Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Known for landmark performances as a character actor and superstar, he is the only actor to top-bill three Best Picture Oscar winners.
On the island
Eight records
I chose La Bamba because it's one of the things I found out I could do on the set to keep loose. So I taught myself to jump rope like a boxer and I would put somehow I'd heard Labamba once, Richie Valence, and I put it on a cassette and put my earphones on and I could jump rope.
It's called Cement Mixer and it's the first song I remember if it's nineteen forty-five that makes me about eight years old in which I really laughed.
(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay
I just remember driving to work every day to make the graduate and every morning I went to work there was not a morning that passed that I didn't hear sitting on the dock of the bay. And I still love it with all my heart.
I never heard it until Diana Kroll sang it, and it had the line in it, which you'll hear, called Shafafa on the side. And since I didn't want to eat when I was growing up, it was a tense table, I would be told to eat this particular dish that they gave me because it had shafaffa, and that meant it was delicious.
I did have a girlfriend that I met in acting class. And uh I walked in one night and I saw that she was making out with my acting teacher, and it devastated me. ... I would just sit at that piano all day long fooling around, and somehow this song came out. ... Bette Midler's doing a special on T V and she calls me up. ... She wrote the words and I got to play the piano and Bette sang the song.
I did want to be a jazz pianist for years u until I had to realize I didn't have the talent. ... I was listening to the radio just a few years ago, and this guy was singing it, and I filled up, I became emotional. It was the first time I really listened to the words because he sang it as a ballad.
Memphis is chosen because I first heard it on a day I was particularly depressed. Not depressed, particularly depressed. And it just took me out. I love it to this day.
Are You Having Any Fun?Favourite
Well, I just did a film called Quartet, and in that film is a song that was sung by Flanagan and Allen, and it's ironic because it happens at a moment in the film where someone might be dying at the home. And it really sums up the spirit of what this film is when you hear it sung by elderly people.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:24What took you so long [to direct your first movie]?
I don't think thirty five, forty years is that long to make this decision if you had my demons. I actually directed actors when I started studying acting. ... But no one offered me any directing parts and it's very hard to audition as a director.
Presenter asks
2:12What do you mean has stopped you?
I think that I really believe that I was a freak accident when I became famous after the graduate. It wasn't meant to be. My friends, Gene Hackman and Bob Duval, we all just hoped to make a living doing what we did. And since God gave me this crazy gift, I felt I wasn't entitled to be able to do anything else.
Presenter asks
8:11Tell me about your dad. What was he like?
My father was a a very serious young man who had ... delusions of grandeur or whatever ... He wanted to be a director. ... Then he was fired and he went from set decorating into selling furniture. And he was Willie Lohman in a sense.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
Do you feel like somebody who's survived your parents?
Yes, I would say barely survived.
Presenter asks
19:21Given that you had a sort of shaky sense of your own self and self-worth, how did you deal with all the rejection?
Yes, in fact we all got to the point where you know y you have an 8x10 picture of yourself and on the other side is your resume which we would lie about. ... But it got to the point where it was so painful we would knock on the door of the casting director, slip the eight by ten underneath the door and leave.
“I think that I really believe that I was a freak accident when I became famous after the graduate. It wasn't meant to be.”
“Quite frankly, that you spend a lifetime trying to figure out who you are.”
“If you didn't grow up as a child star, if it took you years and years to get your first job, the feeling is is that this is your last one, you're not going to be asked again.”
“Follow your passion. Don't get trapped in the culture, because making it in my day was simply making a living. And today it jumps straight to celebrity.”