DRIVER: That's interesting to hear you say that because I feel like you know them very well but maybe ... like, I would get texts from you the night before or maybe the morning of shooting, where you have a line change, but it's something very specific. Like, "It shouldn't be McDonald's, it should be Burger King," or something. And I remember watching you in between takes, just checking out the script before you're about to do the scene, to kind of refresh your memory about everything that was going on.
BAUMBACH: That's all true. It's like you were saying, I need to be as prepared as possible from my end, so that I can be reacting to all the other things—the actor, the dog. There were a couple of days on While We're Young where we talked about this, when you're in a good groove and the actor really understands the part and comes as prepared every day as you are and is so inside it. And then there's the day where, for whatever reason, it's just a harder slog. And I feel like those are the days where all the preparation and everything becomes more necessary because you have to find a third route there.
DRIVER: Yeah. At the end of whatever we're doing, I always feel like I want to go back and start over again because now I have a better sense of what it is. I feel that with everything. Like, if you're doing like a long run of a play and you're doing it seven shows a week, at the end of it, I want to go back and start from the beginning. On While We're Young, you gave me a physical thing to hold on to from the beginning and that was helpful. When I wasn't making sense of it, I would go back to this physical thing, this idea of water, where he moves into a room and then he moves out of the room and it's all very fluid. I found that helpful as a checkpoint. Oof, God, I was like, "Don't ask me any questions about process." And then here all I'm doing is talking about process. [laughs]
BAUMBACH: Sorry.
DRIVER: No, no, no, it's my fault.
BAUMBACH: But while we're here, do you remember when we did press together in Paris and you talked about acting being a benign rebellion? Or is this something you've talked about a lot?
DRIVER: No, it's not. I mean, that day with you, and then in every interview since. But other than that ...
BAUMBACH: Well, I've attributed it to you, but have now just outright stolen it. Because I do think it's a very good way to describe what a great actor does. You're both acknowledging the authority of the director and the necessity of the actor to push back and find their own voice.
DRIVER: I always found something strangely paternal about the director-actor relationship. Actors want so much approval. And I'm looking to you to tell me it's good. I want you to be happy and like it all. But at some point, I distrust you, like, "Well, they don't know me as well as I know myself. I know my potential. If it's not good, then I have to fight to make it better." And I start distrusting everybody because you're insecure. So I start to rebel against what's happening, to kind of shock my system a bit. Not rebel like I don't show up on time or I show up drunk or something ... Now we're never going to work together again. [both laugh] It's just a way to take ownership of it for myself.
BAUMBACH: I like that.
DRIVER: I'm looking out my window ... They're always doing stuff for the holidays—Halloween's a big one. Do they trick-or-treat in your building? One year, Joanne [Tucker, Driver's wife] and I bought $100 worth of mini candies, thinking that all the kids in the neighborhood were going to come by—not thinking, obviously, that no one's going to let ****ing strangers up into our building. For some reason, we didn't put that together. We had, like, four kids come by. [both laugh] This one princess took all the candies we had hand over fist. I actually ****ing hate Halloween.
BAUMBACH: It must be cool to see all these kids dressed as Kylo Ren on Halloween.
DRIVER: Yeah. I was dropping my wife off outside our building and I saw this mom holding a lightsaber—like, my lightsaber—and scarily accurate. Like, life-size. And she was handling it like she's handled it a million times. She was juggling four kids who were all running in different directions, and she had three different bags and this lightsaber. Suddenly, the things that are great about this job came into full focus.
BAUMBACH: When you were growing up, were there performances in movies or the theater that you really connected with?
DRIVER: It depends what age. When I was growing up, it was all film. In the town over, in Nappanee, Indiana there was the Round Barn Theatre at Amish Acres where they did, like, Annie Get Your Gun seven years in a row. But apart from that, I didn't have much exposure to theater. I remember watching Total Recall [1990] very young, and Predator [1987]—a lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. But top five performances, I'd say maybe Bill Irwin in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; Fiona Shaw in Happy Days at BAM; Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People [1980]; and pretty much everybody in Kramer vs. Kramer [1979]. Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer is pretty great. Also, Paul Giamatti in my friend's apartment. We did this reading of Philoctetes by Sophocles. He was reading Philoctetes. It was just Paul Giamatti, my friend, and myself in this apartment. And it was one of the most amazing things. He has a foot that's wounded and he's begging Neoptolemus, my character, to cut it off. And I forgot to come in because in watching him, I actually believed that he was suffering and had been on this island for a long time. It was really incredible. But as far as movies that influenced me growing up, it was mostly, like, Lethal Weapon [1987].
BAUMBACH: Right. [both laugh] How was it working with Jim Jarmusch on Paterson? I remember in the mid-'80s when Stranger Than Paradise [1984] and Down by Law [1986] came out—this was right when I was discovering director's movies—and those movies were so exciting for me.
DRIVER: I think Down by Law was the first movie of Jim's I saw. He's just an amazing person, as well, and that comes out in his movies, too. Your sets are similar in that it feels like a conversation that starts when you first agree to do the movie, and it doesn't stop. He says this funny thing on set, where he's like, "We have to figure out this problem because dozens of people are going to watch my movie." [both laugh] And he's also so interested in a lot of things other than film. He's just very curious about all sorts of things. He always meets something unfamiliar with interest, as opposed to judgment, which I find is a pretty amazing quality.
BAUMBACH: I think that you feel that in Jim's movies: There's the movie, and there are so many interesting elements within it. Even sometimes who he casts, particularly in the early movies with musicians and nonactors, artists that were just so interesting and brought something kind of unnamable to the movies—Tom Waits and John Lurie I love. Or Robby Müller, his cinematographer on Down by Law, who shot it in that incredible black-and-white. And, yeah, a conversation is a good way to describe it. I think that when I connect with an actor or a cinematographer or editor, somebody you work that closely with over a period of time, you're still having that conversation—it doesn't stop with the parameters of the movie. And now, this Interview interview. And so Silence! You're in two movies this winter—two wonderful directors. You've now worked with [Steven] Spielberg and [Martin] Scorsese. You've kind of worked with [George] Lucas. You now need [Brian] De Palma and [Francis Ford] Coppola.
DRIVER: Yeah, and they all worked on each other's movies. They all passed their scripts around to each other. Scorsese has this really awesome story of when he was sleeping on John Cassavetes's sets. He didn't have a home. I think they were shooting something in California. Scorsese didn't have a place to stay. They built a set of a house and he was sleeping in it, and everything was decorated and labeled. He was sleeping in a bed labeled "bed." He'd pick up the phone and it'd be "phone." And it'd be fake. [pauses] Maybe we can add that you laughed really hard when I finished.
BAUMBACH: Parenthetically: "Long pause. Driver's story ceases to interest Baumbach." [laughs] I apologize for being general, but there are some directors where it begs a question, like, "What's it like to work with Martin Scorsese?" It's kind of the question to ask.
DRIVER: I guess it's similar to what we were talking about with Jim. They both came up in times where it was a group of people trying to figure it out together—a bunch of friends. As directors, they just know how to talk to actors, and they have a better sense of what everybody's job is on set. They're used to everybody being in the room figuring it out. We were talking about rebellion; that's especially relevant when it comes to Scorsese. You expect to go there and your impulse is to be, "Tell me what to do, and I'll do it." He doesn't want you to do that. He hires you for your ideas and wants you to take ownership of it. It's really inspiring to work with someone who's accomplished so much and is the tip of the pyramid and is still turning to you and wants your ideas and opinions.
BAUMBACH: Because his visual style and energy have been so influential in so many different ways in the culture, I think his Cassavetes way of doing things is maybe less talked about. At least, I hear it talked about less. The performances in his movies have that kind of ... It's why people got so excited about Robert De Niro in Mean Streets [1973] and Taxi Driver [1976]. There's this sense of letting the actor have authorship of what they're doing.
DRIVER: Scorsese was telling me—I think this is well documented—how he was making Boxcar Bertha [1972] or something, and he showed it to Cassavetes, and Cassavetes was like, "What the **** are you doing? Work on this thing you were telling me about." He just pointed him in the right direction, and based on that conversation, the next movie he made was Mean Streets. Cassavetes was a godfather figure to those younger filmmakers.
BAUMBACH: It's interesting how directors of that time—who are distinct in different ways, like [Peter] Bogdanovich and [Robert] Altman and Scorsese—you can connect to Cassavetes, because they knew him and were mentored by him or friends with him or were just excited about his movies. You see the influence in such different ways. But this shoot was more rigorous in terms of what you had to do physically.
DRIVER: He asked us to lose weight. When the movie begins, the characters have been traveling for two years, from Portugal to Macau, sailed around Africa. There's disease and shortage of food. They're already kind of depleted when they get to Macau before their last leg to Japan. There's a lot of storytelling happening off camera. When we come in, the stakes are already so high, and then we continue to lose weight. He wanted to see that physically. He asked us to lose a lot of weight. I didn't know how much that was going to be. And, I can't control what's happening in scenes, but I could control when I ate food. And that visual part of the storytelling, I don't think I've ever taken it to the extreme before. It's an interesting thing. You're so hungry and so tired at some points that there's nothing you can do—you're not adding anything on top of what you're doing. You only have enough energy to convey what you're doing, so it's great. There are other times where a scene's not working and you don't have the energy to figure out why it's not working.
BAUMBACH: Do you remember what was the first Scorsese movie you saw or the first that made an impact on you?
DRIVER: Taxi Driver, I think. I went through the ones I hadn't seen while we working together. I saw Italianamerican [1974]—the documentary he did on his family—which is really good. He's shot in his parents' home, and it's very small, and his parents are talking all about their lives and the people who were in and out—again, the communal aspect of it, which may tie into his way of working. His mom was in a lot of his movies. There's this great part at the end of the movie where they're rolling the credits, and the last credit I think is a recipe for making spaghetti sauce. It made me think about how rich all that stuff is when you are young, you just mull over again throughout your life. It makes me wonder how much people change.
BAUMBACH: He wanted to do this one for quite some time, right?
DRIVER: 28 years. Someone was telling me that there's a shot that he's wanted to do since Mean Streets. Although I've heard people tell different timelines for this, like "For the past ten years ..." or, "When he was born ..." [laughs] I'll have to ask him. But the fact that there's a shot he's been imagining for years is really great.
NOAH BAUMBACH IS THE DIRECTOR OF FILMS INCLUDING THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, GREENBERG, FRANCES HA, AND MISTRESS AMERICA. HE IS CURRENTLY AT WORK ON A NEW FILM.
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