‘YOU HOPE THEY LAST...’
Filmmaker ROB REINER talks about a career filled with iconic characters, scenes, lines
Director Rob Reiner (“A Few Good Men,” “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally…”) recently visited the WLS-AM (890) studios for an interview for the “Roe & Roeper Show,” hosted by Roe Conn and Sun-Times movie columnist Richard Roeper. His latest film, “And So It Goes,” starring Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, opens Friday. What follows is an excerpt of their conversation.
CONN: You’ve made [a number of] iconic movies. Whenever any piece of any of these films —“The Princess Bride,” “An American President,” “A Few Good Men” — is on, I have to watch the rest of it. Even if it’s the closing credits I will sometimes watch it.
ROEPER: “This is Spinal Tap,” “An American President.”
REINER: That makes me feel great because you make movies and you hope people enjoy them and you hope they last. And one of the great thrills I got last year, was, they did a 25th anniversary of Princess Bride and they had it at Lincoln Center and all of these people who had — it was like the Rocky Horror Show, they’re basically just calling out the lines. And what gave me such a kick out of it was, all these people who were like eight, nine, 10 years old when they saw it for the first time now have kids of their own and they’re introducing their kids to it. It’s a thrill.
ROEPER: A lot of your films, they have what I call that repeatability factor. People talk about their favorite films, you know when you talk about “Princess Bride” OR “A Few Good Men” OR “Spinal Tap” OR “When Harry Met Sally,” it’s the kind of film, where if you’re clicking around you’ll stop on it and say “oh this part is great! and 45 minutes later the closing credits are going. Some great films, like a “Schindler’s List,” don’t have a repeatability factor for me.
REINER: You don’t get sucked into “Schindler’s List” every time and have to watch, ya know?
ROEPER: “Princess Bride” is a fable, but there is a timelessness because the dialogue and the relationships because these films are about the characters.
REINER: It’s a lot of fun for me that there are lines that are quoted from the movies, I get a tremendous kick out of the fact that you know my mother, who has the line in “When Harry Met Sally”— “I’ll have what she’s having”— that that is now one of the top lines of all time in the AFI or whatever. And I love the fact that she’s in there with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. Right there with them,
CONN: Is your dad [legendary comedian Carl Reiner] happy about that?
REINER: He is actually. He’s very happy. Very proud of the fact that she’s immortalized with it.
CONN: As a guy who started as an actor and then went to become a director, and every actor says, I wish to direct some day... were there people trying to talk you out of it? Because your television career was going really well, your
acting career.
REINER: Well, in my day, people who came out of television were considered second-class citizens. The royalty was movies and we were the peons. And so to make a transition from a sitcom actor to become a film director was just not heard of. There was me and Ronny Howard and a few others, but it didn’t happen. Now everyone goes back and forth between television and movies. But in those days it was a very, very tough transition.
ROEPER: In “And So It Goes,” you’ve got a role — you’re the pianist, the accompanist to Diane Keaton’s lounge singer. But as an actor, as you know you’re at the mercy of everyone else. And I’m thinking, I’ll bet you had more fun as a director all these years
than having to worry about the next role.
REINER: It’s true, you don’t have the anxiety of waiting for the next role. Now, because I’ve been able to do both, whenever I get a chance to act, that, to me is fun because I don’t have the headache. Somebody else has all the problems.
CONN: In “A Few Good Men,” that great scene, “you can’t handle the truth,” did know that you had one of the most iconic scenes ever to be put on film?
REINER: You never know what scenes are going to last or have an impression, you’re just doing something that is in support of the story. I knew the scene was working, I mean Jack Nicholson’s performance is incredible. There’s a little story that goes with it. When I went to shoot it, I asked Jack if he wanted me to shoot him first or shoot the coverage, the reaction shots — Tom, Demi, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Pollak — you know I had a lot of cutaways from people reacting. And Jack said, “Why don’t you shoot them first and I’ll be off-camera and that way I can rehearse the thing and by the time I’m ready to shoot I’ll be ready to go.”
And so now we start the first thing, we’re shooting somebody else and he gives, what you see on camera, he gives that performance. And he does it over and over and over again — off camera. And I finally said to Jack, why don’t you save some of this? He says, “Rob, you don’t understand, I love to act. I don’t get great parts like this all the time.”
CONN: Your new film stars Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton.
REINER: Yes, two slouches. The genesis of the movie came from an experience we had when we were doing “The Bucket List” press junket. And everybody would ask us, “What’s on your Bucket List?” and Jack Nicholson would say, “One more great romance.” And that became the idea for this movie, we wanted to explore the idea of two people finding each other at that later stage in life.
ROEPER: Through the decades, Douglas and Keaton had never worked together.
REINER: And they were dying to work together, they never had. And you know, when you do a romantic comedy, you always wonder, are you going to have the chemistry? It was like instant chemistry. They were
terrific together.
ROEPER: There were some real-life parallels. Michael’s character has a son with a drug problem, and Michael has lost a brother to addiction, and his own son has had drug problems.
REINER: And you know I didn’t have to talk to him about it, he knew he could play those scenes without having to discuss it. And I have talked to Michael about that privately, about what he’s gone through. And we’re very close with each other. We share a lot of things. We both have fathers who achieved at a very high level, and we both made our bones on TV series. He was on “[The] Streets of San Francisco,” and I did “All In The Family,” so we have a lot of things in common and I’ve known him a long time. He’s a great guy.
CONN: So his health is good and he looks great in the film. Diane looks great, too.
REINER: He’s doing great with Catherine [ZetaJones]. His life is really going really well.
CONN: You almost hate it — the guy is talented, good looking…
REINER: I hate him because of the amount of hair he has.