SOME INTERVIEWS OF JAMES SPADER
"The bad guys I love playing in movies have gotten me more good exposure than the nice ones", the twenty-seven-year-old actor says. "I enjoy offbeat roles. All over the world there are conniving, insincere, inefficient people who slide through life because they're good at playing politics. In Baby Boom I'm taking this person and saying, 'See this rat? He's working in the office right next door to you!' I didn't condone the crumb I played in Pretty in Pink, but I understood where his motivation came from - qualities that everyone shares: insecurity, loneliness, lack of self-confidence. There's good reason why people do what they do and say what they say." ~Seventeen Magazine, Nov, 1987
"I think I was trying to test the limits of what can connote a good time," he says. "It manifested itself in self-destructiveness, or whatever." Then, hearing his words, he grows self-conscious. "I don't really want to go into this because I get sick of people traipsing out their tough times. Everybody goes through strange periods where they're experimenting in their dark corners. I guess I get sick of people talking about their olden days and then the reforming periods."
When he first came to New York, Spader took acting classes and worked a series of grunt jobs. He bused tables, was a messenger and shoveled manure at the Claremont Riding Academy. One day he went with his sister to a health club and ended up conning his way into a position as a yoga instructor there. The extent of his training was to buy a book about yoga from a supermarket checkout stand. It was at the club that he met Victoria, his future wife, who taught the class that followed him. "I used to fall asleep in my class," Spader remembers. "I kept telling her I'd love to make her dinner sometime. We kept sort of meaning to see each other outside of work and just sort of get laid, you know?"
One day she said, "You want to smoke a joint after work?" I said, 'Sure.' We went and did that and I walked her home. It got to be that every night I'd walk her home and we'd talk and sometimes smoke a joint or just wander the streets of New York. I'd stop off at a grocery store and make her dinner and clean up afterward and go home. And, um, then we started living together. We got laid somewhere in there, in the middle of all that." The two have a most un-Hollywood relationship. They have been together eleven years, through they only married in 1987. He seems devoted. He's been known to call her hourly when they're on opposite coasts. Those who know them say they are a union of complementary opposites: Victoria, who works as a Hollywood set decorator, is stable, quiet and down-to-earth, while Jimmy is prone to flights of fancy and can be maddeningly self-absorbed.
"You know, when you choose to make your living as an actor, it's all fine and good to look at it as some kind of artistic endeavor," he says. "At its best, it is that. But the fact is, most of the actors out there don't earn $3 million a picture and can't afford to take two years off between films and look for the right thing. Most of us are tradesmen. Acting for me, is a passion, but it's also a job, and I've always approached it as such. I have a certain manual-laborist view of acting. There's no shame in taking a film because you need some money. No shame in taking a film because you have always wanted to visit China. I was thinking about this last night as I was driving home. I started to go back through the different films I've done, and the television movies I've done and I started to think about why I chose them at that time. And I realized, every single film I've ever done I've taken because of the money. Every single one. I'm not ashamed to say that."
He says, "I took True Colors because it enabled me to buy my grandparents' house. And that was more important to me. I didn't want to see a place that had all the ghosts that had disappear. I knew what I had to do, and that was go out and find a job. If I don't need the money, I don't work," he continues. "I'm going to spend time with my family and friends, and I'm going to travel and read and listen to music and try to learn a little bit more about how to be a human being, as opposed to learning how to be somebody else."
Finally, Spader drops the defensiveness and admits, "a certain amount of what I'm saying is self-protection. Yes, I knew the role I was getting into in Sex, Lies and Videotape was certainly different from what I'd done in the past." And wasn't he eager to show he could play a sympathetic leading man? "To deny that would be lying. I did want to do something that was very different. But I guess the reason I'm fighting agreeing with this is that I did enjoy every one of those pictures. I wouldn't give them back for something else right now. With hindsight, you can say, right, after I did Sex, Lies and Videotape, all of a sudden things opened up in a way that hadn't happened before. But I didn't expect that. I took the film because I was interested in doing that part. Looking at work as stepping-stones is something I don't have any time or energy for. It seems a shame to look at your work as some sort of means to an end, because the end is death, you know? The means is the flesh and blood, so you'd better enjoy it." Does this new status as a leading man make him nervous? "I'm always nervous. I'm nervous when I wake up in the morning. I think you have to be sort of satisfied with a divine dissatisfaction. That's actually a quote, but I've forgotten who said it." His tone is honest and self-questioning, absent of any smugness. But at the same time, all the poking behind his tough exterior has make him uncomfortable. He grows more distant by the minute and feels the need to look for cover. Seated on the back of the bench, he follows a bright-red barge floating by. A boy on a bike stops to wave to the boat from the shore. The tug toots back. Spader contemplates the meaning of this gentle scene. Abruptly, he turns and announces, "I want to go home and see my son now." ~GQ Magazine, Oct, 1990
"I finally met this casting director, Shirley Rich, who was one of about two angels that I had when I moved to New York. I said, 'Shirley, I'm having such a hard time.' She said, 'Jimmy, at the very beginning of your career there's nothing wrong, even when you've never done anything, there's nothing wrong with saying, I'm in this for this, but I'm not in for that.'" Shirley Rich now says she's amazed Spader remembered that lesson. She spotted him at seventeen and thought he has "a sophistication that other boys his age did not have. It was extraordinary. He would go into readings with this snide quality. He had that as a kid! It was a superior kind of thing. Not in his own attitude but in his acting. I remember saying, 'You gotta go easy on that superior thing, kiddo."
For Jack's Back, a little-seen Rowdy Herrington thriller, Spader got the delicious opportunity to play twins. The characters that are easy skins are the ones that have "great conviction for what they're doing. Lack of conviction is the hardest thing I can play. I don't understand it. I don't understand it in life either." At one point, Spader's convictions involved the usual excesses. The money was good and he spent it, on food and toys, not out of guilt as might be expected from the son of a teacher but out of "a self-deprecating insecurity." "There's a period of his life he doesn't like to talk about," says Tim Regan. Spader doesn't rationalize his behavior, on or off screen. "There's nothing wrong with some embarrassment," he says. "Go make an ass of myself. I don't want to fall on my face, but you fall on your face every day." His theory of acting? "Let it explode. It's not sacred."
"You'll go over to their house," says Andrew McCarthy, "and Jimmy will be lying on one couch and Victoria on the other and they just hang out. They're doing nothing together," Says Spader, "There's an unspoken language. Vickey and I don't often misconnect. We've lived together a long, long time, and spent a lot of that time living together. We traveled a lot together in little cars. We know each other very, very well. I love it. For a lot of people, their work is their family. If that satisfies them...The work isn't enough for me." ~Vogue Article, Nov, 1990
Spader Speaks
I'm an actor, not a generation spokesman, but you notice certain things. There's a tremendous concentration on immediacy and impatience. Remember when you could eat mushrooms and be gone for eight or twelve hours? All of a sudden it's cocaine. "I don't have time to drop acid or even smoke a joint," people say. "Cocaine only takes half an hour." Then that's not quick enough, and it's "Let's smoke crack." Speed and efficiency rule. The lack of respect for age, time, experience, patience, history--it's really scary.
I'm right in the middle--thirty-one. I look around at my peers and realize the most of the people I admire and respect seem to be of the generation before mine. The late Sixties and early Seventies were the influences on my life--and I was all of ten years old. Most of my friends are in their late thirties. That's the chair I'm most comfortable in. Our generation is still trying desperately to find a way out of its shadow and scream at the top of its lungs--about something. We can't, because we've distanced ourselves from the world. We're more detached, desensitized--less visceral and alive. I've played some of the worst of our generation. My attitude is, if I'm going to play him, I'm going to play his as the biggest ass of all time. One of my ways sensitizing myself is to get all the desensitized touches right. The more complex you make that, the more distance you can put between yourself and what you loathe.
What's achievement? Is it the quality of the means or the quality of the end? As far as I can tell, the end if just the resting-place to more means. Say you get there. You still have to go home and wake up the next day. I see friends and relatives try to buy a house, raise a family, pay for insurance. Then I hear the labels and name-calling about all of that. The only thing that unifies us, maybe, is that everyone I know inherited some sort of strange anxiety. For me, it was eased be doing manual labor for five years after dropping out of boarding school. Someone else can storm the barricades, then relentlessly raise three children. The day-to-day struggle is the most heroic struggle anyone fights. Something won through a shortcut or a hole in the fabric is just not as heroic. ~Esquire Magazine May, 1991
Spader is content with the way it's all unfolded. "I've found satisfaction in a certain degree of dissatisfaction," he says agreeably. "I panicked for about two years when I first started experiencing anxiety. And I thought,' Oh, well, I'm insane, so I have to cure that.' And that's the mistake. Don't cure it - that's your life, friend. That's your life." ~Entertainment Weekly, Nov, 1994
"I'm not eager at all to present my life out there for public consumption," he states. "I like to do one or two films a year and then do what is absolutely obligatory in terms of promoting them. My life outside of films is vital to me."
"I'm not obsessed with work," he states. "I'm not much of a planner. Someone recently asked me, 'What are your dreams and goals for your career?' and I realized that my dreams and goals don't really have much to do with the career."
"The only demand I was putting on the picture was that my paycheck came in and that I had fun making it. It seemed like it would be rather light-hearted. And it was. I'm not a big fan of films that take themselves seriously."
"I was offered a film this summer and I certainly needed a film this summer - need to pay my bills," he says. "But my family goes back East during the summer. I like to spend as much time with my boys as I can before they head off to school. So I turned down the film. If that means we have to be walking around on plywood in the bathrooms before I can put tiles down, or that our living room doesn't have any furniture except a ping-pong table, then fine. I'm willing to make that sacrifice because it's important to me. To take your career too seriously is a mistake."
Hard to do when your fee has just jumped to a million dollars a picture and you've been in some bloody good films... "I'm not trying to leave behind a legacy," he insists. "I'm not trying to leave my mark. I don't have any interest in that. My only legacy is that I would hope I can raise my sons to be fair, decent and humane." He pauses. "That doesn't have much to do with going off and jumping around in front of the camera..." ~ Empire, Feb, 1995
"I've seen death happen in many different ways. Sometimes it's been quick and forgiving. Other times it's been prolonged and unforgivable. Quick and forgiving would seem to be better, but by the same token, we do seem to prepare ourselves for the long haul."
"This country is different from a lot of other countries, where the elderly live out their lives still within the nest of the family. Here, the elderly tend to be dispatched, as opposed to being brought back into a fold that they themselves created."
Was Dr. Ernst (role in movie Critical Care)a difficult part for you to play?
"Yes, because a lot of the stuff I had to do required putting more of myself into the film than I usually do. In most films, I'm playing somebody very different from me, dealing with ideas and issues that are very different from the sort I deal with in my everyday life. Dr. Ernst isn't really like me, but the decisions he has to make are not dissimilar to those decisions I have had to make in my own life. Treading on familiar ground requires putting more of yourself into a role. Usually, I'm able to hide within a role. Here, I wasn't able to hide."
Is it more fun to hide?
"Yeah, it is."
Posted by aprilng
at 1:08 PM JST
Updated: Sunday, 11 April 2004 11:12 PM JST
cheeky
hug me
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, IVAN~