Conversations with Alan Alda

well why don't we just go home now and top that Alec is if they do that when you're done that's not a lie I'm trying to think if there's a medium a creative medium you haven't worked in from theater to film from prime-time television to PBS from published author to podcasting I guess the only thing left off from your resume is videogames and I'm kind of hoping maybe you can figure out a way that you can make West Wing come alive and take us into an alternate universe sighs I've been around so long I've seen the death of burlesque vaudeville movies television and now I'm working on getting rid of podcasts let's go back let's go back to the beginning post burlesque and I'm wondering did you have the energy the zeal the curiosity at the start of your acting career that you've had over the last few decades oh sure you've got to have energy and you and zeal and you got to be willing to stick to it in spite of all the evidence against your doing that the evidence being that nobody will give you a job you know I mean almost everybody I know goes through that you know look what I just did the end the end the only person I know it didn't go through that is Meryl Streep she got out of acting school and went right to work and I don't know anybody else who did that well you you got out of Fordham in 1956 in 1956 and even at fordham you said you got some work on Broadway as an understudy you know it was partly through the help of my father I think I was an understudy to Don Murray in a play called the hot corner that Sam Levine was in Sam Levine was a great actor we've been in Guys and Dolls he was extraordinary watch guys and because my father was played playing this guy Masterson and I watched him the wings and Sam every night would say the same line standing in the same place but he do them so differently that the laughs would come in different places from a Broadway house his life's are usually in boom right we do know where they're going to come mm-hmm I was astonished to watch him from them I learned more about acting watching from the wings than I did any other way and just didn't really answer your question of course you did just a few years out of Fordham you get a job on the Phil Silvers show in 1958 what was it like in these early days of television for an actor what was it like yeah what was it like what like what it is now that that Phil Silvers I had he knew my family because he had carried me on stage and burlesque when I was six months old my father was a singer and and a straight man in burlesque II would as the singer he would sing while the chorus girls paraded in the opening number and so his official position was known as the tit singer I don't mean to offend anybody was the actual name given to the job my father see this is an educational experience and he so I would watch their less from the wings and they were watching the comics and and the chorus girls and the strippers it was in education education watching the strippers they were a little standoffish but the chorus girls were very motherly to me and I really enjoyed being with them mm-hmm but years later when Phil hired me to be a to play a really big kind of important part in that episode I had never been on television in that way before with that big a part mm-hmm and I hadn't been hadn't acted in front of a camera much I'd mostly acted on the stage and I didn't know you were supposed to know your lines before going in I was on the stage my the way I learned my lines was rehearsing them I was quick I had the script in my hand play the same two or three times in rehearse when I could put the script down and do it that wasn't going to work on the Phil Silvers show cause the first thing they said was okay we're ready for your scene it was a telephone scene where I'm I got all the lines for a page and I hadn't learned it I forget what happened [Applause] no I didn't get fired because the show is still see it on YouTube but it was really embarrassing when I realized I was supposed to understand but you know what I've always had the problem that I can't learn lines off a piece of paper it's very hard for me mm-hmm I have to do it I have to hear it the same so over the years I finally developed the iPhone method which is which is I record the scene reading all the parts so and so I know which is my part I read my part in the normal voice but I read the other parts in the cartoon voice why are you holding that gun I'm holding the gun because I look oh oh don't do that that's a terrible lie acting the scene with more than two people and out of luck but that way I do it and I played I stopped the machine when it stopped the phone when it's time to say my line and I say it and then I play it again and then I find out whether or not I'm right or wrong and it corrects me so that's a good method because I need to hear I need to play it I don't learn the words I learned what's under the words mm-hmm and then makes me say the words and the other person makes me say the words including if I'm on the telephone what I mean I hear what the other person saying to me or if I'm in a monologue I hear what the train of thought is and why the next sentence comes out of my mouth because something has happened in my head or if I'm talking to the audience I'm really trying to see if they're getting what I'm saying so to me it's all mm-hmm you were fortunate you went from Phil Silvers to a couple of other East Coast TV series and then Broadway your first Broadway production was called only in America which was a year after Phil Silvers but your first really big one was pearly victorious in 1962 we have a lot of people who remember the past in this audience a wonderful show I see babies wrote it and started it was Ruby Dee and it was really very sad for me because it was a breakthrough kind of thing it was a farcical deconstruction of of stereotypes racial stereotypes that's how I meant it that's how audiences accepted it and 10 or 20 years later the movement decided that it was retrograde and put it down they took the stereotypes without any irony and I was really sorry to see that because he had made a real contribution and he's he was such a dedicated person with his heart and soul to equality and justice so that's my feeling about that mm-hmm shifting gears it was next on Broadway with the Owl and the Pussycat yeah well they're a bunch of plays right I was in small parts for big parts but the Alan Pussycat was a big change was just Diana sands and me she and I had worked in an improvising company together Paul sills was no well Paul I worked with Paul after I did a season a summer season in Hyannis Port where we did a version of compass which was all improvised we had for the first our sketches we had created in rehearsal that started from improvisations and got refined the second hour was after I ended the first act asking the audience for headlines or words things that would be the subject of sketches in the second hour the second hour was all spot improvisation but it was guts improvising you just went out on stage and tried to be funny no matter what you came up with you don't know where it came from it was there was no discipline to it and nevertheless would Diana was in that and some Reni Santoni honey Shepard wonderful people and about a year later Paul asked me if I wanted to be part of a workshop on the stage at Second City but not doing second city stuff we were doing theater games which have been invented by his mother decades earlier viola Spolin and that's really the most it's the most effective kind of improvisation that I've ever encountered because it's a very strict it's very disciplined you learn something very basic at the very beginning of theater games where by the way being funny is not the objective and you're discouraged from joke making but the basic thing you learned is to connect with the other player and that's why I think it's the best training for acting because if you don't have that connection with the other person it's a fraudulent encounter you're pretending to encounter the other person and there's something even at an unconscious level I think that shows like pretense I don't think it's true that it's like children saying let's let's pretend we're kings and queens let's let's it's not pretending it's it's an act of imagination that's mutual that you enter it into it to get you enter into it together and you agree on the circumstances so as a result to skip ahead I've always been interested in science and when I did the science program on public television for 11 years I realized that it was working the the the the conversations I had with the scientists were working because we had this same contact that you get when you when you work in an improvisation that's of the kind of viola would work on so I realized when we were doing the show that I was helping them by connecting with them helping them to tell their story to a human not to go in to a mini lecture that was full of words that were difficult to understand concepts that were difficult so I thought what if we could train them to make that kind of contact so they could not just make it with another person but make it with a whole audience whether the audience was there or reading a book they wrote what are they thinking while you talk to them what's going on in the other person in other words empathy so that's when I helped start the Aldous center for communicating science which is at Stony Brook University and we've trained starting with improvisation exercises and then moving on to other exercises we've trained over 15,000 scientists and doctors in ten years it all came out of your training with Paul sills and so forth yeah that it turns out in my opinion it's not just the best basis for acting that kind of improvising yeah it's the best basis for human interaction lawyers benefit from it I on my podcast I talked to a hostage negotiator who would work for two years sometimes to get a hostage released and he would do it by thinking about what that hostage taker was going through what the hostage taker believed in and he would let him know he understood he didn't agree or disagree he just let him know he understood what was going on in the person's mind and he'd get the hostage released and he said these same techniques can be used in a marriage he said that and I think it's true do the SAG audience have to worry now that these 15 thousand scientists are going to be joining until you know what's so funny I was asked to go to the Lynne Fontanne house where they do a program every year to work with a standard 20 actors from theaters around the country very experienced actors and I was asked to come spend a week or ten days and I could do anything I wanted I could work on you know various people have done Shakespeare musical theater and I said mm because I value spontaneity so much I wanted to spend the week on spontaneity and the way we'd be doing that would be improvising for the whole week the actors were not necessarily unafraid in fact when we started they said they said we been are we better than the scientists and one woman who my heart really went out there she had 30 years experience mmm sorry she had 30 years experience on this stage she was so afraid of improvising she was planning to stage a fake heart attack and she made the most progress because she wanted to work on a scene she brought a copy of during monster visit so they she and another actor read the scene where she meets up with this guy who's seduced her and abandoned her in the past and now she's come back as a rich woman to the town and once justice and she's got anger and a steaming anger toward him and even toward the baby that came out of their relationship so they read the scene and they were very good it was the first reading but it was in their experienced actors it was a really good reading then I asked them to go back and play a scene to improvise a scene that's not in the play that was the moment in the woods when he actually let her know he wasn't going to marry her and he was dumping her so at first they did what most of us do they were standing there making up dialogue and it was a little boring but the way you get out of that and these exercises is to use the place to to act on the environment and let that become part of it and then you forget about what you're saying and real stuff comes out of you and at one point when I said start using the environment use the place and she said to him don't you want to marry me and he said oh look it's raining in the rain just hit you right there in the nose she was devastated and then as soon as they finished that we went back and they read the scene again it was fantastic the anger she had toward him came from her guts because she had she had not just imagined being rejected by him she had just lived through it and even her anger at the baby that they had which is hard to draw up without a lot of thinking about a lot of effort for most people boy that just burst out of her it was great I'm wondering I'm gonna shift gears I haven't let you ask me any questions I'm sorry ah no you seem like a very nice person given the extraordinary results that improv has brought you I'm wondering did this influence you once you became a screenwriter when she started writing for mash in 1973 did you utilize any of this kind of chemistry that comes out of improv well I think all my life since I since I started thinking about improv oh all my professional life I've tried to use the relating that I learned I have the ability to relate and that to me is I think it's a major part of the acting experience so I have always used it in writing I think I think one of the things about how improv can help writing and it's not the only way but I the way that seems important to me is when you get in touch with the ability to contact another person you get more empathic you understand characters at a deeper level so that affects the writing it also puts you in touch with your own unconscious a little more and as things are poking their way to the top you can pull them out with associations I think it's the associates of thinking is probably how the original stuff comes to the surface there was I once read a story and I haven't been able to track it down it was supposed to be an account of something Freud had written there was a myth about a goat goat herder who kept his goats in a cave with a big rock blocking the entrance to the cave and when he let them out in the morning he let the weak winds out first the the sick ones the ones that were not useful to him as much as the others in case there was somebody out there throwing rocks at them and the burly valuable ones came out last and the image is the the the meaning of the myth is don't knock your early ideas the the weak ones are coming out but they're leading through an associative process to the ones behind them don't give up because you get a lousy idea the first ones they're supposed to be lousy your first draft is supposed to stink but it leads to the second one and some of the elements that brought forth the first one are pulling up the ones behind them and eventually you'll get the golden the golden ones and have patience and don't don't editorialize while you're still creating you gotta break it into two things once once it all comes out and gets on paper then you should attack it objectively but first it should be very subjective I never been able to track that down I don't know if fraud ever wrote about that or not maybe I made it up it's part of the creative process you join mash in 1972 and a year later began writing scripts I think the first script I wrote was at the end of the first year maybe well okay I think so was this a natural transition well I didn't wanted to be a writer from the time I was eight years old and there was only later in life when I was nine I wanted to be an actor and I wrote I made a I would shoot little movies on a wind-up Bell & Howell camera and I'm I wrote a newspaper or a magazine kind of thing that I published on a mimeograph machine and delivered on a horse in the canyon where we lived serious yes seriously and one time I was stuffing leaning over from the top of my horse stuffing the magazine into a mailbox and the guy said oh and I liked that paper I said oh thanks you what do you mean thanks I said well I write it as you write it I was about 11 because I like that so you can't judge things according to people's age you began writing and then by the way the reason you liked it so much was I stole a lot of the material that I put in it I think I was too young to know about copyright from writing you then went to directing episodes of mash often the ones that you had written yeah can you talk about this through line how did directing add to your ability to understand acting I was off from the time I was a kid I was interested in telling a story visually and I was I was very lucky that they trusted me was directing the first show but the first show was a real test it involved a picnic with about 80 people and I covered it with seven cameras and that's for the your first a directing job that's kind of a lot - yes take on and it went okay and that night I was catching a plane back to spend the weekend with my family in New Jersey and I remember skipping down the sidewalk saying I can do it I can do it did that spur greater interest and may be concentrating on directing or was always going to be a triple threat when it came to you writing it's a you know it you're right it's a triple threat there is when you write the wrong word no no it's true when you write direct and act in the same piece there are three ways they can kill you and it's not that easy to do I don't think I did my best and either though any of those categories while I was trying to do them all at the same time well I think we could dispute that especially once you get to your feature film career beginning in 1979 with the seduction of Joe tying it you wrote you know I didn't director I'll get into record no what's his name do I forget his neighborhood Thank You Jeri Schatzberg thank you the four seasons there four seasons that I would I was very proud of thank you talk a little about being a triple threat well one thing that's hard to do is to be objective about your own performance so I would when I was like when I was in the scene especially a close-up I'd shoot more takes of that and try to give myself more options in the editing room and that led to the crew saying a look at a narcissist he is who is only to give myself options I swear to god you believe you believe me don't you [Laughter] did this multiple tape continue in your subsequent films or did the first film teach you how to nobody know what I finally learned to do and when I I remember one time in an early movie I was in that where the director didn't want me to look at the rushes and I thought it was so important to see the rushes to find out what I was doing wrong and fix it which is probably the worst thing you can do because then the movie is all about you trying not to do things rather than giving an open honest fresh performance so one time I even snuck into the projection booth through the Attic so I could watch the rushes and I wasn't very good in that picture either but then I realized that it's really like improv you do it and it disappears into the ether and you don't have to worry about it it's either good or it's not good if it's happening while you do it that's what matters but to get into a situation where you're telling yourself what to do because you saw something you didn't like before all backwards for me anyway I don't I don't look at it how about writing for yourself in the sense that you're writing with your characteristics in mind I don't do that I don't think I've ever done that I write for the character and I try to try to make it a character that's in my range but as interesting I could make but I don't always understand what I'm writing one time I was writing the character that I was going to play in four seasons and I was struggling to find out who he was and I had written a couple of scenes that seemed to make an impression on me and I was taking a shower and thinking about it you know in the shower you get deep thoughts you know and I stepped out of the shower and I said to my wife Arlene I finally figured out who this guy is it's my father and she said you're kidding right and I said no what she said it's you [Music] which kind of took me down to peg because he wasn't that bad verbal a person you know but in ski thought he knew everything the after the four seasons this was followed a few years later with sweet Liberty right did you sense something different doing a second film as a triple threat from your first interestingly on that movie I was very interested in preparing every shot I would storyboarded the whole thing I went out with the photographer and figured out what lens we'd use in every scene where the track would go when I would get on the set in the morning at 8 o'clock the track would already be down because everybody knew what to do then when I got to the last picture I directed I improvised the directing part a little more I didn't plan the shots like that it didn't have his storyboard I couldn't I said and I'd think let's see where should we put the camera and as soon as I did that the crew didn't think I knew anything and it didn't go well so they prefer a well everybody prefers that you know what you're doing I think I prefer it to one of your greatest comic roles was in Woody Allen's crime and misdemeanors Hollywood director Lester could you talk about what Woody Allen was like as a director and what you learned working with him woody doesn't like to talk to people I think or at least when I worked with me didn't and that extended all the way to actors you and I have talked more now than I did with him in three movies and so there was not much conversation I came into the first scene and it was in a real apartment and it was already lit and other actors were sitting in the in their places I don't know why they called me so late but I walk in and what he said hi I said hi he said why don't you sit over there and about halfway through the scene whenever you feel like it go from sitting next to her to sitting next to her okay are we ready she was my sister and she was my mistress and I hadn't even been introduced to them so I think part of his then I figured out what how'd it work it and I I got very improvisational was something I really loved about working with him was that he really valued improvisation and he didn't mind I would improvise my way through a whole scene once in a while he'd say try to include that line I have in there because I use it later in the script and that was really fun for me there was no directing per se of it no his his way at that time was if he didn't like the way he only did two or three takes if he didn't like the way it went he would call you back a month later and you'd do it again and if he didn't like that you might get called back a third time and then you'd be fired after the first day I wouldn't the mind of being fired but then and by the second day I caught on and I and I really loved working I loved the experience and I love that movie I think it's one of our best move absolutely and this same experience happened on the second and and the your third film with with him was a musical yeah that was when I wish he had done more of those they were real it was really entertaining what was it like doing a musical Woody Allen film he wanted you to sing as badly as you could he had the idea that the people should sound like normal people in fact one of the actresses in the movie said I can't sing at all I can't do it so he got somebody to sing for her that she would lip-sync he got a high school girl who had never sung before so he was kind of determined not to have great sing he told the leading actress who was a great singers and don't try try not to sing so well fortunately I didn't need to be advised to do that in the 90s you took another new direction and you became host of PBS's Scientific American frontiers was this something that came out of the blue or were you curious I thought it came out of the blue I think that they they sent me in a letter that sort of that they must have sent to other people and then they might have sent it to me because I had played a doctor on televisions who had something vaguely to do with science I don't know if they realized I think I had such such a great interest in science I could have known because the letter was addressed dear occupant just kidding but I like that joke but I'm I said that I that I hoped that they would let me interview the scientists and not just come on camera to introduce the show and then read a narration because if I could interview them then I could spend the day with them and really learn about their work which we did and it was a great education for me and I'm in many ways you return to Broadway in the 90s first in Neil Simon's Jake's women had Broadway changed since your early days in the 60s there or I guess it had but I would don't know how do you know did you keep track of that I don't know I just don't have an answer to that yeah okay you've done work with Neil Simon a couple to tell ya the movie that he wrote and the California suite and what was it like working with him Malin Broadway was so tuned into the audience reaction it was startling he had he tried to show out in La Jolla or someplace like that in Southern California and didn't like the way it went and fired everybody and closed the show then started a new production that I was in and we tried it out one night in front of an invited audience tonight before we're going to go to New York and started working on it there and it didn't get many lamps and he said to me well I guess I'm going to have to close this and I said Neil look you're funny I'm funny we're gonna get laughs when we have a real audience this is an invited audience it's the first time we've faced them let's let's have faith in ourselves and in a way didn't get great reviews but it ran a season and we got away with it you've created iconic roles on television first in mash and then in 2004 he went to the West Wing can you talk about what it was like working on this pivotal dream fantasy series I felt I learned a lot about politics from reading the script because they were written by people with a lot of experience in politics real experience running campaigns and being in the staff of the Senate or the house and it was very interesting to me to see the discussions that would go on before a statement was released and every word would be vetted because it would reflect how it connected to the constituency and that kind of thing each word that could appeal to in different constituents it was very interesting to me it sounds like an alternate universe now yeah well yeah we don't get that impression now yeah but working on the series did it reflect differently than mash in terms of how TV was made about 20 years later or no they were both shot with one camera and the same kind of schedule and I didn't I didn't see any I'm not aware of many changes I'm disappointing you with that no it's nice to hear there's some continuity somewhere well maybe I'm just not noticing it you're making me scared you did series parts and lots of shows 30 rock the big see the blacklist and a program I don't know how many people have seen but I thought you delivered one of your most remarkable performances in Horace and Pete oh I loved that show that is so good he's a remarkable writer louis c.k and we did it like a play it was it was a little like the old US Steel hour in the 50s several cameras and we rehearsed it like a play and shot it like a play we he wanted to try and I think he did put up on the internet the whole uncut version of what we did all the way so I don't think he cut it or he might have made a few small edits but it had the energy of a live performance because of that your most recent work is the remarkable marriage story Noah Baumbach and I wonder if you could talk about your work on this film where you play one of the few decent lawyers in the film well he's decent and he's so decent you see he has a shabby office I love this movie and I'm very very proud to be in it because it's it's so remarkable it not only is a movie about people but it's a movie about it's a movie that takes a risk that you wouldn't expect somebody to take in in a commercial environment it's about divorce which turns people off I'd I wrote a movie about a divorce and one of the one of the audience surveys had someone saying I didn't go see it because I figured if Alan Alda did a movie about divorce it would be painful and I didn't want the pain you know because I wouldn't just treat it like like a joke I would get in try to anyway get into this the reality of it and Noah does that but what's amazing to me about what he's able to do Noah Baumbach the director writer what he's amazing but when I find amazing that he that he can do is tell a love story that continues right straight through the divorce even though they have heartbreaking fights you can see that these are fights between two people who deeply love each other and it's very much like I don't mean to drag this in by the heels but it's very much like what we talked about on my podcast which is relating and communicating the idea that in a marriage you have to you have to communicate really well to keep going through a marriage especially with the introduction of children and professional concerns and when you start to think about a divorce it's often because communication is broken down then you find out that during the divorce you have to communicate better than you ever did earlier in the marriage and if you don't there's going to be a lot of pain for everybody involved and Noah shows that and it's it's it's an emotional workout I think and like a workout at a gym it can be it can do you good it might not feel great while you're going through it but to stir up those emotions to have the empathy for the people who are going through it is a valuable experience plus he's able to find out what's funny about these things sometimes it's funny and painful at the same time so I'm love this movie in them and it also gives me a chance to talk about my podcast let's talk about your podcast I love this podcast I had which is called clear and vivid it's called clear and vivid and the idea is that I've now had 70 conversations with people like yo-yo ma and Madeleine Albright's and Michael J Fox Sarah Silverman Sarah Silverman had one of the most extraordinary stories to tell and all these stories are about relating to other people and communicating what goes into communication and over and over again you hear very much like what we were talking about before being aware of what's happening in the other person not what you want them to get from you but what they're able to get from you where are they who are they what are they going through what can I say that speaks to that otherwise I'm just spraying stuff all over you it's not getting in Sarah Silverman's story was amazing and it's just one example of many she was looking at her Twitter feed and somebody had tweeted a one-word insult towards like the worst insult you can give to a woman so instead of blocking him or doing a tirade she looked up his profile and found out he was suffering from back pain and she wrote him on Twitter I messaged him and said I I'm in pain in my back - I know what that's like and sometimes I think anger comes out of pain and I think that's why you were angry toward me why don't you try to speak from a place of love and he wrote back and said I have no place of love that was ripped out of me by a man who abused me when I was a child she then found a place where he could get therapy for free he went to the therapy changed his life there now best friends on the Internet is that amazing Wow but there's stories of how diplomats were able how George Mitchell was able to stop the violence in Ireland by bringing people together he said we're gonna have dinner every night for the next week during the day we can talk business and yell at each other at night you can't say anything having to do with business none of these negotiations at night we're going to talk to each other about our childhoods our families our pets the things we care about in life that's all we're going to talk about they talk civilly to each other each day it was harder to yell at this other person who you knew was just like you stories like that over and over again I'm I've learned a lot talking to these people and we use the same techniques I was talking with you about before I don't go in with a list of questions nothing personal by the way most interviews involve a list of questions but that sometimes not in our case but it sometimes leads to not really hearing the answer to the question because you know you know you have this next question to get to whereas if you ask about what you're actually curious about and hear the answer and want the person to tell you more about that or remind you of something in your own life and you say it's like that is that like that for you where you start to share a conversation and you have a communication partner that's such a different experience and that's what I try to do on the show and I see people opening up and it's very it's very enlightening when they do because these are people with enormous experience and yo-yo ma then can talk about how he relates to the other players when he's playing with other musicians how he relates to the audience how he deals with his nervousness about an audience and it has to do with relating he said he used to be very nervous when he was younger coming out to do a concert and then he realized that if he looked at it this way he wouldn't be nervous he now comes out and thinks I've invited these people to my party and I'm going to serve them food and drink and music and we're all going to have a good time together all of a sudden they become real people they're not this this monster in the dark nothing personal looking back you have worked with some of the greatest directors in the world Scorsese you worked with him on the aviator you got an Oscar nomination for your role there you work for Michael you've worked with Mike Nichols you have worked with Noah Baumbach I'm wondering how you worked with Woody Allen I'm wondering if you can I was the best you left that Spielberg yeah we're good well I've been so lucky there's and I would watch them carefully every minute to try to learn from them and and they like to talk they like to explain somebody once told me he met Charlie Chaplin 20 or 30 years after he had made movies and he said he loved to explain the fight scene that he did that took six weeks to stage and he didn't explained it moment by moment shot by shot and that's what I find often great directors love to do they do asked him a question about a particular scene or shot how did you get that they'd like to pass it on it's very nice I got that what Scorsese and would Spielberg I enjoyed that we're with an audience of actors who hopefully will also work with great directors I wonder if you could share your insight about some kind of common thread of what great directors do with actors that might be different than not-so-great directors no I can't I said the reason I can't is that every director I've worked with has been different I think a directing style may stem from a personal style of living the way they organize their lives on the set good to get through a harrowing series of tasks and 200 people lining up to ask your questions all day long you've got to have a sty working that suits you I'm guessing and some woody doesn't level or at least when I worked on them didn't like to talk other Marty Scorsese loves to talk spielberg he the same thing he enjoyed very much enjoyed talking about things but how they offer you suggestions about how your acting is different for everybody and i think it's the only advice I could possibly give I think is to reverse the process we've been talking about in terms of communication to receive a communication you have to go through a similar process of listening well trying to read the other person not only what they're saying but what's under what they're saying an employer tries to communicate with an employee the employee has to go to the same effort to get good leadership out of the employer you can't just take it at face value and say well you didn't tell me that you know you've got to be a team and and both people can benefit from trying to be a team and I think the actor the same thing if you have only one way of working and the director doesn't fit into that it's going to be unfortunate I think we have to be flexible it's easier for me to say because I seem to be I see I feel like I invent a different method every time I do a different part really and that method is coming though from a base of listening and empathy like yes I don't know I make it up as they go along let me turn to our audience who have written some questions let's see you've played a lot of political roles in your career how do you approach them and do you have any thoughts well this is too incendiary about our current political climate no I was a political activist when uh when I was much younger 45 or 50 years ago and I worked very hard to try to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified I identified as a feminist and worked hard for the cause of gender equality and I felt after the Equal Rights Amendment failed failed to be ratified that it was time for me to concentrate on what I know how to do best which is act and write and now teach communication and help help run an organization that is spreading these ideas around the world I don't and and particularly the communication of science I don't want to politicize science or politicize my work by talking in public about current politics I have my own ideas but I don't want to I don't want to use any platform I have for that I want it I have a longer-range plan to help communication improve which I hope will help our political interactions improve there's a speculative question what role or roles would you love to play that you haven't had a chance to yet and Frank okay the thing is I really do regard my whole life and so-called career as an improv all I've ever done is take what comes my way and try to make the most of it I haven't hanker after playing anything there's no King Lear in the future I don't really like King Lear I love Shakespeare and I love I mean he's an astonishing genius but I never understood King Lear I'd be happy to talk to somebody who's played it who can explain it to me but he seems like a dope to me okay is that going to be the headline of this thing all this says you're a dope dear William you blew it yeah okay as actors we have dream jobs we're cast and crew get along like a loving family and nightmare jobs where it is a constant clash of egos without naming names how did you handle the difficult jobs well I missed something in the beginning well in the middle the basic thing is how do you handle a set where it is not working well Oh with there's tension yeah a lack of communication yeah the ideal thing would be to communicate better and that get pissed I'm going to try that next [Music] okay your dad was a burly Q that's what it says a burly Q performer and you used to travel with him what memories do you have of those comics and strippers we've heard about the strippers and did your dad ever let you do any burlesque bits with him well they carried me on stage when I was six months old right and tell me they tell me that there was a bell on the highchair they put me in and I kept ringing the bell right on top of all their punchlines I had early training and stealing the scene but yeah the chorus girls were very sweet to me they took me up to the dressing room and I was sort of their mascot and they would comb my hair and Pat my cheek and then they'd say okay Ally we're going to change our clothes now turn your back and I turn around with my face against the wall with my nose in their costumes and I could smell the perfume and the sweat on the costumes and behind me I could hear them putting on their silk costumes and they thought it didn't mean anything to me I get excited just thinking about it I [Applause] would just kind of done yet I was gonna ask but you kind of answered it looking back on your long career is there a favorite role and I guess being yeah no I don't think there is their favorite moments things that come back to me from time to time that I i relish one you'd never think of there was there were two guys from Britain who did a play called the play what I wrote and every night in the second act they had an an actor or some somebody well-known come in to do the second act with them and you had to learn the song and a dance and you had to learn a lot of dialogue you were you were a real part of the second act and I loved doing it and at one point I was playing count Tobler Owen who had been imprisoned in a French prison and to escape he had to put on a hoop skirt so I put on the hoop skirt and I'm singing and dancing in my hoop skirt and I tripped on the skirt and fall down one of the memorable moments in my life it's so important they don't teach you in acting school don't trip on the hoop skirt but I never went to acting school so I wouldn't have known anyway but there are little moments like that I think of and I think of that you know sometimes people say who's your favorite actor and I don't think of a favorite actor I think of moments that I've seen that I admired and can you share some of those I once saw I was at a dinner honoring Anthony Hopkins and it was entry there was a reel of his work and almost every single clip going back to when he was a young actor was authentic and invested and I that's the closest I came because every one of those I'm almost every one of those clips was a memorable moment where he really connected and then there's that moment in the back of the car when Brando shakes his head and says no no forget what he said could have been a container not it seemed that scene but the other guy takes a gun out Rod Steiger yeah it takes a gun out and he says no no no and I always admired that then I heard later I don't know if it's true he was thinking don't act like that but you got to make the make use of whatever you got yeah I'm trying to recall the film but there was a moment I it was after mash where you kind of shifted gears and started playing darker roles even villainous roles was this a conscious decision to try you're the only conscious part of what you're describing is that when I did then a new life I deliberately wrote the character much more rough-hewn than other parts I'd recently played because of what you're talking about but the fact is I played flawed people most of the time including Hawkeye Hawkeye was a flawed character I it could be that I in in my real life I created a stereotype when I would be interviewed on television that slopped over into my artistic life I'm not sure I mean that may be something in favor of the point of view of some actors who don't like to show up as themselves and only like to show up as one character or another but you know more and more you talk about changes in the business it wasn't considered part of your job when I started making movies that you would go on the road for a month promoting it you might be asked to do an interview but it wasn't now it's in your contract and I understand that but it's over it's a little bit connected to the idea that I always regretted it when two or three decades ago they started referring to movies as product it's not a product at its best it's a work of art and I also have another reaction to and I said I'd say it as gently because I'm not not trying to criticize anybody but it's common for now the public to talk about actors practicing their craft you can do acting as a craft you can also do it as an art you can try to be an artist to me a craft is painting flowers on a dish and there's nothing wrong with that but there's a difference between that and trying to be like Rembrandt and put character into a face that's different and if you aspire to that it's it's different from being a craft well what were we talking about before I got on I feel that the time we've spent together has been a true education in terms of how to approach the art of acting and I would say the art of communicating and I think I speak for everyone in thanking you for sharing such important life lesson for that oh my God look Oh

Channel: SAG-AFTRA Foundation

Views: 11,423

Rating: 4.9101124 out of 5

Keywords: SAG Foundation, SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Acting, Actors, Q&A, Interview, Alan Alda, Career Retrospective, Brian Rose

Id: Ne6yTvwn0Q8

Length: 63min 5sec (3785 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019