Rip Torn thought I was being a wise guy, and one afternoon he got pretty angry with me after telling me to do something and he thought I was pretending like I didn't know what he meant.But he was very frustrated. He was very frustrated as a director in trying to get his little theater group going. It was called The Sanctuary Theater Workshop, I think, and he wanted to do these classical plays by people like August Strindberg, and he was fighting hard to get his show up and be good and be professional.

John Heard

Categorized in : Wise Fighting Rip

Rip Torn had, like, lessons in everything he said, and one of them was, "I know that an actor can undermine anything a director tells him to do by making fun of it." And he thought that that's what I did.

John Heard

torn rip fun

Nastassja Kinski is a sweetie. She's very quiet. But smart. I hung out with her mother more than Nastassja. I think Nastassja was more worried about Paul Schrader and doing the part in The Cat People, so her mom and I kind of became friends.

John Heard

smart mom mother

I remember one afternoon when we were out on a golf course somewhere, and Lauren Bacall, James Garner, and Jack Lemmon were sitting there in deck chairs when I went off to do another scene. And I said something like, "Hey, where have you guys been?" And they said, "Oh, we were down at the clubhouse. We saw your scene!" And Jack Lemmon looked at James Garner, and James Garner looked back at me, and then they both looked back at me and said in unison, "You bet your ass it is!" So I've been up there with the greats. I've had my fleeting moments with theatrical genius.

John Heard

genius guy golf

When my agent called me up and said, "Do you want to be in a movie called Sharknado?" I said, "What is it about? Is it really about sharks falling out of the sky and eating people?" And she said, "Yes." And I said, "Definitely. That is going to be a huge hit. That is going to put to rest the Home Alone dad image. I'm going to be the Sharknado drunk instead, hopefully." And I was right. I don't know how I knew that, but I just knew that Sharknado was going be a huge hit.

John Heard

dad home fall

I was a barfly, so going to work and acting and rehearsing and then going and sitting in a bar and drinking and then going home was sort of my lifestyle. And there was none of that out here in the '70s when I was lucky enough to get movies, and nobody else that I knew was working in movies at that point. I didn't really have a lot of movie friends.

John Heard

acting drinking home

Paul Schrader, he's a... son of a gun. He's a very feisty, very straightforward guy. He's your auteur director. He sent me to a fat farm down in Palm Springs, I think it was, and got mad because he said, "You're just getting massages and backrubs!" He got the bill, he looked at the itemization, and he said, "You're not doing anything to lose weight! I could've had William Hurt for this part!" And I said, "Well, you're stuck with me, so..." He was funny, though.

John Heard

hurt spring son

After The Sopranos, my mother said, "Couldn't there be some raft floating under the bridge when you jumped? Or couldn't you have a twin brother?" I said, "Yeah, if they'd wanted me that bad. But they don't."

John Heard

sopranos brother mother

That show, The Sopranos put HBO on the map. So there I was - and then there I wasn't. Too bad. The same thing happened to me on Prison Break: I got the role of the governor on that, and then a handful of episodes later, I hanged myself.

John Heard

sopranos prison break

They killed me in The Sopranos. I went to David Chase, and I said, "Why me? I'm a detective! You can use me forever!" And he told me, "John, there's a rule in television: Somebody has to die that the audience likes."

John Heard

why-me sopranos forever

Denzel Washington was so great at The Great Debaters, so focused and talented. That was just an honor to be cast in that, for the most part. I was fat, and I guess the casting director sold him on me. He actually said to me during the scene, "You know, I've always found that less is more," which is an expression that you've heard a million times, but it was a nice way of telling me I was overdoing it.

John Heard

nice scene honor

There were a lot of things in it that were important at the time to me. Cutter's Way movie was very relevant. And I wanted Cutter to succeed as a vet, as a guy coming back from 'Nam, because there were so many guys like that. And there were so many other movies at the time, like Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, and The Deer Hunter, that it was really important that the movie be believable, that I come across a pissed-off vet who'd been there and comes home angry.

John Heard

guy important home

The look of the movie and the music, which was by Jack Nitzsche, is what really stands out to me. I don't know if the movie succeeds as a political, cultural comment on the times and the war in Vietnam, and the capitalists versus the everyday guy that gets sent off to fight corporate wars. I don't know if the movie ever succeeded in that range. But it was a wonderful part in the Cutter's Way.

John Heard

guy fighting war

Cutter's Way was a real test of my stupidity. Every day, it was like, who did I think I was? But people put up with me. But I considered myself an alcoholic, so I had the inside track on how an alcoholic would do this or that and so on and so forth. That became pretty annoying, I'm sure.

John Heard

real people thinking

Martin Scorsese was very much the actor's director. We were all very in awe of Martin Scorsese.

John Heard

awe

Griffin Dunne and I were both terrified that Martin Scorsese didn't think we were very good - and if he didn't think we were very good, that was it. That was the end of the line. If Martin Scorsese thinks you stink, you stink.

John Heard

very-good thinking

I did a film about child abuse with the great producer-director Richard Donner, Radio Flyer. Again, I was replacing somebody, but Lorraine Bracco was in it, and they wanted me as the cop in the thing to fall in love with Lorraine, but I said I wouldn't. I mean, I'm a cop, and she's ignoring that her kids are being beaten up by their stepfather. And we had an argument... well, not an argument, but a discussion about it. I said, "I just don't feel right. It's like you're taking everything away from the reality of the movie. Aren't you kind of idealizing this a little bit?

John Heard

falling-in-love mean children

Television is fast and loose. You have two or three takes to get your part right, and if you have a problem, well, by the time you figure it out, everyone's moved on to the next scene. It's good training, keeps you on your toes.

John Heard

good you training time

For 'The Trip To Bountiful,' I was worried about being too heavy, because I supposedly had just gotten out of the hospital.

John Heard

hospital because just being

Pauline Kael said that Rip Torn could get angrier faster than any other American actor: that he could go from zero to 10 in 1.8 seconds or something like that.

John Heard

something go like said

Lauren Bacall, James Garner, and Jack Lemmon - they're all gone now, but I was so impressed by them.

John Heard

them now impressed gone