David Duchovny: Coming and Going

Q: What do you think of the film?

A: Oliver Stone is always two steps ahead as a filmmaker. This was football as war, it was like watching Platoon with a ball. Very visceral. Playing a song like DMX's "My Niggas" over black guys getting ready to play football was a very courageous shot.

Q: You aren't finished with Oliver Stone, though, are you?

A: I wrote an episode for the show called "Hollywood A.D." and I made an offer to him to be in it, so that I can hire him as an actor before he gets a chance to hire me. He'd be perfect for this role. It's a disaffected Yippie from the '60s who's taken to forging religious documents and extorting money from the church. The guy thinks that in order to become an expert in forging he's got to immerse himself in the life and culture of Jesus Christ, and he somehow transforms himself into Jesus. Being an explosives expert, he then bombs the church where his forgeries arc being kept, because now that he's become Jesus he realizes that his forge ties are wrong. There's a scene where Scully hallucinates him on a crucifix. The cross is only three feet high, so you'd see a little three-foot Oliver. I thought Oliver had the right neck size to play that. Although Oliver's neck might be a little thick to play Jesus. The Jesus we know is always kind of a pencil-neck.

Q: Has he read the script yet?

A: I just sent it to him. I don't know if he wants to act.

Q: Why didn't you call him as well?

A: I want to give him the chance to say no gracefully.

Q: Harold Bloom noted in _The Western Canon _that Kafka shared his unbelief in God with Freud, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, Proust, Borges and Neruda. Do you believe in God?

A: I like that company. Who's on the pro-God side? [Laughs] I'm not sure that those people didn't believe in God. God as the white-haired man with the long beard who doesn't believe in birth control and wants to send you to licit because you curse, I'm not sure I believe in that anal-compulsive God. Bur Beckett tells a joke in one of his novels that sums up his idea of God, which is good for me: this guy goes to a tailor for a suit and the tailor measures him and says to come back in a week. The guy returns and the tailor says he needs more time. The guy comes back in another week, it's still not ready, and the tailor tells him to come back in three days. Guy comes back in three days. "Can you come back on Monday?" He comes back and the tailor says again it's not ready. The guy finally explodes and says, "What the hell are you doing? It took God only six days to create the world." And the tailor says, "And look what a job he did." I like to think of it that way.

Q: What interested you in doing your new movie, Return to Me, a romantic comedy without much action?

A: Most of the romantic comedies I see are condescending, but this one had a chance to be entertaining and heartfelt, so I thought I'd give it a shot. And I knew Bonnie Hunt, who wrote and directed it, from doing a bit part on that dog movie Beethoven about nine years ago. The movie's kind of a fairy tale, and I knew Bonnie's sensibility was not edgy in a hip sense, but edgy funny and I thought if you combine the schmaltziest fairy tale with an edgy, funny sensibility it might be an interesting movie.

Q: Interview magazine said Minnie Driver is fearless. How did you enjoy working with her?

A: She is fearless, kind of. She's got a big mouth in a good way. She doesn't hold her tongue. She just forges ahead, which is great to see. Minnie is great to work with because she's game. However you want to work, she'll work that way. She shows up prepared. In a good mood. She's real strong, It wasn't always the easiest shoot. What I said to her before we started was: this is a fairy tale kind of story and we have to believe; our characters cannot wink at the audience. That gave us a good bond to check into each other with.

Q: Mulder has a lot of sexual tension around him, but this character is just so nice, there's no tension. Is that going to be disappointing to your core audience?

A: I don't think so. It's about soul love. People want to believe in that just as much as they want to believe in sex.

Q: Would you call the film a chick flick?

A: People just say that because it's about love and not about fucking. The director is a chick, obviously, bat she doesn't have that chick-flick sensibility. I see no reason for a guy not to enjoy the film.

Q: Quiet, romantic pictures don't have an easy time in today's market. What are your expectations?

A: There's always space for a good romantic movie. I've seen the film and the experience was very much like when I saw Moonstruck. I wasn't an actor then, but I remember thinking, this is fun, I don't want it to end, I like this world. When I knew Return to Me was about to end I felt, Oh, too bad, I enjoyed being diverted into this world for two hours. Téa felt the same way.

Q: Nicolas Cage says he thinks of characters first in terms of how they sound. What do you first think of?

A: I always try to figure out, Where in his body does he live? In his head? His heart? His cock? His stomach? His feet? I try to play the bodily ego of the person and then bring it from there. That helps me get started. You've got to get started. Otherwise you go crazy.

Q: You've said that the best actors convey disappointment. What did you mean?

A: I've always liked Brando's disdain for acting. I always felt it in his performance, and it was very interesting, noble in a way. It wasn't childish. I also got the feeling with Brando that he had a moral difficulty with the emotional exposure that acting trades on. When he spoke about it, it was like, What are we doing for a living? We are selling our emotions. How far do you go? Do you give people what they want or what you want to give them? I always felt like he gave what he wanted to give.

Q: You almost ended up an academic instead of an actor. Is it more prestigious to be a tenured professor or a famous actor?

A: It depends on who you ask. Actors tell stories that serve a function, we go through things for people. Historically that's what plays do. You go to the theater and you have that catharsis because there's a heroic or non-heroic figure going through these things that speak to you in some way, and you are involved and feel vital, and maybe you learn, but at least you have an experience because we all can' go through these heroic things. Even I can't, though I portray them. That's a great service. In that way I'm proud of what I do. All the other stuff--the business side, the overpayment, the concentration on insignificant details like salary, like who's fucking who, like clothes, all those things that are attendant to celebrity--those are much more difficult. But then again, a tenured professor is also serving. If I were a teacher at Yale, I'd be teaching people who are already really well educated. You're not really saving anybody. The kind of teaching my mother and sister do, second and eighth grades, that's different. Those are the true educational heroes, not so much the college professors.

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