Edward Norton

30:22It was really, it was like, and that's kind of who he was, you know, he was really, he was very impressionistic and very stuff, and when we would work, he did all the lighting and he shot the movie, but he also operated the movie. He operated every camera. You know, he was really cool. It was a tiny crew and he did. Yeah, yeah, but also he, a lot of times, there was a great first AD on that film named Mark Cattone who was brilliant and really down for kind of the gorilla where we were working. And a lot of times Tony would come on the set and just say to me, he would go, you know, directing actors wasn't his thing, particularly.

31:01Because he had never really got that. He was staging anything. And he was often saying to me, well, you rehearse it, he knew David and I had basically done the work on the script and then I was, so he would have me kind of direct the actors and work with the actors and get the scenario set up. And he actually liked to be brought in only when he could sort of sit and watch something. And more often than not, he would just go, it's so fucking brilliant, it's so great. And then he would just start going light here, light there, real fast. You know, put the, on my rig, put the rig on my shoulder, and let's rock, you know, he would quickly do the mental math if I'm gonna do this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, let's rock, you know.

31:45And we were often just rocking and rolling, and going so fast, and he would literally fling one handheld thing with the mag off his shoulder as it ran out and have them drop another one on, I've never, you know, it was almost like, we never stopped. It was crazy. He shot like, he shot like two million feet of film on a short, on this movie. It was crazy. And it was very vital. And it was great. I mean, honestly, like, the whole experience was really, it was the way you want to work when you're that age and everything. And it, you know, the process, it took over a year, the editing of it because Tony was nuts.

32:28I mean, he brought in a commercial editor and they cut a thing and the story wasn't there. And then, but the studio gave him a lot of time and we worked together and I actually went and brought, people said I cut them and we hadn't cut the movie. I actually just like, Tony went away. He went away to do a gig. He kind of actually took a break from the whole thing and we were left sort of sitting there going, what are we going to do? And I never cut the film. I just, I kind of put an assembly of the raw materials together so that we could try to recruit. I think Tony agreed, as I remember, that maybe his commercial editor wasn't the guy to cut it, but we couldn't recruit somebody because we didn't really have a thing.

33:07So we put the whole thing together, almost like just like a master, you know. And out of that, we got this guy named Jerry Greenberg who had cut the French connection, Apocalypse Now, Cramer versus Cramer, legend. And Jerry Greenberg was the guy who really came in and really made it the film that it is. And it was the truth is it wound up really positively. The stuff that everybody talked about being conflict later was kind of in my opinion, looking way back on it. I think it was more than anything Tony being anxious about the moment when you have to say, I'm finished. And he sort of spun out on the idea that it was complete and that it was done and started insisting on more time and kind of got him to do a little bit of almost a performance already kind of mode in his fight with the studio.

34:01You know what I mean? And that's two tony is two. He is a bit of a performance artist. Absolutely. You know, his life and his conduct of life within art is kind of a piece unto itself. Yeah. He doesn't turn it off. He actually is. That's right. He is a performance. Yes. And there's a point at which standing back for me, you can kind of go to a medium unique and hilarious and great. It got to a place where it was starting to become a practical impediment to having something that was more than good enough. It was really working. Yeah. And in a way, I always said to people like that people were thinking, like, why is he doing this?

34:43Are you going to fight with him? And I was like, I'm not going to fight with him at all. Like, like, I'm actually sort of, I ended up feeling sorrowful that he cut himself out from the pleasure of the result. And not, not, not, not the credit, he directed film. But in a way, he cut himself, he cut himself off at the last minute from the ability to do that best thing when you've come through the whole thing together, and you all put your arms around each other's shoulders and put your heads together and go, we did this, you know. We've ever done it since? With him? Have you ever had that head down moment, hug?

35:27We did it. I've never run into him, it's really, really weird. I don't have, I feel like today that would happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've even heard second hand that he, I've heard from a distance that he acknowledges that in some ways that he... It's kind of what we were talking about. The way the brain can spin you up into a negative space. I think maybe he knows in a way that it's endured it. And by the way, that's the thing I like in your book. You get a thing done. It's not yours the minute you're done. Number one is things move so far from what they were when you conceived them. It's very, very difficult to wrangle things into what was in your head, and they become what they've become.

36:11And then all these unexpected things happen, you know. They kind of like that at all. Yeah, and people form a relationship with them. They see things in them that you didn't intend. They relate to them. They misinterpret them. They interpret them in ways that are cool that you didn't intend. And in a way, you know, for Tony, like, I think maybe now, maybe all this time later, he's able to see that it's had a beautiful life. Like it's had a beautiful life that everything in the intentional sense, which was to affect people, he achieved it like in spades and... And the film wouldn't be the film unless all of the things that happened happened.

36:47Yeah, yeah. But again, the whole process was... It was right up there in the... At that time in my life, I was like, this is the way I want to work. Yeah. This is the way I want to work. I want to work. I don't want to do John Grisham movies, you know, like I just didn't want to do that stuff. I was like, this is what I want to do. And then these are the kinds of things I want to say. And I was getting to the interesting thing about that one. You ever listen to things you work on at a certain time and think, wow, like it's so different than I thought it was at the time. You know what I mean? Like where you're like older now and you look at the thing and you go, I thought it worked because of X, but in fact, when I was, now I see it in a totally different light, you know, or I hear it in a different way or whatever, on that one, I was with some people, some people hadn't seen it, I was with Bradley Cooper and some other people, and he was exhorting these people to watch that film, you know, so someone screened it, right?

37:47And I hadn't watched it in, I don't know how long, more than 20 years, you know? I just did anything and I had to really, I had a really interesting experience. It was very, it's powerful, but the thing that really struck me was that I thought when we made it, like I thought I was a man, you know, like I thought, I thought I was expressing myself as a forceful adult person. You know, you tell yourself, yeah look, I got muscles on me, I got the ink, it's powerful, it's iconic, it looks good. and I thought it worked. Back then I thought it worked because I was doing something muscular and powerful, right?

38:30And when I watched it and actually teared up a few times watching it, I watched, I realized I was tearing up because it's about kids. It's not because I'm a man and for, it's not working for the reasons I thought it was working. It's working because it's about really young people fucking themselves up around rage and sadness. And I was looking at going, it works more because he thinks he's a man. And then fails so horribly. And in a way, he's barely growing up or is about to grow up when the consequences hit him. But I really thought like holy crap. You were the character. Yeah, but I really thought like, look how you, I mean, I was a kid, you know what I mean?

39:20Like, and that's kind of wild to also to realize like that you have a relationship with a thing and it's not even really necessarily, it's not necessarily communicating in the way you think it's communicating. Maybe in some levels it is. I don't think we can know. I don't think we can ever really know. No, no. But in a funny way, it's like, I feel like all those things The kind of headspace I was in, when you're in your 20s, like your aspirations are so different, or hopefully they are. I think if your aspirations don't change as you get older, you're in big trouble. In a way, you know, like the aspirations apart from ego and apart from wanting applause, wanting money, wanting, and whatever it is you think you're asserting, and things, things.

40:12I also think like I think I was interested in wanting to, I wanted to assert an ability to channel things that weren't like me. You know what I mean? And in a weird way over time, I've gotten this place where I'm like, I don't say totally lost my interest,

40:42but of the things that I think young men get polluted by and they gave me the chance to exercise certain kinds of muscles. And I was very uninterested in things that came close to my own vulnerabilities or experiences or whatever. I really wanted to incarnate things. I'm more and more interested in things that are closer to home. You know what I mean? There's an honesty in what's really happening. Yeah and did you read Barbarian Days? Did you read that book? This kind of highly celebrated writer at the New Yorker who turned out, had this whole young life was like just chase surf all over the world and surfed at a lot of the places like Taverua and long before other people went there and it's called a surfing life but it's a meditation on getting older.

41:33I take it as like a look back at the way that when you're young, you're pushing yourself toward an aspirational idea of what you wanna be, even though in many ways what you are is more present and unencumbered, and the older you get, as you get toward those aspirations, you actually are looking back, wanting to retain that unencumbered feeling of just being present. I relate to that. I relate to, in all ways, the challenge in life is like recovering simplicity. You know, it gets really hard to recover the state of mind. And it's gotten worse. I mean, I think I do agree with like, if you read Walt Whitman's poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, which I think is honestly one of the greatest pieces of American art ever because it.

42:34It's so wild how he's saying in the poem, you 200 years hence, I am thinking about you more than you can possibly know and you're looking back to me. And I'm telling you that the dark days that fall on you, they fell on me. The horrors of Fratricidal War, that was known to me. It's like such a wild thing the way he is like everything you're going through I went through it the warfs along the edge of the river in Manhattan I walked there too I looked at the light on the water and when I was living in New York I remember reading that and just like feeling like a time portal was this guy opens a time portal and he's talking to you through it and he and he has this stretch in that where he says, you know, there never was any more age or beauty than there was now or ever will be.

43:33And sometimes I think that's true. Sometimes I think obviously like the balances and the difficulty of achieving balance, it's the same. It's the same in different forms in all ages and people's existential challenges are the same. And in a way that's like, you know, that's what the Dharma says, too. It's like you're in a state of anxiety that's rooted in your animal nature, your desires. You got to stand to the side of yourself and see that to be able to let go, right? But at the same time, like, it's also incontestable to me that we are succeeding in creating more noise and distraction around ourselves with every passing year.

44:27And I know there was things in the 70s when we were growing up television and stuff, but these things in our hands now, the attention span, the assault on attention span and the assault on slow thinking, quiet, it's just unreal, it's unreal. I'm shackled to it for a whole variety of reasons that are rationalizations, but you tell your story, yeah, but I got my guitar tuner on it. Right, you're like, yeah, I got a guitar tuner that goes onto the end thing too. I don't need my fucking foam for that. And you say like, but I like to check the tides, right? or I like to do this, but then there's the crack cocaine on it that you just get sucked into and you're just like, this is just noise.

45:20It doesn't make you feel good. No, it's just noise. And I'm sure our parents were worried about television in the way we're worried about social media. But I can't say I think those are entirely the same thing. I feel like the age of assault on your attention is the good news is I think people are talking about it. I don't think it's like, I don't think we're all just, I don't think we're unaware. And it's happened fast and caught us. But I do think there's awareness and there's some communication going on. There's a lot of people who are discussing it.

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47:24When did you get into surfing? I got into surfing later and I actually was working on a film in China and and I had an accident doing a stunt and I broke my back. I, you know, it sounds really dramatic. I cracked three vertebrae, right? I would normally do stunts. It depends. I mean, everybody does. There's some blurry line between what, like a level of that that you actually learn it. There's techniques and it's fun to figure out. Plays into the character also. Yeah, and it's fun to figure out the puzzle even of like in filmmaking especially to figure out how do you do that stuff and make it look great.

48:08What was the stuff? But no this was this was this was like a beautiful film about forgiveness called the painted veil. But what was the how did you get hurt? Oh I got to chucked off a horse. I was the horse a horse that I was on got spooked you know it's bucked me off and I landed funny but my father was living in Indonesia then and when that film was over, I went down there to hang out with him and recuperate. How did your dad come to live in Indonesia? He was doing conservation work. Yeah, he was a big conservation pioneer and environmental advocate and program builder and he was working for a big conservation organization down there.

48:52and I met someone introduced me to famous Indian user for a resolve, a great, great guy. And it actually first appealed to me because it looked like it was the direction I wanted to stretch my back. You know what I mean? I needed to open my back up. I was really locked up. And also I had, I was a sailor and, when did you go to the sailing? When I was a kid. Yeah, yeah, I grew up near the Chesapeake Bay, and I learned to sail. I love the ocean. I love sailing, scuba diving, and I had wind surfed, and everything. I just had never surfed. So I started doing it in my 30s, and I just got completely addicted to it.

49:35It really, I think it's like the thing that I've found that I can have a positive, addictive relationship with. I never had a toxic addiction. All those sugar and shit like that is definitely in the matrix for me. But it's just the kind of thing that I feel like surfing is like music. It's infinite. You will never assess it or encompass it because the movement of water and wave form is so infinite and so nuanced and so beautiful and so changeable that just like a musician, all you're trying to do is get yourself inside the pocket of that flow and have the ephemeral moment of getting in sync with that energy and it doesn't matter how many Sometimes you do it, there's no guarantee you're going to get it right.

50:40The next time, and every single place you go and do it, you can do it. I mean, we have the Takuji's, our friend, one of the great surfers and, you know, pipe -pipers of surfing and everything. And I know when you're in the water with someone who's done it their entire life, they're still watching the water and the way it's moving toward them and doing all these micro reads. I mean, it's the ultimate in availability to the moment because you have to perceive what is actually just taking place right now and get yourself in the same way that, and it's good for you physically, it's great mentally, it's just completely, I mean, I have to say like I love the antidote to the social media.

51:29It is. It's exact opposite. And it's and I got to say in a funny way, like, I love doing yoga. I like something about surfing that it might be for me, it's like the most accelerated gateway to a clear mind. Like it, um, and presence. Yeah, presence. So you do, you you do yoga to prepare to meditate or you meditate and you focus on your breath and you work toward emptying your mind and then you hear your mind come in and then it pings you back and then you go, there it is again, let me try to let it go again. There I am again, you know. And all of it's great. Every single form of that kind of practice, literally whether it's yoga or meditation or scuba diving or anything that gets you through into that state is great.

52:27Sometimes, because of how noisy life is, and the fact that I'll get into periods where I'm like, I cannot shut my brain off. Like, I've electively chosen to take on a lot of stuff and it's overstimulating my lists. It's not social meaning shit like that for me as much, although that will be this cheap. Fun projects, things you're talking about. Yeah, no, I don't think. But it's like the radio head song, spinning plates, you know? Sometimes you just go, what have I done to myself? What have I done to myself? Why have I done this? Like, it's an embarrassment of riches. For sure. I know I'm lucky.

53:08I know that there's very little I'm doing in my life that I don't wanna do for positive reasons, you know, other than taxes or whatever, you know what I mean? So it's an embarrassment of riches and it's an uptown problem for sure. Lucky problem to have to sort of electively take on a lot of things that are interesting. And you're missing life. Across, yes, that's what's so wild. Yeah. It's so wild to realize that you have, you've built Pink Floyd's wall. No one else built it around you. You built it. And you're trying to take the breaks off the wall, you get to a point in life and you're like, all I want to do is take bricks off this wall.

53:52And then you can imagine, but if I put this brick on top here, it's going to look so cool. And there's the compulsion to engage with things that are thrilling, vital, fun people who are great, sometimes you can't help yourself and then low and behold, you're sitting there with your brain in a state of anxiety that the literal lists you've made or the ones or even worse, the brain bouncing around worried that it's forgotten something on the list, right? You know, if I club that has that great line, the things you'll end up owning you, that's definitely true in a material sense. But there's a non -material version of that where the things that you've engaged in become this matrix of noisy mind that you can't.

54:53And you're like, where's my time to read? You know, like, where's my time to just listen to music? Or just be with no agenda or hang out with kids or walk in the beach, you know, all of it. And then it becomes this thing of going, you gotta get in the practice going, I can't do everything every day. I just can't. And so you gotta put the balance. But it's funny, like great literature or music. There's sometimes you think you knew what something was about when you were young, then you read it again when you're old or like Marquez's books or, but I do think like the wall, like the wall is really interesting, right?

55:33Because we loved it when we were kids because, hey teacher, leave those kids alone or there was like these little, there's these things you grabbed in it, right? You grabbed what applied you at the time. I like laid back and listened to that whole thing one night. I couldn't understand when I was like, fuck it, I have these good new headphones. I put it on and I listened to the wall all the way through, which I had and done in a long time. And I was like, wow, this is really about self imprisonment. It really is this thing of am I going to be able to deconstruct the thing I put around myself? And I really, I had this whole different response to it.

56:16The thing is that you were saying what's acting and I'm saying, like I feel pretty disconnected from it right now just because my last big personal diary entry was this film I wrote and directed Motherless Brooklyn and it was completely satisfying to me. Like I was, you know, you always care because people invest in, you know, back you and whatever. but I really needed to just exorcise it, right? Like I had worked on it, put it down for like eight years. Wow. I wrote half of it. Tell me the story from the beginning. Well, there was a book called Mothalus Brooklyn by Jonathan Latham, wonderful novel about a guy with Tourette Syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder.

57:04It's a modern novel. It's a detective story from when? The 90s, like the late 90s. But it's the pleasure of it wasn't the plot. It was the head, the journey inside the head of this character. And I related to it like so intensively, like really like the way in Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness, Marlow's looking at Kurt's and going, that I'm looking down into the void and there he is and I'm just on the edge of it. So, Mother's Brooklyn's funny and empathetic and warm, but I really was like, I really do feel sometimes, if 20 synapses had been wired differently, I might be a really painful version of obsessive compulsive, you know, or toretic or whatever.

57:51I related so much to the aspect of it that, like, words triggering compulsive mental play with the words phrases, rhythms, lines, sounds, you know, and the need to repeat them and the need to twist them around and make a rhyme out of something. I mean, it's just like, I really related to it. And then separately and kind of in parallel, I was really interested in in this guy named Robert Moses who, you know, from growing up, you know, Yeah, it was a steak park. He's this towering figure in New York and American history who was very poorly understood until this great book called The Power Broker was written about him.

58:40And in many ways, you could argue that he was the Darth Vader of American life in the 20th century, he was like Anakin Skywalker, a Jedi, like a person of incredible capabilities who went to the dark side, actually went over to the dark side and did incredible damage to the social fabric of New York based on racism and based on power and based on all these things. and people thought he was the Parks Commissioner. And I was fascinated by him and I was fascinated by the idea of the way that injustice has become systemic. They get baked into the actual way our society is built. But he seemed esoteric in a way, like the kind of thing that you could tell yourself the lie that you could make a movie like a citizen cane about him.

59:44And you could say, yeah, I'm gonna make citizen cane. But in the back of my mind, I knew you needed a vehicle for looking at him. So I had this wild idea to use the Tourette detective as the vehicle for... To green -eye it. What happened? But I had to go to... The road idea. Yeah, I had to go to Jonathan who wrote my Lewis Brooklyn. And this is an... And I said to him, I got the craziest idea. And I said, but I can't do this without your permission. Honestly, like I said, I want to take your character, but I want to like Philip Marlow or I want to take your detective and I want to send him in off into another adventure.

1:00:22I still want to explore like the idea that his boss and the only person who understood him is murdered, but I want what he unspools, the thread that he pulls on. I want it to be a vector for looking at what Robert Moses in New York and in the in the in the it's the coolest idea in the fifties and thank God he he said hey I wrote my book you don't have I don't need you to rewrite my book and he said I love films many of the best adaptations are Springboards into something you always know you want to call it motherless Brooklyn such a great title I see such a great title. I see the other but the other thing is he didn't write motherless Brooklyn about Robert Moses and what happened in the bifurcating of the neighborhoods.

1:01:10It was a... But motherless Brooklyn is such a great... That's what happened to the city. No one was looking out for it. All these places that we know, these places that were communities, the African -American communities in Brooklyn and the Jewish communities in the Bronx, and they ravaged them. They chased people out. They did unbelievably scuzzy and destructive things and purposely put highways through the middle of portions of them. There was a lot about the way that they remade New York from the 19th century city into the 20th century city that was purposefully and cruelly and unnecessarily destructive, including including even things that sound apocryphal, but that were true.

1:01:59Robert Moses dreamed up many of the parks and the parkways and things like Jones Beach. He also intentionally had the overpasses set at a height that buses would not be able to go under them so that minorities couldn't go to Jones Beach. Wow. Yeah. And that's true. He really did that. Wow. Really, really tried to make sure that public transportation would keep minorities from his new public beaches. And I love the idea of motherless people but of whole communities that no one's looking out for. Thankfully Jonathan, now he gave me his blessing, he was like, I'm fascinated, he's like, I love this idea.

1:02:39And he let me do this wild transposition of his character into a totally different story. And I had, when I moved to New York, when I was in my early 20s, I worked in housing. I worked in affordable housing, finance, and I used to go around in all these neighborhoods and everything. So it was really connected to a lot for me, and I really wanted to get it done. But when I went to write my own mystery, my own Chinatown, I got really hung up. I got really hung up in the Jigsaw puzzle of it. And then I was lucky and I had gigs coming at me and I was like, I'm going to put it down and I'll do this gig.

1:03:21And I lost it. I lost the thread, I lost the momentum, I lost the impetus. And it kind of was like there. And it was haunting, it haunted me for like 10 years. Wow. And I kept saying, yeah, I'm going to pick it back up. And finally, a friend at a studio, he stuck a fork in me, was like, maybe I should give this to someone else. Maybe I should let someone else have the right so you can still play the role or whatever. It kind of like smacked me in the face in a good way. And I was like, what are you going to do? Are you gonna, you know, what's gonna satisfy you more than finishing this? Nothing.

1:03:57And if you don't, you're gonna, it's gonna be an actual regret. Yeah. Like an actual regret. Not like a passing thing. Like you're gonna regret it if you don't see this through. So I finally, I finally picked it back up and I bounced it around with the writer friend and it was really weird. it was like the thing I'd been so hung up on, it unlocked like that. Like it just, and it wasn't just like in my sleep, I came up with it. It just, enough time had gone by and something that seemed illogical to me just suddenly didn't anymore. I, it just unlocked and then I did it really fast. You know, I did it in a big salvo of, you know, a whole bunch of nights of just staying up all night, sleeping in the day, writing all night, sleeping in the day, and I finally got it done.

1:04:49And then it took me a while to get the, you know, figure out how to get it made.

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1:06:28How hard is it to get a movie made? Well, we're in a, I mean, I don't know if you feel this is true in music too, but we're in a golden era for storytelling, narrative storytelling is in a golden era. Now it might not be the form we grew up with where you went to cinema all the time and everything, but I, but the, what's happened in terms of streaming platforms and all the business of it all, you can gripe about the change in the form and the change in the way it's delivered and where people are seeing what they're seeing and all of it. And it's true, but at the same time, what effectively has happened is that people have set up these blast furnaces and they need coal.

1:07:12You know, there was a series that I love called, I made a destroy you. I don't know if you ever saw that. This British, Ghanayan woman, Michaela Cole, wrote, directed and stars in this. It's so good. It's so brilliant. And to me, it's an example of like, there is so much more diversity of storytelling now. So many more, so many different voices are finding their way. The forms have been exploded. It's not all two hours and 20 minutes. You know, it's like multi -part and three -part and ten -part and multi -seasons and big long films. And I think it's almost indisputable that if you, they're more doors to knock on, more more forms, more ways, and more types of storytellers getting to do their stuff than ever.

1:08:03All the things people are saying about democratizing it more, all true, all great. It just be pushed and pushed and pushed. But I don't think anybody can contend with the fact that there are more ways to get things done today than there ever have been. And that's cool. I think that's cool. I think certain types of things aren't getting made as theatrical films as much anymore. But you got to decide at a certain point if you care like, you know, it's like, I got a lot of vinyl records. I still like to put them on. But I can't pretend that I also don't love moving around in the world with the entirety of all music that's just ever been made available to me.

1:08:51I love it. You know, I love it. I love being able to like, what's the flea termion to like, farrow Sanders that is that last record or whatever, you know, and it's like floating points. Yeah, where would I find to be able to get tipped off to something and then settle in with it? And it's so great, you know, so great. I love the availability of that. That's like, you know, it's great. When's the last time you went to the cinema to see a movie? I saw some things in the last couple of weeks. I didn't go, I mean, I, you know, it sounds fancy, but I, a friend with a screening room put something. So I love seeing things on big screens.

1:09:33I love it. You know, no matter how big your home TV is, it's not quite the same as watching it in a room with other people. I love that. But this was, it's funny, because I wanted to ask you a question. It flows up and out of what we're talking about, which is like, after I did muddle this Brooklyn, I felt satiated in a way, like exhausted. But I got to fully exercise, I got to fully realize the thing that had been in my head for a long time. And that was great. It was great as an actor. I really loved and related to the character. I got to express something. I got to write it. I got to direct it.

1:10:17I had great, great, great actors that I absolutely adored in it. And one of the biggest unexpected things was that I got to produce all this music in it, right? Great. Tom York wrote a new track for me. He played it for me in a demo. And I got to go to Oxford and work with him on that. But this brilliant composer, Daniel Pemberton, we worked night after night after night on the music together and recorded it in Abbey Road. And in Air Studios, George Martin's other place and went in Marcellus and his band created the music for a jazz band in a jazz club that's like Miles Davis's quintet. So I got to work with Winton on recording, re -recording Amingus piece and a Clifford Brown piece and then Winton and his quintet played the sort of new ballad standards that Daniel wrote and we recorded.

1:11:17So I got to make music in Abbey Road in New York with Winton, in Oxford with Tom and I got to really actually produce all that and cut it and weave it in a thing. and I've directed other films, but this was like an exalted experience for me, getting to work with those people absolutely. on that kind of music and to shape the music. I play, but it was like I got to slip into a world that you guys work in all the time and do it in a way that was such a, it was so gratifying. like I never wanted to end, you know, it was so much fun. And then I finished it and then COVID, you know, hit, which was fine with me creatively.

1:12:06I was looking for a big sabbatical from my mind and everything anyway. And I've done one or two things, but I really like, almost like just gave myself a permission to just stop. And almost go through the crucible, like a junkie, you know, like the brain. And what am I supposed to be doing? What am I supposed to be doing? I got to work. Like, what am I doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? There's the voice like screaming in your head, like you're crazy not to gig, you know? Or you're crazy not to work. And I almost had to like let that fade a little to even get around to a point of going, it feels distant, super distant, and that feels good, fine.

1:12:59Like really good and fine. And the last year or two, I've actually had to like, repeatedly kind of meditate, talk to myself, and just go do an exercise of like imagining, I'm on my deathbed. Yeah. And I'm looking back and knowing that I want like a tapestry, I don't want the repetitive experience of playing dress up and make believe, add infinitum. Like, I want to do other things. I want to like just experience other things. And I read this, I actually read this essay that Vassalab Havall wrote. The guy who was the playwright who became the president of Czechoslovakia, incredible figure, and he wrote this essay called Second Wind.

1:13:53And he basically said that in a creative life, you do this wave of work and you exhaust it. And then you have two choices. You can start to repeat that work in one form or another. You can essentially keep revisiting the same ideas, or you can stop. and refill yourself with life and be willing to start again. Whole new adventure. Yeah, and I love that. It's scary. It's definitely scary. It's given me some moments of all the brain, you know, wobbles, insecurity, like is anybody going to let you back in and do it? Are you gonna know how to do it? And that's why I was saying at the very beginning, like, I'm getting damn close to this place where I'm like, I don't really, I'm not sure.

1:14:49You know how to do it. Did I know how to do it? That's great. Yeah, yeah. I think that's good because I think, I'm not physically the same person anymore. I don't look the same. And I think, and there's a part of me that thinks that that's even good within what, acting is that it's best, it's like I do have that thing where I'm like I've seen these people too much. I can't let go, you know, or there's some of my favorite actors who I think have, you know, you kind of forget about them. And then it's like, whoa, but that's hard to do if you're working relentlessly, you know. But the thing I was going to ask As I, when I pulled up, I was playing the Chili Peppers track, white braids and pillow chairs from that, I guess not the, you guys did another one, but the, from the unlearned love.

1:15:45Same set, you put the double ones. That whole thing, I think it's one of the best things they've ever done. And in particular, I think the back half of the second record, which isn't the stuff, you know, that makes the radio and it wasn't, it's not even what they've been playing out in Torres St. Louis, it's seen everything. but those tracks, it's only natural and white braids and pill chairs, and she's a lover and let them cry. They're in such a fucking groove. I went down on that like a kid with the first U2 record or with the, you know, I mean, or or like the clap, you know, I mean, I was listening to it over and over and over again.

1:16:25And, you know, I've been friends with those guys a long, long time. I think they're playing at a level of musicianship, and I think Anthony wrote some, that song when I was thinking, I think it's like one of the best songs he's ever written. It's just unbelievable. Like, there's just not a lot of people who have been making music together for over 30 years who still, in my opinion, find that. It's just great. But I have this kind of theory that, in part, it's because John stops. I think so, too. It's crazy to think about, But it's relevant to this conversation to me, not just because you've worked with them or anything, but because to me, like in the culture that we're in, if you say out loud, you say like, oh, the first time John went out of that band for health reasons and everything, right?

1:17:11Came back in, but they do that whole run of great records that you guys did, like, you know, California Cation and by the way, and St. Amar came in these things. But between that and now, like, it's like over 16 years. It's like 16 or 17 years between that and John playing with them again. And in our culture and in our minds even, if you say the sentence is out loud of like, who would quit playing with the chili peppers or like, who would give that up? right? Like most people would reflexively go no way, right? And yet to me, I really feel like if they didn't, it wouldn't be the same. I don't think you could.

1:17:58There's definitely a feeling of everyone has a tremendous amount of gratitude that they have it now. Right. And that might not have been the case if if you had it all the time. You know when something is gone and comes back, it's that much sweeter. Yeah, you treat it precious, but it's also much easier. You don't take it for granted. Yeah. And it's funny, they play like them, but I also have to say to me, I don't know if you've musically develop mentally, they're playing like jazz musicians on the record. Like they're playing Chad too. I mean, like he's - They're the best musicians. He's playing drums.

1:18:40The best musicians in Anthony from the beginning till now has just continually gotten better and better and better. It's funny, I wrote Anthony about that song, White Braids, but you're never going to hear on the radio, right? It's one of my favorite songs on the album. Yeah, it's gorgeous piece of writing. And John's playing this beautiful, like, less Paul -like rhythm fill. You know what I mean? Just these, I mean, I sat there trying to work those chords out But because they're, it's just this gorgeous. And I asked him, I was like, I wrote him, I said, I think that's like one of the best songs you've ever written.

1:19:16And he said, you know what's really weird is he said, I, the scene, he said, I saw the scene of that, I saw those two people in a cafe like 20 years ago. And I wrote it down. Like, he's, I've been sitting the image of this couple. which I love too, because I think like the, I think it's, I can't remember what, it's in one of Rilka's, the Austrian poets letters, he says, he said like to a real artist, 10 years is nothing, gestation is everything. I think about that a lot, I think like, but it's something that I really admire about, I don't even know John as well as I know, fully in Anthony, but I really admire that the courage to live a life and take a break from an identity.

1:20:13You know, it's really, really hard to do. Absolutely. Let's listen to that song.

1:20:37I'm a tanger, tiger, and a wanna ribbit off to shreds a wide, and ask it wide She's a loaded cobra, and she wanted to be with me for the ride In a Sunday dinner I'm reminded there's no final place to kiss Then one like this But babe, I can see what's right with you Why pray to pillow J? I could spend my nights with you This pussy will go away I can see all sides of you Why praise and pillow chair I don't know what I would do Without your pillow She's a bobby bear and singin' To the fish in heaven sacrifice All that's unknife There's a common bee a popped up back in we believe it is a lie You can see the river running through my devastated concrete ice It won't deny But today I can see what's right with you What pretty pillow tray I could spend a night with This pussy will obey I can see your side of me What pretty pillow tray I don't know what I would be

1:22:46California Blue, say to you, say to you, California Blue, say to you, deep into the sky, Roll your mind, roll your mind, deep into a sky, roll your mind,

1:23:36San Francisco Bay, San Francisco Bay, San Francisco Bay, San Francisco Bay, San

1:23:59So nice. Yeah, there's so much, this is a romantic song. There's like so much longing in it and dreaming of connection. You know, it's just a great, it's a beauty. I really love it, but it's funny. I like the idea you had that there's people are making themselves antennas and conducting things down. They could come through different people, but they come through. It's really weird. I think there's lots of... I mean, I play guitar not great, but I love guitar. I really love the instrument. and I just, you know, I'm in music. And I love lots of bands and, you know, identify or relate to things. But there is such a funny thing.

1:24:49Like, and to me, John is like one of the all time, you know, for me, John sits in this really specific, like Hendrix and Prince and John, for me, they play the same way. There's a lightness of touch. there's a flickering -ness to it. But it's really wild. The best way I can put it is, like when I'm listening to this record, like I was listening to It's Only Natural when I was coming out here, sometimes the path of the notes that a certain person finds land in you and they're right. You know, they're just right. There's lots of people I listen to and I'm like they're great. That's great. Whatever.

1:25:36I can't explain the level of satisfaction my brain gets out of like where John puts notes. They're like to me, they're like perfect. And I kind of get that sensation. You're talking about the book where I'm just like, why am I, you know, other people might not feel that. And it relates to the Mello's Brooklyn thing. I get really thrown off if I feel like A note or a syncopation or something lands in the wrong way. You know what I mean? A rhyme or a thing. Yeah. I think that is such a strange aspect of the brain that something in you is saying, like, it's not language, it's not logic, it's not anything, but your brain is saying, that's in the right place.

1:26:26Yeah. Why? You know? Yeah, we don't know why, but you really can feel it. Yeah. And I think that's the key to all music. I've recently come to this. Like it really is just the timing, that the little timing between the notes, that's where all the energy lies, the juxtaposition, the space. The way these guys are laying, it's also the way people lay space over each other. Like they make, someone makes space, and someone else seems to push at someone's pulling. Right. And on this group of tracks that I like, One of the things I love so much is it's like this inversion because John's flees playing a lot of melodic complexity around spaces, John's making with some very simple rhythmic things.

1:27:16There's a big inversion going on of a lot of what you associate with like bass and guitar, you know. But I just find the whole, the way that I have to be honest, like the older I get, the more I envy music as a form of expression. I like what I, you know, I like the things that I've gotten to work on. I think also maybe because it's not work for you. Do you know what I mean? Like the fact that it isn't work. It's true. You get tinned right in a different way. Yes. And look, I know musicians spend an enormous amount of time on the math to get to the place where it becomes not math, right? Because there's mathematics and music, there's patterns.

1:27:58and musicians can get very analytic and wonky also to create a thing that helps the rest of us get out into the non -analyt, you know, the rhythm and the and vibration stuff, but there is something really enviable to about the autonomy that's in music. Like I feel this with like Tom and Johnny and these guys, you know, I stopped in to see Tom and Johnny were in studio at Abbey Road late and I went in and I was just watching them. You know, I was like, these guys have been just like fleeing empty. They've been getting since high school, you know. And they're still sitting on the floor on the Park K Floor and Studio 2 in Abbey Road just playing, you know, playing literally, figuring shit out.

1:28:44And they don't have to get anybody's permission to do it. They don't have to get anybody's money to do it. They don't ask anybody to do anything. They can just go and do it. And there's a cataclysmic gulf between that freedom and the form that I've worked in more where the amount of headache. I mean, I love that I can sit down and write a thing, right? And if it would, it would have ended there, that'd be great. But the lack of autonomy, not just as an actor, like film in general. the number of people involved, it's such a big production. It's an assault on your desire to have that kind of sacred space, right?

1:29:34It doesn't facilitate, and in some cases it doesn't even permit the creation of a sacred space. And I find that really enviable. And the longer I'm friends with people like, like, and fleet, I mean, you know, we've been friends a long time. Like he's a monk. I mean, I envy the purity. I really envy the purity of the fact that, like, lots of times I pop across to his house and he's in the middle of a base lesson. Yeah. A base lesson. He still takes lessons with his jazz teacher and he's practicing and practicing, you know, those guys have a devotional relationship. Tom expresses this too that like, you can't think of it as content.

1:30:18If he doesn't have a devotional relationship with it, you know, and it keeps him... Do you think that life? It's very hard to have. I'm gonna be honest. It's hard to have a devotional relationship to keep a spiritual space in work that is as crowded as making films is. But I love the idea of that as a... That's a problem to solve. Like, don't think of it. Yes, it hasn't been that way. Yeah. But maybe there is a version of that, and it could be really interesting. Maybe you can basically put together a essentially a small theater group. Yeah. And film everything you do, and have it be, and it could turn into some, there's some thing.

1:31:06You can say that, yeah, yeah. There's a way to do it. There's a way to do it that approaches it. but Bertima is damn close. That was like, right up there with for me. How quickly was that shot? Very quick, like I think 28 days or something like that. Lots of rehearsal, which was wonderful. And I'm not saying that, you know, Francis Coppola's line I love, like he said the best things about making movies is that they're collaborative and the worst thing is that they're collaborative. Right. You know, it's like, it's like really true. But, and I think it's, I think it's also unfortunately actually true, the Hitchcock line that like directing a film, he said directing a film is to be pecked death by a thousand pigeons.

1:31:48So true, right? It's just like the questions never end and the left brain assault on the right brain is the intrinsic challenge in making movies. And there's just so much artifice. It's also unfortunately, and maybe this was why Alejandra wanted to do, when I read Birdman, he didn't originally say, I'm going to try to create the single shot experience, right? I think whether he knew it or not, what he was trying to do was come as close to flow state in a filmmaking process as you can. And I know, look, you guys are craftsmen, you're stitching together a lot. You're, you know, I know it isn't pure flow state.

1:32:32It's not live. It's it's a lot of crap. It's a combination and a lot of stitch work. Yeah, right? A lot of stitch work. And yet if you guys do a take and you're seeing a take, you're trying to find those things where the flow of the notes arrives at the right place, right? And that that's actually when I talk about it, that's not dissimilar from doing takes on a film. Similar. It's like women. it just locks in and comes together. And you say that was the one. That's the one. Yeah, same. But... And then you still might do something else to it after. It's true. Even as we're talking about it, I'm sort of...

1:33:09Yeah, even score. I mean, think about it. Just putting the scoring changes. Yeah, oh, hugely, hugely. I have never ceased to be amazed by not just what music, but sound mix in general. Most films just don't work like at all until the sound mix is done. It's not even like... It's not even fairy dust. It's literally like, it's like a piece of furniture that's gouged and you can see the bolts and the cracks and everything. And until the sound mix is done, there's no shell, it's like shellac that goes over the whole thing and something that looks beautiful. And it works. And there's this whole sleight of hand.

1:33:47I can't explain it, but it suddenly makes the whole thing cohere. I mean, I've been right up against the edge of going, oh my god, this just doesn't work at all. And when you do the sound mix, it's suddenly, it's like, oh my God, it works like gangbusters. You know? It's wild how much the auditory experience of it can change. The story you told about the De Niro scene and being taken out of the moment by what he was doing reminds me very much of the scene in Birdman where your meeting Michael Keaton's character on the stage and he's got all these ideas of how the performance is supposed to be and you start your performance is so good that he doesn't even understand that that started.

1:34:41He thinks you're still talking to him when you're doing the scene. It was just like that and he didn't even know what to do with it. Yeah, it was a great moment. Yeah, it's it's there's a lot in that that's multi -layered and fun Amazingly that is the scene I was talking about yeah where Alejandro said you guys are doing it like all wrong It's amazing. I'm not sure that what's in there. Yeah, isn't The very first one of those early ones. If it isn't it's the one we went away from it and came back to it It's very disarming watching that scene because we all have the same effect as Michael Keaton We're in we're experiencing Michael Keaton that the viewers yeah, and When we come to realize it's already started it's like oh This is what it's really like.

1:35:32Oh when it this is when it's good. Yeah exactly It's like you don't even know it when it's good. I just I just think that and maybe maybe it's familiarity breeds contempt or you're always looking across, you know, whatever, grass is greener. There's something in me though that some of it's the autonomy. I've always envied musicians and their autonomy to do their work in a room together and no one can, they don't need permission from anybody, right? It's harder to make films that way. You just, maybe I'm rationalizing it if I was, I should be able to take my iPhone and go out and do whatever I want, right?

1:36:08But it's just, it's the way of the world. but I actually think what everybody's really chasing on some level is a feeling of flow, state, surfing, music, anger, whatever. And maybe two, it's because I like going in hearing live music so much. And when I see live music, where you just go, what could be better than that? Like, what could be better than to be, to have the facility with an instrument or your voice to be able to be having it flow through you and working it out as you're going, it's like, to me, it's just incredibly enviable. But I mean, I guess you've done it so long. It's not like you can romanticize that it isn't struggle.

1:36:57Like it's like people, but you people get in and they, when it happens, when something magical happens and it happens often, it's still shocking every time. You can't believe it when it's happening. Yeah. When we were up in that other building in John Schaunty started playing guitar. First time I went back to see a rehearsal after John rejoined the band, I just started crying when they were playing together because it was such an emotional thing to see. It's so tightly knit between them where it's like the psychic connection is so deep. They move like like they're one half of an octopus. They just work together perfectly together.

1:37:46And then when they're doing a take -live, and I've heard the song in rehearsal many times, and then there's a dramatic thing that happens in one of the songs, or in all of the songs often. And something happens where you can't believe you're in the room. while this is happening. It's almost like they can't believe it's happening. Yeah, or that they're not even there. They're so there that they're not there and it's remarkable. I had that experience also with the color centena when he starts playing. It's like it's coming from somewhere else. It's some other thing. I don't know how to explain it.

1:38:32Yeah, yeah, I mean I think Tom York told me that there's a track I love of theirs called there there It's it has that line just because you feel it doesn't mean it's there like you know and I think Tom told me that When he listened to it back It was he started you know, he started to cry like that It was like one of the even though they were pretty far along in their career at that point that he really like It went beyond him you know what I mean yeah, and that he was made emotional by it It's funny because Anthony You know, he's such a fun master and he writes things, but I kind of think of my friends who are songwriters.

1:39:13Like, the thing I'm really knocked out by, he's really like a surrealist. I mean, he really is like a linguistics surrealist. And it's that same part of me that relates to the terratic thing in modelist Brooklyn and the word play, the impulse to, like if anybody plays with words more, I mean, I don't know who writes in a way that's wordplay more than Anthony. Like he stitches things together, he puts rhymes and concepts together that like if you look in a moment, I mean, don't make any sense at all. Like literally it, you could write it and I always know what it's getting at. Yeah, it paints a picture.

1:39:59It's so wild though. What is that line? You know, there's a Carmen Gia parked out back and we believe it's alive. I've like, why am I moved by that? Like that's really wild. You know what I mean? Like that hits me in the heart because it's words that don't make sense, but you know that it's about a guy wanting to get in a car with a girl and drive. You know what I mean? And that's amazing to me. I love how oblique the ability to just put words together that are funky and that rhyme and everything, but that don't make literal sense that are so oblique and have that much longing or juice mojo, whatever the vibe of the song, it's a pretty wild thing to be that non -literal and always be able to communicate an emotional sensibility.

1:40:57It shows you, it's like those things where, We've ever seen those things where they'll take a paragraph and every single word of the paragraph, they jumble the letters, but you look at the paragraph and you can read it out loud perfectly. It's something like that. It's like you don't need the logic of it to get the essence of it. But that's another advantage, I think, that music has over images. Is the image shows you so much that it's hard to imagine your own version, because you're looking at a version. Whereas if you're listening to a story, what you picture in eye picture, will picture different versions of that story.

1:41:46Yeah. But if we see the picture, we're looking at the same picture. Yeah. Yeah, in a way, it's why there have been some great music videos, but on the other hand, I don't know. It can be just as limiting. Yeah, I don't have a lot of use for a lot of them. Tell me the craft of learning to act. What was that for you? When did it start? How did it work? It's hard to say. I saw, I saw, my parents used to like to go to play as a night. I think I had a babysitter who was in a play. And I saw a play when I was like five. And the whole thing seemed very magical to me. And it wasn't movies at first. I don't remember watching movies as a small kid, but I saw plays.

1:42:34And I immediately wanted to be in that. I don't think it was more articulate in that. I wanted to be a part of it. And I took, you know, I took, I started taking acting classes at a little community theatrical arts school, not at my school or anything, just this great little community. How old were you at the time? Five. At then. Yeah. You started taking lessons at five. Yeah. It's amazing. But I did, you know, I played piano too, and I did soccer, and I did things. It was not like, this is what I'm going to do at all. It was pure play. Yeah, just play. I just thought it was fun. I bounced around doing, you know, all my jumbled little life.

1:43:23It wasn't like a calling at that point. But I will say there was a lady who created our little community, the Atch -Glard School, who was completely legit. And when I mean at the like Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg sent that level of seriousness of intent to communicate what this is and that you take it seriously and that you gotta learn the craft of it. And - incredibly lucky that that incredibly really interesting to this is like in suburban Columbia, Maryland like central right lady she came out in New York moved her husband and She built a community theater arts program in a little Noir'sville in central Maryland that lots of people flowered up and out of into Broadway careers.

1:44:34I mean, so cool. And that my recollection of it was, when you say a studio, it was a studio. It was a place that the kids who were there were like, if you're here, you come correct. It's real. It's real. It's wild. And then after that, when did you reengage with it? I think a measure of seriousness about it notched up when I was like 16 or 17 and my public school just went for whatever reason went down and went to the national theater in DC and Ian McKellen was doing this one man show, which when I think back on it, I'm like, why But they take a bunch of public school kids from outside ball to more to see Ian Mackellen in a one -man show about acting Shakespeare.

1:45:31That's what it was called. And it was kind of about his life in theater. In a way, it could have been right at home in this conversation. It was him kind of meditating on creative life and how, in his case, Shakespeare's texts had opened up the gateway for him into... It sounded like a great show. Like it was what it was for me was, you know, your teenager and you're kind of, you're fantasizing a different, at least I was kind of like, oh, it'd be great to be a pro baseball player. Oh, it'd be great to be a spy. Oh, it'd be great to be, you know, whatever he made it seem like, oh, that's a life.

1:46:14Like that's something you could actually do. like it's not like, oh, there are people who are in movies, but I'm here. It was like, no, no, this is a door and you can walk through it. And I definitely remember my wheels turning after seeing it and going, this is in the realm of the possible. And maybe, maybe something I should not let slip out of the mix, you know what I mean? But then when I went to college and I studied theater some, but I can't explain it. I had this kind of, part of it was I just didn't know who I was. I thought I wanted to study physics. I studied history and then staying languages.

1:47:07And to be honest, I disliked my school experience It's up through high school. I was so emotionally unhappy that when I really, luckily got to escape to college. And for me, it was a total reboot. Like, no one knew me, tabularasa. People seemed actually switched on about things. And suddenly, I was like the kid in the candy store. I just, you know, I kind of wanted to sample everything. So I didn't have direct, I didn't have a sense of directional, like, thing. It was more just like, oh, I get to just be enthusiastic without self -consciousness. And that was a real gift. But I knew I wanted to go to New York just because New York had a, I can't explain why.

1:47:53New York was in my fantasy life. It was like a place I wanted to, and it was like, I had the Beastie boys in my, you know, there was that version of New York. There was the like, talking heads, CBGB version of New York. There was the punk. There was the hip hop, there was Bruce Springsteen. For me, it was just an a huge figure in my desire to get out of where I was. And I grew up in that root 95 corridor. You know, like some of his like tracks, like New York City serenade and, you know, 10th Avenue freeze out. And these things, he painted this picture to me that I was like, I'm going into that, right?

1:48:35And then there was Scorsese films and there was, I had this whole New York just had everything to me. I really thought like, that's a place. And I still feel that, like I think it's changed a lot, but it has a density of collisions. Like, and when you're young, the thrill of being in New York to me was, you literally might go from one scenario to the other scenario in two or three blocks with five minutes of walking. And I loved the density of the collisions in New York was nuts. It was everything I wanted when I was that age. I wanted all of it. And I wanted to have a lot of unexpected encounters and everything.

1:49:25But I went through this thing of going, I literally would still have these flip as I go, like I am going to go apply to the State Department and I'm gonna go work for the CIA. I mean, I, I, I, I, it sounds really weird, but I, I wanted to live abroad. I had lived in Japan for a minute. What was that happening? Just I was studying Japanese and I was studying IKido and like between two years in college, I, I just was like I'm going there. And I, and how was that experience? Amazing. Amazing, really exotic and great. not like I lived in Osaka, huge city, you know, but it was like it was so amazing.

1:50:05It was a it was the first taste I had. It was the first window I had into the recognition that what's going on in America is not the beyond and all in other places that the world's a lot bigger than no matter how big we think American culture is. Sometimes it's really big and people do know, you know. No, but we should It was like going to another planet. I really felt like I was on another planet. There was no one had any reference point that was familiar to me, and that was healthy and good. But do you ever read, this is a weird reference, but this is really obscure essay called within the context of no context.

1:50:47We ever read that. George Trow, TROW. It was kind of famous among New York intelligentsia. kind of like the way they talk about Marshall McCluen and the whole idea of the medium is the message and all that stuff. This guy basically, he wrote this, and it's funny because your book, I really like, I've really enjoyed reading your book. Your book's kind of rhymed to me too, of Milan Condeira, the great check writer, his book, it's called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I've never read that. And it also is just like one page you turned and it's just got a paragraph this long on it. and the next page is a full essay, and the next page is a thing.

1:51:30It's beautiful. But within the context and no context is kind of this meditation on the idea of like, does a thing have an intrinsic quality or is it, does what a thing is exist outside of the context that's around it? And I thought about it when it's making motherless Brooklyn even because I was thinking about that thing of like, do I want to set it in the modern times or do I want to set it in the fifties, make about this thing? He has this one line in that where he says, in America today, if I walked down the street wearing a fedora without irony, it would crush my head. And I really think there's something in that because we're not a homogenous culture anymore, or we're not a white dominated, me, you know, we're now we're becoming a true polyglot culture, but it does an interesting thing, which is, it means that there isn't a context that we, you know, men wore Fedora hats without thought, because in the context of the time, a man wore Fedora hat, there was no commentary.

1:52:47There was no commentary in it, right? Today, like, your self -selection is an assertion of something, whether you mean it to be or not. And he was kind of, this was, it was way ahead of his time because he was basically saying, we're heading toward a context of no context. And what is that going to do to us? And I think some of all this, you know, a lot going on today about identity and in all forms. And I feel like he was meditating on that then he was kind of saying what happens when there's not a unifying context, there's a lot of liberation in that. And Bowie was on that too. I feel like I feel like he was way ahead.

1:53:36I think one of the reasons we were all obsessed with him was he kind of was like I am completely outside of any context that you wanna put around me, even rock, even the 60s rock, and nothing that you, nothing that you even think a rock star is, fuck you, I'm an endrogeness alien in the Kabuki. It's like, oh my God, oh my God, the liberation from him was a whole other order, you know? How did you decide to put the movie in the 50s instead of now? Why did you make that decision? Because it was two things. One was I really wanted a context in which the character with threats is isolated because the context of the time is not sympathetic or evolved.

1:54:33I wanted a less evolved social context in which he's a freak and in which treating a person in the way that he needs to be treated to be isolated is not, you know, today we'd almost acknowledge that that's not the way you should treat someone. And I wanted his isolation to mirror the isolation of a young black woman in the 50s. I wanted there to be a theme of people who aren't seen for what they are, so that his condition makes him not seen for what he really is, to the black woman, and so she's not seen for what she is. And then I also think that Robert Moses was the dark, people thought he was the parks commissioner, and he was an autocratic racist just who ran the city, you know?

1:55:29And there's like danger in not seeing some things for what they are. So I just thought like, I thought you could... And it solved a lot of issues by putting it in the 50s. Yeah. And also in the 50s was when the, in the US, in American cities, we baked in a lot of the discriminatory injustice just that we built the projects. And we created things that became poverty traps, like social ghettos. I mean, that happened in the 50s. Prosperous African American and Jewish and Latino neighborhoods that were real middle class neighborhoods got raised so that like Pratt housing could get built. And that kind of stuff was intentional.

1:56:27So it was also like a thing I think that was worth. That was kind of what I was interested in. So tell you about moving to New York. You know, I loved it. I loved New York. You moved to the city in the mid 80s. I went to NYU, I think, in 1981. Yeah. I think New York was probably even tougher in the 80s than in the 90s. Oh, for sure. I mean, it was like for sure there was still like a boarded up building everywhere. Yeah. I mean, in the 90s, I think it's, you know, Brooklyn still had a lot of edge and Harlem still had a lot of edge like and but, you know, I don't know. I don't know. It's in Potsay.

1:57:08New York probably still has a lot of edge if you're the a certain age. I love that New York's a world city. I love that it's like. Did you move there though with a mission? Like did you move? You just wanted to live in New York. Yeah, I figured I felt like I was going to find the adventure that I wanted. And what were some of the adventures that you got into? You know, I worked for I think my granddad had set up that was a housing development organization. And it was great for me because I moved to New York and one of my early jobs was, was I went all over the five boroughs, interviewing people who had left a shelter and gotten into good affordable housing.

1:57:58You know, it was like we were making the case for how important access to affordable housing is, right? It was that kind of thing. And that's all great. It was great work. It was cool to... The people who were doing that work, I still kind of think of as very heroic people. like I really admired them. Still. And you must have met some really interesting people. Yeah, doubt, but it was really, but I was lucky. I had my little Nikon camera and a little mini cassette recorder. And I would knock around, you know, to all over, you know, into mostly lower income neighborhoods and stuff. And I was interviewing people, taking their pictures and interviewing them.

1:58:36And I was almost like a go for, but I was, I was getting to see a lot of the city and encounter a lot of people. And then, you know, and I waited tables and I had like, I mean, I had bizarre jobs. I mean, I did so many. I have this memory. I had a job. I wasn't even a job. I used to do a thing for extra dough because I could read fast. I found out that I couldn't type. But I had a girlfriend who worked courts, stenographers, take the transcripts of courts, but it's in code. They take a tape deck and they read, this is the way it used to be, then they read that someone who can type sits with a tape and types it all out.

1:59:26And they got paid the best up here and then the types got paid this. The bottom of the thing was the proof reader. The law firms and the courts had to have court documents and depositions and court testimony, proofread. So the bottom of the pecking order was you could go to these services and you could take as much as you could take. They would say it has to be backed by X, right? But they paid 17 cents a page. And you could read fast. And I could read, you know, like 100 pages an hour. Wow. Right? When if I was... Have you always just had that ability? Yeah. Yeah. I could... I was good at reading and good at words and things.

2:00:16But it was also almost like a game because you were reading it, but you weren't sitting there and trying to absorb it. You were looking for errors. And a lot of it is like, Rick, did you ask her at that time if you could come? Edward, yes, Rick. And what did she say? You know what I mean? But there was format stuff that they wanted to catch. And here's the thing, in every batch that you could take and get paid $0 .17 a page, they put 10 purposeful errors to check you. They couldn't go through and check it, but if you missed more than three, so they would just take it, they would check the 10 planted errors.

2:00:58and if you missed more than three, you didn't get paid. So you had to be a little bit careful, right? I got pretty good at it, and I used to, this is my subway gig. I would sit on the subway and try to pick up 17 bucks an hour by reading fast, right? But of course, I was also doing my little downtown. I was moonlighting in play, I was doing my thing, I was doing acting classes, I was moonlighting in plays when I would get into them and I was staying up too late and I would be tired. So I have two memories. One was I fell asleep on the uptown like three express at midnight or one in the morning, trying to pick up a few extra bucks to the things and I fell asleep and I woke up like in the South Bronx.

2:01:55I woke up like and I looked around and I knew I was not like where I wanted to be at 2am and I like tried to jump off the train and the guy you know they shut the doors and remember they would like caught my ankle and then the guy was like nudging the train forward and I was screaming I was like come on come on man they let me out and I was like well maybe this young and then another time I was coming off in acting class in East fourth street. And I knew I had this batch that was due, it was winter. And I was like, shit, if I don't turn this in, I think I got to go sit somewhere. And I was so fucking cheap at the time.

2:02:32I mean, I had like, I should just go on and set in a coffee shop or something, right? I was like, I just have to find a quiet place, focus and get this done. And I've poked into like one of those NYU buildings near Washington Square Park. And I kind of like, I went past this security guard. I was like, I'm just gonna find an empty classroom. I poke around and think classrooms are locked or there's things in them like shit. I go in this bathroom. There's this door and I'm like, open this door in this NYU bathroom and there's a storage closet and it has like desks and like bathroom, and I'm like, great.

2:03:09And I'm so fucking Michael Ante, I go into this storage closet off a bathroom at an NYU building and I sit down until I do my proofreading and I fall asleep. So I'll sleep and some janitor came and locked the door. And so I'm like, I wake up, I've missed my thing, whatever, it's nighttime. I'm locked in a storage closet off a bathroom in an NYU -like building. And I start literally like going, how? And I'm like, holy shit. I can't even get to the toilet. Like, what am I, what's gonna happen to me? I'm gonna have to spend the night here. Did you? And I'm like, Pah -ding, think, something I hear these keys.

2:03:57Great. This dude opens door and he's janitor. He's just looking at me like, what are you doing, you know? And I remember kind of having moments like that where I was like, you feel like, man, This is like marginal, you know? This is just, I'm, what am I doing? Like, you're like going by the seat of your pants and you're kind of like nothing. You're not, you're like, I'm not putting anything together here. Like, what am I doing? You know, and those are the times I'd be like, I gotta get out of New York, I gotta go, I gotta do something, I gotta get a job, or I gotta do it, but every time I would contemplate what I was gonna do, And I had ideas or something like that.

2:04:45Then I kind of would be like, yeah, but I did get this audition for this play. And I would always land, like every time I got ready at the cusp of like, fuck this, this is just crazy. Something good would happen. Something that was enough of a taste, a re -injection of what I was loving about it. And I kept going along. I mean, I feel like, I mean, you were doing music even when you were at NYU. I remember it in high school, the zines and everything coming out of like, Ural's early stuff. I mean, I remember like, the way Deaf Jam percolated to us, you know, we had, do you remember, we had one station called WHOFS.

2:05:36It was the mid -Atlantic alt rock stations. It was where Spike Jones and I are both from. And here's the weird thing. I made some money one summer and I started building my own BMX bike. And I used to cobble the parts together and I would save up to get the right kind of pedals or Shimano cranks or whatever. And Spike worked at the only cool, it was like rockville skate and BMX. Wow. And I used to go there. So cool. And we're the same age. And he worked there as a prodigy, like a kid. I think Spike has to have been at the place I used to go get my skateboard trucks and stuff, which was really wild.

2:06:18But anyway, WHFS was the only place they played like the clash and Britpop and later, you know, REM and the Pixies and all of it.

2:06:35Alternative. right there in Baltimore, why? Same, same in New York. Yeah, there was no hip hop station. So, whfs, what was the only place they put, you know, hip hop, any, you would get these little flickers of hip hop and then the beast of boys and stuff like that. But in my view, that's happening by like, run DMC's like 86 or no, even earlier, like 80, when was the first run DMC record? It's like maybe 84. before, yeah, like I'm in high school. And we had this feeling that this thing was leaking down to us, you know, like this springsting kind of talks, did you read his biography? Did you read his autobiography?

2:07:19I read, but I saw the Broadway show. Yes, which was amazing. Amazing. In his book, he has a really beautiful kind of section about what it felt like to live in a small town and how the radio was being beaming from exotic places. And I really felt like the stuff you guys were doing, it was leaking to us through one channel, you know? I had the same experience growing up on Long Island and getting the music from New York. Like the Ramones, or were they big for you? Biggest. The Ramones were? The Ramones, I saw them play 50 times. Yeah. More. That's amazing. was we're like the talking heads, they were CBGV, right?

2:08:05I mean, they were a big CBGV band. Huge, huge. Who else in that time, like Divo? Divo. But also there was always that and then like trouble funk from DC or R &DMC. Mm -hmm. We had, I was in the Baltimore DC. So we had like, you know, minor threat and the Gazi were like our... Love Miner Thread. That was like, they were pretty much the pinnacle of what... Yeah. Was coming up and out of there, but there was that club, the 930 Club. I saw Radiohead there. At the 930 Club? Holy shit, that's amazing. I actually remember, I didn't, I can't claim that I went and saw them there, but I remember the police played the 930 Club, you know, and that was, they were like the kind of band that was coming through, like, like Outlandos Timor was coming through on that one alt rock station and the Smiths.

2:09:00And, you know, were you getting involved enough in things that were lighting you up, even while in college that you never had like a, this is marginal, I'm not putting anything together, I'm out of here moment. Like basically did it, did it ladder up, did it ladder up for you successively without from literally like college straight through to when you guys were setting that up. I thought I was gonna have a real job. I didn't think music was, I didn't do music thinking it was gonna be my job. I did music because that's what I love to do. And luckily music took over before I ended up going to law school or doing something regular.

2:09:43Did it just keep flowing and getting better and better such that you never had a moment of what I would call like existential? There was never an existential issue. You didn't have a, yeah. That's so lucky. It was unbelievable. Unbelievable. I didn't even know it was a job. It just happened. Yeah. That's really lucky because I think it's wild. I mean, now that I have kids, their educational experience so different from mine was, like I really hated mine. They love theirs. It's, and I'm happy about that. But to me, I'm like great with, if they're joyful, great. Win, win, win. But what's really weird is for me, it wasn't good.

2:10:27And then getting to go to college was good, right? The more I look at American life though, the more I think that in a lot of ways, I'm lucky, I'm lucky that I made it through to a point where, and I don't want to say non -straight world. Like I wasn't comfortable in the straight world. And by that I mean like, I never even con him swear, taking a job. Just swear, right. I never even contemplated like taking a job at a bank or going to law school or anything. I just couldn't see myself that way. But literally because of what I experienced in college and the degree to which the definitions of success were very informed by plugging into the next thing.

2:11:19As a result, I had existential, big, existential doubt moments about pursuing a creative life. Big, right? And because my grandfather paid for me to go to college, I even had a thing of like, I have a responsibility to think, thank God he was amazing and told me, no, that's ridiculous. Like the arts are the best thing in the way. But he actually said, no, go, go, go, go. Keep going for it, right? In my case, if it wouldn't have happened the way it happened, I would have had a regular job that would have probably made me very unhappy yet. I would still be doing music as much as possible. But it's interesting, isn't it?

2:11:58Because I think Flee's book is really beautiful. His crown, Cole, his young life is so beautiful. in the sense that he just, he assesses it with such wisdom. You know, but I'm like when I look at him and Anthony or when I look at Bruce or or you know, kids who are left to their own devices in a way that we wouldn't want for our kids necessarily, right? Who have wives that have a lot of danger and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of stability and a lot of drugs and a lot, whatever you want to say, like, flee his chronicle is like music saved his life. Like music is the vector and it's the only way up and out.

2:12:39So there is, there's danger, but there's not necessarily an existential crisis because it's like this is, this is the path to me. It's a funny thing because and I'm kind of wrestling with it now. Like, it's almost like a veil. You have to deal with the fact that like sometimes you think you've liberated yourself from certain things, but you still hold the DNA memory of a way you were taught to view the world. And I am almost going through this thing because it's a long way for my kids being at colleges, but I'm I've almost come to this place where I'm like, I not only don't care if they go to college, I'm not sure I even want them to.

2:13:16Given, same. Given what I see going on, and I don't mean the modern fears about ultra -left - I think, no, no, no, that more that I'm not sure that even what I went through doesn't hold within it more than I was even aware at the time of value system that's hard to break away from. Oh, there's the Marlon Brando line in with the female character is saying how, you know, how nice it is to be a little kid and to be free and then he has the line about the indoctrination. Do you remember the line? I can't remember what it is. It looks like it's an ad lib. Is it in the last angle in Paris? Yeah. Which by the way, that talk about a movie that you understand better is you get older, holy crap.

2:14:07He's, I mean, he's a super complicated, beautiful tragic in many ways figure, I think. The film that I was talking about having that experience with Danyuro on was Marlon's last film. He Marlon was in it and I knew him before it and how did you know him before that? I knew him because someone who was a friend of his said to me that he had liked some of the stuff I'd done and then kind of said to me, you know, you should go up and see him and I was like I don't you know I'm not going to present I don't And he goes, no, this person said, no, you know, he needs people, you know, and when I started realizing is that there was a period where I think he was lonely and I think that his who he was almost in a weird way put a cocoon around him, like I think there were people who got invited to kind of go and just bring him some stimulation and some, you know, youth and and fresh conversation and stuff.

2:15:17And he, and that's how I met him through this mutual friend. What was it like meeting him? It was great. I feel looking back on it that I think Marlon was very guarded out of habit. The habit, no, not the habit. The long experience of too many people venerating him made him not tricky in a funny way, but he was a little coy. He would wait a bit to see what you were gonna be like, to see if you were gonna be gushy, or if you were just gonna, you know. Top of normal conversation. Yeah, talk shit with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was really funny. Yeah. He really liked jokes, he really liked things.

2:15:59So I think it was sort of like, I think if he got to, oh, okay, you know, you're all right. Yeah, yeah. You're just a pal. You're gonna give me shit. You're gonna thing, then you kind of met him. And I found him, he was old. I thought he was really funny. He was very, very interested in other people. He was inquisitive, wide -ranging. Like, you could tell he was like an auto -diadactic person. He, what he had learned, he had learned himself kind of. of, you know, and he was, I don't know, maybe in a way, maybe I got lucky and he was in a time in his life when he was less. I know for sure there was stretches where Marlon was so contemptuous of the bullshit around him and he was so contemptuous, even of movies and contemptuous of, he had a very, he went through, definitely through periods of really disdaining his own talent, craft, the form itself.

2:17:13I think he had a pretty, I don't want to say tortured, because that's another, but I think he had real ebbs and flows in the measure of how much he respected, even the form that he was known for, and didn't want to talk about it, and didn't want to think, maybe I got to a point with him where he was comfortable enough, but I would ask him certain things. And I found him really on... He was great. I talked to him about his early days in theater and he was very relaxed, and funny. He was really funny. You think it came from the fact that he was so deified that he felt like he wasn't... He was never seen for who he was.

2:17:55For sure. I mean, you've seen Scorsese's You know, the big epic film on Dylan, no direction, huh? You know, I don't mean this in the wrong way, but it's actually one of my favorite things. Score says you did and like, and I think that's such an important film because it's a portrait of a person becoming an artist, but then also at an incredibly young age having to defend and the integrity of everything we've been talking about here against the onslaught. And I actually find myself pretty amazed. You watch this 20 -year -old guy who has the density and the sense of self and the awareness before there were even pop stars or any of it.

2:18:41He's way, you forget how few people had been made famous in that way. Like Frank Sinatra and like Brando or what Elvis. But being told that you're the voice of a generation when you're 20 years old and having the presence to go, that's nothing I can relate to. And refuse to unpack the work. I mean, that's like how many of us have ever refused to dissect the meaning when the ego stroke of the interview comes at you. You know what I mean? It's pretty unbelievable. It's cool about that Scorsese film. It's the first time you ever hear Dylan answer a question. Yeah. Because up until then it's always just starkasm and deflection deflection.

2:19:27No, it sounded like he was really honest. There's one part in it where they're cutting between the interviews with him, parrying with people. There's a famous one. He's at the table and the guy says, is, you know, what is the meaning of this, this, and he goes, I don't know what it means. I wrote it, but I don't mean I don't know what it means. What do you think it means? You know, and I'm like, who says that at 20? Like who, who, who in their 20 has people telling them, asking them to explain their stuff and saying that there are generational voice and goes, don't saddle me with that shit, man.

2:20:05I can't relate to that. Yeah. You figure it out. And then to your point, they go to him, I think he was in his 70s at the time, and saying, yeah, I was very interested in Woody Guthrie's idiom. I mean, he literally goes, I was pretty interested in Woody Guthrie's idiom, and I took what I saw going on around me and put it through that. But I wasn't gonna talk about it at the time. You know, I mean, it literally, it was like, to your point, finally, it was like, Dylan the craftsman. and Dylan the guy who created characters. Dylan the guy who goes, yes, it was fucking constructed. Yes, I knew what I was doing, but I wasn't gonna compromise it by unpacking it for you.

2:20:51I not only don't think many people, I actually think it's almost gotten worse. It's not, I'm not trying to stick a finger at colleagues or actors, I think, but lately, I feel like, you know, awards which are so antithetical to art. I mean, really the older I get the more grotesque I think it actually is. And I don't think people even realize how much they're being commodified. Their ego is being stroked as the mechanism for getting them to become a commodity for a ratings thing and for ads being run. It's an agenda And when you realize that awards are in agenda, they become, you're just like, this is doing such a violence to the purity of work and the connection to people.

2:21:42It's just horrible, right? Yeah, but the more so. Keeping creators against each other. Yeah, it's the worst. I don't think people realize how negative it is to the mission of having people experience what you've done to sit in your costume talking about how much you admire the director and them saying, you're just like, you're completely atomizing my chance to have a moment of willing suspension of disbelief and to have the magic trick of the whole thing. Which is the whole game. And it's just like, why would you do that? And again, to see someone who even at 20 years old understood that if I let you behind the curtain, it's over.

2:22:25Like it's over. It's really, really amazing. And I think that Brando, you have to really go back and almost refresh yourself on the fact that when he did streetcar named Desire, he was 23 years old. And he woke up at 24 years old, being told he was the fulcrum between the old world and the modern age. I mean, literally, like Miles Davis, Marlon Brando, Pablo Picasso, Bob Dylan, like those people got treated as if they were the fulcrum between what came before and what came after. And if that happens to you when you're 24 and yeah, you're doing your thing, but I think it made him, I think it fundamentally broke his trust with humanity.

2:23:23If you really get down to it, it broke his trust with people being rational and reasonable. And it totally broke his trust that anybody was looking him in the face and seeing him. And for who he really was, who he actually was. Exactly. And that resentment, and so then the whole thing starts feeling fraudulent. And that resentment starts to cook. And I believe that he resented his authentic life being taken away from him. The opportunity for an authentic life, the opportunity for authentic interaction, for authentic experience. Yeah. And why else do you go by a T. H. S. Ireland and... Yeah, I was just gonna say that's how the way he wanted to live into E .D.

2:24:09Yeah, and we're people didn't care, whatever. I think that is pretty tragic. It's pretty tragic for a person that young in life to feel that their chance to wander in the world. He said that. He was like, I used to... He told me one time he was like, you know, for all the world all I wanted to do was go dig ditches. I just wanted to go to Italy and work on a road crew, you know, and just have beers with guys after work, you know? And I think he never wore it comfortably, because he never reconciled with it, right? You know, he never reconciled with what it, what I think he feels it, it ultimately took away from him.

2:24:48But lastango in Paris is pretty amazing because my theory on that film is it's the last time that he invested in the work and that, that, I mean, this could be a totally crack -but -three, but Marlene Tudegum in a lot of movies. If you go watch it from street car, onward, street car, he's chomping on a piece of gum the whole time. I know it sounds weird to say, but in the context of the world at the time, that alone was sexual. Like, it was oral, as sexual people didn't do that. It's not just that he's sweaty and in the t -shirt and he's got to want him. He's chewing on his gum. He's just visceral and present and things.

2:25:33And if you watch it, I think it was like a, whether it was a conscious or unconscious, I think it's one of Marlon's tropes. He's chewing on gum a lot because it's grounding. It's relaxed. It's whatever. And in last tango, if you watch at the end when he's dying, he takes a piece of gum out of his mouth and he sticks it up under the railing of the balcony before he dies. Wow. And in my mind, he's done. And he never chewed gum and movies after that again? I mean, in Superman, you know, in whatever. Yes, fascinating. But I think my theory, too, is that last tango is just him. The varnish is gone.

2:26:17Most of what he says is about his own life in the movie. The thing that it's improvised and most of it's about him. Their story is from his real life. And I think that he essentially just, he lets himself be seen as a person without any affect and then he wraps it up. And I don't think after that, I think it's the last time he invested in communicating really in the work. But also by the way, when you watch that film, part of me goes, what we were talking about in the beginning. Part of me goes, he may have gotten to the point where he said, well, all that's really left is the lack of artifice in any form.

2:27:08Your diary, right? Last angle is just diary from Marlin. It's mostly personal diary, managed by Barelucci or whatever, but... And after that, what are you going to do? Go back to like, fate teeth and a military Terry Costume or whatever, it's like, I get it. I get in a way these sort of like, this is run, it's course. I've done, what do you do after you've done that? So it turns into the Vegas Act instead of the, yeah, yeah, or a paycheck or whatever. And then there's the feelings that come with doing the thing for the wrong reasons. And I think he had that too. Like kind of like, you know, the shame, almost a kind of shame.

2:27:53Like you didn't live up to your gift. Or I'm going to put another way. I don't think it was that with him. I have a theory that in some ways there's a certain kind of shame that comes when you don't have the courage of your convictions. And I think his conviction was that he didn't want to do this anymore. And his conviction was that it wasn't worthy, that he wanted a different kind of life. But he still was doing it. But he went back for the money. Right. And I think, and I think that there's a feeling, there's a feeling that comes with not sticking to your convictions once you have them. But that's that thing we were talking about too, what John and taking breaks, whatever.

2:28:42It takes a lot of courage to stop. Absolutely. It takes a lot of courage to stop doing a thing that you've done well and that you get a lot of regard for and get a lot of money for and choose the fullness or richness or diversity of your life and a grounded human experience. And so I think like if you're Marlon and you keep saying, oh, this is all bullshit and I don't care about any of it and everything, I'm going to do Superman. It feels like everything we're talking about today is the same story. It's all about you. So you know really it's amazing. Well, I think Yeah, we keep coming back to the same story of that having the courage to step away and live Yeah, but but you know what you know, I think the reason Marlon though is an interesting on a meditate on it, in a way to me, it's funny because he played Kurtz, right, in Apocalypse Now, but to me, he is a little bit of a Kurtzian kind of a figure.

2:29:45Yeah. Because I don't wanna feel that way, but also not just, there's no reason to throw a thing you've done under the bus. When you know it has beauty in it and you know it can be done in a pure way and when you've had good experiences, and I don't think necessarily you even need to create false, bright lines or declarations like, now maybe there comes a time some I know one actor said I am retiring like I'm done and told me that he declared it because declaring it would be a part of strengthening his commitment, right? But am I, I don't feel that, but I do think to me like maybe Marlon's like the negative of example, and we were talking about John and his breaks from the band, right?

2:30:36That's a positive example to me because why? Because it refilled the tank or it brought around again to the place of desire, and then it can be done again with love. And that's what you want. That's what you want, I think, is like to be able to renew or resuscitate… Yes. But from a different place as a different person and different observations, different things to bring to it. But it isn't necessarily easy. But if you end day, it's like the ego. Like there's nothing but ego that makes you say and maybe money, you know? I think it's also the excitement like, I know if I'm presented with a puzzle, because I always think of the work as sort of like solving a puzzle.

2:31:31So this is a new puzzle that's presented. And thinking about it would be fun to figure out this puzzle. Because every creative project is like a lot of things to figure out how to make a more. So it's fun. You also have the benefit or the pleasure of facilitating helping other people get to their rest of the expression. And that's kind of amazing. You're doing a service for someone else every time you work with them, which is pretty cool. What's the longest you've ever gone without producing music? Never. It's amazing. Yeah, it's always happening. Do you have moments of aspiration to be free of even the puzzle, solving, or the, or the, Do you have moments where you say, I could use a mental sabbatical from...

2:32:29I definitely have the feeling that you said earlier of like why did I make the choices I made? But usually I have that feeling like in the morning it's a beautiful day, it's sunny outside and I wanna go for a walk on the beach and I know there's gonna be a group of people waiting in the studio for me and I said I was gonna be there. Right. Noon, I have to be there at noon. So, and I don't want to go that feeling of when you commit to something, you have to show up. And usually the commitments happen in advance. Right. So, I commit myself in advance and then when it comes time to actually show up, I don't want to show up.

2:33:09Right. Then, when the puzzle is presented, when I get there and we start figuring it out, it gets really fun and I love it. Yeah. It doesn't, and it doesn't always go well. Like it often, often doesn't go well. well and that's interesting too. It's not as much fun and I don't go home at the end of the day and it's good of a mood when that happens but it's just a matter of patience because I know it's not done until we do solve the puzzle and I wish we were to solve it today but we didn't it's okay. You know we know now at least we know these things don't work. You know what the solutions we've tried don't work.

2:33:44Do you get the feeling sometimes that I guess one thing I feel sometimes it's that things take longer than you think they're going to take. That thing we're talking about about putting a commitment, a brick on the wall, commitment commencing something and it could be you know building a house somewhere you know what I mean but you you I think one of the negative dividends of getting some things done and they go well and they kind of reinforce my oh I've got capabilities to do more than one thing at once and now I've got the resources now I got the help so I'm gonna commence different things. And at least in my case sometimes I'm like, wow, I thought I could do multiple things at the same time.

2:34:42And I can, but they now are obligations that are carrying on, that have more durability than I thought they were going to. And it takes a longer time to unclip and liberate yourself back to simplicity. I don't feel old. But I think when I was even younger, I thought that I was going to get shit done faster than it turns out you can you know complete projects and stuff like that. And then like you said, you've engaged other people in the, in collaborating on it and then it's an obligation, which is, which is challenging. But also like making other kind of things, you know, started making some documentary projects and the book was a different thing and it took a lot of time.

2:35:33So, um, sometimes I think it's more interesting to do something I haven't done before. But I'm also really, I love music and I can't help myself. But I mean, that that that takes me back to my kind of, my mounting observation and life that a lot of my friends who work in music, sustain that the passion for it is pretty, that it continues to... It is truly a devotional practice. Yeah, and I think a lot of my friends in music have maintained greater simplicity in life that, like, music's enough. You know what I mean? And that's not to be reduction say off the people that family lives and they're complicated and you have your business these things.

2:36:25But sometimes I think like that impulse to do a diversity of things to exercise different muscles express different, express yourself in totally different ways is really satisfying and sometimes but that's where you can start to go like man I'm spending a lot of plates. And then you can start having the feeling of like, am I spending any of the plates masterfully? Or am I spending any of the plates in a way that's enjoyable? Am I allowing myself to enjoy one thing at a time? To the full depth of what it has to offer? But I also think there's some point at which which you gotta get to where you're like,

2:37:17can see the ways you're different from other people. You can be inspired by people, but if you're kind of like, you gotta just get right with yourself the way you are and go, so and so's life is different from my life, whatever, we're different, we're all taking it on in different ways. We have to play our own hands. Yeah, it's a player on hands. I'll ask this as it relates to theater because it'll be easier to think about because you do it the show night after night. Do you feel like when you're doing something every day, are you always either getting better or worse or does it ever plateau? I don't know if I'd say better or worse.

2:38:03Changing? Changing for sure.

2:38:09More than you'd think this can apply in movies too, but I think that I had to get my head around that is, I think, pulled from, like music as an analogy, is that,

2:38:26you wanna believe that you're gonna be able to find emotional connection every time. And when there's an audience involved, You have a different relationship. You feel the people have come to see you make that connection, right? You can be doing a play. You can even be doing a film and you can be on take 24 and going, I don't have it. I don't feel it. I'm hitting the notes, but I don't feel it. In a funny way, that's when an actor is a musician in the sense that like you're playing your body is the instrument, your voice is the instrument, your emotional, you're asking this role is a thing. You have to trust that you've done the work and that you are hitting the notes, that it can connect for people.

2:39:23Because you've done the work, it is connecting that you can't possibly feel it to the depth of your soul every night, whether you're an actor in month three of a really great play, that some nights you weep within the moment that you've done many, many, many times because it hits you. You've got it and you're right there inside it, accessing it. Your emotion is even authentic and they're feeling it too. But then on the night that you're playing the score and your head's a little over here, it's still, it's okay. You know, it's not a cause for panic and it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean it wasn't good, it doesn't mean you didn't deliver it, it doesn't mean whatever.

2:40:13I mean our friends that we've been talking about, like I saw you know, the guys on this tour, I mean, they've been touring for fucking two years practically now. I've seen it a bunch of times. I saw them in 19, I wanna say I saw them in a bar in New Haven called Toads. Remember Toads? Yeah, I think my punk rock band played it toads once. Yeah, I think I saw, like when a mother's milk came out, when John Joined and Van and Mother's Milk came out, I saw them somewhere like that right after that, because John and I had this image, so I was like 19, he was 19, you know? And I feel like, like if you've seen people play a lot, But you can kind of towel just like, oh, he's like in the zone, like a basketball player or whatever, you can be like, oh, they look tired tonight, you know what I mean?

2:41:01Nobody says they don't like deliver in their show, like their show kills, you know? You know Charlie Parker had his head off in something else on nights when his virtuosity people were like, they were melting. You know, but you gotta, you gotta like be okay with that, I think. You just have to remember that the audience that comes to see you doesn't get to watch the show every night and doesn't get to compare your performance. No. They just see one. Yeah. And the one they see is the one they remember. And also the, the, yeah, for you, it's, it's like a little bit of Zen stroke and like this curve might not be as perfect as you did it last night.

2:41:45But for them, that's the picture. And also what you're doing is the totality of what you've been doing. It's not your perfect connection to it on a given night. And it's funny because that's a pretty unique thing to the performance arts. You know what I mean? There's not a lot of analogies that I can think of where like if you phone it in and soccer, you're going to lose. You know what I mean? like when you're trying to create magic in the live setting, you just can't do that professionally and not allow yourself to rest on the muscles you've built sometimes and and be okay, you know. And you're also you're representing yourself in this moment.

2:42:39So sometimes maybe if the performance to you is less good, it's still authentic in where you are in that moment and it's real. Well, that's really interesting too, because more than a musician and actor has a text that they got to stick with, right? For me, one of the things, it's a real nuance, but I grew up a little bit in certain plays that I did when I realized that what you just said is true. It's not even that I have to, I may not feel it, but I have to be okay with hitting the notes. It's actually a little further. It can change based on where I am. Tonight I can be within the same text.

2:43:31I can be a little colder and the plays that tonight. Yeah. It's not that I have to hit the same notes but be faking it a little or fawning it in. And it's actually, I can channel where I am. I can keep it authentic within reason, keeping... And it sounds like that also would inspire the people you're playing against. They're going to change based on your change. Everything changes. Then you're in a government. Yeah, and that's where it is like a band. But that makes it more like improvisational and more keeping it real. and it gets back to that challenge of just being available to what's actually happening.

2:44:14Actually, someone who's, it's a weird thing to say, but someone who is very committed to that is Bill Murray. I've only done Wes Anderson films with Bill and hung out with him a little in life and everything. But it's not that Bill's not super appreciated as a really great actor in addition to being Bill and being funny and everything, but he is extremely serious about his commitment to being available to what's actually happening in the work and in life. And sometimes it almost seems like he's being provocative, but I think that among people I've met kind of in my trade, whatever. He really wants to just respond to the moment.

2:45:10And I've seen him in life in some ways that were a little unnerving, in some ways that were really funny, some ways that were kind of heartwarming. I've seen him kind of not be happy when he sees a disconnect and he'll stick a fork in. make it real. Yeah go you know kind of the snapping of the fingers in the work it's really cool. So Bill is in the moment. Anyone else you can think of that has that kind of in the moment feeling? Yeah I mean you realize people come at things in just very different ways even within what looks like the same thing. I'm certain musicians are the same you know it's like there's people who who are highly improvisational and fluid and some who, for whom preparation and like really conscientious sculpting and crafting and sticking to that is matters more to them or is that their mojo, you know.

2:46:16Who do you say you're more in the second school? If he depends on the gear I'm in, And if I'm just acting in something, it's a more pleasant experience to have wide latitude to discover and flow and everything. But I think actors have to be, in the best scenarios, you are there in service. You can be a primary collaborator in creating a thing. The chemistry of every single thing is different. Just like it is, I keep saying music, but sometimes you got one person who's really the band. You know, they write the songs and the things and there's people who are really, but they're the leader and sometimes it's totally different.

2:47:03It's like, it's the right way. Every single film, every single project is a different chemistry of relationship and collaboration. collaboration, but I think as an actor, you have to be prepared and enthusiastic to step into and service the vision that a director has, the frequency that they're trying to establish. And even it sounds like the style. If you're going to make a movie with Wes Anderson and you try to come to it in the same gear that you're in. It's just not going to work. Like you must know, love, appreciate, and be conversant with Wes's language, not just the style of the sleeping apps.

2:47:53You're there to service, you're there to play a role in his company. And what a pleasure, you know, what a delight. It's a thing. I think when I'm directing, I would like to do something that allows for more improvisation and fluidity and discovery as a storyteller, as a director, the things I've done, it's really weird, not really weird, but when you shoot in New York, like shooting my little Brooklyn, I had so much less time than I should, I don't say should, You worked what you got, but there was no way to make a big period, 1950s film, in modern New York City, in the schedule that I had without a nearly maniacal amount of preparation.

2:48:55The fun was that I was able to go to almost exclusively New York actors that I've worked with and know, and we're all from my orbit and say, I need everybody here like a play. We can rehearse. I need everybody to be tight, to be ready. I'm not gonna be able to do a lot. We're gonna have to move pretty quick. And I only involved people that I thought would deliver. And happily, you know, who was in there. Yeah. They were, they're all Arabian horses, all thoroughbreds, theater trained, theater experienced, able to come, and know that they're helping me by bringing the goods ready and fast, you know?

2:49:37And they did, and it was great. Did it mean that with some of my favorite actors, I was able to play? No, I wasn't. I understood. But you got to work in the... You got to play with the... Like you said, the cards you're given, you know what I mean? How different would your performance be depending on the person in your performing against. I mean, I guess it can be really, yeah, I mean, it can be hugely affected. Have you ever done a play where the character that you play against changed, like the person playing the character changed over the course of the play? No, I haven't, I haven't ever had that.

2:50:21I'm curious to how different that would be. Oh, that would be. I mean, strange, because you've been with a real person. Like if the person is a more energetic or talks faster, if I could be impacted. I just saw, you know who Ossie Davis was? Great writer and actor and director. I did, I did a film and got to be friendly with Leslie Odom who, you know, he played Aaron Burr in Hamilton. and he brilliant singer, a brilliant actor. And he's got this revival up in New York right now of this play, Otsi Davis wrote in the 60s. And I was completely blown away by it. It made me, I don't know if I was in a headspace of going, got New York theater, how antiquated.

2:51:14I kind of walked in, maybe I just was in this mood of like, had been back in New York in a while, I was like, you know, God, like, what is theater? Like, what is this? Like, how many people is this for? Is this work anymore? Does it, you know, I had a lot of that going on in my head. And I walked out of there going, that's why theater exists. Like, that is why it exists. The best. Because it couldn't have been anything else. And it was so heightened and so delightful and satirical and great. But I also really, Leslie and this actress, Karayung, they were performing in a gear. I don't even know how to describe it.

2:52:10It was so boldly operatic, comedic, almost like, comedia del arte. It was like something you would expect, like, mullierre or, you know, like those great John Patrick Shanley plays, they were big and operatic. And she was doing things physically that I was sitting there, as an actor, I was sitting there and going,

2:52:38What would bring you to that choice? I was gobsmacked. I was like, I can't even wrap my head around where you got the indication that that's where you should go because it was so whacked. And it, but it worked. Unbelievable. Wow. Unbelievable. I didn't even know how to describe it. I was just like afterwards, I was literally doing, you know, the we're not worthy kind of like thing to them both because it was so theatrical, it was the definition of like like real theatrical art like it was it was it was floating way up above reality. You know, it wasn't behavioral naturalism, it wasn't moving inside, it was like It was just this totally elevated thing and it's great.

2:53:36It sounds great. Yeah, it's funny in the way that like when a lot of the best things in any form it feels to me are things that shouldn't work. And it's like the force of talent is hauling it down. I felt that way about Hamilton honestly. I'm not a musical theater, aficionado, or a huge fan. You know, I don't say I'm not a fan, but it hasn't generally been my bag, you know. I saw that a couple of times, and I actually got emotional a few times watching it. I got emotional over the audacity of the whole thing. I imagined him walking around in the Bronx with his headphones on and his pad, right?

2:54:22having the balls and the conviction that he could write something of that magnitude. Yeah, I had that feeling about Hamilton and I had that feeling about Book of Mormon. When I heard about them, they're like, that sounds like the worst idea ever. Yeah. The worst. Yeah. And then they were mind -blowing both. Yeah. I agree. I, both of those I totally agree. Like on paper. Yeah. Bad ideas. Bad idea. But there was something about the scale of the creative audacity of Hamilton actually made me cry. Like I was just so blown away at the size of the swing. And also just the magnitude of it, it is like a huge double album or something.

2:55:19the scale of it is just incredible, the density of it. And it's always something like that that is what transports you like you're, did you see the movie Triangle of Sadness? That I had the Swedish filmmaker I think has made some of the best modern films. Triangle of Sadness was like, it functions like a dream. Like, if I said to you, oh my God, I had the most waxed out dream. I dreamed that my girlfriend and I were arguing about the check at dinner and who was gonna pay. And it got so heated that we were fighting in an elevator over it. And then we were on a yacht. And Woody Harrelson was the captain, but there were Russians there.

2:56:04And they made the crew swim and then there were pirates. And then we were surviving on a beach, but the toilet attendant became the queen. That's how it works. like it's it's it functions like a surreal dream and and again it's almost like knowing when you know something about making movies you're almost more impressed because you know how hard it is nothing about it's supposed to work to break out of like I saw some interview with Freddie Mercury about Bohemian or whatever you're knowing. It's just like it shouldn't work, right? There's no bridge, there's no nothing, there's these things, none of the things that are the way you do a song.

2:56:48And now we can't live without it, you know what I mean? It's just like, Those are the revolutionary works, the ones that don't fit any, they don't check any of the normal boxes. When they work, it's the most fun thing to see. Yeah, because you got shown something, you know. I don't know if you feel this way. I think the people I know in music really do have a religious relationship with music. And I think because music is not, because it's so primal, because it's vibrations, and because people get so affected by it, it's like sacrosanct. I don't think the culture even, nobody questions that we need music.

2:57:36You know, I definitely do go through things where I just sort of go. I know art has value. I know it helps people. Like I think Joseph Campbell's really right that if it's opaque, it tends to be more narcissistic if it's transparent. And a person can see through it and say, oh, that's really about me. That's when it's mythological, you know. And I do agree with that. Like, it makes people feel not alone, or it makes people perceive the universe differently and that there's some value in that. But I definitely will go through some things where, sometimes I'm thinking like, the productization and commodification of content will sometimes, like, my cynicism, It's like, it's like an opposing force.

2:58:30It is like an opposing force. And I love films, but I literally, like I do get to a place sometimes where I'm like, are we making opium? Are we just making opium and giving people like something to check out in front of for a minute, you know, a palliative against like the stress of modern life. The answer is with Birdman, no. I hope so. I hope that's right. As an example. I hope that's right. You know, I clearly are examples the other way. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing too. Many. And photography and everything. But being lucky enough to know some people who I think have done like incredibly heroic and important work that's like in direct service of other people.

2:59:24sometimes my brain goes, you've done enough of this. You know what I mean? I'll get to this place where it's just be like, or even, I know this, you won't agree, but sometimes I'm like, there are voices that are coming into the mix that need to be heard, like literally more than mine. Like I just go, I've done this enough. Like I've done this enough. It's room for everybody. I know. I know. I know. It's true. It's not like a... It's not zero -sum game. No, it's not a zero -sum game. But I have my ebbs and flows to just like... What does the world actually need? You know what I mean?

3:00:17But I... It's probably overthinking it, you know? Yeah, your part isn't what the world needs. It's what's your diary entry? Yeah, yeah, it's what's your part? That's all Yeah, I guess the The other thing is it's Like we know people who work in tack and things like that too, right? Everybody goes to think what you think you're like you think you're painting the future or something, you know and like we're definitely The truth is that not even the long -term future, the immediate future is so unknown and so unpredictable. You can say, I engage with what I think is like, I think that the issue of what we're doing to the environment of our planet is important, because it is going to affect people and intrinsically, I think it's important.

3:01:20When you take a breath and you step back and you just realize like, you can throw yourself against ideas of how you can contribute and what needs to be done and everything. And you have to acknowledge that like in six months something can happen that makes everything move. You know what I mean? and then when you acknowledge how small your life is within this massive uncertainty about what are going to be the emergent phenomenon that actually define what things look like in the future. You come back to the place of saying, well, in that case, hopefully it's not selfish to say, Then I ought to think about just the existential quality of the way I'm spending my time, which gets back to like being present, being available, allowing yourself simple pleasures of just existing.

3:02:23And in any day that you've got the blessing that you're healthy, you're not being bombed, you know, you're like don't squander it, you know? Do you feel like there's a spiritual dimension to your work? At times I have, and I guess when I'd say spiritual, I don't necessarily mean divine, but I think that there's actual gift of service. If you're trying to connect people to each other, like there's that thing we were saying about it when you're talking about empathy. If the work's got empathy, and you know that through it, you're reaching out to other people to say, we're in this together, and you can see yourself in this, we're talking to each other, then yeah, it, it, it, and it's really interesting because people, people can be absolutely ridiculous and disconnected in the way they come up to you because they know you, but when people come up, kids, or when anybody comes up who's present and isn't going like I'm so excited because you're I know you or something.

3:03:37When people are coming up with presence and connection and saying, man, that connected for me. How can you be in any way cynical about that? Greatest feeling in the world. You cannot be cynical about people affirming back to you that they felt seen, they connected, did they felt open, you know, it's the best. Best. Then you go, okay, this is as worthy as anything else. Yeah. I mean, when we were working on Fight Club, it's very reverent. We were laughing our asses off. It was very, there's no question in my mind that sitting in the room was the awareness that this is for us and our friends. our parents will not understand this.

3:04:27They won't, they probably won't like it. They won't relate to it. They won't get the love of it. This is ours. And we better go for it. To best feeling. We better go for it. Because we've got in our hands the vehicle to remember what it felt like to be in a certain place at a certain time for a certain group of people. And that was an interesting experience too, because it was one of my first experiences of feeling that sensation that strongly. And then the commodification, it didn't go well at all. You know what I mean? That movie was like a flop in the beginning. And Fincher was, I think, felt very bruised.

3:05:10And I remember we showed it in the Venice Film Festival. and Brad came up to me right before we walked into the big red carpet stupidity and all that stuff. He said, how do you think this is going to go? And I said, I don't think this is going to go well. And he said, he said, me neither. Let's get high. And he, of course, because he came in on a private plane, he had like a joint, like the size of a large cucumber. And he's a podhead. I wasn't, we smoked this joint, walk into the Venice thing. I felt like someone was carrying me by my ears three feet off the ground the whole time But it was great because we I sat he and I watched it My my recollection is that we saw score sazy walk out Which was also kind of like perfect like you know, it's like and then it was booed.

3:06:00Yeah, right? It got booed right and it was there were booze and We were in the last row in the back and Brad turned and looked at me and goes that's the best movie we were ever gonna be in. And I said, me too. And we were like, hug each other. Wow, how cool is that? Yeah, it was like, we were tear -yied. That's real. And he said that's the best one we were ever gonna be in. And I, while people were booing. Yeah. And it was funny, because it wasn't a joke. Now, I wanna be careful. Maybe it's maybe I was stoned and I don't, I think my recollection is the Scorsese walked out of it, because I also think I remember that hitting fincher in a way, but this is all a little hazy to be honest or very hazy.

3:06:47But there's, but I hope in a weird way that I am remembering that right, because fincher had a thing on the office wall when we were rehearsing, and it said like on the path to enlightenment, you have to kill God, kill your parents, and then kill your teacher, right? And I remember thinking like, If Scorsese walked out, we did it. Yeah, amazing. Like we killed our teacher, you know, like fucking critics. But if we feel good even if our hero walked out, then we're in good place. That's an incredible story. Thank you for telling me that story. I love that. Yeah, that was funny. And then it, you know, then, but then it was to your point.

3:07:26It's like, it finds its way. Yeah. It is what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you can't, you know. And in a weird way, like with that one, what could be more true to everything it's trying to say for it not to do well? Yes. And then be something you'd never trade. Like you'd never trade what that one, how that one went into everyone in our friends that we made for it, you'd never trade it for, you wouldn't trade it for a billion dollars. It'd be the sign of defeat if it was. But to know it in the moment, when while the people are booing, to hug each other and know this is great, that's really bold, I love it.

3:08:16Yeah, there's something to it where you just like, you know, like when you're showing, they should have never shown that movie in Italy with some titles. It's like that should, you know, they should have showed that. I don't even know what. It should have been like, it should have been in a college auditorium, you know, with free tickets for everybody. Like, no pretension, no, nothing. Do you miss life in the, like the cities of your youth? Not in the least. You don't. Do you think you're zero? I think I know that about you, but do you think you knew when do you think you realized that you were ready for a big fundamental shift of scene from the energy that catapulted you into the kind of work you wanted to do?

3:09:13You didn't take a break from work, but when did you just go? I got to do this a different way. Yeah, I never knew until it happened. It's like I came to California to work on a project. I hated California. I loved New York. Came to California to work on a project. We was here for like nine months and ended up buying a house because I was tired of staying in a hotel and I thought, well, when I come from New York, I'll have a house to stay in and I just ended up never going back. And grew to love it. And then the next time I went back to New York, I was, remember feeling like I can't remember what it was that was keeping me here.

3:09:50I didn't know. And the same thing happened when I moved from in town to Malibu. At first when I got a house in Malibu, I thought, oh, that's really far away. And then when I moved here, it's like far away from what? You know, like nothing I wanted go through is anywhere but here. I know. I had a cell because as a kneescoaster, Baltimore and the New York, and like I had a total prejudice against LA in particular. And I would come out here and work and get out of here as fast as I could. And I totally missed the whole trick. I thought LA was like West Hollywood. And everything that's truly great about the state is like the space and the light and the ocean and the mountains and the snow right next to each other.

3:10:36Yeah, yeah, and the desert and, and, and it, but it embarrassingly it took a while for me to like perceive what was, you know, get out of the matrix in a way and perceive. No, because you were indoctrinated. Yeah. We were. I was in New York, it's not about being like a New York theater actor and doing thing and, and there was always that line like, um, if it's like, I think it was a Neil Simon thing, someone said to him like why don't you, you know they're making all your plays in the movies, why don't you come to LA, you know it's like when the weather's just so much better and everything and supposedly he said yeah when it's 30 below in New York it's 76 in LA and when it's 110 in New York it's 76 .8 but there's a million interesting people in New York and 70 in LA.

3:11:27Yeah, that's pretty good. And you know, it's just not true. No, it is. What it is is good and bad people everywhere. Yeah. And you just got to find your people. It was, yeah, I think that's right. For me, it was partly because coming out here, working in the movies, and because LA, it's very diverse, but it feels like an industry town. If you're in the industry, it is an industry town. I think it is. And in a way, it's seeking to unfold you within its hierarchies. Yeah. It wants to define you within its hierarchies, and if you're resistant to that, then you just wanna get the fuck outta here.

3:12:34ディ