Burt Reynolds - Best Interview Ever!

i'm really delighted to have our next guest on the show he's a fantastic personality and i really enjoyed his work as an actor in the longest yard something i haven't always been able to say about sheamus and white lightning ladies and gentlemen mr burt reynolds [Music] bert do you really have approval of everybody who works in your films yes and you'll never be in one of my films right wonderful this set wonderful for one of the you know i feel like i'm inside victor mature's mouth or something strangest chair i've ever seen bro you're very you know yes i am yeah how would you how would you have evaluated your own work in some of the films that you did prior to uh prior to the long shot much better than you my friend much much better than you i mean did you did you how would you have reviewed white lightning as a film well i don't review my work that's what people like you do who have nothing else to do um i um i take the best of what's offered to me and usually that's not a great deal now it is thank god you know certain things coming in now that are better but at that time white lightning was the best of the group and it was what you call your basic action-adventure comedy kind of thing lots of car chases and that and i thought we did you know lawrence olivier can't make get over against the wall and put your hands up he can't make that live and i did the best i could with it and i thought it was a good picture and regardless of what you thought of it john uh it made about 18 million dollars that's an awful lot of money that's a lot of money it was made for 950 000. at that time were you getting a piece of the action how do you mean that uh were you getting a piece of the film yes i i got a piece of it one of the one of the best articles bert i ever read about you was in the september 30th issue of um sports illustrated and i got the distinct impression from reading that article that you would become a football player in high school and that later you got interest in becoming an actor just because it was a way of getting the attention of women is that true no not true at all i yeah i thought it was a very good article by the way because sports illustrated um kind of cuts through all the crap and uh that's easy for you to say no they do they really do and it wasn't loaded with a lot of cliches and they weren't interested in who i was dating or a lot of other junk and and they they kind of asked questions and they really wanted answers and and they didn't want to know when i first lost my virginity and all that kind of stuff and it was a it was a really i think a good article very honest article and i said to them and i was as honest as their questions were and they asked me when i really wanted to become an actor and i said about three years ago which is true i mean i wanted to uh be in the picture business a long time ago and i didn't just crawl out from under a magazine as some people would like to believe uh i've been at this for about 20 years now well if you were at it for 20 years and you only want to become an actor three years ago for that other 17 years what was it that kept you going i was having a wonderful time i was making a living i was enjoying meeting some very interesting people i thought i was growing as a person personality and i to to be very honest with you i wasn't quite sure whether i could cross over from being a personality in quotes to being an actor and uh i think i can now bert i read with interest in that same sports illustrated article that you went into training before the movies that the scenes would look realistic was that quite important to you the reason i ask is because it's been common in hollywood movies when they do a sports movie they get somebody who does not even approach looking like an athlete you know tony perkins running around trying to play jimmy pearson he throws like this yeah you know was that terribly important to you uh yeah it's funny you brought that up because i i saw that picture uh fear strikes out and he threw exactly like santa d and uh i didn't know if i would ever get a chance to play an athlete a football player because football pictures have been disastrous at the box office as you probably know sports pictures have been disasters and i wanted very much for it to be a picture that you believe the guy was a jock at one time and played quarterback and i played half back in college i didn't play quarterback so i worked very hard in learning to throw the ball and also i had ray nichky and joe capp and people like that trying to take my head off and so i wanted to be in good shape so yeah i did i trained for a long time in that same article but you said that oh we got to take a commercial break we'll be right back after this message [Applause] [Music] in that same article you talked about the fact that you had been a stunt man when was your first job as a stunt man well the first job i had uh was in the show called frontiers of faith would you what could you be a burning bush yeah someone had somebody hit you with taps no well they that was the thing they they didn't have uh they didn't use stuff man they didn't know what a stunt man was it was a i don't know if that show's still on or not but i was hanging around the village with a bunch of actors and the producer of the show mentioned that they had to throw a guy through a window and they'd never done that before and i said i'll do that so they threw me through the window and they gave me 220 bucks or something i said this is terrific what a terrific way to make a living so he went on this as this business does he went on to become the associate producer on craft theater and every time they had a guy to go through a window or down the stairs or out of a whatever they called me and because it was live you had to play the part of the guy who got thrown down the stairs you know and as the years went by i started talking more and being thrown down less but i never went to you know i never wanted to be an actor it wasn't i wanted to be a football coach and someday like brian you know do sports announcing or something like that trade with you yeah i'll trade with you when you when you take a look at the fact bert that guys who pretend to be policemen get ten thousand dollars a week and a real cop may get two hundred a guy who pretends to be a teacher gets ten thousand a week a real teacher gets seventy nine dollars yes do you sometimes feel that actors are overpaid i know they're overpaid but don't tell anybody no i i think that what people tend to forget is like i started in 1954 to be an actor not to be an actor but working in this business now this year i make what i consider to be an outrageous amount of money for the amount of time that i put into what i do but if you you know kind of laid that out over 20 years i'd be making about 87.50 a week and it isn't the the longevity is not there you see john i mean i can't a a star movie star in quotes that's about 10 years where he's on top of everything maybe and some guy's less than that women have a much shorter span if i can cross over if i can make that what we talked about into the actor situation i can stick around and then i'm going to have a longer span and that's what i want to do because i'm just now meeting the challenge i think and i think it it's not enough just to be on the screen and and take a scene away from somebody because because you have charisma that's you know what a boring word that is i mean i i want to be believable well for the 17 years that you weren't believable humility with tom snyder [Music] no but but for that 17 years did you ever have any doubts or any insecurities about where you were going did you ever think that hey maybe i should quit and do something else no i never did regardless of what you wrote about me but what other people wrote about me i never ever had any doubts i felt that well in that case if there were guys who said unkind things about you when you were coming up did you ever feel that you wanted to retaliate if you ever became a success [Laughter] yes yes but i'll tell you something and and i know you're intelligent enough to accept this for what it's worth uh maybe you're not actually i used to be the critics darling i really was up until what i call bc before the centerfold i i was the critics darling i could not do a bad i mean i used to do when i was on gun smoke and you know walked around looked at matt dillon's belt buckle you know and played the the indian the resident indian there and when i was on a riverboat and uh some very bad pictures some people who clobbered me later really clobbered me later used to say this guy is going to be the new whatever and then along came the centerfold which i did and along came deliverance and along came the tonight show and along came a lot of other things and along came a guy who who did something nobody else had done and that was your pardon the expression exposed himself in a lot of areas and and that was i enjoy doing what i'm doing i mean robert redford is not here tonight he's on a mountain somewhere uh [Music] i i enjoy people i like people i like doing these kind of shows i like doing those kind of things and there's a lot of people like pauline kale who will never forgive me for that they think that i'm playing down to the audience they think that i'm playing down as they think that just i should go somewhere and suffer and think about acting and only appear on the screen and the rest of the time i should read the autobiography of of spencer tracy i don't know what the hell they think i should do bert uh i can't thank you enough for being here i know you want to get back to your no i don't i want to stay john [Applause] this is a cheap show and he can only afford me for 12 minutes i gotta go [Music] you

Channel: John Barbour's World

Views: 551,634

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Id: BwPIW0zrpOA

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020