Cannes Roundtable: Bruce Dern on Nebraska and "Dernsies"

Bruce Dern on Alexander Paine and Nebraska.

I’ve never felt making a movie that we were making magic. I never felt that it was an extraordinary experience while making it or anything like that, but on this movie I had something I’ve never had every day of my career. I mean every day on a movie. On other movies I’ve had what I call genius directors. I’ve had this, that and the other thing and maybe two or three days in a whole movie out of say 50 days or one day a week with each one I’d be excited to go to work. I mean, I’m always excited to go to work but I mean really excited and charged up.

Hitch gave me close. He had on four or five days, maybe two days a week every week, he was up to something that he was never telling me about. On this movie, this man, every single day I went to work, I felt excited and I felt excited because I thought maybe we just might do something that’s never been done before. That’s the excitement to me with this role and Alexander because I had never done any of it before.

He sent me the script eight years ago. He sent me the script and I said, “Wait a second, whoever wrote this?” His name wasn’t on the script. Bob Nelson’s name was on the script but I knew that Alexander Payne was directing it. He sent it to me so his hand was going to be in embellishing it, fixing it or whatever we had to do. I felt a feeling after meeting him, and I had not really ever met him except a little bit because Laura starred in Citizen Ruth. That was 18 years earlier. So I felt the sense of trust five minutes after he was in my house.

I love Rafelson. Frankenheimer is my favorite in terms of personality. Ashby, Walter Hill, guys that I don’t call one of my six geniuses. The reason Alexander gets it and who I now list as my favorite is because all the others push you to risk every single day out on the edge of the cliff and they all have butterfly nets to catch you in and throw you back up to do another take or another take but that’s what they did, like with John or Hal. You’d go 16, 17 takes. Rafelson the same way. Hitch, no. You got one and if you were lucky, you got two if the camera screwed up, but if you screwed up, print it and we’re on.

This guy takes the time to shoot behavior. You have to trust to let yourself know that behavior works. The first day of work he put his arm on my shoulder like this and he said, “Bruce, this is Mr. Papamichael. He’s the cameraman. I’m Alexander Payne, I’m the director. Trust us to do our job. We will see what you’re doing. We’re not going to move off you because you don’t have anything to say. So just be yourself.” Jack’ll tell you the same thing when he went to do About Schmidt. At that point we were tired of doing behavior-like roles but not having anybody have the patience to watch the behavior so you try and invent Dernies, or anything you can to keep the character flowing.

You don’t have to do that. I didn’t change one word in here except the little thing I said but you don’t have to because you know he’s going to cover it. You know he’s going to shoot it and the movie takes on a certain glow that way. Maybe it takes you three or four minutes to get into it but pretty soon in the movie you find out what’s going to happen and develop. The very first scene we shot in the movie is the scene of me in the police station when he comes to get me and I show him the letter and he says, “It’s a crock.”

Alexander Payne pays Laura Dern the biggest compliment on her father.\

I got tears in my eyes that I found out something I didn’t know. After the scene was over, Laura called me. She said, “Dad, I just got the most amazing phone call. From my friend.” I said, “Why would you call me and tell me that now?” “Because my friend was Alexander and he said to me on the phone, ‘I don’t have much time now but I want you to know something. I have my movie.’” That’s big stuff to me because that’s coming from the guy who I rate equal to some pretty good directors.

Bruce Dern on the great directors.

Nobody will ever equal Kazan to me because I don’t care what his politics were or anything else, the man had game. He knew how to see a whole movie in front of him before he ever began. He knew how to study the details. What’s one of the great love scenes of all time, it’s Marlon Brando picking up her glove when they’re standing outside the fence in On the Waterfront and looking at it. It’s a love scene. Then yeah, sure, they go kind of crazy in the hallway but attention to detail and Alexander’s the best.

I asked Burt Lancaster one time, I did a movie with him and he later became a friend of mine, we did a movie called Castle Keep which George Clooney’s remaking now. It’s not called Castle Keep. He didn’t even know there was a Castle Keep. I told Waldo, his makeup guy who was the makeup guy on Nebraska.. He said, “We’re going to do a movie that really studies preserving the art from Europe.” I said, “God, we did that movie in 1967.” He said, “What was that?” “Castle Keep.” They’d never heard of it. Anyway, I asked Burt Lancaster, and this was Sydney Pollack’s second film, Castle Keep. He said, “There’s only one. Visconti. I did The Leopard. It was like going to college.” Because Burt always tried to do really good, interesting things. Yeah, he was this and a tumbler and a trapeze artist but he was god damn good. You look at The Rose Tattoo. I mean, he can act. Elmer Gantry, he could act.

Bruce Dern’s last anecdote begins with a comment on fame and craft.

I’ll leave you with one last thing. When I first started acting, I was in Philadelphia, I went to dramatic school there for about two months and there were three goals. I don’t see this anymore and to me it’s what’s wrong with the acting you see coming up today. Our three goals were go to New York, become a member of The Actor’s Studio, work for Kazan. Now my goal is work for Alexander again but now when they come to Hollywood, they want to have a star on the Boulevard and go to the party. Nobody continues studying, nobody continues working, half of them may never have studied. They see reality TV. I can either marry a Kardashian, sleep with a Kardashian or someway I’ll get on television or I can have a voice or do something else. There’s no work ethic anymore. When you go to work with a lot of the young actors, you don’t see any ethic. You don’t see let’s go.

Richard Dreyfus at the Cannes premiere of Nebraska.

Last night I got a tremendous compliment from a guy who I did a movie with who’s a favorite of mine, who if I were to say list the actors in the generation below me, there are two guys that are better than anybody else and I’m leaving out a lot of names you’re going to be pissed off at me for. One is John Savage. The other is Richard Dreyfus. Dreyfus was there last night and he hugged me at the end of the thing and put his arms around me, had tears in his eyes, and he said to me, “Thank you for taking me back to school.” That meant a lot to me because Richard Dreyfus, people don’t know this, but he was the star of All That Jazz. He was fired after one week because he was out of control. They brought Roy Scheider in. Fosse was a friend of mine and there was a producer on the movie named Dan Melnick who was a studio executive and Dreyfus’ friend and he couldn’t continue. He just physically was not able to. He stopped at Walgreens on the way to work every day. You can’t do that. I’ve grown up seeing that in movies a lot and I get it. I missed a decade to Vicodin. Who am I? I’m not a drugger, I’ve never had a drink, I’ve never smoked a cigarette, I’ve never had a cup of coffee. I never smoked marijuana but I did take Vicodin for 10 years and missed the ‘90s. I was working through it and everything like that.

That disappoints me more than anything and what’s happened is the community, you guys included, accept a lot of bad behavior as great acting. “Oh, that was a great performance” but there’s three or four performances, whether you know it or not, were totally done under that kind of influence. That’s my look on things and the actors that have surprised me, that I didn’t think would come back, were: Matt Damon was a little jittery on All the Pretty Horses but it was his first film under the gun. He’d done the movie about Boston.

Bruce Dern concludes with another story from The Driver.

The first time that I ever saw anybody who had an ability to surprise me, really surprise me was Ryan O’Neal in The Driver because he’s funny and sweet. In The Driver, there’s a scene where [he] demolishes a car. They put him in the car to say, “Well, how do I know you can drive getaway car for Christ’s sake?” He said, “Well, because I’m a driver.” They said, “Well, show us.” He puts them in the backseat of the car, he drives it on the down garage and totally rips all the doors off the car, everything else, with them still in the car, makes it totally unmanageable. Gets out of the car and he says, “I can drive.” But Walter Hill knew that Ryan could do that, and then you look at Barry Lyndon which he shot right after that. There’s some stuff in there that’s amazing that he does. What was great about Ryan was he had a sense of humor. He was extremely funny.

Bruce Dern concludes one last time.

This may be off color, but I’ll leave you with this. Walter casts a bunch of people off the streets. He’s given extras, doesn’t use them and then just casts people. There were a bunch of transvestites standing up against the wall that he wanted to use in a bar. Ryan and I are sitting there looking at them. He said, “Man, it used to really surprise me seeing this in front of me, but I must tell you you can go to Marrakesh and get a ho for five grand.” This 1977. I said, “I never saw that quickness in that.” Paper Moon I guess had just been done or was just about to be done but he’s funny.

He got a rough deal, he behaved poorly and I’ve had three terribly disappointing things in my career. To me, they’re terrible, to nobody else. One, Roger Corman was never allowed to make a major motion picture. Two, Jack Nicholson was never allowed to direct again unless he was in the movie. He wasn’t in Drive. Three, the way the industry treated Mike Cimino after Heaven’s Gate. You can look at The Deer Hunter, you can look at Heaven’s Gate, you can say, “I don’t care how long they are.” Heaven’s Gate has brilliant filmmaking in it. It’s not three and a half hours but I did a movie, All the Pretty Horses which is a damn good movie. It was better at 3 1/2 hours than it was at 2 which the Weinsteins cut it down to and asked Billy to leave the editing room.