Jake Chessum

particularly matters. But I'm not sure that's a great excuse for doing it poorly.

I've pretty much learned not to worry about things I can't control. I often find myself with friends and acquaintances and they're worrying about this or that--I say, You're worried about the plane going down? What are you, a pilot?

It still interests me to try and make a kind of perfect play. I mean, you'll never even be close. Like a great baseball player hits .320 or .318, maybe even .340 one year. We hit like .060. And it's okay. If you think you've discerned what went wrong before, by the time you apply your little brain to that, several hundred things have gone wrong. Things are flawed or damaged or corrupted, or all three. But that's kind of nice because it reminds me of life, and because a lot of times when people have made super-exceptional things, it's really hard for them to go again.

There will be people who will hate anything you do. And some people will really love it. But that's not really different from the people who really hate it.

This is what politics is to me: Somebody tells you all the trees on your street have a disease. One side says give them food and water and everything will be fine. One side says chop them down and burn them so they don't infect another street. That's politics. And I'm going, Who says they're diseased? And how does this sickness manifest itself? And is this outside of a natural cycle? And who said this again? And when were they on the street? But we just have people who shout, "Chop it down and burn it" or "Give it food and water," and there's your two choices. Sorry, I'm not a believer.

I believe in humans.

A movie is like a line drawing, but a theater performance is like a painting. It develops over what seems like an extraordinary amount of time. I did a play called Burn This for two years. It probably took me about six months--the accents, the vocal patterns, the rapidity, what I had in my head--to run it through my mouth. 'Cause it's a painting. You do a little bit each day.

I like to work. I go to the theater and maybe I'm upset about something, and the play starts and I start watching and it's too late, I'm already lost in it--and when I say "lost in it," I don't mean lost in the magic of it, because to me the magic of it is the work. What went wrong? How could it be different? Why was it so good tonight and so absolutely gobsmackingly awful in the matinee? What is this great mystery?

A lot of our wonderful actors, from Brando to George C. Scott, found it a shameful occupation and really lost interest in it. But it always interests me, and watching others do it always interests me, and I don't find it shameful. I mean, as compared to what?

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, you became famous, what's the worst that could happen to you? Page 6? Cindy Adams? Liz Smith? There weren't cell phones with cameras. Waiters didn't listen to your conversations and send them to Drudge or Defamer or Gawker or Jezebel or Agent Bedhead. Now we're all Japanese. We're a nation of paparazzi. And it's okay. You make your peace with it. We get so many rewards, we're much more remunerated than other people, so I guess we should take more licks than other people, too.

It's hard to believe Michelle Pfeiffer ever said hello to me--not that she's not memorable, God knows. But I sort of blacked it out. What I'm trying to say is, when I think of the other person, I don't think of me as involved with them. They're uncorrupted by me. As if they were never troubled by my existence.

I'm always mistrustful of people saying they know this or that. When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

I don't remember my life before I had children.

It was fantastic when they were growing up. But they're not terrifically interested in either me or what I do. I remember Amandine was nine, and Nicole was trying to explain to them that I didn't work in the garden with a guy called Mark, that isn't what I did for a living. And they didn't believe it.

Getting older is just so irritating. I was never a great tennis player, but I loved to play. Now I can't brace like that, let alone run after the ball. Playing basketball, I can't jump. It irritates me a lot. But this year, I started ferociously going to the gym--two or three hours a day and really hitting it hard. I hate not being able to do things I like to do much more than I hate going to the gym.

I'm a sort of nonsmoker--let's just put it that way. I'll always be a smoker who just doesn't smoke.

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