David Duchovny: An Actor and a Poet

Q: You also wrote a novel in college which you called Wherever There Are Two. Oliver Stone recently published his early novel. Do you have any interest in seeing yours published?

A: I would show it, but I know I wouldn't be interested in working on it. Did Oliver Stone go back and work on it?

Q: He did, but he tried to keep it in the voice he used when he was 19.

A: I think the only virtue of something like that is keeping it as it is. If somebody wanted to publish it, I guess I would. Why not? I don't think it would embarrass me. I'm more interested in a volume of poems I'm working on. I'd like to publish them.

Q: That should make you a bundle.

A: Probably the best thing about poetry is you can't get rich from it. If I take my hiatus without working this year, which I probably will do, it will give me time to see what I have.

Q: Would you publish one of your poems with this interview?

A: Yeah, sure I would do that.

Q: I read that you wrote poems to a girlfriend who got married and her husband threw the only copies away. What writer writes without keeping a copy?

A: Me. They were on those aerograms.

Q: Think that former girlfriend has any regrets?

A: No, I think she's happy in her life.

Q: Are there any lies you've told former girlfriends you'd like to retract?

A: No, because I think they found out and have either forgiven me or not.

Q: As a graduate student at Yale, you studied with one of the giants of academia, Harold Bloom.

A: He had a mind that was unlike any other. He's the librarian of Western culture. Of anybody in the world to have a conversation with about books, you'd want to talk to Harold Bloom. If I could just have Harold in my car stereo and go, "Talk to me about Milton today," it would be fascinating.

Q: Saul Bellow said Harold Bloom has one of these souls that began to wither under the influence of too much education.

A: Harold Bloom's philosophy is about the soul withering under education. The Anxiety of Influence, his most famous treatise, is about being crushed by what came before. If you come to a strong writer too early, you don't write.That's one of the problems with my education. I don't think it's such a great idea to expose young creative people to the best that Western culture has to offer because then you go, "What am I going to do?"

Q: Did you ever want to study abroad?

A: I was up once for a Rhodes scholarship. I made it to the regionals, which involved an interview. They put us all in a room and we're all sure we were being watched. When it was my turn I walked in the door and there were 10 people. As soon as I stepped into the room, the questions started--I didn't even get to sit down. The first question was: does a fiction writer have any responsibility to teach good morality?

Q: And what position did you take?

A: Obviously the wrong one. [Laughs] I said no. But this was the Rhodes scholarship committee and the answer they wanted was yes. I'm involved in something similar now with discussions about violence. What is the effect of entertainment on morality? It's an impossible discussion. When the state decrees what art should tackle and how they should do it, you get the 70 years of Soviet realist art that no one wants to look at now. I always go back to Milton's essay on censorship, which basically said: the devil exists--is it our responsibility as teachers to show our children only God and leave them to be surprised by the devil and taken more easily?

Q: John Grisham challenged Oliver Stone over this issue, saying that Stone had to be partially blamed for the true-life murder spree committed by a couple who dropped acid and watched Natural Born Killers.

A: Well, see, Grisham can't write. He's an idiot for doing that. How many more people have taken machine guns to other people while quoting scripture? There's no accounting for human nature. If they hadn't been copying Natural Born Killers they would have come up with it on their own. You can't define causality in that way.

Q: So the bottom line with you, then, is not to legislate degrees of violence but be responsible about what you watch?

A: I'm for violence occurring offstage, but you go back and look at the Greek plays-- they're much more violent than anything we have. And much more profoundly disturbing. When's the last time we've had a hit movie about some guy fucking his mother? And yet it's one of the central works of Greek art, and we now think of it as high culture. They've got a play about a woman going crazy and eating her son. Big hit! Try and get that one made. Unfortunately, you have the marketplace determining what's going to be made.

Q: What's the most violent thing that's appeared on The X-Files?

A: We've had huge canker sores exploding; a guy who ate somebody else's livers; a guy who has no body fat himself and survives by sucking the fat out of fat women. It doesn't get any worse than that, does it? We killed a little dog, and we got so many letters--you kill a dog, forget it. You can kill as many people as you want, but if you kill a Pomeranian, you're in danger of losing an audience.

Q: Anthony Hopkins told me, "Actors are of no consequence. Most actors are pretty simpleminded people who just think they're complicated."

A: [Laughs] I don't think I'm simpleminded, which is different from being simple. I respect simplicity. I think I'm intelligent. I definitely think a lot, which is not necessarily an advantage for an actor. Intelligence and thinking are not what we want from our actors. We want spontaneity and instinct. We want them to do the things that we don't do. Anybody can sit and think. But acting is like any other profession: you've got interesting people in it and you've got boring people in it.

Q: What's your definition of an actor?

A: One of the best definitions of an actor I ever saw was Pauline Kael talking about Brando, where she said as an actor he always looked like he was about to say something more interesting than he eventually did. I think Nicholson has that too. It's a gift.

Q: Whose work will you go out of your way to see?

A: I'll go see Pacino. Duvall. I'll always see Brando, even in The Island of Dr. Moreau. I like Nicolas Cage. Sean Penn. Travolta. There are a lot of famous actors who are good. And there are a lot of non-famous actors who are wonderful.

Q: What's the hardest thing about acting?

A: The waste of time. I like acting, but not living in the trailer and waiting for setup after setup. I haven't been able to make productive use of that time. It's not quite free time. There's work coming up--so it's like this tense boredom. It's not even just flat boredom.

Q: Do you have any friends who can hang out with you?

A: Not really. I don't have a key man. I've got to get one. I love the idea of a key man. Old-time actors have key men. It's always a guy. The new actors have assistants, who are usually women. But the old-time guys have the guy from the neighborhood, guy they grew up with, the key man. He checks out what's for lunch, he's always around.

Q: Have you ever wanted to play Hamlet, supposedly every actor's dream role?

A: Hamlets are no good when they get close to 40. It's like, What are you whining about your parents for? If he's 40, you lose respect for him.

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