The Dude and the Zen Master (10 page)

B
ERNIE
: Would you say that Robin Williams spends a lot of time in the world of practice, or does he just play?

J
EFF
: Both, I think. You practice going a little further, making that insult a little sharper. At some point it becomes playing, things come out and you can’t help it, it becomes a reflex thing. So he probably goes back and forth. You can practice playing, can’t you? I mean, you practice getting into that groove, into that spot. Isn’t that meditation?

There’s another way of looking at practice. A doctor might say,
I practice surgery.
That’s a little bit different, isn’t it?

B
ERNIE
: For me, I’m practicing when I’m in a place of no subject-object relationship. I could be working, but if I’m just totally in my work it becomes play.

J
EFF
: In that instance, practice and play become the same thing, right? In acting, rehearsal might be thought of as a practice. But when I’m rehearsing, that’s the time to also really get down and play. Just get into the thing, see where it takes you. As Sidney Lumet said when we were going through
The Morning After
day after day, it’s like peeling the onion. Each time you do it you’re going to find new things. You practice freshness, practice playing.

B
ERNIE
: So can people just play their life, or do they have to practice their life?

J
EFF
: Or indicate their life? Or rehearse their life?

B
ERNIE
: In my terminology, if you bear witness, which means you’re living it, then you’re playing. If you follow your ideas about what you’re doing, you’re practicing. I like to work with people in their lives, whether at the workplace, their home, whatever. So how do you get them to play their life, to totally plunge in, do what you did with Sidney Lumet, do the whole movie? Say you’re doing your life, and now it’s changed a bit. You’re not stopping every three seconds to say,
Did I do it right? What’s a better way of doing it? Did those people do it right? Are they screwing up?
You’re just fully living your life. For me, that’s play. And I think we can train to do that, and that training is the practice.

My experience is that when you really play your life rather than rehearse it, it’s beyond joy and sadness, you just feel much more alive. When you’re in a planning mode, all kinds of stuff come up:
I should have done this, I should have done that, why didn’t I do that?

If at some point you decide you want to teach acting, I’m sure you’ll teach people to be alive in their acting. That will be a practice. And I think certainly in Zen or Buddhism in general, the role of the teacher is to try to help a person be alive in their life. And they have to practice.

J
EFF
: Those knots we were talking about earlier can be invitations to practice. We’re busy playing, only now our clown gets knocked over or life hits us in a bad way; those are all reminders to practice.

9.

WHAT MAKES A MAN, MR. LEBOWSKI?

J
EFF
: Just like in life, there are many paths to acting, many ways to do it. There are some actors who want you to call them by their character’s name. They don’t want any kind of involvement or engagement with you outside of the role. A lot of great actors are like that. My school is more like,
I want to know the person in real life
. I want to know who that person is, and I find that informs the work.

There are two words that mean kind of the same thing, but also different. For instance, there’s
hot
and
cool
. There’s
Hey man, you’re cool!
And there’s also
Hey, you’re hot, man
. They’re both good things, but kind of different. So you’ll get someone like Scott Cooper, who directed
Crazy Heart
. He was so encouraging and genuinely excited. Then you get the Coen brothers. They’re not particularly demonstrative. They’re masters, funnier than hell, but kind of cool. That’s their style, you know what I mean?

Movies throw together all these different kinds of people who’re trying to do their art and it’s all workable. The weirder the approach sometimes, the groovier. Like the bit of sand in the oyster that creates the pearl. If the grain in the wood is perfect, it’s not as interesting. When you get a burl, for instance—God, it’s wonderful!

B
ERNIE
: I feel fortunate that I was able to study with a wide assortment of teachers, with very different styles and ways of doing things. Then there are others, who warn you that you’ll get too scattered, just stay within this niche and work there. But life isn’t a niche, life is life. If you just stay in that one little place, how are you going to feel alive? So I like to work with as many different personalities as possible: hot, cool, tepid, whatever. It’s exciting.

J
EFF
: And so endearing. You know, we’re all basically the same, wanting to be loved and wanting to love.

You remember that great Marvin Hamlisch song, “What I Did for Love”? It reminds me of the Joy of Singing workshop that I took years ago, run by Warren Lyons. The workshop was two weekends long and the class was made up of opera singers, gas-station attendants, carpenters, anyone who wanted to learn about singing and creativity, because the two are connected. What Warren taught us was that whatever keeps us from going all out in our singing, whatever muscle keeps our song down, also keeps the rest of our creative juices down. This can happen because of something way back in your early life. For an example, maybe in grammar school you didn’t sing so well and the teacher said, “Bernie, can you just mouth the words instead of singing them?” From then on some muscle got crippled and you don’t sing loud, not even in the shower. This was the muscle Warren wanted us to open up, our creative muscle.

The first weekend, everybody had to stand up alone in front of the class and sing “On a Clear Day,”
which has
incredibly
beautiful lyrics but a pretty difficult melody. I sang, too, but I also watched the others. We’d get up there and we would use everything we had because we were on the spot, we had to sing. And when you’re in that situation you pull out everything you’ve ever used in your life to make people love you, whether it’s self-deprecation, charm, shyness, whatever. It all comes out.

I learned that it’s not about hitting the note sharp or flat. Sinatra would sometimes hit a note a little flat, too, and that imperfection made the sound even stronger. It’s not about perfection, it’s about authenticity.

Warren assigned each person a song that would bring out something he or she was avoiding in life. There was a banker there, and the song Warren gave him to sing was “What I Did for Love.” It fucking broke my heart, man. He got up there nervously and said things like
I can’t do this, I’m not a singer, but here I go.
He began to sing barely in tune, struggling, and that struggle was so courageous. We’re all doing the best we can, we’re pulling out all of the stuff that works and doesn’t work in our lives, and how all that shows up in the world is so unique and beautiful.

In the movies you work with all kinds of actors, some sort of gruff or not so easy to get along with. But that’s what they do for love. That’s what they have to do to be here with us, and it’s wonderful. You look at a twisted oak tree and it’s beautiful, because it’s being what it has to be, which is twisted. Even people who’re fighting you or are against you for whatever reason—there’s a beauty in everything we do and who we are, you know?

Going back to the music workshop, I noticed that one of the things that got in the way of my song coming out was being afraid of really plugging in. The songs that Warren gave us were the standards, the great show tunes. My wife, Sue, joined me there on the second weekend and we did a wonderful exercise. You had to hold hands with your partner, look into each other’s eyes, and sing to each other. The task of the person being sung to was to receive the song. The task for the singer was to give full expression to the song. The song that I was assigned to sing to my wife was “Somewhere,” from
West Side Story
, which begins with the words “There’s a place for us.” Those words are so gorgeous and so deep that when I got in touch with them it was too much; I felt paralyzed. Finally I just let them do what they did to me and managed to sing them through sobs and tears.

The song Sue was to sing to me was “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Sue somehow managed to sing her song a little more intelligibly and I remember the love shooting out of her eyes. Strong stuff, you know? Maybe even frightening.

B
ERNIE
: Touching places you’re afraid to go to?

J
EFF
: The feeling is so strong you shut down, almost like it blows out your instrument. You can’t sing, speak, or anything.

B
ERNIE
: Like reaching a knot in the wood?

J
EFF
: Yeah, maybe. When you’re a performer, you feel the pressure to get on with it. You have this set amount of time, and if you don’t perform you’re going to lose your audience. But Warren created this safe place where there was no time limit. You had the space to really be with the song and feel it. When you’re making a movie, it’s up to the actor to create this kind of safe inner environment, but a director can support that, as if he’s telling you that you’ve got all the time in the world.

I did Hal Ashby’s last film,
Eight Million Ways to Die
. My brother Beau had done his first,
The Landlord
,
so I’d known Hal for a long time. He was one of my favorite directors, a master. Hal had such art balls and so much faith in the actors he assembled that he gave us lots of freedom to improvise. The script, as far as he was concerned, was just a rough outline of the story; the scenes we shot often had very little to do with the dialogue in the script. Hal used this method in all the movies he made. Look at the pudding that came out of this guy’s oven:
Coming Home
,
Being There
,
Harold and Maude
,
Shampoo
,
Bound for Glory
,
and
The Last Detail
, among others.

In spite of these great movies, Hal’s method of making them drove the producers and financiers crazy. They would see the dailies, the scenes we shot the day before, and say,
What the fuck? These words aren’t in the script. He’s making a completely different movie from the one we hired him to make
.

When Hal first gave me the script for
Eight Million Ways to Die
, I asked him why he wanted to make this film; it didn’t really seem to be the kind of story he’d be interested in telling. He said, “You know, I have the same question. I guess that’s why I want to make the movie, to find out why I want to make it.”

The producer of this film didn’t respect Hal’s method. One day, when we had about another week of filming to go, he came and told Hal, “You’ve got just today and then we’re pulling the plug.” You can imagine how heartbreaking that is when you’ve put so much love and energy into a movie and now you’re being told that your vision will be badly compromised. Hal took his broken heart into his trailer, probably burned one, for all I know, then came back out with an idea of how to truncate the film schedule and finish the filming by the end of that day.

Now, this was Andy Garcia’s first movie. He and I had a great time; the environment Hal created was very inclusive, so we’d all give each other ideas. But now we were under the gun, time was of the essence. Hal had worked out this way of adding more exposition by having Andy do a long telephone conversation. Andy did three or four takes, and I saw there was a problem.

So I went up to Hal and said, “Hal, I think Andy’s having a problem with this part of the dialogue. I have an idea.”

Hal said, “You know, you’re probably right. But Andy’s a good actor, let’s let him figure it out by himself.”

Hal created the alternative reality that we had all the time in the world. Even though we were under such time constraints, there was no panic whatsoever and we got the work done.

In the end, even though he completed the film as instructed, when he gave it to the editor to assemble and took a two-week vacation, the producer came to the editing room, confiscated the negatives, fired Hal, and cut the film with complete disregard for Hal’s vision. Seeing that Hal Ashby was an Academy Award–winning editor and such a master filmmaker, this seemed to me like a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face. That was the last movie Hal made and he died shortly afterward.

Hal was such a wonderful cat, I remember him telling Andy and me,
I want to set up a little editing room in Malibu and teach you guys how to edit film; I’d love you to come by and cut some of the scenes with me.
Unfortunately, that never got to happen. Andy and I often reminisce about what a wonderful time we had and how sad we are that Hal wasn’t shown the respect that he deserved.

So there is a window where you have to perform, but if you can do that with the feeling that there’s no window, that’s wonderful. It lets you open up and go deep.

At the same time, there are some things that prevent us from opening, like when I had to sing “Somewhere” to Sue and I was almost paralyzed. For instance, it’s cool to be together with someone you love, but what makes me different also has to be respected. I guess I want that same respect and safe space in personal relationships that Hal gave Andy and me and that he didn’t get from the producer.

You see it in the history of our country. Before coming together, the thirteen original colonies fought each other before realizing they were going to be stronger and more effective if they joined forces. In feudal times, before there were countries as we know them, cities and towns battled and warred for years before they finally decided to join together to create European states.

B
ERNIE
: People hang on to their separate selves for dear life, afraid to come together. But the one is still much stronger than the pieces.

J
EFF
: I think this fear of being vulnerable and looking weak accounts for our fear of bearing witness. I love living in the United States, but I can feel the fear. When 9/11 happened, for a short while there, maybe a week or two, everything got very soft. There was a lot of sadness, a lot of loss, and also a lot of compassion. Then what was soft became rigid. We contracted and lost our openness. We got tight:
Dammit, we’re going to get them! We’re going to make war on terror.
That always seemed absurd to me. We couldn’t stay with questions like: What is our place in the world? Why did those guys crash airplanes into our buildings and kill so many people? What had we done, if anything, to get such a reaction?

I’m not a political expert by any means, but I do know that we have supported many dictators and supplied them with guns. But questions like that make us feel too vulnerable and afraid. It was one thing to say that 9/11 was terrible and we had to catch and punish the crazy guys who did it; looking at it as an all-out war was something else. Much of our nation was overcome by fear, and politicians responded:
We’ve got to protect ourselves so we’re going to war
. And if you were a politician who didn’t agree with that, you couldn’t play the game; many people felt they couldn’t speak their minds during those years.

In the same way, we can’t fully acknowledge the evil of slavery in our history or how we treated Native Americans and how that goes on even now. So we have to bear witness. We have to own our part in everything because there is nothing that isn’t a part of us.

B
ERNIE
: One of the twelve steps of the AA program is to make amends to those you’ve harmed. It’s never too late. So certain people attacked us on 9/11. They were fanatics and most people around the world, including Muslims, were horrified. At the same time, many of those same people felt that we’d acted like big bullies for years. That didn’t justify 9/11, it just pointed to the bigger context in which all this happened. So what was the right action? Getting and punishing the criminals, but also bearing witness to what we’ve done in the world and making amends. That might have changed the situation significantly as opposed to just going to war.

J
EFF
: But we’re afraid of doing things like that because it means opening up and being vulnerable. How many of us are ready to acknowledge the effects of our military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned us about so long ago? It’s a self-perpetuating machine that makes a lot of money while people can’t feed their families or educate their children.