“Aren’t they wonderful?”
That’s Alan Alda talking about Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story.” It’s also quintessentially what you’d imagine the legendary television and movie actor saying about his co-stars. And if you have high expectations for Alda, you’ll be happy to know he still lives up to them in person.
At 83-years-old, Alda obviously isn’t as energetic as he was decades ago. His left-hand shakes noticeably due to Parkinson’s disease. He looks as world-weary as you’d expect, but he’s still a working actor keeping busy in both film and TV. He as other ventures too, most notably a podcast he’s quite proud of, Clear + Vivid. And unique opportunities still come his way such as a chance to appear in Baumbach’s “beautifully written” new drama. He couldn’t turn it down.
READ MORE: Noah Baumbach memorializes divorce in “Marriage Story” [Review]
“I thought how great the writing was,” Alda says. “I’m always interested, first of all, in whether or not I think it’s well written before I think of anything else. Then I had this wonderful chance to work with Noah as a director, and he’s a really, really comfortable person to work with. Very, very strong. And these other actors, they’re brilliant actors, Scarlett and Adam. I’d really be surprised if they don’t get nominated.”
We haven’t even broached the subject of awards season, but Alda knows the game and why we’re chatting in a makeshift reception area on the westside of Los Angeles. He has 21 Emmy nominations and 5 Emmy Awards. If there was an EGOT just for nominations, he’d be in that club. Of course, he’s also getting awards chatter in the best supporting actor category for his role as former talent manager turned actor Bert Spitz. It’s no surprise that Baumbach left the character pretty much to Alda and his script.
“I don’t remember talking about the character,” Alda says of his conversations with Baumbach. “People have been asking me if I based it on somebody. I based on what was in the script. I got clues from that, I got clues from the way the scenes were going. I learned more from rehearsing it than from analyzing it because you can take a wrong turn intellectually and try to fulfill some intellectual idea when seeing it in motion is more revelatory to me, because I’m an improviser. I like to improvise. Not that any line in the movie was improvised. It’s all the way it’s written, but the relating with one another, the spirit of improvisation, the ability to relate to what you’re getting from the other person, that means a lot. You find out a lot more about what’s happening. You pay attention to that then if you get some idea of how it’s supposed to be.”
Even speaking for less than half an hour Alda can’t resist including a memorable story or two. When asked about Baumbach he recalls working with directors who thought they had to fool an actor into doing something to get what they wanted out of a scene. Basically, the antithesis of working with someone such as Baumbach.
Alda recollects, “There’s this legendary story of a famous director, I forget who it was, with a famous actor making a Western in like the ’40s and the director said, ‘I want you to jump off that roof and land on the ground.’ It was like a 10-foot jump. And the actor said, ‘I’ll break my leg. I don’t want to do that.’ The director said, ‘I’ll do it, and if I don’t make it, you don’t have to do it.’ So the director jumps, pulls a muscle in his leg and doesn’t tell the actor. He says, ‘Look, I’m fine. You jump.’ So, that’s not what Noah does. I had a director once fire a gun behind me. [He] had the prop guy fire a gun, because he wanted me to look surprised and he didn’t see if I could look surprised without the gun. He just assumed that I’d be more [so]. I got so angry.”
But it’s Alan Alda. He’s pretty much always been the man you’ve seen on screen your entire life. Do you think Alda got mad at him? Made a scene?
No, he says, “I let it go because it was over and done with, but I was angry.”
Over his sixty-year career, Alda has starred in and directed some films that helped bring the everyday aspect of divorce into the mainstream including 1978’s “California Suite,” 1981’s “The Four Seasons” and 1988’s “A New Life.” There has to be some serendipity that another heralded work about the subject has come this way at this point in his career.
“Divorce is an upheaval and that’s usually what the story is about, the upheaval,” Alda says. “Here the upheaval happens, but it never stops being a love story, which is an amazing achievement it seems to me, right up until the last shot. They now love each other in a different way, but they love each other better than they did when they were married. Their communication is better, their thoughtfulness about one another is more pronounced than when they were married. So, it’s may not be a happy ending in the conventional way of looking at it, but, to me, it’s a satisfying ending because they’ve grown.”
Despite his underrated cinematic efforts (roles in “The Aviator,” writing and directing “Sweet Liberty,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Flirting with Disaster,” “Bridge of Spies”), it’s his contributions to the televised medium that will put him in the history books. Currently filming another season of Showtime’s “Ray Donovan,” he marvels at the state of the current state of the industry.
“This is really a golden age. We talked about golden ages every 10 years, but this is extraordinary,” Alda says. “And the new way of telling stories, binge-able stories, is I find very attractive. It’s really fun to stay up till 2:00 in the morning, and saying ‘Do we have time for one more?'”
And, yes, he has some thoughts on why we’re experiencing such a “marvelous” period of episodic content.
“I’ve been alive to see burlesque die, vaudeville die, radio, network television and what I see happening under the surface, and this is what I think I see. I’m not an expert at this. But the studios and the network televisions folks, the ones who put up the money for the productions, have the impression that because they have control of the money, they also know how to do it,” Alda says. “And the streaming people, I get the impression, find people who do know how to do it and generally leave them alone and that enables them. If you’re working with people who are responsible and are well-chosen, it gives them the chance to take good chances, to take chances that they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to do. And they’re unhampered. To have one vision that’s a good vision is better than to have a good vision that has 20 people changing it every few minutes.”
As our conversation ends Alda beams a smile that you couldn’t imagine anyone would ever believe was not genuine. He makes sure to shake your hand. And ask that we reference his new podcast. And keeps on keeping on.
“Marriage Story” is now playing in limited release. It launches on Netflix on Dec. 6.