Tim Robbins doesn’t want to be an expert

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:14It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. Yes, Tim Robbins is an Academy Award winning actor and an Oscar nominated director, but he's still working. It's the great thing. It's always great to see him. It's been way too long. He's currently starring in the Apple TV series Silo, which I have to say, I started reading those books just before the pandemic. There's nothing more chilling than reading those books before the pandemic starts. And your character, I have to say, he reminds me of so many guys you play who trade in information. I find myself thinking about Catch a Fire or Antitrust or City of Ember, these guys who love information.

0:49Was that one of the things that attracted you to playing, Harley? Yeah, absolutely. It's that curious thing that happens with people in power when they find rationalizations for lying, for example. you know the uh the the big life of the greater good uh you know how many times in our lifetimes have we had to deal with the ramifications of people in power that felt that they didn't need to share information or had to suppress information or worse yet attack people that were getting over the target banishing them deplatforming them you know it's a regular uh a regular occurrence in human nature and in the essence of power.

1:36And so I was really curious about what is it to play someone that clearly knows that he's deceiving people, but he's doing it from a completely virtuous place. He's trying to save 10 ,000 lives. So, you know, the rationalizations, justifications that people put in their heads, we have to do this because only 10 people will die as opposed to 1 ,000. Because we should say the show is set in a post-apocalyptic future that actually deals with bombing in Iran. It couldn't be more propitious. Yes, and when I first received the scripts, by the way, to see a story that they were about to do about a locked-down society whose citizens had to behave in a certain way or they would be banished from society, who introduced drugs into the society to control them.

2:29Being basically sort of put down by technology. Right. And birth, you had to pass certain tests in order to procreate. All these weird, weird parallels. And I'm sitting in my little lockdown place and I'm like, holy s***, they're going to make this. And I get to be part of it. It was just one of those beautiful moments of like, they're doing something metaphorically with this that is about right now. they are speaking to this moment with this futuristic drama first of all in the watching of this it's sort of like the show is kind of this intersection of Blade Runner and like an Alan Pakula paranoid thriller of the 70s mystery yeah what's happening but that level of paranoia is really ratcheted up in this third season where you really not now you can actually trust people including your character weird right Yeah, who has actually had to die to be reborn as this person who, first of all, he doesn't whisper anymore.

3:28He tries to speak. He actually wants to be heard in a way he didn't want to be heard in the previous seasons. I mean, what an amazing gift to be given as an actor. The character that you're playing in season three undergoes a transformation. A physical transformation, mental, spiritual, moral. Everything he believed in. Turns out to be a fraud. His entire worldview is shattered at the end of season two. He realizes he's been lied to about everything. And so where everyone in the silo thinks he's dead, he is silently seething and ready to do whatever he can do to help the people that he used to oppress.

4:18It's interesting, too, because he's now, like, looking at people in the way he— like, usually—he almost, like, appeared as, like, a shadow. He'd look at people standing over somebody, talking behind them. They'd look at him. But now he wants people to see him because— and I want to ask you about the way you're playing him now because he wants to be heard. These initial episodes, he's fighting to get his voice back because he kind of had this— when this thing happened to him, he had this sort of— Terrible burn. We can hear the rasp of his voice, but he's also trying to make himself louder. he's become, I don't want to say a preacher, but he needs to be heard in the way that he hadn't before.

4:53And I was really impressed with the way you were doing that with him. Interestingly, you have to deplete everything. Like when you, you do a little research about burn victims and it's just a tremendous injury because it's everywhere and the pain is constant. And so every time the camera was rolling, I had to, had to get to that state of constant pain. And when you're battling through that, you have to have a purpose. You have to have a reason to stay alive. Because if you succumb to the pain and the injury, you can easily die. So it's like someone in the midst of a constant battle to stay alive.

5:34And the reason he's battling is because he's pissed about what happened. And he wants to find a way to make amends with all the people he's hurt. I think he also wants to find a way to forgive himself. I mean, that's what he wants. No, no, I'm here. Pay attention to me. Look at me now. I want to look at you. You look at me. I need to be seen to have this kind of expiation. It feels really Catholic to me in an interesting way. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it is. It's the idea of forgiveness. And I don't think, though, that he feels that he needs to be forgiven. I think he's already forgiven himself.

6:08And that's the important thing is that if you're going to act out on this thing, if you're going to find a way to make things right, you can't keep beating yourself up. You have to say, okay, I was wrong. I'm going to change. You know, I love how this script kind of reflects my own journey over the past five years. I've realized that one of the most liberating things in life is to be able to get to my age and say, you know what, I might not know. I might not have known. I could have been wrong. I'm now in a constant state of learning. I think the problem with most of our societies throughout the world is that we're overrun by experts that are giving us bad advice.

6:55I've come to understand that just within my own field, the people that I've been drawn towards have been the people that are quite competent, quite talented, but never presumed to be experts. They're still learning. Robert Altman, when I was in pre-production with him on The Player, people from different departments would come in and they'd ask, Bob, what do you want about this? What do you think about this? And Bob's answer always was, I don't know. What do you think? And after they would leave the office, I would ask, Bob, you know, you did know, right? You do know what you want. He said, yeah, I do.

7:32I have an idea of it, but why would I ever cheat myself of a better idea? And so it's that humility in the face of a task. You have expertise at it, but to come from the point of view of being an expert, you will learn absolutely nothing. You will just be talking to people, at people. You will not be discovering, because if you're an expert, you know everything. So I've come to realize that one of the most dangerous things on earth is the virtuous expert, the one that comes with morality on their side. Those people have caused more conflict and strife in the world than anyone else. Well, it's the treatment.

8:16My guest who shows it's always time to learn is our old friend Tim Robbins, who's starring. Well, what a joy it is to learn, too. By the way, we should say he's starring in the show on Apple TV, now in its third season. And all these things you're saying are things that you've kind of been carrying around with you since I've known you. But it's like you're owning them in the ways you hadn't before. Yeah. I'm at a place where I saw a great deal of the people that I came up with go off in different directions. And rather than judge it, I just have to reassess me. Right? I'm not going to say I'm right or they're wrong.

8:51That's ridiculous. I'm just taking a different road. I'm taking a different path. And I believe that that path is one that is going to lead to more freshness of discovery and more living in the moment. I became very interested in this book called The Nature of Things by Lucretius, written in 350 BC. It's basically this long-form poem about Epicureanism, which was a belief system that was a philosophy or a religion of that time, which was of course, you know, eliminated by the Alexandria fires and all the different censorship that went on with the early Catholic Church. But the great thing about Epicureanism is that it basically is saying that the whole purpose of life is to live in the miracle of life and to not take anything for granted and that what you're seeing every day is a beautiful accident that's happening only right now and it's a miracle in front of your eyes.

9:48We're going to talk a break and talk to my guest who's gone from being an existentialist to a philosopher. The actor Tim Robbins, his newest project for Apple TV is Silo. It's the treatment. There's more to come. Stay with us.

10:22Rufus Sewell, supporting actress Alison Janney, and guest actor Bradley Whitford, with Emmy-nominated writing from Deborah Kahn. Decider calls The Diplomat a masterclass in storytelling. It's a treatment. Our old friend Tim Robbins is back. And he's here to talk about a number of things, as he always does, but the primary among them is the show Silo on Apple TV. More than any other season, this has been a season about nobody knowing where to turn. Everybody looking over their shoulder. Also memory. Like, what is memory? And that's what's beautiful about this season is this parallel story is between the origin story set around now and the silo 300 years from now.

11:02But they're both talking about memory and how memory can be controlled. And this is something we know from other dystopian novels. You know, 1984, the whole elimination of memory or animal form. Yeah. And why was that such a theme from all science fiction starting around the turn of the century? It almost makes you think there was a recent thing that happened in history that people's memories were eliminated. One of the things I find when I start thinking about those science fiction novels, too, they're also about the way information is disseminated. Whenever there's a new technology, there's new control of the information.

11:41I mean, that new society growing an animal farm, suddenly information can be controlled in the way that it's disseminated. Certainly in 1984, it's about that, and also sort of like making information tribal. And I think it's as much about the way – it's about the fear of the way information is controlled. and almost goes back to the Gutenberg inventing the printing press because suddenly you could have mass lies being told. Yes. I just find this show to be as much about that too. That's why when artists, he's white-knuckling this control because this is a thing that he can own. Yeah. And then when he's freed from that, he says, well, it's more important to talk because that's where we're going to really get information out because we can trust each other when we're talking.

12:22We can't trust the way the information comes to us with technology. Right, but here's the thing. That's an oral history. So there's theories about this. Like if something really terrible happened that you wanted to eliminate from people's memory, it would probably take two or three generations to do that. The first generation was there. The second generation was told about it. The third generation was told about it by someone that was told about it, right? Around about that third generation, if you are on the way to eliminating a disturbing reality that is in our past, what do you do with that fourth generation that still insists that it happened?

13:02You label them crazy. And then it becomes inconvenient to carry on the truth. Oh, my gosh. You're saying that I can't not think about what Eisenhower did in World War II, where he called Patton. He's called these generals that you have to come see this, what happened in these camps. I want witnesses to this, get people with cameras, shoot this, because if we don't do this, it will be denied because it's too horrible a truth. And people won't believe it. I need people to come and look at this. It needs to be captured and disseminated to the world. I was lucky enough to meet Václav Havel when he was still alive.

13:36Oh, shoot. And we had this conversation at dinner, and he said his biggest fear, this was about three years before he died, his biggest fear was that the young people of this new generation that never lived under Soviet oppression would choose Soviet oppression as a way to solve problems. this idea that if unless you lived in communism and and really figured out how to survive in that you would have no fear of it coming around the corner because it comes with all these hey you know you free stuff you know it's like there's some you know your food is short you don't have to worry i've had this kind of like great experience over the past five years uh touring around with my play Topsy Turvy, and we played it in Eastern Europe.

14:31And so this is a play I wrote about lockdown. And in the discussions after the play, there were some really vibrant talks. And one of the things that we were talking about in Romania was this idea that, you know, I said, how do you, how'd you guys deal with being locked down? And they said, you know, we lived under the Soviet Union for so many years that we know how to look like we're complying when we're not complying. We were experts at it. So I was like, okay. I said, what else reminds you of the Soviet Union? And they said, cancel culture. I said, why? They said, well, for years, we knew that the Soviet Union had files on us and anything we might've done in our past, they had.

15:23But as long as we were good party members and we didn't rock the boat, nothing would happen. But the second you started asking questions, all of a sudden that affair that you had with your secretary 35 years ago is going to come to light. They're going to ruin your life. They're going to ruin your career, your reputation, and your family. And they will make a big deal about it and show everyone else this is what happens when you act in a certain way. And they said that for them, that's what cancel culture feels like. It's like this dormant information that's ready to smack you in the head. And you better not step out of line or we will ruin you.

16:02We've been talking about controlling information with our old friend Tim Robbins. He's starring in Silo on Apple TV as The Treatment. So when we're talking about controlling information, you would sort of let something slip to me just before we got started, which is to say you're making your archive available now. You must have tons of material stored up from the plays and your recordings and the movies you've done. And I mean, I'd like to hear about your directing movies. Everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. I, you know, I am a pack rat, so I saved everything. And so I've got hundreds and hundreds of pictures from sets, you know, that I've got little films I made.

16:42I have a film, like a 15 minute film I made on the set of Howard the Duck when I was like going nuts from that. but it's all this all this kind of stuff that was in boxes and i about a year ago i started doing an archive and i realized this there's some fun stuff in here and there's also stuff that i really want people to know about you know uh plays that i've done scripts that i've written also uh my dad and my brother are both musicians so i'm doing this thing when you come on to the website it'll be robin's radio will be streaming all 24 7 so every month there'll be a new album from each of us so that someone's music is playing at all times so um it's a way to to open it up but it's also it's not gonna be an unlimited archive every month there'll be a different selection okay and that's uh tim robbins.com and comes on uh september 1st you must have some incredible diaries of the making of Cradle of Rock.

17:41Oh, man. It's also about when information is in control. I mean, there's something, I think of you as a storyteller being the way, most fascinating by the way, information gets out. Yes. And it kind of sort of tries a paranoia you can create over here. Meanwhile, some people just trying to get through the day, hoping the right thing happens. I'm still thinking about it and watching Silo. But it's also in just how it perfectly reflects in my own life and how I'm perceived, right? So, the way that that the media or whatever that is responds to what you say or what you have done and how it portrays you winds up in people thinking from that receiving of that information or narrative from the media makes you think you're a certain kind of person that makes them think that you are a certain kind of person that was one of the things that i've been dealing with all the past 10 years like, that's not who I am.

18:36And I want to just create a direct line to who I am. Listen, if you do something controversial that's embarrassing for people in power, they will embarrass you. They will try to hurt you in some way. The good news is it's not gulags and getting on trains in the middle of the night and putting you a thousand miles away from everybody. But there are ways and mechanisms to marginalize and make people think of you in a certain way, like you're crazy, or you're a crazy liberal or a crazy conservative, whatever the epithets they put on you are so far away from what the actual truth is that part of me wants to create a new source of information.

19:18That's all driven by two years ago, I started writing a memoir. And it's taken me this long because I really want to get it right. And I've got people interested in it, but I don't even want to give it to them yet. I want to almost finish it before I present it because it's coming from a very, um, naked point of view. It's, it's like, how can I be completely honest? Uh, and still, I don't, I'm certainly not going to be spiteful or mean to anybody. I just want to be honest about what it is to be in this business and where the fallacies are and where the joy is and where this frustration is. And it's rarely what people think.

20:00It's all these different intricacies and games that go on and different perceptions that people have. In other words, I'm not complaining. I'm actually celebrating. I think it's pretty miraculous that I've had the career I've had. I've been so lucky, so blessed. And part of it is getting past the challenges, you know? And that's part of what the book is about is like, I feel like I've been going a thousand miles an hour for the last 40 years and haven't had time to slow down and say, hey, wait, let's look at this. So this is my kind of period of time where I'm just reflecting, but also hoping that whatever I write will help others, you know, in their journeys in this business.

20:47My guest who has truly become an Epicurean in the best sense of the word is our old friend, Tim Robbins, who's been away from the show for way too long. How far away is the book from being finished right now. I'd say about a year. Well, there's an invitation now to come back. I would love to see it and read it, and always happy to see you. His new show on Apple TV, where he plays Bernard, the head of IT, no longer his silo in the silo. Tim, it's always great talking to you. Thanks, Alistair. It's been great to be back. I'm on the top, most found, I've built a tree now, like he's in their minds, the most...

21:21Tim Robbins is a writer and director who has led actors to Oscar-winning performances and has won an Oscar himself as an actor for his role in Mystic River. His theater, The Actors Gang, is still thriving in Gulf of City, and his newest project as actor is his role in the paranoid science-fantasy series Silo, now in its third season on Apple TV. At the archive, kcrw.com slash thetreatment, you'll find previous interviews with such ambitious talents as Tim Robbins. At KCRW.com slash the treat, you'll find our weekly series where some of the most creative minds relive the moments of inspiration in their lives.

22:09The newest treat comes this week from actor and writer Julia Fox, a survivor who looks back at a work about enduring addiction. The show is produced and edited by Rebecca Mooney, and mixed by Katie Gilchrist. Two cooler days, everyone. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's The Treatment.