AVC: Do you generally dislike playing villains?
AA: Yeah, I don't like it.
AVC: You made some short films in the '60s. How did that evolve into directing Little Murders?
AA: I felt like I got my chops on a few shorts. They offered me Little Murders and I did it.
AVC: Did Little Murders reflect your comic sensibility?
AA: I'd have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. Little Miss Sunshine is like that. That's my fave genre, if I had to pick one.
AVC: On the page, Little Miss Sunshine is a farfetched comedy, but it's almost played as a drama. Was that intentional?
AA: Absolutely. Everybody was on the same page right from the first day as to exactly what kind of movie they wanted to make.
AVC: You were in another movie called Deadhead Miles, which Terrence Malick wrote. But there isn't much information about it out there.
AA: It never got released.
AVC: How does a movie written by Terrence Malick not get released?
AA: Because it wasn't any good. It was a weird road movie with completely insane characters.
AVC: What did you play?
AA: A weird guy on the road.
AVC: Little Miss Sunshine has an amazing cast, as did Glengarry Glen Ross and Catch-22. Does being surrounded by so many gifted actors force you to step your game up?
AVC: I certainly hope so. I had that experience a couple of times with musicians. Over the years, I played with a couple of spectacular guitar players, and playing with them has made me play better than I knew how to play. I hope the same thing is true with acting.
AVC: Jack Lemmon said the cast of Glengarry Glen Ross was the best he'd ever been a part of. Do you agree with that?
AA: Until now, yeah.
AVC: In Little Miss Sunshine, you're a mentor to a child performer. Did you grow up in a creative household?
AA: My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
AVC: You were the first actor other than Peter Sellers to take over the role of Inspector Clouseau. What that intimidating?
AA: I was one of the many people to fail at that.
AVC: Why did you take the role? What was the appeal?
AA: At the moment, I thought I could do something with it.
AVC: Have you seen the other non-Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies?
AA: I've seen a couple of them. They don't really work, do they?
AVC: What would you say is the most important thing you learned at Second City?
AA: I learned so many things, I wouldn't know how to begin to isolate them. I learned an enormous lot about a lot of different things.
AVC: Does any specific skit you did there stand out in your mind as being especially inspired?
AA: There's one I did with Barbara Harris that people still talk about, a museum piece that still gets shown to new people coming in there 40 years after the fact. That one is pretty much a standout.
AVC: What's its premise?
AA: I was a beatnik looking for a place to stay for the night. It took place at the Chicago art museum. She's a very uptight Chicago girl on a tour. We start a conversation, and I try to hit on her, and it's my attempt to have a relationship with this girl. Very simple premise: using art as a way to have a relationship with her.
AVC: Of all the things you've accomplished in your career, what are you proudest of?
AA: You're asking me all these definitions. I try not to make any kind of definitions that you're looking for, because they keep changing all the time. I don't know what I'm proudest of. The fact that my kids still talk to me.
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