In his memoirs, 2006's Never Have Your Dog Stuffed and the new Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself (due out Sept. 4), Alan Alda talks more about stage acting, speechmaking, and his general thoughts on life than the film and TV roles that made him a household name: as one of the stars (and writers and directors) of the seminal TV comedy M*A*S*H, as a featured player in Woody Allen's Crimes And Misdemeanors, Everyone Says I Love You, and Manhattan Murder Mystery, as a creepy killer in Whispers In The Dark, as a prickly senator in The Aviator, and most recently, as a hard-bitten Republican candidate on The West Wing. In print, Alda comes across as thoughtful and abstract, absorbed in the minutia of acting and pondering acting, both as a vocation and as an exercise in creativity. Onscreen, he mainly comes across as distinctive, memorable, and hard-working. While promoting his latest role as a hard-driving newspaper sports editor in Rod Lurie's Resurrecting The Champ, Alda recently talked with The A.V. Club about picking his roles, picking his directors, picking the topics he writes about, and picking the battles that still scare him.
The A.V. Club: How did your role in Resurrecting The Champ come about?
Alan Alda: I don't remember. I guess my agent suggested me to Rod Lurie, or maybe he asked for me. That's a pretty boring answer, but it's the way the question mostly gets answered. It's just part of the business. I mean, once we got together, we had to find out whether we were interested in working together. And we hit it off right away. I like him very much. And he's a very good director, good for an actor to work with.
AVC: At this point in your career, do you ever chase roles, or do they mostly just come to you?
AA: Yeah, it's mostly that. And even among those, I'm in a very lucky point in my life, where I only do things that really interest me. And it's usually not the part. I don't think I ever did something because I just wanted to do that part. It's usually cause I'm interested in the writing, and want to be part of that project.
AVC: You normally meet with directors and decide whether you want to work with them?
AA: Yeah. In a way, people audition each other. You get a sense, usually—it's very rare that you say… Although that has happened. When I did The Aviator, they said "You want to do it?" and I said "Yes," and that was it. I did make one call to Marty Scorsese to see what he meant by some of the stage directions, and he said "Oh, ignore the stage directions." [Laughs.] So there was no feeling each other out there, it was just a question of "Does this pro want to work with that pro?" But very often, if you know it's going to be a small movie, and the working conditions are going to be a little harder, you want to make sure that your personalities won't clash or something.
AVC: It's a small role for you. Do you primarily just consider what the final project will look like?
AA: Yeah, that's it. I don't really worry about the size of the part much any more. It's nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there's something playable there, and if it's interesting to do, then that's nice. There's also an advantage to just going in for a couple of weeks, and coming away with something that's worth doing.
AVC: If you have time to get into the character, do you prep for your roles?
AA: We did a little bit for Resurrecting The Champ. I remember sitting in a living room with several friends who had come over to dinner, and I realized most of them had been in journalism so long that there were a couple hundred years of experience there, so I was asking them what it was like for a sports editor in his daily life. And they were suggesting that there should always be someone coming into his office asking about something. And he would be checking the layout of the columns. We incorporated that kind of thing. But Rod Lurie has experience in the newsroom himself, so he was onto most of that.
AVC: Without seeing Lurie direct, how could you tell you wanted to work with him?
AA: Well, one thing is, you see how well they relate. If, when they talk to you, they're really talking to you. And it's a little bit like speed-dating, you know? How do you know if you aren't going to want to have dinner with somebody, just spending a short time, or you have a meal with them, how do you know you're going to want to see them again? Or let them touch your elbow, you know? But there's also, you can see when you talk to somebody—and it works the other way, too, when I directed movies. Sometimes the most important thing was not a reading that an actor would do, but a conversation I'd have with him where I could see what he had to draw on to play the character. Who were they? Who were they compared to the character? And as an actor, when I talk with a director, I'm interested to know what the director sees in it, what are they interested in, what's the meaning of this story that they hope to find.
AVC: You've worked for some very big-name directors, including Scorsese and Woody Allen. Are there people you would work with more because they have that kind of reputation than because they meet your personal criteria?
AA: Really top-notch directors, I've often worked with them just to see how they work. I wasn't knocked out by the script of a movie called Mad City, but I was really interested to watch Costa-Gavras. I think he's one of the great directors. And I liked what I had to do in The Aviator, but the chance of just working with and watching Scorsese was a big plus.
AVC: How did his method compare to yours as a director?
AA: Well, everybody, the really good ones, take who they are and turn that into their style of directing, I think. I mean, Woody Allen, for instance, he does very little shooting from different angles. And when you shoot from different angles—until lately, it's usually all been from one angle, one master shot. And I think that's because he doesn't like to see things over and over again. He doesn't like to say the same thing over and over again, he doesn't like to watch the same scene. And if you shoot it from different angles, you have to watch it each time you shoot, and you have to light it, and it takes forever. He never did that. He didn't like to talk to people, so he didn't talk to the actors. And a certain kind of spontaneity came out of that. So he took who he was and made it a style. And Scorsese loves to talk to people. And he talks to the actors in a very upbeat, positive way. He's full of chatter, and in the gentlest way, he makes you realize that there's another way to do it, so you go in that direction. The different personalities lead to different shooting styles.
AVC: Who's been best for you to work with in terms of matching your own personality?
AA: I had a great time with Scorsese, and that worked out great, because… I did well enough to get nominated, so that, you'd have to put that at the top of the list. But I just had another terrific time with a director who's had a lot of experience directing on the stage, though this was his first film. Terry Kinney, his name is. And it was great, because he's an actor and a director, and you know he's really watching, and he knows what's going on in your head. He's a collaborator, he's right in there with you. I've worked with some other first-time directors who didn't know, really, what you went through to get a performance, and didn't know how to talk to you as an actor. It's like if you were building a house, and you said to the carpenter, "Can't you hammer that in with your saw?" or something. You need somebody to talk your language a little bit.
AVC: Do you think that roughly the same disciplines make a great stage director and a great film director, or are they very different?
AA: I don't know. That's an interesting question. I've seen it work both ways. I mean, I thought that the first movie Nicholas Hytner did, The Madness Of King George, was a brilliant first film, and he got it all from directing on the stage. I think you gain a lot if you've directed on the stage. If you're directing your first film, and you've never directed anyplace, then you're not as far along, because the technical demands take a lot of your time, and if you don't know how to communicate with the actors, then it's very common to just let them flounder. And you sit behind the camera, glued to the monitor, and just worry about shots. But a movie is not shots. It's something happening in the shots.
AVC: What about your own directorial career? You haven't directed in a while.
AA: Yeah, I don't really feel like it any more.
AVC: Do you think you're done with it?
AA: You never know. I don't know. It's just not something I feel like doing now.
AVC: Do you see any common thread between the film projects you've directed, in terms of what draws you?
AA: No, no. Only that they seem interesting, and they seem well-written. I never had a plan for the thematic interest, ever. I think life is more interesting than that. It keeps changing, it keeps coming up with new things.
AVC: You have a very distinctive voice, and a fairly distinctive speech pattern. Does that ever create problems for you as an actor trying to disappear into a role?
AA: Hmm. No. [Laughs.] Not that I'm aware of, no. And I alter that a little bit, if it really seems I have to. I just played a guy from Missouri in this movie that I just finished, Diminished Capacity. I had a Missouri accent. I guess I sound a little different. But that's a problem anytime you've seen an actor a lot, you see things that you've seen before. Often you see posture—the way a person walks is so distinctive that software can identify someone from a satellite by the way they walk. And those things are not necessarily changeable. I mean, a really great actor, in a lucky performance, can transform himself or herself. I've seen actors do that. But often it's a mechanical transformation, which isn't as interesting, and you've got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.
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