Why Richard isn't fussy about Hollywood
For a man who has been a Hollywood star and international household name for decades, Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss is remarkably down to earth and unaffected by his celebrity status.
“Celebrity is the silliest, sickest and most dangerous toxic waste,” he says.
In fact, so untouched by it is he that, despite 35 years of working in Tinseltown, he says today that he still feels like an outsider, which is why he left.
The celebrated star of stage and screen is on the Island as a juror at the Bermuda International Film Festival (BIFF), and along with co-juror and long-time friend Carrie Fisher, the duo spent time this week up close and personal with the public at the BIFF Front Room, where he was interviewed by US film critic and BIFF international board member David Poland.
Forthright and humorous in equal measure, Mr. Dreyfuss took his audience behind the scenes of moviemaking to paint a candid picture of a profession and the cut-throat people who drive it.
While star-struck fans worldwide may stand in awe of actors and actresses, that is certainly not the case among the Hollywood brass it seems.
“They are always trying to cure cancer and leprosy, but they don’t say they will cure studio executives, which is as important as curing cancer,” Mr. Dreyfuss says.
“I like to tell studio executives that the only good thing about them is that one day they will be fired, and will be treated as disrespectfully as we are now.”
Apparently screenwriters are even less highly regarded by industry brass.
“Wanting to be a screenwriter is like wanting to come fourth,” the actor says. “Writers not only do not have any power, but also they have to deal with the daily experience of having their moral character destroyed and laughed at in front of their faces. The myth is that they make a lot of money. They do not.”
Regarding celebrity and money, Mr. Dreyfuss says it is amazing that, after 100 years, people still completely misunderstand the two.
“You are the richest person in the world and you get sick. Everyone tells you who the best doctor is to go to, but you don’t know until you’re dead. There is no way of guaranteeing that money will give you anything but money, and money doesn’t answer very much.”
Nevertheless, it is apparently the reason why he is in a new film, ‘Suburban Girl’, coming out later this year, despite reputedly having said in 2004 that he was ending his film career. Bills, it seems, are the great leveller for everyone, even an Academy Award-winning actor.
In terms of celebrity, Mr. Dreyfuss makes clear that what the magazines and down-market media print about people in his profession is not reality.
In Hollywood, famous people have celebrity imposed upon them no matter what. While others do not know the real person, no matter what evidence may be presented to the contrary, nothing dissuades them from believing what they want to believe.
“That is insanity,” he says. “I love to be ‘assumed’. One of my favourite things is to walk into a room and be assumed. ‘Oh, I know everything about you’. ‘Oh really? Then you are an a*******.’
“Nobody believes people who tell the truth about celebs. If you are a movie star, people don’t care about the bad things in your life. You have to be happy, and it is quite an amazing thing to see the death of empathy.”
Asked if he felt a “sense of community” in Hollywood, Mr. Dreyfuss says that while he had many close personal friends who lived there, the closest of whom was Ms Fisher, and he “guessed” there was a sense of community, he never felt part of it. Never.
“On every studio executive’s desk is a picture of that person with five other agents and studio executives on a river rafting trip, but I had never been or wanted to be on that trip. I never felt at home in Hollywood, so I didn’t feel that community.”
Yet through Ms Fisher, whose parties the actor describes as “a feast of weirdness” because of the “bizarre collection of people” she gathers together, he is able to converse with “the most interesting people on Earth”.
Born in Brooklyn in 1947 to Jewish-American parents, Mr. Dreyfuss’ acting career began at age nine at the Beverly Hills Jewish Centre. By age 14 he debuted in the TV production of ‘In Mamma’s House’.
At age 30 he became the youngest actor at the time to win the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in ‘The Goodbye Girl’.
Fame, however, came a few years earlier with the role of Matt Hooper in ‘Jaws’, and he welcomed it.
“It was exactly what I wanted, but it didn’t happen overnight. When I was about 27, 28 and had become a recent celeb, I taught a class in ‘How to be an Unemployed Actor in LA’ because I loved being one myself. I loved the whole life. I loved working, not working, getting jobs, losing jobs. I wanted the whole schmeer, so for me I started working at nine, then making money in TV and theatre in LA when I was 14. Then I started getting a reputation within the industry when I was about 18, so it was a natural progression. There wasn’t one moment when I could say, ‘This is when it happened’ — ‘The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz’, ‘Jaws’ and ‘American Graffiti’ together changed the nature of my professional life.”
Today, with a huge catalogue of film, television and theatre successes to his credit, he admits he is particularly proud of some, would prefer to forget others — which he wouldn’t name — and is ashamed of the circumstances surrounding one. The success of some films surprised him, while others he thought would flop.
“I was intensely proud of ‘Mr. Holland’s Opus’ (1995),” he says. “It was is one of the few films whose afterlife has been as substantive as the film itself, and I realised that it made an impact far beyond our expectations. I also think ‘Close Encounters’ will outlast all of us. I thought ‘Jaws’ would ‘tank’, and as for ‘American Graffiti’, its success shocked everyone.”
Claims that he remembers nothing of making ‘Whose Life is it Anyway’ are denied. While others acclaimed his performance, the recovering substance abuser says he is ashamed that he cannot remember discussing it because he was “out of his mind” at the time.
“It is kind of a black hole, but if people get things out of it that’s great.”
Of his craft, the Academy Award-winning actor says “movie making is a particularly peculiar, wacky, attractive, feverish, ultimately institutionable industry and people behave very oddly.”
Yet it seems to have held him in thrall from childhood, which is when he decided he would become a movie star, and despite the fact that he now claims he does not like film acting.
Comparing it to theatre, which he does like, Mr. Dreyfuss says: “Film acting makes you rich, but it is something that you do alone. You do it out of sequence. There is no audience and everyone in the room is doing something, so you are working for yourself. When you finally see something that you were involved in a year earlier it is not anything you own.
“When you do something in the theatre, however, although they do not pay you, you own it. It is yours for three hours or whatever. You can feel the layers of ownership, and the focus of concentration on you.”
Making people laugh is a particular blessing, and often, when doing comedy, he wished the lights would go up a little so he could enjoy seeing his audience in helpless mirth because that was when he realised “the realise that line about comedy being the surcease from sorrow”.
Recalling an occasion when he shared the stage with 17 other comedians every night, Mr. Dreyfuss says it was “as close to a spiritual experience” he has ever had.
At one time he had an on/off attitude towards giving autographs until he was humbled by one fan who came up to him in the street and simply said, ‘Thank You’.
“I realised actors are the only people in the world where strangers walk up to you in the street and say ‘Thank You’. It was a very important and humbling moment.”
He apparently does not give interviews any more because he doesn’t want to “turn part of (his) life over to writers of articles who are limited in space and time, and who get to editorialise behind your back”.
“If ever I am going to explain myself to the world, which I doubt I will do, I will do it in a book because it has more room for it. Everyone shares on thing: the fact that inside ourselves is a universe of complexity and minute detail that makes up your life which you could not possibly communicate to others.”
In fact, Mr. Dreyfuss harbours a profound hatred of the press for the shameless way it operates, and particularly its obsessive coverage of celebrities, citing such tragic figures as the late Anna Nicole Smith as an example.
Looking back on his career as an actor, Mr. Dreyfuss said going to work was “always fun”, but he has no idea how he went from being “an over-acting TV schtick, and stupid, neurotic actor” pre-’American Graffiti’ to a very different kind of actor in that film and beyond.
“How you get good, I don’t know,” he says modestly.
What he does know, however, is that acting is never “just a job”. Rather, it is about having a body of work of which to be proud.
Of all the directors he has worked with, Mr. Dreyfuss regards Steven Spielberg as “the bravest in the world” for eschewing the path of so many successful directors who simply “repeat themselves”. Instead, the award-winning director constantly comes up with new subjects.
“He could just ride ‘ET’ for the rest of his life but he doesn’t, so my respect for him is way up there.”
Beyond the world of stage and screen, the visiting juror is currently developing a Civics curriculum for public elementary school which will teach fifth graders and up “reason, logic, clarity of thought, the theory of democracy, civilisation and debate, and parsing information in the information industry”.
“As Jefferson said: ‘If people are sovereign, then the tutors are sovereign.”
In fact, Democracy is a major focus for Mr. Dreyfuss, who spent one and a half years researching democracy at Oxford University,where he is a senior research member of its St. Anthony’s College.
