[IMG:L]Richard Dreyfuss boarded a ferry to get to one of the Bermuda International Film Festival’s exclusive parties at a private home on a private island. Preemptively stealing the thunder from any nearby Jaws fanboys, Dreyfuss announced, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” In fact he was right, the boat had to make two trips to get all the partygoers to the island.
Inside, Hollywood was the order of business when Dreyfussand fellow BIFF juror Carrie Fisher faced an audience of festival attendees in a Q&A entitled “Tales from Hollywood.” Given that his Bermuda duties were evaluating films, it wasn’t like he was lying around the beach.
“All we’ve really done so far is seen a couple movies,” he said. “We haven’t had a Bermuda enough experience. The people that we’ve met have been wonderful, really nice people, although they still ask you to pay the check which is annoying. But no, everyone seems to be nice.”
Hosted by David Poland of Moviecitynews.com, with some questions from the audience, Dreyfuss dominated the discussion with his detailed recollections of industry gossip. His first recollection of seminal directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas was laced with economic reality.
“They once said to me, ‘Why didn’t you do the sequel to Jaws?'” Dreyfuss recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you give me Romania?’ They refused to give us anything. They’re not doing it for love, they’re doing it for money. George Lucas has legitimately been making one film for 35 years, and that’s money, baby.”
[IMG:R]Despite that, Dreyfuss has everlasting fondness for Spielberg. “Steven is the bravest director in the world, bravest. I don’t know whether he’s given credit for this but Steven Spielberg does not have to do anything but repeat himself, and he doesn’t. If you look at any other director of his stature or near his stature, all they do is repeat themselves. That’s all they do. So my respect for Spielberg is way up there, because he doesn’t have to do Schindler’s List and he doesn’t have to do this or that or Munich or whatever. He could just ride ET for the rest of his life.
“I think when the book is written about Steven Spielberg, it will have more surprises in it like that than any other,” he continued. “When we did Jaws, Jaws was a film that had probably more anecdotes and more stuff and more epic stories, amazing. One of them was that you could actually see a boy become a man. That’s what he did. He was a boy given a boy’s spectacular early ’70s opportunity in Hollywood, and he went through truly the pressure cooker of all pressure cookers and he grew up and became a man. It was an amazing thing to watch.”
Dreyfuss knew that Spielberg‘s follow-up movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, would be an enduring classic, so he employed subterfuge to get the part. “That was the only movie I ever badmouthed other actors in order to get the role. I used to walk by Steven‘s office and say things like, ‘Nicholson is crazy.’ Or ‘Pacino has no sense of humor.’ And I got the part because I said, ‘Steven, you need a kid. You need to have a kid in that role.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You’re hired.’ Because I knew that that film would outlast all of us.”
Prior to that, working with Lucas on American Graffiti inspired Dreyfuss to develop an impeccable Lucas impression. Mimicking his high pitched monotone, Dreyfuss shared, “This is George Lucas talking to an actor. ‘You wanna do it again? Wanna do it again?'”
So good was Dreyfuss‘s Lucas that he was able to play pranks on actors auditioning for Star Wars. “I once imitated George when he was casting Star Wars and Harrison was in the lobby on the ladder making his lamps or something. Actor after actor after actor would come in to try out for that role. I was hanging out with him and Brian De Palma. George was just so bored to death, it was killing him. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll be you’ because I had a beard at the time. So Brian and George sat on the couch and I sat behind the desk and the next actor walked in and it was Nick Nolte. So he was really wasted and tired, he sat down and I said, ‘So, tell me what you’ve done.’ ‘I just did this miniseries and [grumbles].’ ‘Have you read the script? You like the idea of Star Wars?’ and I did that for like five minutes until Brian cracked up. He couldn’t let it go on. And I wasn’t paid for that either.”
When Dreyfuss makes fun of Lucas‘ decades-long quest to perfect the Star Wars series, he knows from personal experience. “I visited George and John Williams at the Beatles’ Apple Studios in London when they were making the first film. And then last year I visited John and George when they were making the last film at the Apple studio. And I realized that they had been sitting there for 35 years making the same movie. Didn’t you want to do something else, make a musical or something, a short about Iran? I don’t know what, but it was bizarre.”
Other, smaller movies also hold a special place in Dreyfuss‘ heart. “First of all, there’s no such thing as another job. When I was nine years old, I knew I wanted to be a movie star and that meant to me the body of work. It didn’t mean one role. It meant having a body of work to be proud of. So in the ’80s, a whole bunch of movies came along that were smaller but brilliant – Tin Men and Once Around – and there was no hesitation. Those were the movies I was born to make, so I never thought otherwise. There were films that were bigger that I said no to and films that were smaller that I said no to and films that were more successful that I said no to. Ah, but I have no regrets.”
Even some of his notable failures were positive experiences. “When Rosie O’Donnell and I made the sequel to Stakeout, we had such a good time making this movie and we went to the press junket and we were laughing up a storm and telling jokes and having a good time, and then it finally began to sink in that the press wasn’t smiling. And they thought it was a piece of junk. And really, I remember the moment where Rosie and I went, ‘I don’t think they like this movie.’ We had a good time.”
Dreyfuss earned his second Oscar nomination for Mr. Holland’s Opus in 1996. Though he did not win, the film remains one of his proudest achievements. “As a matter of fact, it’s one of the few films whose afterlife has been as substantive as the film. I remember one night a week after, two weeks after it opened, I was listening to one of those late night national talk shows where the guy goes, ‘Hawaii,’ he presses the button. ‘Mars,’ boom. And everyone was talking about different aspects of the film. I realized that the film had made an impact far beyond our expectations and it still has. So I’m enormously proud of it.”
That film also sported a pre-Crash Terrence Howard as a black kid with no rhythm. Dreyfuss said there were no signs of his greatness back then. “No, but I was never as good an actor as I was, let’s say in American Graffiti, in anything I ever did before American Graffiti. I mean, I was an overacting TV schticklock comic stupid neurotic actor and I overworked all the time. How I got good, I don’t know. But when they hired me for American Graffiti I was a different actor. Graffiti and Holland and a couple of others, there’s lots of young actors in these movies that turned out great, fabulous.”
Despite his vast memories of old Hollywood, there are some moments that have been permanently lost to Dreyfuss. During his battles with addiction, he made an entire film – Whose Life Is It Anyway? – that he cannot remember.
“It’s true because I was loaded all the time. I don’t discuss that particular film without saying that, because it’s just not true. I can’t really take credit. I can take blame. I can’t really discuss it because I was just out of my mind. When I say that I can’t, I mean that I really can’t. I don’t credit, I don’t evaluate it. It’s kind of a black hole. If people get things out of it, that’s great. There’s a very famous scene in Becket where Peter O’Toole and [Richard] Burton were so drunk they kept falling off their knees. But you could never tell because they’re just brilliant. So it’s not really germane in a sense, but for me it is because I did something I was ashamed of.”
With all of his uncensored anecdotes, there really was no juicy badmouthing to be done. “I had a great time and maybe two or three films I didn’t have a great time and I’ll never tell you which ones they were, but I just had a great time. I rarely, if ever, I worked once with an *sshole. And the mythology of Hollywood is that you’re always working with a prima donna, you’re always working with someone who’s impossible and that never happened – except once. I worked with an actress once who was so disliked that they gave her a “Goodbye, Shelly” party the day after she left. I thought that was kind of funny. I worked with people who might have had the reputation of potential prima donna-ness, but they were great when I worked with them. And going to work was always fun.”
