In 2004, two years after the $800 million-plus worldwide gross of Spider-Man confirmed the viability of all things comic book-related, director Guillermo del Toro brought Mike Mignola’s Hellboy to the big screen, starring Ron Perlman as a gruff, reluctant, occult crime-fighter who just happens to be a giant, red harbinger of the apocalypse. A fantastically imagined mid-size commercial hit, the movie was the lead punch in a one-two combo — the other being 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, which racked up six Oscar nominations, including one for Best Foreign Language Film — that landed del Toro the plum assignment of following in Peter Jackson’s footsteps with an adaptation of The Hobbit. In advance of the release of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, del Toro talks about his surprisingly personal connection to the franchise, striking the right balance in practical effects work and CGI, and the difference between climbing Mount Everest and driving on the freeway. For the full read, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

In chatting with the lovely Jenna Fischer recently I had a chance to ask her if her experience on Lollilove — which she wrote, directed and starred in, with then-husband James Gunn — had really soured her on directing as much as it was made out to be in some other interviews. In a word, yes.

“I just learned from doing that film that I’m an actor,” she says. “I approach work very emotionally — like, what’s the emotion, what’s the relationship here? And that’s a part of being a director, but the director is also supposed to think about how things look, how to place things and visually paint a picture. And my brain just did not want to do it, it couldn’t paint the picture. Also, I didn’t want to think about it, because then when I had to go in and act, it made me very self-conscious. So I like having the tunnel-vision of just focusing on character and relationship and emotion. Directing hurt my brain; it’s just not big enough for it.”

And the writing? “I’ll never do that again as well,” she says, sweetly serious. “It was horribly painful as well, I didn’t like it. What was great about doing the movie was how much I appreciate anybody who can conjure up something from nothing, anybody who can write or direct and tell a story visually, and any crew member, too. Directing a movie, you gain such an appreciation for what every person on the set is doing, and how things don’t happen in a vacuum, and that the actor isn’t the most important thing to the movie. They just aren’t. Sometimes you get treated like you are, but that’s just a way to baby you so that you stay calm and sedate. But you aren’t actually very important. And that’s a really good thing to know in Hollywood, to keep some perspective.”

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is no stranger to fantasy and adventure — his imaginative art and production designs and knack for breathtaking practical effects have helped anchor and inform the Hellboy franchise, whose sequel opens next week, as well as the politically-tinged, Spanish-language films, including 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone and the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, that have made him an arthouse darling and critics’ favorite. For his next big screen endeavor, though, del Toro is of course tackling the biggest fantasy adventure of them all — following in the footsteps of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster The Lord of the Rings trilogy by adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit into not one, but two films.

While the established level of craftsmanship might be daunting to some, del Toro seems not only emboldened by the opportunity, but downright enthused by the challenge. “The way I see the five films, provided we do everything right, is as a symphony, and what I’m doing is an overture,” he says. “Therefore it can be a different color and energy, and lead  you into something that is already filmic legacy. All we’ve got to do is create an almost freestanding piece that can then, if viewed together, make sense as a symphonic whole. If the two first pieces are crafted with their independent merits, but also the second film leads seamlessly into the first film of the trilogy, we would have created perhaps one of the most beautiful symphonies, filmically, that has been done. The idea that I’m going to have the tools that exist in Weta, that exist in New Zealand, to create those films…” Here del Toro pauses briefly, a wide grin breaking out across his face. “I am ready to build the Pyramids, or the Temple of Ra!” For the full read, from Reelz Channel, click here.

As previously mentioned, on Monday I did some interviews for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, opening wide July 11, and Mike Mignola, the originator of the source material, talked a little bit about his collaborations with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro — including a rather strange visit to a haunted house with the Pan’s Labyrinth director and composer Danny Elfman.

“This is one of those things that Guillermo always says will happen, and then usually never happens,” recounts Mignola, with a smile. “But he lured me over to England during post-production on the first film by saying, ‘Hey, you, me and Danny Elfman should get a haunted hotel room.’ But we did, and then we decided to each spend a half-hour alone in the room. Guillermo very much changed his mind when we turned out the lights and it was his turn. He wasn’t as keen on it then. And then Danny’s cell phone rang, and it has some sort of Nightmare Before Christmas ring-tone, and he and I nearly wet ourselves laughing. Nothing happened, but it was very interesting,” to say the least.

Mignola, who said he pushed to move the character of Lobster Johnson from the second film to a possible third movie after some late studio and producer wavering on the matter (“I said you’ve written a very specific story for a medium, and switching [from Johan Krauss to Lobster Johnson] now, late in development, would be like saying, well, we can’t get Superman, let’s just put in Batman instead — you can’t swap them out,” he explains), feels that del Toro has plenty of material in mind to continue to franchise, as long as box office returns warrant it. “If Guillermo puts everything in the third film that he’s talked about, it’ll be about 180 hours long,” Mignola says.

I did some interviews yesterday for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Luke Goss, who appears in that film under a lot of white make-up as a spear-twirling elven prince bent on Earthly domination, talked about his next movie, the just-wrapped big screen adaptation of the videogame series Tekken, helmed by Dwight Little (Murder at 1600).

“I play Steve Fox, the former leader, this crispy Tekken guy,” says Goss. “He’s not that old, actually — I say that because they surrounded me with a bunch of 21-year-olds. We filmed the fight scenes in their entirety, like 30 times, so we’d choreograph them and then go through the whole thing, which was very different than the work on Hellboy, and exhausting. And I think it’ll definitely be a hard R rating, because a lot of the fans are, [well], also crispy Tekken dudes.”

Robotic loneliness, love and yearning
may not seem like the most natural jumping off points for an animated
film, or any movie for that matter, but those questions were at the
heart of Wall▪E, according to director Andrew Stanton. “We
had this lunch around the time of Toy Story, in 1994, where we
were batting around any idea we could think of to try and come up
with what the next movie would be,” recalls Stanton. “One of the
half-brained sentences tossed out was, ‘What if we did the last robot
on Earth — everybody’s left and this machine just doesn’t know it
can stop?’ All the details weren’t there, there
wasn’t a name for the character and we didn’t even know what it would
look like. But it was just the loneliest scenario
I’d ever heard and I just loved it; I think that’s why it stayed in
the ether for so long.”

The yawning interim between Wall▪E‘s
inception and release, marked by some noodling around and roughly
four years of production work, have of course been filled with
animated hit after hit from Pixar — nine theatrical releases in all,
and around $5 billion in ticket sales. Still, there’s no simple
formula. “We’re always trying to be different with every movie,”
says Stanton. “We’re a director-driven studio and we’re trying to
encourage and support the (director’s) vision so that every film will
be unique, and have its own taste and slant. But I knew going in that
this was more of a major unconventional film, even when we just had
the character conceit and nothing else.” For the full interview feature piece, from Reelz, click here.

I chatted with Jenna Fischer a while back, in advance of the sadly aborted release of The Promotion, and she confirmed that The Office was a dream gig for her in more ways than the obvious. “I was a secretary for five years in various offices and I loved it,” says Fischer. “I always thought if I didn’t have a career in acting, I’d want to be the secretary to the President of the United States. Like, what is the biggest job you can shoot for as an assistant? I think I can do it, I can anticipate his or her needs!”

Here she laughs a bit, then continues. “I really did like it, though. I like filing, I like organizing things — not in my personal life, but I love going to work and working on an Excel spreadsheet. My Christmas list is on an Excel spreadsheet — any reason to make an Excel spreadsheet! But really, I like offices, and I like office work, so to get an acting job set in an office was like my dream come true — they combine my two loves. Even now, if you take to a Staples, I’ll get lost in there. The sheer variety of Post-It notes is amazing to me.”

Not everything in Fischer’s occupational past is peaches and cream, though. “I didn’t like catering very much — catering is so weird. I was always offended when people would look right through me, like I was a moving prop of food, but then I didn’t want anyone talking to me either,” says Fischer. “I was like, ‘Please don’t ask me any questions, don’t ask me what’s in it, I’m just going to make it up.’ I was always very grouchy as a caterer. If I was at a wedding and everyone [is getting] chicken, just don’t ask for the sauce on the side, just don’t. Because I don’t want to have to walk back to the kitchen and get sauce in a little cup and remember where you’re sitting, because you look like every other person at every other wedding that I’ve done for the past two years. So I was very grouchy, but as a result, when I’m at an event that is catered, I do not ask for my sauce on the side. I am polite but not too chatty with the staff, because I’ve been there.”

I had a chance to chat with Steve Conrad, the writer-director of The Promotion, recently, and ask about Chad Schmidt, his long-gestating, zonked-sounding script about an actor who moves to Los Angeles in 1989 and, over the next 16 to 24 months, finds his career burnished but mostly stymied by the fact that he looks like Brad Pitt.

“I said I wanted to do a movie like Straight Time now, but I feel like I can’t just do it. I just feel like there’s a more invitational way to make that movie,” recalls Conrad, the writer of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, of the project’s genesis. “So I thought long and hard and I came up with this concept making a comment about faith, which I’m really preoccupied by — how little we actually control and choose, and how difficult it is to just put one foot in front of the other some days. And so I had to get Brad Pitt to sign off on it, because it wouldn’t be worth my time to write if he weren’t up for it. So he’s up for it, spiritually, and I know that he’s starting to talk about directors now, to start to talk about making the actual movie. So I feel like we’ve slipped into a groove on it.”

Conrad is a credited producer on project, and laughs about rumors that it’s started filming, guerrilla-style. But would he like a chance to take a crack at it as director, now that he’s whet his behind-camera appetite with The Promotion? “Oh, I absolutely do have interest,” says Conrad. “I don’t know if he has an interest in me. Brad doesn’t know I’ve even made this movie, but I’m trying to get him to come see it.”

“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” Conrad continues, “but I think I’m going to put that script online, because people ask me about it all the time. There’s just something about the idea that people want to lean into. I don’t think there’s any harm in reading the script, do you? Why can’t it be like a book? People don’t not see a movie because they read the book — no one said, ‘I don’t wanna see Harry Potter because I read it already.’ Why would they not go see the movie if they read the script?” Here Conrad pauses, thoughtfully. “I’m going to ask (Sony) if I can do that.” Another beat. “They’ll say no, though,” he says, somewhat with the resignation of an academic who knows he’s about to lose a bureaucratic argument.

Director Nicholas Stoller and his Forgetting Sarah Marshall star, Jason Segel, not only delivered a solid commercial base knock ($62 million, domestically) with their spring comedy, but they also laid track for a couple future collaborations as well — including Five-Year Engagement as well as a reboot of the Muppets franchise, which the pair are writing together. “Jason had a general meeting at Disney, and at the end of the meeting they asked, ‘Are there any properties you’re interested in?'” recounts Stoller in a recent interview. “And he said, ‘Well, I’m just curious — what you’re doing with the Muppets?’ And there’s an awkward pause, and they looked at each other and said, ‘Nothing.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you do something, I’d love to be considered.’ And then they said, ‘We’d love to have you involved,’ and then Jason pulled me into the project.”

“I love the Muppets, like any comedy geek,” Stoller continues. “I call the Muppets the gateway drug to comedy; that’s what kids get into when [they’re young], that was certainly the case with me. We’re in the middle of the script right now. It’s an old-school Muppets movie, like Muppets Take Manhattan or The Great Muppet Caper. [It should be] really cool.”

It’s been 15 years, but for Nancy Travis, So I Married an Axe Murderer is still a scarring experience… literally, actually. Just out on an air-quote special edition DVD, timed to coincide with the theatrical release of The Love Guru, which includes a code for the download of eight free songs from the movie’s bestselling soundtrack, the 1993 film stars Mike Myers stars as Charlie MacKenzie, a San Francisco poet who meets the girl of his dreams, Harriet Michaels (Travis), when he stops to pick up some haggis for his parents at a butcher shop where Harriet works. Although neurotically commitment-phobic in the past (dumping one girlfriend because she “smelled like vegetable beef soup,” for instance), Charlie thinks that Harriet could be the one. His mother, May (Brenda Fricker), and best friend, cop Tony (Anthony LaPaglia), however, help feed Charlie’s worst instincts when Harriet’s circumstantial connection to a series of slayings makes him begin to wonder if she could be an axe-wielding serial killer. Nevertheless, after those fears are momentarily quelled, Charlie pops the question, leading to a wild honeymoon where all is eventually revealed.

Calling in from Los Angeles, Travis took some time recently to field a couple questions about her experience on the film (a quick clip is available here), and one can read between the lines as they may. The chat is excerpted below.

Brent Simon: You’d done a couple comedies prior to this — was it the Three Men and a Baby films that really opened things up for you?

Nancy Travis: I think even earlier than that, I was kicking around New York a while, and first got a break doing commercials. And then I did Three Men and a Little Lady, Married to the Mob and Eight Men Out all at the same time, and that started to really open things up more. I actually maybe think it was Married to the Mob, in which I played a comedic caricature, that opened things up. But everything led to the next thing — there was no bolt of lightning where everyone suddenly said, “Oh, get her!” You could even go so far as saying the first sitcom I ever did opened up a whole comedic avenue as well. And right before Axe Murderer I was doing The Vanishing, a very intense horror movie, and I literally drove from that location to begin shooting Axe Murderer.

BS: To beautiful San Francisco, which plays an integral part in the movie. Did you shoot all of it there, or were you back in Los Angeles some as well?

NT: All of it was really shot there. We were there three months, and it was fantastic.

BS: Does that make a big difference for an actor, being on location? Or does it depend on the movie?

NT: I don’t know, I think for an actor it’s more interesting and fun. And often, because you’re away from your own home environment, your whole focus is on the film. But I think I’ve seen just as many things shot almost exclusively in studios that are just as good and interesting.

BS: How tricky was it trying to play different tonalities, because your character is seen, through the lens of Mike’s character, as quite different at certain points in the film, but you don’t want to bait those things too obviously.

NT: Yeah, it’s a tricky thing to balance, and often we did various takes of my
reactions to things, just to see how far we could push that limit.

BS: Mike came out of Saturday Night Live, which, despite all the camaraderie, is still an intensively competitive environment, with everyone jostling to get face time, and get their sketches on the air. Was he more relaxed with So I Married an Axe Murderer, or still really driven?

NT: It was his leading man debut. He’d already done [Wayne’s World], so he was already a movie star, and this script came along, and the man who eventually became my husband (Robert Fried) is the producer, and it was hard to get Mike to commit to do the movie because it was a leading man and not a character. And I think to help him feel (long pause) comfortable, he created the role of his father. The studio wanted to cast an actor to play that role, and Mike really wanted to do it. They brought in a make-up artist to do all this prosthetic make-up, and they made him screen test as the father, and that ends up being some of the most memorable and charming scenes in the movie.

BS: I’ve talked with Mike before about his process of testing out his characters in live settings — 30 minutes of scripted material, 30 minutes of improvisation, which obviously isn’t the case here.

NT: This was a movie that shows a side of him that no one ever really saw before — it’s a certain vulnerability that he has in the movie that you don’t really get to see. It was a dangerous place for him to go as an actor, and yet possibly one of the more rewarding.

BS: Was his angst outwardly manifested on set?

NT: First of all, I have a lot of admiration for him. I think he’s incredibly talented, and has an instinct about what is funny and what he does that is funny that a lot of people don’t have. Mike did a rewrite on the script and it was his idea to set it in San Francisco with the whole coffee bar craze. And he did a lot in terms of creating a lot of the characters and plot of the movie. So he had quite a hefty hand in it, and I think with that goes a lot of responsibilty and nervous tension as to how it’s all going to turn out. And I think that was tough for him.

BS: So what’s your verdict on the infamous ghost child from Three Men and a Baby?

NT:
You know, I denied it for so long, and came up with excuses for what it
could possibly be. And then someone said, “You should just really look
it, it’s really weird.” So I rented the movie and it looks like a
ghost-child. I mean, every excuse that I gave seemed to fall by the
wayside. Either that, or it’s the greatest marketing ploy in the
history of moviemaking. We shot that in L.A. and in England, and a
little bit that we shot in New York, and the piece that we shot on the
soundstage is the piece that is the ghost-child.

BS: Wrapping up, back to Axe Murderer, so how was working in a butcher shop?

NT: Oh God, believe it or not I went to a butcher shop and did research, quote-unquote, and the one thing the butcher told me was, “Cutting meat, there’s nothing to it — all you have to do is remember not to look up from the knife and the meat, keep your eyes on the knife.” And that was the one thing I took away with me from my training, and sure enough, the first day of shooting I’m cutting the meat and Mike Myers walks into the butcher shop, and as I’m cutting the meat I look up to say my line and cut my finger. So then I was yelling, “Cut, cut!” and literally meaning cut. So we stopped production, they rushed me to the hospital, I got stitches, the whole thing. I still have a little scar.

To view the film’s special edition trailer, click here; to purchase So I Married an Axe Murderer on DVD, meanwhile, click here.

On February 23, 2003, an op-ed article about director Roman Polanski’s U.S. fugitive status appeared in the Los Angeles Times. What was most remarkable about it was not the fact that it was written by Samantha Geimer, the now 45-year-old woman whose sexual encounter as a 13-year-old with the Polish-born filmmaker triggered 1977 rape charges and a high-profile Los Angeles indictment. No, it was the fact that Geimer, the perceived “victim” of Polanski’s actions, was making the case that his Oscar-nominated film The Pianist should be judged on its own merits. Two days later, Geimer followed up the article with an appearance on Larry King Live. “I got over it [the sexual encounter] a long time ago,” she told King. “I wasn’t prepared to carry a lot of bad feelings with me and further damage my life and continue the trauma of it.” Among those watching Geimer’s appearance on the program with attorney Lawrence Silver was documentary filmmaker Marina Zenovich, also now 45. That was ultimately the spark that led to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which, after screening to acclaim at this year’s Sundance and Cannes film festivals, premieres tonight on HBO and later hits theaters courtesy of ThinkFilm. For the full feature interview with Zenovich, from FilmStew, click here.

I didn’t really much care for Bloodline, the documentary that examines one of the theories promulgated by The Da Vinci Code, that Jesus Christ had a decidedly Earthly relationship with Mary Magdalene, and bore human offspring, but over on A Critical Moment, ace scribe Brad Schreiber has up an interesting interview with said film’s director, Bruce Burgess.

For a 16mm movie shot in three weeks on a shoestring budget of credit
card financing and $30,000 in savings, The Foot Fist Way has paid huge
dividends for ascendant funnyman Danny McBride, even though it hasn’t
yet grossed dollar one from audiences.

The movie was accepted into competition at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where it was embraced by a legion of comedic heavyweights, among them Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Surprised it wasn’t acquired at the festival, the pair later snapped up the movie, via their Gary Sanchez Productions shingle, for distribution through Paramount Vantage. It’s had a long and winding path to release, but the movie quickly conferred “made man” status upon McBride, helping him land memorable supporting roles in Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod, Ben Stiller’s The Heartbreak Kid, Owen Wilson’s Drillbit Taylor and two of this summer’s most highly anticipated comedies, Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder. “It’s been pretty insane,” says McBride of his at-once-quiet-and-quick career trajectory. “I live in Virginia, and every time I would come back out to L.A., I would suddenly hear of all these other people who had seen the film.”

“When we were in college, we would just sit around and drink beer and watch the same movies over and over again,” continues McBride, who will also topline the forthcoming HBO series Eastbound and Down. “And when we made this film, we wanted it to be something that could have that sort of lifespan — something that some other guys in college would sit around and drink some beers to and enjoy. Now I’m running around with Will, and running from dinosaurs in Land of the Lost. It doesn’t seem real.” For the full interview, from CityBeat‘s summer preview issue, click here.

The theatrical release of his big screen adaptation of Postal is in limbo, but that doesn’t mean a tranquil slip into the twilight for its writer-director. So here’s more on Uwe Boll, if you need it, from CityBeat.

Acting is of course a hard-knock lifestyle, with daily judgments from casting directors, filmmakers, audiences, and then finally the actual critics. But debut directors also have it tough. First they have to compete in tooth-and-nail fashion for one of a limited number of studio jobs, and then hope the movie does well enough to book another gig. Nicholas Stoller though, had a not-so-secret weapon. A writer on TV’s Undeclared and a collaborator with Judd Apatow on the script for Fun with Dick and Jane, Stoller is the first-time helmer of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, one of a dozen movies produced by Apatow since 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin hit it big at the box office. On the eve of his film’s release, we met up for a chat over coffee, which is excerpted here, for H Magazine. For separate talk about the movie’s 83 frames of penis, meanwhile, click here.

Sure, delightfully derided Uwe Boll wants to make a searing, serious movie about the Sudanese genocide. But he also wants actor Billy Zane to pay him $450,000, and is suing him for said money — the result of a dispute over the screwed-up distribution of Boll’s 2005 film BloodRayne. In a recent interview I asked Boll about the lawsuit, and whether it’s had an effect in trying to secure distribution for his forthcoming film, Postal.

“I think the whole thing with Romar Entertainment, where Billy Zane was a partner, was totally a disaster for me,” says Boll. “I was very damaged because we had a contract for 2,000 screens and we got 800, and the 800 screens were not the best screens. And everybody who looks into the box office performance in North America knows that there are around 1,000 screens or theaters that make money, and the rest of the theaters are disasters, let’s say it this way. So if you run in New York in the E-Walk or in the Empire, you make $30,000 or $40,000 the first weekend, even with a weak movie. But you run elsewhere and you make maybe $500. And the theater is actually happy that they made $500 with you, but with a first-screen average of $500 on a new release, you’re dead. And the major companies, of course, are running their movies everywhere at the same time, so it evens it out, but in the case of BloodRayne we had maybe 100 good screens and 700, like, really bad screens. So then it turned out that Billy Zane took $450,000 out of the P&A budget as his private commission. And I told him, look, I want that money back. And he didn’t want to pay it back, so I had to sue him, and now we see in court what will happen. But I don’t think that he has any chance to win that lawsuit. I think he should pay me the money back.”

How could interviewing Paris Hilton be a surreal and shameful experience?

How could it not? For the full self-flagellation, from FilmStew, click here.

A specialized slinger of sardonic asides, and a multi-hyphenate talent in the truest sense, Larry Miller is one of “those guys” — a familiar face whom audiences recognize from other movies, and lean forward in pleasant anticipation of, yet might not be able to immediately place. Miller’s latest acting turn comes in the direct-to-DVD comedy Senior Skip Day, where he plays a principal with a near-sociopathic dedication to killing the buzz of his carefree students. The grateful and gracious Miller took some time recently to talk about that movie, as well as his other projects, and the conversation is excerpted below.

Brent Simon: Hi Larry, I appreciate your time. I know you’ve had a busy week.

Larry Miller: Well thank you, but don’t be silly, we’re in each other’s lives here. I’m lucky because I’ve had a couple jobs come in, and I work pretty steadily.

BS: I believe I first interviewed you for 1999’s Pros & Cons, which you wrote. Is that something you see yourself returning to, screenwriting? Because I think you have a distinctive comedic persona, and I imagine a lot of times you’re cast for that, but do you have the desire to strike out and create something new for yourself, all your own?

LM: Absolutely, that was the first thing I wrote! First of all, writing is a big part of my life. When I just got started I said I want to be a writer or an actor or a comic, and it’s unbelievable, that’s what I am. There are a thousand things you don’t get, but a bunch of things you do get. And as far as writing goes, I never left it. I have a book out now called Spoiled Rotten America, which is a bunch of essays, and I love that. I’ve written many, many scripts since, and some TV shows, and some get made and some don’t. And right now I’m doing more stand-up, so I have a chance to write more things for that and go back out on the road. It suddenly hit me after years that I’ve been very lucky as an actor and a writer, but I didn’t want to stop being a comic. And I mean that in the sense of not theaters or corporate jobs, but being a real comic, to me anyway, in two, three, 500-seat clubs, and really knocking it out there. So I’ve always been writing, and I couldn’t pick one over the other. If you asked me if it was more rewarding to write and sell a script, and see it get made… it’s not more rewarding where it counts, meaning in the head and the heart.

BS: That always struck me as among the laziest questions from a lot of journalists — what do you prefer, theater or movies, or TV or film, etcetera? Because the truth is, of course, if you’re a creative-minded person then you enjoy the variety of that kind of life.

LM: Boy, I tell you what, pal, exactly. I mean, come on, look at all these things. I can’t understand how people don’t get up everyday, if they have a chance to make something creative, not skipping around giggling. I know sometimes people like to have a bleak, empty attitude about life, but there’s a great quote of Emerson’s — “give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors insignificant.” And I think that’s fantastic. I mean, health and a day! Anyone who’s looking to beat that is I think missing life.

BS: As a quick interjection, I had a friend in college and we were doing peer critiques of things we’d written, and I’ll always remember that he read something I wrote and said, “You met some good writing that day,” which I thought was so striking and perfectly descriptive because when you’re writing that’s all you’re trying to do — you’re trying to do it to the best of your ability, to advance this thought or argument.

LM: Sure. And the phrase that day is very important. The world is brand new every single day! If I come home tonight and everyone’s well, and I can have a drink with my wife, what’s better than that? Would we be happier if we had a 50-room house? You’d have to be a lunatic to need that.

BS: Well, on to Senior Skip Day. Your character, Principal Dickwalder, is sort of an Ed Rooney-type character. He is driven to inflict misery, isn’t he?

LM: And in a way, aren’t we all? You know what was so much fun about that was that — very early in the process, with all these people I loved working with — I had an idea, and we just ran with it. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a great movie, and it’s going to be great for a long time. But I said, and this is what we wound up doing, that Ed Rooney gets weaker and is destroyed more as the movie goes on. Every bad thing that happens to him knocks his spirit apart until at the end he’s just sitting on that bus like, “I can’t take it, I just can’t take it.” He’s destroyed physically and emotionally. And I said, “Why don’t we take this guy and go the exact opposite direction with him? That every bad thing that happens to him makes him break out of this reptilian shell into some kind of dark criminal lord.” Each time he gets beaten up he gets stronger and more horrifying in a way. So when the guy beats him up on his lawn, I kill him. That was the idea, and it was really neat to put it in place and have everyone creatively say, “Yeah, let’s do that!” Even though it’s not a high-budget movie, and there’s certain shots you can’t get, to get there and create it and get as much of it as you can out there is pretty fun.

BS: You’ve played principals and college deans a number of times. Do you think there’s something about you that lends itself to these authority figures?

LM: Hey, fine with me, I guess John Wayne didn’t just play one sheriff. You know what I mean. That’s obviously reaching pretty high, but you know what — CIA guy, head of a corporation… that’s part of what’s worked out for me, and that’s fine. I’m not necessarily going to be up for the remake of James Bond. You know when you see a movie as a kid you think you’d like to be the hero, but you never know in life. There’s a friend of mine, Richard Jenkins, who’s just the lead in a movie now (The Visitor) that’s getting a lot of attention, so you never know where your chance to really bring yourself out is really going to come from. But I have that stand-up too. And if I worked a ton more as an actor, and it was all in comedy, and it was all being a principal or an annoying or a corrupt this-or-that, I’d still have a chance to do these things I love.

BS: Was your own high school principal a memorable character in any way?
LM: No, like most folks, and like you and me too, by the way, he was just a decent enough man who’s trying to get by and figure out what life is all about. We had an attendance officer… what was his name? Oh, Mr. Sykes! It’s like a name out of Dickens. He was fearsome! And the weird thing was that at that point, in the 1970s, that was actually something kids were scared of. Today you wouldn’t be scared, because he never actually did anything to you. But just to get called into Mr. Sykes’ office was gigantic. Tough kids who were in fistfights a lot would sit there with their knees shaking.