Danny DeVito: Little Big Man

Q: Didn't you once play a dog named Andy in a play with Judd Hirsch?

A: Yeah, it was written by Rosalyn Drexler at the Theatre of Living Arts. I played Andy, who was a dog, smoked a cigar, a very tough dog. Judd played this weird pill-pushing doctor and when he'd leave, Judd's wife and I would carry on. I was a very horny dog. It was a musical, if you can imagine that. I had a couple of good songs, and then a large plastic penis came out onstage in the last act. It was interesting, but it didn't get to Broadway.

Q: Who were some of your childhood idols?

A: Cagney, Robinson, Bogie, all those guys.

Q: And today? Do you have a favorite performer?

A: Bruce Springsteen is my favorite performer.

Q: Since you're both out of Asbury Park, I should have guessed that. Who are the directors who have had the most influence on you?

A: Let's look at the films I'm transferring from laserdisc to 8mm--laserdiscs are great, but I have a desire to get everything smaller. Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Fritz Lang, Hitchcock, Kubrick, De Sica, Fellini, Pontecorvo, Kurosawa, Renoir, Cocteau, parts of Spielberg.

Q: What about comedians?

A: I really like Robin Williams. And Billy Crystal, I love the characters he does. Albert Brooks is one of the funniest people on earth. I don't see Albert do the stuff I see Robin or Billy do, but Albert Brooks, I can't be in a room with the guy, he's just too funny. He kills me, I don't wanna be around the guy.

Q: That's obviously not the case with Michael Douglas or Kathleen Turner, whom you've been around for three successful pictures. Did you suspect from the outset that the first, Romancing the Stone, would take off the way it did?

A: We were pleasantly surprised that the reaction was so big. When we watched the movie for the first time at a screening in New York, Kathleen was sitting in front of me and in the middle of the movie I leaned up to her and I said, "Sequel."

Q: And that sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, took you to Morocco. You brought Rhea and your children--was that a nightmare?

A: Ever been to Morocco? It's rough, man. Fez is the kind of place where you want to go buy a rug and then get the hell out. You don't want to, like, hang out with a two-year-old and an infant.

Q: If it ever becomes a trilogy, would you want to direct it?

A: Oh I'd direct it, sure. Just so that I can continue to torture Michael. I've never got him back from when he hung me on a 60-foot crane upside down at the beach in Malibu. He told me we were shooting a poster for Romancing the Stone, and it turned out to be for "Hollywood Bloopers and Practical Jokes." So I still owe him for that one. Just because I greased him down and hung him 30 feet in the air on a chandelier in War of the Roses and then turned to the crew and said, "That's it, half-hour lunch," that doesn't pay him back for that!

Q: Assuming Douglas knows you want to torture him, will he listen to you?

A: If I'm the director? I get to say when we do things. Isn't that the way it works?

Q: Let's talk about the movie you're directing now, Hoffa. This one seems to be a departure from the tragicomedies you seem to lean towards.

A: I guess you might say it's less like The War of the Roses or anything else I've ever done. Although I thought Roses was serious.

Q: Did you always have Jack Nicholson in mind to play Jimmy Hoffa?

A: Yeah, from the very beginning.

Q: Hoffa was a controversial figure. What's your take on him?

A: I have a very high opinion of the man. I think he was a hero.

Q: Most people consider him a gangster.

A: Depends on your definition of a gangster.

Q: He wasn't exactly an admirable figure, Danny.

A: In other words, you believed the press. See, here's the thing. If you just look at Hoffa: His father died of black lung and his mother brought in the washing. He and his brother helped deliver the washing and he got involved in the union when he was a young man trying to make a better wage for the working man. And from that beginning, until the time he disappeared, that was the only thing he had on his mind. He was trying to do better for his family, as we all do. We want our kids to eat and go to college and have a good, enjoyable life, we want to find a woman that we love and can share things with. In his case he found a woman who was on the picket line and they shared a certain dream. And he cared about putting food on the table for not only his family but for the 1.7 million people that were in the union. I'm dealing with a man with more passion for his work than any man I've ever met or heard about.

Q: You're also dealing with a man who has been linked to organized crime, who was considered to have siphoned off union funds for his own use. I mean, when you read about Hoffa, it wasn't that guy you just described.

A: When I grew up hearing about Hoffa, you just heard little sound bites: some battle going on with Kennedy; he's involved with the mob. I didn't have any relatives who were Teamsters, but later, when I started getting interested in this, and spoke to a lot of people who were Teamsters at the time, they only have the highest regard for Jimmy Hoffa.

Q: What do you think happened to Hoffa?

A: He was killed. They've never seen him, never heard from him again. I guess it was pretty obvious what was going on. Hoffa was becoming very, very powerful, on the verge of controlling a bank in every major city in the country. He could pick up the phone and shut down New York. There are a lot of people who felt that being at the negotiation table with a guy with that much power wasn't a good thing. So the way you do that is you try to own the other side. But I don't think he could be bought, so they had to get rid of him.

Q: So if Hoffa's a good guy, that makes Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney General, a bad guy for going after him?

A: Bobby Kennedy was doing what he had to do. He was doing his job. We go right through that era in the film.

Q: Sounds like a controversial picture.

A: [smiles] It might be.

Q: And who do you play?

A: His right-hand man, his friend. I think people are hep that I want to be in all my films, that I want to direct and act. There's a great character here, Bobby Ciaro, who is with Hoffa from the very beginning all the way to the end. I had to sleep with the director's wife to get this part!

Q: In American Film it was postulated that the key to your comedy is your size, which enables you to simultaneously repulse and amuse an audience.

A: Thank you very much.

Q: What would you say is the key to your comedy?

A: The key to my comedy? I think it was the day I was driving through the Holland Tunnel and I saw Woody Allen with a moose on his hood coming back from a hunting trip.

Q: How many readers out there do you think will know that's a reference to one of Woody's classic routines?

A: He's a guy I forgot to mention earlier. Boy, I like him. Very much. Hi Woody, how you doing? So, is Mia pregnant?

Q: I don't know.

A: Well, congratulations if she is.

Q: How fond a memory was it seeing the births of your children?

A: It was very thrilling to be there when Lucy and Gracie and Jake were born. Rhea did all the work, but I helped in spirit. I'm very jealous that I can't do it myself.

Q: When you and Rhea first came out to California you fell in love with a '64 Dodge Dart. Do you still have it?

A: That was after Cuckoo's Nest. There were a few years where there was not much happening until "Taxi." We borrowed $400 from Rhea's mom because we saw this Dodge Dart in The Recycler. It was a great deal, 1964 Dodge Dart Slant-Six convertible, top worked, no heater. We still have it. We fixed it up a little, reupholstered, new top, new mechanisms, new hydraulics. We would never, ever part with D'Artagnan.

Q: So, the guy who destroyed a car in Tin Men is actually someone who names his car and falls in love with it. When you read a script like Tin Men or Ruthless People, can you sense immediately that it's going to make a good movie?

A: You feel, "Wow, this is hysterical, this is funny," and you want to be a part of that. You don't know whether it's gonna be a hit or make money.

Q: There's a scene involving a blow job in Ruthless People where you get to deliver one of the all-time one-liners: "I love wrong numbers."

A: It was one of those things in the script that you can't wait to do it. I think it got one of the longest laughs in movie history, it went on and on and on. They made a test of the movie and Jerry Zucker called me and he had a tape recorder and he said, "Listen to this," and he played the scene he recorded of the test audience, and you heard the scream, you heard my voice--"I love wrong numbers"--and then the laugh on the tape went on forever. It's one of those classic lines.

Q: What has happened to the company you and Rhea formed? Weren't you supposed to be looking for projects for the both of you to do?

A: We're still looking. Got a couple of things in development. She's busy, she's doing her 10th year at "Cheers." And, you know, there are three children.

Q: The two of you have been involved in the child-care crusade, haven't you?

A: Child care's a big thing in our house. Our country's so backward in terms of that. These latchkey kids are probably taking your hubcaps right now, or worse. We've really fallen way behind.

Q: You've appeared before the California Legislature. Did it do any good?

A: No, I don't believe so. It's frustrating. We're talking about the future of the country and the world. People protect unborn fetuses more than they protect people who are born. We have people who are on the bandwagon about this big debate over whether people should have abortions or not. Take it easy, you know? You are pissing up a rope because you've got hundreds of thousands of kids with no care out there that are already born. Let's put our energy into that. I mean, I love these high-horse people who are way, way, way over childbearing years, really safe, right? Most of them with vasectomies, hysterectomies, or they can't produce kids, going wild about some woman having control over her own body. They are incensed about the fact that some woman maybe doesn't want to have a baby. They should take their energy and their money-- because a lot of them are very, very wealthy people, politically powerful people--and put it where we need it.

Q: Well, I can see why Rhea has said you have a tough streak in you.

A: I don't think so. I'm a pussycat.

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Lawrence Grobel interviewed Bette Midler for our December issue.

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