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Home > Interviews > 2004 Politics |
Recent Roles: The Aviator (2004) Baldwin plays pilot Juan Trippe in this great film detailing the life of Howard Hughes
The Spongebob Square Pants Movie (2004) Baldwin plays the voice of Dennis in this movie of Nickelodeon's popular television show
Along Came Polly (2004) Baldwin plays Stan Indursky along with costars Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston |
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Do you feel like the proverbial dream factory should be laid bare in this fashion? Well, it’s a business. When you do a movie at Paramount, and you finish shooting the movie and you walk across the hallway, so to speak, to go to Entertainment Tonight, which they own, you’re doing a television show which the studio owns that they’re charging commercial time for that they’re earning money on to promote the movie that you just walked off the set of. So the synergistics are not lost on everyone. The problem with this business, and I’ve spoken to SAG about it, I’m trying to get the screen actor’s guild to have a conference with the publicity departments of the major studios, to talk about the fact they’re taking actors now and they’re kind of inserting them like suppositories into the cavities of the movie going public. I mean, it’s all so much marketing now using actors. What used to be clever marketing campaigns by studios has been replaced by actor-driven campaigns, so that when the movie fails, the marketing department can step back and say, “Well, we ran Alec’s picture up the flagpole and nobody came to the movie so we’re clean.” We used to have a Saul Bass poster and there was some creativity, not that there aren’t creative elements in marketing now, and people who do marketing for the studios work just as hard, but they are daunted by a more crowded marketplace and the problem is that most of the marketing that’s done now means let’s get the actor out there to charge up the hill and if you get shot to pieces you get shot to pieces. Get out there and do Letterman, Good Morning America, I mean this tiresome tedious round of promotional things to raise the awareness again in a very crowded marketplace to call attention to your film, and the only thing worse than what we have to do is if we don’t do it. If you don’t do it, then you’re the tree that falls in the woods and nobody hears it. It’s a bad, bad situation when there’s just so many God damn movies out there right now it’s ridiculous. What part of this character appealed to you? Well, it wasn’t so much the character. I mean, I never look at movies so much in terms of the character. I read the movie and I say this is a movie I want to see and I kind of screen the movie in my mind in its entirety and I say to myself, “Is this a movie that I want to be in?” I’ve been offered roles that were dynamic and flashy roles in movies that I thought were very mediocre, and I’ve played roles that weren’t as dynamic in great films, and I’m much more interested in being a modest component in a great film than being a dynamic component in a film that’s not that worthy, so I always look at, I say this is a very well-written film. Jeff Nathanson’s a brilliant writer, he’s a brilliant guy and I love working with him. We’ve got a great cast, I thought it was funny, and it’s funny how the best movies by my lights are movies where it’s so well-written you don’t have to work that hard. It’s all there. Nathanson’s created the situations for you and you need to get out of the way of what’s clever and just stand there and say the lines. I’m on a plane, Matthew looks at me and says, “Is your wife in the business?” I say, “Why would I marry a whore?” and we don’t have to have any putty on our faces, any wigs, and we just say the words and get out of the way and it’s funny. In great writing that’s the way it is; there’s less you have to do, and just say it. What’s it going to take for you to leap into politics? I don’t know. I mean, to do that would mean to give up what I’m doing now and I’m really not finished doing what I’m doing, but maybe. I don’t imagine I will do this the rest of my life, I know that, but I’m having a good time doing this again after a few years of not having a good time. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, so my enthusiasm peaks and ebbs and I really am enjoying myself now because I’ve worked with some people I loved. I loved doing Cat in the Hat with Bo Welch, I loved doing The Cooler with Wayne Kramer, the director. I loved working with Matthew and Jeff. I mean, for me it’s all about what’s the experience like making the movie? Has it been a good way to pass the time, and I don’t really think about how well the movie is going to do. If it does well, great, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t.
So with all of the Hollywood inside jokes in The Last Shot, was there no room to use your brothers for a cameo appearance? I think there were enough satirical moments in the movie without putting my brothers in the movie. There was a good enough satire quotient without putting them in there, but I often have people ask me to do things with my brothers, whether they want me to do it legitimately and do a straight drama with them or do something silly and that’s kind of a send-up of my family or what have you, and the material never seems right, you know what I mean? I mean they send me something in which the only dynamic is the fact that we’re in it. The script is anemic and it’s not very well written, and I’ve often dreamed of doing something with them. I had a western project with CBS for years as a miniseries that my friend wrote, and it was actually really quite wonderful, and we were going to cast my ex-wife and my brothers and I. That’s amazing- we had wonderful roles. It was set in the old west, and my ex-wife’s character was an animal activist who was lamenting the fall of the buffalo herds- it was really wonderful, you know, and all very personal, but we never got it off the ground and now I’m too old to play that part. Was this a character you could relate to? Well, I think anybody in this business gets to that point where, you know, you need a hit. My character in the movie is a character who’s desperate for a hit record, you know what I mean, he needs a sting, he needs a bust, he needs a successful operation to raise his stock in the eyes of his brother and the bureau. Have you ever felt that kind of professional desperation? Oh yeah. I’m in this business so I feel it every day. I mean, unless you’re the highest paid actor who’s at the top of the pile, everybody else is in there thinking, I hope that I do something that either creatively excites the community or you do something that sells a lot of tickets, one or the other. Is it safe to say that industry inside jokes now play equally well everywhere? I think that the way that the business is so kind of self-referential now with the “Making of” and “HBO First Look” and there’s a whole kind of industry now about the forensics of the business so to speak that wasn’t here 20 years ago, and I think a lot of that is very detrimental to the business. It’s demystified the business in a significant way, but these are viewed as marketing tools no doubt. But yeah, I think that most people around the country now get it about, you know, a lot of the lingo and a lot of the attitudes that dominate the movie business in a way that they didn’t 20 years ago. |
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