Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
My third AICN Legends piece is the first to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. I can't explain why, but there's always something a little extra special about interviewing an Oscar winner (even thought I don't think the subject even comes up in this conversation). And let's face it, were it not for some of the films that starred Richard Dreyfuss over the years there are those of us that might not be doing what we're doing on this site and others like it. You could begin with JAWS and end with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, and those alone would justify including Dreyfuss in this series. But beginning with a somewhat memorable, uncredited appearance in THE GRADUATE and continuing on through such works as AMERICAN GRAFFITI, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ, THE GOODBYE GIRL (the film for which he won the Oscar), WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?, DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS, STAND BY ME, TIN MEN, STAKEOUT, POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, WHAT ABOUT BOB?, THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, MR. HOLLAND'S OPUS (he earned another Oscar nomination for this film), the television remake of FAIL SAFE (in which he played the President), Showtime's THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT (in which he played Alexander Haig), POSEIDON, and W. (in which he played Vice President Dick Cheney), Richard Dreyfuss has given us some of filmdom's greatest and most varied performances.
Dreyfuss came up in the film world around the same time as Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro, but for some reason seemed far more fun and accessible than those actors, and maybe as a result never quite got the acclaim by the critical world that he should have. Perhaps he was penalized for making it look easy. But fans knew how good he was and kept turning up to his films, making him one of the most successful and recognized actors of several decades in a row.
Dreyfuss has always been unapologetically political and maintains the life of a ferocious activist, but in recent years he has developed a plan he hopes will get introduced into the public school system that will teach children exactly how the political system works, in the hopes that a better understanding of civics and government will result in a more informed opinion come election time. I'll let him explain it more, but it's one of the reasons he was in Chicago a few weeks ago, so I warn you, he gets pretty vocal about the previous administration. Save your bile for somewhere else, because you've been warned. Dreyfuss maintains that, as far as acting goes, he's more or less retired, but I'm hearing good things about his role opposite Edward Norton in LEAVES OF GRASS, which just premiered in Toronto and was written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson. A lot of words come to mind when I think of my time with Dreyfuss. He's ornery, articulate, intelligent to the point of being intimidating, and yet completely cool and fun just to be in the room with. There's never a doubt who is in charge when he steps into the room where we did out interview carrying a plate of steak, searching for a bottle of soda to go along with it.
Capone: Do you want me to wait until you are done?
Richard Dreyfuss: No no.
Capone: That looks too good to let get cold.
RD: So go ahead and knock yourself out.
Capone: I’ll start with an easy one, while you are getting ready. The event this weekend [a suburban theater was screening four of Dreyfuss' films, after which he did Q&As, giving him the opportunity to plug his "Dreyfuss Initiative" for public schools], do you do a lot of things like this, getting to meet the fans and coming to screenings of your films?
RD: No. I have never done… Well I guess I have had a tribute. I must have had a tribute, but I’m doing this because I have a non-profit initiative group to bring civics back.
Capone: I’ve heard about this, yes. What are you anticipating? What are you dreading?
RD: Well if they had limited it to the films of the '70s, I probably would have said “No.” But I asked them not to do that, and they have added films from the eighties and nineties and that makes it more palatable.
Capone: The comedy choices are interesting, because there is definitely that period in the late '80s and early '90s, where you were doing these wonderful "serious comedies." They weren’t about jokes and they weren’t about gags, but they had these great deeper meanings and they were also incredibly funny. If they had thrown TIN MEN in there, it would have been the perfect mix.
RD: Do you know the story behind ONCE AROUND?
Capone: No.
RD: ONCE AROUND was produced by… What’s his name? His father just died.
Capone: Griffin Dunne?
RD: Yes. Anyways, a PA walked up to him on the set and said “Would you read this?” And the next day, he said to her “I’m going to make this my next film,” and it was a true story about this guy that her sister had married and everyone in the family had hated him, and she became an intensely popular screenwriter and now teaches as UCLA I think and it was one of those Hollywood stories. She just walked up and said, “Would you mind reading that?”
Capone: Have you seen that piece, I think it was in the Village Voice from the screenwriter of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE [Josh Olson] called "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script." It's great. His basic premise is, I won't read your screenplay; it's nothing personal; I'm just not interested.
RD: [laughs] A friend of mine teaches screenwriting at Harvard and every once in a while I have taken over his class and I always ask, “How many people here want to be screenwriters?” And a few hands go up. “How many people here want to be directors?” More hands go up. I say, “Those of you who want to be screenwriters have the ambition to be fourth, so you’ve got to rethink that.” “There are at least four people on top of you who can shit all over your work.”
Capone: That’s exactly right! You're doing Q&As after the movies, too, is that right?
RD: I will be doing it one way or another.
Capone: I’m just kind of curious. The times when you've meet with fans, what films are they bringing up that you are kind of surprised sometimes that they even remember? There are obviously several that they could bring up that would be more obvious, but are there some that you go “Wow, I can’t believe that people are actually bringing this up and talking about.”
RD: I’m not really surprised, but if someone brings up like LET IT RIDE, I immediately know they are a degenerate gambler.
[Both Laugh]
RD: No one brings up LET IT RIDE, unless they are deeply in debt. No, there aren’t any real surprises. There would be if they brought up certain films… I would have a heart attack and die. "Why would you do that?" I was always proud of the list of the body of work and I think there were maybe three or four films I didn’t like, and the rest I liked.
Capone: That’s a pretty good ratio.
RD: It’s the best ratio I’m working with!
Capone: POSEIDON seemed to mark a moment where began this modest return to acting, but even before then, it seems like a lot of what you have been playing lately have been politicians or people involved in the political process. Obviously you are no stranger to politics…
RD: It’s more happenstance.
Capone: Is it really, or is it people just saying the “Distinguished, gray…”
RD: Well that may be it. Even though I never went to college, my constituencies are the ones that went to college. So maybe as I’ve been older and grayer, it looked like I was a professor, but no, there was never anything conscious about it.
Capone: When they first told me you were coming, the first thing that flashed into my head was your Dick Cheney performance that you did for Oliver Stone. It seemed like the whole thing just came together so fast, and casting choices were just popping out on a daily basis. Do you like working that way?
RD: Oh yeah. I didn’t like working with Oliver, because Oliver is… There are two kinds of directors, the ones that believe that you end up with a more creative product through stress, anxiety, and yelling and screaming and there are others who want a relaxed atmosphere. And Oliver really is of the first bunch, so that it’s just not a pleasant experience to work with him, but at least he was approaching the subject that shall not be named, you know. He took all of the politics out of it, so it really wasn’t very courageous, but he had Cheney in it and he had Rumsfeld and all of that stuff. And we are going to watch, not the film, but we will watch those people get indicted.
Capone: You think so?
RD: Yeah.
Capone: He did take the politics out of the title character, but I wouldn’t necessarily say he took it out of every character, though.
RD: There was a character missing, let’s put it this way. And there are more ways to write a movie, not just this one, but the character that he took out, which limited the film was You and Me, the ones who were terrified of their own president. And by taking that character out, by keeping the film in the White House, it made it look like business as usual and it wasn’t, and so in later years, people are going to look at that film and they are going to go “So what’s the big deal?”
Capone: It in no way captured the mood of the nation?
RD: No. He captured the mood in the same way that "West Wing" captures that White House mood, but [Aaron] Sorkin was smart enough to bring in Republicans who were smart and who could out talk the Democrats, the liberals in the White House. Oliver didn’t do that. Four or five years from now, depending upon whose revision of history succeeds, no one will watch it, because there won’t be any reason to.
Capone: I don’t want to get into a discussion of process necessarily, but was there a key to sort of conquering Cheney for you?
RD: Every actor loves to play a villain and every actor knows that the trap of playing the villain is to wink at the audience and say, “I’m not him.” You have got to figure out a way not to do that. Every fiber in your being wants to go [whispers] “I’m not really that bad.” “I’m not Hitler.” So you’ve got to figure out a way to dispense it correctly. That’s what was fun about playing Cheney.
Capone: I've always heard that the key to playing a villain is to remember that the villain doesn’t think he’s a villain. He thinks what he’s doing is righteous, and that he’s a good guy.
RD: Well, that’s one key, except you know that there are people out there who are going to say “Does Dreyfuss believe that shit?” And you want to go “I don’t believe this.” You want to reassure them that you are a hero.
Capone: I think anyone who knows anything about you would never in a million years think that you were believing Chaney's shit. But let me go back a little, since we are talking a little bit about the films that are playing this weekend. Obviously by the time you got involved with JAWS, you were an established actor. Was stepping into that scenario, were you aware that something was different from what you had done before or was it just another job initially?
RD: Well there were three films that happened on top of each other and by the time the three films were over, my life was different. And they happened really one after the other after the other, and there was no pause, so for me when I look back it’s about 18 months of three films that made me famous. I don’t like horror movies, so I turned JAWS down twice, and it wasn’t until I saw DUDDY KRAVITZ, which I thought, “Anyone who sees this is never going to hire me.” So I called Steven Spielberg and begged for the part. AMERICAN GRAFFITI opened first, and I was in Canada; and DUDDY opened when we were shooting JAWS and then JAWS. By the time JAWS had opened, it was a different world for me.
Capone: I don’t even know if you are aware of this, but there is a new film festival in town starting tomorrow that is playing the documentary THE SHARK IS STILL WORKING that you did an interview for them.
RD: Oh sure. Peter [Benchley, author of the novel JAWS] died of a broken heart. He was taken totally by surprise by the paranoia that was ignited by the film, and he spent the last 10 years of his life trying to make up for it, and that film was one of them.
Capone: Some writers might be proud that they have had that effect on people.
RD: We kill a million sharks a year. Sharks kill four people a year. We are literally endangering the ecological balance of the ocean and he had no intention of doing that. He was miserable. But how can you not be afraid of sharks? “That’s crazy.” There were three hundred species and two hundred and ninety eight bite you.
Capone: When the Discovery Channel does Shark Week every year, it just reinforces the paranoia. During that time you are talking about with the rapid succession of acclaimed work, did you actually have an opportunity to enjoy you success, or was working the enjoyment?
RD: I loved it. I had a ball. I was the happiest unemployed actor and the happiest employed actor you ever met, because I was doing something I loved. I was getting praised. I was getting rich, and at the beginning to have people in, you know, Rwanda know whom you are is a heady experience. After a while it becomes "Twilight Zone," but at the beginning it was great.
Capone: We heard so much about the chaos that was the making of JAWS, but between that and then a couple of years later with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, was there a difference in Steven’s approach? Did things seem a little more organized the second time around?
RD: There was a tribute to Steven once, and I wrote something that actually got into the program, and I was glad because it gave me the opportunity to say that I watched a boy turn into a man. JAWS was a series of hysterically funny stupid things, and one of them was that no one realized that we were the first film ever to try to shoot a movie on the ocean. That is hysterical, and you can’t imagine the difference between trying to shoot on the ocean and having a mechanical hydraulic shark in salt water with the shark on the ocean floor and shooting it in the tank. And it made for lots of funny stories. With CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, he had already been recognized as a genius, but he was a grown-up genius.
Capone: What about the way he directed?
RD: He’s one of the few directors that I have worked with that actually gets into the process of the actor and makes suggestions and knows the nuance and has an opinion. Most directors nowadays don’t. Whatever the actor does is OK with them. It’s like they forgot to take the acting class. Like the crushing of the Styrofoam cup scene, that’s Steven. There were all sorts of little things in the film that he suggested, gave to me, and told me and then he would listen if I came up with an idea. Most directors don’t listen.
Capone: Coincidentally, I’ve been watching recently the first couple of seasons of "Saturday Night Live," and Belushi’s take on you… What did you think of that?
RD: I think it was great. Right around that time Betty Davis was interviewed on the Dick Cavett show and she said, “You haven’t arrived until you have been imitated,” and so it was this great compliment. And it was funny, too.
Capone: We talked at the beginning about the work that you did with the two comedies that they are playing this weekend [WHAT ABOUT BOB? and DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS] and then TIN MEN. Were you looking for films like that at that time, or was that just the way things were being written?
RD: I didn’t want to be compartmentalized, so if I did a drama, I wanted to do a comedy. If I did a comedy, then I wanted to do a drama. Good writing is good writing, so the good comedy has tragedy and the good tragedy has comedy, so for about 15 years you knew a good script, because there were layers, and it wasn’t just sperm in your hair. [Both Laugh] Which is funny, but it’s a little simplistic. There is something un-simplistic about me. I’m an urban neurotic character, and I really couldn’t play, I don’t think I could play a simple character. Could I? I don’t know.
Capone: Around the time POSEIDON came out, you were quoted as saying the reason that you took the role was for money, and you didn’t apologize for that. Is that still the case? When something like W. shows up…
RD: I did W. for money, which means I’m a jackass, because it didn’t make any. I retired about 8-10 years ago, and the only thing you are not more aware of that is because I was broke and didn’t have the money to take the ad out in the Hollywood Reporter that said “Thanks for the 35 years”, which is what I wanted to do. It stopped being a love affair and so when I work, I work for money. I enjoy it. I love it, but whereas in 1980, if someone had told me I couldn’t act anymore, I would kill them happily. If some one told me now that I couldn’t act anymore, I would say, [snaps his fingers] “Damn.” Really, there are no exceptions. And POSEIDON kind of came out of nowhere. I had been a kind of unofficial Disney actor. I had made a lot of films for Disney, and they offered me POSEIDON and offered me my old salary, so I said “Yeah.” Then they said, “Why did you do the film?” “The salary.” I had no problem with that.
Capone: So what you have been focusing on is teaching and pulling together this idea that civics needs to be taught beginning at a very young age. How is understanding the political process going to help an elementary school student?
RD: First of all, you have to raise up devotion. You have to have people fall in love and the most famous characteristic in the U.S. now is cynicism, and you only get cynicism from one place--“Dreyfuss Theory #124” [laughs]--and that one place is a broken heart. You don’t get cynical from any other thing, and we went into the '60s with a love affair with America that was heaven high, and we left the '60s cynical. You cannot build a nation around the belief that everything is a fake. You have to find, the younger the better, people who are still open to fall in love. In a way, it’s like mid-wife-ing, you bring two lovers together, America and Americans, everyone else in the world knows that America is a miracle, and they will crawl over their dead aunts to get here, except Americans. They don’t know. They have not a clue what you are talking about.
Capone: You are not talking about patriotism.
RD: I'll call it patriotism. I make a large distinction between patriotism, because your country is south of Canada, and patriotism because there is an inherent meaning and value. America has given gifts to homosapiens, without which this world would be a very different place, and most people don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.
Capone: What form is this initiative taking? Is it strictly a curriculum, a series of books, or videos?
RD: It’s a curriculum. It’s persuading kids to persuade their parents, who will persuade the superintendents that this is what has to be taught, and it has to be taught because we are the only country in the world that is bound only by ideas. We don’t have a caste or class system, we don’t have a common religion, we have nothing except those ideas from the enlightenment, and if you don’t teach them, then we don’t have them. That’s when a Dick Cheney can operate, because all he is doing is taking advantage of our own stupidity.
Capone: This last election raised the awareness of the way the political system works, maybe more than any in my lifetime, so some people might feel like the job…
RD: …is over…
Capone: Not necessarily over, but it’s definitely begun, and younger people especially seem much more aware. What do they still need to get in your mind?
RD: First of all, people do think that once they become aware, the job is over--it’s a recipe for suicide. Second of all, it’s about the paradigm that you choose to look at the world through and what values you pass on to your children. I made a speech recently in Maine to the Bar and I said--there was a lot of horseshit involved in getting there. I missed my plane, even though it was standing there for 20 minutes and they wouldn’t open the door… It cost me a hotel room I couldn’t afford, in order to go to Bangor to make a speech that I shouldn’t have to make and I was pissed. And I said, “This speech is dedicated to the American dead. If you can about this country after your death, stick around. If, however, you really in your secret heart don’t give a hoot in hell, leave now because I have nothing to say to you. I said, “How many people here--lawyers, professors of law, judges--practice in Maine without going to law school and no one raised their hand. I said, “I rest my case.”
I said, “You know the meaning of the Bar and you know that you have to be trained to the arcane rituals of the courtroom, and yet you can’t transfer that sensibility to citizenship and citizenship is not voting. It is not a sporadic effortless thing. We are the only system of government ever that requires to some extent the involvement of an educated civic body, and if you don’t educate that civics body, you are not bound. And watch, because we are only just beginning the first of the 10 decades of the 21st century, and is there anyone in this room that thinks the next nine decades is going to be some kind of Fred Astaire movie? It ain’t, and we haven’t taught our kids what due process is and why we have it and where it came from, so it’s really easy to change it to selective due process, which sends shivers up the back of my neck. We don’t teach our kids how to balance a checkbook or hammer a nail, and they are in for it. We are the first generation, literally, that gets an F in the most important principle that our nation is founded on, which is that the future is more important than the past--the American Dream."
That’s not something to be proud of, and we will have all of these reasons that we don’t do that which is completely and utterly obvious. You would not sit down on a plane if you heard an announcement that said “We are going to pick the pilot today from business class.” You wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t let a doctor touch you if the AMA said, “We are no longer going to vet doctors, and our new slogan is 'You want to be a neurosurgeon? Go Ahead!’” We wouldn’t do that, and yet we do that with our government, and that’s why it was important for me to name it properly to say, “This is the pre-partisan tools of civic expertise that everyone has to know,” and you can decide to be a Republican or a Democrat. If you think you can run this country and maintain your sovereignty without it being stolen by giggling thieves, you are nuts, because that’s what they do. They giggle while they rip you off, and you can’t name a sector of our society that that hasn't happened in.”
Capone: Does it trouble you with the high percentage of children that just pick the same party because of their parents?
RD: I did that. I think everyone does that, and then after a while you start to separate out.
Capone: But feasibly what you are talking about is that you would fortify them early with this basic knowledge of the system and, when it’s time to pick, they might not pick the same one.
RD: Right. A lot of the parents are terrified of that. Republicans are afraid kids are going to come back Democrats. “Holy Shit!” That’s normal, but what isn’t normal is to believe that the system itself is un-corroded, non-toxic, and I just got this letter from a senator and he wrote really beautifully for three pages about what was wrong with the country, and then he said, “What should we do? We should get involved.” I said, “Senator, you can solve every problem that we have, and it wont mean a damn thing until we deal with the basics, because if you fix Wall Street and you fix the banks and fix the mortgage prime people, they will come back with subtler thievery.
There is nothing that binds us together, nothing that gets in the way of profit, nothing and yet when I grew up, if you had had a conflicts of interest at the level of the executive branch that we had in the last eight years, it would have been laughed off of the American table, because we were trained for 200 years that that was simply not acceptable. Torture--this guy had the audacity, balls, brilliance, whatever you want to call it, to allow torture of human beings to become part of the daily American political lexicon. And I’m telling you, I’m an agnostic. I don’t know if there’s a God or not, but if there is, someone is going to burn for that one. We gave torture up about the time we gave incest up, and I don’t see anyone talking about incest. But he brought torture back. Unacceptable.
Capone: That’s an excellent note to end this on, “Someone is going to burn!” Thank you so much. It was really great to meet you, and enjoy your weekend in Chicago.
RD: Yeah, good meeting you.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
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