The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1375 - Edward Norton

00:00:01.000 We go.

00:00:02.000 I always know the conversation is going to get off to a good start when I meet a fellow Lenny Bruce fan.

00:00:07.000 Yes.

00:00:08.000 And I... You know, there's that line in Fight Club, the things you own end up owning you.

00:00:15.000 And I generally am not a stuff guy, but when I came in here, I did find myself going, this is the right kind of place to keep stuff.

00:00:24.000 And I've been wandering around looking at things, and that was my favorite thing that I saw.

00:00:29.000 You have a couple of great Lenny Bruce posters, one of which I've never seen.

00:00:34.000 Which one?

00:00:35.000 The one with his...

00:00:36.000 It's really wild.

00:00:37.000 He looks like an Indian guru or something staring into the middle distance.

00:00:41.000 That's an amazing photograph of him.

00:00:43.000 Yeah, I kind of bought as much vintage Lenny Bruce stuff as I could find.

00:00:48.000 This place has sort of evolved into a semi-gallery. 0.99

00:00:53.000 I would like to have a house with nothing in it and then have this place just filled with shit. 0.99

00:00:58.000 No, I kind of agree. 0.99

00:01:00.000 Also, I think that it's fun.

00:01:02.000 When you have people come through a space so that you're actually like...

00:01:05.000 Sharing the things.

00:01:06.000 It's sort of like you're letting someone come in and wander.

00:01:11.000 Some of the best museums in the world are people's individual curation.

00:01:14.000 Some of the best art collections ever made are better than any museum because they're put together by someone and you're finding the threads and things.

00:01:21.000 So I think when you can assemble things that have meant something to you but you can put them in a space where other people can bump into them, it's better than just...

00:01:31.000 Than letting them just collect dust in your own home where you stop looking at them.

00:01:35.000 You have a very unusual perspective for someone who makes a living as an actor.

00:01:40.000 Why do you think so?

00:01:42.000 You're a very thoughtful person.

00:01:44.000 Very thoughtful.

00:01:45.000 I know a lot of thoughtful actors.

00:01:47.000 I do too.

00:01:48.000 I do too.

00:01:48.000 But it's not common.

00:01:51.000 You've got to find them.

00:01:52.000 You've got to curate those folks.

00:01:53.000 Yeah.

00:01:54.000 I... It's a funny gig by definition.

00:02:03.000 If you think about all the yin-yang in it, the paradoxes in it, it's like on the one hand, with guys, actors, there will be a lot of... 0.94

00:02:13.000 There's a certain kind of...

00:02:16.000 Not macho, but there's like, you know, men will look to play intense roles and these things.

00:02:21.000 But what you're doing is like, it's, you're playing dress up.

00:02:26.000 Like, you know, you're like, and I always liked, I always liked the Dorothy Parker, the famous New York, you know, writer said, scratch an actor, you'll find an actress.

00:02:36.000 Yeah.

00:02:38.000 I think it's the greatest line.

00:02:40.000 And it's not how it sounds, just to be a little, you know, like...

00:02:44.000 That's not a knock on actresses. 1.00

00:02:47.000 No, no, no.

00:02:48.000 But that's the real truth of the whole thing, is like, we put on makeup, we put on clothes, we play dress up, and we pretend to be other people.

00:02:56.000 And it's like, it really is like...

00:02:59.000 You know, when people are like, you know, sometimes my brother and sister will laugh because I've done these certain things that have a certain kind of iconic intensity or whatever, right?

00:03:12.000 And they look at me and they're like, are you kidding?

00:03:14.000 Like, have you ever seen the size of his ankles? 0.80

00:03:16.000 They're like, my brother's like, he's such a twerp.

00:03:18.000 Like, he's such a...

00:03:19.000 My brother's like two inches bigger than me and 30 pounds bigger and way stronger, you know, my little brother.

00:03:25.000 And he's...

00:03:26.000 And it's always like, he's the...

00:03:28.000 He's a theater nerd.

00:03:29.000 He's not, like, tough.

00:03:30.000 They're like, don't buy the...

00:03:31.000 When you played the Hulk.

00:03:32.000 Yeah, no.

00:03:34.000 But, um...

00:03:35.000 Or American History X. American History X, yeah.

00:03:37.000 But I do...

00:03:38.000 I do think there's, um...

00:03:43.000 Sometimes it's really funny the way there's a posture in it.

00:03:46.000 Sometimes there's like a public-facing posture that some people who are in this trade, this weird thing, will adopt.

00:03:53.000 And it's like, hey man, I hate to tell you, but you don't have to live into something.

00:04:04.000 I sometimes feel like people are compensating for the fact that what they do, in fact, is play dress-up.

00:04:09.000 Right.

00:04:10.000 Do you think it's also that they have to kind of project this image to ensure that they get more of these tough guy roles?

00:04:18.000 Maybe.

00:04:19.000 I don't know.

00:04:20.000 I don't know.

00:04:21.000 I think...

00:04:21.000 Or maybe it's like...

00:04:25.000 That's who they wanted to be.

00:04:27.000 Maybe in a weird way, they're living into...

00:04:30.000 Some people, I think, they relish the opportunity to change the story of who they are.

00:04:37.000 You know what I mean?

00:04:40.000 They're getting to...

00:04:42.000 Through getting well-known, they're getting this chance to sort of wipe the slate of whatever it is they were getting away from, and they're getting the chance to sort of create a...

00:05:06.000 Yeah, there's...

00:05:10.000 I also think there's a Dustin Hoffman,

00:05:31.000 Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Morgan Freeman, Meryl Streep.

00:05:39.000 That's all like the post-Brando generation. 0.99

00:05:42.000 All of those people, literally all of them, wanted to become actors because of Marlon Brando.

00:05:47.000 And he so rewrote the idea of what it was, what it could be, that you got a whole...

00:05:57.000 It was like what Bob Dylan did in the culture.

00:06:00.000 It was like it rewrote – it just rewrote the game.

00:06:04.000 Or like what Lenny did with comedy.

00:06:06.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:06:07.000 Lenny Bruce.

00:06:08.000 And there are these people who come and they have – They have like a kind of a permanent – they're a permanent before and after in a certain kind of field, you know what I mean?

00:06:21.000 Hendricks with the guitar.

00:06:22.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:06:23.000 Yes, I would say so.

00:06:25.000 I would say so in rock guitar, yeah.

00:06:28.000 Although it is interesting when you go back and look at rock in that era – There's that famous story of, I think, of, I don't remember if it's like Pete Townsend making Eric Clapton come with him to hear Hendrix and Clapton crying.

00:06:40.000 Yes.

00:06:40.000 You know, about it.

00:06:41.000 Yeah, I heard that story.

00:06:42.000 But you also can't discount what Clapton in, you know, there's those famous photos of the wall, Clapton is God, like...

00:06:52.000 There's, it's hard to like, you can't really underrate what Clapton did to guitar, and guitar, you know, in that era too.

00:07:01.000 Right, no, he was phenomenal, but it was a different thing.

00:07:03.000 It was a different thing.

00:07:04.000 Jimi Hendrix was a protean.

00:07:06.000 He seemed like he broke through to a new dimension.

00:07:11.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:07:11.000 He popped through the membrane of existence into this new sound.

00:07:15.000 And there's guys that are, like, there's people that have a distinct sound.

00:07:20.000 Like, are you a Gary Clark Jr. fan?

00:07:22.000 No, I can't.

00:07:23.000 Gary Clark Jr. is a phenomenal blues guitarist.

00:07:27.000 Okay.

00:07:27.000 And he has a sound that's almost instantaneously recognizable as Gary Clark Jr. You hear him and you go, oh my god, there it is.

00:07:36.000 Everyone who works with him is just like, they just walk away sweating, just going, Jesus Christ.

00:07:41.000 Wow.

00:07:41.000 It's phenomenal.

00:07:42.000 I feel that way about Willie Nelson.

00:07:44.000 I think Willie Nelson is legitimately, in country music, there's before and after Willie Nelson.

00:07:50.000 And you can say that Hank Williams Jr. or whatever, but Willie Nelson to me is the hinge around which it goes from being something that had a Nashville Grand Ole Opry kind of polish to it,

00:08:07.000 And he basically took it—he reclaimed it as this, like, American roots thing and put jazz in it.

00:08:16.000 That's what's so crazy is anyone who plays music knows, like, Willie Nelson is essentially a jazz guitar player.

00:08:22.000 Like, and he's—you know, Redheaded Stranger is—to me, that's a before and after kind of a thing, too.

00:08:30.000 Like, there's that whole outlaw thing.

00:08:33.000 And I think there's a whole lot of— It's almost like after that, there's two camps.

00:08:38.000 There's still going to be the Steve Earle in his Copperhead Road thing, but then there's Steve Earle roots Steve Earle.

00:08:48.000 He almost straddled it.

00:08:51.000 But my point about Brando was just that he...

00:08:58.000 He changed the idea of the type of person that male actors wanted to be.

00:09:07.000 Suddenly it was like they wanted to have like a patina or a – as a visceral.

00:09:14.000 They wanted to be visceral, not polished.

00:09:16.000 They wanted to be muscular.

00:09:18.000 They wanted to be masculine.

00:09:19.000 They wanted to be – You know, intense.

00:09:25.000 Like those were not the kind of words that people, when you think back on like Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, like that is not what movie stars were aspiring to.

00:09:36.000 They were aspiring to polish, a kind of a polish.

00:09:40.000 There was an authenticity, right?

00:09:43.000 There's something to his performances where you go, oh, well, this is more like real life than on the waterfront.

00:09:50.000 Like, the I could have been a contender thing.

00:09:53.000 Like, when he's doing that, you're like, oh, this is how someone would actually behave if they felt like their life had been a disaster and it could have been avoided.

00:10:03.000 Well, you just hit on something, though, that it drives me nuts because when people sort of talk about Brando, they're like, you know, they're sort of the, like, the Stanley Kowalski, the brutal masculinity, etc.

00:10:17.000 The thing about Brando is he is beautiful.

00:10:20.000 He's kind of this enormous Roman-looking guy.

00:10:24.000 Yeah.

00:10:25.000 But where he kills, where he really kills is this kind of broken sensitivity that he had.

00:10:31.000 And I could have been a contender is not a tough guy's speech.

00:10:34.000 It's the opposite.

00:10:35.000 It's a broken tough guy.

00:10:37.000 It's a guy practically crying saying like...

00:10:40.000 You were my brother and you should have looked out for me.

00:10:44.000 I needed you looking out for me.

00:10:45.000 And my life's gone down the toilet because in that moment you didn't look out for me.

00:10:52.000 It's like tearful.

00:10:54.000 And even the best moment of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar is really when he falls on his knees in front of his wife and cries.

00:11:04.000 You know what I mean?

00:11:05.000 He was way...

00:11:14.000 Right.

00:11:18.000 Right.

00:11:27.000 Yes.

00:11:27.000 And it resonated real.

00:11:30.000 Like, it felt real.

00:11:32.000 And if you watch actors before him, there was a certain undeniable theatric element to what they were doing that was like, oh, this guy's acting.

00:11:43.000 Whereas he seemed like a guy who was really living the scene.

00:11:48.000 Yeah.

00:11:49.000 Yeah.

00:11:50.000 And some of it – sometimes I think it sounds silly to say the instrument of a person, but he has this crazy – he looks the way he looks, but he's got this marble-mouthed – he's not articulate.

00:12:02.000 He doesn't come off as – like there's a mushiness to the way he speaks and kind of a – Yeah, it doesn't have style.

00:12:14.000 You know, the guys before that, you felt that they were working on their style.

00:12:20.000 And he seemed to be sort of like scratching his ribs and mumbling and, you know, in a t-shirt.

00:12:31.000 And he just was kind of present in the moment.

00:12:35.000 I think it was all accentuated by the way he ended his life, like the end of his life.

00:12:38.000 He was enormous.

00:12:39.000 Yeah. 0.82

00:12:40.000 Gigantic fat guy and he just given in to all of his vices and he was just this guy.

00:12:46.000 He was a beautiful man.

00:12:48.000 Yeah. 0.97

00:12:48.000 He just didn't seem to give a fuck about that at all. 0.97

00:12:52.000 Yeah, I think he said something to me one time about how much he was enjoying his life when he was like 23. And he's like, you know, even when he was doing the play Streetcar that made him famous, he was telling me like he would get with his pal Diego and go up to Harlem, 0.97

00:13:07.000 go to clubs and hit on girls and all these things.

00:13:11.000 And I said, you weren't aware of what was going on, you know?

00:13:15.000 And he goes, well...

00:13:17.000 I was aware of a certain amount of noise rising, and then one day I woke up and I was sitting on a pile of candy.

00:13:24.000 And I thought, what a really wild way to say it.

00:13:29.000 And I do think, I'm not even joking to me, it's like what you said.

00:13:33.000 It was like after that, there was no boundaries.

00:13:38.000 He was getting everything.

00:13:40.000 Everything was...

00:13:42.000 He wasn't going to be able to resist.

00:13:45.000 He wasn't disciplined.

00:13:46.000 He wasn't a super disciplined person.

00:13:48.000 He was a very poetic person.

00:13:50.000 And I don't think he was disciplined.

00:13:51.000 And I think that a lot of what happened...

00:13:54.000 You know, he had something like 17 children.

00:13:57.000 And he got...

00:13:58.000 You know, he had appetites.

00:14:00.000 And he had these things.

00:14:01.000 And I think that...

00:14:03.000 I do think that he...

00:14:08.000 You know, struggled to...

00:14:13.000 To deal with all the things that came with being that famous.

00:14:17.000 Yeah.

00:14:18.000 And being that famous when there wasn't really a lot of examples of how to do it right or wrong before you.

00:14:24.000 Yeah.

00:14:25.000 It's sort of the Elvis thing, right?

00:14:27.000 Yeah, it's the Elvis thing.

00:14:28.000 The flip is like Dylan, who I still find myself, like when you watch the new Scorsese, have you seen that thing, Rolling Thunder?

00:14:37.000 It's really worth watching that.

00:14:41.000 Or the original Scorsese doc about him on No Direction Home.

00:14:45.000 Here's this guy, he's in his early 20s, and they're coming at him with all this voice of your generation, all this stuff, and he's like, that's nothing I can relate to, man.

00:14:54.000 And he's going...

00:14:57.000 I can't help wondering if Lenny Bruce loved Dylan.

00:15:00.000 I don't know that, but I would think that Lenny Bruce was tuned in to Dylan because Dylan's thing was like...

00:15:07.000 Don't ask me what it means, man.

00:15:08.000 I wrote it.

00:15:09.000 I don't know what it means.

00:15:11.000 What do you think it means?

00:15:12.000 He was just constantly going, buzz off, man.

00:15:15.000 I'm not picking it apart for you.

00:15:17.000 I'm not going to pick it apart for you.

00:15:19.000 I'm not going to buy into this stuff you're putting at me.

00:15:22.000 He was 20, 21 years old.

00:15:26.000 Who resists people falling all over them to call them great when they're that age?

00:15:32.000 Nobody.

00:15:33.000 Nobody has that.

00:15:37.000 Sensibility.

00:15:37.000 Sensibility to go, everything you're bringing at me is going to be bad for me.

00:15:42.000 If you watch those interviews with him when he's that age, it's pretty astonishing.

00:15:47.000 Because to your point, you're like a thoughtful actor.

00:15:51.000 I look at him and I'm like, nobody has that discipline at that age.

00:15:56.000 Yeah, it's amazing how uniquely qualified he was for that position at that point in time and that very strange, tumultuous time in history as well.

00:16:04.000 And not only that, right at the moment that Joni Baez brings him out on the stage at the Newport Folk Festival and basically goes, this is the prince.

00:16:14.000 I anoint you.

00:16:15.000 He's the one.

00:16:16.000 He's Neo.

00:16:17.000 He is the one.

00:16:19.000 And the next year...

00:16:22.000 He doesn't even take one year to go, let me just lean into your love.

00:16:28.000 The next year he comes with an electric guitar and plugs it in at the Newport Folk Festival and people start screaming in agony, like going, what are you doing?

00:16:38.000 Like, you're Bob Dylan, you're the king of folk, you can't plug in a guitar.

00:16:41.000 And people are like running to try to cut his cords with an axe in this thing.

00:16:45.000 Like, that's how much of a betrayal.

00:16:46.000 And he's like...

00:16:48.000 There's people yelling traitor at him and he's going, I don't believe you. 1.00

00:16:51.000 I think you're a liar. 0.96

00:16:53.000 And he's turning around to Robbie Robertson and going, play it loud. 0.99

00:16:56.000 The guy is so punk rock.

00:16:58.000 He's so totally punk rock.

00:17:00.000 He was as punk rock as anybody ever.

00:17:03.000 I think he probably had to be just to resist what they were trying to box him into.

00:17:08.000 Yeah, but there's never been anybody who was more like, oh, you like what I'm doing?

00:17:12.000 I'm gone.

00:17:12.000 I'm over here.

00:17:14.000 Like, enjoy.

00:17:15.000 You're going to not like it because you like what I just did.

00:17:18.000 Now where I'm going, you're going to be discombobulated and upset, and eventually you're going to catch up, and then when you catch up, I'm going to move on to something else.

00:17:26.000 It really is amazing, because how many people do you know in any of the things we all do, Right.

00:17:37.000 Right.

00:17:46.000 Well, it's always weird when you see somebody lean into something and it's not really them and they become what people want of them.

00:17:54.000 A great example in comedy was Kinison.

00:17:58.000 Kinison, when he made it, everybody wanted to lay these gigantic lines of coke for him, apparently.

00:18:05.000 They're like, oh, it's him!

00:18:06.000 It's him!

00:18:07.000 He's here!

00:18:08.000 They just laid some giant line of coke and he would joke around about it like I had to do it. 0.99

00:18:13.000 And he would do a giant line and almost have a fucking heart attack. 0.98

00:18:16.000 I can't not live into the thing because then they'll stop trusting it. 0.99

00:18:22.000 But you become a caricature.

00:18:24.000 You become this thing.

00:18:25.000 Like Dice Clay is another example.

00:18:27.000 Dice Clay used to be one part of his act.

00:18:31.000 His name is Andrew Silverstein.

00:18:33.000 So he would do his act, and then the Dice Man was a character that he would do.

00:18:37.000 But people loved it so much when he would do that character that the character became his whole act, and then he became the character.

00:18:44.000 Where you see him in real life, he's wearing weightlifting gloves and walking around in a Gold's Gym t-shirt.

00:18:49.000 He became that guy.

00:18:51.000 He's hilarious still, but he's that guy now.

00:18:55.000 But now he's kind of out the backside of that, wouldn't you say?

00:18:57.000 In what way?

00:18:59.000 Well, now he's acting in things.

00:19:01.000 He does do that and act well, but he still does the same kind of stand-up.

00:19:06.000 Really?

00:19:06.000 If you go see him, it's still hilarious, irreverent, just not...

00:19:15.000 Well, let me ask you a question, because I think it's interesting.

00:19:18.000 I think in that vein, like if you look at Howard Stern, who I've met only a couple times, but I found him to be like an extremely, extremely thoughtful guy.

00:19:31.000 And I don't mean that.

00:19:33.000 He just was very, really smart.

00:19:36.000 But he's also like...

00:19:38.000 I don't know, the conversation—we have mutual friends, and I really enjoyed talking to him.

00:19:45.000 Like, I thought, like, oh, there's nothing tricky about him at all.

00:19:48.000 He's really, like, down in his shoes.

00:19:51.000 He's interested.

00:19:52.000 He actually asks questions.

00:19:53.000 I mean, there's some people you meet, and you're just like, oh, my God.

00:19:55.000 They're talking in a mirror.

00:19:57.000 You're a mirror, and they're just looking at themselves while they speak to you.

00:20:00.000 They're waiting for you to get done talking so they can talk.

00:20:03.000 Yeah.

00:20:05.000 But what I think is really interesting is like, so Howard, imagine the pressure, because I grew up in the Baltimore area.

00:20:14.000 He was on DC Radio.

00:20:15.000 He was on DC 101. I remember that.

00:20:20.000 The shock of him, literally.

00:20:22.000 And imagine, you know, the pull to deliver on what you've built, which was obviously, you know, a huge audience that wanted this thing.

00:20:35.000 To me, it's really interesting and impressive that Howard's kind of – and I'm saying it like I know him.

00:20:41.000 I don't know him.

00:20:42.000 But watching it, to me, this idea that he's kind of said, hey, look, you know, I'm – I'm going to be honest about where I'm at and in some measure I'm going to say there's things I've done I regret.

00:20:55.000 There's ways I've treated certain people in the interest of the show that I'm kind of done with that.

00:21:02.000 I don't really want to be that guy.

00:21:03.000 And in some measure, you know, He's kind of saying to his audience, like, you've got to deal with me where I am now.

00:21:10.000 You know what I mean?

00:21:11.000 Now, it's not like there's a huge risk in that because his audience is gigantic, right?

00:21:17.000 Well, it's also he's so successful and so universally praised as being the most important figure in the history of radio.

00:21:23.000 Like, there's no one who does, like, what I do, podcasts.

00:21:27.000 There's no gigantic debt of gratitude to Howard Stern.

00:21:30.000 The fact that, you know, he was getting fined by the FCC. I mean, they were...

00:21:35.000 Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

00:21:36.000 He kept getting fired from radio stations.

00:21:38.000 We kept doing the way he did it, and it changed the way people do talk radio.

00:21:43.000 Honestly, the fact that we've talked as long as we've talked up to now is a function of him proving that there was a tolerance for...

00:21:53.000 Long form, basically.

00:21:54.000 You know what I mean?

00:21:55.000 I mean, it's like people knock on Netflix or whatever.

00:21:58.000 I'm like, anything... 0.85

00:22:00.000 There's an amazing thing going on in the world right now, which is people are reproving or reconnecting with the fact that for all of what goes on on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all this bullshit,

00:22:15.000 the truth is people like and have the appetite for and their brains...

00:22:22.000 Enjoy longer form conversations and longer form stories.

00:22:28.000 More than it was assumed they did.

00:22:32.000 You know what I mean?

00:22:32.000 And like popular culture feeds us a lot of like fast food and Xanax in like a speedball of you can't handle anything.

00:22:41.000 You don't want anything more than literally like a little bit of junk food with a little bit of Xanax because you just want to lie on your couch and watch someone else save the world.

00:22:49.000 I know that's all you want, but that is not true.

00:22:52.000 And I think like...

00:22:53.000 You know, you look at things like from Peaky Blinders to Chernobyl to like the Ken Burns Civil War series.

00:23:01.000 Like we're going through this thing where people are realizing like, no, that's not actually true.

00:23:07.000 People actually like you, my pal Dax, you know, Shepard, who's got a great radio show, is People like to listen to people who have actual conversations.

00:23:18.000 Well, they're also listening – it's a new way of ingesting entertainment.

00:23:24.000 Like you're getting it in your car, you're getting it in your ears when you're at the gym, when you're on the subway or a bus or a plane.

00:23:31.000 And you're getting these stimulating long-form conversations that maybe people didn't even know they wanted.

00:23:38.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:23:39.000 I agree.

00:23:40.000 Everybody loves a great conversation with someone.

00:23:42.000 So it's like you get to have that conversation without participating.

00:23:46.000 Right.

00:23:47.000 And Stern definitely was like – we were talking about before and after.

00:23:52.000 There was talk radio, but that – But it kind of starts there, I think.

00:23:56.000 I think you started to be like, I can listen to this guy for a long time.

00:24:00.000 Yeah, he broke through the membrane.

00:24:01.000 Like we were talking about Hendrix entering into a new dimension of sounds.

00:24:04.000 He broke through the membrane of talk radio.

00:24:07.000 And what he's doing now is, well, now he's a man in his 60s.

00:24:12.000 Who's extremely wealthy and he has some, I'm sure, some regrets as you were talking about the things that he's done in the past and said in the past.

00:24:20.000 And he's also like, this is who he is now.

00:24:22.000 He's not going to pretend that he just wants to bring strippers in and have them ride the city in every day.

00:24:27.000 And when people get upset that he's changed, well, I hope you change too, man.

00:24:30.000 I hope everybody changes.

00:24:32.000 No, that's what I mean.

00:24:32.000 I admire...

00:24:33.000 I mean, it's true.

00:24:34.000 It's not quite Dylan when he's 24 and being anointed, plugging in a guitar.

00:24:39.000 But I do think it's...

00:24:41.000 When people sort of go, hey, I'm going to be where I am and you've got to deal with it, that's positive, I think.

00:24:53.000 Well, it's definitely better than leaning into it and being what people want you to be and then be struggling with that and tortured by that.

00:25:00.000 I actually think most of the – most of people who – I think that mostly ends up badly.

00:25:05.000 Yes.

00:25:06.000 Yes.

00:25:06.000 Yeah, I think whenever you don't go with whoever you actually are and whenever you don't acknowledge that whoever you actually are has changed.

00:25:13.000 You know, if you're growing and learning and having these epiphanies and these realizations about yourself and where you fit into your own life and how you've interacted with people in your life, you're not making adjustments, and you're only doing it that way because you think that's what people expect of you.

00:25:28.000 Well, you're a prisoner to your own first incarnation.

00:25:32.000 Yeah.

00:25:33.000 You know, the first thing that people saw, and that was kinesis.

00:25:36.000 And he's kind of a prisoner to that forever.

00:25:39.000 Yeah.

00:25:40.000 Yeah.

00:25:40.000 And acknowledged it.

00:25:42.000 Yeah.

00:25:42.000 It's why anybody who – it's not even act two.

00:25:48.000 Anybody who keeps doing interesting things through phases is even more impressive.

00:25:57.000 Yeah.

00:25:57.000 Is it hard as an actor too if you get an iconic role and then you are sort of – Always remembered for being that guy in that thing.

00:26:09.000 Is it a hard transition to go from an iconic role to going into your next role?

00:26:17.000 Do people still want to talk about the big movie that you were in just a year or two ago?

00:26:24.000 That hasn't been a big thing for me.

00:26:28.000 I think...

00:26:32.000 I tend to take a bit of time between things and also, I don't know, when I, you know, like the first thing I did kind of popped off pretty hot and then everyone's like sending me like,

00:26:52.000 You know, psychotic.

00:26:54.000 Right. 0.95

00:26:54.000 Psychotic, interesting characters. 0.95

00:26:56.000 I was like, well, I think I'll do a musical with Woody Allen.

00:26:59.000 You know what I mean?

00:27:00.000 And wear a plaid jacket and do a dance number in Harry Winston's.

00:27:04.000 Switch it up.

00:27:05.000 Yeah, or...

00:27:08.000 And then what's really weird is I did that first – I did a – I played this lawyer.

00:27:12.000 I played a young lawyer in the Larry Flint film, right?

00:27:15.000 And off of that, I got this distinct vibe of like, hey, the next John Grisham movie is – like the way you were talking in court in that movie, you would kill in this John Grisham thing as the young lawyer or whatever.

00:27:30.000 And – And I remember I met – Francis Coppola was going to direct The Rainmaker, this Grisham thing, and I was up for it.

00:27:39.000 I didn't get it.

00:27:40.000 Matt Damon got it.

00:27:42.000 And I didn't do some ballsy thing and like say, that's not for me.

00:27:46.000 I was like Francis Coppola.

00:27:47.000 I was like, I want this – but when I was talking to him about it – And thinking to myself a little bit like, this seems a little square, but it's like Francis Coppola, you know what I mean?

00:28:01.000 And when I was talking to him about it, he was like, well, what are you working on?

00:28:08.000 What are you interested in?

00:28:09.000 And I was telling him about my friend David, who had written American History X that we were working on.

00:28:16.000 I was kind of telling him what we were trying to do with it and how we wanted to make it as this kind of like...

00:28:21.000 Gorilla, you know, thing.

00:28:23.000 And he was like, you should do that.

00:28:24.000 You should do that immediately.

00:28:26.000 And I was like, well, I want to...

00:28:28.000 I was like, don't cancel...

00:28:31.000 I still want to do this with you.

00:28:33.000 He's like, no, no, I think you should do...

00:28:34.000 The way you're talking about that.

00:28:36.000 And he said, if you do that now, they'll never know what to do with you.

00:28:43.000 They'll never be able to put you in a box.

00:28:48.000 Because that's just...

00:28:50.000 If you pull that off – and I kind of was like – I did have an agent at the time.

00:28:56.000 It was really old school, really funny and he was kind of like – he didn't understand that.

00:29:01.000 He was like – He was like, find something big.

00:29:05.000 Let's find something big.

00:29:06.000 Big director, big film, big franchise, whatever.

00:29:09.000 I remember thinking, nah, I think I'm going to do this.

00:29:13.000 We knocked that off.

00:29:15.000 The funny thing is you say, well, does that become a trap?

00:29:17.000 That wasn't a trap.

00:29:18.000 That was like a liberation.

00:29:19.000 It's almost like doing that part.

00:29:21.000 It was like a permanent hand grenade on...

00:29:24.000 It was like, well, we never know what to expect now, right?

00:29:30.000 So it becomes like liberation at a certain point.

00:29:34.000 Because, like, I weigh 150. You know, like, I'm not big.

00:29:38.000 So, like, once you do something like that, it's sort of like, hmm, this guy's...

00:29:45.000 This guy's kinky. 0.99

00:29:46.000 What the hell are we going to do with him? 0.99

00:29:48.000 You know what I mean?

00:29:49.000 And then it's just sort of like you get to decide for yourself in a way.

00:29:54.000 That's brilliant.

00:29:55.000 Robert Downey Jr., as amazing as he is, is always going to be Iron Man.

00:29:59.000 Sometimes you get one of those roles.

00:30:02.000 Like Thor, Chris Helmsworth. 0.99

00:30:04.000 He's fucking Thor. 0.99

00:30:05.000 Dude, you're Thor forever. 1.00

00:30:07.000 You flirted with that.

00:30:09.000 And I think it depends on how many of them you do.

00:30:12.000 When you did The Hulk, were you worried about that?

00:30:16.000 A little bit.

00:30:17.000 Was there any hesitation?

00:30:18.000 Because I was surprised when you did that.

00:30:20.000 I was like, this is an interesting choice.

00:30:22.000 As is evident, I got more worried about it.

00:30:25.000 You know, I was very interested because I loved it.

00:30:31.000 I'm not, like, snobby about it.

00:30:33.000 I loved those, like, comics.

00:30:35.000 And I subscribed to them.

00:30:37.000 I subscribed to Hulk.

00:30:40.000 All the darker stuff, like Dark Knight, Frank Miller, the whole...

00:30:46.000 All of it was really, you know, it was something I really latched on to.

00:30:54.000 And I love the Bill Bixby Hulk.

00:30:58.000 Like, he's it for me.

00:31:00.000 He's always, for anyone our age, like, he's, you know, him walking away at the end of the show.

00:31:04.000 That's it.

00:31:05.000 And I, so yeah, no, I thought, I tend to get Just the way I felt about American History X, I actually thought American History X was sort of like Othello or Macbeth.

00:31:19.000 I thought it was – that's what I said to David.

00:31:22.000 He had written this kind of edgy thing with the drug plot in it.

00:31:25.000 I was like, I think you strip all that away and you literally just make this about rage destroying a person who's got a lot in him.

00:31:32.000 It's like a Shakespearean tragedy but it's just – it's skinheads. 0.95

00:31:38.000 That really lit David up and that's where we went with that, right?

00:31:41.000 Yeah.

00:31:42.000 But Hulk is like the – it's Prometheus, right?

00:31:49.000 The guy who steals fire from the gods for people but he gets burned doing it and is cursed, right?

00:31:56.000 He's trying to take – Like the power of nature back out to people from the gods and he gets burned.

00:32:03.000 And that's how I thought about it.

00:32:05.000 I was like if we could do something like that that leans into this guy who thinks he's going for something good that's going to help humanity and he cracks open like the backside of God and takes something out that is not meant to be taken out and now he's cursed.

00:32:24.000 Like, cursed.

00:32:25.000 You know, that's what was amazing. 0.97

00:32:26.000 Even as silly as the show was on some levels, Bill Bixby was cursed. 0.90

00:32:30.000 Like, that's what... 0.97

00:32:31.000 And the end of every show, you were like, oh my god, he's still cursed.

00:32:36.000 Like, alone in the world and cursed, right?

00:32:38.000 And there's something pretty heavy in that.

00:32:41.000 Like, pretty cool in that.

00:32:45.000 And so it wasn't...

00:32:49.000 You know, I thought it was like really worth a crack. 0.97

00:32:52.000 I fucking loved it. 0.95

00:32:53.000 How did that scene come to play where you were with Hicks and Gracie? 0.99

00:32:58.000 Oh, because I studied Aikido when I was in college.

00:33:02.000 Wow.

00:33:04.000 I was studying Aikido, and then when I was studying Aikido, Hoist Gracie won the...

00:33:15.000 You know, that was...

00:33:17.000 Ultimate Fighting Championship.

00:33:18.000 That was like the late 80s, right?

00:33:19.000 1993. 93, okay.

00:33:21.000 Close.

00:33:22.000 Five years later.

00:33:23.000 Right.

00:33:23.000 So, but he...

00:33:24.000 I became aware.

00:33:26.000 Oh, no, that's it.

00:33:27.000 You're right.

00:33:28.000 Because I was in New York.

00:33:29.000 I was studying Aikido in New York.

00:33:32.000 And Hoyce Gracie won that first UFC. And like I said, I'm six feet tall, but I literally, if I'm in shape, I weigh like 155, right?

00:33:42.000 And Hoyce, when he won that, was like six feet and under 180, right?

00:33:48.000 And I remember it melted everybody's mind.

00:33:51.000 I mean, it melted everybody's mind.

00:33:52.000 And so I became interested in them.

00:33:57.000 And what they were doing, honestly, do you know in the story, in that family's whole crazy story about being...

00:34:08.000 You know, they were Scottish.

00:34:10.000 The grandfather was Scottish, right?

00:34:13.000 And he was like a consular.

00:34:15.000 He was a customs official in Brazil.

00:34:19.000 And because he had a good relationship with the Japanese consul, And helped, was very generous in helping Japanese people get their papers to come through and in.

00:34:32.000 The Japanese consul, I think the story is, who knew Aikido and Jiu Jitsu, offered to, like, teach his sons.

00:34:41.000 Yeah, it was Count Maeda.

00:34:42.000 He came to Brazil and taught Carlos and Horian and Ilio.

00:34:50.000 Well, mostly Ilio.

00:34:51.000 Who are the fathers of the Hoi-Sixson generation, right? 0.99

00:34:53.000 And then Ilio's oldest son.

00:34:56.000 I think Horian was the oldest son.

00:34:59.000 He's the one who created the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

00:35:00.000 But Hickson, the reason why it was so significant that you had him, is that was the champion of the family.

00:35:06.000 Like, undeniably, undisputed everyone.

00:35:10.000 Everyone throughout jiu-jitsu, it's very, very rare that one figure is universally recognized as being the superior product of jiu-jitsu, and that was Hickson.

00:35:21.000 Yeah, if you followed that stuff at all, you kind of heard that breakdown of it.

00:35:27.000 I thought a part of the story, I think Hickson told me...

00:35:33.000 When we were in Rio, I think what he said to me was that the reason Gracie Jiu Jitsu became its particular derivation and its particular kind of things that allowed Hoyce to do so well was because their father...

00:35:50.000 Was smaller than his brothers.

00:35:52.000 That's Ilio.

00:35:53.000 Right.

00:35:53.000 And they were all bigger.

00:35:55.000 And because he was smaller, he adapted the style to work for a smaller person against a bigger person, obviously.

00:36:04.000 And then that kind of reached its...

00:36:08.000 It's pinnacle with Hoist winning that tournament.

00:36:13.000 This gets down in the weeds for people who aren't into this stuff.

00:36:18.000 You talk about these things, the cracking through moment, right?

00:36:21.000 That was a cracking through moment.

00:36:23.000 It was like, wait a minute.

00:36:25.000 A guy his size just literally won an all-form, all-size tournament.

00:36:30.000 How is that possible?

00:36:32.000 You know what I mean?

00:36:33.000 It was like jaw hits floor.

00:36:36.000 To me, what was really interesting was I was really little all the way until literally the end of high school.

00:36:41.000 I was very small.

00:36:42.000 I grew a lot when I was like 17. But I was really interested in Japan and I was interested in martial arts and, you know, James Clavel's Shogun.

00:36:55.000 And I took like a karate class and it scared me.

00:36:59.000 People, if they were bigger and faster, it was just scary.

00:37:02.000 If you were little, it was like, I can't.

00:37:05.000 It doesn't matter if I can do these combos or whatever.

00:37:09.000 In truth, I'm terrified of anybody bigger than me and I don't feel...

00:37:14.000 That this is teaching me anything that I would have the confidence to use to defend myself, right?

00:37:32.000 And he was small.

00:37:33.000 He was like, you know, maybe smaller than Hoyce Gracie or whatever.

00:37:36.000 And the guy was unbelievably, like, potent.

00:37:40.000 Like, just one of the most potent teachers in anything I ever had.

00:37:45.000 I was riveted by this guy.

00:37:49.000 And it kind of started to make me believe that with grappling and locking, which there's a lot of jujitsu in Aikido, and I was sort of like – I was fascinated. 0.97

00:38:01.000 I started feeling like this makes me feel like I – It's not like kicking someone's ass at all.

00:38:09.000 It's just more like I feel more empowered. 0.92

00:38:11.000 I feel able to handle an authentic situation, which is mentally empowering more than like I want to get into scraps.

00:38:21.000 And it was just kind of amazing.

00:38:23.000 It's like having a secret in a way like, whoa, there's a secret to a much smaller person being able to lever a much bigger person.

00:38:29.000 And then that thing happened with the gray season.

00:38:32.000 It was sort of like...

00:38:34.000 I think?

00:38:57.000 Welcome to my show!

00:39:12.000 And I'd seen the videos of Hicks.

00:39:14.000 I'd never met him or any of them, but I'd seen the videos of him doing the amazing stuff with his stomach.

00:39:19.000 Yeah, the yoga.

00:39:20.000 Yeah, and the breathing.

00:39:21.000 Fire breathing.

00:39:21.000 And I just was like, and everyone was like, who's that?

00:39:25.000 I was like, Philistines! 0.99

00:39:28.000 You're all Philistines! 1.00

00:39:30.000 And I was like, find me Hicks and Gracie and ask him if he'll do a scene with me in the movie being the guy who's training Banner to calm himself.

00:39:39.000 And he was there, and he did it with us.

00:39:43.000 Yeah, there it is right here.

00:39:44.000 Yeah.

00:39:45.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:39:46.000 When I saw this in the movie, I was like, oh, fuck yeah. 0.99

00:39:50.000 Like, what a smart move. 0.99

00:39:52.000 Yeah.

00:39:52.000 And I was like...

00:39:56.000 I was like, yeah, see?

00:39:58.000 I forgot this. 0.98

00:39:59.000 Holy crap. 0.78

00:40:00.000 I haven't looked at this in a long time. 0.98

00:40:02.000 Look how charismatic he is, too.

00:40:04.000 I mean, the guy could have been like Charles Bronson.

00:40:07.000 100%.

00:40:07.000 Like a movie star.

00:40:08.000 Did you ever see Choke, the documentary?

00:40:10.000 Yeah.

00:40:11.000 One of the greatest documentaries in history.

00:40:14.000 It's like pumping iron.

00:40:14.000 Absolutely, yeah.

00:40:15.000 Absolutely for martial arts.

00:40:17.000 And it details Hickson's journeys to Japan to fight in Japan Valley Tudo, which was around 94, which is right after his brother had won the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

00:40:27.000 And the story was that...

00:40:29.000 I think we're good to go.

00:40:49.000 Right.

00:41:08.000 Hoist is the ultimate fighting champion.

00:41:10.000 He's the guy.

00:41:10.000 But his brother would just run right through him.

00:41:12.000 He would run right through everybody.

00:41:14.000 They would have a line of black belts, and they would all wait for their turn to get tapped.

00:41:19.000 And they would roll with Hickson, and he would just dismantle everybody.

00:41:22.000 People that thought they understood jiu-jitsu.

00:41:26.000 There's so many levels and layers to jujitsu that even though it looks like, what is the difference?

00:41:31.000 This guy's doing an arm bar, you're doing an arm bar.

00:41:33.000 There's specifics in the intricate aspects of the positions that Hickson understood that they just didn't understand.

00:41:40.000 And then on top of that, he had much greater control of his body because of his yoga background.

00:41:44.000 I mean, he became obsessed with yoga.

00:41:46.000 And breathing.

00:41:47.000 Yeah, some breathing and something called gymnastica natural, which was like a style of movement that was sort of like vinyasa yoga with all these flowing postures, but also with a bunch of almost like animal movements to it, too.

00:42:02.000 And it was a very physically demanding thing, and he became outstanding at that as well.

00:42:09.000 Sorry.

00:42:09.000 But people don't – from the outside, when you start talking about things like jiu-jitsu and ultimate fighting, you think of it as brutal, violent.

00:42:16.000 But it's an intellectual pursuit and it's a spiritual pursuit because to be the person that can overcome all of the obstacles, you have to have incredible control of your emotions and your thought processes and your understanding of who you are.

00:42:29.000 And that, I think, is one of the things that separated Hickson from everybody.

00:42:33.000 I do too.

00:42:33.000 I also think that – I think that people don't realize that – A lot of stress, a lot of aggression.

00:42:44.000 It's like aggression actually is paired with stress usually.

00:42:49.000 You know what I mean?

00:42:50.000 It's hard to be aggressive, super aggressive without a little bit of adrenaline pumping and stress and all these things.

00:42:56.000 The truth is, like, there's so much of the training – if you're actually training this stuff, what you're training yourself to do is be calm.

00:43:04.000 And that's, like, totally counterintuitive because people think, no, you've got to go in there like Rocky and, you know, want to win.

00:43:10.000 And it's like, well, in a fighting – in a competition, sure, on some level.

00:43:16.000 But really, really, really great people, kind of in any sport, but it's even more counterintuitive in fighting is – Is you need to cultivate calm.

00:43:26.000 And the ability to be clinical and think calmly, control your breathing, because you get exhausted if you can't control your breathing.

00:43:35.000 And the truth is, is that those are life skills that are actually very...

00:43:41.000 They cultivate calm.

00:43:45.000 It helps you cultivate calm in life.

00:43:47.000 And the thing I always really liked about Aikido...

00:43:52.000 Is that there aren't attacks in it.

00:43:55.000 It was developed by a guy, Morihei Yeshiba, who was an all-round bujutsu master.

00:44:02.000 He was like in jiu-jitsu, kendo, karate, all these things.

00:44:07.000 And he developed Aikido because he had joined the global pacifist movement.

00:44:13.000 He was like one of the most respected cross...

00:44:20.000 I think?

00:44:34.000 To passivism if they refined and Aikido was a refinement of kendo, jiu-jitsu, judo and he basically said I'm going to develop a non-aggressive martial art that has all – it has no attacks and there's an uke in it like for the – But it's only a defensive,

00:44:54.000 and it's like that phrase we all hear, redirection of energy, the conversion of negative energy into neutral.

00:45:02.000 That is really his contribution.

00:45:06.000 He was like, you can take the most aggressive energy and you can neutralize it, and you can neutralize it very peacefully, or you can neutralize it with a little more teeth in it, depending on how aggressive the person's being.

00:45:17.000 But I loved that.

00:45:19.000 I thought that was amazing because it was like...

00:45:22.000 I wasn't like looking to be in fight, but I loved the idea that you could have control and you could like neutralize.

00:45:29.000 And I think there's something kind of amazing in that.

00:45:33.000 I think it's like actually aligns with like yoga, with meditation, with all things, surfing.

00:45:41.000 I mean, that's what surfing is.

00:45:42.000 It's like there's all this energy coming at you.

00:45:45.000 And it's going to put you into the rocks or rock you or flip you over.

00:45:49.000 But you don't let that happen.

00:45:53.000 You look at it.

00:45:54.000 You look at a million waves.

00:45:55.000 You figure out how to move yourself.

00:45:57.000 You get in there and you get the exact opposite of getting torched.

00:46:00.000 You get the best thing ever.

00:46:03.000 And I think things like that that are...

00:46:07.000 Where you have to – those are like Zen.

00:46:09.000 You know what I mean?

00:46:10.000 And I think like Jiu-Jitsu, what you're saying is really ultimately like why he was great is he had like the deepest Zen of anybody in the whole thing because he was the calmest.

00:46:21.000 And he had like the micro, micro, micro, micro understanding of – Yeah, he had everything.

00:46:36.000 He had the full package of it.

00:46:38.000 Did you ever see any of Steven Zagal when he was very young?

00:46:41.000 When he was teaching in Japan?

00:46:43.000 I was totally fascinated.

00:46:45.000 It's weird, right?

00:46:47.000 Like me, right?

00:46:48.000 Like serious actor, thoughtful actor.

00:46:53.000 But Above the Law, because I was into all that stuff when Above the Law came out, And there was this scene in Above the Law, and he's in an Aikido, you know, gi with the black thing, and he's doing this thing. 0.79

00:47:06.000 And I was like, oh my god, like, this is so cool.

00:47:10.000 Like, when have you ever seen this in a movie?

00:47:13.000 And he was a, you know, big guy.

00:47:15.000 And he made it violent.

00:47:16.000 Yeah, big.

00:47:16.000 It was a very unusual sort of contribution to martial arts, and martial arts movies.

00:47:21.000 He made it realistic.

00:47:23.000 It was one of the most realistic martial arts movies ever.

00:47:26.000 Yeah, it was – and when you look back on it, there's things about it that don't date super well.

00:47:31.000 Yeah, of course, but he was undeniable skillful.

00:47:34.000 Literally what you just showed, the thing of the guy coming, it's that simple thing, that thrust and the break and the thing.

00:47:41.000 Yes.

00:47:42.000 He also, in the film, when the guys come at him, this shows you how it burns your brain.

00:47:48.000 There's a scene where there's like a bodega and the guy, I think he smashes a bottle and he comes at him and he does like a move.

00:47:56.000 In Aikido, it's called like kotakaishi.

00:47:59.000 It's like the wrist break flip over.

00:48:04.000 And it was just like, oh my god, he's doing nuanced Aikido moves in a big action movie.

00:48:11.000 It was kind of cool.

00:48:12.000 Well, he was one of the first, I think, the first Westerner to run a dojo in Japan.

00:48:16.000 I mean, he was a legitimate Aikido master.

00:48:19.000 Yeah, and I think...

00:48:20.000 But what's interesting is when I studied over there, he was...

00:48:23.000 It was slightly controversial because I don't think he was...

00:48:27.000 He had broken away from like Yushiba Aikido.

00:48:32.000 He was doing...

00:48:33.000 He was doing like the way that Gracie Jiu-Jitsu is not pure Japanese Jiu-Jitsu.

00:48:38.000 He was doing something – somehow it was associated more with Osaka than Tokyo where the Honbu Dojo in Aikido is.

00:48:46.000 And there was – Some controversy.

00:48:49.000 Yeah, there was just like the way things are with schools of thought.

00:48:53.000 But yeah, he had a certain legit kind of thing.

00:48:57.000 And it's really wild because people like Mike Ovitz who was like the power agent – Of all of Hollywood in the 80s, you know, Mike got a black belt training with Seagal.

00:49:05.000 Like, he was really serious Aikidoist.

00:49:09.000 I didn't know that.

00:49:10.000 Yeah.

00:49:11.000 That makes sense.

00:49:12.000 Yeah.

00:49:12.000 It does.

00:49:13.000 He's a cautionary tale, too, though.

00:49:16.000 I mean, not even Ovis.

00:49:17.000 I mean, Seagal.

00:49:19.000 What did he become?

00:49:21.000 I guess.

00:49:22.000 Honestly, I don't know anything about him past a certain point.

00:49:30.000 I don't know what went on there.

00:49:34.000 You can leave it at that.

00:49:36.000 Yeah, I don't.

00:49:37.000 Tell me about your new movie.

00:49:39.000 Let's leave it at that.

00:49:41.000 It's called Motherless Brooklyn.

00:49:46.000 It was kind of a big swing because I wrote it and I produced it.

00:49:52.000 Is this the first time you've done that?

00:49:54.000 Directed it.

00:49:56.000 No, I produced and directed the first movie I directed is Keeping the Faith.

00:50:02.000 It's me and Ben Stiller play a rabbi and a priest who are best friends.

00:50:08.000 And they both fall for the same girl.

00:50:10.000 Did you ever see that one?

00:50:11.000 No, I didn't.

00:50:12.000 It's funny.

00:50:12.000 Yeah, you'd like it.

00:50:13.000 Ben is hilarious in it.

00:50:16.000 That was obviously lighter.

00:50:19.000 That was a lighter kind of movie.

00:50:21.000 But I've lived in New York almost 30 years, and I like making movies in New York a lot.

00:50:27.000 That was a pretty light one.

00:50:28.000 This one is more...

00:50:31.000 This takes place in the 50s in New York and it's kind of – it's got a Chinatown, LA Confidential kind of a noir bent to it.

00:50:41.000 It's a mystery, a murder mystery of kind of – that leads into some of the stuff that happened in New York in the 50s that is hard to believe because New York was – New York was run by basically a Darth Vader-like figure who was never elected to public office and people thought he was the Parks Commissioner of New York but he was from 1930 to 1968,

00:51:10.000 he had uncontested authoritarian power over New York City and New York State and he made every significant decision I think I'm going to go.

00:51:39.000 He was responsible for the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn and going to LA. And nobody knows this.

00:51:45.000 You think of New York as the great – that's like the great egalitarian melting pot city where democracy works except that it was run by a total autocrat.

00:51:54.000 For 38 years?

00:51:55.000 Yeah.

00:51:57.000 He's largely – it's broadly accepted that no mayor or governor of New York could do a single thing without his say-so from basically about 1930 to about 1968. How is that even possible?

00:52:10.000 How come no one knows about this?

00:52:12.000 How did you find out?

00:52:13.000 Well, people do.

00:52:14.000 There's huge – like in one of the big Burns Brothers documentaries about New York, there's a whole – literally almost a whole episode on him.

00:52:22.000 There's a great book about him that won the Pulitzer Prize.

00:52:26.000 And there's – his name was Robert Moses.

00:52:29.000 And he – you know, there's Robert Moses State Beach in New York.

00:52:32.000 But literally, people think he was the Parks Commissioner.

00:52:34.000 But he was – And he was like Anakin Skywalker.

00:52:38.000 He was like a Jedi Knight.

00:52:40.000 He was a big liberal progressive believer in progressive change and government reform.

00:52:45.000 And in his early years, he got crushed by Tammany Hall and the power brokers and he went dark, went completely – Yeah.

00:52:56.000 That's not the most imposing picture of him that you've got up.

00:52:58.000 No, that's an imposing picture.

00:53:01.000 Find one of the ones of him standing in front of his models.

00:53:03.000 There's famous ones of him.

00:53:04.000 That looks like a man of will.

00:53:06.000 Yeah, actually, to the left of that.

00:53:07.000 And keep going to the left of that.

00:53:10.000 Because there's a scene in our movie where Alec Baldwin is literally like that.

00:53:15.000 Alec Baldwin plays a character who's based on him, inspired by him, I should say.

00:53:20.000 It's not at all in my film.

00:53:22.000 It's not the true story.

00:53:23.000 But yeah, there you go.

00:53:27.000 But I think this idea, I was really interested in this idea.

00:53:32.000 You know, what's great about Chinatown as a film is...

00:53:36.000 It's mostly sexy.

00:53:38.000 You don't know what the hell is going on in that movie.

00:53:41.000 Until 20 minutes before the end, you have absolutely no idea really what's going on in that movie.

00:53:46.000 But it's just sexy.

00:53:48.000 It's like the music is amazing.

00:53:50.000 The photography is incredible.

00:53:52.000 The actors are like adult and real.

00:53:54.000 And he's Nicholson, right?

00:53:57.000 The hook is like Nicholson is so cool.

00:54:00.000 You really will kind of follow him...

00:54:03.000 You'll watch the way he deals with anything and you're just laughing and enjoying it, right?

00:54:08.000 But underneath it all, when you're done, you go, is that true?

00:54:14.000 Is LA basically built on stolen water?

00:54:18.000 Is that like the...

00:54:20.000 LA's original sin is that people made fortunes. 1.00

00:54:24.000 The valley was just farms and they stole the water from up north and rigged the game and made these gigantic fortunes by irrigating San Fernando Valley.

00:54:35.000 You come away with like – you come away with an awareness that like the California story is not exactly what it's cracked up to be, right?

00:54:44.000 It's – there's some big crimes underneath it and the people who – and in that movie, it's like, yeah, people ripped everybody off.

00:54:53.000 They faked droughts. 0.86

00:54:55.000 They created fortune cells and the type of people who did that also raped their daughters. 0.99

00:55:00.000 Literally, that's like what that movie is about.

00:55:04.000 And it's pretty bleak.

00:55:05.000 It's like you can't make a difference.

00:55:07.000 You cannot change anything.

00:55:09.000 And if you try, the person you're trying to help is going to end up with a bullet through her eye dead on the steering wheel.

00:55:15.000 It's a really dark movie.

00:55:17.000 And people forget that because you just go, oh, Nicholson, Faye Dunaway.

00:55:20.000 It's like, no, that's a really, really bleak movie.

00:55:24.000 But I love the idea that That you can do things where like the pleasure of it is like the pleasure of movies.

00:55:35.000 It's grown up.

00:55:36.000 It's kind of what we've been talking about.

00:55:39.000 Like, if you said to most people, if you showed Chinatown to most critics today, they'd go long, boring, whatever. 1.00

00:55:45.000 It's like, you want to say, fuck off. 1.00

00:55:47.000 Like, fuck off. 1.00

00:55:48.000 Like, what is it that you... 1.00

00:55:50.000 Why are you assuming people can't handle grown-up?

00:55:55.000 You know what I mean?

00:55:56.000 And I think that I really dig those things where you go through...

00:56:02.000 The movie starts, you look at it and you go, this looks really good.

00:56:06.000 This looks really grown-up.

00:56:07.000 This is big.

00:56:09.000 The actors are, like, adult and authoritative.

00:56:13.000 The dialogue's great.

00:56:14.000 The music is great.

00:56:15.000 It's hypnotic.

00:56:16.000 And your brain just goes, I don't know what's going on.

00:56:19.000 I don't care.

00:56:20.000 I'm bought in.

00:56:21.000 And if there's a character in it that you can hook into, you float.

00:56:25.000 You float through those movies.

00:56:26.000 You just kind of go, where's this going?

00:56:28.000 What's going on?

00:56:29.000 Oh, man, that guy.

00:56:30.000 She's great.

00:56:31.000 He's great.

00:56:32.000 Wow.

00:56:32.000 Like, this is just all juicy and great.

00:56:34.000 And by the end, you get somewhere and you kind of go... 0.96

00:56:38.000 I'll be damned. 0.58

00:56:39.000 That actually was about big things.

00:56:40.000 Did those things really happen?

00:56:42.000 I really dig those movies.

00:56:44.000 I dig Chinatown, LA Confidential.

00:56:48.000 I think The Godfather works that way.

00:56:50.000 The Godfather is about immigrants. 0.85

00:56:51.000 It's about immigrants normalizing in America.

00:56:56.000 It's like that's a long movie.

00:56:57.000 You just settle in for that movie.

00:56:59.000 Your brain settles in and just goes, this just couldn't be better.

00:57:04.000 I couldn't be happier to be watching this scene after scene after scene.

00:57:08.000 And I wanted to make – I wanted to try – I wanted to try to make one of those myself.

00:57:15.000 I wanted to try to make one of those.

00:57:22.000 It's cliche to say they don't make those anymore, but I think they were always hard.

00:57:28.000 It's not like they were easy once and now they're hard.

00:57:31.000 They were always hard, but I would look at people like Warren Beatty.

00:57:36.000 He made Reds, which is one of the great movies from that era.

00:57:41.000 Even, like, Spike Lee doing Do the Right Thing.

00:57:43.000 I don't know if you remember when that movie hit.

00:57:45.000 Sure.

00:57:46.000 It was massive.

00:57:47.000 It was a huge deal.

00:57:48.000 I was, like, 18 or 19. Yeah.

00:57:51.000 I saw that movie, and I was like, he just rewrote the game.

00:57:54.000 Like, this kid. 0.92

00:57:56.000 Who the hell is this? 0.98

00:57:57.000 He wrote it. 0.97

00:57:58.000 He directed it.

00:57:58.000 He acted in it.

00:57:59.000 He got public animated to the music.

00:58:01.000 Yeah.

00:58:01.000 It's about his neighborhood in New York, but it's about, like, race in America.

00:58:04.000 It's like, oh, my God.

00:58:06.000 That guy just took, like...

00:58:07.000 A huge swing and connected on like every level.

00:58:12.000 And it didn't even give you some BS kind of like, don't worry, it's going to be okay in the end.

00:58:17.000 It was like, Martin Luther King says violence is not the way.

00:58:22.000 Malcolm X says sometimes it's the only rational response.

00:58:25.000 What do you think?

00:58:26.000 You know what I mean?

00:58:27.000 It was so ballsy.

00:58:28.000 It was so ballsy, that movie.

00:58:31.000 And I think like, After a while, it's sort of like, I just started feeling like, well, you know, I don't really need to gig.

00:58:39.000 I might as well.

00:58:41.000 I've worked with a lot of great people.

00:58:43.000 I've worked with some pretty great directors, including Spike.

00:58:45.000 And I was kind of like, I've been in New York a long time, and I just thought it was really weird.

00:58:50.000 No one knew that story.

00:58:52.000 And I was like, I'm going to try to make one about this, you know.

00:58:55.000 As someone who doesn't make movies, I always wonder, like, what happened between, like, say, Steve McQueen's Le Mans.

00:59:02.000 Did you ever see that movie?

00:59:03.000 Of course, yeah.

00:59:04.000 Remember how there's no dialogue at all for like the longest time?

00:59:08.000 And I remember I watched it recently over the last couple years and one of the thoughts was, I don't even know if they could do this today.

00:59:14.000 If anybody would allow them to make a movie where no one talks for a long time.

00:59:20.000 They're just sort of setting the stage of what it means to be a race car driver and what's the atmosphere of the races.

00:59:27.000 It's just the idea that you were saying earlier about having this short attention span theater, these movies that are designed for what they believe is a populace of people that don't have the interest in something that's more unique or something that requires thought,

00:59:46.000 something that drags you in.

00:59:48.000 And that was much more common in the past.

00:59:52.000 Like, why was it more common in that era of McQueen and all those other movies that they did like that?

00:59:58.000 And what has happened?

00:59:59.000 And these rare examples, like when a guy does break through with something like Do the Right Thing, or a few other examples, why doesn't that stimulate the appetite for more?

01:00:11.000 Is it that hard to do?

01:00:12.000 On one level, yeah.

01:00:16.000 It's easy to recognize when they're great, but it's still not easy to make them great.

01:00:28.000 We're talking about people who...

01:00:31.000 Are some of our greatest artists or directors, you know what I mean?

01:00:35.000 And lots of people, they try on some level, but they just – not everybody is Spike Lee, you know what I mean?

01:00:46.000 Not everybody is Francis Coppola or, you know, it's like – Sometimes people make things and they actually are slow.

01:00:57.000 You know what I mean?

01:01:00.000 It's like in Spinal Tap when they're like, it's a fine line between clever and clever.

01:01:10.000 You know what I mean?

01:01:13.000 I think people try, but I think that there are some people who really do think Jaws had a big effect on movies because it was like the first true blockbuster,

01:01:29.000 right?

01:01:31.000 I don't know.

01:01:32.000 You know what?

01:01:32.000 Actually, though, I'm wrong.

01:01:34.000 I think that what happens more often than not is Adult people get the jobs at the big companies that make the decisions about what to make, right?

01:01:46.000 And at a certain point, they sort of age out.

01:01:48.000 They start to age out and they don't actually have any idea what the vibe is.

01:01:56.000 They don't know what to make for the coming wave of younger people. 0.98

01:02:02.000 And so these little windows open up now and then where in that era they needed They needed new people.

01:02:12.000 They needed like – George Lucas making American Graffiti.

01:02:15.000 Nobody thought that movie was going to be a hit.

01:02:17.000 Nobody.

01:02:20.000 They open up.

01:02:21.000 They say, we don't know what to do.

01:02:23.000 Do something different.

01:02:25.000 And a couple of new voices like come in and they make things that – We're good to go.

01:02:50.000 I think?

01:03:17.000 An unbelievable array of directors made really, really memorable films in that year.

01:03:25.000 And I think it was because...

01:03:29.000 It was another one of those moments like, we don't know what to do.

01:03:33.000 We're just going to have to close our eyes and go, you kids figure it out.

01:03:38.000 You know what I mean?

01:03:38.000 The thing about films, it seems to me, it's such a collaborative effort.

01:03:42.000 And when you have so many moving pieces and so many people involved that have a say in the decision-making process, it's got to be insanely difficult to get something out that's pure.

01:03:54.000 Yeah.

01:03:54.000 Yes, that's true.

01:03:56.000 That's true.

01:03:57.000 Francis Coppola said that the best thing about making films is that they're collaborative and the worst thing about making films is that they're collaborative.

01:04:09.000 He also said it's the last moral totalitarian job in the world, like being a director or something.

01:04:16.000 I can't remember.

01:04:17.000 But it's true.

01:04:19.000 It's a very – because like I made this movie.

01:04:22.000 I had like – I had a fraction of like the budget of the Irishman, right?

01:04:27.000 Which I'm naming only because it was a period – You know, mine's in the 50s, that one's across these things.

01:04:35.000 And I had like less days to do it than I had on my first movie that I directed.

01:04:43.000 How many days did you ever do it?

01:04:45.000 Like 46, which for perspective, Fight Club was a 130-day shoot.

01:04:51.000 And 46 days is less than most movies I've made.

01:04:55.000 And this was a big 1950s shoot.

01:05:02.000 We're good to go.

01:05:15.000 That is like, you can be like, I've got the vision, we're going to do this.

01:05:19.000 But there's a kind of madness in saying, this is what I want to do.

01:05:22.000 I want to recreate the old Penn Station that doesn't exist anymore, right?

01:05:25.000 Which we have in the film.

01:05:27.000 Like, my character goes into the old Penn Station that was torn down in 1963 or whatever.

01:05:34.000 And you only pull that off with the most kickass Justice League of collaborators imaginable.

01:05:41.000 Like they make you look like you're a visionary or know what you're doing because you get these people with crazy talents of their own.

01:05:51.000 And I don't mean just cast, although I had that too in this.

01:05:55.000 I mean like some of the very, very, very best people bring their talent to like making that work.

01:06:02.000 And so that's like when you say like – your job is more to say I have really talented people.

01:06:10.000 I've got to get their frequency wave in line with mine.

01:06:13.000 If I can get their frequency wave in line with mine, then it can be my – My idea, my vision, my weird ideas can be in there, but it's executed with the help of people who believe in it and buy into it.

01:06:27.000 That's the key.

01:06:28.000 It's like you're marshaling people to get to it in sync with you.

01:06:38.000 And, you know, I have a sick cat.

01:06:39.000 It's like Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Bobby Cannavale, Michael K. Williams, who's like Omar on the wire.

01:06:50.000 Wow.

01:06:51.000 This great actress, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Leslie Mann.

01:06:57.000 You know, on and on and on.

01:06:58.000 And all these people did this as a favor to me because I didn't have any money to do it.

01:07:02.000 So starting with Bruce, Bruce was like, you know, he said to me a long time ago, if you have something good, I want to be in it.

01:07:10.000 I really want to do the kind of stuff you're doing and I really mean it.

01:07:13.000 I'll do anything you want to do and help you get it done.

01:07:16.000 I was like, he's not going to remember that.

01:07:18.000 He's going to be like, sure, sure, but I'm doing Die Hard for the rest of the year.

01:07:22.000 And he didn't.

01:07:22.000 He was like, where do you need me?

01:07:24.000 I told you I'm in.

01:07:25.000 Let's get it done.

01:07:28.000 Basically, Bruce, Alec, Willem, people like that, I practically call them co-financiers on my film because I only got it done because they deferred everything.

01:07:37.000 And I think that's really cool.

01:07:39.000 That's amazing.

01:07:40.000 Yeah.

01:07:40.000 When you write something like this car chase scene through Harlem, I mean, I would imagine the logistics of pulling something like that off, it's got to be insane.

01:07:49.000 Yeah, it's nuts. 0.99

01:07:50.000 When you wrote it and you brought it to the people that are the stunt people, the people that coordinate these chase scenes, were they like, oh, fuck? 0.99

01:07:59.000 People get – people – yes, you know, doing the things is not hard. 0.96

01:08:09.000 Getting permission to do them in Manhattan is tricky.

01:08:14.000 And there are people who look at you like you're dreaming, man.

01:08:18.000 Like you're not – And what you do is you go out and scout and you start – you say, look, this is – we can do this here and this here and this isn't hard.

01:08:27.000 This isn't hard.

01:08:27.000 We only need this one block cleared.

01:08:29.000 Then you like find that place where you're like, I want him to do a huge screeching turn onto Frederick Douglass Boulevard because it has a nine-block stretch where there's very few buildings that don't look like they're in the 50s.

01:08:42.000 Right?

01:08:43.000 Leading up to a bridge that you want to go over the bridge.

01:08:46.000 And then you get with, like, the guys at the NYPD and you beg.

01:08:50.000 Like, you just beg.

01:08:51.000 You go, look, we're going to be like the Dirty Dozen.

01:08:55.000 Everything is going to be so well planned and ready to go.

01:08:58.000 We'll be able to...

01:08:59.000 We'll say, just shut it down and in 20 minutes we'll be done.

01:09:03.000 You know what I mean?

01:09:03.000 Like, you start...

01:09:04.000 20 minutes?

01:09:05.000 Well, no, just for a shot.

01:09:06.000 You know, it's like, we just need to do this once or twice.

01:09:10.000 To get this turn of the car around the corner and headed up the avenue with 80 cars from the 50s.

01:09:18.000 And you're using legitimate 1950s cars as well?

01:09:21.000 Yeah.

01:09:21.000 So those things handle like...

01:09:23.000 They're horrible.

01:09:23.000 They're boats with wheels on them.

01:09:25.000 So any car that's actually got to be doing anything, like going fast or making a big turn, you have to have four of the same model that you've painted identically because they're going to break.

01:09:36.000 Like, they will break.

01:09:37.000 You'll push one hard, it will break.

01:09:39.000 And then you have to, like, bring the other one in.

01:09:42.000 Wow.

01:09:42.000 You know what I mean?

01:09:43.000 So you...

01:09:46.000 And you basically can't make them go fast.

01:09:49.000 You know, they don't have pickup.

01:09:51.000 So you're figuring out, like, what are the moves we can make that make it feel like this thing is really bombing?

01:09:57.000 And how do we cross-cut around the fact that it takes three blocks for it to accelerate?

01:10:04.000 I mean, like, literally, to go from, you know, 10 miles an hour to 40, you need, like, literally, like, three or four blocks.

01:10:10.000 So you have to, like, get it up to speed.

01:10:17.000 I'm not doing another period movie.

01:10:19.000 The next movie I'm doing is going to have Tesla P100Ds that go like 0-60 and 2.4.

01:10:26.000 Now, when you write this out, how much time is involved in preparation of writing this and then doing all the scouting and then trying to implement this whole...

01:10:37.000 It took me a couple of years to write it because I haven't even said...

01:10:42.000 I think you have to know yourself.

01:10:44.000 I'm not Bogart.

01:10:45.000 I'm not like Jack Nicholson.

01:10:47.000 The magic they bring is the magic they bring.

01:10:51.000 The character I put at the middle of this is the detective that I play has Tourette's syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

01:10:59.000 So he can't...

01:11:02.000 Like when he meets a blonde at the bar, he's like the opposite of Bogart. 0.93

01:11:08.000 He tries to light her match and can't stop blowing it out because it doesn't sound right to him.

01:11:13.000 So he's kind of a train wreck.

01:11:15.000 Like he's the opposite of a cool detective.

01:11:19.000 And in fact, Bruce Willis plays the cool detective who he works for.

01:11:23.000 So like Bruce Willis is Nicholson.

01:11:28.000 But when something bad happens to him and my guy has to step out of the assistant role, he's his operative because he has a great memory.

01:11:36.000 He has a photographic memory and some really weird ability because his brain is chaotic and He has certain little gifts that Bruce Willis relies on him for and believes in him.

01:11:52.000 But when he has to sort of figure out what happened to his boss and solve this mystery, he kind of has to come out on his own, out of his comfort zone and kind of become a detective.

01:12:03.000 And it's like, you know, he's ticking and twitching and shouting and doing things that make it very difficult for him to move in the world.

01:12:12.000 So that's kind of like...

01:12:15.000 I had that part of it and I was grafting it into this story of what happened in New York in the 50s.

01:12:24.000 And it took me a long time to write it and get it right.

01:12:26.000 But once I had it right, you know, we probably prepped the movie for like nine months.

01:12:33.000 We were actively like scouting New York.

01:12:39.000 You know, and imagining, like, where can we do this and how can we do this?

01:12:42.000 But I live in New York, so I loved it.

01:12:44.000 I, like, get on my motorcycle and go up to Harlem and Washington Heights and literally, like, cruise around.

01:12:52.000 Just cruise around.

01:12:53.000 I know the area really well anyway.

01:12:56.000 But sometimes you just have to, like, just...

01:13:00.000 And that's where a bike in New York is really great, like, because you can just sort of float around, float around, float around, mentally mapping...

01:13:08.000 Like where you can do a thing.

01:13:10.000 And it was pretty fun, actually.

01:13:13.000 That's such a bold move, riding a bike in New York City.

01:13:15.000 No, it's not.

01:13:16.000 It's not?

01:13:17.000 LA is way, way, way more dangerous.

01:13:20.000 Because New York, no one's going that fast, right?

01:13:25.000 You can be...

01:13:27.000 I can't explain it.

01:13:29.000 In New York, there's a rationality to the way people are moving.

01:13:32.000 But I'll tell you the number one main thing.

01:13:36.000 New York driving, it's so stop and start.

01:13:41.000 Nobody has time to be on their phone.

01:13:44.000 And in LA, if I'm on a bike, I would say I regularly look to my right and I look to my left and both people on either side of me are texting.

01:13:56.000 Do you ever see...

01:13:57.000 Yes, all the time.

01:13:58.000 All the time.

01:13:59.000 When I'm in my truck especially because I can look down.

01:14:01.000 Yeah, and you realize that in this town, 60% of people at any given moment are texting on their phone.

01:14:09.000 And it's just appalling.

01:14:12.000 And it's so dangerous.

01:14:14.000 And I'll be on...

01:14:16.000 If I'm on a motorcycle in LA, I'll look at people...

01:14:19.000 They're texting for so long and finally I'll have to like hit the horn or something and look at them.

01:14:24.000 I've gotten past like, you know, anger and literally just looked at people, flipped my thing up and gone like, please, like please get off your phone. 0.99

01:14:34.000 Like you're going to kill somebody and kill yourself. 0.97

01:14:37.000 But we can't. 0.98

01:14:38.000 We can't break the addiction.

01:14:40.000 People cannot break the addiction.

01:14:42.000 And it's not a more – you realize it isn't a character flaw. 1.00

01:14:47.000 It's not like, what an asshole. 1.00

01:14:50.000 It's everybody. 1.00

01:14:51.000 It's your mom.

01:14:52.000 It's your sister.

01:14:53.000 It's your friend.

01:14:56.000 Everybody is doing it because we're addicted, like a device addicted.

01:15:01.000 Yeah.

01:15:02.000 But when you're on a bike and you realize, like, I am floating in a sea of people who are going to mess up.

01:15:10.000 Someone is going to mess up, and they've got airbags and, you know, new modern stuff.

01:15:16.000 You don't have anything.

01:15:21.000 I think this is way more dangerous riding than New York.

01:15:26.000 That makes sense when you talk about things like the 405 or the one-on-one when people are flying by and passing and changing lanes and the texting, too.

01:15:34.000 Yeah, and also the big avenues.

01:15:35.000 People get up, you know, Wilshire Boulevard, whatever.

01:15:37.000 They're looking at a thing and they blow that red light, right?

01:15:39.000 All the time.

01:15:40.000 And half the times you hear about or see bad accidents here, especially if they involve motorcycles or something, it's not like the person screwed...

01:15:50.000 The person on the bike didn't screw up.

01:15:51.000 Someone went through a red light and just broadsided them or they T-boned them.

01:15:57.000 It's like, do you really want to make the huge bet on yourself where what you're riding on is other people's concentration?

01:16:09.000 Were you riding when you were living out here?

01:16:12.000 I've never – I've always lived in New York.

01:16:14.000 So when you've been here, it's only for a few months at a time?

01:16:17.000 Yeah, no.

01:16:18.000 I've spent winters out here.

01:16:21.000 I like to surf.

01:16:24.000 And I'm – by the way, I'm like not – I'm not like a pro-experienced like veteran motorcycle rider at all.

01:16:33.000 I just enjoy it and like out here it's fun.

01:16:37.000 Go up the Angeles Crest Road or something pretty like that.

01:16:40.000 I love driving up there.

01:16:42.000 It's cool.

01:16:43.000 There's California.

01:16:44.000 LA is hard. 0.99

01:16:47.000 Being on a motorcycle in LA sucks. 0.99

01:16:49.000 It's just hot and everybody's in your face. 0.97

01:16:53.000 California is incredible.

01:16:55.000 There's so many amazing places to go in California.

01:17:03.000 I kind of got hooked on it out here. 0.98

01:17:06.000 And so then when you were in New York, you just said, fuck it, this is actually a good place to ride a bike. 0.98

01:17:10.000 No, it's not even that. 0.98

01:17:12.000 I ride bicycles too in New York.

01:17:13.000 I like it.

01:17:14.000 But it's more just that...

01:17:17.000 The thing that pulls you in, I mean, I have lots of, you know, I like to surf, I fly planes, I like, there's a lot of stuff that I think is much, much, much, that's thrilling, that's much safer than riding motorcycles.

01:17:27.000 It's not, like, my jam.

01:17:30.000 But once you have that skill set, once you can do it, if you have a bike, there are those times in LA and in New York, too, where you take a look at, like, the gridlock and you're just like...

01:17:41.000 I'm going to be in this forever.

01:17:46.000 And on a bike, you can lane split and just get where you need to go.

01:17:50.000 And in New York, too, you can zip around in ways that is efficient.

01:17:59.000 So how long did you sit on this story?

01:18:03.000 How long did you know about this?

01:18:05.000 And what was the process of having this sort of build in your mind to the point where you wanted to write it, direct it, produce it, cast it?

01:18:12.000 Honestly, I read the book exactly 20 years ago.

01:18:14.000 I read it in the fall of 99 when Fight Club came out.

01:18:21.000 That's right around the time I read this novel, Motherless Brooklyn.

01:18:26.000 But the novel is about the Tourettec detective who's trying to solve the murder of his only friend basically.

01:18:36.000 But it takes place in the 90s.

01:18:37.000 It's not about any of that stuff about New York in the 50s or anything.

01:18:42.000 It's just...

01:18:44.000 The character is just amazing, though.

01:18:47.000 Like, amazing.

01:18:48.000 So when I read it, the hook was the character.

01:18:50.000 I was like...

01:18:51.000 I was like, what a great character.

01:18:53.000 It's such a wild...

01:18:55.000 He's like just this hot mess of...

01:18:57.000 He's smart, but he's totally messed up.

01:19:01.000 He's funny, but also really pretty painful and lonely.

01:19:05.000 And it was just everything.

01:19:07.000 And I was like, that's...

01:19:09.000 I could get so into trying to figure that out.

01:19:15.000 For reasons that are a little hard to explain, the tone of the book feels like a 50s detective novel, but it's set in the modern world, and I was afraid in a movie that would feel a little bit like the Blues Brothers, like guys in fedoras, but a Prius is floating by, and so you're sort of like, maybe this would just be cooler if we set it in the 50s,

01:19:35.000 and I talked to the author about that, and he was super into those movies, and so he said, okay.

01:19:41.000 Wow.

01:19:41.000 So then – but then the middle period was the period of mashing that up with these sort of stories, the New York Chinatown kind of of it, the deep, dark history of what really went on in New York and that took a long time.

01:19:57.000 And then I had it ready in 2012. I was really ready to go and I just couldn't get it to – I couldn't get – Bruce said he was in and that was kind of angry but I couldn't get everyone I wanted together at the same time and I couldn't get the amount of money I needed or that I thought I wanted and I couldn't get a studio to back it.

01:20:20.000 Because honestly, number one, I'm not like a green light anything he does kind of an actor.

01:20:29.000 It's just – I think that's a different sort of thing.

01:20:36.000 But also I was out there saying it's sort of like Rain Man meets L.A. Confidential and people's eyes just kind of cross.

01:20:45.000 They're like – Bring us the next one.

01:20:49.000 Like, they're like, we don't get it.

01:20:51.000 We don't get it.

01:20:53.000 We don't get it.

01:20:54.000 Yeah, it's like...

01:20:55.000 And also, I got, like...

01:20:58.000 I had, like, this idea of getting...

01:21:00.000 I love Radiohead, and I like jazz, and I wanted to, like...

01:21:04.000 I got Tom York to write a song for the film, but I got Wynton Marsalis to do all the jazz and stuff.

01:21:09.000 And people were also...

01:21:10.000 They were like, these things are not going to go well together.

01:21:13.000 You know?

01:21:14.000 And then they went to get...

01:21:15.000 Like, a lot of people have said to me...

01:21:19.000 A lot of people have said to me it's the best music in a film that they've heard in many, many years.

01:21:25.000 Flea played trumpet and bass on Tom York's track in the film.

01:21:32.000 Flea's a really good trumpet player and his dad was a jazz musician.

01:21:37.000 I didn't know that.

01:21:37.000 Fleet came out of the movie like crying.

01:21:39.000 He was like, that's honestly my favorite music that I've ever heard in a film.

01:21:43.000 And I think...

01:21:44.000 But you can't tell people that you...

01:21:48.000 I thought that would work.

01:21:50.000 I thought this mashup would work because I knew Tom and I knew he loves Charles Mingus and I knew Wynton was capable of doing...

01:21:59.000 He's really interested in dissonant, weird...

01:22:03.000 It's edgier kind of modernist music as well.

01:22:07.000 And I was like, this is going to work.

01:22:09.000 And it did.

01:22:10.000 It's really, the music's amazing in the film.

01:22:14.000 It's like its own, like the record's out now and people are flipping out about just the music and the movie hasn't even come out yet.

01:22:23.000 With such a crazy combination of factors and details that you smashed all together.

01:22:28.000 Yeah.

01:22:29.000 And it's got to feel, first of all, it's got to be a tremendous relief and also feel amazing that you did it.

01:22:35.000 I do feel that.

01:22:37.000 I feel like it would have haunted me.

01:22:41.000 It was rattling around in my head such a long time I felt very discouraged about it at times because I was kind of like, you know, I've done a few okay things.

01:22:51.000 Like I've done some stuff that was weird and that people didn't understand and it's come together pretty great, you know what I mean?

01:23:00.000 And you sort of go, God, I never expect anybody to give me money.

01:23:05.000 To make something.

01:23:07.000 That's just risky.

01:23:08.000 I would never put money into making movies.

01:23:10.000 Never.

01:23:11.000 It's too risky.

01:23:12.000 And I get it.

01:23:14.000 So I'm not like, I deserve this.

01:23:17.000 But it was more like...

01:23:18.000 Sometimes I was just like, am I going to be able to figure this out or not?

01:23:23.000 Am I going to get this done?

01:23:25.000 And I think getting it done and not having quit on it...

01:23:32.000 And in some ways feeling, not actually knowing that it's better that I made it now.

01:23:38.000 I know more.

01:23:39.000 I was more, if I'd tried to do it 20 years ago, I couldn't, I didn't have the chops to do some of the things, like working with Spike Lee and Alejandro and Yuridu and people like that really, like, it upped my sense of how to do,

01:23:55.000 I learned a lot about how to do a big thing without all the money in the world.

01:24:00.000 Now, this is released nationwide, worldwide, like when?

01:24:04.000 It's released on this Friday, right?

01:24:05.000 Yeah, this Friday.

01:24:06.000 It's everywhere?

01:24:07.000 It's a broad release?

01:24:08.000 All over America, yeah.

01:24:10.000 Yeah, it's a wide release here.

01:24:13.000 Yeah, and I think, honestly, like, the day it comes out, like, you can either see Terminator, like, 9.11, or ours.

01:24:26.000 There's, like, not...

01:24:28.000 I like certify on the Joe Rogan experience.

01:24:31.000 There's not a grown-up human being who will not...

01:24:37.000 Be stoked about this film.

01:24:39.000 Like, I can say that people who are seeing it are very, very, very into it and very bought in because it is one of those, like, it's a big meal, but it's a really, like, it's a really rich,

01:24:55.000 good meal, and it has amazing, amazing performances.

01:24:58.000 I don't think Alec Baldwin has ever been better in a movie.

01:25:02.000 And I think Willem Dafoe is amazing.

01:25:06.000 Michael K. Williams is amazing.

01:25:08.000 And the music is great.

01:25:10.000 And it's a cool story.

01:25:14.000 And I think...

01:25:16.000 I think it's kind of one of those things that it's worth going to the theater to see, but I guarantee you it's more worth your time than another Terminator movie.

01:25:25.000 Well, it sounds like it to me.

01:25:27.000 I'm really excited about it, and I will see it for sure.

01:25:29.000 Thank you.

01:25:30.000 And it was a pleasure talking to you, man.

01:25:31.000 I really appreciate it.

01:25:32.000 Thank you very much for coming in here, man.

01:25:33.000 Absolutely.

01:25:34.000 Thank you.

01:25:35.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 31, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1375 - Edward Norton

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