CHRIS NEUMER: I appreciate it. I was looking at some other interviews that you had done.
JEFF DANIELS: Yeah, what did I say?
CHRIS NEUMER: Well for starters you had somehow managed to turn "tell me about your character" into something interesting.
JEFF DANIELS: [laughs]
CHRIS NEUMER: I was like, "Wow, this is worth the drive then." You had said about Clint Eastwood that he never really showed off by shooting the reflection of someone in the doorknob. You said that that was good. So I was curious, is there a time and a place where a reflection in the doorknob or a reflection of someone in a tea kettle on the stove is appropriate?
JEFF DANIELS: Oh sure. Absolutely! Clint was just more cut and dried, black and white. He’d want you to just walk in and say it. Yeah, absolutely. I directed the two films. I don’t know enough about directing to know when to shoot the reflection in the tea kettle. I really don’t. It’s fun to look at sometime. Too many tea kettle reflections and I start to lose interest though. I’m an actor. I like to see actors acting.
CHRIS NEUMER: And acting inside a reflection in a teakettle–
JEFF DANIELS: I don’t know enough about directing and cinematography to know about that. Hitchcock did it a lot. Other directors have done it really well and very effectively. I wouldn’t know when to do it or why.
CHRIS NEUMER: The tea kettle was a reference to Fincher’s Fight Club. There’s actually one of those.
JEFF DANIELS: Oh is there? I wouldn’t say that I knew that when I said it. I’ve seen doorknob shots.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’ve seen doorknob shots too, but the tea kettle was a specific reference to that. It turned out that one of the most complex shots in the movie because of course they didn’t want the camera reflected so they had to CG the camera out and then they had to worry about some other stuff. But then I started wondering and this is really the impetus for the question, how much harder or easier is it for you as an actor if you are being shot in the reflection of a doorknob or a teakettle? Is it technically demanding or is it artistically demanding?
JEFF DANIELS: [smiles] Well, specific to a tea kettle, you know you aren’t going to be in that sharp of focus. You still do the scene, but it’s more mechanics really. You absolutely have to hit this mark within 1/8 inch for us to make this incredible tea kettle shot. Okay, then it’s mechanics. Alan Arkin told me once, [in Arkin voice] "You know what film acting is? Can you get in a car and drive 50 feet and hit a mark and put the wheels right where you are supposed to put them? If you can do that, you will be a brilliant film actor." Sometimes it’s just about marks. Arkin was great. He directed a TV thing I did. Chris Durang wrote it. I’m dropping names but… It was Julie Haggerty and me and Alan directed it for PBS. It was some 1/2 hour thing. It was so great, one of my great experiences. Alan’s an actor hero of mine. Anyway, that’s what he said.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s actually a pretty spot-on imitation.
JEFF DANIELS: I just did a reshoots on a movie and it was all about, "You need to drive up…" and it was twelve people around the video monitor. "You’ve got to hit this." I need to, like, get within a 1/2 inch and I’m backed up 50 yards. Happy to say I did it and they were stunned. Stunned.
CHRIS NEUMER: What was that specific stunt that you were doing?
JEFF DANIELS: Just pulling up and turning. There’s a guy on a park bench, but you’ve got to see past me through the window to him perfectly framed, all that stuff. It’s a wonderful trick. What they did was to use a C-stand [ed. note: a C-stand is a free-standing lighting fixture that is roughly eight feet tall]. They hung a tennis ball from the C-stand and the goal was for me to put the tennis ball right up against a mark on the windshield.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, like the old pulling-into-the-garage trick.
JEFF DANIELS: Yep, just like that. Everybody’s set. You back up and there might be a little piece of tape, a mark on the window that the camera can’t see and you back up 50 yards. On cue you come in and put that ball right up against the window. Pretty easy.
CHRIS NEUMER: The shots that take me out of the moment–and this is probably something that is unique to me because I know so much about film making– are the ones when the car comes up and the actors hit the brakes just a little bit too hard because they’ve got to hit the mark and the car shutters a little bit. It’s just not the way anyone would ever do it
JEFF DANIELS: Or they hit the sand bags.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, it’s the things that you don’t see. I remember in a couple of interviews that you did about Dumb and Dumber, you had said you realized that the movie was Jim’s thing and you were just sort of following in his footsteps. I went back to the movie and I thought that a lot of the things that I laughed hardest at were your scenes. What is the psychology, this is probably the anti-star school, but what is the psychology or headspace you have to get into to go, "Okay, I’m just going to follow him."
JEFF DANIELS: There are two things: one is the business end of the movie and then there is the creative, story side. I knew that Jim was the one who had Ace Ventura out at the time and Jim was the reason the movie got made. The Mask hadn’t come out yet, but word was that it was incredible. I got the movie because Jim wanted me. Jim said, "I want an actor across from me who isn’t a comedian. I want someone who won’t just wait for me to finish and then try to top me." So it seemed logical to me, not only from a business standpoint, to let Jim lead and have Harry be the follower; I wanted to be the good soldier, the good friend next to him. It’s almost like you can’t have two leaders.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well you can, but it just doesn’t work.
JEFF DANIELS: It doesn’t work. So it made sense in knowing that Jim wanted someone who wouldn’t–it wasn’t that I wasn’t going to compete with him. Competition never came into it. It was more that he said he was looking for someone who was going to make him listen, which means he was looking for someone to act and react. That doesn’t mean top him. It was a smart thing to do off camera and it worked, I thought, for the film on camera. If you forget all that and just look at the story, he’s the one chasing the girl. I’m just tagging along getting into trouble.
CHRIS NEUMER: This is true.
JEFF DANIELS: Why would I be the one who is leading the way? He’s the one telling us we’re going to Colorado to see this girl and bring back a brief case.
CHRIS NEUMER: Dale Dye is the guy who trains all the people for weapons and he says the one thing he can always spot is the guy who is looking for the camera. I guess he’s on set and he calls people out. He’s like, "This is not what you do. You try and look for your close-up and it’s not coming through. If you want to be a star you don’t go, "Okay, I’ll let him lead." It seems like there is a reverse logic that’s there that isn’t too often seen. Is funny how what’s best for the project, often is what’s best for you even though it doesn’t seem like it.
JEFF DANIELS: And it’s what I’ve done and maybe to a fault. I serve the story and if the story requires it, it’s probably better for me to follow Jim. That’s what I am going to do. I’ve never been so ambitious that I would distort the story to move my career forward. Chewing scenery or doing something other than the character needed to do in this story to make the story work goes against the "Look at me, look at me. Where’s my close-up?" school of acting. It’s kind of how I was brought up in New York. "You are part of a whole. Shut up." And it’s a good way to do it. You look at the best projects and the best films and they really are like that. Yet there are times that you can stand out and you know that those times you’ve got to take it and lift it. In that particular case it made perfect sense for a lot of reasons.
CHRIS NEUMER: In another interview you had been talking about how while preparing for The Squid and the Whale you had looked at your character as being sort of under-appreciated . You said that you yourself in a sort of weird way were underappreciated in Hollywood. The quote was, "The under appreciated factor of lots of people getting nominated and getting $20 million a movie. I don’t." I coupled that with another story where you had said that your Squid and the Whale character was an opportunity for you to try and get nominated.
JEFF DANIELS: Came close.
CHRIS NEUMER: Probably more deservedly that a couple of the other actors who were up there. I wanted to find out if this is a goal of yours to try and get a nomination specifically or is it something that is sort of organic and you will take good roles and if it happens, it happens?
JEFF DANIELS: The latter. It would be fun to be invited to the dance. You bet, but I’m not taking roles for that reason. It’s more like, "If it happens, it’s absolutely great and wonderful." I’ll never campaign again like I did. That was a 5-month slog through everything above a high school paper. They said, "You are going to feel like you are running for president," and I felt like that after a while. But I had to do it because it was such a small film. They didn’t have the marketing of some of the other studios.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s probably the real work for you isn’t it?
JEFF DANIELS: It was a lot of work, but I was proud of the movie and I knew I had no chance whatsoever if I didn’t do that and play that game. So I played that game and I did that. I got close. I got very close.
CHRIS NEUMER: I was trying to think of a suggestion. I’ve been on this sort of anti-biopic kick where you play real life characters and then all of a sudden that’s when you get thrown on all the nominations . I think 10 years down the road, maybe 15 years down the road Dakota Fanning is probably going to get an Oscar nod for playing Courtney Love. I was trying to think of a semi-recognizable tragic figure and I thought of Errol Flynn later on in life. I don’t remember off the top of my head whether he played any real life characters, but I wanted to ask you if this might be something on your list of things to do?
JEFF DANIELS: [chuckles] I think there are voters out there who think that when you play someone who exists that you can compare the two.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s a lot easier to judge, yes.
JEFF DANIELS: It’s easier to judge and that must be harder. It isn’t always the case. I played a couple of them. I played Washington, George Washington and Chamberlain, all that stuff.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is it more taxing?
JEFF DANIELS: It’s more research. You get to make up less material. It’s more limiting in a way. I look for the next good role. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to worry about that stuff. I just don’t care. It’s back to the latter; if it happens, it’s absolutely great. I’ll rent the tux, we’ll get the limo, we’ll show up. It’ll be great fun. I hear the parties are great. And it would be an honor. Good swag, but… The thing that’s kind of cool is to be appreciated and to meet people. I’m about to go out and do a play in New York and one of the things that I’m looking forward to, assuming we do well with this thing, is the people in New York who will come and see it. They are the actors whom I’ve admired and haven’t met yet.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is there a name or two that you can mention of people you admire but haven’t met yet?
JEFF DANIELS: Ahhh, no. But they tend to come if they are in town and if yours the play to see… which we aren’t yet. I hope that we will become one of the plays to see, but you come backstage and you say hello. I’m looking forward to that, to see who’s here tonight. That’s kind of what the Oscars were and that’s kind of what happened with The Squid and the Whale. Wherever we went, whether it was the festivals of the LA critics, there were some great moments in that whole arduous campaign. I met some great people. That’s what is kind of fun. It really is a small town, an exclusive club.
CHRIS NEUMER: Amazingly small.
JEFF DANIELS: When you’ve been doing it long enough, you end up seemingly having worked with everyone. It’s not true, but it feels like that.
CHRIS NEUMER: I noticed a story that you had told and said that Clint Eastwood came up to you ten years ago or so and recounted scenes of Dumb and Dumber that he just loved. You said that you were sitting there nodding your head saying, "I know, I know." That got me thinking, that’s got to be a great feeling for you for somebody like that to come up and say that. So I wanted to ask if this factors into how you judge the success of a project? Or rephrased, how do you judge the success of a project?
JEFF DANIELS: I don’t. If people like that come up, I don’t decide it’s successful at that point. I just know. I’ve been doing this long enough to know. Usually, no, not in film. We knew at the end of shooting in Squid that we had something good. Then you get through editing, and it’s even better. Great. You’ll finish a movie and go, "Well, I know what this is going to be. " Usually it turns out to be that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Have you ever been wrong? Of your fifty films has there been one where you were like, "Oh, this is not going to work and it turns out to be great."
JEFF DANIELS: Well not going to work vs. making a lot of money. On Dumb and Dumber we had no idea. We had no idea that it would do what it did financially and then around the world and years later on DVD. It still cracks people up. Didn’t see that coming. We knew it was probably funny to 15-year old boys, but other than that …
CHRIS NEUMER: And really immature 30-year olds.
JEFF DANIELS: We didn’t even know. We thought the teenagers would love it and, for me, it was a chance to work with Jim and do a comedy, a big broad shake it out comedy. That’s all I had when we were shooting. Something Wild probably was commercially disappointing. I thought Red [Schwartz] and Jonathan [Demme], Melanie [Griffith] and I really made a good movie. We all made the same movie. We really liked what we did, but when it came out, they really marketed it like a Chevy Chase comedy [ed. note: Chase was not actually in the movie]. Because it turns into something darker two thirds of the way through it, people didn’t go. I think half the critics just said, "The movie needs to decide what it wants to be, one or the other. It can’t be both." We argued that it was just one thing, but …
CHRIS NEUMER: Is this the Million Dollar Baby argument?
JEFF DANIELS: I don’t know what that argument is. Oh, where it turns at the end? Clint fared a lot better than we did. And Terms of Endearment was another one. Here’s this wonderful character driven, mother-daughter thing, and all of a sudden Debra gets cancer. Whoa, wait a minute! But financially, I really never know how something is going to do. Arachnophobia, we were making that, it was Frank Marshall’s first directing thing. Steven [Spielberg] was executive producer on it. Frank had wanted to direct a movie produced for Steven; it was a chance for Frank to go do something. Nobody’s really going to get hurt financially. It’s a movie about spiders. So we’re shooting it and it’s kind of Frank’s folly or something. We’re all working hard and it is what it is. It’s a real first rate kind of horror film as done by Frank and Steven and Amblin. Then we started testing it and it was scaring the hell out of people. Now the studio is thinking that this is going to make $100 million and we had no idea. Then it opened. I think it ended up coming in at $60, $70 or $80 million, something like that, and it was deemed a failure at the studio. So it went from ‘it might make its money back’ to ‘Oh my God a $100 million blockbuster’ and [then] it failed. You just can’t keep up.
