interview page 1 | e-mail Chris Neumer
CHRIS NEUMER: We’ve talked about Dumb and Dumber a couple of times here. A lot of times the scene with you and the toilet in Dumb and Dumber comes back. When my mother found out that I was interviewing you, she said, "Isn’t that the guy from Dumb and Dumber?" I said it’s the guy from Squid and the Whale, Imaginary Heroes, Pleasantville and The Purple Rose of Cairo. I found it interesting that you’ve managed to get away from that. I can’t remember if it was Saturday Night Live or a skit on Letterman, but they just kept coming back to that sequence.
JEFF DANIELS: Oh, Chris Elliott, yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: If it was me, I’d be like, "This is just great. There’s me on the toilet again. Why’d I ever do that again?" Were you afraid that you would not be able to get away from that, ever?
JEFF DANIELS: No, I wasn’t afraid of it. I never worried about it too much. I didn’t go right into like a sequel because there wasn’t one. I didn’t go right into–there was a comedy called The Stupids …
CHRIS NEUMER: You leave those things to Tom Arnold.
JEFF DANIELS: Well, I mean they came out pretty quick with that. I think I just purposely veered away. I just started doing other things. They weren’t going to make the money that Dumb and Dumber did. For those who were paying attention critically or in Hollywood, I had a career before that, so [I just wanted to] get on with the career after that. It will just take a little longer.
CHRIS NEUMER: That sounds very logical to you and me.
JEFF DANIELS: Absolutely! A lot of people remember me for that.
CHRIS NEUMER: That or Full House.
JEFF DANIELS: [laughs] Full House… Yes, I was great in Full House. I just go, "Thank you," and I sign. Dave Coulier
. CHRIS NEUMER: When he’s getting, "I love you" on the toilet, he’s going, "Thank God, they think I’m working!"
JEFF DANIELS: [smiles] Jeff Bridges is the one I worry about. I love Bridges and I would love to work with him some day. I just know he will occasionally get, "You were great in Dumb and Dumber." I hope he’s all right with that. Again, I can’t control that so I don’t worry about it. I’m still getting offered the Imaginary Heroes and the Squids and stuff like that. There are still many people that see my method behind the madness, which is the range. In the industry, they see the range. If all that happened, whether it was theater or films or TV, was that I getting were those types of projects, the Dumb and Dumber character time and time again, then yeah, I’d probably have quit by now and said, "Well, that’s what it ended up being. Let’s invest wisely." It didn’t though and I think part of that was my focus on having as much range as possible before that. Who knew? It exploded. Blood Work to Squid to this.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s amazing how important your choices are for what you work on. As an actor, it really does matter what script you choose, what director you want to work with and what the esthetic of the project is.
JEFF DANIELS: Yeah, here’s the extent of what we’ve done since Squid.
CHRIS NEUMER: You say ‘we’?
JEFF DANIELS: ‘We’ the agents. I have two agents that I work with.
CHRIS NEUMER: These are the guys you’ve been with forever?
JEFF DANIELS: Yeah, Paul Martino in New York. Been with Paul since 1980 and same company, Eddie Yablans out in L.A. Eddie went up from Paul’s assistant to whatever. Now he’s running the film division in L.A. for ICM. So they are the two guys and the focus now is just good writing, good directors. That’s what we are doing. That’s all we’re doing. If somebody throws money, we aren’t going to jump on it. [laughs] I guess that’s easy to say because no one is throwing money [at us], but really we’re just concentrating on the writing, the writing, the writing.
CHRIS NEUMER: You had stated when you were talking about Blood Work that working with Clint Eastwood was a goal that you didn’t know that you had, that you got to check off your to-do list. I figured that I would ask if there are any other strange little things like that that you can know ahead of time. I don’t know… maybe getting trampled by a CGI elephant or staring opposite Rachel McAdams in a romantic comedy…
JEFF DANIELS: Getting kissed by Elizabeth Hurley was pretty good, being directed by Woody Allen. Everyone wants to be in a Woody Allen movie. "Oh look, I’m in a Woody Allen movie and I’ve got two roles." Meeting Jack Lemon. Working with Altman, Jonathan Demme.
CHRIS NEUMER: Looking forward to unchecked boxes that you have.
JEFF DANIELS: I’d like to do a Spielberg movie just because I want to see how he does it. He’s such a student of the camera. I just would love to be on that set and do my job and then sit there and watch him set up the other shots and just be around that. We’ll see how the theater thing plays out. It’s been 13 years since I’ve done that. I used to love it. I still do love it. I go on Monday. I committed to this in July, off-Broadway. This is the point where I should be going, "Oh my God, what did I … When is the last show?", but it’s not happening, so we’ll see.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s good that you’ve been doing this for so long and you can still get excited.
JEFF DANIELS: Yeah, I am inspired. The last five years I’ve been getting calls to come into New York for a reading because we were kind of going, "Boy I’d love to do a play." But I can’t. I’ve still got kids in school and I made a commitment and I need to be here. That’s kind of why I’ve said no to theater: it’s a big commitment for no money. A big commitment for money where I get to fly back and forth is a little different. I would do some of these readings and they were okay. I’d close on a couple of them, but then this one came along and it’s every night at 8 o’clock. It’s going to be trickier than hell, harder than hell, eight times a week. You can’t cruise through this one. So to still be excited about something, challenged, and inspired is kind of what it needs to be. Otherwise I’ll just stay here, write plays, play guitar and wait for the one that is. Or just live the life that I worked hard to get.
CHRIS NEUMER: You sort of tip-toed around this but I’m curious… I just wrote something about how you can judge a movie ahead of time. I know it sounds horrible when you say it out loud, but when you know what to look for you know there are certain combinations. Just because it has a number in it’s title doesn’t mean it is bad on its own, but when you also see that it is presented by National Lampoon and has Paris Hilton on the poster, then you know you can probably avoid it. Do you have any little things that you have identified as red flags?
JEFF DANIELS: Because I’ve been with Paul and Eddie for so long, I usually don’t see those scripts at all any more. They are really great at filtering. They know not only what I want to do, but what we want to do next. If it isn’t it, I won’t even see them. They will just turn them down and if [writers or execs] are persistent and there is money attached, Paul and Eddie will go, "Look, because there is money, we have to bring this to you, but you’re not doing it." I’ll say, "Well, let me read it." And then it’s usually, "Ah, you’re right about it." Ideally you go into the script and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. That’s a reason to do it. I did a movie, Mama’s Boy, that will be out in the summer with Diane Keaton and John Heder. It was John’s movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: He’s not going to play a spaz again is he?
JEFF DANIELS: No, he plays a 29-year old guy still living with his mother. His mother is a widow. She meets this guy and I get brought in. He doesn’t like me so it’s a triangle. The son hates the new boyfriend. It was very funny. It was written by a guy named Tim Hamilton, rewritten by a guy named Tim. No, I shouldn’t say that. A guy named Hank wrote it, but Tim Hamilton directed it and helped with the writing. He did a thing called Truth and Advertising which I had seen on the internet years ago and it’s hysterical. It made its way around the internet. He also directed a music video I did after Dumb and Dumber with the Crash Test Dummies. I had never done a music video before and Dumb and Dumber was exploding and the Crash Test Dummies were in Toronto and they wanted to shoot it. It was like, "Would you come in and be the character from Dumb and Dumber on the streets of Toronto for two nights?" I said yes and Tim directed it. In Truth and Advertising, it was internal monologues; it was these corporate guys around an advertising table and they are saying what they are thinking instead of what they should be saying. It was absolutely hysterical. "I’m going to point at the blackboard like I know what I’m doing, but what I’m really doing is faking it because I didn’t really prepare this morning." "Yeah I going to listen like it was absolutely the most incredible thing I’ve said, but what I really want to do is fuck that girl across the table." So it was ten minutes long and it made its way around the internet. Tim is the director and now years later he’s directing Mama’s Boy. But you know that, even though the script is smart, the marketing people are going to make it as broad a comedy as they can. You know going in that that’s what this one is going to be. I hope it is. I hope it makes a lot of money. The Lookout you don’t quite know what it is. It’s Miramax and Spyglass, but they are kind of are trying to make a really good movie first vs. something that fits into a certain marketing plan.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s interesting that you mention that because there are a few people that I trust and if they are doing it, I’m going to take a look at it because I trust what they are doing. Joe Gordon-Levitt is one of those guys. His choices have just been tremendous. He’s really good in just about everything.
JEFF DANIELS: He plays a guy with a closed head injury. He was in a car wreck.
CHRIS NEUMER: Don’t tell me too much because I’m going to see it.
JEFF DANIELS: No, I won’t. I won’t blow it at all. This is the first 5 minutes of the movie. He flashes back to when he got in a car wreck. Now it’s present day, still 5 minutes in and he’s going through rehab and he can’t remember anything. He has to write everything down. He lives with this blind guy who does this. I kind of work with the center, the rehab place and I take people in and I help them. He helps me kind of get around the city. I help him kind of get through life a little bit until he is ready to live on his own. Joe’s approach to the whole head injury thing was really all internal and you believe that he doesn’t remember. He just did a great job with it. There were a lot of traps in that character and he avoided all of them I thought.
CHRIS NEUMER: The last thing and ideally I really wouldn’t like to talk about it at all. I have to ask because this is a huge part of you, but every interview I read and I read all the stuff about how you moved to Michigan and I get why you moved here. I figured I would put a slight spin on the standard question of, "Why?" and make the statement and see what your response was to it. Here you did something that should seem genuinely boring, moved to Chelsea, Michigan and this gets all the press. You have any comments on the constant focus of why Jeff Daniels lives in Michigan?
JEFF DANIELS: I think the journalists who ask that are like, "Why, why would you do that?" It’s, "Why would you move to the Midwest? You were on your way up. Why would you do that?" I think that drives the question. They are incredulous sometimes because it is so out of the norm and I am the first to admit it. Maybe it’s eccentric. We did it for a lot of reasons, family and all the things you have read.
CHRIS NEUMER: They think it’s eccentric?
JEFF DANIELS: It probably is a little bit.
CHRIS NEUMER: How about normal?
JEFF DANIELS: I had a friend of mine say, "Why did you do this? You could be in LA living that life. How many people get to be stars who live up on Mulholland Drive next to Rod Stewart and Sly Stallone. You moved here?" Yeah, I didn’t want that.
CHRIS NEUMER: It seems like it could be–Hollywood certainly has an image. I could be there, but I’m going over here. It’s like the head of the MPAA saying we got to get a team over to Daniels’ place, see what’s going on here. Get the ship right.
JEFF DANIELS: I just wasn’t interested.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, that’s good enough for me.
JEFF DANIELS: I just … I also said this and it’s true. I didn’t think my career would last. I’ve always been fatalistic about it. History tells us that it’s very difficult to sustain a career over decades. I think, even then, that I knew that you can’t score in 1985 and still be that guy 30 years later. You can’t create an image and play to that image for 30 years… even with plastic surgery. Every star I met, I wasn’t impressed with. But I didn’t know how to do that either. I certainly have been impressed by Jack [Nicholson] and Shirley [MacLaine] whom I met early on. Yeah, I was impressed, but I didn’t know how to do that. All I wanted to do was be an actor. That I knew how to do. I wanted to raise kids and I didn’t want to live in L.A. I just didn’t like L.A. I liked New York, but it was too expensive and the career wasn’t going to last, so, I thought, why not just move home, raise our kids there. I’m going to be doing movies at least for five more years, so why don’t you, Kathleen [his wife] and the kids stay here surrounded by extended family vs. leaving you in an empty house in L.A or an apartment in New York. Let me protect you and I’ll be the one jetting off and coming back. I’ll tell you, when we had the second kid, third kid, I would shoot until Friday and I’d get on the redeye out of L.A. and land in Detroit at six AM, walk in the house, see the kids, be dad, super dad, super husband Saturday night, time zone hell. Then I’d get back on the seven PM plane out of Detroit Sunday night, land in L.A. at ten, be back at the house or hotel at midnight and on the set Monday morning. I did that a lot and she was happy. Kathleen loves New York and loved being a part of the whole Squid thing. She enjoys that more than I do. We certainly enjoy New York a lot. We were driven to live back home in Michigan because of the kids. I think we are going to be spending a lot more time in New York in the coming years. This place [the theater] runs without me. For fundraising they still need me and that’s by design. I can do playwriting sitting in a New York apartment. The kids will be off to college, running around.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well the funny thing is I’ve spoken to a number of actors and actresses who actually look at you as an example of, "I’d like to get to be like Jeff Daniels.
JEFF DANIELS: [laughs] How do you do it?
CHRIS NEUMER: They tell me they’d like to get to the point where they can go to live where they want to live. They don’t want to live in "the hellhole of L.A." "I want to go somewhere else, wherever I want." You and Harrison Ford are setting an example.
JEFF DANIELS: In ’86 I did … Harrison was in too. Sissy Spacek was in Virginia, I think Tommy Lee Jones was in Texas and Redford, of course, in the mountains of Utah. Those were the ones I was aware of. Maybe Newman was in Connecticut. I didn’t like the feeling of waiting for the phone to ring and being completely controlled. You control my life that way. I have to wait for the phone to ring. Am I going to hear about that movie this summer? I’m waiting right now or are they going to go in a different direction? That doesn’t mean you have to control my whole life, so there’s definitely some I want to do it my own way, live where I want to live and if that hurts me, then it hurts me. It has cost me money and roles.
CHRIS NEUMER: I knew you said that before and I’m not prying when I say this, but this is my inner journalist even though I have no training in that. You’re doing all right financially. You could have been doing maybe twice as good financially, but there’s a cutoff where it’s almost enough.
JEFF DANIELS: Well for those guys, yeah. I can’t retire today. I’ve spent some money and I pretty much paid for Super Sucker because we couldn’t get distribution. That was a big hit.
CHRIS NEUMER: I just have to ask.
JEFF DANIELS: No, I’m doing fine. I could sell a couple of things and I could probably retire, but I still want to work. That’s what I thought when I hit 50, "Ah that’s it, that’s enough, great." But there’s still stuff I want to do and I still like doing it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Anything else you want to add? I could probably sit here and talk to you the rest of the afternoon.
JEFF DANIELS: Nope, that’s it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Good. By the way you caught my eye and you probably noticed me stuttering half way through. Is that T. C. Boyle stories?
JEFF DANIELS: Oh yeah, T.C. I love his stuff.
CHRIS NEUMER: I do as well. He’s one of the few fiction writers I still read.
