Three years ago Steven Seagal, a complete unknown, appeared on the cover of The Los Angeles Times Calendar section, accompanied by a story that said CAA head Michael Ovitz intended to make this man a star. Those who scoffed--and there were many--didn't know Michael Ovitz very well. Seagal's first picture, an action/aikido movie called Above the Law, was a success, especially considering its miniscule budget. And Seagal didn't go away. His next two movies, Hard to Kill and Marked for Death, did even better. Suddenly Seagal was being counted among the most powerful men in Hollywood. The scoffing ceased.
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Who is Seagal? His background has been shrouded in ambiguity and intrigue. This we know: He was raised in Orange County, in Southern California, but left home early for Japan, where he studied the martial and spiritual arts until he reached a high-degree mastery of aikido. He married a Japanese woman, had two children, established a dojo (an aikido training center), met the actress Kelly LeBrock, divorced his wife and married her. He supposedly got involved with the CIA, traveled to Third World countries, then returned to the U.S. to set up his dojos in Taos, New Mexico, and Los Angeles. An aikido student, Ovitz saw Seagal's fighting ability, and larger-than-life (6'4") presence, and thought he'd make a tough action hero. The three pictures followed quickly. But Seagal wasn't happy. He didn't like the director of his second picture, didn't like the writers of his third, felt he could do better himself. Now comes Out for Justice, a film he has co-produced. At last, he says, it's a film he believes in.
When I spoke with people who have worked with or for Steven Seagal I found a reluctance to talk openly about him. One assistant said she just didn't want to say anything. A crew member on two of his films said only that he was a wild man, that I'd better be prepared for whatever paranoia he's expressing at the moment, and warned that I'd better keep my car running. A writer said I must be very careful around him, he knows firearms for real and could be a very dangerous person. Someone who knew him before his first movie says he invented his persona, that he went to Japan to dodge the draft, that he never even met the aikido sensai he claims to have studied with. But all of this comes from people who speak in whispers, who refuse to be quoted, and thus is no more than hearsay.
On the set of Out for Justice Seagal is working with the director, John Flynn, on a scene where actress Jo Champa and her son have to dive into a bathtub to dodge bullets. Seagal wrote this scene and is excited about it. "This is a great scene, a great scene," he says to his wife Kelly, who is there with their two small children, Dominic and Annaliza. After the scene is shot, Seagal doesn't quite see the greatness in it. Not enough bullets, he decides. The sound of gunfire must be more rapid--eight, ten shots in a row, then a few more at random. It's set up again, ears are plugged, the shots come louder, quicker, smoke is in the air. Seagal is satisfied. He walks out past the food table, grabs a handful of candy bars, and heads for his trailer to eat a hearty three-plate lunch, down Super Papaya Enzyme Plus pills by the dozens to aid his digestion, spend a few moments with his family, and talk about all the contradictions that have been printed about him.
Lawrence Grobel: There are a lot of distortions out there about you. Think we'll be able to clear some of them up?
Steven Seagal: You do 1,000 interviews, 20 percent of every one is not what you said, or is twisted a little. If you multiply 20 by 1,000 you've got a lot of inaccuracies out there. And all that these asshole people will do is they'll take all the different inaccuracies, build them up and say, "See, he's a phony. See, he's a liar." It's humiliating and degrading to have to talk about things that are so trivial.
LG: People _magazine and the _National Enquirer recently openly questioned the truth of what you say. Why have you allowed yourself to become a media target?
SS: In the beginning they were very nice to me, but I was warned by my publicist that when you get too big, there's always some pricks who are going to try to come after you. Do Kelly and I look like we're having a problem?
LG: Is that the latest?
SS: Yeah, the fucking Enquirer wrote we're getting a divorce. You read this shit and we have to laugh, there are details about these fucking intimate arguments that we got in and she stood in front of the door and held the clothes... what is this shit? It's all made up!
LG: And was People's piece delving into what they called your "murky" past also made up?
SS: Someone said to me that People made the turn from a magazine to a shit periodical like the Enquirer after they fucked Robin Williams. Now, no movie star will ever do an interview with them. My publicist gave them the truth about me and they chose not to print that. I could sue them and I could win, but I don't want to spend fucking five years and five million dollars. But it's a Time/Warner publication and I'm not going to forget that. Believe me. I spent 30 years of my life going through a tremendous amount of training, things I could never begin to explain to you, to earn a reputation that I think was fairly well deserved. There are a lot of people out there who think I'm one of the best in the world at what I am. And I didn't work these many years to develop this reputation, which is based on honor, for some flighty little male impersonator to take these cheap stabs at me. It bothers me because I just don't think it's right.
LG: We'll get into your story and try to clear up some of the myths, but first, I've got to tell you that, in researching your background, I've never come across so many people who didn't want to go on the record about an interview subject. Is it because you're close with Mike Ovitz, one of the most powerful people in the industry? Or are they just afraid of you?
SS: I don't think people don't want to talk about me because I'm close to Ovitz. Some of the people that you're talking about know that I have a bit of a mysterious past, they know that I'm a man of honor and if they say something they should know what they're saying. With some of these people there's a very good reason why they haven't been able to talk about me. Because maybe I had an incident with them where I said, "Look, this is the way this is, if you want to talk about me, know what you're saying. Let it be the truth, because if it's not I'm going to come back and talk to you." That's the way I am.
LG: And have you "straightened out" those who have talked in the past?
SS: You know, you could make me look really bad, but let me just say this: if somebody said something about me that was untrue, yeah, I would go talk to them. And if I haven't, I still will, yes. But please don't paint me in the wrong light, I don't want to be painted as a fucking thug and a jerk. It's a point of honor.
LG: What got you interested in the Oriental arts?
SS: When I was a little boy I saw a demonstration of the martial arts at a football halftime in Michigan. This was in the '50s. And I can remember seeing a little old man out there tossing these big people that were coming at him like they were pieces of paper. There was something that came up inside me that said, "That is what I am meant to do."
LG: It's been written that you studied with Morihei Uyeshiba, the founder of aikido and a great Shinto mystic. It's also been written that he died two years before you got to Japan. What's the truth?
SS: Never met him. I got to see him, listen to him, watch him, never met him.
LG: What was it about aikido that attracted you more than karate, t'ai chi, or jujitsu?
SS: Aikido is not merely about fighting and the development of the physical self but the perfection of the spiritual man at the same time. It has very harmonious movements, very beautiful to watch and beautiful for your body to feel. The movements are basically based on another person attacking you and you using that momentum and their state of mind to turn it back on them.
LG: Aikido plus Shinto mysticism constitutes a religion that must have been very different from your own Western background.
SS: I was a very religious kid. I was raised as an Episcopalian. Like every religion that I'd ever known as a child, particularly Catholicism, their doctrine would say: We are the way and we are the only way. What I found with Shinto mysticism and aikido was that they were the first religion that said, "We are all searching for God and we may go different pathways but we are all trying to get to the same place." That was very meaningful for me.
LG: You say you were an Episcopalian. I had heard that you were Jewish and that you changed your name from Siegel to Seagal like Marion Morrison changed his to John Wayne.
SS: No. Everybody thinks that. I didn't know John Wayne wasn't his name. Marion's a nice name.
LG: Did you get into many fights growing up?
SS: Yeah, I got into fights every day of my life for a long time. It's a little embarrassing for me to recall childhood incidents and recount them.
LG: Did you ever have a nickname?
SS: That's a great question. I'm sure I had a few.
LG: Such as... ?
SS: They're too embarrassing.
LG: What about sex, how embarrassing was that?
SS: Nobody talked to me about it, it was something I learned about in the streets.
LG: How old were you when you lost your virginity?
SS: About 15, 16.
LG: You seem reluctant to talk about your childhood.
SS: I have a gift of completely letting things go out of my mind that I don't look at [as] having value for me. I always hated being a child. I always felt like an adult trapped in a child's body.
LG: Were you close to your mother or father?
SS: I was so afraid of my father that I tried to be real careful around him.
LG: Was he as big as you are?
SS: As big as me, every bit. I was sort of a loner. I had three sisters--two younger, one older--of whom I had very little to do with, almost nothing. And I had very little to do with my mother and father growing up. My mother was a medical receptionist or a nurse, something like that. I just wasn't close with my parents or my grandparents, who I knew very superficially. I know it sounds hard to believe, but I had no relationship with my family. I just wanted to get out.
LG: When did you get out?
SS: I left home when I was 15 and I started working in Burger King. And I was a musician and played guitar and drums in different places, just tried to get up enough money to eat.
LG: Did you drop out of high school?
SS: No, I graduated.
LG: Didn't you enroll at Fullerton College?
SS: I was there for a couple of weeks and I knew it wasn't for me.
LG: What about reading, anything influence you?
SS: I remember reading something called The Cockroach by Kafka.
LG: Metamorphosis.
SS: Yeah, that was one of the strangest things I've ever fucking read. It sparked my imagination. See, when I was a kid--this is my only kid story, after this you won't get any more--I was in the third or fourth grade and I believed that I had an ability or gift from God for certain things. We had a creative writing class and I came up with this really interesting story about this guy who woke up and found himself in this strange world below the ground, with little people. The story ends as the guy wakes up--having been a test pilot for the military, he'd gotten in a plane crash, and of course this is something that he had dreamed. We were being graded and the teacher gave me a C and in red ink she wrote under it, "Bizarre, to say the least." As a real put-down. That was it for me. For the next 20 years I wouldn't pick up a pen again. Finally my desire to write was so strong that I overcame that, but I'll never forget it as long as I live. And I intend to someday write something that will get some kind of acclaim.
LG: So after the trauma of school you decided to go to Japan. How did you think you could support yourself?
SS: A lot of friends told me I could make a living teaching English there. And I did--enough for me to study what I wanted to study. I went there a few times in my early youth and by about 1970-71 I was there to stay for a long while.
LG: And you managed to pick up the language within a year?
SS: I spoke very well, very quickly.
LG: You were in Japan during the Vietnam War. Some say you went there to avoid being drafted.
SS: First of all, I was never afraid to go and fight. Back then I was politically unaware. I would have thought I was fighting for a just cause, which I no longer think. I would have been happy to have gone. As it turned out, I got a very high lottery number and was so deeply immersed in the Japanese culture that I just decided to make that my life.
LG: Were you involved at all with the drug culture in the '70s?
SS: Missed it all. When I got to Japan I was working so hard to develop special powers and special traits, the last thing that I wanted was a cigarette or alcohol or drugs.
LG: And once you discovered aikido, were you sweeping the floors of your dojo, and doing your master's bidding?
SS: You're the only person I can talk to who might understand this. I was doing a cover for GQ and started to tell this guy stories and he looked at me and said, "What the fuck, you crazy or what? You go to a dojo and you sweep the mats and massage the master and make food for him, what for?" It was so insulting to me I thought, fuck it, never again will I tell another journalist these stories. Westerners can't imagine there's anything else out there. I'm the first white boy to receive these credentials and I went through more than the Japanese went through. It was a little bit harder than sweeping the mats in the morning and massaging the master. I mean, you got your ass kicked.
LG: Did you do anything other than train and teach English in Japan?
SS: I started writing for magazines and newspapers. I did lots of articles, just like you, for a few years.
LG: You also met and married a Japanese woman, Miyako Fujitani, who was also training in aikido. How did you meet?
SS: At an aikido affair. We had no intention of getting married but she got pregnant.
LG: How were you, such a big geijin, accepted by her family?
SS: I learned to become very small.
LG: The People article said her father was an aikido master and that you never started your own dojo but worked at his.
SS: That's another preposterous fucking thing. Her father never even heard the word aikido, he had been dead for the last 35 years. It's all fucking lies. That's what I mean by irresponsible journalism. It's fucking poppycock.
LG: So how did you wind up with your own dojo in Japan?
SS: I had started a dojo in Kansai, in a place called Ishiya, and my fiancee at the time had become the victim of a confidence game where a large building that had a dojo in it was part of it. The building was worth $20 million and there were some very seedy characters that were doing some very bad things to her and her family. I spent a couple years fighting these pricks and finally I won.
LG: Were you going against the Yakuza, the Japanese mob?
SS: I'm not going to use the word "Yakuza" any more because I'm just really trying to stay away from the fucking sensationalism. Maybe the Yakuza were involved, maybe they weren't. They were bad people, criminals, okay?
LG: So how did you deal with them? You were a foreigner, alone, still basically a kid...
SS: Yeah, but I was a tenacious motherfucker, man, and I was fearless. I jumped right into their faces. What I think ended up saving me was being able to get to the press.
LG: The media actually helped you get them to back off?
SS: Yeah, and they got the property back.
LG: And that's where you opened your dojo?
SS: Right.
LG: What's the most dangerous thing you've ever done?
Kelly LeBrock: [bottle-feeding Dominic] Staying with his ex-wife.
SS: [smiling] That wasn't nice.
LG: I thought he was going to say, marrying his latest one.
SS: [puts his arm around Kelly] You're a banshee, aren't you? Isn't she beautiful? [back to the question. . .] The toughest situation you can be in is when you know you're dead. And you say, "This is it, I'm fucking dead." It's happened many times to me. It's like war. But I never tell war stories. I was involved in a lot of things that I would just like to forget about.
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LG: Was marrying Miyako one of them? During your marriage you had two children, a son and a daughter. You told Arsenio Hall that your ex-wife takes the money you send her but she doesn't let you see your kids.**
SS: I may have to go to court about that. I send a lot of money there all the time, she'll never let them come here. I believe that if I'm sending that much money I have a right to see them. And I want them to be able to come here to see me.
LG: What finally went wrong with your marriage to Miyako?
SS: I tried for ten years to make it work. In the end I left because I didn't like her, didn't like the kind of person she was.
LG: Didn't you also meet Kelly while you were in Japan?
SS: We met in Japan, yeah. I got a phone call from a friend who was a publicist who said, "Listen, a client of mine is here, would you take care of her while she's there?" I didn't know who she was. She tells the story of me knocking on her hotel room door and looking through the peep hole wondering, "Who is this ugly guy?" Then she opened the door and thought, "Well, pretty ugly, but not as ugly as he was through the peep hole."
LG: This was before you had anything to do with films?
SS: Nothing.
Kelly: He was a martial artist.
LG: Did you demonstrate your skills?
SS: I demonstrated my healing skills on her.
LG: Where did you pick up spiritual healing?
SS: I studied acupuncture, bone manipulation, and herbology over there for many years.
LG: While in Japan you also made contact with people in the CIA, didn't you?
SS: A handful, yeah. It was a good theater for the CIA, there were a lot of Soviets there involved in espionage, whether it's computer technology or whatever.
LG: So these CIA people saw your martial arts and linguistic abilities and what? Were you recruited?
SS: I'm just going to say, no comment. I knew a bunch of them, I worked with some of them. Stuff like that.
LG: What about stuff like dealing with the Shah of Iran?
SS: I never did anything for the Shah of Iran, but I did try to set up a safe passage and security for some of his family.
LG: One of whom, a nephew, got killed?
SS: That happened, yeah. He got killed because he didn't listen. He just didn't think he needed security.
LG: But South Africa's Archbishop Tutu did when he came to America. Were you involved?
SS: I'm not going to say exactly what I did. With Tutu there were thousands of people who saw me bring him into the United States and get him out. There are other things that I did that were very covert.
LG: Have you ever done anything illegal where you've been arrested?
SS: I was arrested falsely a couple of times. I'm not sure that I want to see this stuff in print, it didn't have anything to do with drugs or assault and battery. I was just in possession of some weapons that they weren't sure if it was kosher or not and I ended up being able to show them it was.
LG: Did you have licenses for these weapons?
SS: Let me put it this way, if I were to carry a weapon I would have a license for it.
LG: How versed are you in firearms?
SS: Very.
LG: Is there a particular gun that you like to use?
SS: A .45 is my personal favorite.
LG: How do you reconcile the use of weapons with the philosophy of the martial arts?
SS: To me the martial arts are the ways of war. In wanting to become familiar with the ways of war I tried the best I could to get on top of things. And be able to be a well-covered warrior.
LG: On screen you seem to have two signatures: one is that you break limbs, the other is your pony tail. How did each come about?
SS: The pony tail thing was something I never even thought about, I just didn't cut my hair and everybody liked the way I looked. The breaking limbs thing is something that I know how to do better than anybody else in film. When you want to give the bad guys a comeuppance, I thought that was a cinematic way to do it from time to time. I'm hoping that those are not my only signatures.
LG: Have you ever broken any real limbs?
SS: Yeah.
LG: Accidentally or on purpose?
SS: On purpose.
LG: Then let me ask you the obvious next question: did you ever kill a man?
SS: No, but I'm about to right now. I'm going to answer that the way you know I'm going to answer. Who, me?
LG: When you moved back to the U.S., you opened up dojos in Taos and in Los Angeles. How did you attract students?
SS: Word of mouth. People want to find the best teacher.
LG: You still have your dojo in L.A. Do you still teach?
SS: I do private classes whenever I can.
LG: How much do you charge?
SS: I teach for free. I never take money, ever.
LG: You've been quoted as saying you became like a guru to Mike Ovitz.
SS: He has been a mentor to me when it comes to Hollywood and acting. And I was a little bit of a mentor to him when it came to some aspects of the martial arts.
LG: He was the one who encouraged you to become an actor and client?
SS: Absolutely, he was the one who picked me up and said, "I see something in you that I want up there and we're going to try to make it happen."
LG: And he brought some Warner Bros, executives to a sound stage for you to show your stuff?
SS: Ovitz wanted me to demonstrate for them. I did, apparently they were impressed, and that's the end of that.
LG: Or, rather, the beginning?
SS: No, that's not what got me a starring role. What got me that is they did a screen test and we shot an entire scene on 35mm and they liked what they saw.
LG: Was it Warner's hope that you would be the next Clint Eastwood?
SS: That's what they may have wanted at one time.
LG: That isn't what you wanted?
SS: No.
LG: How bad could that be?
SS: Clint had a fairly long career but there's only two films that he made that I ever really loved: The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me. And maybe the original Dirty Harry.
LG: When you spoke of Eastwood, you used the past tense.
SS: I like Clint, he's a nice man, but it happens to everybody. It happened to Burt Reynolds. One night you're the biggest star in the world and the next minute nobody knows you. It's going to happen to all of us. The important thing is to be able to take it with grace.
LG: Action adventure movies seem to draw the biggest box-office. Eastwood, Bronson, Burt Reynolds seem to have had their day; Stallone's beginning to wane; Schwarzenegger, Gibson, and Willis are still hot. But studios seem to grasp at the prospect of finding new bankable action heroes.
SS: That was the thing that Fox kept saying to me over and over again, that they felt I filled a void. However, for me, I'm hoping to be able to create a different kind of picture that's not limited to the martial arts.
LG: How important is it in your films to have a woman get shot?
SS: You have to create a conflict, a situation where you have a reluctant hero who wants to just go about his job. Something has to happen to propel him into a situation where he has to step up, at great sacrifice to himself, and get the bad guys. It doesn't work if the bad guys kill his mother's uncle's friend's neighbor's pet dog. You've got to make the stakes high.
LG: Let's talk about your first film, Above the Law. Were you surprised that it got made?
SS: The director Andy Davis and myself never thought that would get released.
LG: Who did you think was going to stop it?
SS: I imagined the government would. Who confiscated the Noriega tapes from CNN and why?
LG: But Above the Law was fiction, a movie.
SS: It's based on fact. Everybody thought it was a simple action film, but if you listen to what's being said, there's a lot going on. When I was on tour for it, I saw on national television a newscaster talking about the CIA being involved in narcotics trafficking for the purpose of funding covert operations and possibly even funding the contras, which the CIA created. And that was what Above the Law was about. I cannot to this day believe that we got away with saying what we said.
LG: Your second film was Hard to Kill, which made a lot of money, but you called it a cartoon.
SS: It's like anything else in life, you have to travel up the escalator fighting for control of your own destiny, your own career. If you're in control, then if you fail you have to blame yourself, but if someone else is in control, it's a hopeless feeling. I had a hard time with Warner Bros. at the time. That was primarily a picture that I felt I could have resurrected and made something very wonderful, but I got a director who didn't know how to direct. It was not a picture that I was proud of.
LG: Kelly acted with you in that one. How was she to work with?
SS: As an actress... deep, sensitive, caring, serious, articulate. The only wonderful experience on the movie was acting with her.
LG: One review of the film pointed out your limitations: "The movie is professional, enjoyable--and totally soulless. Like its star it never, ever sweats." How do you take that?
SS: Like water on a duck's back. I get out there and I sweat my fucking ass off. I have multiple people fucking attacking me, and I do some hard shit. And I do sweat. So, when they say "soulless" tell them to go fuck themselves! What does soulless mean? I'm anything but soulless.
LG: Didn't you say that you rewrote 93 percent of_ Hard to Kill_?
SS: That was Marked for Death. My attorneys, the director, producers of mine, we all looked at the final script and we counted like 93 percent I had totally rewritten. But I didn't get credit for that. Is that right to you? It's bullshit! But people in the business know the story with the Writers Guild.
LG: What is the story?
SS: It's very simple. If an actor goes on the screen and acts for five seconds he gets credit up there. If I find a screenplay that has an interesting concept but as a screenplay it would never, ever get made and I take it and rework it and spend thousands of hours to fix it up--it doesn't matter how much of it I change, the Writers Guild will never, ever give you credit because you are the second writer that's come on and they'll say, "You have to change over 50 percent of it." But they'll never give it to you no matter how much you change because they have a different way of counting.
LG: So Marked for Death wasn't exactly close to what you had envisioned?
SS: Not even slightly. I'm a man of honor. If you don't have honor you don't have anything. That's why it's real hard for me to tolerate the shit in this town.
LG: How bad is it?
SS: Eighty percent of the people that you meet in this town are not very brave people. My golden rule is, if you're talking to somebody that doesn't have any courage, don't trust them, because they can't stick to their convictions and be honest and stand up.
LG: In other words, you don't think very much of the Industry?
SS: There are two sides to it. One is I consider myself to be the luckiest man alive. I was born a poor boy and certainly I don't base happiness upon money, but I would say that God has really smiled on me and for that I really have to be thankful. I have the greatest wife on earth and four beautiful children. With people like Ovitz, I've been very lucky. Everybody's been very good to me. The other side is, as much as I have to thank Hollywood for what it has brought to me, it's full of the good, the bad, and the ugly. There are a lot of people who really don't care about anything other than what's a piece of meat and what they can market. Some of the greatest actors of our time can't get arrested right now if they piss on a cop's leg. And it's not because they can't act anymore, it's just the nature of Hollywood. One minute you're the king of the hill and the next minute nobody wants to know you. That kind of ungratefulness, that unloyalty, is very distasteful.
LG: You're closing in on being king for the day. Are you beginning to feel your power?
SS: I don't think that there's any one man who's very powerful at all. I mean, if Out for Justice grossed $300 million in America I still wouldn't think that I'm that powerful in the sense that I know that I'm certainly destructible very quickly. And I know if I pissed off the wrong people, or did the wrong thing, in a snap of the fingers I'd be gone.
LG: Still, you're excited about your new film?
SS: Yes, because it was a tremendous opportunity for me to get into a character and have fun with it. I made this a story about friendship, about two kids born and raised together in Benson-hurst and God's strange hand would have it that one of them becomes a cop and the other a mobster, which in Brooklyn is very, very possible, and even common. It's a picture about the neighborhood, about people, all endearing stuff.
LG: Haven't you also said that you'd rather make a Terms of Endearment or a My Left Foot than an action film like Commando?
SS: Yeah, I do. I really do. I haven't had the chance to make the kinds of films that I've wanted to make yet. They have been primarily action, and my greatest fear is to be pigeonholed into simply one genre. Because I'm not a martial arts actor. Do you call Spencer Tracy a martial arts actor because he used it in Bad Day at Black Rock? There's martial arts in The Manchurian Candidate, do you call Frank Sinatra a martial arts actor? How about Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor?
LG: Is directing in your future?
SS: I'm going to try directing at one time, maybe the next piece might be a nice one to cut my teeth on, we'll see.
LG: And what might that be?
SS: An environmental piece called House of Cruise, written by Brandon Guy Alamo. Greatest script I've ever read. It's about a man against nature. Kind of starts out like War Games where you see some sophisticated military base tracking a missile. It goes awry and there's this really interesting cross-cutting with this Stone Age tribe in the Amazon. Sure enough, this missile comes right through the triple canopy jungle and into the mouth of the sacred cave in which they are about to start this sacred ritual. It's a great story--and I didn't write it.
LG: Who are some of the directors you'd like to work with?
SS: Jim Cameron, Dick Donner, Sidney Lumet, Pollack, there's a ton of them out there.
LG: You didn't mention Francis Coppola or Martin Scorsese.
SS: I'm sure Coppola would never want me. Francis Ford Coppola, in my opinion, never had an original thought. Never. And he doesn't mind stealing things that are already published. He stole the entire book, In God's Name, from David Yallop, for Godfather III. Every fucking page, fucking frame for frame, he stole. And believe me, that ain't all he stole.
LG: That's a pretty strong accusation. I take it you didn't care for Godfather III?
SS: I hated it. I thought it was a piece of shit. Did you see it? Did you like it?
LG: Yeah, I did.
SS: Let me put it this way: I've been studying this subject for many years and I just thought that the casting was bad, from Pacino on down. And the story was really, really weak. It was an embarrassment. And the first two are my two favorite films of all time, the greatest films I've ever seen in my life.
LG: Well, that takes care of you and Coppola. What about Scorsese?
SS: He can be a talented director, but probably the worst movie ever made in the history of mankind was The Last Temptation of Christ.
LG: Why?
SS: Why? Did you see it? Having Harvey Keitel with a Brooklyn accent playing an apostle...it was a joke. It didn't work. It was pitiful. And GoodFellas was also the worst picture I've ever seen in my life.
LG: We now know two major directors you won't have to worry about working with. Who are your favorite actors?
SS: Sir John Gielgud is one of my favorite living actors. And Al Pacino is just a fucking great actor. Even though I haven't liked some of the recent pieces he's done, Bobby De Niro has done some wonderful performances. I'm a big fan of Meryl Streep and Holly Hunter.
LG: Is there much competition you feel between yourself and guys like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Eastwood, Willis, and the other action heroes?
SS: I think there's room for all of us.
LG: But who's the toughest?
SS: If I had to get into a fistfight? I'd say probably Stallone could kick the shit out of any of the rest of us.
LG: Did I hear you correctly? Were you including yourself there?
SS: I don't want to sound braggadocio, but the difference between me and most of the actors is I don't give a fuck. I'm ready to die and I'm ready to do what I've got to do. I'm ready to go for it. And anybody that knows me knows that.
LG: Even with your family and all that lies ahead for you, you're still ready to die?
SS: That's the backbone of being a true warrior: not clinging to life. I don't want to die, but if I'm faced with it, I want to do what I've got to do, and that's a real man. You know what I'm thinking about these actors. But it would not be becoming of me to say I could kill any of them instantly. The only thing I could say is you don't know till you try.
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Lawrence Grobel is the author of The Hustons, and he wrote about Steve Martin, and Marlon Brando, in our February issue.