Jack Nicholson

Emmanuel Itier: What´s it like to play a dying old man?

Jack Nicholson: I’m serial killer who kills people because… dumb question! I don´t favor the international press. Take your fucking hat off. Afraid? Identity crisis? Isn´t this a lovely press conference, ladies and gentlemen? The third one is always the charm.

EI: What did you discover, doing this together?

JN: We both had a lot of awareness of one another. We´ve known one another a long time. A reaffirmation, you know? It went pretty quick. We worked nice and easy together. We share a lot of the same sensibilities. It makes it easy to move something around when you are comfortable with a person. Things I discovered–I put in the movie, like, where did you get all those freckles?

EI: Do you have a fear of death?

Morgan Freeman: I don´t think I´d like to live forever. I think there is going to be some downturns in the human existence that I don´t want to be here for, but I really would like to live a really, really, really long time. I don´t fear death at all. What I fear is how I die.

JN: You don´t want to be embarrassed.

MF: I don´t want to be embarrassed. That’s it. I do not want to be embarrassed.

EI: Where will be your final resting place?

MF: The ground. I don´t want to be burned up. I don´t want to be entombed in a mausoleum or crypt somewhere. I want life everlasting–that means going in to the ground, going back to Mother Earth, and she will spit you back out again.

EI: What about your fear of death?

JN: I think fear of death–fear of the unknown–motivates people to not live in the now, number one. To live forever–I always mistrusted someone who said they didn´t want to live forever. I trust you now, Morgan. And then one of those things, like capitol punishment, that you actually change your mind about because the real question–it becomes ever more possible that, if not live forever, we have more control over how long we live. I changed my mind when I said, thought to myself, the real question is not whether you want to live forever, but do you want to live forever at the expense of your children, because if suddenly people stopped dying, we´d have a real ecological problem on our hands. So I always thought that was an open and shut question. But, like many of them, I had my mind changed with a little further thought a few decades or so ago.

EI: Can you relate to death being funny?

JN: Only in a Fellini movie. Gallows humor makes us all laugh, so I guess it´s funny.

MF: Well, is it funny in the end? It´s funny now, but if you are lying there and all the juices are leaking out, is it funny then?

JN: Well, you can bet that the last thing on Earth that you want to do will be the last thing on Earth you do do.

EI: How much fun did you have together shooting it?

MF: For myself, tons. This is a dream come true. It´s one of my life dreams, to work with Jack, and so every day was a holiday. Every day was perfect. Every day was what I wanted.

JN: Sometimes things are great. This was one of them. Not tons of surprises, other than when you talk to anybody in that sense, but I expected we were three takes, two prints, a good percentage of the picture. We never did rehearse much, did we? I never had a movie crew outrun me. By that, I kind of tease people. “Oh, he´s ready!” It´s the way I keep fit. But man, I didn´t hardly get to turn around in my dressing room and they were ready to go. They actually outran me.

MF: A lot of times you are leaving the set and they say, “20 minutes to turn around,” and you know 40 minutes is what you are going to look forward to, minimum. Not so here. Twenty minutes was 20 minutes.

JN: And that same old 20 minutes. It´s always not, so…

EI: What is your opinion about your man?

JN: I think the movie tells the story of him. Things that don´t worry about money; all I got is money. There is not a clearer, better way to say about a type of person that he´s isolated. He says it himself. He knows everybody hates him, or assumes they do. And at the same time, some people get things done. I started making money at 11. That was the end of that, but I do. Certainly he´s tried. He´s had several marriages, which he comments on. It´s like anything. If you are in that position and of that commitment, as this character is, you really have to make time for something else. And there was a line I wrote that was cut out of the movie, which was… I forget if it was Morgan saying it to me: “I always understood how people could make money, but he never really knew how to make time.”

MF: I think that was a narrative line.

JN: Yeah. Anyway, I remember a lot of things you said and thought, we talked about–I don´t believe it wound up in the film. I think the story tells what happened with him and his daughter. If I hadn´t lived it, I certainly read it in The Great American Pastoral, which is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which I thought was great–Philip Roth. And he deals with women in that same way. What I like about the tone of this movie and my character is it´s not sentimental, but it has sentiment. He doesn´t have to say much, other than he´s thrown this man out in a fit of temper. He´s thrown him out of his life, comes home, and you see him weeping in the mirror. And the two girls behind him say, “Is he crying? I don´t understand it. He´s always so much fun,” which is about his character. And I think he is, but it´s also good storytelling because it´s a punctuation point. He´s reuniting. I´m breaking apart. Packaging bothers old people. Why does everything have to rip your nails off? He´s having nothing but frustration; doesn´t really know why. Have you ever read The Divine Comedy? And all that, so that´s, I think, who the guy is. I think he´s pretty clearly depicted, and I could probably give a similarly lengthy, useless speech about Morgan´s character also.

MF: But there is one character in this film who is a friend of yours, and a close friend of yours, and that´s your assistant. He´s the guy you can speak your mind to, who gets your humor, and who withstands your irascibility. He´s a dream come true, actually.

JN: And he´s so unable to deal with it that he makes jokes that he´s only there because of the will. But I think it´s definitely a father/son kind of thing and, as I say, Rob did a great job pulling these ingredients together. Sometimes I don´t like to tear a movie apart and analyze it, but when you just think about what Morgan said and the fact that he´s the guy climbing the mountain to the repository of the remains and so forth, I´ll tell you something about a character that´s interesting. I get so into a character when I watch the film, the only thing that pissed me off–why not my own coffee can? Did I have to learn this much?

EI: Would you like to know how much life you have left?

JN: Well, I´d like to resolve the beginning of this press conference. I´m normally not that scratchy. So to my hat man back there, the answer to your question would, of course, be resurrection. That´s the last thing on my bucket list for the day. I apologize for my nature.

EI: How hard is it to find a project for both of you? Is there a character you´d like to repeat?

JN: It´s like all those questions about how do you choose. It´s not–it´s a different thing, as a professional. In the abstract, you could choose this or that, but you only have so many things that are available to you with the time that you have to and/or want to work. Morgan and I very much wanted to work together. How could I not want to work with Rob? The country thing–so I was a Marine as a result of the last job I did for him. So in this case, I was already in before I even read the script almost. If it was horrible, I would have… So it´s things like that. We´ve all got a bucket list. I can´t work with Marilyn Monroe, so she´s off the list. But there are a lot of people. You can´t make a list about actors that you like because there are a lot of us.

MF: And they keep coming.

JN: And that has a lot to do with it. I´m thinking about it last night–they are always asking me, who are the young actors and this and that. I´m categorically against making up lists like that because somebody´s always pissed off or this or that, so I never answer. I thought, no, I´m going to do this different. I´m going to write out some long list of the people, be it Nic Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, Julian Robbins, or who is the young people and this and that, and just Sean, who I´ve already done a bunch of things with, and make that, which would be, incidentally, a pretty long list. The directors, I noticed the other day, when they asked me a question, it´s like with writers. I don´t keep track of the names like I did in my 30s and 40s when I was a cinephile. But once somebody says this director, then I go or I will have seen things. I tend to remember people like Joe that did Pride and Prejudice, which I thought was cinematically the tastiest directed film of that year. You know, that idea and how those hands clasp and how the furniture and the transitions… it was very cinematically directed, so he´s a guy certainly, anybody should want to work with. But there are a lot of other ones. And, as I say, I just don´t remember. I don´t keep track of it. It´s like equipment. I feel, hey, I´ll know how to run an Avid or whatever it is when the time comes that I have to use it, because that´s professional. I´m not studying to be a film editor and so forth. But I´ve never had any problem. Okay, what does this thing do? Boom, boom, boom. I mention Avid because there weren´t any. The first director that I worked with on it, I think it was Hector Bobenko, and we worked out together how to use an Avid. So that´s the same thing with who do you want to write this, but I used to know all that–all the directors. But now there are many of them–I couldn´t tell you their names–of directors that I might want to work with.

EI: Is there one great role of film still waiting to be made?

JN: I keep meaning to reread Sabbath´s Theater. It´s another Roth book. I happened to have read all of Roth that I could get my hands on while I was doing About Schmidt. That´s a project, because the hardest thing to find, both in literature and scripts, is a sexual component for an older character. So, as I say, it´s more a note to reread it because I kind of remember in the movie Nicole and Anthony Hopkins did, that has it also. But I´m not sure about Sabbath´s Theater, but I remember he´s got some crazy relationship with a Hungarian woman and they are grave and everything else. So there are those kinds of things. You know, there are biographies that I think people talk about all the time that should be done right–Tesla. I´d rather more direct a movie on Napoleon than act in it because I´m too old now, so they say. Things like that, but it´s a question, as I started, it´s not really the way you consider it in the profession. It´s the art form of the possible. Yes, this would have been great with Burt Lancaster, but he´s doing The Leopard so somebody else is in it. It´s the art form of the possible. You do what´s possible in movies. What I like about it–it´s piece work. You do one and that´s that for that. I often think–I don´t know if Morgan does–I´d like to go back and redo some of the parts, just to see, because that´s what you do anyway. You do several versions of everything you do and that´s kind of what keeps you alive.

MF: It´s kind of like being on stage. You get two or three shots at it. You get a different chance every night on stage. This moment didn´t quite work last night. Let´s see if we can go at it another way. You can´t do that in the movies. I don´t think there are any great parts that I want to play. There are some stories I want to tell. How great the part is or how great the movie is going to be, I have no way of knowing. Jack points that out quite well. But there are a lot of stories that I want to tell, and I want to tell them primarily as a producer. I think I´m getting a little long in the tooth to play some of the roles I´ve dreamed of playing. My dream Western, for instance. As Jack says, riding is fine. Getting on and off a horse is the problem. It becomes problematic.

EI: Why not a cinephile anymore, Jack? Do you attack all projects from every angle?

JN: I think every project requires full energy and effort, but that´s different, so there is no always about it. I´m still a cinephile, but my age group–we expected to see a masterpiece every week from about ’60 something to well into the ’70s because foreign film was distributed here. There were actually more than one revival house per college town so that we saw this broad spectrum. The reason why I´m semi past tense is we have not had the opportunity for that anymore. I don´t read the Calle de Cinema. I traveled with Goddard when I first went to Europe once. I still look at movies as a cinephile, but we are in a very protracted… Here´s how the movie business has changed–it´s conglomerated. A movie that makes, say, $10 million in the black is a rare occurrence. It doesn´t mean anything to the companies that are dealing in hundreds of millions if it´s vis-Ã -vis conglomeration, where a movie company is just a department of a larger organization. Even the people who see movies–their sense of what is a successful movie is distorted by this, so it´s a little hard to fit auteur theory into that concept. Nonetheless, there will be a concept about what I´m talking about vis-Ã -vis being a cinephile–someone who loves and studies movies. You can be like that or not. I read more thrillers than I do serious books because I do it in a night or two and it´s mainly to keep me away from television to begin with. But I have to be honest, it took me a long time. Cormack McCarthy I love because he´s economical. It doesn´t take a long time. But of course, it´s perfect when you take longer in time in a reading experience, but nonetheless… So I´m just giving you the kind of things that are debated by cinephiles about who is Howard Hawkes versus Seka and what´s all this about.