Interview conducted by Josh Horowitz
December 3, 2003
Normally, a character actor like Bob Balaban should just recede into the background of celebrity much like the men he portrays. But that’s just it, Bob Balaban’s characters register. You remember that face, often those glasses, or at least that voice. At least I have. I’ve always been a fan. I was a fan of his cartographer/translator in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. I was a fan of his comedic spins on Warren Littlefield, the then-president of NBC in THE LATE SHIFT and SEINFELD. And in recent years, he’s been memorable as part of the ensemble in the Christopher Guest directed troika, WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, BEST IN SHOW, and A MIGHTY WIND.
Balaban was born into the business. His uncle was the Chairman of Paramount and his father was a dominant force in Chicago theater. Aside from acting, Balaban has written, produced and directed in film, television, and theater. Two years ago, he was nominated for an Oscar for producing GOSFORD PARK.
One of his great sources of pride today is his off-Broadway production of THE EXONERATED, which he directed. The play, which details the moving stories of wrongfully convicted prisoners on death row, features a revolving celebrity cast. Everyone from Kathleen Turner to Alanis Morissette (currently appearing) has been in the production.
Balaban gave me a ring on his cell phone from a cab just recently.
Bob Balaban: Josh, how are you?
Josh Horowitz: Hi. I got a chance to see THE EXONERATED yesterday.
BB: Great. How was Amy Irving in it?
JH: I thought she was very good. How did your association with the play begin?
BB: About five years ago a young actor, Erik Jensen and his girlfriend, Jessica Blank went around the country doing interviews with about 25 people who had been on death row, who had been exonerated. They were moved to do this after attending a conference on the death penalty. They came back with reams of material. They brought me the material and I immediately threw it on its feet with a bunch of movie stars. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins and Richard Dreyfuss and many others did a series of benefits where we simply read the transcripts. In the course of five years we cut it down. I was the director at this point so I helped organize this and helped bring in more material so this could feel more like drama. We’ve raised over $300,000 for our six characters in the play, who receive the money directly. It doesn’t try to change your mind about the death penalty. It just tries to make us all aware in a very non-political way of what can happen to an innocent person.
JH: It sort of fills an odd place in the theater world. I wouldn’t call it entertainment, at least not in the sense that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is. Where do you think it fits in?
BB: Well, that’s kind of a quote from Ben Brantley’s New York Times review. He said, this is entertaining, it’s just entertaining on a deeper level. It’s being engaged, being moved, being stimulated. In a funny way this is hybrid theater. I guess I call it “docu-theater.”
JH: I often think of directing as an egotistical profession, adding flourishes and grand gestures. But your direction here is so spare, it goes in an altogether other direction.
BB: Truly, any good directing or good writing or good acting has to be in the service of the story. Whatever it is that brings this thing across more richly and more interestingly and compellingly to an audience, that’s what we do. If it required us to strip ourselves naked and stand on our heads and sing, I’m sure we would have done that.
JH: You career has really run the gamut. THE EXONERATED is obviously more experimental theater. You’ve done TV and mainstream film, etc. Has there always been an interest in trying everything out?
BB: It’s exactly what I was doing when I was 18 or 19 and then I didn’t do it for many years because I was more or less content to be an actor for hire. When I was in my high school years, I started to do some writing and putting on weird plays . Then I got interested in film and a lot of other stuff and then I got
cast in YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN in my junior year of college and basically decided I would be an actor. I just got work. So I was in MIDNIGHT COWBOY and CATCH-22, all very early on. I basically was fairly fully employed for about 15 years until I woke up and went, wait a minute, I’ve just worked with Sidney Lumet, who is a great director, on PRINCE OF THE CITY. I should learn something from him so I went to Sidney and asked if I could apprentice myself to him and he said yes. So I ditched the next few acting jobs and spent about five months dogging Sidney around, watching him make a movie[DEATHTRAP]. I wrote down every shot. I asked him why he used what lens, went to the pre-production meetings and the editing room all the way to the first preview. That’s when I began splitting off. I directed a short film and a pilot. I directed this odd movie called PARENTS. So basically since then, I’m always scrambling around for something I find interesting and I don’t really care what it is. I write a series of best-selling children’s books called MCGROWL. Usually when you’re an actor, you have these nervous vacations in between jobs because you’re never sure when the next job will come, but I don’t tend to have periods like that.
JH: Can you ever completely relax and just not do anything?
BB: When I get an acting job in a movie, that for me is like a spa retreat.
JH: Your family certainly has deep roots in the theater and film. Most sons or daughters have a strong reaction to joining the family trade, sometimes rebelling. Did you?
BB: Many more descendants of people in show business end up in show business because it looks like fun I think. Kids love the fact that it’s so un-grownup. You get to stay up late. You go to parties. You meet people. It’s very child-like. It’s not very adult not to keep regular hours and know what you are going to do next summer.
JH: I’m always fascinated by the persona actors and particular character actors establish over a career. This is what was written about you by Leonard Maltin in his movie guide: “During the late 1970s and 1980s, producers looking
for physically unprepossessing, soft-spoken intellectual types rarely got past the letter B in their casting directories. No one surpassed Balaban in those roles-and the more dispassionate or loathsome the character, the better he was.”
BB: Well I’ve tried to change that a little bit. I’ve done a few things that were a little different. But there is no question in movies you are both restricted and aided by whatever your physical presentation is. For the most part, I’m more lawyers and doctors and psychiatrists and stuff like that. And I don’t think people are crazy to put me there. On the other hand, there’s lots of other stuff that I can do that I do get to do on the stage that I would probably never get to in a movie.
JH: What are you good at playing? What is your greatest proficiency as an actor?
BB: I think my greatest proficiency is for showing up. I’m very reliable. Sometimes I’m good, sometimes I’m not as good as I’d like to be but I try hard.
JH: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS remains one of my favorite films of all time. You had what must have been a singular experience of simultaneously being directed by Steven Spielberg and acting alongside Francois Truffaut. When did you find out it would be Truffaut you would be sharing most of your scenes with and what was your reaction?
BB: I was very scared and I was especially scared because I didn’t speak French and I was supposed to be this great film director’s interpreter on the movie. But acting is a form of faking anyway so I did get through it. Of course the minute I met him I realized he was not foreboding or frightening. He was just a wonderful interesting fabulous person that I got to stand next to for eight and a half months. It’s probably one of my favorite experiences.
JH: What one thing did you take away most from your relationship from Francois?
BB: If I had to reduce it to one thing, one of the things I admired him for was his realization that he had to limit the scope of the things he was doing to the things he was most interested in doing. He was a man who had nothing peripheral in his life. He just weeded it out and just did what fascinated him. And I wish I could do that more because I have too much periphery in my life. Truffaut had none. He said at one point to me that while he loved the movie and thought Spielberg was brilliant, he said he was so completely not interested if a flying saucer landed across the street he probably would not stop editing his movie to go look at it.
JH: Do you feel like you’ve been able to cut out the periphery, as you’ve grown older.
BB: No, I feel like I’ve added every day. But I like it so I’m obviously not destined to be Francois Truffaut.
JH:I know you did some improv work at Second City when you were quite young. Did that come in handy when your work in the Christopher Guest movies began?
BB: It’s been very useful. We’re always looking for parts of ourselves who are obsessive or weird. There’s no question I have no trouble thinking of dangerous things that might happen if the vine gets twisted around your foot from the flower arrangement [as in A MIGHTY WIND] but that’s not really me but it’s very easy for me to go to that place.
JH: Everyone else it seemed in that movie had an opportunity to sing or play an instrument except for you? What happened?
BB: Although I do sing rather nicely, I play no musical instrument. My character was not required to do that.
JH: These films are so revered today. There are literally almost no good comedies anymore.
BB: I’m inordinately fond of them. It’s great that people feel the same way. Wouldn’t it be great to look on these years as the Preston Sturges years only it’s the Christopher Guest-Sturges years? I think every once in a while somebody comes along who taps into a kind of humor that’s unique and I think Christopher has found away to do that.
JH: What’s coming up?
BB: I’m in MARIE AND BRUCE with Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick. I just did a talk show for the Sundance channel where I take people in my car and talk to them for hours. And of course, the national tour of THE EXONERATED.
JH: Still calling in favors to get people in the show or does it get easier?
BB: No, I’m still calling in favors. I’m going to go do some of that right now actually.
THE EXONERATED is currently playing Off-Broadway in New York City. For ticket information, visit the show’s Web site, www.45bleecker.com/exonerated.html.
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