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Just Jack: Nicholson Kicks ‘The Bucket List’ Into High Gear

[IMG:L]Normally, to get an audience with the most iconic movie star of the last four decades, we’d have to drop a couple of grand for floor seats at a Lakers game.

So you can imagine our giddy shock when Jack Nicholson invited us to join him for a chat about his latest film, The Bucket List, in which he and Morgan Freeman play a mismatched pair of terminally ill men who decide to embark on a mission to check off all the things they want to do before they kick the bucket.

Director Rob Reiner, who previously collaborated with the actor on A Few Good Men in 1992, has this to say about the 2007 model of Jack Nicholson: “He’s an artist. He’s a true artist and he brings his 15 years of life experience to a new character and that was all brought to bear.”

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And Nicholson, 70, brought all he had to bear when he showed up to talk to Hollywood.com. Playful, philosophical and profound behind his trademark shades, the 12-time Academy Award nominee with three Oscars on his mantle favored us with that unforgettable grin and name-checked as casually as only the biggest movie star in the world could.

[IMG:R]Hollywood.com: When you do a movie like this, does it bring home a sense of dealing with your own mortality?
Jack Nicholson:
The first [early screening] audience said ‘This is a movie about living.’ One of the things about it that I like is that everybody considers their mortality all the time, whether they know it or not. That fear of the unknown, it drives you. We wanted–even though it’s a comic approach–we wanted it to have some resonance. I think it’s because these are interior, private conversations that we have with ourselves. We haven’t really seen them on film before. I’m sure we’ve all been to a funeral and said, ‘Well, how do I want my … whatever you want to call it … to be dealt with?’ Do you want a big statue, like this, which is one of my considerations sometimes? [Grins] Do you want to be staked out on the top of a tree, like an Indian, and let the birds eat you? I went by the assumption that these are things people have thought about. How consciously have they thought about it, I don’t know, but if you touch that chord this is what you get. My first acting teacher, Jeff Corey, said ‘Your job is to provide a stimulating point of departure.’ This is what you do in a theatrical experience. I thought ‘This will be a doozy for that particular element. That’s what I think about.

HW: You shaved your head for the film. Did you also take that level of realism to jumping out of an airplane?
JN:
Oh, we dove like son of a guns. Fantastically and fearlessly leapt out into the void, we didn’t care, and so forth. [Laughs] This is part of my new lying approach. Why I say that–it’s probably useless to you because I’ve said this before when I was first doing interviews I met Diana Vreeland, who was the editor of Vogue magazine–the normal complaints people have about interviews. She said ‘Well, Jack, you must not tell them the truth.’ I said ‘What?’ She said ‘Well, my guess is that you are going to be doing a lot of interviews. If you tell them the truth, then very quickly you will become bored with your own life.’

[IMG:R]HW: Watching you and Morgan on screen is like watching a couple of great athletes going up against each other. How did you find a rhythm with each other?
JN:
Where it’s the goal of the character, like when I have to push to get him in this trip, there is that. Other than that I don’t think either Morgan or me are pushers, exactly. I think each of us is more than enough for the other. I told him when I first met him, ‘You know, Morgan, this might be something that somebody didn’t say about you. I consider you the modern James Dean.’ He said ‘What?’ I said ‘I’m talking about his one thing. There is acting and there is cinema.’ Dean had this quality. When they wear a hat or a coat or whatever. You don’t see a graphically non-telling image of Morgan, ever. You don’t have to do too much, and he does plenty, but I don’t think he had heard that about himself. Apropos of watching one another, I bring this up because I thought that about him for a long time. I could almost list the various hats or coats and what they meant to the character. I could say why it was not only right for the character but it served the big picture. This is what I thought was Dean. Dean knew how to be photographed.

HW: Tell us something we don’t know about Morgan Freeman the man.
JN:
Morgan is extremely gentle but don’t take him for granted. Another couple there, the woman says of her husband ‘Yeah, I’ve always said he looks just like you, Morgan.’ Morgan kind of stiffened up like this, grabbed the guy, and put him next to him like this. He said ‘Now, tell the truth. Do we look anything like one another?’ I think you get what the implied stinger in that was. I thought ‘That’s my man. He’s sweet, but don’t f*ck with him.’

HW: Like your character in
The Bucket List, have you ever taken a dream you have had and made it into a reality over night?
JN:
If your life is full, that’s probably enough. A lot of people ask Morgan and I about our “”bucket list,” but our good fortune has been that acting educates you about life. It doesn’t matter what part it is, you just go on learning. That is the elixir, for me, of the job.

HW: And we’ll bite: Any bucket list items from the film on your own personal list?
JN:
I’ll give you the shorty: I would love to see the Pyramids.

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[IMG:R]HW: Rob Reiner said the difference between working with you on A Few Good Men and The Bucket List was 15 years of life experience. What does that life experience do for you in approaching the role?
JN:
I would approach it the same way. Jeff Corey [taught me] 85 percent of whoever you play is identical to the character, whoever it is, man, woman, or child. It’s the 15 percent that you have to find, isolate and act, so to speak. I would approach it from that point of view since I’ve held it since I was in my 20s. It would obviously be different. A lot of this movie was informed by my character being not what he thought he would be: Not an excellent patient, but a rather poor one. It [to me] happened by coincidence right before this movie, nothing as frightening as what these fellas had to go, through. Another one of my favorite lines is this guy who sets up this whole system, hospitals, and how they run. When they ask him about it, all he’s got to say is ‘Well, I’ve never been sick before.’ I think that says a lot about everybody. Suddenly you think you have it and now you are in the situation. Jesus Christ, it’s very different. Acting is hopefully that every day. Sure, we all study and you have an idea of what this is, what that is, and then your deepest yearning is to come in and be shocked out of your system by what actually occurs.

HW: Are you selective about what roles you take on?
JN:
Absolutely. The criteria changes. On The Departed, I went into what for me was forbidden territory. I thought ‘Well, my space is this. They did not hire me–because there was no part for The Departed–to play a part. They hired me to kick this movie in the ass, knock it sideways, and put it into the realm of possibly popular.’ Well, this is something an actor can’t think about. You can’t say ‘I’m going to make a hit movie’ or you are as dead as you can be. Once I get a forbidden thought it will not go away, so I just went with it. Now I just let it in, because we make a lot of movies. You want them to be different. Anybody can be good once or twice, if they have got some talent, but once you have to un-Morgan the part, or un-Jack the part, then that’s when you are in the pro game. When you can suspend who they think you are and re-involve them in a new story. This is really our job at this point in our body of work.

HW: Will you direct again?
JN:
Only if somebody asks me.

HW: Will we ever see that fabled third Chinatown movie?
JN:
I don’t really know. Every once in a while there is a little twitch but there is no strong movement about it right now.

[IMG:R]HW: Is there another character that you would like to revisit again?
JN:
I thought about revisiting three of them as a certain unit of work. Ones that were unresolved. Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces. This thought came to me, because [Darryl] Ponicsan wrote a sequel to The Last Detail. There were a lot of movies in that period where the form of the movie was ‘Well, they just went off.’ Because they were all about different eras, I thought ‘Here’s an actor’s trilogy.’ The parenthesis of Jake Gittes [in Chinatown and The Two Jakes] tells a lot about the character. If you took Bobby Dupea, from Five Easy Pieces–where did he go? Did he go to Europe and play the piano? What did he do? Who he was, that was very typical of America at that moment. The same is true of the military guy in The Last Detail. This to me is always the one advantage of sequels. Yeah, I got a million ideas.

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