Inside The Actor's Studio - David Duchovny

[Music] tonight's guest has received two emmy nominations eight screen actors guild nominations and won the golden globe the golden satellite award great britain's national television award and the tv guide award for his portrayal of special agent fox mulder in the x-files he has appeared in the red shoe diaries and twin peaks on television and his film appearances include new year's day the rapture julia has two lovers beethoven chaplain california playing god evolution and full frontal he has written directed and co-starred in house of d people magazine has declared him one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world and he has been gq's man of the year the actors studio is proud to welcome david duchovny where were you born i was born about a half a mile from here 11th street and 2nd avenue i wasn't born there but that's where i came home to what is your father's name my father's name was amram what is the origin of the name duchovny i think duch means spirit in russian and other slavic languages my grandmother told me it meant rabbi where did your father grow up he grew up in brooklyn what was his profession when you were a child i believe he was in what you call public relations i think he was a speechwriter he worked at the american jewish committee the ajc but he wrote books like the establishment dictionary on with the win biography of martha mitchell the wisdom of spirit yagna these were like i guess called political satire that he'd do to supplement his income along with playing poker every wednesday night what is your mother's name my mother's name is margaret meg and her family name meg miller margaret miller where was she born she was born in scotland do you feel scottish uh i i think that i do i i think that my father uh being a new york jew and my mother being uh a scottish lutheran i don't know if you're you know the lutherans but they're a fun-loving kind of people but uh they uh they have a lot of things in common and and they have um kind of a survivor uh mentality uh a a downtrodden mentality in a way and i think uh it's uh it kind of chimes within me in that way do you have any siblings yes i have an older brother and a younger sister as we have so often in the past ten and a half years we've come to the commonest theme in this series how old were you when your parents divorced i think i was 11. what was its effect on you i think i felt like i was alone i think was the problem i think i felt like mine was the only family that was going through that right and of course obviously more than 50 of the other families were absolutely as i was preparing for tonight uh this was the point in the blue cards when i encountered the vanishing and reappearing h you now spelled duchovny with an h in the middle yeah but i happen to know that when you were a kid there was no h that's true and your father never used the h never did nor did your brother no still doesn't couldn't afford it how do you explain this you know lipton's a pretty pretty good name for reading off the page yeah you don't get duchovny right duchenne my father i think got tired of being called duchovini the chubney dukkovic dutch dutch oven whatever and he took the h out but he never did it legally and then when my parents divorced my mother as a kind of you know put it back in really yeah so i put it back in uh my brother who was older and kind of siding with my my dad left it out and my sister you know was kind of on a monday wednesday friday how did you become a student at collegiate my mother prized education over everything over anything and always wanted me to get a college degree that was her her mandate almost and collegiate is a wonderful school uptown and she had her heart set on me getting a scholarship there and i i did how did you do scholastically at collegiate i did well i mean i worked my ass off i was so scared i i just uh i was terrified not to get straight a's what subjects interested you i think i was always interested in literature so english as we call it in high school what about sports basketball and baseball were you good yeah yeah yeah i was good where did you go from collegiate i was an english major princeton you've credited your academic experience with teaching a discipline yeah yes i do credit it for that you've said that your entire life has been an attempt to get back to the feelings that you had on the playing field in sports house said um just the kind of unconsciousness that that happens when you're when you're playing a game any game doesn't have to be a sports game and i think uh when when i'm acting and when i'm feeling good acting it it reaches that level of uh kind of ecstatic lack of self-consciousness and then of course when it's not that it is uh the converse which is the most hideous self-consciousness in the world um to me it's like a a drug to get to that place where you're where you're just feeling and and and playing and reacting and not thinking and it's a lovely place to be as i'm sure you know most of the people here know what was the title of your senior thesis at princeton it was called this is so pretentious it's called the schizophrenic critique of pure reason in beckett's novels and and you can all leave now if you want what made you decide to go to graduate school i thought that the life of an academic was suitable to the the kind of career i saw for myself as a writer that i could have the three or four months off a year to pursue my own projects or whatever it was but there's a certain kind of level of of play that goes into teaching that i was also very attracted to and maybe performance as well as being up in front of a class and what did you study at you i was in the phd program for english literature did you begin work on your dissertation i did what was its subject it was called i'm not i'm not acting right now you have the title there don't you yeah i know i know it i know i know it magic yeah magic and technology and contemporary american fiction and poetry sir why magic and technology i kind of was going to talk about certain writers pension mailer ishmael reed james merrill robertson davies canadian author i was going to talk about technology and magic as similar fields of things where incredible things happen you know technology is a magical field you know you you know think of the magic of toast you know on a very small scale i think there are things that you should and should not do with your power of magic and yet technology is never spoken about in in moral as a moral field so uh except by these writers i thought that they were trying to infuse a kind of magical morality in terms of well just because we can do it doesn't mean that it's morally right to do it right and i thought that was an interesting field to pursue are you abd on your uh phd then all but the dissertation that's all but but don't you think they should have a much nicer latin term for that than abd yeah abd all but dissertation it's it's it's not good enough how did acting come up as a preferable alternative to teaching and writing why acting well i i when i was at yale i started to think well i'm going to write plays now you know as you do when you're 22 you think well i'm gonna i'm gonna do this so i'm gonna speak french i'm gonna write plays and i thought if i was going to write dramatically that i should learn something about acting and that's how i i kind of went in through the back door to start acting at yale at you yeah during this time weren't you commuting into new york and actually almost got blackmailed by a student at you know who knew i was uh studying acting in uh in new york and with whom did you study in new york marcia howefrecht and we might as well confess now that in the front row yeah he's one of our distinguished teachers in the actor's studio drama school martial faculty standpoint tell us about study with marsha what did marcia teach you well i know that when i went in to act i thought that acting was saying words a certain way very consciously and i thought well you know i've heard actors they say things a certain way and then they must figure that out before they go up there they you know they go i'm going to say it like this and then i'm going to go up there and i'm going to say it like that it's going to work what a mistake one of the first things that marcia teaches us taught me was just complete freedom because i was green because we were beginning class it was don't worry about the text the text is floating on top of what you're doing whatever i just remember you know something like if you want to laugh at the funeral you go ahead and laugh because as soon as you don't laugh then you've stifled your impulse and then you're phony and then you're you're you know you're spiraling into that depth of despair and self-consciousness that we also know so well so marcia just taught us whatever we were feeling was right marcia would you tell us about david the student i think that david got into finding his truth rather quickly you know and and rather easily he was always a lot of fun girls all loved him when did you make the decision to leave yale and teaching and writing for what is apparently a wicked life upon the stage i think you know when that dissertation was bearing down on me and i thought well this is really you know and i had kind of fallen in love with with with acting you know at that point and i just thought whatever careers i was going to choose demanded complete focus so i chose one how did new year's day happen for you i was introduced to henry jaglin who is a you know a career independent filmmaker extraordinary a truly independent filmmaker through an ex-girlfriend honestly and i just started i started to try to pursue work as as an actor and and you know he said yeah come on do a scene i mean it was just just luck and timing but that wasn't released was it for two years i think after we show um maybe he doesn't often have a story a narrative story so it takes him a long time to edit what took you to los angeles i felt like i was starting late i i was 26 or 27 and i felt like i felt like i had to to earn my keep you know and there was just more work out there that that i could make my rent with the theme music of inside the actors studio is written by angelo batlamenti it was david lynch's composer and composed i think one of the greatest scores ever heard on television the score for twin peaks tell me how you got involved in that series apparently james spader the actor had had suggested a part of a transvestite drug enforcement agent to his friend mark frost who was one of the producers of the show yeah i just went in to audition and they told me i was going to be playing a transvestite and i didn't have the clothes for it so i kind of just came in with an emery board i think and just kind of you know did this and it was very effeminate in the audition and i got the part and then i went on set and they they narrowed my legs completely and they put me in a big old dress and they put me in a wig and they had the almost kabuki makeup on me and then i i looked at myself in the mirror and i thought uh don't work so hard you know you know that the mask is there and i loved that feeling of uh you know realizing what the mask is saying you know and realizing how to speak through the mask and uh i think um from then on i kind of realized that whatever you're doing you've got some kind of mask on so that's what you have to that's one of the things you have to figure out is is is how to speak through whatever the mask of your character is at that moment what about the clothes that you wore yeah they were tight were they yeah yeah i grew to respect the the travails of women uh wearing pantyhose because they they made me feel fat the rapture was a movie with serious intentions some very good roles in it yeah what was interesting about the rapture was i think it's the only the only movie that i can think of that um actually comes down on the side of there is a god and yet the mimi rogers character decides not to throw in with them or it was basically if there is a god and he has done what he has done to me until i'm not interested i don't i don't want to have anything to do with him and i thought wow that's uh that's ballsy that's a ballsy movie do you have any problem with the nudity in it only my own wasn't a problem we were swingers you know me and me were swingers we were having sex in a furniture store so uh you know got to be nude in the furniture store uh but it was uh it was very um it's tough you know it's just another thing it's just another thing that that you have to deal you know that to get out of your own head you know you just happen to be naked there but you still you still got to be the actor you still have to do your work what drew you to california yeah the film in california with a k what drew me was you know an interesting script and a chance to work i mean i feel you know very fortunate in many ways to have been able to educate myself on camera you know to continue my education and i started with marcia yeah as an actor i was able to you know make mistakes and to be to be less than than i could be to be to be lousy at times and still keep coming back and working and to get to a point where i could actually um achieve some kind of competence and from that base level of confidence really get freedom and then you know i feel like i'm just starting in that way that i achieved that base level of competence and now now it's all just exciting because now you can now get a chance to see what you can really do [Music] tell me how the x-files came into your life um that was like 1993. so i'd been out in la for about three years and uh i just you know my manager i had a manager melanie green still is and she sent me the script and said i know we said we weren't going to try to do television because i thought i'd go from movie to movie that's how i envisioned my career so she sent me this x files and she was convinced that it was very very good and i thought it was good and um so i went up for it and uh and it's just one of those weird one of those weird things where one day you're going to an audition for the x-files and then you know 10 years later you're you're still working on the show when the part was offered to you did you think this series was going to succeed i didn't know i thought oh here's an opportunity to try something here's an opportunity to do a job and to to learn and to grow and to try a character and uh if it goes a year that's great if it goes one show that's great i certainly never saw it becoming what it was were you a devotee of science fiction before he became involved not at all and and and still i'm not in a in a way i understand i i very much appreciate the kind of drama of the x-files you know the production values and hopefully the acting and the writing uh and i don't think of it as science fiction really i just think of it as a drama how fully formed was special agent fox mulder when you got that script i think there there was a lot in it that was that was fully formed in mulder because um i think there was certain like levels of of uh insubordination and humor that um i always wanted to bring out more within the tension of of the filming one of the things i loved from the pilot and from the early scripts was that that mulder is a complete failure you know he's never solved a case ever and when he walks in the room everybody laughs and looks away or snickers i love that and i think i'll always love that about mulder is that he's he's horrible at his job he should have been fired long ago where does the name mulder come from that's chris carter's mother's uh maiden name and who's chris carley chris carr is the creator of the x-files if the x-files had been shot in los angeles do you think you could have done what you did in vancouver no vancouver offers uh logistically just too many different environments the x-files is a peripatetic show you know it's got to go to the mountains to the seas yeah you know it's got to have rain it's got to have sun it's got to stand in for all of america tell me about your co-star yeah well she was whereas i wanted to jump in immediately on everything she was more uh coming from more of a theater background where she wanted to know she wanted to know more before she jumped in so she had a real steep learning curve in the beginning and then she then she just flew after that you and she walked a tightrope for years before you finally fell off it you've described it as a chaste love affair and compared it to cary grant movies in which verbal sparring was a code for sexual sparring the intelligence of chris carter and keeping it a chaste love affair was that you you constantly wanted to come back you know you there was never since it was never consummated the pressure was never let let out of of our balloon you know we were constantly you know the smallest touch was was rife and that was that was fun in terms of breaking down scripts and story arcs this is youth talking and things like that my education helped but not in terms of the heart right i said i think that your brain can get you only so far your brain can get you to a smart performance one that there's nothing wrong with but not one that you know sings how much of david wound up in agent mulder at first there's that guard there's that strong delineation between me and the character you know i'm gonna play this guy i'm going to figure out who he is and then you take however maybe the first year you take figuring out who that guy is and then you know as the years go by you can't become less vigilant sometimes if the character is not light years away from you as mulder you know physically and vocally was not from me yeah so yeah i sneak in and i want a sneak man to me that becomes exciting in any part oh yeah but yes yes i find that the most organic the most fun the most thrilling thing for me is to sneak the parts of my personality that makes sense in there and expand that guy you've expressed particular affection for several episodes dwayne berry episode yeah you can see this one coming up sixth avenue contains the speedo scene why did it create such a stir mulder was a guy that you would never expect to see out of a suit so the fact that he appeared in a bathing suit uh in that baby it was shocking the red the red space yeah was shocking it became famous wow yeah sure it did oh yeah the fans of that show went nuts and you know that's well they were they were like the first internet-based fan folks so they went they went crazy they saw that speedo yeah one of your favorites is one of my favorites small potatoes oh yeah it was called by tv guide one of the greatest episodes in tv history did you enjoy playing the dual role oh yeah anytime you get to you know just stretch out a little bit and play being being possessed being inhabited by another spirit you know but still looking like mulder that's you know a gift to be able to do that somebody gets inside yeah darren's darren's character does i think the scene in which eddie as mulder or was you of course blunders around mulder's office with which he's unfamiliar right he's one of the best in the history of that series the remarkable thing about it is it's absolutely eddie's soul in your body every single moment yeah [Music] fbi f b i fbi you looking at me there ain't nobody else here you must be looking at me you want a piece of this [Music] you're a damn good-looking man and in this one you got to cheat because uh eddie as mulder can try to seduce scully that had to be a lot of fun to do for the two of you yeah really release a lot of pent-up feelings do you ever wish things were different what do you mean the person you wanted to be when you grew up when you were in high school how far off from that did you end up career-wise miles off target not not just that but you ever wish that you could go back and do it all differently do you [Music] oh one of the things i like best about the show is that you guys never called each other by your first names right right i loved that huh she was like can i call you lipton do you like that that's right we haven't had a fairy it's the same thing exactly the same story tension grows whose voice is it saying i made this over the 1013 logo at the end of every x-files that is our sound mixer's son yeah i think it's terry couturier's son it is and i i actually love that so do i sodor i i don't want to say it's my favorite part of the show it's classic it's like you know that's what that's what you feel sometimes when you when you get done with a job you know when you get done creating something you feel like a you know an eight-year-old boy yeah looking at your little lego or your little sandcastle whatever it is and you just go i made this exactly who wrote and directed the unnatural me david did you enjoy it i loved it i loved it i loved being uh you know in control of of every aspect from start to finish and i loved um you know the the greatest the greatest gift of being an actor is you get all these people who are so much better than you at what they do costume designers scoring hair and makeup whatever and they give you what they do they give it to you and they make you so much better than you are and it just it was great who wrote and directed hollywood a.d does me too this is one of the most self-referential of the episodes right because they watch themselves two of them being portrayed on the big screen right the premise is that uh a uh screenwriter has turned one of their cases into a movie which is not so far-fetched no we are thrown up against the difference between you know our hollywood image and our and our conception of ourselves who plays mulder in the movie gary shanley why i just thought it was funny and uh and gary said he'd do it who plays scully kay leone my wife yeah in the bubble bath scene what does scully tell mulder about taylor leone that she has a crush on him i appreciate that skin man don't call me that yes sir um uh where are you now i'm right underneath you manelli at the same hotel as you right below you and agent scully frederman got me a associate producer credit on the movie ap skinner huh uh so what are you what are you up to right now sir i'm taking a bubble bath uh hold on just one second hey scully skin man is calling me from a bubble bath it's still me molder uh sorry well just just hold on one second sir scully yeah yeah skinner is calling me from a bubble bath wow he's really gone hollywood totally you know mulder speaking of hollywood i think that tae leone has a little crush on you oh yeah right like taylor's ever gonna have a crush on me i think that shanley likes you a bit too really are you tattooed yes i i my daughter i have a tattoo i have a compass um my daughter's name is west and i have a compass uh with uh nse and west spelled out so i i had that done when she was nine months old and i have a son and i only have one tattoo so i gotta get another one you're gonna get another one i have to i mean i can't you know what is he gonna think he's like daddy where's where's my scarification i'll ask my wife to note that he has one and he's going to get two and i still don't have one two weeks ago i was privileged to attend a screening of a movie called house of d who wrote house of d i wrote house of d who directed how's the high director awesome what is the genesis of that hundreds of yards from right here there was uh a women's house of detention on 11th street and sixth avenue it got torn down in 1973 but until then there was a prison in the middle of this neighborhood if you can imagine it and not only a prison but a women's prison and not only that but they could hang out the bars and what fascinated me about the house d was the idea that you know we live in a society where prisoners are are not in our midst they are taken away much like the mentally ill they are taken away and put away yeah out of our and i thought well how interesting must it have been to actually have the free world and the incarcerated world but up against one another and actually have haphazard communication and what if what if the free person was a boy who didn't have didn't have a mentor you know his father was dead and his mother was for whatever reasons incapable of mentoring him into the age of 13 into adulthood and what if by chance he he struck up a question now the answer to which will depress our writers no end how long did it take you to write the screenplay well i would say since i started thinking about in 1973 it took me 20 20 years how long did it actually take you when i sat down to write it it took me about a week did you intend to direct it from the beginning yeah when did it occur to you that you had acted it as well when it became feasible economically a good thing economically it's an independent film i had to raise you know a certain number of millions of dollars to to make it outside of the studio system i had to i had to cast some well-known people in it i was lucky enough to get robin williams almost right off the bat did you propose to tara that she would play the mother in this or was it her eye it was appealed to me who played that wonderful woman up in the jail cell erica badou who's mostly mostly known as the singer but was in cider house rules and the boy in the movie this kid named anton yeltsin who's just i hate the word genius he's it's not my it's my least favorite word but we'll get to that he's stunning in it but kim is a mess he's just uh naturally so available that's robin williams do you enjoy working with him robin is like you know um he just he just wants to act you know he's just your director of photography michael chapman he shot raising bull he shot taxi driver he shot the last detail and how do you work with him are you responsible for the setups and the choice of lenses or is he i kind of tell them what i want to see and what i want to feel i believe that you have an interest in psychotherapy yeah it's funny because i have this other script that i that i want to do next which is kind of about um there's this psychotherapist named james hillman who talks about you know seizing control of the narrative of your life you know i think he says we're fictional yeah he says we're fictional and in a way and he says well you have the power to tell your story the way you want to tell it in a way you can tell your story as if you're a victim or you can tell your story as if you're something else and and i i was just fascinated by that idea that i'd at some point in my life had gotten into this rut where i was telling the story in a way that was lousy for me so uh i wrote this script kind of about that that i want to do next which is really like it's how you tell your story [Music] we begin our classroom with the questionnaire invented by my great hero bernard pivo tell me what is your favorite word grace what is your least favorite word doubtless it's right up there with hopefully what turns you on the ocean what turns you off pretension yeah what sound or noise do you love david there's a sound that we used to make in high school that still gives me great pleasure what uh it's hard to do just like out of the blue but it sounds something like this just out of curiosity what is that it's just a thing we did [Laughter] [Applause] and i will say my wife begs me for that she does [Music] [Laughter] what sound or noise do you hate gee i guess oddly enough when you kind of run your hand over a bed sheet like that when you're cleaning it yeah that sounds like that's a chalkboard thing to me i see everybody's favorite what is your favorite chris wood [ __ ] what profession other than yours would you like to attempt uh attempt and succeed i'd like to be a professional basketball player professional baseball player what profession would you absolutely not like to undertake i'd say butcher i think that'd be hard for me if heaven exists what would you like to hear god say when you arrive at the pearly gates there's what i think he will say and then there's what i'd like him to say okay let me have him both what i think he will say is mulder [Laughter] um what i'd like them to say uh you did good you you you used you used what you had here are your students hi hi my name is sarah i'm a second year actor hi thank you for coming i was wondering you talked a lot about your work with marcha and i was wondering when you first get a script what you usually do for your weigh-in well the first time i read it i i kind of uh there's a certain kind of feeling that i look for in my for let's be delicate close to my gut there's a tingling that should happen somewhat lower than my gut whether or not you know i feel like i'm like i'm getting like nerve jangly you know reading this thing and and something in me is and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up or something happens i don't even know what it is and then so then i know okay there's an area in there that i'm interested in and then i kind of go back read it over again and again and again and try to figure out what that is and the way in but you know as as i'm sure you do with marcia there are there are ways in after that you know ways in through centering wherever the guy is in his body and animals and all those wonderful tricks and stuff that you learn i call them tricks but tools [Laughter] that's better tricks is kind of fun though isn't it it's like tricks hi my name is amy i'm a first year playwright and i was just curious if your interest in psychoanalysis and literary criticism influence your writing and how you create characters most people would say that freud is a literary critic i mean the things that he talked about you know you have the oedipus complex you have we study him in our right you know he was a fan more than anything and the things that he talked about you know i know he liked to say he was a scientist but the ego doesn't exist you can't find it in the head not as the id or the super ego these are these are poetic conceits so he's both a critic and a poet he happens to be a very powerful one and he's virally infected us with his language so that we speak about these things as if they exist they don't actually so i think that in that sense you know looking at freud or psychoanalytic terminology or uh mental critical terminology it can be helpful it can also get in your way because it's one step removed from the primal impulse so you gotta you gotta juggle it i mean i can't i'm never going to get fully away from it and and whatever i do so so i work with that you know i think a lot of what happens in your life as you as you grow as you get older as an artist is you you realize okay i got this and this is what i do and i can i can work within this range and you start to know yourself and i hate to say you know your limitations which can be a wonderful thing not you know i know it sounds like hell but it actually can be a wonderful thing and actually surpass them by recognizing them sometimes [Music] let's close with this would you introduce your friend come on introduce a wonderful actor ron eldar right here i challenge ron to ask a question remember that time in mexico [Laughter] when you directed your film what was your uh your happiest moment and what was your saddest moment the happiest moment was um was probably watching this this 14 year old boy anton yelchin be a great actor you know just kind of um you know i cast him i thought i thought he'd be good i hope that he didn't get tight i hope that he could deliver and then just to see him just just blossom in front of me i just it's just amazing and then the saddest moment um oh well actually i mean it's very personal the saddest thing was that uh my father who who uh lived in paris he and it's not really the um prototype for the character but um i was gonna shoot those three days in paris and my father died like two weeks before i started shooting so i didn't get to i was very much looking forward to in many ways as a child just showing off that i was going to come to paris as a director and you know wear a beret and a megaphone and show my dad those things and uh that was very sad to me that we we missed we missed it but then when i was in paris i got to see where he lived and all that stuff so that was it was very personal to satisfy [Music] you

Channel: LVEI La Vérité Est Ici

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Rating: 4.860465 out of 5

Keywords: x-files, x-philes, lvei, fans, gillian anderson, david duchovny

Id: zannB8evMb0

Length: 40min 4sec (2404 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020