Gary Sinise: Gary After Gump

Q: Richard Gere had not yet come back then, right?

A: It was the movie he did right before Internal Affairs, which is the movie he did right before Pretty Woman. Miles From Home is a really nice, little-seen Richard Gere performance.

Q: What kind of relationship did you have with Gere?

A: Good, very good. [Pause] I can't think of anybody that I should trash [laughs].

Q: Penelope Ann Miller was in the movie, too. I'll trash her, you don't have to. Actually, that's back when she was an ingenue and still good.

A: When she came to do her final audition, I had Kevin Anderson read with her, and they had a wonderful, very gentle communication with each other that works in the film.

Q: People seeing your movies might think you grew up on a dusty farm near Omaha. But Highland Park, Illinois, is an upper middle-class Chicago suburb.

A: [When I was a kid] we moved from the south side of Chicago to the [wealthier] north shore.

Q: You were in a rock band, right?

A: I had my first guitar in the fourth grade. I was always the leader of the band, the lead guitar.

Q: Did you do a lot of drugs?

A: I was a freshman in '69. We had a totally liberal school, let me say that. There was an area of our school called the Glass Hall, and it was where all the stoned kids would hang out all day long. It was very glassy in there, I did my share of all that. We used to go outside to the parking lot, find an open car, get in and smoke pot. I went out by myself one day and was smoking a joint and the door swings open, and it was the wrestling coach, who, earlier in his career had been kicked in the throat, so his voice [goes falsetto] was like this, and he said, "What the hell are you doin' in here?" And he grabs me by the hair and drags me out of the car, smoke trailing behind me, and drags me into the principal's office. And by this time, my heart is beating like crazy, but my head is way behind. A near fatal mistake.

Q: How did your parents handle all this?

A: That was a time when rebellion against authority was the order of the day. My parents had to buy it, because I was following my own path. Some bad things happened there, I've always been close to them, but I went through a time when it was just hard to communicate, I even fell into a Jesus freak thing.

Q: How long did that last?

A: A few weeks. There was this band of wild Jesus freaks living in a house and one of the guys in my band met them. I remember going to one of the meetings, and we were all standing around in a circle and trying to get Jesus to come into our hearts. We were standing there for along time and they were all saying, "Jesus come on in and take this lost soul," shouting and screaming. And I'm a kid, and finally the blood just drained out of my head into my feet and I couldn't stand up anymore, and they laid me down on a bed and thought I'd had a religious experience. Like, Jesus had come into me and knocked me out. When they all left the room, my buddy stayed, and I said. "Hey man, let's climb out the window." We ran away and that was the end of my Jesus days.

Q: Didn't you have a light-on-the-road-to-Damascus experience trying out for West Side Story as a teenager?

A: Yeah. When I was a sophomore, some of the guys in the band and I thought it would be fun to audition for the school play because it was about gangs. We'd seen the movie and thought it'd be fun to rumble onstage. We all stormed into the audition, this scary group of Glass Hall trolls, and we all got cast. I was a Shark, Pepe, and I had brown makeup on and a headband. Somebody asked me the other day about whether getting nominated for an Oscar was a high point for me. And it was, but I can think of 10 that have meant as much, and not the least was Pepe the Shark. I fell in love with theater during that play. The last night of the show, I was one of the guys who had to carry Tony off the stage, and I'd become best friends with the guy who played Tony--he became one of the founders of Steppenwolf, Jeff Perry--and I was carrying him along and all of a sudden I burst into tears and was sobbing because it was over. And the guy who played Chino grabbed me and every¬one was sobbing. It was a moment when I knew I was hooked for life.

Q: That was very young to find what you're going to do in life.

A: It's lucky. And it's fortunate the way things turned out. It's fluky that you'd get a group of people that would end up clicking the way Steppenwolf did. John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Moira Harris, who's been my mate for 20 years...

Q: Were you all avid readers of Hermann Hesse, with dog-eared copies of Steppenwolf?

A: I still haven't read the book.

Q: You were influenced more by film¬makers than playwrights when you started your theater, weren't you?

A: In the late '60s and early '70s, movies were cooking. It's what turned me on to drama. It's when Al Pacino did The Panic in Needle Park, Scarecrow, Serpico, The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon--these are monstrous, powerful performances. I'm fortunate on my current project, Truman, to be working with Frank Pierson, who wrote Dog Day Afternoon, and before it's over he's going to sign a copy of that screenplay for me. The '70s in the movies was a time where the gloves were off and the doors were open and you could do anything you wanted. It was the first time filmmakers could bite the heads off chickens if they wanted to and it would be in the movie.

Q: What's your attitude to your own era in Hollywood?

A: Well. I'm still drawn to the same kind of material they had then.

Q: But now isn't then.

A: No, but when a movie like in the Name of the Father can get made-- that could have been made in the '70s. Occasionally we can run to those films. Times have changed and blockbusterism has taken over, but drama is still drama. I've always been drawn to it, which is why I made Of Mice and Men.

Q: When you were making your film acting debut in the World War II pacifist drama A Midnight Clear, could you honestly tell your co-stars, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Dillon and Peter Berg, apart with their helmets on? Didn't they all seem like the same person?

A: [Clears his throat, smiles] Not to me. I was like the senior citizen on that picture and I had a great time. I had my family with me in Park City where we were filming, and the guys would come around and play Risk, the board game, all-night ses¬sions. It was a fun movie 10 make.

Q: How was it playing the villain in Jack the Bear'!

A: I had a great time making it. It was the first time I got a big trailer and I had a lot of downtime to sit and work on my Of Mice and Men project. My character was a Boo Radley type who actually turns out to be everything you feared, the psycho from across the street, and all I had to do was limp around and lurk and make an occasional utterance and go back to my trailer. After the theater where you work your butt off all the time, I wasn't about to complain about sitting around and getting paid for it.

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