Phil McCarten, Associated PressClick photo for larger image.
Listen to a longer version of Patricia Sheridan's interview with Jeff Goldblum.
To download the file to your computer, right click on the above link and select "Save Target As ..." After the file has finished downloading, double-click on the file to listen to the audio.
Q: At one point in the film "Pittsburgh," you say, "I don't want to act anymore. I just want to retire. It's sheer misery." Is that a common emotion for you?
A: It's fiction, so I'm acting there. But no, I never wanted to quit acting. In fact, it's often challenging and sometimes there's a nice delicious kind of struggle to it but, um, it makes you delightfully uncomfortable at times. Just the kind of adventure you're looking for if you're an actor. But I always was deeply romantic about that and in love with it. I've never wavered from my commitment to do it.
Q: You've never suffered from major stage fright?
A: No, not in the way I think conventionally and classically [stage fright is] referred to. Part of acting for me has always had some here and there ingredient of what I now think of as a kind of excitement and heat and internal turbulence. You know? Sometimes what can feel like trepidation or "Oh gosh, I don't know if I can do this" ... but that's what you want.
Q: What did it mean for your family when you became famous?
A: That's an interesting question. You know, I don't know. I'm very close with my sister Pam, who is a wonderful painter and an artist. I think she was, you know, as everybody else was supportive of me and I think delighted. But essentially I don't think it made any real difference in our relationship, which has always been substantial. Not based on anything as fleeting as success (laughing) or show business.
Q: In the film your mother is married to someone a little older than you. Is that fiction or is it true?
A: There are many things in the movie that are fictional. There are some elements that are taken from real life. I like it when people, especially before they see it, are a little in the dark. In fact, I can tell you that was my real mother, and that was Harvey Tyson, who is in fact married to my mom. That's right -- the ages they refer to in the movie are correct. He is 20 years younger than she is.
Q: An interesting dynamic with the family.
A: You think so? Really. Yeah, I've always been inspired by those Cassavetes movies. It was obviously a fictional story but he would sometimes cast [his real-life wife] Gena Rowland's parents as her real parents and other non-actors and use them in such a way that their acting had some extra surprising elements to it. Even though we're not seeing it all conspicuously and prominently and dominantly told on the surface, there is something underneath that seems real authentic and multidimensional and complicated. That's what I was inspired by and kind of after. I think we got that.
Q: You've been married twice and engaged a couple of times. Would you say you are more cautious with a woman now, or do you fall quickly?
A: (Laughing) Funny question. I am, you know, I think, I know more what I want and what I don't want more quickly these days, probably. That's probably true. But I'm as open as I've ever been. As receptive and easily stimulated and kind of wildly romantic.
Q: You are doing a film about the Holocaust, "Adam Resurrected."
A: Yes, well, it has something to do with the Holocaust. You know, Paul Schrader who wrote "Raging Bull" and "Taxi Driver"... and many interesting things, directed it. He likes to describe it as "a story about a man who was once a dog, who meets a dog who was once a boy." In fact the central event in the movie is how this man (played by me) with plenty of past wounds and personal, psychological trauma ... goes through a healing process with a young boy, and they both share a troubled association with the dog thing. It takes place in Israel in 1961 in a mental institution. A rehabilitation center exclusively for concentration camp survivors.
Q: Since you were raised Jewish, did it make you want to delve into your own roots?
A: My parents sent all of us to a Hebrew School at a local synagogue. It was kind of traditional. It was small. I had a bar mitzvah, but then we weren't encouraged to participate much in anything. I knew about the movie a year before I did it, and I immersed myself for that whole year as much as I was able into all sorts of facts about the Jewish experience in Europe during World War II, of course. I talked to many survivors here. I went to Israel for the first time (I'd never been) to do some research. It was very personal and personally enlightening and disturbing and provocative and educational.
First Published: August 12, 2007, 11:15 p.m.
