Alec Baldwin
IFQ: What are you doing next, filmwise?
ALEC: I have a film that I want to direct.
IFQ: The Devil and Danny Webster?
ALEC: No, that we already made and that we had a big problem with. I’m in litigation with that right now. The people I made the movie with committed fraud; they did not have the money to make the movie and they submitted false bank documentation when we were half-way through the shooting. The film is still sitting in their office now. My name came off the movie.
IFQ: Did you shoot what you wanted to shoot?
ALEC: Vaguely. I had a fourty-eight day shooting schedule. I wanted to do something funny. It was a comedy. We did okay. We worked real hard. I’ll never forget their accountant saying, “You guys were 700 grand under budget and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” There was 700 grand left in the budget, and I was a first-time director.
IFQ: Congratulations. We’re going through the same thing.
ALEC: You are. (To Olivier) Do you make films too?
OLIVIER: Yeah.
IFQ: He’s directing a film. He’s playing a rock and roller who commits suicide, an analysis on the singer looking back on his life, looking at all the deaths – Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain – and the tradition of dead rock stars, going between the desire to kill himself and the desire to complete a documentary.
ALEC: Sometimes I think about film and think, “How much does a film, the elements of a film, preemptively feed into the style of the film?”.
IFQ: Like Godard said, “The economics of a film are the politics of a film.”
ALEC: It’s funny to talk to you because when someone makes a movie named King of New York, you get real hard before you watch the movie. Okay, who is the King of New York and why is he the King? You’re like, “Give it to me,” if you’re a New Yorker, “Bring it on.” With the energy of your name and the films you’ve made, you’re halfway there. You got half a hard-on already, d’ya know what I mean? And you watch the film, and with that in mind I’m writing a film that I want to direct, but I swore I’d never direct again.
IFQ: Do it.
ALEC: I know, I know, but it is such a pain in the ass to direct.
IFQ: Well if you get the right…. We’ll talk about it. We’ll help you.
ALEC: If I get someone to do it with me it’d be great. I just want to do something really simple. It’s about someone who has forgotten how to live, his life is about his work. We live in a generation whose life is about their work. I put him in a creative field; I made him a businessman, I put him in the world of television, he’s an executive, not incidental but as a consequence where he felt there was creative self expression in his work, when there isn’t. He ultimately deals with it and doesn’t deal with it. His life is very unfulfilling. He’s divorced, and he meets a woman who is a temp in his office. Sometimes he sees her, sometimes he doesn’t. And whenever he’s with her he’s intrigued by her. She’s very enigmatic and very seductive, and he wants to fuck her obviously. He starts to date her and he finds out very quickly her background is that she was a junkie, and she lost custody of her own child because of her drug problem; her husband divorced her, and she’s about to go to court to get the final rendering of what’s going to happen, and the court rules that she loses her child permanently. Since she’s been cleaned up, she freaks out and then goes out and shoots heroin, and he goes with her. And the two of them go off on this kind of journey because he loves her. (Copyright. Alec Baldwin Inc., WGAEast2002)
I had Pete Dexter, the novelist. Pete’s a great writer. He wrote the original screenplay. It was very dark – it was funny, but it was dark and funny, and that’s why it’s not a studio film. They wouldn’t make it that way. They demanded we rewrite it.
IFQ: This script you just told me?
ALEC: No, this is Dexter’s. Dexter wrote the original screenplay.
IFQ: What studio was it?
ALEC: Universal first, then Castle Rock. When I was with Castle Rock we had a great bit of good fortune: we got Bill Condon to do the rewrite, right before he won the Oscar for Gods and Monsters, so it was a coup. We were the last to get Bill Condon at his old price.
IFQ: No kidding. Are you going to produce?
ALEC: But once you do that, it’s all you want to do. I want to write and produce, and of all the people that changed my mind, of all people was Warren Beatty. I had dinner with Warren Beatty about four or five years ago. He’s a really smart guy. He looks at me and says, “As soon as you take the ultimate responsibility for all of it – and I know its a pain in the ass a lot of the time; I don’t want to either – but until you take ultimate responsibility for all of it, you are going to be fucking neurotic.”
IFQ: Yeah, disappointed too.
ALEC: That’s what I did, but in the meantime, negotiating all that and making all that happen is tough, so I have to go on as an actor for hire. So I’m going to do another film. I might do this movie with Ed Pressman, The Cooler. The guy they stick on the table to cool the action.
IFQ: In Vegas or Atlantic City?
ALEC: Vegas.
IFQ: Who’s directing it?
ALEC: The guy’s name is on the tip of my tongue…. I’ll get it in a minute.
IFQ: I’m not interested. What are your political aspirations now?
ALEC: None.
IFQ: None at all?
ALEC: To run for office you need money.
IFQ: You gotta raise money. It’s the same gig, right? They’re all rich, right?
ALEC: It’s a choice you have to make. In other words, I can take my lifestyle, to be rigorously honest with you, I can take my lifestyle and just completely minimize it. I can get rid of my apartment in New York, my office in New York, my house in East Hampton, my office in Santa Monica, my condominium in Santa Monica. It’s a lot of money.
IFQ: Yeah. But that’s also generating a lot of money.
ALEC: Well, we’re talking about two different things. One generates a lot of money when I do that for a living. Once you go into politics, you stop doing that for a living. You can only go into politics to: A. first and foremost, absorb the issues and learn the facts; you have to pick specific areas of expertise you’re going to cast your lot with. You wanna be involved with health care, you wanna be involved in energy, you wanna be involved with foreign policy. What’s your bag gonna be? The days are gone where you can stroll in there and you can sit down with Larry King and go, (does a dead-on Ross Perot imitation) “Well, you know, I love this country and I think it’s a great country and I want people to have everything and to have their dreams come true.” Nowadays you’ve got to have some goods to deliver. Brando once said, “The problem is not that people ask my opinion, but that I give it.” The problem isn’t that people ask me to run for political office, which they do. The problem is if I bit, if I took that bait. If I did, if I did that … I’m not ready to do that. I would need to go off on a lo-o-o-ng journey to discover what areas of policy I want to become more involved with. Now that is: A. if I want to do it; B. if I am perfectly capable of doing it. My confidence is very high that I could do that. Hey listen, other men and women who are no better than you and I have walked through the Halls of Congress.
IFQ: That’s what Congress is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be about people like us. I mean, who could best represent Eastern Long Island in a sense?
ALEC: Right now I’m just happier to do the issue-oriented stuff and not run for office.
IFQ: And then again, how much more powerful are we as filmmakers than as elected officials, you know? That’s the thing about getting a magazine, I just need anything, don’t care if it’s a fucking two-page fucking newspaper, whatever, this is the Independent Film Quarterly.
ALEC: Which means you only have to come up with four a year.
IFQ: The Alec Baldwin Dossier.
ALEC: It’s funny because whenever I talk about this subject, when I talk about making films, I always tell people, the thing I did when I started to make films – I wanted more control. I wanted control far sooner than I had any right to expect it. When I’d come to work I was very eager to let people know what I didn’t want to say, actors I didn’t want to work with. I’d tell you who to cast, you know what I mean? And all of it was good-intentioned. “Hey, I’ve got a plan, I’ve got an idea, and you don’t realize how my plan is going to be good for you too, man! I’m factoring you in! I got your back here man! I’m not going to fucking bone you! I got a great idea!” When I say Miss X or Mr. X, I’m like, “You don’t understand, it’s going to be all good, we’re all gonna win Oscars, we’re all going to win fucking whatever, Independent Spirit Awards or whatever, we’re all going to go to the top.” And the thing I realized is that I wanted my control, and when I didn’t get it I got uncomfortable. It’s the best way I can put it. It made me uptight. It made me not want to do this. And I realize now that even though my intentions were good, it wasn’t like asking them to hire someone who wasn’t right for the part. I wanted my ideas factored in. What I learned was two things. This is complicated now. If I did a movie with a director I loved, the director to me was genre. I would go to work and I swear to God, it was “yes sir” and “no sir.” I did Pearl Harbor a couple of years ago with Michael Bay, and when it came to the big budget, fucking big budget monster effects movie, I went to work everyday with Michael Bay, who I loved. He’s a great guy, and I loved working with him, and he had ideas that helped me. He would whisper things in my ear about the take and the intent of the scene and the pace of the scene and whatever. He said things that helped me. When I went to work, it was “yes sir, no sir.” This was his world, you know what I mean? I just did a political film for HBO. I played Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense. The project involved Michael Gambon, who played LBJ, and Donald Sutherland played Clark Clifford. It was all about LBJ’s escalation of the war from ’64 on. (John) Frankenheimer was the director. I’ve known John for years, and who the fuck are you going to want to fasten your seatbelt with more than John in that world, a world of word, historical. So I go to work with John. He’s seventy-two years old or seventy-one or seventy-three, whatever he is, and the guy has more physical energy and mental acuity than anybody on the set of the film. Everybody, no matter what age, is keeping up with John. He was so intense. He came in every day, march to his trailer, look at dailies. He was a fucking ferocious beast. Then I do other films with people – it was packaged. It was my agent,”Hey, it’s you and this girl and we’re going to do a thriller, and she’s the cherry on the sundae today, and you’re going to do it with her and do it with Mr. X, and he just did all those great Pepsi commercials. We’ll roll him in here and in an N’Sync video.” They roll him in and we do the movie, and it wasn’t happening for me. I’d let that get to me rather than myself. Now I go into the situation, say, “You want me to make a film?” I meet the director, I either get the vibe or I don’t. I make my decision based on that. Once I’ve made that decision and I go do the movie, I know how to interview a director now. Unless it’s somebody who I know their work. I go watch videos or DVDs. If I go and I get the situation and we go and make the movie and I’m not getting what we’re making, I keep my mouth shut, and I get my work done and go home. I take responsibility. I did my work. All actors have to become self-directors in this day and age; there aren’t a lot of good directors out there. I go to work, I’m self-directing, as opposed to the old me. I was in my trailer breaking my fucking furniture, and I was on the phone with my agent fucking screaming and the phone melting in my hand. And all the fucking rage I had because I lost control, and the bottom line was that I wanted the movie to be good.
IFQ: The right direction, the anger is going.
ALEC: I say to people, I’d love to teach a class to them about acting, but I also want to teach them about acting professionally. How you go to work and how do you get through the day, day in, day out, day in, day out. I really don’t want to do this, it’d be a tedious kind of class. But in my heart, I feel this information should be conveyed to them somehow about how to make a movie and be what you promised yourself you’d want to be in this business. I’m not talking about success; I’m talking about, we’re all sitting in a room, I say to somebody, I defy anybody in this business who says different. You’re sitting around, hours of boredom on a fucking soundstage. I wasn’t born in fucking Hollywood or Culver City on a fucking soundstage. I grew up on Long Island. I’d go to the theater. I’d watch movies, I’d watch movies, I’d watch movies. My eyes were going to fucking fall out of my head. I couldn’t get enough. I’d go home and watch TV. Back before they had HBO. No VHS, no VCR, no nothing.
IFQ: They had the same movies over and over.
ALEC: There was a show on PIX or WOR where they showed the same movie all the way through the week so that the housewives could miss one piece and come back with the flu and watching Inherit the Wind five fucking times.
IFQ: It was on a loop.
ALEC: It was on a loop. Inherit the Wind, Five Days to Cairo with Bogie and Peter Lorre, all these great films, and each syndication company had the dibs on one studio so (W) NEW had all the Warner Brothers movies – Angels with Dirty Faces, City for Conquest, Dead End, whatever, all those movies, Roaring Twenties. You’d watch them to death.
IFQ: Million-Dollar Movie.
ALEC: Million Dollar Movie, Chiller Theater, movie, everything. You’d watch and watch and watch. You’d sit there. You couldn’t watch it enough. You’d be sitting there. “That’s my family, Jake”. Every-fucking-body was walking around talking to themselves just like this. “Don’t you know that I could never let that happen? Don’t you know that that’s an impossibilty? That I would use all of my powers to prevent that from happening? It was an abortion, Michael!” You couldn’t watch it enough! You couldn’t watch it enough. “They massacred my boy!” You couldn’t see it enough. And Brando…
IFQ: When he came on, forget it.
ALEC: “Shove it up my ass. Every breath I want you to trim your fingernails. I want you to shove it up my ass and smell the farts of a dying pig. You didn’t care.”
Abel Ferrara