Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An actor best known for playing Hawkeye Pierce in MASH, as well as roles in The Dirty Dozen and Klute.
On the island
Eight records
out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plot. Out of the tree of life, I just [picked] me a flower ... You came along. Everything started to hoo. It's a real ... But the best is yet to come.
Horn Concerto No. 1 in D major, K. 412Favourite
Dennis Brain with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan
that's about sex. That's about making love. It's Mozart, but it's um it's really Dennis Brain. ... it's a piece of music that just is so sexually luxurious for me.
It's Patsy Klein. Sweet Dreams. It's uh it's where I come from. It's Nova Scotia. It's uh She's our hero.
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Aria / Variation 13
Whenever I hear Glen Gould, I think of Chris, and I think of Canada, and so it's the Goldberg variations that of Glen Gould, and it's Toronto, it's Cold Wind, it's everything.
I I love the sound of it. I love... everything that he says in it and uh And I and I s I've been here in this bed, on in that place, and uh it just makes me laugh.
When when I was working here, just after I left Perth. I I danced. I loved to dance. And Dave Bruback is hard to dance too'cause it's uh It it's five time, but uh I remember walking in my shoes and carrying these special sneakers.
This song what one, I know the words so I can sing along and two I loved so much of what Janice was.
J'ai rencontré l'homme de ma vie
My wife told me to take this one. Deandafriend is a dear friend. She's a blood sister of my dearly beloved wife. Um and my wife said to me, You have to take this record because uh This will tell you everything you need to know.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:31Why is [acting] so necessary to you?
You let it go for a little bit and then it comes raging back. and compels me to to go do it again.
Presenter asks
3:37Why don't your opinions count [when working with a director]?
Oh, but but but it's my information that I'm giving him. So tho that information is governed and and processed through my opinions and so so they do count and and it's a it's a vital relationship. It's vigorous.
Presenter asks
6:16People said that [the sex scene in Don't Look Now] was so beautiful and so moving that it had to be you were doing it for real. You you weren't, were you?
I've got to tell you something. No way. It wasn't about that. It was to describe to you what it was really like in that room. You know, you've got two unblimped Aeroflex cameras which are making a dreadful noise. You've got everybody outside with earphones on. And Nick and Tony were there with the cameras and Julie and I were there naked. And I had in my contract that that there would be no frontal nudity.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
7:33How was [becoming a sex symbol] for a man who, as I understand it, had actually been rather embarrassed about his appearance for so many years?
Oh, I wish somebody told me that then. ... Wow, no, I still have the big ears, I'm afraid. What a what a what a wonderful idea. No, I'm afraid nobody told me then.
Presenter asks
11:54Why did this son of a Canadian school teacher and a salesman decide ... to go into the theatre?
I I I knew that I wanted to be a sculptor. I I drew a lot and I had dreams of sculpting. And I went into the local candy shop ... and there was a charcoal drawing at the end. Someone had done a drawing of Winston Churchill, which I thought was dreadful, and everybody was saying how wonderful it was ... I realized ... I knew that what I wanted to do wouldn't receive the same kind of appreciation ... and in my eleven year old head ... I somehow in the course of a year transferred all of that desire to be a sculptor to an a desire to be an actor.
Presenter asks
14:50Was [getting to speak in the Dirty Dozen] a piece of pure luck?
I was I was one of six people. who were given a role, a non-speaking role, in the dirty dozen. ... Clint Walker's character, Posey, had to pretend to be a general, and Clint interrupted and said, mister Aldrich, I I don't think it's appropriate ... And Aldrich didn't even look up. He just was. Pointed his finger at me and said, You with the big ears, you do it. So the big ears came in handy'cause Those handles got me noticed.
“My contract says that I don't have to do the beginning five or six minutes of my character's appearance in the film for the first two or three weeks of shooting so that the director and I get used to each other ... so that we look at rushes and we make mistakes, and those mistakes appear in the middle of the film. And the audience takes their impression of the character in those first five or ten minutes.”
“It's a very intimate relationship. It's excruciatingly intimate. It's it's so intimate. That when the movie's finished and there's a a kind of void ... That that sense of desperation and inadequacy that happens when you end a love affair”
“I give this guy a thousand pieces of information and then he puts a character together of seven hundred and fifty, and it's different from the character that's sitting inside me ... the character inside me who's made up of a thousand pieces goes nuts.”