of my life. I mean, he's the one who discovered me and then he wants the Bronx.

35:42And he said, and these classic words he said to me were, Don't worry kid, if you're in trouble, I'll pay money. I'll pay money. If you get down on money, you got it. It's the first person in my life who ever said that to me. I thought, this is crazy. He's lying. He's got to be lying. Apparently he wasn't.

36:13Anyway, I went to him and I said, look, I'm going to be lying. I saw something I think we should do. I said, I saw this thing called Scarface. And it's amazing. It's amazing. He said, wow, what do you mean? I said, just see it. Take a look at it. So as soon as he saw it, I must say he said, yeah. And then what happened was the whole process of doing this film with universal everything that goes with it. And Bob DeNiro and Scorsese had ideas about it too. They sensed how great a film it was. But to find the way in was the big thing. How do you get there? How do you do it? You do it in the thirties, what do you mean?

37:03And Sidney LeMade, of course, saw it and said, And put it on the boat arriving from Cuba when Castro gave us all these interesting, strange people. And of the Marl lift, it's called Marl lift. And he's an immigrant, the same way he was in the original Scarface, he was an Italian. And I thought this is an idea. Oliver Stone. the great one was called to write it. And then there was discrepancies between Breggman and Lamette for the first time on what kind of film they wanted to make and there was a falling out and of course Brian De Palme came and it was that you know that thing that happens sometimes where you know I keep pointing out the luck of things.

38:04You get bad luck too, but this was good luck. Oliver, and he came out to my house, and we were talking together about how I saw it and stuff. But his idea with Sini's idea was, and then Brian came in and Braggman. Now Braggman, Brian, Oliver and me were like, we were not in the same, we were not on the same globe.

38:46It's just and it just happened. And, and see, Sidney wanted to do a more socially, you know, a kind of ideology and going to that, that Sidney, which he's great at. But Breggman said, no, that's been done. And so we came up with this sort of barbaric thing that Brian wanted to make an outproud of it. And, uh, work, just working. I mean, um, it cost a fortune, but it was for a reason. He, Pregnant really wanted that high intensity and that crazy world at these, uh, and it just took the film into another place. And I saw it recently, the Arrow Theatre does reruns the things, because when it first came out, it was devastated.

39:51It was, they wanted it. I thought, I think I may have to leave the country or something. People hated it when it first came out. I only hated it. Not people as much as the critics. People were, but the critics and the movement out in Hollywood too was just, it was, except for the few as always, that saw something there. And then as time went on, there was, you know, the, it just started to grow and the hip -hop generation and the rappers just took to it and understood it and they just started the word got out and they just, because they understood it in a way that, and that related and so people started watching it.

40:44And that's when that came out, the VHRs came out, you know, cassettes of this. And then it just went through, it just maintained and just became this thing and it's still going. So I feel very close to it naturally because I started it. Is that the first film that you started? Yeah. So you had an instinct to make something different than the things you were being offered? That's right. And it turned out to be Scarface. And at first, the critics didn't like it, the Hollywood people didn't like it. But the world liked it. And the world continues to like it and love it. Yeah. It said something. Amazing, right?

41:27It is. Tell me about your experience with therapy. Therapy was necessary for me and it started way back when I was in Boston and the Godfather had opened. And I was staying with David Wheeler. I was staying in his house, he gave me a room in his house and we were doing Pavlo Hummel, basic training. David rapes play. Beautiful play. The basic training of Pavlo Hummel. Did you know it? Have you heard of it? Oh, yeah, I want a Tony for it. And some masterpiece about the Vietnam. Anyway, I was staying in David's and I woke up. And David said, hey, look, you just won the National Board of Review. You won the award best actives in Godfather One.

42:35I said, wow. I said, followed by the afterward. I said, you have contact with the Psychologist in Boston. That's amazing. It's all timing, isn't it? It's amazing. He said, of course.

42:59This is the flip side of the story of the breakthrough. There it is. Yes. This is the exact opposite. Yes.

43:09So I started and you know, he got me through many, many, many periods. And I just kept putting it in this guy and Boston, told me about someone in New York who finally, you know, you do this. I got to the point was every day. And then things would happen. And I really, I grew to love this man, this therapist with me. I actually loved him, you know. And it's a relationship that can happen. And it did. And then I went on to do it, and I still would do it. I do it today, but I haven't found it with someone yet, because I've had about three, and I had Peter Newbauer in New York, who I also loved, and out here I had another doctorate.

44:05I outlive them for some reason, I know what that means. But they're great, and they were great to me, and they got me through it. They got me to hear, anyway. I'm so grateful. Have you ever played a scene against an actor who's so good that you forget you're in a player or movie? Yes. Tell me about it. That happens. I mean, it just happened to me in Lear. I'm doing work with this great actress, Jessica Chastain, you know, who, and I've known her for years and years. She was disallowing me with me and saying, and we're doing a scene, a big scene. And I'm saying my piece in the way, and I'm directed to, at this point, take, a garment off her sister, whose my daughter and she, my two daughters, and I reach out and just rip the garment off.

45:20It's like, and she goes crazy and attacks me. I mean, literally, she attacks me and we go, and we go through this old thing, Shakespeare. I love it. That's the kind of feeling we have in this film. And now, of course, we have to change every day afterward to suit that movement that she did. But it's so beautiful and so beautifully done. That just happened to me. So I completely took you by surprise. Completely. I mean, out of this world, I said, what's he doing to me? But it was so appropriate. They just worked for our character. And for me and the scene, oh my God. So that's just happened. So I'm always ready for them.

46:19They, they go sometimes I was, I remember in performing at high school. I'm going to sing with this young, I mean, with 15 years old, and we're doing a scene from one of those cagney plays with Henry Fonda did this movie together. Anyway, I was playing Henry Fonda's part, and all of a sudden the other actor gets so excited and he lifts both his fists and he turns them on the on the desk and powers them down and bangs it and looks at me and he is a ferocious pit bull. He's a pit bull because we always had animals we would study and he's studied a pit bull and he made it work. He put the pit bull into the car.

47:17That's the whole point of And I was stunned. I remember thinking, my God, give them a donut or something. Throw them a cracker. My God, it was scary. I hated them. It was brilliant, of course. It's great. Absolutely. Can you think of any examples where you did something in your performance that was so unexpected that the people you were playing against didn't know what to do. Because the opposite story. Now you've got me. That's absolutely true. I've done it. I've been on Broadway and I've done everywhere I go. I do it. I don't know, especially on live theater. You know, I do do these things occasionally.

48:04But what I do is sometimes when I do them, I notice that my fellow actors working with me together already. I mean, they're paying attention. You know how it is. They know who they're feeling. Yeah. Yeah. If we do it, they performances a week in these plays and you've been doing them and doing them. Now, you got to get gilded up and they are. When I come in the room, and they know what's he going to do tonight? Usually I don't, I don't, I try to keep it, you know, spontaneous. I mean, you don't want to start doing that because I fell in love for the gesture once I did. I was in the play with James Earl Jones and I did this thing.

48:47I was 26, right? And I did this thing in the middle of the play and I got a laugh from doing it. It was really funny what I did. Just came to me, right? The next night, guess what I did. I tried to do it again and I couldn't repeat it. I screwed up. I forgot the source from which it came. It had a source and I forgot what made me do it. And then it was stale and didn't get anything. So I try not to do anything that I'm, you know, I start dancing on stage in Plankaric, Plankaric, Plankaric and Ross, playing your salesman. And I always had to start dancing between things. And I said, later after the play, I said, what happened to me?

49:48Ah, my father was a salesman and my father was a great dancer, ballroom dancing, one prizes and things like that. I said, that's got to be there somewhere. You know, unconscious. Unconscious. Unconscious, they're connected. That's right. That's why I say you got to free that, free that unconscious. That's what I hope I can do. But you didn't do it in rehearsal. It just came out in the performance. I didn't do it in rehearsal, though. The poor guys, they had a deal with it. But no, I remember too. I went a lot about the oldest actors when I, like, Keen Edmund Keen, the Booths, and I read their biographies either.

50:40They wrote or someone wrote about them. And Eleanor Adoucise, I've read a lot about Sarah Bernhardt. I was very attracted to the old school of what actors did before films. And Adoucise, Eleanor Adoucise, and great Italian actors, would do things. Like at one time in Ipsen's ghosts, this play and haunted by the memories by all kinds of things, but she would say, I won't just come out and say, Ghost, that was the line, Ghost, Ghost, Ghost. And she'd say it and practice so much so that in the theatre it would echo in the audiences, he hears, that's how far she went. And the other one was sometimes she would just start walking towards something.

51:46And everybody would stop. If the impulse moved her, what it came out of, of course, was a situation in the play where it served the play. It didn't. It wasn't equal century going to do it. Had its own purpose. That's something I think she would repeat at times, and times not. The life of theirs is, I mean, it's a high wire. Let me tell you that. It's a higher. And I think I always talk about the wire that's on the floor. And then the wire up there. And the theater is up there in films that's on the floor. Oh, I just did that. Oh, let me do it again. You can't do that on the theater. Once that starts, you're on the wire.

52:44It's live. It's live. It's it. And what happens to you, you get used to it because of the challenge. that it sort of ignites something in you and the danger of it is addictive. And you sort of scare it at the same time you want it. You're forced to do your best. In the moment there's no second chance. There's no second chance. Right it. And if anything goes wrong, you have to get out of it. Yeah. In the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The old telephone that rings at the wrong time and you pick it up and you say to your fellow actor, oh this is for you. You tell the story in the book of a woman coming up and asking if you have a light for a cigarette while you're on stage.

53:35Yes. And you know I have debut in London. You know the theatre, the wonderful theatre is great. London Theater is great. And I was said in this wobbly woman, you know, she's a classic dinner party girl, you know, and she's coming down the aisle toward the stage and she's Jack King, I love what she's seeing. She's tippy toes kind of, and she has a cigarette it in between her fingers and she looks up at me and says, God, a light. God, a light. I say, uh, well, at the moment she came, we were talking about this thing. We were going to rob, you know, together with me and it's about these three thieves.

54:30And, and I said, we're working here, lady. And a lot of the things we were just working, they give us a chance here, we were trying to do something in the context of what we were saying to each other, robbing something. We were just working, we were both working as actors, but working in the scene too, to pull a job. The flow of Louis was down, the Louis came down, the aisle just grabbed. said, oh, my God, the woman says, please, I mean, no light today. But that would be a few things would happen in London, would happen anywhere. I mean, that's the beauty. The one I have when I was playing Pavlo Hummel is the playing and all of a sudden I just pick up these eyes in the audience.

55:20I pick it up, I see the eyes and I think, who is this? They seem unwell, just so penetrating. I thought, what is this? I sort of moved my entire performance in that direction. I couldn't help it. I mean, I was just so when Curtin call came over, I really had to find out who belongs to those eyes. That's got to be misright, you know, or something. I thought, what was that? And I turned and I looked in its direction and it was two seeing eye dogs. Wow. That's amazing. Amazing. That's theater.

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57:44How much of a performance is based on the words and how much is based on something else? Well you got the behavior.

57:59The importance of the word is that that's why it's, you know, they had silent films, you and they worked, but they would have the titles on the screen after it. I was watching a film that I really liked, but I had a problem because there was subtitles and a lot of action in the film. And I was caught between the action that I wanted to hear and the subtitles that were on this screen and evenly. So it's got a bit overbearing, but it is both, of course, its behavior and things that happen to you. But I think also it's the situation you're in that you're playing. Whatever that situation is, how much you're in, you know, it's both.

58:58It's the situation in the world, but the world is first. How much of what you do is dictated by the actor you're playing against? I have to say another story here. These things. I'm in a film and I'm working and I'm talking to this person, another actor who is not looking at me, which is very strange. And I keep doing it anyway, wondering what's going to happen. And then I talked to the director. I mentioned the actor is not looking at me. I mean, why? And it's okay. So director goes to her and says, you're not looking at Al. Well, it's not my turn. I didn't get it either. I just thought, well, what does that mean?

1:00:06It means this person has not done a lot of films or something. Or she is saying, I'm giving him an opportunity to do his work. But part of the, he doesn't know yet that part of the work is that we look at each other. I mean, yeah, it's an experience really. I mean, I don't know where that was learned, but whatever it was.

1:00:36And so I just sort of, when the next, he told me, well, look at him. He prefers that. And she did it fine. It was fine. But that was interesting. I explored that a little bit. And it's, you know, you find that a lot of people are not experienced yet. And you know, that's all there is to it. Like we were saying, just keep doing it. And that won't happen again. This is a good question, I think, related to that, which is because you've done so much theater, have you ever done a part where the character you mainly play against where the actor changes over the course of the run, and how does that change things?

1:01:24Well, it does change things because if, like anything else, if, if, if something's a skew, something is not right, I was in a play where I would do a lot of things in the play that would come in post of things. But I owned that, having done it for a long time, and it was a role that I did. And another actor started to do it. Either he was inspired by the fact that I do my thing, whatever it was, but it was in the control. It was in the play I had been doing for a long, long time. So, what I had had those incidents, all of a sudden someone's doing something different because I did it. I didn't investigate it much because I don't like to have any, yeah, but it is disturbing.

1:02:30In the book, you talked about one night where you've connected with the loving spirit of energy. It's such a beautiful way of describing it, the loving spirit of energy. It's beautiful. Wow, did I say that? You said that in your book. Wow, that's cool. In the book, you also use the phrase to know someone else inside yourself. Wow. It was beautiful. Beautiful. It's like when you're acting and it's going good, it's when you come to know someone else inside yourself. Isn't that really good? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't remember someone. I thought you've made it up. It's great. No. Thanks. Those are your words.

1:03:17I'm so glad I said that. That's really good by the way. Oh, thanks. Thanks a lot. It's wonderful to hear that. Yeah, I think that's true. I really do. I think you do. And that's kind of a pleasure too if it happens. You know, if you read a great book sometimes, you don't want to finish it. So you keep, of course, it's talking to you. You know, it's like your friend, your new friend. It's wonderful feeling. I want to talk to you a little bit about the book. I'd listen to the audiobook and it doesn't sound like you're reading the book. It sounds like you're just telling stories. I want to ask, how does that come to be?

1:04:04Because most audiobooks, when you listen, even if it's the writer who's reading it, it sounds like they're reading the book. This sounds like you're telling the stories. Well, I was taught that from Sean Penn because Sean Penn, I don't know the name of the last Dylan book, but I was reading the Dylan book and you know, I was audio. I was, I thought I was listening to Dylan, but it was Sean Penn. It's an amazing performance. It's like just you're there with Dylan. So I don't know, I think it just comes natural. I mean, through these things, you know, so we're late, like when I talk about a story here with you, you know, I see it.

1:04:50You see the story, you know, I see the street that it was happening on because it happened. You're describing what you see. Yeah. There's a part in the book where you refer to yourself or someone refers to you as an off, off Broadway movie star. Yes, yes. It's really fun. Yeah, yeah. And my friend Harold, he said it, he said, what are you doing in these films for I was doing these films? He says, you know, you want to be an off, off Broadway movie star? What is this? You're a movie star. And Greg Wynn would say to me, why do these movies, too? He said the other thing. He says, go down in the village or something and do it.

1:05:35Don't put it on the screen and get millions of dollars for it. Please. People don't want to see this stuff here. Because everything I've ever done that has something to do with my read on things is always a failure, completely, out of failure. I do it. So I do it with my own one. I did do it when I had money. I used to put it into films, making films. and the films were not viable, you know. There's one called Local Stigmatic. Yeah, the Local Stigmatic. I have a story. This is the Jonas Mekis. Do you have any idea who he was? He was the village guy and he was the anthology of films. I loved him and I showed him the film.

1:06:24And he had sent to me, my God, how? Well, you're going to get the Oscar for this. I thought he went crazy at all. He went crazy, isn't he? We all get a little older. And there it was. I liked him a lot. And I said, no, I don't think so. So I showed it to all people, Elaine May, who is just a genius. And I said, I don't know quite what to do with this. So I showed it to him. And she said, well, it's over. She said, hell, it's okay, yeah. But you don't want to put this out. I said, hell, you don't know how famous you are. Can you? I said, that's right, somehow I don't. I don't. And this is so true, it's so wise on her part to tell me this.

1:07:32And then I never did, put it back, keep it there. And someday, it's like a sea, my kizu. Yeah, I hope someday it comes out. And who knows? Because some of these people might also hate its car face. Yeah, I mean, I drag that. But I think though it's got its own thing at the time. Who knows if it'll even kick in when you see it now? You're a way to treat it like Shakespeare, where you make a documentary around it. And it's part of the story, but there's additional information that makes it... Well, if you told me this 10 years ago, I might have put you scurrying me to death now. I think, oh, I'm sorry.

1:08:18I need, I need a, whatever it is that you carry around with you, a wind machine of some sort.

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1:10:08Yeah. And I want to know why does that not happen more often? The idea that there's a film that for whatever reason didn't work, and that you took it upon yourself to recut it. Yes. And then you had to put it out. Yeah. He did. Very interesting. A lot of the work. And I guess he put it out. but something happens, someone at once told Marty Breggman, once told me, he heard it, that when you have a back end in a film, meaning you get residuals for the film if it does well, those residuals are like, the studio has like a hose, and there's a lot of holes in the holes. And by the time the water gets to you, it's relatively empty.

1:11:02Because you know what I mean? It's the money. It's the money. And then it's the why do you do this? The understanding of why the artists would put this together for the sake of what the film represents and what was trying to be done. because after all you do make these things and you do do them so that an audience can absorb them and have a certain feeling about them. And if that can be done, I don't know if it still resonates, but we had Arrow gave us the screening room, the big theater. And we lost you, Hudson. He's gone. And so I went up there, talked a little bit about it. And I agree with you why it isn't done more often.

1:12:03But it depends. We see you think it over the many years. It is more for the understanding of where film can go, what we can do, and the reach should exceed the grasp of what's happened for. That kind of thing, that spirit, you take that on with his own money, which is right in a way. It's what you do if you want to say something because this film is not for now. This will one day do something or it won't. We don't know, but it's got a chance because it's part of an expression. What do you say? It just feels far away from the time it'll be understood or taken for what it is an experience. It's an experience.

1:13:15That's what it is. And he was able to do that. And people go and not go, but that's it. And that's where he took what is done by a lot of the great, there's a lot of great filmmakers throughout history. There's so many great filmmakers, but a lot of great ones, you don't of them. I remember at the time of Joe Chacon had told me, because I was going to work with him and he was this great actor in the connection and he started a thing called the Open Theatre in the Village in those days. But he said to me about why I was doing this, how do you go out there and make films. I can't do it because he was really special.

1:14:11He was a director and an organizer, but he couldn't understand what I did it. Well, I wasn't what he was. He lived, this was his identity in that world, and that's very important. And I understood it when he said to me, I said, I know he doesn't know how to be in this world of films or how. Maybe it's part of being a performer, then an organizer or someone who puts big things together, and he was great in the collection too. And his inspiration came from the Living Theater, and Harmony Kourin is an nephew of his. Can you believe it? He's great. Harmony Kourin, in a little movie I made called Manglehorn, did a take in a kind of partially playground sort of place kind of where there's little machines and you know that sort of thing.

1:15:18He started going in a monologue and he wouldn't stop and I'm telling you it was like listening to James Joyce that's how far he went and I said this is the most unbelievable stuff I'm hearing and he just just poured out of him and it was like what is he saying this is amazing it's not in the film Wow. And it's all improv. Yeah. He just was going. He was on that role. You know, like a rap, a rapper, and he was just coming out. You talk about using music to prep first scene. Tell me about how you use music to prepare. Well, I did that. I could try to do that again, but I you see, as time goes on, like I said, after you've done this soul, all your life, Sometimes you don't need these accesses.

1:16:17Yeah, it's interesting. But when I was doing Godfather II, I just would go, you know, they didn't have this kind of equipment back then. You had to listen to the, you know, photograph them. And I put on a record either it would be Mozart or Stravinsky in right of spring. And I click on the stuff with these earmuffs and listen to it, pounding in my head, and I go in there and become. I go in the scene, become, and all of that. I've just been through. I don't know why I did it, but it was something I did. Yeah. It fed you in some way. It fed me in some way. Yeah. You also describe idiocincratic moments where you would go for a walk before a scene and do odd things.

1:17:16Wasn't clear what those things you would do. Oh my God, I would do these things. What we do. We got to a point. I wanted to write a book and just it's amazing. This born on the 4th of July, if you ever read it, was that opening or Johnny got his gun, that opening chapter, the first couple of paragraphs, and that's in, born on the 4th of July when he's been hit, and he's just thinking, I mean, it was just beautiful, but I would like to write something of an actor having to go on stage in like five minutes and going through how does he get out of the dressing room to get to the stage and make an entrance.

1:18:04It would be so funny that things I'd do and have to do and then backtrack and go, I mean, it got to such a point. I don't know. It was, it was of course dealing with anxiety. Alcohol was my way of dealing with anxiety and drugs. But now no alcohol, no drugs. I get a little ritualistic. When I think I've even started to move away from that, not nearly as much. It just keeps, you know, stay alive long enough. And those things can, can not that they disappear, but they, they don't have the same kind of relevance anymore. Yeah. It sounds like also the story you told earlier of doing a play long enough, where eventually you got to the point where you're just standing in your spot.

1:19:08Yeah. How about that? It's the same thing. It's again like you're shedding all of the extra stuff. Yes. And all that's left is you. That's right. And if you're not, you know, you've got to be ready to do that and experience, get you ready to do that. You can, I had enough of it. You can start to say, wait a minute, somehow there's a little wisdom. Just the touch comes into your life. It helps you. I hope. I really hope. You do these shows that are like seminars or one -man performances. Well, those are very, I turned out, when I got broke, I mean, you know, all my money was gone. And I remember this one guy, a wonderful little guy from New York.

1:20:07You know, you know, how are you? Yeah, what's going on? And he, you know, like worked for the Rockefeller, and said, he was pretty fucking smart. I'll tell you that. And he liked me and he said, you know, I like you, man. Don't worry about it. He broke, I said, he said, like he says, he says, yeah, I'm just so worried, man. I don't want to see a cell in pencils in front of Carnegie Hall. And I said, laughed like you did. And you know, he looked me straight in the eye. He says, it's not funny. I was broke, you know, and I had all the loads of stuff. Anyway, I remember that. And what, why did I tell you this story?

1:20:56There's got something to make. We're talking about the seminars when you started getting on stage during the one man shows. I saw you somewhere in Europe, and I saw your name on the theater, recently in the last couple of years. A couple of years ago, yeah, Paris, I think. But I didn't have the name of a play. It just had your name. Yeah. And I didn't know what it was. I was interested. Yeah. So tell me about what those shows are like. Well, those shows came out of this. I was broke. I had to find a way to make money. So I started putting that together. And I started doing a few films that would pay me.

1:21:36They weren't high on the, whatever you call that, the list of films to do. But I had to, because anyway, I got this idea. I said, why don't I just go talk to people? Wherever. And that's what people do. That's what a lot of the artists and entertainment people did. They wound up from Gregory Pact, the Gary Grant, you earn that way and you do it by telling stories. I did it and I found enlightenment there with talking about my own life. Probably that's why the book finally came out because it was way I could just talk about things. I was in my 70s at that time. So even work was more of supporting jobs and stuff.

1:22:41They weren't making films with big office anymore. That would, that used to balance my nut every month. So I saw myself enjoying it. I put together, people helping me. put together a six -minute thing of you, you know, excerpts from things you've done. And I had a friendly audience. They came because they wanted to see me. And I was like, it was cool. I was with friends of people who wanted to hear what I have to say about things. And then I would do more alongs, I do Shakespeare. The last thing I did is I was working out recently, but I had a coroner artery on both sides, two surgeries on either side, and the doctor slipped and I lost one of my vocal chords recently.

1:23:47So I just kept going because I was working on this, you know, Anthony, Mark Anthony speech, and Julius Caesar, friends, Romans, classic. But I wanted to do it in a way that had music and had some additions to it in my seminar that I would come up with Caesar's body, you know, and lay it on the ground. Then I'd go up to the podium and I'd start this great solidically of, and out of context, and we even got a sound person to do the streets of Rome during that period and how we could infuse some of that. And I was just working. I had about another month to go to deal with it, but I went and did it anyway.

1:24:43And what it did is it brought the vocal cord. The brain started to, apparently, Dr. Quake talked to from Mass General, came happen to be an LA and talked to me, looked at my throat, he says, it's coming. I think you're going to come back a little bit. Because the brain knows this is what you need. And I thought, yeah, and I kept doing it. So that was the seminar there. I have a tendency to want to do seminars, then do commercials. I have a hard time with that. I had a super bowl commercial which I was supposed to do. But I feel there's an interesting thing that I discovered keeps happening. You discover things.

1:25:37It's Jack Carrowack had a, of course, very interesting life. His great was great. But he was embarrassed about being famous. It's odd. I don't know what that's about.

1:26:01And I have them. It could be also that I have an innate shyness in me, which I compensated by doing those things that helped. helped.

1:26:15And I found it in a way therapeutic, and I would see anything up there too. You know, that was another thing. I didn't sense for myself. But I would read them, have you ever seen Jason Rohbart's junior to Iceman Comet when he was young. Oh my God. TV version. The TV version. Oh my God. The Sydney LeMette directed that. That is the greatest thing I've ever seen. All I've ever wanted to, my entire life was do that. And I keep trying and failing. But you know, find a way to make it my own. I'm still working on it. That's the inspiration of my life. That's the greatest performance I ever saw. Would you say you learned anything about yourself through working on the book?

1:27:15Yeah. I would say, only I don't know what it is, but I know I've learned something. I don't know what it is. I mean, sometimes when I'm talking, I'm with you and talking to you here because it's not because of a film I've made, but because of a book I wrote. And you know, to say I actually wrote a book, it's like I never thought I would do it. I just thought, I need to write a wonderful book. I'm so glad to hear it. You can see it's a lot of work. Yeah. I just looked there and it just started and I started seeing that past that I had and myself as a youngster and I just kept talking and it felt good.

1:27:58But it felt good going back. Would you say that before you start a project, whether it be a play or film, that you have your character fully developed in your head before you begin, or do you continue learning about the character through the making? Through the making, I learn more and more, because I have to interchange with people that are my fellow actors and what is going on in my life at the time, how this thing is progressing, who are the people, this takes a lot of people to make a film. And I think things change as I do it. Do you ever look back and have new insight into a character you played after you've played it and realize there's more going on than you knew at the time?

1:28:51Yeah. I'm always surprised if I did something really well. It surprises me. I really am surprised by that. And I've come to start looking at my work. I never did, but I look at it from time to time in a film. I recently saw Superco. I hadn't seen Superco. I don't know who remembers seeing it. And it's, you know, it's your work. It's like the painting Picasso does, there's a documentary on Picasso where he actually paints right there on the camera. You see that and he's painting the Virgin's, and then he finishes the painting and he puts it at his side, and he's there and his painting's there, and he's smiling.

1:29:53And he just created it, but they have nothing to do with each other. That painting is, so you start to see it and understand that it's work. It's a painting. You know, when you watch, actually if you saw CERPICO recently. Yes, I did. Do you see the movie? Do you see you young, you all young? Do you see, oh, I remember how we made this. What goes through your head when you watch it? Because there's a lot of different versions that can play in your head when you're watching. They, and they do, all of that happens. Yeah, it's just the hair I had and the beard and the hair. And I thought, who is that?

1:30:38Well, how did I have those kind of things? I mean, I didn't know I had those kind of things. And what I found interesting was, as naive as it was, it was real. I thought, this is personal. You know, I knew super -go. I studied it. I studied it as much as I get to know them. And that's all you need to do is you pick these things up and don't even know it's coming to you. But I saw it so differently than I ever saw it from the first time I saw it. And it resonated for me. I thought, wow. And you sort of want to take credit for it, but you don't. I don't take credit for that. I just, who was that guy?

1:31:30That's another chapter in somebody's life. How was I that? That's not me. And yet I could enjoy it. I could see there's a value to the film. Yeah. Funny, isn't it? That's funny. Scott makes really me when I saw that, I thought. I didn't see that for it. And I saw it on a big screen just about a month ago. And it was like, what the fuck? Who's that? Holy smokes. Where did that come from? Yeah. Where did that come from? It's all magic. Wow. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, these are the kinds of things I'm finding out as I go along with life and I continue it. Yeah. Very interesting.

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