- Santa Monica and Vine
that's just like legendary as,
you know something out of a,
"The Star is Born."
- Right?
With Judy, on roller skates.
- Right?
Where you at CarHop,
like she was in that movie?
(laughter)
- No, I had my little yellow rubber gloves
and I was incognito.
It was fantastic.
- So there's people out there.
- One of the best jobs.
- That can say, "I drunk at this place,
"turns out Renee Zellweger,
- Oh yeah
- "was serving back there
"as a bar back."
- Oh yeah.
- I can make a list of the
people that I served in there.
It was the best fly on the
wall job I've ever had.
- Big showbiz legends types?
- Oh sure yeah, I mean let see,
Billy Idol would come on there.
- Get out I just met Billy
Idol the other night, crazy.
- Isn't he fun?
- Yeah, he's daughter works,
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
believe it or not.
- I do believe it.
- I do believe that.
Smart guy, yeah.
(upbeat music)
- I only read the first
couple of paragraphs
of any like story about the
people that are making a movie.
- Oh that's wise.
- 'Cause that always, that's
where the juicy thing.
I read the thing where
you couldn't believe
that they where asking you to play,
to play Judy.
It was like, "Why would they come to me,
to play Julie Garland?"
- Oh sure, yeah.
- What they say?
- I don't know if they ever
actually answered the question.
They just invited me
to come over to London
so we could talk about it.
So that, yeah we could just talk about it.
- So they actually
ponied up, you air fare.
Who turns down a free trip to London.
Nobody does that.
- Oh and by the way, they said,
"Come over, we'll talk about it.
"We'll just take some pictures
and see if you feel kinda
"what it looks like, if it's possible."
"We'll just see if it's possible.
"And then we'll go to, Abbey
road, and record somethings."
- Oh you were fish on a hook.
(laughter)
There, you were done.
You could not say no.
- I could not say no.
- So what it the first thing you do when,
I mean the legend, like
playing Judy Garland
is like playing Elvis,
or you know it's like playing
John Lennon or something.
What is the first thing you do.
- Well I mean there's
a lot of material.
- Yeah.
- Thank goodness.
- You watch everything.
- You watch everything.
- All of her, you know, her body work.
- Did you watch the variety
show that she did on--
- Oh yes.
- Oh that was a work of art.
- It was so good.
- It was stunning, and
the fact that nobody
was tuning in on it, because she was--
- Bonanza.
- Oh is that what killed it?
- They were up against Bonanza.
- Did you know who was
one of the house pages
in the studio audience helping
seat people in back stage?
And wearing a little CBS suit.
David Geffen.
- Are you kidding?
- He was a CBS page for
the Judy Garland show
and evidently helped,
tend to,
the kids
for Lorna Luft and is it?
- Joey
- Joey, yeah.
Did they talk to you about it?
- No, I didn't know that.
I had to ask him about that.
- Oh, yeah.
- I'm still fascinated
you know when you go
into the rabbit hole
you just get more greedy
don't you find?
I mean don't you find?
- You get frustrated because you can't,
you found this nugget,
that explains the entire character
and you can't find any place
to put it in the movie.
There's something that is,
is there any way we can work this out?
We had one thing that found out,
I asked the Joanne
Rogers, he said you know,
"What did Fred drink in the morning?"
And Joanne said, "Did he have coffee?
"No, he ate, he drank
hot pomegranate juice."
(laughter)
And so I said, "How are...
No cranberry juice, he
had hot cranberry juice?
And I said, "Is there any?"
I went to Marielle Heller says,
"Is there any way we can get it?"
She says, "The most
we're gonna be able to do
"is have a,
"glass of red liquid, (chuckles)
"sitting on the counter while
you're talking on the phone."
I said, "Good enough for me
as long as we can get that."
- Well might explain some
things you know 'cause.
- Oh yeah.
- You know, you'll see it.
You'll see it.
- That's right maybe,
some red teeth.
- How interesting, what was your?
'Cause it's different when you're playing
a person whose lived.
- Yeah.
- There's a different responsibility.
- Well not, I talk to a lot of people
who had very specific
long-term relationships
with Fred
- Nice.
- Who could tell me all about,
everything about him,
how, what, the normal,
how he took his work,
how regular he was.
(laughter)
- Meaning that he was,
you know that he was very dedicated
to doing this show in Pittsburgh.
But,
Judy, you're dealing with the legend of,
Fred
has not gone through any
kind of like bowdlerization
that it has with with Judy.
I mean, they're the legendary
status of everything
that she's been through and
how she became who she was.
- No.
- Come on.
- No Sid.
- Judy.
- No,
No!
I'm working harder than
you would ever believe.
- Are you?
- And right now my husband
is making a deal for me.
That means I can start over.
- You're not listening.
- I have someone I can rely on now.
- All the stories are between
just individual recordings
of certain songs like "The Man
that Got Away" and whatnot.
That, did you have,
did you have an
overabundance of information
you had to sift through?
- Well, you know, how well,
you try to be judicious about what it is
that you take as fact.
- Right.
- Consider the source.
- Right.
- So there's a lot of
contradictory information.
And a lot of it was, it seemed like,
oh, the truth is in her
somewhere, but that's not it.
It sort of lies in between
these bits of information.
And there's so many biographies out there
of people who claim to have known her
that don't get mentioned
in the biographies
of the people or the
autobiographies rather
of the people who we know
knew her from public record,
because it's familial connection you know.
So,
yeah, I guess.
Um, I mean, there's never
such a thing, is there?
Because, if there's so much information,
inevitably something's going
to become repetitive.
- Yeah
- In a way that okay that
substantiates the suspicion.
- The only thing that kind of helps,
the only shortcut we have
is in the choice of wardrobe.
(laughter)
- Because, you have a
photograph and they've made it
and then there it is.
So, but you know,
- That's true.
That's the beginning of layering
on the suit of armor that
does become something
and I was, there was two
things about your movie.
One is when you're in the cab,
you're trying to find a
place to stay and Lorna,
the daughter says, "Are you
going to sleep now mommy."
'Cause you took a couple of pills.
And Judy says, "No, these
are the other kind."
(laughs)
Means you're gonna go up.
So there you've laid down
a foundation of somebody
who was pretty strung out by the time.
Suffering from a lot of lifetime
of taking mood altering drugs,
just in order to get along with a day.
Those stories and then
putting dexedrine in her
and Mickey Rooney's soup so they could get
through those Andy Hardy movies, you know.
- You see you knew about this.
- Yeah.
- It's not something that
a lot of people were familiar with.
I wasn't,
I wasn't aware of any of that.
- I can't remember, in the
scenes will Louis B. Mayer.
Do they make mention of any of that?
- Yeah, just a little bit of it.
She can't sleep anymore.
- Right.
- The woman is with her so
that's not my department.
- You look at that output prior to,
"The Wizard of Oz."
- Yeah.
- And she had already, I mean,
she had already worked
herself into a puddle
in that backbreaking kinda quick.
Like all those big musical numbers
for those Andy Hardy movies.
- Yeah.
- And everything else that she did.
And how old was she made...
- "Wizard of Oz?"
She was 16, or was she 15 or 16?
- Oh men that tough.
- Yeah, she was just starting to,
her body was just starting to change
and I think that one of the tools
that they use to keep her slim.
Besides binding her and trying
to keep her weight down
because they didn't want her
to be voluptuous, because
they had finally found a way
to market her as the girl next door,
and God forbid that
Dorothy be sexy, you know.
So they found her and kept her you know,
her weight down
and the drugs.
- I was disappointed,
that we didn't get to see
you recreate moments like
from "The Harvey Girls"
or "Meet me in St. Louis,"
or the ones where,
- Right, interesting.
- Where she had but this is from
what the reading that I did.
When she had that kind of
like negative self image
that she wasn't the prettiest
woman in the world, on camera.
And yet, she's the only
one you look at, you know.
I know, she's just ethereal, wasn't she?
She was so beautiful.
It's impossible to
imagine that she had that.
I don't know, that she'd been broken down
to where she couldn't see it.
- The expression that
she was able to put into
what was I'm guessing
was pre-recorded tracks.
You know, the songs were
all pre-recorded somewhere.
- In the MGM?
- In the MGM days.
- Yeah she talks about that,
yeah that they would go in the morning
and lay down the tracks.
And I heard that she did
something like 28 takes
of "Men That Got Away."
Until she could recognize that everybody
in the room was feeling it
the way she was feeling it
and then she was happy.
- But then the recreation of
that on camera to a playback
and what you're not really
impacting the soundtrack
because you are essentially you're miming
or mimicking or recreating something,
but her eyes and her face
and the emotion that you put into that
is, I wouldn't know, I
wouldn't know how to do that,
you know, from the beginning.
And you don't sing for the
longest time in the movie.
- Oh interesting,
I didn't think about that.
- I was checking the watch,
and said, "Okay, this is a
movie about Judy Garland.
"We're gonna get Bang,
bang, bang goes the trolley.
"We're gonna get something
right off the bat."
And it is a long time before you sing.
- It's interesting, it
didn't feel that way to me.
(laugher)
- Oh really?
- Here it comes.
- Did you?
- It's interesting,
I didn't think about that, but
I did know that Rupert wanted
to establish this story in a
way that you would understand
where she was in terms of her ability
to access her instrument at that time.
So you wouldn't be quite sure whether
or not she was going to succeed.
He wanted to set that up
so that it seemed a precarious moment
when she stepped onto the stage.
- There's a lot of education
that you have to go on
in your movie because
I don't think anybody
could believe that Judy Garland was broke,
or that Judy Garland,
- No, that was shocking.
was not wanted.
- Made no sense.
- Or Judy couldn't get a job.
No, she was always Judy Garland.
- Yeah, it made no sense to me.
I mean, she's iconic
and deserves her place
at the table of of international
superstars for all time.
- Well, yeah.
- You know,
so that she would be having
financial challenges.
- When you finally sung
and the fireworks go off
and everybody who's watching the movie
has to collect the back of their head
because you've blown them away so much.
(laughter)
Those weren't prerecorded songs.
Did you do,
you were you were recording
those live?
- Yes.
I'm guessing.
- Yes.
- Right.
- Yes.
- And did you do them all in a row?
Because of the block shooting,
were you always in that space?
No, we could do a couple numbers a day,
there were a couple of days
when we would have to cram in
a lot of things on the side.
Like we did the San Francisco stuff,
which also included a lot of choreography,
and,
then we throw in some, you know,
which one did we do that day?
Someone who loves me or needs me rather,
oh, yeah, like, you know, just then
but we had a week or something to get all
that stuff together.
- It's hard enough just to go
and figure out how to shoot the scene
that you've sort of memorize
and familiarize with the text,
but you also have to do all that rehearsal
for the musical numbers themselves,
which is equal to preparing
for a Broadway show or something.
How do you get through a day?
I mean, this is what I always think about
when I look at these old musicals,
particularly and Judy without a doubt,
is like, "Man, they were
in rehearsal hall somewhere
"for, you know, a long time.
"Before they ever put on the makeup
"and showed up on the set in
order to shoot it for real."
What was the rehearsal
process like for you?
How much did you have
to work on those songs
before you got around to the day
that they were on the shooting schedule?
- Well, um, the songs I started,
by myself
before any of the pre-production began
after that conversation,
the initial conversation
at Abbey road in London,
'cause why not?
- Why not?
- Cause of course you say yes.
- They couldn't throw in you know,
Buckingham Palace or something
like that in there as well.
- Yes why didn't I ask about that.
Yeah you know, that was fine,
you drive and they actually let you
that was pretty miraculous.
That,
yeah, that was a good day, by the way.
Have you been to Abbey Road?
Sorry to get tangential.
- I have, yeah.
- But I know you're
a big music fan.
- Yeah I have.
What were the circumstances?
They were pretty heady.
- Tell me, tell me.
- We were with Olivia Harrison,
George Harrison's widow.
And, said, "Oh come on by
'cause we're gonna listen
"to some stuff."
And we ended up going
and you go to Abbey Road and everything
is Abbey Road.
- Yeah.
- There's that stairwell.
- Yeah.
- And there's that,
there's the studio where
it actually happened and
nothing really changes
in those studios except the equipment,
the walls and the floors and the piano
and they're all pretty much the same thing
as they always have been.
- And they kept the old boards.
- Yeah and there's a little room
that you go up where
you know, there's a...
And,
it's stunning.
I mean you're vibrating
while you're in there
and it's not hard then to go back
and look at certain photographs
and realize that, oh
well that mic was right,
that mic was right here and
it was taken right there
and,
you hear the music.
The sound stages are
a lot in the same way.
What is now Sony Pictures,
was MGM?
- Yes that's right.
- And the proportions of the streets
and the stages are all
exactly as they were.
- Yes.
- And I think they've just
begun to do things like
put up the list of the
movies that were shot,
in certain places.
- Oh outside of the stage.
- Yeah.
- Yes I've seen that.
- And see there is like,
oh, and the funny thing is,
this is where they shot,
"The Yellow Brick Road,"
was right here.
And you realize that, well
"The Yellow Brick Road"
is an awful lot of that movie,
so it's probably on every
one of these sound stages,
you know.
(laughter)
One way or another.
It enters into that.
- Yeah, for sure.
- Do you know what this is?
It's Lloyd
Lloyd.
- Hold, please.
We can't fire him, can we?
Hello, Lloyd.
Oh, it's nice to meet you.
- How many years have you been acting now?
How many years.
- I got my first
professional job as an actor
when I was,
20.
- What was it?
I was at the Great Lakes
Shakespeare Festival.
I got into the union.
I got into actors equity
doing repertory Shakespeare
so that was (laughs) 43 years ago.
- So you, did you know
that you wanted to do this?
- No, when I started going to the theater
because there was
required for some classes
that I was taking, that
I thought I was going
to be a lighting designer
or a stage manager.
- Really?
I thought that at being an actor was,
this other.
I didn't know what you
could get a job doing that.
I thought you had to be like,
you had to go through
some miracle of discovery
or something like that.
- Your were anointed or you...
Or yeah, or you went to
England and studied somewhere.
You went to Juilliard maybe.
I thought I was gonna be working
at like Marriott's Great America
and the Roadrunner
Tasmanian devil half hour,
you know, thrill show.
- How did you get into that from Oklahoma.
- Oakland, California.
- Oh Oakland, but you
are from, you were from.
- Your from Texas, so everything
becomes Oklahoma.
- Goes that way.
Yeah goes that way.
You're from Oakland.
- Yeah, I'm from Oakland.
- Okay, so you always had, you always had.
- I ended up studying
Theater Arts for three,
I went to junior college and I did a show.
I was in a play that did our town
and then I was in State
College in Sacramento,
and I didn't get cast.
This is funny all things
will pass, all things,
this too shall fade, you know.
I didn't get cast in the show at school
and I thought I was an abject failure
'cause I had come to Sacramento
to study, to be a theater arts major,
and I couldn't get cast in a show.
But there was a play that
was being cast downtown
at a sort of like, not
really a regional theater,
but a semi-professional theater company.
And the guy who ended up
being the guest director
of it invited me and a few other people.
To his real job, was as artistic director
of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.
And he needed bodies
to change over the sets
because they were still in rotating,
but everybody got a part
in one of the shows.
And he said he was an Irishman.
named Vincent Dowling, and he said,
"Tom, I can't pay you a salary.
"But I can give you something
much, much more valuable.
"And that is experience in
the professional theater."
(laughs)
Which means like, you're gonna work
for nothing.
- For nothing.
(laughter)
- Which we did,
but he was absolutely right
because you end up doing it.
And then from there, I
didn't, without even realizing
that I had become a
professional actor overnight,
meaning I was paid to do something
I had just enough money
for, you know, gas.
And I got in, I ended up
going to New York City based
on the advice of some really
great pragmatic professional
actors who I worked with.
And from there I you know, after that,
it's all just how many
cards land in the hat.
You know, I got cast in a TV show.
And next thing I know I'm in Los Angeles,
trying to just being that guy
waiting for the phone to ring.
- What was it that made
you go to New York?
I'm just curious because,
there's that moment when you--
- Did you have that?
- Yeah I just ran out of things to do.
I didn't, I never considered
it as a profession.
- So you in Texas.
- Yeah, college.
- Right.
- Gonna be a journalist.
- Did you go to Los Angeles or New York?
- I went to LA.
- Okay, all right.
That was, I was from California.
- And you went to.
- I didn't like LA and
I knew a lot of people
that just kinda went down there
and they disappeared in the mist.
And I was working with professionals.
You know, trained professionals
who'd done an awful lot of theater
and says, "If you come to New York,
"you can audition for anything
"that exists in show business,
"from Broadway plays to you know,
"being in the chorus of tour boat shows.
"You know, you could go
out on the Princess Cruises
"and sing selections
from high button shoes."
- It's a good job.
(laughter)
- Which I could never do.
And it was just there and it was through.
It's really who you meet
and somebody introduces you
to somebody else and says some things
and the next thing you know,
you're in somebody's office.
And you know, the potential
and his new talent
is kind of like coin of the realm
and then they throw you out there
and see how you do.
And the first thing I found myself,
my first actual, I made a
pilot for "Bosom Buddies"
but my first actual thing that aired on TV
was my episode of "The Love Boat."
I was on "The Love Boat" in 1980.
And...
- What was the episode?
'Cause I was watching. (laughs)
- Well, it was with, I was on it
and I was but for some reason,
I was cast as an old college
fraternity buddy of Gopher,
who comes on
and hit on Julie McCoy.
(laughter)
And then he pretends and they
almost have a love affair
but then they laugh but they gang up on me
in order to make me feel like I can't,
I can't get laid on "The
Love Boat" or something.
I was like 10 years
younger than Fred Grandy,
there was no way we could have gotten it.
But I drove through the main
gates of 20th Century Fox,
where the set from "Hello
Dolly" was still up
and I went on to stage
I gonna say stage 24
or stage 19 or something like that.
And I was on the frigging "Love Boat"
and when it aired night,
I can't tell you what it
meant to my world, you know.
My fifth grade teacher called me up
and said, "I can't believe my, you know,
"Tom you were on "The Love Boat."
It was a big deal.
- You made it.
- Yeah.
- Did you have a party?
- No, no, no.
- You didn't have anybody
come over and watch?
- No, I couldn't afford a party.
So we just watched it with the kids
but my son,
my son Colin,
he was,
Oh Geez it was, he was only like three,
maybe three or four.
And at the end of the movie,
at the end of "The Love Boat."
You know, it's sailing way and they show,
they show the close
credits he started crying.
And I said "Why are you crying?"
"It's 'cause you're going
away on the Love Boat."
He thought I was on
that boat sailing away.
It was very very sweet.
- Oh sweet Colin.
- What was your first?
what was that first thing
that the world got to see you?
- First thing, gosh, 'cause yeah,
I did a lot of commercials.
- Oh alright, this is great.
For like a year, two years.
- My wife did 8 million
commercials as well.
And I have to put them together
and I'm astounded how many times
I saw her growing up on Television.
- Oh you're kidding.
- I said, "You were in the
Kodak crank commercial?
"Oh my Lord, oh you were in
that Coors light commercial,
"oh my Lord."
What was the most?
What was a extraordinary thing
you had to do in a commercial?
- Coors light.
- Coors light.
Yes, yes I had to roller blade,
down a hill carrying a
six pack on my shoulder,
in a bikini.
(laughter)
- Of course, rightly so.
And by the way (laughs)
And let's look at that clip right now.
If we could.
- Oh, thank God, I'm not
gonna tell you where it aired.
So you can't find it.
- Well it's Coors Light.
Was it a national?
- It was not.
- It was not a national.
- And now as I sit here
in this pink chair,
I might be glad of that.
(laughter)
But, I just, I'm so fascinated
to talk to you about that.
Because you know that you
just had the inclination
that it was time to go and
you had children at the time.
- Yeah.
So that's a big decision
that you're gonna take that chance.
- It was the only thing I knew how to do.
- It was the only skill
that I had any sort
of like paths that I can
say, I have a resume.
You know, I did these four roles
at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.
Then after a second season, I said,
"I have these eight roles
"at the Great Lakes Shakespeare
Festival that I did."
- And where people patting
you on the shoulder going
"Yeah, good luck."
Or were they encouraging you,
because they could see that there was--
- The other act, the great
friends that I made there,
understood that we were all in the same,
we all have the same desire.
And that is to,
celebrate storytelling, somehow.
We all just dug it more
than anything else.
One of the things that
even Vincent said was,
you know, "Work in the
theater is more fun than fun."
And when he said that I said,
"That's exactly right.
"Because nothing else I do in life
"is nearly as exciting as
getting ready to be in a show,"
you know.
- I've never heard that saying before
and applies, that's the
only way to describe it.
- 'Cause you did plays and you studied
in college like crazy.
- No I didn't, I didn't.
I'm like you.
I didn't get cast.
I didn't actually go to
college to study acting,
I was gonna be a journalist.
And I failed.
(laughs)
It's a good thing, It's a good
thing to deal with sometimes.
- No I failed the typing test,
I didn't type enough words
and however many minutes.
I didn't make--
- And so that's the only
requirement of being a journalist?
- Well, to get into the journalism school.
So I was waiting to go the next semester
and I started to work.
And I started working a lot
and one thing led to the next
and I started to think maybe
- Okay, so outside of commercials.
- Yeah, okay.
- What was?
- Like so long ago.
- What was the half hour or
one hour or motion picture
that they cast you in, that you ended up?
- The first thing.
I did something with John Avildsen.
- Yeah.
- Called "8 Seconds".
- Yeah, okay, yeah.
- And you know, it's a blip.
I played the, you know, the indiscretion.
(laughs)
- You were in a movie?
- Yes, yes, pretty special, right?
I didn't know, I wasn't sure.
I didn't know.
- Here's what happened.
- Who he was.
- You were in "8 seconds."
- Yeah.
- And Even if the movie
didn't come out yet,
the next meeting you
went to it said Renee Z,
and in parentheses, it
says, in "8 Seconds."
You're in a movie.
So therefore, you were automatically
had this other tangible, you know,
potential as you are walking.
- Yeah.
- Yeah,
there is that.
Yeah. I think the first film film was,
the first lead that I played
was in the "Chainsaw Massacre."
And it was a, it was an independent film
that was financed by a local lawyer,
who had somehow been
involved in the original.
And,
yeah, the director.
- Wow.
Was doing it locally.
And that's where I met McConaughey.
- Oh!
- Yeah, 'cause we'd done.
We had done "Dazed and Confused" together,
but we didn't meet on that set.
- Forgive me, "Dazed and Confused"
was one of most important
movies of the 20th century.
- Oh, interesting, yeah.
- Where you a senior in that?
Are you a bad girl, mean girl?
- I was,
I was filler.
I was, they needed more senior girls,
but I don't think they had a
budget for more senior girls.
And I wasn't cast out of Austin.
They had cast it elsewhere,
but they said, "Why don't you come and be
"you know, a featured player."
So I had to be there every day.
But, you know, I was
just basically watching
and it was a great experience
because I got to watch
and come to understand
how the different departments work.
- [Announcer] Ladies and Gentlemen
- I can't
- What do you mean you can't?
There's an audience out there
waiting to hear you sing.
- My mouth, dry and it could fall apart.
- No, no, no, listen to me.
- [Announce] Judy Garland.
- I can't.
- You'll be fine.
Now, on you go.
(loud applause)
- I was wanting to ask
you so many things about,
about your experiences in New York
and the difference
between playing characters
that you sort of have
a little more liberty
in defining yourself
and discovering yourself
and then playing this
person who is well known,
who is, you know, pretty iconic in terms
of his appearance weekly,
and the way that he influenced
an entire generation
of children of people.
And I was curious of a couple things
in your process with that.
I mean, I mean, by the
way, congratulations.
What a beautiful,
representation.
- Oh thanks.
- I mean really.
- Likewise.
- But that's just something that you do.
You have this, It's so--
- It's scary.
- It's weird because your such
a recognizable unique person
and yet you disappear in
whatever it is that you do.
It's really magic.
But anyway, beyond that.
- Okay, alright.
- I gotta ask you, what, in
the experience of playing him,
how was it different to you,
when you're, what do you look for
in terms of the parameters?
- I have played a lot of real people
with actual people, Charlie Wilson
in "Charlie Wilson's War".
- Was so good
Richard Phillips in "Captain Phillips"
and a lot of times, Jim
Lovell in "Apollo 13."
And you get to meet
them and you get to say
"Okay, for good or for bad,
"I'm playing you,
"so you're gonna have to make your peace
"with me playing you.
"And you always have to make your peace
"with me saying things you'd ever said
"and doing things you never did."
And you know, perhaps
providing motivations
that you yourself didn't
feel but at the same time,
I want to be as accurate as possible
to the behavior and the procedure
of what you went through.
That's a really good bridge to work
with somebody to get there.
Fred, number one is gone.
And the interview processes
of which is you can't get enough of that.
I watched 8 million
hours of Fred's program.
There was an excellent documentary called,
"Won't You Be My Neighbor?"
- Yeah, was beautiful.
- That, you know, it's actually
a companion piece I think
we were, when we saw that I
actually said to Marielle,
who was the director of
"A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood",
Marielle Heller, I said,
"Is there a reason to actually
make this movie anymore
"after the documentary came out?"
And it's actually a wonderful
companion piece, one for each.
The biggest challenge I felt,
as portraying Fred
was,
the genuineness of him.
You think about it, he's not going
through an extraordinary crisis.
He doesn't have a thing that
he wants to make happen.
He's not you know, trying
to get home from the moon
and it's sort of big struggle.
He's literally just being Fred Rogers,
being interviewed by a journalist.
- Right.
- And I think because
cynicism is the default mode
for an awful lot of him even as a actor
I was coming on as what,
"Is there something
specific that I don't know
"that I need to somehow be able to hit."
And his wife Joanne and
all of his co-workers,
even his two boys.
I don't think they had
the language necessarily
in order to communicate
that there was no agenda
there was no, he was just simply a guy.
He was a cracked vessel who took his,
who worked very hard at his job
and took it very very seriously
and I think when the job
you're taking seriously
is to make two year old
kids feel safe in the world.
That's not necessarily
a real active choice.
You know, that's not there's not a lot of
Sturm and Drang to it, there's no,
you don't train for that,
you don't learn how to fly a plane
or something like that,
you're not dealing with it.
You have to instead just embody
this kind of ministerial quality,
'cause he was an ordained minister.
He was a Presbyterian Reverend, you know,
but his church was this Television show.
And if you, if you're
not specific about that
you're just gonna come off
as some sort of like saint
that always has benevolent,
beguiling eyes you know
and always has a gentle manner.
And the outside, Marielle
Heller did me a great favor
because in the first meeting we have,
I'm sure you've faced
this as well as Judy,
which is, how deep are
we gonna go on this look.
You know, I get a wig, you know.
But I got a very specifically shaped head.
I have specific teeth.
Are we gonna do, are
we gonna do his teeth.
I have a specific nose,
we're gonna do his nose.
How far are we gonna go to reconstruct,
our body,
into these very well known,
icons?
And Marielle just said,
"We'll do a wig and
we'll do some eyebrows.
"And that's that."
I said, "Great."
knowing that that's the parameters that,
that tells me where I'm gonna have to make
the construct of everything else.
- Celebrity, mercy.
- You don't consider yourself famous?
- Fame is a four letter word
like tape or zoom, or face.
But ultimately matters
is what we do with it.
- And the voice and the lilt in is voice
and he's movement, the way
that he carries himself.
He's such a gentle presence.
- I had a great difficulty slowing down.
- Interesting.
- And if I was going to show you,
we were gonna sit down the movie,
I would get to a point and say, okay,
"That's my first day of shooting."
They had been working for two weeks.
And this is my first day of shooting.
- Yes 'cause there's a
stillness that you embody.
- Yes.
- Yeah.
- But compare that first
day of shooting stillness
to a week later in which, first of all,
Marielle Heller is you know,
kicked my butt just enough.
And I have learned how to feel as though
I'm not just wearing clothes,
but that the clothes are wearing me
and I become something else.
That,
I am wiseacres and I talk a lot
and I have a lot of energy.
And,
to slow down,
like that,
how often does your director
come to you and say,
take more time with this?
They never say that.
- Oh, no.
- They never say that.
- No, most of the direction
that you get in a career is,
speed that up, talk faster, act faster.
(laughs)
- And you as Judy, I mean,
you had this ongoing constant twitching
that was going on that came from,
you know, a different source
besides just a personality,
but, were you exhausted at
the end of some working days?
- Probably, but, you know,
that's one of those things
that you train yourself
not to pay attention to.
- Yeah, yeah, right.
- 'Cause it's irrelevant.
- Right.
You can't do anything about it.
So there's no reason to.
- if you look at a clock,
there's a reason why you know your clocks,
your watches never work
when you're performing
because if you actually
keep track of the time
you're doomed, oh my god we're gonna
be here till 10 o'clock at night.
You can't let that, you
can't let that happen to you.
- No definitely not.
And with, you know,
there are certain things
where you don't want to stop anyway
because you get greedy and
you just want more materials.
And it happened, I must
say produce particularly
when we were working in
the land of make believe
And the opening I could
not get enough of Fred,
in Fred's house.
I actually I took naps
on the set just 'cause I.
- Oh your kidding.
- Well that's a comfy couch there
and so I don't wanna go all the way back
to a dressing room and there it is.
It just--
- And it just felt.
- I wanted to stay there all
day when they finally wrapped.
It's like I gotta take off these clothes.
I gotta go back and be myself, again.
I'd love being
in Mr. Rogers house.
- Ensconced in that.
- It was just so wonderfully familiar.
- And he created probably a sense,
there is a different kind of peace.
- Oh very much.
And we had the actual, we
actually had his lighting grid
and his lighting diagrams,
were what we used in the show.
- Wow.
- And Marielle went off and found
these old Ikegami video cameras
that are hard to find.
And so even if you were
like looking at the monitor
of what the camera was saying,
it was just, it's just
wonderfully soothing.
- Oh how special.
- It was just beautiful.
- It was very pleasing though.
- So special.
- That's you know, that's you know,
that goes beyond you know,
the amount of bobby pins or
how much weight you've lost
or you know, whether or not you really got
the right slouch down
or something like that.
- No, of course.
But, did you get from, I
don't know your conversations
or, 'cause you were saying earlier,
it's not really a proactive thing
when your goal is
something that is sort of
from your, its internal.
It's not something that you
can easily express physically
or in the choices that you make,
but did you get a sense that he recognized
the importance of what he was doing?
I mean, because we've
seen that he spoken out
to Congress and all that.
But do you think that?
And how did you capture that?
- There was Tom Junod,
who was actually the journalist
on which the movie is based.
He was around a set a lot,
which I thought was fantastic, you know,
because if anybody knows that movies
are gonna to make a talk of maybe version
of what you really went through,
it's gonna be like a journalist
who did the same thing at some point.
And,
I asked him about,
the interviews
and Matthew Reese who plays
Lloyd was the alter ego
for Tom, went through the same thing
which was experiencing the jujitsu
that,
Fred used as a self defense mechanism.
And, once he told me that
I was able to go back
and there were all, I
had all these tick marks
from an awful lot of the interviews
that he had done that we're just,
"Oh that's that's where
he turns it around."
'Cause even even like
with, any interviewer say,
you know, Charlie Rose,
they'll say something like,
"Well, do you ever have a dark side?
"Do you ever get very angry Mr. Rogers?"
And he goes like this.
He goes like, "Well, yes of course,
"I'm just like anybody.
"There are times that I get very angry.
"And I'm sure that you at times,
"sometimes have a great
difficulty communicating
"what you want."
And so he literally just,
it's like he allows a question
to Boomerang around him
and come back on it.
And he asked Joe and Bill,
and a few people at QED said,
he was the master,
at that.
And I think,
it comes off as best,
there wasn't a person who knew,
who worked with him in Pittsburgh,
who didn't say when you
were talking to Fred,
you were the only person
that mattered in the world
because he was.
That's what his connection
were to these little kids.
And a two or three, see him interact
with a two or three year old kid
or even kids who just watched them
when they were two or three.
Now they're eight or 11.
They are already so
vested in the investment
that he put into them that
it's by and large grown ups,
speak to kids in a lot of questions,
and,
ultimatums.
"What's your favorite class at school?
"Who's your favorite football team?
"Oh, do you like to dance?
"What your favorite kind of dance?
"Oh, really, did you have a good?"
They don't pause and wait for an answer
they suppose onto them.
I don't, how can a kid have
a favorite class at school.
They can have a fun class at school.
They can have a class
that they look forward to.
But the idea of them
having a favorite class
requires some sort of
judgment that a two or three
or four year old kid
probably doesn't have.
And he knew that, he knew that he would.
His ability to share,
a moment in real time
with somebody and that was
his ministry with little kids.
But it was a self defense
mechanism with adults.
- Isn't that interesting.
- Yeah.
He was awfully good at it.
Because you think about it,
if he's a minister, let's
imagine he's a minister,
and he's tending to his flock.
If someone comes into the
office to talk to the Minister,
they're not to talk about him.
They're coming in to
talk about themselves.
And that's what he was always able to get,
to get somebody to do,
to talk about themselves.
And,
Matthew Reese, was
talking about the amount
of time that a journalist uses as an ally,
as Tom, Tom would say,
"Hey, I could always outweigh my subject,
"I could have outwait them.
"I would just be out there
on the periphery waiting
"for them to get bored
or say something else
"and then I'll find out then I'll pounce."
Fred Rogers could wait
them out of the best them.
(upbeat music)
