USA TODAY International Edition
Bridges shares a look at ‘Tucker’ behind cameras
Jeff Bridges has lots of memories from filming the 1988 biopic “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” but one is particularly painful.
For his role as automobile visionary Preston Tucker, Bridges recalls rehearsing a scene in which he punches a large bulletin board to “really express my anger” to employees. Well, he packed a little more power than he wanted to and broke his right hand.
Director Francis Ford Coppola sent the Oscar-winning actor to the hospital, where he was outfitted with a removable cast. He came back to do the scene again, “and I almost break my left hand!” Bridges says. “I look back and I see that behind this bulletin board is an angle iron (metal frame) that I just perfectly hit each time. I was so pleased that Francis didn’t fire me.”
Bridges has long been an avid photographer on movie sets, capturing black-and-white shots behind the scenes with his signature Widelux panoramic camera on everything from 2010’s “TRON: Legacy” to 2016’s “Hell or High Water.” He’s sharing with USA TODAY an exclusive collection of photos from “Tucker” (which premieres Tuesday on Blu-ray and digital HD) for the film’s 30th anniversary.
What’s even more impressive is that he did it all with a broken hand. “I must have really wanted to take the pictures,” Bridges, 68, says. “I tucked my left hand under the thing, and I used my center finger to hit the button so it wasn’t too much stress on my arm.”
When Bridges sees the old images from “Tucker,” which chronicled Preston Tucker’s idea for a “car of the future” with revolutionary safety designs and how he ran afoul of Detroit’s Big Three automakers, “all kinds of images and stories spill into my head.”
Bridges loved working with Coppola, with “his childlike energy and enthusiasm” and idiosyncrasies, including crafting a camcorder video of the entire “Tucker” narrative for the actors to use as reference before production began. “He created this spirit of an ‘Our Gang’ comedy, like, ‘Let’s make a movie! This is fun!’ ”
He also took photos of his co-stars. Bridges remembers Joan Allen, who played Tucker’s wife, Vera, as “gorgeous, inside and outside,” and says the late Martin Landau, who played financier Abe Karatz, “was so wonderful to work with. I really miss him.”
Bridges is most wistful when talking about his father, Lloyd, who died in 1998 and co-starred as Sen. Homer Ferguson. The film was the first time Bridges and his father worked together as adults (“When you see a little 8-year-old kid running around in ‘Sea Hunt,’ that’s probably me”).
“It was so wonderful playing with my dad on that level – I say playing, because acting is really an extension of playing pretend when you were a kid,” Bridges says. “He was such a great playmate and approached all of his work with such joy. That’s probably the greatest thing I’ve learned from my dad.”
Bridges’ funniest memories of “Tucker” were palling around with Landau and watching a courtroom scene involving a day player who was hired to say one line in the witness box and couldn’t stop falling asleep between takes. “I say to Marty, ‘Look, he’s not tense, he’s just relaxed, man. Chilling out.’ ”
It turns out the actor had narcolepsy and would zonk out if he got really nervous. “From that day on, I did exactly that same technique,” Bridges quips. “Rather than trying to hold my tension for the scene while they were resetting the shot, I would just kind of go to sleep.”