Don't let the audience hijinks fool you: This weekend's chat between Matthew Broderick and Alec Baldwin at the Hamptons Film Festival gave the two old acting chums almost a full hour to catch up -- often hilariously so, with Saturday's ostensible tribute to Broderick generally resulting in a freewheeling gab session between the guys.
Baldwin, a longtime HIFF supporter, introduced Broderick with a brief appreciation capped by a bit of chop-busting, which set the tone for the event as a whole. "In the world we're in now," he said, "there's a lot of stuff that's funny, but it's not exactly the smartest material. It all seems to be kind of dumbed-down. And here's someone who's made his reputation by being very funny and clever and smart at the same time, and never going for the cheap laugh. Well, I shouldn't say, 'Never.' If you comb through all his films you might find a couple examples. But never lunging for the cheap laugh or whatever."
Much of the early discussion was in fact focused on Broderick's early stage career -- landing his first role in a play by Horton Foote (the Southern author and playwright who was a friend of Broderick's actor father James), then breaking through in Harvey Fierstein's watershed Torch Song Trilogy. Asked by Baldwin why he wanted to actin the first place, Broderick replied, "That I don't know. I guess I saw it and thought it would be easy money."
"It is, really," Baldwin said.
Their repartee continued through the discussion of Broderick's early film work -- Max Dugan Returns, Wargames and Ladyhawke in particular. "I remember seeing Michelle Pfeiffer leaning out her window," Broderick said of the latter's production in Rome. "I think with a cigarette. She's long since quit that. She was so incredibly gorgeous in this Italian light, and I was like, 'I have made it.'"
"In the beginning," Baldwin said, "for me, and I wonder if it was the same for you--"
"This is more about me, though," Broderick interrupted, prompting laughs from the crowd.
Most in the audience were of course waiting for Baldwin to grill Broderick about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and writer-director John Hughes, with whom Baldwin also worked on She's Having a Baby. Baldwin broached the subject following a brief aside about Martha Marcy May Marlene, the festival darling opening this weekend and acclaimed by Baldwin for the director-actor partnership between Sean Durkin and breakout star Elizabeth Olsen. Broderick hadn't yet heard of Martha, but he could immediately trace a similar phenomenon back to Hughes.
Here's video of Broderick and Baldwin's exchange, followed by a few text excerpts of the exchange:
"That's an example of someone who's so tuned into your performance," Broderick said of the 1986 classic. "It's so important. He knew what to use with me in that part. He knew how to get it out of me and how to edit it. He was hilariously funny and quiet. And sometimes he could be very quiet. And you'd think, 'Is John mad at me?' And people would say, 'I don't think so.' And two weeks later, he would, 'I know you think that I was mad about something, but I'm not anymore.' But ultimately he was extremely easy to work with. He was the most easy person for me to work with by the end of that. Not that it wasn't a little difficult getting there. By the end, I'd get an idea, and I wouldn't even finish explaining the idea."
Meanwhile, Baldwin claimed, Hughes tried cue cards on the cast of She's Having a Baby. "I was doing a scene where I was talking -- I was with my girlfriend," he explained. "And we were supposed to be horrifying Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern with our debauched lifestyle. And she would say to me, 'Where [have] you guys gone recently?' and John would write notes on cue cards as the cameras were rolling."
"Oh, God!" Broderick laughed.
"So, 'What cities have you been to?' or, 'Which ones do you like?'" Baldwin continued. "And John would write, 'Berlin... Lesbians...' 'Well, you know, Berlin's so full of lesbians.' He'd hold it up where you could see it. John's the only one who did that. It was amazing."
"He would write while you were shooting all the time," Broderick said. "It ultimately was a wonderful experience."
Broderick was also candid about a pair of his less-wonderful experiences, or at least less-wonderful films: The Road to Wellville and The Stepford Wives.
"That's example of one where best intentions went [awry]," Broderick said of Wellville, director Alan Parker's star-studded, poorly received adaptation of the T. Coraghessan Boyle novel. "I don't think I'm alone in saying that didn't quite work out. I don't know why. I love that book. I was so thrilled to be cast. Alan Parker with the very best design people. Wonderful cast. And it just... The movie is silly, and... I don't want to put the movie down. It's just not as good as the book."
"As you thought it would be," Baldwin said.
"That's me; that's my opinion," Broderick added. "And it was with the greatest intentions on everyone's part, honestly."
The same results met The Stepford Wives, in which Broderick starred with Nicole Kidman, Better Midler, Glenn Close and Christopher Walken. "It was very complex, as they say," Broderick noted
"Big budget," Baldwin said.
"Big budget," Broderick confirmed. "Maybe too big in a way, you know? The best cast you possibly imagine. [Producer] Scott Rudin. Everyone was top of the line. Just something about the... Maybe it was that they weren't sure how to make a comedy out of that? Because when you come right down to it, they're killing their wives and replacing them with robots. That might be funny to some people, but it wasn't an easy [concept]. I don't know why it didn't work. You tell me. Except I'm very sensitive!"
"This was supposed a psychological thriller," Baldwin said. "It was [director] Frank Oz? Now he's making it into a comedy?"
"Yeah," Broderick said. "I guess I wasn't quite sure..."
"Which way to go?"
"How to do it, yeah. A scary comedy is an unusual thing -- which he was aware of. I think it does exist."
"Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein?"
"...Meet the Mummy. Yeah."
Baldwin eventually raised the subject of Tower Heist, Broderick's upcoming film With Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Alan Alda and others. "Brett Ratner's the director," Baldwin said, followed by a big, showy laugh. "Let's hear about Brett Ratner."
"Brett Ratner was great," Broderick said. "You know, this is one of those big, monstrous movies, honestly, that was fun to shoot. It was all a gang, and we had a lot of time to kill, and we enjoyed our little selves, truthfully. And Brett is a very big personality, for those of you who haven't worked with him. But he's very smart, ultimately, and will not quit until he has what he wants... Maybe five times. [...] He watches that monitor and stops at nothing."
They closed out their conversation with a protracted exchange about Marlon Brando, Broderick's co-star in the 1990 comedy The Freshman. Here's video of that exchange, followed again by text excerpts:
"Nobody ever really thought Marlon would show up," Broderick remembered. "You know? They were like, 'No, he's really doing it.' And I was like, 'Really?' And they said, 'Yeah.' And then we got to rehearsal one day, and he wasn't there. Then we started rehearsing and they were like, 'He's on his way.' Yeah, he's on his way. Whatever. And not that late, there's a knock on the door. We thought, 'That might be Marlon Brando. Probably not.' And we open the door and he was on his knees apologizing that he was late. He came in on his knees to say he was sorry. And he was in, I think -- this might be a hallucination -- but a velour sweatsuit and sunglasses. Possibly even a cowboy hat."
"Very Vegas," Baldwin said.
"I was like, 'Wow,'" Broderick said. "'That is freaking Marlon Brando.'"
"That was the first time you ever laid eyes on him?"
"The first time I'd ever laid on eyes on him, and it was a little like when Ralph Kramden meets the mayor, you know?" Broderick adopted Jackie Gleason's jittery, starstruck panic. "'Ayayayayay humminahummina...'"
Baldwin also met Brando once while attempting to persuade him to appear as Big Daddy in a new TV adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. (In the end, Brando wasn't insurable for the role.) "He was very kind and very sweet," Baldwin said of the lunch at Brando's house that went on "for this really long period of time."
"The one thing this I will say, " Baldwin added, " is that when I sat down, he said. 'We're like two dogs, you and I.'" And here Baldwin undertook a low, nasal-y Brando impersonation. "'Sniffing at each other. I'm sniffing you, and you're sniffing me. And at some point you just say whatever it is you want to say. And I'll say whatever it is I want to say, and the we'll see where we wind up.' And I said, 'Yeah, great! Fantastic!' Because I think he was used to everybody being in awe of him and creating a very artificial environment for him."
Broderick nodded, replying: "He once said to Bruno [Kirby, another Freshman co-star] or to me, 'I haven't had an honest moment with another person in 40 years.' He felt like everyone treated him like 'Marlon Brando.' [...] I said, 'Do you see dailies, Marlon?' 'I don't like to watch myself on film. My one time, I saw some footage and I was not happy with it, and it upset the director. So I choose not to go from now on.' And I said, 'Well, which film did you go to that you didn't like?' And he said, 'On the Waterfront.'"
The crowd gasped. "I said, 'Oh,'" Broderick continued. "You should give yourself another chance!"
The audience Q&A soon followed, and we all know how that went. Or if not, find out here -- and of course check out the rest of Movieline's Hamptons coverage here.