The actor: Chris Elliott, son of famed radio comedian Bob Elliott of Bob And Ray, and four-time Emmy winner as a writer for Late Night With David Letterman. Elliott's Letterman appearances gained him an early notoriety as a goofy comic, and he went on to star in the TV vehicle Get A Life and the film vehicle Cabin Boy before dropping back to smaller roles in a wide variety of comedies, dramas, and animated prime-time shows. He's also recently written two "novels," as he puts it: 2005's The Shroud Of The Thwacker and the new Into Hot Air.
Get A Life (1990-1992)—"Chris Peterson"
Chris Elliott: Probably the most fun I've ever had, actually, acting. Because it was the perfect extension of the stuff that I'd started to do on Late Night With David Letterman, and when I look back on all my work, it was probably the best possible incarnation of Chris Elliott, of me. Of what I can do. I look back on that actually as my finest work. [Laughs.]
The A.V. Club: You're credited on the IMDB with writing two episodes; how much involvement did you actually have with shaping the show?
CE: Well, I sort of created the show with Adam Resnick, and then David Mirkin came in and ran it, but we didn't do that show in front of an audience, so there was a lot of playing around on the set, and I was in the writers' room breaking stories and stuff every day. So I was pretty involved.
AVC: How did you communicate "This is what the Chris Elliott character should be like" to all the other writers, the people who didn't start out with you like Adam did?
CE: I was lucky on that show, because Late Night had given me a good foundation, and I already seemed to have writers, at least, who were fans of mine. Writers knew of me and knew my style, and Adam's voice is really strong, and it didn't take long for people to get what we wanted to do. I think also that the writers that we had on the show were pretty great: Charlie Kaufman and Bob Odenkirk, among others.
AVC: What's Charlie Kaufman like to work with?
CE: [Laughs.] At the time, he was very quiet, you know? He was—if it was like Your Show Of Shows, he would have been—I guess Neil Simon was the one who used to whisper ideas to Mel Brooks? Charlie Kaufman, if he had anybody who would listen to him, he was that. He was very shy and quiet, but always wrote funny stuff.
Cabin Boy (1994)—"Nathanial Mayweather"
CE: Cabin Boy is a flawed movie, and I look back on it with a certain amount of regret in terms of some of the choices that we made, but at the same time, I'm pretty proud of it, and actually happy that it has somewhat of a cult following at this point. The character in that movie, I like. It was basically Freddie Bartholomew from Captains Courageous, and it's sort of funny to watch that movie now, because I start with this sort of pseudo-English accent, and then as the notes came down from the studio, you can actually see the accent starting to diminish throughout the movie. [Laughs.] I think I end with hardly an accent at all. But I'm actually proud of the movie.
AVC: Was it shot linearly, so the accent diminishes scene by scene, or does it vary depending on when a scene was shot?
CE: You know what, I'd actually have to go back and look at it. Somebody else actually pointed that out to me, and it wasn't shot in order, so it's hard to support what I just said, except that maybe that process was already beginning in rehearsals and so forth, of just toning it down. But there are some scenes where it's heavy, and some where it's nonexistent.
AVC: That's another Adam Resnick project. Did you meet on the David Letterman show?
CE: We did—Adam was an intern. He came a couple years after I had been a writer—he was made a writer fairly soon after that. And he's just one of those guys—he grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I grew up in New York City—but as soon as we met, we knew we would have been best friends if we had gone to high school together. We did a lot of stuff on Letterman together, we did a lot of the characters that I do, like Brando and that kind of stuff, on Letterman, and then Get A Life. I think Adam is one of the most brilliant writers out there, actually.
AVC: You just put out a new novel—all the press releases have "novel" in quotes.
CE: Uh-huh. I did that.
AVC: What does "novel" in quotes signify to you?
CE: Well, it's because these books, these "novels," are basically parodies of novels themselves, and they work on a number of levels. They do work as novels, but they're so goofy, and the idea behind them is not just "There's this crazy story," it's that this Chris Elliott persona is actually writing these novels. So for fans who follow my work, it's again a sort of natural extension—it's something I guess back in the '80s, I would have brought on and joked about on Letterman, you know, without actually writing the book itself. Coming out with a fake mock-up of it. But these are the real thing, so the joke is really, "Yeah, it's a funny story, but it's funny also because this guy Chris Elliott is the guy writing them." And then on top of all that, I think it's funny that people are actually buying them.
AVC: Why name the character after yourself? You're trying to make a character separate from you that's "Chris Elliott"?
CE: I feel like I've done that already, that it's the same persona, it's the same character—it's not the guy you're talking to now, it's the character that I developed on Letterman. This guy who goes through life with blinders on, and has this desire to be famous boiling underneath the surface. And that's this guy that I've played in almost everything I've ever done, in characters that weren't named Chris Elliott. But specifically, in these books, it's fun to reference my past career, and to do that, I have to be me.
AVC: How does writing a novel written by the Chris Elliott character compare to writing something like Cabin Boy as a vehicle for the Chris Elliott character?
CE: It sounds kind of corny, but it's liberating, because you don't have anybody telling you "No, you can't be that crazy," or "You've gotta be more likeable here," or "You can't do this or that." It's freeing in that sense, because you can basically just wake up in the morning and stroll down into your office and go. Wherever your imagination takes you that day ends up on the page. There's very little editing in this process as well, but on the downside of that, with me, there's a good deal of insanity that ends up on the page.
There's Something About Mary (1998)—"Dom Woganowski"
CE: A part that I think anybody could have—it was really funny on the page right away. That was one of those scripts that I read and laughed out loud at, which I rarely do, so I'm fairly certain that anyone could have plugged into the part and just done the lines in the script and gotten laughs. I added the facial blemishes, after I met with Peter and Bobby Farrelly, as kind of a running thing, so I guess I feel like I contributed something to it, but with or without the boil on the eyelid, it still was a character just funny on the page. I can't take much credit for that.
AVC: As directors, do they encourage a lot of improvisation or feedback from the actors?
CE: Yeah, they do. Because they work with people like Bill Murray and Ben Stiller and guys that can actually do that kind of thing, so they like that. They also—they'll take a suggestion, if it's good, from someone who's behind the cameras, as well, and they make everybody feel like they're a part of the whole process when they make a movie. I think that's why they end up with good products, because they're sort of grabbing from everywhere, and everybody is contributing.
AVC: What's their directorial collaboration with each other like from an actor's perspective?
CE: I guess there's times when it's kind of good-cop, bad-cop, where Peter is the one who delivers the difficult news, and Bobby is more the praiser who comes to let you know it was great. But in general, there's very little of that from either of them. Bobby is quieter than Peter—Peter will drop his pants at the drop of a dime if he has to. Bobby's a little more subdued. But they work well together, they never argue. At least not in front of the actors. You feel like you're working with one guy.
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