Michael Douglas is going to remember 2000 for all kinds of happy personal and professional reasons. Here he talks about life with Catherine and Dylan, the two acclaimed films he made this year -- Wonder Boys and Traffic -- and the remarkable career that led to his current peak.
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Michael Douglas sits in a plush, oversized couch in the mahogany den of a huge apartment with a spectacular view of Central Park. His soon-to-be wife, the gifted, gorgeous actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, is in the other room attending to their newborn son, Dylan. He and I are about to discuss the two impressive movies he's starred in in 2000, either of which might be the occasion for an Oscar nomination for him. If there were theme music playing underneath this scene, it would have to be the Frank Sinatra tune "I've Got the World on a String."
Ever since Douglas emerged from his famous father's shadow years ago with a Best Picture Oscar for coproducing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he's been interesting to watch on- and offscreen. While continuing to be a savvy producer--his credits, not counting movies he himself has starred in, include Flatliners and Face/Off--he also distinguished himself as an actor. He didn't merely give skillful, inspired performances like the one that earned him a 1987 Academy Award for Wall Street, he became the only top-earning star with the stones to play deeply flawed or outright villainous characters in hot-button films like Fatal Attraction (1987), The War of the Roses (1989), Basic Instinct (1992), Falling Down (1993), Disclosure (1994) and A Perfect Murder (1998). But Douglas's 2000 marks the kind of year few people in any walk of life ever see. His romance with Zeta-Jones resulted in enduring love, a baby boy and now a wedding, and his on-screen work hit new heights. In director Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys, which was released early in the year and is now, in a gutsy move by Paramount, being rereleased for Academy consideration, he gave perhaps his most winning performance ever as a slightly overweight, slightly over-the-hill college professor who smokes pot, sleeps with the college chancellor, mentors a screwed-up kid who's the writer he'll never be, and somehow manages to redeem himself. In director Steven Soderbergh's Traffic he plays the U.S. drug czar who's trying to stem the cocaine trade while dealing with his crack- and heroin-addicted daughter. Few if any of the other actors in Douglass league would have gone near either of these roles, and none would have been likely to do them better.
When you're wealthy from two decades of good business decisions, and you're at the top of your professional game, and you're about to marry the jaw-droppingly beautiful screen sensation who put her meteoric career on hold to bear you a son, you can look like you don't know what trouble is. But one of the interesting things about Michael Douglas is that a very short time ago he most definitely did, as he tells me.
MICHAEL FLEMING: A few years back, your career hit a lull, your marriage ended, your son went into rehab and your father had a stroke. Now you're in love with a beautiful, talented woman, you have a new baby, and you've done two of your best movies ever. Did you imagine life could get this good again?
MICHAEL DOUGLAS: No. For a while, I did feel like the line in that song, "I've been down so long, it looks like up to me." They were a tough few years. I lost my stepfather in '92. My dad had that helicopter crash, then he had the stroke. There were the marital issues. Obviously I had issues with my son. And my mother had problems with cancer. It was coming at me pretty much every which way for a while. It gives you a deeper appreciation for when things are good.
Q: When this interview appears, you'll be just about getting married. Who's called the shots on this wedding?
A: Whatever Catherine wants, that's what she'll get. We discuss things, but nothing has come up that's totally insane. She's not an outrageous spender. Whatever makes her happy, she'll have it.
Q: You got married pretty quickly the first time. Did having been through one marriage temper your hopes, or are you going into this head over heels, too?
A: I don't think there's a choice; you have to be. I take this stuff pretty seriously. Nobody was holding a gun to my head, saying, You have to get married. Certainly Catherine wasn't, even with the fact of having Dylan.
Q: You and your new family have been a newspaper staple over the last several months, and it was reported you sold photos of the three of you for a ton of money. That seems odd.
A: It seems odd, I guess, for the United States. But Catherine is an international star, and in England the paparazzi become like bounty hunters and go to extraordinary extremes to take a photograph they can sell. When you spend your whole life protecting your name and likeness, how do you deal with these people? I've been really open about it, saying, Look, you want to take a photograph of me and sell it? We'll split the money, and I'll give my half to charity. When we were going to have a baby, we knew a bounty hunt would happen. So when we were contacted by a magazine about their doing a layout, paying us for it, then syndicating the photos--a fairly common practice in Europe as opposed to here--we simply saw it as a way to build financial security for our new son and control what was going to be a madhouse. I'd rather do that than have some guy harassing us, though that happens anyway.
Q: Catherine has discussed how much she was maligned early in her career by the British press. You've had your scraps, too, haven't you?
A: I've gotten along pretty well with the press. I've been outspoken about tabloid journalism and I'm always disappointed how it creeps in to our mainstream press. When I went to rehab, someone came up with this sex-addict thing, and that's been carried along, despite being totally untrue, for like 10 years. The tabloids did that. But I've had a good relationship with legit media. I talk straight and I'm usually happy with the results.
Q: Did you realize how talented Catherine was when you first met her or did you just see her beauty?
A: Well, I first just happened to see her in a screening of The Mask of Zorro, and went, Who the hell is this? As I've said before, Julie Christie was probably the last time I saw somebody that striking. Now that I've gotten to know her, the Cheshire cat smile I wear is because nobody has any idea yet of her talent. It's extraordinary. And this is from somebody who was never going to be involved with an actress, ever.
Q: Why did you make that past vow? Was it the insecurity of actresses?
A: I'm sure this is a chauvinistic remark, but there is an insecurity and a self-centeredness that's really hard to deal with. But Catherine has discipline. She started when she left home at 15, with her parents' permission, and spent two and a half years performing 42nd Street on the West End. On "The Streets of San Francisco," we did eight and a half months straight of six days a week, 14 hours a day. You develop a muscle, and Catherine has that. She's going to kick some serious butt, and I think people are going to be really surprised at the kind of range she has. She's got a great voice, and she's a great jazz tap dancer. One of my big thrills is to beg her to put on those shoes and do it. She's great.
Q: Personally, I think the shot of her in the catsuit dancing her way under those beams of light in Entrapment is what made that movie a hit.
A: Oh, yeah, I agree with you, absolutely. The flip off the beam wasn't bad either.
Q: You've owned this apartment for a long time. The den we're sitting in seems to be a guy's sensibility. How are you and Catherine meshing, in terms of style? A: I've had this place for about 15 years--I love it. About five or six years ago, I put two apartments together into this one. Catherine has been great. She loves New York. We spend time here, though our residence is still in Los Angeles, where I have a condo and she has a house that she's selling. We've also got a place in Colorado, and one in Spain.
Q: When she came in, did she redecorate?
A: No, this apartment has been this way for a while. She's comfortable and happy and feels secure enough with herself and our relationship that there's no, "I can't be here, your ex-wife used to be here. Let's sell the apartment and move." There's none of that. Hopefully, she feels like it's hers. As things go on and we get more kids, there'll be things we have to do.
Q: It's certainly beautiful as it is. Are you a big art collector?
A: I was. I started soon after Cuckoo's Nest. Originally, I wanted to collect German expressionists, but that gets expensive. So I picked up some Hudson River School, and I like Orientalist pieces from the turn of the century, when Europeans were going to North Africa and doing these exotic paintings. But I haven't collected for a while. I enjoy going to galleries and museums, but it's an insane time to be trying to acquire art. The truth is that I much prefer a view to a painting. I've got a couple other places with views as good as this one and I spend a lot more time looking out a window or off a porch than I do looking at a wall.
Q: Let's talk about your year on the big screen. After having a great role in Wonder Boys, you now have Traffic coming out. How did you come to do this film?
A: I loved the subject matter and I was a big fan of the director, Steven Soderbergh. Originally, the role was a very reactive part, and I said no at first. Steven then went to Harrison Ford and they did a rewrite. When I admire a director a lot I never think about interfering with the role--I just think about whether I'm going to do the picture. But Harrison or whoever works for him is very good, because it became a really good part. I was saying, I wish I'd thought of that. When Harrison, for whatever reason, decided not to go ahead, I said yeah.
Q: The most startling change from the original script is that the movie no longer has the scene where your character samples crack in order to understand the power it has over his missing daughter. What happened?
A: When we got into the movie, we saw that it made no sense for this character. One day, as the scene was coming up, Steven said, "You know, I just don't see him doing that." The moment no longer seemed valid.
Q: You've had family members with addiction problems and you yourself have had problems. Do you believe there is a genetic predisposition to addiction?
A: Alcoholism has been traced to some genes, and so has drug addiction. If you have a history of it in your family, you need to be more careful. The movie addresses the enormity of the drug problem.
Q: It took guts and a lack of vanity for Catherine to go onscreen in Traffic when she had visible effects of her pregnancy. She's become a brand name based on her beauty, but didn't seem hesitant to play a role when she wasn't looking her best.
A: That was her decision. And I certainly encouraged her. As someone who has tried to play different roles to avoid becoming typecast, I think it's important for Catherine, particularly with all that sex appeal stuff, to remind everyone early on that she's got some chops.
Q: Was Traffic a hard movie to get made? It bounced from one studio to another.
A: Even though Steven had an unbelievable year with Erin Brockovich, this is not a mainstream picture. Traffic needed somebody like Harrison Ford or me to get it made, which points out the state of our industry--I think we are going through some pretty weird times.
Q: How weird?
A: We're not much more than a generation away from the cottage industry run by the Warner brothers and the Harry Cohns, and now every studio is just a small part of a huge conglomerate. We've always had a precarious balance between art and commerce, but I think commerce is really top-heavy now. You're seeing much more a quarterly earnings mentality, which means the lowest common denominator. The development coming out of the studio system has been really thin, and I think movies are getting bad, I really do.
Q: Your earlier film this year, Wonder Boys, got fantastic reviews and nobody went to see it.
A: There was a big debate over how it was marketed. For one thing, I took a reduced salary to make a picture that was supposed to come out at the end of last year for Academy attention. That was why we all got involved. But around Oscar season, Paramount had Sleepy Hollow, Angela's Ashes, The Talented Mr. Ripley and one other, and we still had a couple things left to do to finish the film, so they moved it to 2000. For another thing, this was a quirky picture. I think they thought the only thing they had to market it with was me, and they put me out there looking kind of different, and nobody got it. I usually go along with everyone and assume they know what they're doing, but in this particular case, there were more unique ways to have marketed the picture. The reviews were as good as Curtis or I or anybody has ever gotten. The people who saw it liked it. Mind you, there was a healthy debate and we went that route, so I have to take some of the brunt of this myself. Now they're bringing it back for the attention. I'm happy to see there has been a change. Curtis has to be applauded, because it was his diplomacy and tenacity that saw it through. We'll see.
Q: Was that your best performance since Wall Street?
A: It was a really, really good part. It was different from the others. Compared with the characters in A Perfect Murder or Wall Street, this guy was much more uncertain about himself, more like the guy in Falling Down. Sometimes you want to do something a little different, not be so concerned about your vanity and you put on weight. Wonder Boys allowed me to play against the intensity that runs in the Douglas genes, to play a man of inaction as opposed to a man of action. I call it a coming-of-age movie for a 50-year-old.
Q: Having just worked with Steven Soderbergh and Curtis Hanson, who are both hitting their strides, can you compare the two?
A: Directors who have a stronger visual sense--I'm thinking of Ridley Scott on Black Rain and David Fincher on The Game--are probably the most difficult to understand. You really have to trust them, because it's all a matter of what they see, not necessarily what they hear, and they don't always communicate what they see. Curtis Hanson is a writer himself, so he's got an incredible ear. And Steven has the most unassuming style. He shoots the way I personally enjoy, with a little longer lens, staying out of the environment the actors create. They're both lovely gentlemen, and, I don't know--maybe I'm just getting older--but I like to work with people who are really pleasant. They both like actors, and you'd be surprised at how many directors really don't.
Q: It's on record that Oliver Stone aggressively manipulated you in the making of Wall Street. Can directors still work head games on you at this point in your career?
A: I'm sure they can, but if they've been doing it, I haven't really been aware of it since Oliver. He was the preeminent one in that area. Yet his record of getting performances from actors is incredible. Almost everybody he's ever worked with has done their best work with him.
Q: Which of the two Oscars you've won had the most palpable effect on your life, Best Picture for Cuckoo's Nest or Best Actor for Wall Street? A: The Oscar for Cuckoo's Nest had a profound impact, in that people kept asking me afterward, "Why are you acting?" I was just coming out of a television series, and I know they didn't mean it in the negative way it sounds, but I'd say, "I think I have something to offer." Everybody said, "But you're an Academy Award-winning producer!" I'd never thought about producing, though--I was just fortunate that my dad had bought the project. For me, the big one was Wall Street, because as an actor, and particularly one with a father who is an icon, to get nominated by my fellow actors and win was more important. It really helped me get out of that shadow. That was a great year for me, because I also did Fatal Attraction, and the two movies were back-to-back commercial successes. They changed my life.
Q: Was Wall Street a hard role to get right?
A: There was a tremendous amount of dialogue. I never believed until the day we started shooting that Oliver was going to shoot all of it. But he did. And he was good. He was adversarial, but in hindsight, he just wanted a little more of an edge, and he wasn't afraid of my taking it out on him. I worked really hard on that picture. With dialogue-heavy pictures, you really have to rehearse, you have to be able to brush your teeth with that dialogue, or you get into those TV habits, the so-called soap-opera syndrome, where there are pregnant pauses when they're remembering their lines.
Q: You've played a number of bad guys. Are there things you will not do? Could you have played Hannibal Lecter?
A: I might have, if I could have related to it. I don't believe in pure evil or pure good. I like the gray area. I'm always interested in the areas of moral dilemma where people are struggling to make the right decision.
Q: You must occasionally wonder if taking a character that's too evil could be career suicide.
A: Given the range of what I've done, I think I can be accepted doing almost anything. I'm not looking for trouble, but if it's a piece I can substantiate... look, on Gordon Gekko, if I get one more drunken guy from Wall Street telling me, "Hey man, you're the guy." I get more guys with tears in their eyes, saying, "You're the guy that made me want to go into this business." I'm the hero? I was the bad guy in that picture. But I'll tell you, there's certainly a lot more fun in playing a bad guy. Most audiences enjoy it more.
Q: Do you impose your viewpoint forcefully on a film?
A: A lot of directors fear I'm looking over their shoulder because I'm a producer. But when I'm acting, I'm into the joy of acting, of being somewhat selfish in dealing with that moment. Granted, before I start I think through the picture really well. I know the rhythm and I know what my responsibility as an actor is--to bring up the pace, or to find the humor or tension, whatever the picture needs. But I just love the moment.
Q: It must have been hard to find your way in acting when your dad was Spartacus. Was he helpful, critical?
A: He was helpful and wonderfully supportive. He saw every play I did in college. Of course, he was sure each time that it would be the last time. You try to create your own identity, but obviously half your genes are your dad's. I had a certain intensity, but I thought I'd never be the actor Dad was, and that led me to play sensitive kinds of roles early on. Later on, when I looked back at my father's career, I saw that his first six or seven movie roles, the ones before Champion, were sensitive young men, too. Generally, the children of parents who've achieved a lot of success are late bloomers. It takes a longer time to find your identity.
Q: When did you have the confidence to embrace that trademark Douglas intensity?
A: I didn't have a lot of choice early in my career. I had terrible stage fright, I was pretty shy, and I looked really young for my age. It took a while. Then you have to remember, even by 1984 when I produced Starman, which got Jeff Bridges an Oscar nomination, I was not on the list of actors that were acceptable for that role, and I wanted to be. The year I mentioned, when both Fatal Attraction and Wall Street came out, was the point at which I began to feel fully confident.
Q: You're now among a small number of actors who make the big bucks. Has being a producer helped you make some of the more daring choices that got you here?
A: I feel that the responsibility of having the success I've had is to continue to push myself. I enjoy the risk. The comment I most appreciate getting that's different from most of the guys is: "When I see your name in a movie, I never know what it's going to be, but I know it's going to be good." I think that because of my producing background, I tend to look out for the movie as a whole even when I'm acting, more than a lot of other actors. I think about what my responsibility is in each scene to make the movie work. And that means not being afraid of having the best possible actors in the other parts, and of letting them get their scenes or get the movie. Basic Instinct made Sharon Stone. It was a fabulous part. I was in every damn scene of that movie and had to work my ass off to keep it going, but mine is not the colorful part. Still, the picture looked and worked great and I'm proud of my work.
Q: That must have been a life-changing movie, in that Carolco Pictures paid you $15 million and the picture made a fortune, so you became a $15 million-a-picture actor.
A: It was progressively going up before that, but that was a biggie and it worked.
Q: You have had your share of hot, even kinky sex scenes, but that one with Jeanne Tripplehorn in Basic Instinct, where your character practically rapes her, is a difficult scene for a leading man to do.
A: In a scene like that, what I try always to do is make the actress feel comfortable, let her know that I will be looking out for her. OK, I'm going to touch your breast here. So there's none of that where she feels, Hey, what are you doing? It's sort of like doing fight sequences. You go through the beats. I'm going to go boom, kiss, kiss, rip. Then it's action and you do it. It's the most unspontaneous thing in the world. The difficulty of doing a sex scene is that sex is the one thing in movies that your entire audience knows about. Nobody in the audience has been killed and most haven't taken a bullet or been in any brutal fights. Lovemaking, everybody's an expert.
Q: You passed on going back for the sequel to Basic Instinct, which Sharon Stone signed for and Paul Verhoeven is considering. Why not you?
A: I did a sequel once, and I don't see it as anything other than a financial decision.
Q: There was a lot of controversy, even in the making of the film, including when you and Verhoeven clashed with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.
A: That was tough. In a lot of movies I do, I'm in every single scene of the picture. If you have a producer background, and you're the kind of person who tries to make your environment as copacetic as possible, the danger is you sometimes think you're being taken for granted. Unfortunately, we all know it's the person who needs the most attention who sometimes comes out the best, whereas if you take care of business and do your job, you can suffer in a situation. I've had it happen on a couple of pictures with people who'll go unnamed. Then we had that whole thing where Paul's nose hemorrhaged and there were rumors that I'd hit him. We were just having a discussion and the hemorrhaging started in his nose. Paul did an amazing job with the Eszterhas script. You know...I don't want to give Joe Eszterhas any more press than he's been getting already, but...
Q: Sounds like you didn't bond.
A: Well, he was very, very adamant about his script. When we faced some militant gay and lesbian activity against the movie in San Francisco, he was much more amenable toward script changes than he'd been before.
Q: Basic Instinct, the earlier Fatal Attraction, and then Disclosure made for quite a triple bill for the feminist-in-hell multiplex.
A: Well, they're very different. We took some heat on Disclosure from people who felt that, with all the women who were dealing with harassment, how dare we do a turnaround. But those films span over eight years, and everybody has made it like they're the focus of my career. Did I feel during that time that there was unresolved conflict between men and women? Absolutely. Did I think the roles of men and women in the '80s and '90s were very confused, in terms of what each gender wanted? Yeah. I think it's just recently kind of exhausted itself and women realized they cannot have it all.
Q: Black Rain is a film that was good and should have done better. Why didn't it?
A: It was hard to know who to root for. And people here were uncomfortable with race stuff and talking about the bomb. There was a critic who'll remain nameless who called it a racist film. I called him up and asked, "Have you ever been to Japan?" He said no and I said, "Then what the hell are you talking about?" The Japanese loved it. I loved it--I thought it rocked from top to bottom.
Q: Joel Schumacher once told me he was horrified when he tested Falling Down and found audiences rooting for your character as he committed violent acts against ethnic groups.
A: That was a surprise, to an extent. But I think they understood this nerdy engineer, a patriotic guy who did all these things for his country and one day gets pink-slipped and told, Hey, we don't need you anymore. You know, as we finished that film the riots were going on in L.A. I'll never forget the last day of shooting--that's literally when it all started. We were working in the Valley, and when we finished I headed to the airport. It was a war zone. You could see dots of fires all over the place, all heading for the west side of town. I got my family on a plane--I didn't even know where it was going.
Q: Considering that timing, plus the fact that Three Mile Island happened right after the release of The China Syndrome back in 1979, you manage to choose films that have a finger on the pulse.
A: I read three papers a day and follow the news closely. I don't know if you remember in the movie, but when one character describes the "China Syndrome," he says it could render uninhabitable an area the size of Pennsylvania, which is where the Three Mile Island incident happened days later. The whole thing made a big impression on me and kept me on a course of disarmament. I work with the United Nations as a Messenger of Peace, focusing in the area of nuclear weapons and small arms reduction. And because I was here in Manhattan when John Lennon got killed, and it happened right outside the building I was in, that started me working on the handgun and weapons issues.
Q: Your selectivity saved you from Cutthroat Island, which helped to sink Carolco, the maker of Basic Instinct. What happened?
A: I was fairly far down the road with that film, but I didn't pull out right before production--it was four or five months before. I just didn't feel comfortable doing a picture with the director married to the leading lady. After a couple of drafts, I didn't like where it was going. There was all this momentum to go ahead, but it didn't smell good.
Q: Those Carolco guys made you rich. Was it hard to back out on them?
A: Yeah, it was. They're good guys. I've always erred on the side of being gracious, but I must admit I made a couple of cracks about the fact that I would not be doing for the director of Cutthroat Island what maybe the leading lady would be doing.
Q: The American President was a departure from the films we just mentioned, in that you played a virtuous president--apparently Hollywood's hope of what Clinton could have been. Did you think that film deserved to do better?
A: Yeah. I loved the movie. There was confusion. It was a romantic comedy, but there were people who wanted to push it as an issues picture. That hurt it. If it had been marketed as a romantic comedy, it would probably have done better commercially.
Q: What's the best decision, business or creative, that you've made as a producer or actor?
A: [Long pause] Any decision I ever made was always based on the material, but I've worked diligently on defining the backend, the profits. As we all know, the history of profit definitions is a labyrinth. I think that through hit and error I have had a certain degree of success defining the backend, the gross definitions, particularly in foreign territories. Paying attention has paid off. I think I've audited every single movie I've ever done, and I can say I've always been at least able to cover my audit costs [laughs hard].
Q: Have you made more money producing or acting?
A: Well, I guess it's gotta be acting. There's a little difference between the salaries a producer gets and an actor gets. What you're hinting at is an area that's always bothered me. Some people think I've been so business smart. But I had to learn about this stuff maybe more than other people. You've got to remember where I started out. Cuckoo's Nest was an independent production, financed by a man in a small company out of his pocket. The China Syndrome was what was called a negative pickup, where a studio gives you a letter of credit that they will make the picture for that amount of money and then you are responsible for this or that. Romancing the Stone was a similar situation. My history was outside of the studio system, so I had a crash course in stuff that I didn't necessarily understand. Economics wasn't my specialty. As a producer you learn that stuff the hard way.
Q: A lot of people probably don't realize you produced many pictures you weren't in, like The Rainmaker and Face/Off
A: I'm changing that strategy now, because it proved a bad decision. I was concentrating on my responsibility as a producer, and I made a mistake in not searching out more projects for me. Some guys book three years ahead, but I never know what I'm going to do, what I'll feel like, or what's going to come. Now it has reached a point where material has gotten thinner. I wish I could say there were even two roles out there I wish I'd done. And it's not just me--there are a couple other guys who don't know what they're doing next either. I've got some good stuff that's getting closer, but it takes a minimum of about three years. I've gotten hurt because I had nothing in development for me.
Q: If the movies are bad now, imagine what's in store as studios greenlight twice as many projects because of the expected SAG strike next summer.
A: Studios look like they're stockpiling. The film business may be a relatively small percentage of the overall business of the conglomerates who own the studios, but it's the locomotive in terms of corporate image. It still has a hold over these people. I fear they will use this strike to really clean house.
Q: As someone who's both a producer and an actor, what do you feel about these upcoming negotiations?
A: I'm nervous about who on the studio side is going to emerge as a leader. There seems to be very little agreement, and if it happens by committee, you've got a big slew of people with different tensions. You've got News Corp. in Australia, plus French and Japanese companies.
Q: You must be more relaxed fathering a baby at 55, when you're financially secure, than the first time, when you were struggling to make a career for yourself.
A: It's true. You're not struggling with the balance between your ambition and your responsibilities as a husband and a father. I'd love to find the next picture, but nothing's going to take me away from enjoying time here. Dylan just passed six weeks now, and for us to have all of this time to spend together is nice. I admire Catherine so much. She's at the top of her heat, and, boom, she goes off to have a baby. She's sorting through all these offers she's gotten.
Q: Is there a downside to becoming a father at 55, like the changing of diapers, which you must have thought was long behind you?
A: There's an element of that. Look, I'm happy to get up at night, but I ain't getting up at eight o'clock for work every morning, so I'm really blessed. We can afford some help, too. This is the part where you feel so happy about your hard work paying off. There are moments of "What am I doing?" and people look at me like, you know...But I'm really excited about it. Catherine wants three, so that'll need negotiating. I've got to talk about that third one. But I keep teasing her that I'm the only one hoping for an actors' strike, so that maybe we can slip the second one in.
Q: You look at guys like Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Anthony Hopkins and Sean Connery, and they seem to embrace the aging process. Warren Beatty seems to rebel against it. As you get older, do you think about making that transition?
A: The guys you mention had careers playing characters. Sean has been all over the place and wears well. Not a lot of guys look like him. Clint, too, plays those characters that were not totally based upon being God's gift to women. And Jack is Jack. Warren, not to take anything away from him, was a beautiful young leading man in the classic Hollywood tradition. They're all good actors.
Q: What's in the future for you?
A: Just keep trying to play good characters. And, hopefully, age well.
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Michael Fleming interviewed Helen Hunt for the November issue of Movieline.