INTERVIEWS

SUNDANCE INTERVIEW
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sundancechannel.com: Being an actor is a really hard, miserable thing in
many ways. You put yourself through a lot of agony...

Liev: What agony?

sundancechannel.com: Oh, auditions, rejection, waiting around for
someone to give you a part.

Liev: You're right. I was just curious what you thought the agony was. I
guess I've never been that phased by rejection, so that wasn't really a
problem. That was part of being such a good liar. Rejection never bothered
me. If someone rejected me, I would just make up a reason as to why that
had nothing to do with me. Which is usually the truth in a roundabout way.
Auditioning is fun. It's part of the game. It's part of your job. When
you're working a lot, to take time out to audition is hard. I loved the days
when I first got out of school, sitting around and really analyzing a text and
saying, "Man, I'm really going to nail this." And to go in and meet these
strangers who had no idea who I was and just hit them with an audition that
really turned them on. That's a very exciting feeling. It's akin to a theatrical
experience. Except you don't have the benefit of a mob; you know, in a
mob you can get eight people to react and twenty more will join them. In an
audition, you have two or three people who are resisting reacting because
they've already been there eight hours. It's kind of a thrill. It's a nice
challenge. And if you do your homework, it's a great exercise.

sundancechannel.com: What are some of the projects that you've enjoyed
working on the most?

Liev: I liked THE DAYTRIPPERS a lot. I like Greg (Mottola, the
director). He's a very talented, intelligent writer who believes enough in the
people he hires that he truly collaborates. He listens very carefully. And also
he's so intelligent that you know that as an actor or a gaffer or DP or
whatever that you can tell him what you want to do and trust that in the end,
he's going to make the right decision.

sundancechannel.com: That was a really quick shoot, right? Like eighteen
days.

Liev: I like working that quickly. You can track your character. I also really
like working with Ron Howard. I think he's a wonderful director. He's very
open minded. He's got a format that he likes to follow, and I think that's
important, but within that, he's constantly figuring out the best way to do
everything, using everyone around him.

sundancechannel.com: What about DENISE CALLS UP? I was really
surprised to hear that he shot most of those scenes without the other actor
there. Was that a difficult way of working?

Liev: That was like improv. Because you find the character, and the
dialogue was so clearly shaped, and so based on timing, that you have to
play the dialogue the way it was written. So it doesn't really matter who's on
the phone. He's such a solid writer that you can trust his instinct and timing,
and then physically and emotionally you improvise what the character is
doing while having these very articulated conversations.

sundancechannel.com: Do you like to do improv?

Liev: Yeah, I used to do a lot of improv in school. In rehearsal, not so
much. The movies I work on are either extremely rich or extremely poor.
So there's not a lot of time to rehearse. It's a big luxury. I can just imagine
me and Gary Sinise, Mel Gibson and Lili Taylor sitting around doing vocal
warm-ups. And then, "Liev, what do you feel like saying to Mel right now?"
It would be great, but it's not going to happen.
I worked with Rolland Joffe once; we had this hour-long meeting where
we improved, and I just loved him. He was such a great director. It's a great
way to develop a character. But most people won't give you that luxury.

sundancechannel.com: So you're in a million movies right now:
WALKING AND TALKING, DAYTRIPPERS, BIG NIGHT --

Liev: Barely.

sundancechannel.com: Barely in BIG NIGHT [a larger part
reduced to a quick cameo in the editing process], DENISE
CALLS UP. What's the full list this year?

Liev: Well, RANSOM. The others I did last year. DENISE was
'94. And I've been doing a lot of theater.

sundancechannel.com: So how did this happen that you're in all
these movies at once?

Liev: Word of mouth. They were all low budget independent films.

sundancechannel.com: So did they all happen at once? Did
people hear about you because of PARTYGIRL? Did you feel like
you just woke up one day and you were getting offered everything?

Liev: I've always been working. I've been lucky that way. Since
school I don't think spent more than three weeks unemployed.
Partly I think it's just that I like to work. But word of mouth.
People start talking. Producers and directors start talking.

sundancechannel.com: Where did you study acting?

Liev: I went to the Royal Academy, RADA in London for a year,
then to Yale for three years, for graduate school.

sundancechannel.com: And since then you've done
PARTYGIRL, MIXED NUTS... what was your first?

Liev: PARTYGIRL. I think there have been eight. MAD LOVE is
another. I did some TV Movies. Lots of theater. I did THE
TEMPEST this year. I like Shakespeare a lot. I did Pinter's new
play MOONLIGHT on Broadway with Jason Robards and Blythe
Danner. IN THE SUMMER HOUSE with Diane Wiest. ESCAPE
FROM HAPPINESS, by George Walker. The next film I'm doing
is CONAIR, with Nicholas Cage and Steve Buscemi.

Liev: It's amazing how much of my childhood is completely absent. I really
feel awful about that. You know those late night infomercials about
memory? I really want to do that. Only because maybe it would help me
remember some of it. But then I realize those are really just for short term
memory, so... but I'm terrible. I can't remember anything. People. places,
names. It's really bad. I think it's because I'm so neurotic about everything
else that I overload my brain. It's depressing, because you want to
remember.
I have flashes sometimes, or dreams where I think, "Wow, that was
pretty vivid. That must have happened when I was five." I remember a
birthday party and my father set up these strings -- this might be a dream,
not a memory -- where you followed these strings to your present, like a
spider web. I saw all the other kids follow their strings and they would wind
up with a Match Box car, or a paddleball game, and I thought, "Cool. It's
my birthday, so if they got those presents I must have a real lulu." And I
followed my string and I got a bag of popcorn. Unpopped popcorn.

Liev's mother: That's my story.

Liev: That's your story?

Liev's mother: That's what I got for Christmas. No, wait, that's true. That
did happen to you also. We both got popcorn.

Liev: I thought it was a dream.

Liev's mother: No, no. You're right.

sundancechannel.com: There are so many things like that, that you can't
remember whether you dreamed them, or if they are stories that you think
you remember because your parents told them so many times...

Liev: Oh, exactly, and then if you're a liar, like I was --

sundancechannel.com: What's homework for you? Actors are always
talking about homework. What do you do?

Liev: Homework. I think nine tenths of it is impulse. And I think really good
actors are people who are watchers, observers. They watch people really
carefully. They're less interested in what you say than say, how you handle
your piece of bread. That's how you find character. Those things you
recognize in yourself.
Anything that's impulsive is something that we share. Our actions are as
different as snowflakes, but the fact that we have impulses that are
unpredictable is something we have in common. So if you can get that in a
character then it's riveting to an audience, because they recognize
themselves, or they recognize humanity, and suddenly the film or the play or
the photograph or whatever becomes real.
So I think, in terms of homework, that if you just read the thing enough,
and then forget about it, and then read it again and just let it work on you.
It's like dance: if you take modern dance classes, there are these improvs
where you move just one joint, and that joint makes another joint move, and
suddenly you've got a motion. And the motion builds into an expressive
movement that has a story to it, when really you just started with this (he
gestures).
It seems insignificant, but sometimes when you're doing a character, it
can have nothing to do with text. You find something, like the way you grab
a wineglass, and it's just by accident, and you think, "What can I make out
of this?" It can mean so many things. It's like, you improv off your own
impulse, and that's why I think it's something you can't really teach. [We
should note that Liev is a graduate of Yale Drama School.] You can teach
people to speak loudly or better or in a different accent, but I think
ultimately the measure a good actor is their ability to give in to impulse,
especially on film, because the camera is so voyeuristic. It's always trying to
find out if you're lying. It hates stagy dialogue. Stagy dialogue never works.
That's why I think David Mamet, who's a great playwright, has made a lot
of films, like HOUSE OF GAMES, which is a great writing achievement,
and it's interesting for us, as practitioners of theater, as filmmakers, but not
necessarily to others.

sundancechannel.com: Getting back to the theater stuff, what is it about
that that makes you keep coming back to it. Is it the experience of the live
audience, that idea of making a connection, that it's immediate...

Liev: That's a big reason. I also think we haven't gone there yet in film, and
theater allows you a wider range of expression. It stretches and limbers you.
It makes you move away from the cliché. That there's much more going on in
terms of language. There's a spirituality in theater that I don't see very often
in film.

sundancechannel.com: You don't see that as possible in film? What about
adaptation, all the plays which have been made into films? That's something
the film industry is certainly very interested in right now.

Liev: My dream is to do Shakespeare on film, but to do it filmicly. To me,
Shakespeare is really an action writer. The Elizabethans were interested in
entertainment. In those days, you could go see a hanging or go see a play.
And Shakespeare was it. Everyone went to his plays. I saw this old poster
once for HENRY V, and it advertised it as "HENRY V, WITH THE
EXCITING BATTLE AT AGINCOURT". They got it right: it's an action
film. Or Olivier's HAMLET. The "To Be Or Not To Be" monologue is voice
over. He shoots the danger. There are quick cuts. It's Hamlet's perspective.
Even the structure of the verse is about action. It has an internal action of
climbing up.

For a moment we're distracted from the interview by the unmistakable
sound of the knock of opportunity. Hmm. He's got something there.
Shakespeare as action writer. In the age of blockbuster literary
adaptation, we realize it's a goldmine. And public domain. We ask Liev
to whip off a few quick storyboard sketches of his idea...

sundancechannel.com: You're in two movies at the same time where you
play characters who are both in phone sex relationships. Coincidence?

Liev: It's awful. They were shot two years apart, but now they're coming
out at once, so everyone thinks, "Oh, the phone sex guy." I didn't really
think about it when I was cast. Then one day, on WALKING AND
TALKING I was lying on the bed with the phone in my ear thinking, "This
feels a little familiar". But I think it's important to the characters in different
ways.

sundancechannel.com: But don't you think they're in it for the same
reason? That it's essentially avoiding intimacy?

Liev: Maybe, yeah. I hadn't thought about that. The guy in WALKING
AND TALKING, he's a hack at sexual intimacy. He does everything. He's
addicted to pornography. He does this stuff all the time. In DENISE, Jerry
is a complete virgin.

sundancechannel.com: Do you think it's as difficult for men as for women
to do things which are intimate or explicit on film. Nudity for example?

Liev: I think it's exactly the same. I really hate being nude on film. Nicole
wanted us to do the skinny dipping scene in WALKING AND TALKING
with no clothes, which suited the scene, but then Catherine (Keener) didn't
want to, so we did it in our underwear. I felt really uncomfortable for some
reason that night, so in the scene, Catherine runs in like she's Farrah
Fawcett or something, and I get two feet in and dive into the water, which
was only about a foot deep. The first time I went into the mud. So I'm
pretending to swim, but my nipples are rubbing on the lake floor.

sundancechannel.com: You were a liar?

Liev: Pathological.

Liev's mother: Tremendous. He was so creative.

sundancechannel.com: And are you now?

Liev: Oh yeah. By default. Because now I tell the truth, but I've told lies so
much of my life that I can't remember what's true. Part of being a good liar
is you convince yourself that what you're saying is true. So I made up all
these stories about my life that are complete lies, but somewhere back in my
mind I have these residual memories of these lies that I told as if they really
happened.

sundancechannel.com: Do you think acting is like that?

Liev: Lying? Yeah. Sure. Pretending you're someone else. I think film
acting is -- I don't know, I'm not much of a method actor -- for me it's
pretty technical.

sundancechannel.com: So what do you get out of it? What do you think
draws you to it?

Liev: It's like playing a musical instrument. With the director and the writer,
you shape a story, and you're playing the music.

Liev: Acting is hard. Before you said acting is an agonizing profession.
It's hard because more often than not you're a hired gun. And your job
more often than not is to make someone else's idea happen. There's
something expressive in that, but the concept and imagery is not yours.
You're adopting someone else's idea. That's very hard. It's easy, but it's
emotionally very difficult, in terms of what you want to do with your life,
what you want to say, in terms of what's the whole point of this. I think the
impulse starts with the realization that when I do certain things, people
respond.
I think I always felt very isolated. I felt kind of megalomaniacal. I had
this fantasy that -- this is another thing I remember from being a little kid
-- I'd sit in the window on First Avenue and watch the people in the street
and I became convinced, from watching this Yule Brenner movie called
WESTWORLD, where you could shoot robots, I was convinced that if I
took a knife and cut someone open, I would find a circuit board in there. I
had this notion that nobody else existed, that the whole world was
functioning as scenery for this play of my life. A total megalomaniac.
When I started to act, I felt like for the first time in my life, I was really
communicating to people. And they were accepting me. I wasn't a real
popular kid, and to be standing in front of four hundred and fifty people
and receiving their approval was almost an initiation, like here I was now a
member of this elite group called human beings. It was a terrific feeling.
That sensation is what started everything for me. Constantly reminding
yourself that you belong to a community which is the world. All those
things, drinking, drugs, obsessive behavior, addictive behavior to me is
covering the pain of not being able to join the world. To me that's what
art, what acting is about. Joining the world. So to be able to find work
which allows you to do that is difficult, unless you're writing it. There's less
and less of a demand for that, where we recognize ourselves, we show
ourselves.

sundancechannel.com: A lot of the characters that you play seem like they
could be easily unsympathetic. You have this really remarkable way of
turning things around so that the audience always stays with them. They
almost take on that quality of a relative that you know so well that you know
all their flaws but still love them or respect them.

Liev: I pick characters who are like that. I pick trouble characters. On
DAYTRIPPERS and DENISE CALLS UP and WALKING AND
TALKING, my friends said, "I really like the script, but this is a problem
role. He seems like such an asshole. How can you play this?" I like those
roles a lot, because they allow you to what I think we should always be
trying to do, which is to share our humanity with each other.
It's not a big deal if I'm "handsome, dashing, wonderful guy" and you all
love me. You're supposed to. But I think "handsome, dashing, wonderful
guy" has very little to do with most of us. At least in my own life I feel like it
doesn't really apply to my world. If you can take those characters and get
people to identify with those traits that we all share but don't like to admit,
that are held very close and are personal, and play them out, it allows us to
identify those things in ourselves. I think the trick to making the character
appealing is essentially that you always remember that as a character, you
always love yourself and also that you're always vulnerable, no matter how
hard you are. You're always vulnerable to other people's judgments of you.
Because that's what we have in common. We're always worried about what
the other guy thinks. And it's nice to play characters who overcome
something, who have some kind of journey.

sundancechannel.com: What's on your hand?

He has a tattoo across his knuckles that says "Doom".

Liev Schreiber: It's a tattoo from the movie (RANSOM). It's supposed to
be a prison tattoo. It's a device in the movie, that you see my hands at the
beginning, but you don't see my face. Later, when you meet the kidnapper,
you see the tattoo. It's a fancy reveal.

PRAIRIE MILLER INTERVIEW

A WALK ON THE MOON: INTERVIEW WITH LIEV SCHREIBER

* By Prairie Miller *

Following his roles in Sphere and the two Scream movies, actor Liev
Schreiber is into something a little more quiet and serious these days
in Tony Goldwyn's A Walk On The Moon. The story of 1969 culture
clash in the Catskills between bungalow folks and Woodstock's
summer of love, A Walk On The Moon is the very special pet project of
Dustin Hoffman. Schreiber sat down to about his character Marty, a
nerdy nice guy whose wife, played by Diane Lane, runs off to
Woodstock with a seductive hippie. He also revealed some exciting up
and coming parts, including his turn as Hollywood legend Orson
Welles.

PRAIRIE MILLER: How exactly did you find yourself taken with A
Walk On The Moon?

LIEV SCHREIBER: I was working with Dustin on Sphere, and we got to
be friendly. We were having a terrific time. And his company was about
to set off on making this film with Tony Goldwyn.

After working with me for two or three weeks, I guess the idea occurred
to Dustin to pass the script on to me. For me just to be working with
Dustin was a huge treat. And to become his friend was a remarkable
experience and a lot fun. I kept pinching myself. I mean, here I was
with the guy from The Graduate.

He's an actor who was actually my role model for a long time. I really
love his acting, I always have. You know, as an actor he really defined
and understood the naturalistic element of film. And the kind of
characters that I've always been interested in are the characters that
Dustin has always played.

PM: Tell me more.

LS: He's always done that thing where, you know, I just felt that when I
saw him in The Graduate, to me 'leading man' was redefined. Suddenly
audiences were introduced to a leading man that they could identify
with more readily. More people could identify with a kind of actor who
was interested in people's flaws, foibles and vulnerabilities. And out of
those one could create character.

My personal theory is that we tend to identify in the secret darkness of
a movie theater with people's shortcomings more than we do with other
things. And I think that's a very brilliant way to approach character.
And so I admired him very much early on. So when he gave me the
script I was just, like wow. I'm working with him, he's become my
friend, and now he's giving me movie scripts. I was just in heaven.

And then to actually read the script by Pamela Gray, and see that it
was really something of substance, to me it was a very emotional
experience, reading A Walk On The Moon for the first time. Because
my family had lived through that, and a lot of people had apparently.

And the funny thing is, a woman came up to me yesterday during a
benefit we were doing, an older woman came up to me, She said, you
know that was about my life. We were up in the Catskills too. And if it
wasn't the Catskills, it was somewhere else. There were a million
places like in the country where people would go.

PM: You seem so emotionally close to your character in the film. Was
there anything personal that touched you about Marty?

LS: For me personally, it was my grandfather. My character Marty was
based for me on my grandfather, whom I loved very much and who was
sort of a father figure for me. I recognized him right away in the script,
and that was very emotional because he had died very recently, just
before Dustin gave me the script. So I had been thinking of him a lot.
He had been through the same thing as my character, and he wasn't
able to forgive and move on as Marty was. And that broke his heart for
the rest of his life.

I thought, oh my God, here's my grandfather coming back to me in this
script. And I thought, I'll never get it. You know, I'm a character actor, I
don't get these kinds of parts. But Dustin wanted me. And the funny
thing was that he had called Tony Goldwyn to tell him, you know, I met
this guy Liev Schreiber. And before he could say it, Tony said, you
know I was just looking at this film Daytrippers, and I'm thinking of this
guy Liev Schreiber. And then when I got to L.A. and met with Dustin
and Tony and realized that this was a reality and was going to happen,
I was very excited.

PM: What's the satisfaction you get from doing blockbusters like
Scream?

LS: Well I'll tell you, my first real ambition was to make people laugh.
And I think that's what I started doing. When I was a little kid, that was
the only way I could really get attention, was to make people laugh. So
I figured if one could make a living doing it, that was pretty exceptional.

So I started out writing monologue shows, and doing a kind of
standuppy thing. You know, a sort of characters from my neighborhood
thing. And it was mostly comedy. So my appreciation for the baser
forms was apparent pretty early on!

I love to do independent films because I like the material generally.
You're not making a lot of money, so when an opportunity comes along
to do something like Scream or Scream II or Sphere, you jump at them
because they give you the financial freedom to go back and do the
other things that you want to do.

And they can also be fun. For example, with Sphere. I've always been
a huge sci-fi fan. I love science fiction.

PM: How come?

LS: You know, it's something you can do in film that you can't do in
theater. You know, all that special effects razzmatazz. Also, the
opportunity to work with Dustin Hoffman, and to work with Barry
Levinson and Sam Jackson was very exciting for me. You know, to be
acting and scuba diving at the same time was a big treat.

PM: So what will audiences see you in next?

LS: Well, I've just completed a low budget independent movie called
Spring Forward, with Ned Beatty and directed by Tom Gilroy. It's a film
we shot in real time, about two guys who work for the parks
department. It's basically a film about the seasons and their
relationship over the course of the years. We took a year to shoot it,
which was kind of fun.

I've also got Jacob The Liar coming out, which is a Holocaust film with
Robin Williams and Alan Arkin. And I've just finished a film Hamlet,
with Ethan Hawke playing Hamlet. Right now, I'm shooting a film called
Lazarus And The Hurricane. It's the Hurrican Carter Story, like the
Dylan song about the middleweight boxer. We're shooting that now. It's
a Norman Jewison and Denzel Washington project, and we're just
finishing it up.

PM: Now there's a full plate! Could there be anything else?

LS: Well, I'm leaving for London tomorrow to do a film about the battle
over the making of Citizen Kane. It's already been a documentary, and
this is essentially a dramatization of that story.

PM: So who do you play?

LS: Orson Welles! It's about the battle that went on between Hearst,
Welles and RKO over the release of the picture.

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