Christopher Walken was a lion Tamer, Tell me about working on your new film, “A Late Quartet.”
String instruments are particularly difficult to simulate. It’s not like playing a trumpet, or sitting at a piano, when they can fake it. Both hands are involved, and body movements. We had to take lessons — a lot of lessons — and I had a cello that I practiced every day. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener became quite good, but I had a more difficult time. I didn’t get very good.
Can you play a basic song, like “Hot Cross Buns”?
No, I couldn’t play really anything.
Had you played any instruments before?
No. When I was a kid my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It’s hard to keep going when you don’t get any better.
And that’s one of the themes of the movie — the obsessive dedication that’s required to be a musician.
I’m that way about learning a script. I like to stand in my kitchen with the script on a counter that’s about chest high. Usually I do something else at the same time — make a chicken or slice vegetables — and all day long I just read it over and over and over.
How do you run lines and cook a chicken at the same time?
It’s the power of distraction. My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.
You’ve expressed a desire to play a “regular guy.” Was “A Late Quartet” that kind of role?
Before we started, I said to Yaron Zilberman, the director, “I think this part is a chance to be myself.” I have played a lot of villains, and there’s a certain kind of tongue-in-cheek aspect to it, an absurd aspect. I was in “Annie Hall,” playing this suicidal guy who wanted to drive into cars. Very quickly afterward was “The Deer Hunter,” and I shot myself in the head. With movies, they’re so expensive to make that if you do something that works, especially early on, it can stick. But there’s a lot of me in this part.
How often do you decline work that’s offered to you?
Not much. If I read a script and I think I’d be terrible in it, then of course I don’t do that. And roles that are just way over the top in terms of strangeness.
Too strange even for you?
Yeah. Sometimes I’ll take a part, and they’ll hire me and then they’ll rewrite it. They Walkenize it — they make it more off the wall, more eccentric.
Is that flattering at all?
No, it’s very annoying! Now I have it in my contract that if you give me the part and you change it, it’s gotta be O.K. with me.
You’ve described yourself as a nervous person.
I think it’s sensible to be nervous and careful and to have backup plans. Somebody asked me, “If you had to give advice to a young actor, what would it be?” I never even knew I was thinking this, but I said, “Always, even in a limo, wear your seat belt.” To me, that’s good advice. Avoid dangerous things.
As a teenager, you worked for a lion tamer in a circus. You’ve described the lion as “like a dog.” Really?
When I said she was like a dog, she was — you could pet her, and she would rub her head on you. I would come into the cage and wave my whip, and she’d kind of lazily get up and sit like a dog and maybe give a little bit of a roar.
Of all the help-wanted ads, what compelled you to respond to that one?
It just looked too good to pass up. I like cats a lot. I’ve always liked cats. They’re great company. When they eat, they always leave a little bit at the bottom of the bowl. A dog will polish the bowl, but a cat always leaves a little bit. It’s like an offering.
Do you leave a little bit at the bottom of the bowl, too?
I do. I always leave a little bit. I have a pizza tray out in my backyard, and all of that extra food goes on it at night. There are possums and raccoons, and they love it. Just before I came down to talk to you this morning, this very big hawk was there for two hours, sitting and watching the squirrels.
