Jack Nicholson Interview - Part 5

by Peter Bogdanovich

from Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin

When you saw the audience at Cannes...  
Yeah. The audience was kind of weird and interesting. From the minute my character came on that screen, that entire, very cold audience, exploded. It was like being in the 42nd Street Theater..  
 
I thought, “Jesus Christ, I gotta rethink my plan here.” I want to direct a picture, but in order for me to think about directing, I had to like bury certain acting aspirations. I felt I had to concentrate on directing and not split the focus or I wouldn’t get to do it really.  
 
Then you decided to focus on acting.  
Yeah. Part of my thinking was, “Well, I can still direct because I won’t have to get the acting job so much.” If I act, my aesthetic group - the post-New Wave generation of movie makers - instead of me making one picture every two years, we’ll as a group make two or three. That wasn’t the only reason, but hey, I’m a movie star, I had to explore it. I thought I knew what to do, and as it turned out, at that point I’m not a hick. You were there. For instance, look at Five Easy Pieces.. When I did Easy Rider., the audience thought that’s who I am - the big audience didn’t know me. So they think of me as a Southern lawyer-type, a Southern hick, weird lawyer and this and that - and what is Five Easy Pieces.? It’s a guy who starts off in disguise as a hick oil worker, and in the middle of the picture turns out to be an intellectual concert pianist. What could be more vehicular than that?  
 
Didn’t Bob write that for you?  
Bob and Carole Eastman wrote it.  
 
Didn’t she write it for you?  
Oh, absolutely. I knew the character - her brother-in-law - that it was based on. And we had a long relationship.  
 
You and Carole?  
Yeah. She wrote The Shooting.. That was her first script. She wrote a couple of interesting pictures after that. All the Frenchies want to use her. And dear friend. The Eastmans are my Glass Family [from Salinger]. She was in the acting class at Jeff’s. In fact, 5 or 6 screenwriters came out of that class.  
 
Was there one moment when you had decided you wanted to write?  
Jeff was the best at improvisational teacher of all time. He had a few very strict rules. No plot, no “fuck,” and you can’t say, “That’s ridiculous.”  
 
Why?  
Because it ends the discussion, as “fuck” ends any conversation. Once you say “fuck,” you can’t drop back. You know, with The Departed., a Scorsese picture, the Ratings count the “fucks,” well, there’s no way you can do a Martin Scorsese picture and stay under the limit for “fucks.” You can’t do it. That’s why we broke through a little bit in this period we’re talking about with Easy Rider.. We did a lot of law work at BBS, you may or may not know.  
 
I didn’t realize that - law work?  
Well, we went to the Supreme Court about these things. Carnal Knowledge., that was part of the thing, Five Easy Pieces., and Mike Nichols - he’s the guy I couldn’t get an interview with - for The Graduate..  
 
Carnal Knowledg.e came to be. I’m at the end of a love affair, I’ve done Easy Rider.. I think it’s good, but I’m not thinking it’s that! Who would? Nobody. When it happens, I knew it’d be good - I’m not thinking this is gonna involve me this way. So I’m now down on a trip through the dope fields of Mexico, kind of as a reminiscence on behalf of a friend of mine, just a trip down into Mexico, way down. On the way, we go through Guaymas. We’re having a tremendous amount of great adventures and fun. Comes that moment in Mexico where you say, “I gotta get back.” So we now turn around, we go back. We now arrive in Guaymas, and there’s lights strung up, there’s music - we’re in the dark - two guys with beards wandering out like Sierra Madre..  
 
Who’s with you?  
Red Dog - I can’t say. We went through Guaymas, a derelict town on the way, and here’s all these cars. So we ease up on one end of the bar, and then we find out Nichols is down there - the guy I couldn’t get an interview with - shooting Catch 22.. They moved in there. I knew Buck Henry - Buck comes in. We’re at the bar, hoisting one up, looking around at the movie yucksters. Buck comes over and we’re talking like this and [Art] Garfunkel came over - that’s when I met him - we’re just drinking at the bar, making a movie - that’s interesting, and so forth. Now Mike comes in, he looks at me at the bar - the guy who is the king of the movie business, I couldn’t get no interview with. And he looks at me and he looks at Buck, and he says, “You know this actor right here?” Buck says, “Yeah, this is Jack Nicholson.” He says, “Jack Nicholson! I just cast this whole picture of actors this age for Catch 22. and you know this guy and you didn’t tell me...“  
 
Because he had seen an early cut of Easy Rider. - this is like my first response to the picture. I’d been down in the weeds. So I’m thinking, “What the hell is he talking about? My last experience is: this is Mike Nichols and I can’t get an interview.” So now, “what’s wrong with you, Buck?” I wasn’t that happy about the discussion, quite frankly, I’m still more on the side of “couldn’t get an interview.” “Well, people are gonna like Easy Rider, and off we go.” Well, his next picture was Carnal Knowledge. - And I’m the next guy with the biggest director in the country, and I know that’s a move you gotta make.  
 
I had plenty of plans - I never didn’t think of myself as a smart guy. Nothing went the way I planned it in this period - it all went better - in every way, including I wouldn’t have to do those twelve years again - the sweating - but now that I was past ‘em, I love knowing what I learned in those twelve years, because not many people get there knowing that. That’s why I said it worked better - I wouldn’t have planned on it.

So when was the moment you decided you wanted to write?  
With Monty [Hellman]. And Devlin got me writing - my dear departed Don Devlin. You know, Fred Roos was a big supporter in the early days and part of our crowd. He said, “Look, Lippert wants an action picture.” I forget if I’d written the other script with Monty first or not. Same period. The Monty script I wrote we never shot. This was a spec thing he wanted to direct about an actor. Years later Fred got me an offer for that goddamned script, the one I wrote for Monty. But I had lost my copy. With Devlin, it was, “Hey, we’ll make a few bucks maybe” - we got the job, we wrote the script. That’s the way we did it. Orson [Welles] said, “The actor who writes is the ideal personality for film.” I used to listen to everything he ever said like it was the gospel.  
 
Orson wanted to do that picture [Midnight Plus One.] with you and [Robt.] Mitchum.  
Yeah. It would’ve been good. It was Orson’s version of Apocalypse Now .actually.  
 
He got discouraged.  
We said yes to everything.  
 
He got discouraged because Mitchum said no.  
Did Mitchum say that? At that point he could have done without Mitchum.  
 
How did you like working with James L. Brooks.  
Jim’s ability to rewrite on his feet is amazing. There’s a saying about acting: “The actors need to fail.” When an actor reads a scene, if he doesn’t like it, it’s really because he fears it, or he hasn’t really tried to work out the scene. So, normally, my process is: Try to do the scene first, and then work it from there, and that’s the best way to do it. Classically taught that way. With Jim Brooks I worked differently. Because if I tell him there’s something about a scene that I don’t like - even if it’s not a particularly big thing - he goes away after listening to me, and like clockwork, ten to fifteen minutes later, comes back with a better scene. Automatic. Jim’s just phenomenal:[ snaps fingers] better scene! It stimulates him in some way.  
 
What was Scorsese like to work with?  
Martin, I felt through the length of this production, very much likes to work in his own world and work alone. That’s the way that artist likes to work - and that’s fine by me. I don’t particularly push contact, but always make it known I’m available, or not. I can’t think of many “or nots” but - if they want you to do something and it’s geographically impossible, that’s “or not.”  
 
He sends his best. I spoke to Roger Corman today.  
My Man.  
 
He sounds exactly the same on the phone as he did forty years ago.  
Integrity will age you well. He’s one of those people, you know, I feel like I see him all the time, but haven’t seen him.  
 
He’s still making pictures.  
Of course. He’s got it together, as they say.  
 
Would you say those Westerns with Monty were the first pictures you really were proud of?  
There were a few things before that certainly had pieces I could say I was proud of.  
 
Like what?  
I liked the effect of the little tiny piece I did in Little Shop of Horrors..  
 
Psych-out [1968].  
Yeah. Today, if I wanted to call something Love on Hate., and I was the writer, and they changed it to Psych-out. for exploitation reasons, I hope I would be in a position to keep that from happening. I was not that then.  
 
Love on Hate. was the original title? That’s much better.  
That was the title of the script I wrote. I was living the things that I was writing about at this period. Metaphorically, I thought of almost everything that I acted or wrote as autobiographical. It wasn’t that it was necessarily truly autobiographical, but I understood autobiographical momentum, or tracks from one piece of work to the other, or cumulatively. Fortunately the profession we’re in does have to do with life, so you’re not far a field. Look, this is a statement about work. Even with the Westerns, I like to talk about the poetics, the symbolisms, the so-called artsy-fartsy part of movies, and I expect it because that’s the way I felt about the European film. When I went there, “Oh, boy! I’m gonna get to do this.” And, very quickly, I was kind of told that in the real milieu, this was de rigueur in some way, with the symbolism, you know. But I still think about it that way when I work.  
 
Like The Departed. I have an underlying theme for my character, and how I think the theme of the picture evolved. When you’re in a genre, I think you go to universal themes that somehow relate to the immediate of the time they’re made. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” always a valid theme, but you can become a bit bored because people have heard it. Yet when you’re working, it’s a valid unifying route for the work. It’s not going to be the work, it’s just going to be the under-part of it. The Departed .is about, “What is intelligence? What is information? What is the level of information?” And because of the fashionable, insane desire for total transparency and everything else about that, the danger is we are becoming a nation of rats. And that’s a poetic image, that’s sort of the universal theme that I worked from on The Departed. . Whether anybody else was involved does not matter - whether people can see the literal result or not. Ultimately, a movie simply must be worth the while that you go to see it. Entertainment. Education. Everything that we get from movies.  
 
After ,Easy Rider., when your career changed, and then after Five Easy Pieces, it changed again - did you continue, without credit, to rewrite material you were acting?  
We used to make fun of Sasha Guitry. at our old film group: produced by Sasha Guitry, written by Sasha Guitry, directed by Sasha Guitry, starring Sasha Guitry; when you get flyers, it’ll be his name four times. When an actor directs, he doesn’t get the same amount of credit for his performance as he might. Why?  
 
It’s even true with Citizen Kane. that people talk about Orson as a director but rarely talk about his amazing performance.  
Well, part of what I like about Orson is his feeling that you should never get too respectable. The tradition of the Mountebank is part of the theatrical tradition from the beginning.