00:00 Steven has a way of ending things that is so hopeful and so beautiful in every one of his movies.
00:06 At what point does the excitement of getting cast in a Steven Spielberg movie meet up with
00:23 the terrifying pressure of playing him and what is essentially an autobiography?
00:27 When I show up, I'm folding every scene I'm in so to make sure what I have to prepare for,
00:32 folding every page and then I just stop folding it because it dawns on me that I'm going to be in
00:43 every minute of the movie afterwards and that was very weird. Nobody told me that. Yeah, I think
00:50 that's when it was, oh man, this is a big responsibility and I think that's when the big
00:57 fear happened but then that's when the work happened too. I really also enjoyed the process
01:04 on this film. It never kind of stopped learning, moving, changing, shifting. I think part of that
01:11 was what Steven was searching for in the material and Steven and Tony talking and rewriting stuff
01:16 and us all coming together so that was always evolving including where maybe Paul meets Bert,
01:24 meets Arnold too. I'm one of those guys that said, can't we, don't do it with him,
01:30 he'll know a little bit better. So my trust was perfect. I mean, absolutely, not only necessary
01:38 but if you were there, you would trust this guy because not only does he know what he's talking
01:43 about, it's his family and it's his person, right? So he owned the character and then said to me,
01:50 would you share him with me? I mean, that's not what he said but I can understand it and I thought,
01:54 oh, move you. How's that? Okay, you know, make you feel something about something that you wrote
02:05 and a man you knew, tell me about him. No. That good? Yeah. Okay. So this is an actor's dream.
02:14 Day to day, he's so entirely in the moment so he's really responding to, even though these
02:19 are his parents, he hasn't laid out a plan for you to follow in order to be them and to please him.
02:28 He is completely in the moment and responding to what's happening in front of him and so each
02:33 take changes what he thinks he wants or what he wants you to try and then you find yourself in
02:38 completely new territory because you're somewhere that you haven't planned. Everything that happens
02:43 is Danny having a statement and, you know, it was him and Tony organized it in a way to tell,
02:49 to write a script and to tell the story of a movie and, you know, using literary devices,
02:55 whatever they do, but everything happened to him and so I just wanted to ask him everything
03:02 about his life and what it was like for him growing up and I could really just understand
03:08 what's going through his head, therefore the character, and half the times he would just
03:14 want me to figure out and but then we just talk about it and he'd tell me stories of
03:19 what it was like for him growing up in Arizona with his sisters, his parents, his uncle,
03:23 his whole perspective on life in the world. That's what I was really after and that helped me a lot.
03:30 I just dove right into it. Yeah, I, you know, it was a personal journey we were being invited to
03:38 go on so it didn't seem, you know, inappropriate to ask pretty personal questions, you know, and
03:46 yeah, and I wanted to really dive into the specifics of the dynamics, especially as we
03:53 were playing different scenes, like, yeah, really kind of at least having an internal understanding
04:00 of like, what, where are we in this journey, in this scene, you know what I mean? And so,
04:05 it really, yeah, and he really seemed to welcome it, but also at the same time he made it very
04:12 clear that he doesn't love talking to the actress about the scene. So I would actually talk to Tony
04:15 a lot, like Tony, because also like what's real doesn't matter, it's more like for the movie,
04:19 you know, so he was more than happy, yeah, like me and I would talk to Tony for hours and hours
04:27 and he loved to talk about the scenes and Steven was more,
04:29 I asked him from the get-go and he was like, I don't love to talk to the actors about the
04:34 scenes. So I was like, okay, won't do that. Yeah. - Knowing you as someone who likes to work loose
04:41 and with a lot of improv, I'm curious just how, to what degree you had to adjust the way that you
04:45 worked on this movie, especially knowing that Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg wrote this
04:49 essentially for you? - I, you know, I was in a movie Aaron Sorkin wrote, not a lot of improvisation
04:55 on those sets, I can confidently say, probably less than on this one, which did not have much,
05:03 you know, but it's honestly, it's a pleasure. It's not, it's in a way the alleviation of a
05:13 responsibility to not be asked to improvise and to just be told to say what is written and say it
05:20 as though it's improvised, but to not actually improvise it, you know? And when it's written by
05:25 Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, it's a lot easier to do that, you know? And often, you know,
05:30 I think people are drawn to improv 'cause it is at times making up for a lack of writing, you know,
05:37 which is not why we ever did it, but I think that at times is why people feel as though they need to
05:43 like add stuff. But this was written very conversationally and very naturalistically
05:49 and was a pleasure to say, you know? - You're only in two scenes, but the bombastic
05:54 nature of the character plus just the lesson that he imparts to Sammy. - I'm sorry, but I'm in three.
05:58 - I'm sorry, you're in a few scenes. - There's the beginning, the middle,
06:01 and the end. - But I am curious just how,
06:04 kind of knowing the impression that Uncle Boris is going to have, is going to leave on Sammy,
06:09 how does that ultimately impact your performance and your approach to the character?
06:12 - Well, it becomes the challenge to begin with, right? Why would you do it that way? Why, well,
06:16 you know, it's almost like being asked to play a part that you don't really know how it's going to
06:22 end in the other guy. And that's a question that went on forever, you know? So this man was
06:31 necessarily brought in in the middle of a family situation to make this boy understand who he's
06:41 going to be, right? Even if he doesn't know it. And if you looked at the face of poor Gabriel
06:48 LaBelle, if you looked at his face, you would never think it was going to work.
06:52 It was almost like the firing squad was in his room. That's the part I really love so much.
06:59 It's almost hilarious, you know? I'm going to dance in front of your face until you get it,
07:06 you know what I mean? And I was hoping that Steven would go along with that much energy.
07:14 And he's going like this. I loved it.
07:18 - To what level did you get the opportunity to talk like director to director with Steven Spielberg?
07:23 And did this have an impact on you as far as just wanting to jump back into directing a feature
07:29 film yourself? - You know, yeah. I mean,
07:32 what's funny is early in my career, the first times I met was as a writer. I was a much more,
07:38 I was kind of more sought out as a writer than an actor when I was first going on meetings with
07:43 people like Steven, you know? And that's what's really nice is I think a lot of these people that
07:50 I've known, I've known him a long time in some capacity, kind of know me as someone who works
07:55 more behind the scenes than in front of them often, you know? So it was incredibly instructional.
08:01 And he was outwardly, you know, yeah, like articulating his process, why he was doing it.
08:09 I would ask him a million questions. I would just kind of bombard him with questions about why we
08:16 were doing what we were doing. Why'd you do that? Why'd you move the shot there? Why'd you decide
08:20 to do that? And yeah, it was not something I was gonna like squander, like the opportunity to
08:26 really absorb as much as I could from him and the crew and Rick Carter and Janusz. I got to work with
08:36 him on another film, but I kind of remained friends with him over the years. But like, yeah,
08:40 just really getting to ask everyone a million questions all day. It was really fun and it was
08:45 great work. It's a very engaged set. Sometimes you work on a set and it feels like the movie is one
08:51 of several things that is happening. That set is not like that. Everyone's really, every conversation
08:56 is about the movie that's taking place, basically, which I like. You know, he's been working with a
09:00 lot of the same crew for a very long time and they were saying to me that this was different than
09:06 any other one. So I think we were, you know, on a special one, yeah. What was your favorite part?
09:19 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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