Alan Arkin is currently working on the film version of Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night".

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CAPEN: First of all, are you acting now?

ARKIN: Yes, I'm right in the middle of a production.....

CAPEN: I meant at this moment.

ARKIN: This moment? No. No, I don't do that. Although, interestingly, Marlon
Brando would be the last person on the face of the Earth that you would think does that. I spent the evening with him a couple of years ago and he spent the entire evening performing. Acting. Every minute was a performance. Conciously. Which came as a big surprise. I don't do that.

CAPEN: How can you tell the difference, say with Marlon Brando, or these--

ARKIN: Well, they're playing characters all evening long. So, I mean it was very
evident that he was acting. Whenever he told a story, he played all the characters. Fully. And he did that a lot. It was interesting.

CAPEN: So the question is, it's this thing that you do that's apart from any other actor. And I know that we're all slightly different in some way or another. But what you do on the air, no matter what is thrown to you, you seem to, there seems to be this dynamic that occurs that leaves someone who's watching the film in the same sort of quandries, I guess is the word, as you.

ARKIN: As the character I'm playing? Well, I'm very touched by your saying that, but I thought that that was the whole idea, I thought that was the whole reason for acting. When I was a kid -- I knew I wanted to act from when I was five, and I started studying seriously when I was six and seven. Not with anybody else, but I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn't move me, and I tried to analyze, even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did.

I remember particularly, my mother was talking to somebody and I know it was earlier than when I was ten, I don't remember exactly. My mother was talking to a friend of hers who had just been through some kind of tragedy, and I was just sitting, drawing, on the floor while they were going through this. This woman was crying and sobbing and bemoaning her fate, and I found myself saying "I'm not moved" by what she's doing, by her problems. And I said, "Why am I not moved?" Then I said, "It's because she's complaining too much. She's crying too much. If she would do it less, then I would be moved more." And I just put that in the hopper for my work. It was, uh, crazy, I suppose, because it removes you from-- I was removing myself from the experience which is an aberration, but it paid off in a way, because it became part of my technique, whatever that is.

CAPEN: What I'm trying to get at is this moral dilemma you seem to exude all the way
from "Catch-22" to "Glen Garry Glen Ross." Something is thrown at you that's of this world, it's very much of the world, and you don't know what to do with it.

ARKIN: Well, it's interesting, because the two parts you talk about are both characters
that have moral dilemmas. Very specifically. It's obvious in "Catch-22" . But in "Glen Garry Glen Ross," the thing about my character in that piece was that he's the only person in the film that has even a moment where he has some concern about the people that are being served by him. He has a line where he says, "What we're doing is not fair to the customers," and nobody else in the piece cares about that. So he is in a moral dilemma. Yeah, that's interesting. I guess that's true of a lot of the characters I play. But isn't that true of all, of most characters in films that are in some kind of moral dilemma, whether they choose address it or not?

CAPEN: Yeah, and I think that's true, but I think the difference with you is that you are
-- it's chronic with you. In other words, when it happens to you you are taken aback. You're like Everyman, who, given the situation -- But it gets down to the moment, too: when it hits you, you are really in a quandry. And I think you leave the person who's watching you in the audience at the movie theater in a quandry. You stir that up in them. Am I getting hot?

ARKIN: No, it's nice. It's very touching, but I have no idea that that's what I'm doing.
I'm just trying to fulfill the parameters of the character as I see them. I don't go into any kind of -- I want to move people, but I feel that the only -- it's a primary goal, obviously, for an actor to want to move the audience. But it's not something you keep in your mind when you're doing your work.

It's not something -- I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor. I think it's that simple. But my goal when I'm playing a character, the only thing I'm aware of conciously that relates to that at all is that I have to be moved by the character. I have to care somewhat -- I have to find myself a storyteller. If I'm not a storyteller in some way, and then find a way to immerse myself into that story that I want to be told, I don't feel like I'm doing a job. It's not enough just to get up and do "behavior." That to me is not being an actor. I have to have a -- I want the character to have some kind of agenda. I want to make a statement with the character of some kind or another. I know a lot of actors don't work that way: they go in, they do their day's work and they have their moments, and they feel like they said their line right, but I don't know if they think conceptually. I think it's partly coming out of improvisational theater.

I know when I'm directing, and I've directed a lot over the years, that, whenever I hire an improvisational --, an actor who's done a lot of work in improvisational theater, I know that I never have to talk to him about what his role in the entire piece is. They know instinctively what function their character has to fulfill in the entire piece. And that's not true of a lot of actors! But that's the way I work, and it just saves an enormous amount of time and energy whn you see how would the pice be misshapen if my character wasn't in it! And the minute you say that, then you know what you have to do. You know what the character has to do. Once I know what the character has to do, it becomes relatively easy to -- I don't mean simple -- but it becomes a lot easier than just to find those ways in which I want to serve that piece.

An actor I admire to an enormous degree is Robert Duvall, because he's one of the few actors I know around that works that way. I don't know if he's even concious of working that way. But I always feel like he's in complete service to the material. If the character's big and blustery, he's big and blustery; if the character has to disappear, he'll disappear. There doesn't seem to be any ego at play in his work at all. His work, conciously or unconciously, is to serve the piece he's in. I find that really admirable.

CAPEN: So is a movie like "Glen Garry Glen Ross" the type of thing that you would go
after? Did you go after that or did they find you?

ARKIN: No, they found me. I didn't even want to do it. But my wife and my
manager felt that I -- and my agent -- kind of pushed me into doing it. I didn't like the character. I didn't want to play that character particularly because I felt that it was too archtypical of the kinds of stuff I was getting. I felt it was too easy. It was too much of a "let's get Arkin for that" 'cause that's the kind of thing he's done twenty times already. But I like not to do things I've done twenty times already. Even though it all comes out pretty much the same anyway, you like to think you're trying something completely different (laughs).

I felt that with that going into it that Mamet didn't like my character. And that annoyed me. It wasn't from talking to him, it was just from my reading it over and over again, I felt like he had a certain amount of embarrassment about my character. 'Cause he's not a tough, smoking -- tough-talking, cigar-smoking, woman-bashing kind of character which is the kind of people he usually, I think, feels most comfortable writing about most of the time. And I felt like he knew -- he was smart enough to know that he had to have a character like mine in the piece, and he --. He didn't write me any lines! I don't have any lines in the piece!

CAPEN: It's sort of echolalia, isn't it?

ARKIN: (Laughs.) Right. Exactly. But I tried something with him based on that one
line that seemed important to me, that instead of making him just the patsy and the jerk in the place, I had an internal line that allowed me to feel some kind of respect for him, which let me play him.

CAPEN: Are there movies that you would have killed to be in that you weren't cast in,
or are there movies coming up that you'd love to do?

ARKIN: I would have killed to have been in "The In-Laws." That's the kind of movie I would have loved to have made.

CAPEN: So "Little Murders" is --

ARKIN: No, "Little Murders" is another -- most of the things I've done I haven't
wanted to do. My wife -- my wife has propelled me into two-thirds of the work I've done. I keep waiting for Renoir to be born again and to offer me something, and he's not around, and he's not offering me anything. But I think I'm a little bit out of my time in that I like the films of the thirties and forties that has sense of community, had a sense of -- uh -- community -- there's no other word --

CAPEN: For example? A film?

ARKIN: Well, you don't need a name. Because most of the studio films had a sense of
community about them. Whatever the pitfalls of the old studio system, and there were many, and they were run by egomaniacs just the same way they are now. But one of the things they did was they had a stable of actors that worked together all the time so you got the feeling when you saw the movies in the thirties and forties you were watching people that knew each other, that had some sense of communication even if it was hello-how are you in the commisary, or to get drunk together, or to go to the parties together, or to be in the mass photographing sessions they had. There was some sense of relationship. Now, I go to the movies and I don't feel like anybody knows each other. I feel like they've met that morning, and that they're going to rush back to their trailer in the middle of the afternoon, and there's no sense of community.

CAPEN: Kind of like major league baseball.

ARKIN: Yeah! And I feel like the entire culture is rife with that kind of boxes around
individuals, boxes around groups, boxes within boxes within boxes and I think it's horrible. It's not the movie industry, because the movie industry, after all, is just a reflection of what's going on in the rest of society, by and large. But it's still terrible to me. The music industry is the same thing now. The joy and excitement and majesty of music as it should be in theater and film is seeing people work together and do something beautiful as a group. And in music -- I mean I was watching on the plane flying in, you see guys with the pots on their ears, and in isolations booths, and they never met the musicians, and it's called a group, but they don't know each other. Everybody's working as an individual. And it ends up being terrific for the technicians! The technicians love the sound because it's perfect, but it's -- DEAD. There's no sense of something living that's been captured.

CAPEN: Robert Bly referred to it as "corporate rock" a couple years ago -- rock and roll.

ARKIN: Yeah, that's very much to the point.

CAPEN: So, where do you disappear to when you're not involved in the work?

ARKIN: The work? You mean acting, and theater and film? I go different places.

CAPEN: Out of the country? Completely away, just some exotic place?
ARKIN: Well, we have a place in Canada we go to that's pretty isolated. Our closest
friends are moose. And eagles and whales.

CAPEN: And you are also a writer?

ARKIN: Well, a little bit. I play with it when I'm not acting.

CAPEN: Why children's books?

ARKIN: Well, like most of the things I've done in my life, besides acting, I just kind of
fell into it. I wrote a small piece for my youngest son many years ago, just as an entertainment for him, to help him get through something that was happening in our lives that I thought was a little bit difficult for him. And I wrote this story for him and people thought it was good enough to get published, so it got published. Then I just -- I continued writing for him, and my other kids, and now my granddaughter. So, it just happened.

CAPEN: And this is the sort of thing that brings you to some sort of joy then?

ARKIN: Yeah. No, I love it. Yeah, I love kids and I've worked with them a lot.

CAPEN: Any sage advice from from a very, very much established actor to people who
are coming up?

ARKIN: Oh, God. It's a -- I think a very bad time for the arts. I think we're in a tough
time in our culture. You have to really need to do it desperately, in order to do it now, I think more than any time before. I don't know. I haven't thought about it in a while. I don't really know what advice to give anybody right now.

CAPEN: How did -- to backtrack, how did it happen for you? All of a sudden there you
are, in "Catch-22," that was my first experience with you on screen, and it was a major novel, and then a major motion picture and of great importance beyond that, in its commentary I think. I wonder how you happened to jump into that limelight? Or work your way toward it?

ARKIN: Well, it's funny, you perceive that as the first time you knew me, but that was a
big failure at the time. The movie was a dismal failure. I guess it was my fifth or sixth film, and I think my first major failure. So I jumped into the limelight for you, maybe, but I've been alive for many years before that. (Laughs.) As I said, I wanted to act since I was five, and I got in my first professional production at the age of fourteen, and was in Second City for a couple of years: I was with the first company there. I went to Broadway with the Second City and I got two Broadway plays that I played leads in after Second City. And then I did "The Russians are Coming," which was my first film, then "Wait Until Dark" and "Poppy" and "Heart is a Lonely Hunter." And then you heard of me, in "Catch-22!"

CAPEN: And "The Russians are Coming," was it, oddly enough for that era, a real
success, wasn't it?

ARKIN: Yeah. We went into it as a mission. Everybody connected with it was afraid.
We thought we were going to get the entire right wing of the country down on us for saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Russians are human beings. We're treating them like devils with horns."

CAPEN: Because these were the days when David Susskind's limousine was being
stoned for having Krushchev interviewed?

ARKIN: Just having him interviewed! It didn't mean he supported him. And we
thought we might get picketed while we were making the film. We thought there would be protests and, to our amazement and delight, when it came out, there was a kind of sigh of relief throughout the country. I'm thinking, oh my god, finally, somebody said it! They don't have horns.

CAPEN: So, your acting icons before we close this?

ARKIN: My acting icons? The people who I look up to? Oh God. There's a long list of
them. A lot of actors that probably nobody ever heard of because they were famous -- My father used to drag me to foreign films at the Thalia in New York when I was growing up. So I grew up with people like Harry Bower, Louis Gervais, and Remoux, and Michelle Simon, and -- these were a lot of my icons. From the French films of the thirties and forties. Jean Guband. And, when I made the transition into actors who could speak English, there were poeple like Walter Huston, and Spencer Tracy, and then Brando, and Duvall, and like that.

CAPEN: So, very quickly, how was that evening with Marlon Brando? What was that
like?

ARKIN: Well, it was fascinating. He wanted to meet me, for reasons that I don't yet
understand. He called me up and invited me and my wife and my younger son over to dinner. We got there around seven and stayed there 'til about midnight. And had a good time, except to this day I don't know why he wanted to meet me. I'm delighted that he did. But I don't know why. His home is very, very spare, which I found kind of exciting. Delightful. Vaguely oriental, and very, very spare. Simple.

CAPEN: Thank you, Mr. Arkin.

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