Jeff Bridges Q&A

11 March 2009

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Four-time Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges is as versatile as he is talented. He has starred in numerous box office hits including Gary Ross’ Seabiscuit; Terry Gilliam’s offbeat comedic drama The Fisher King; the multi-award nominated The Fabulous Baker Boys; The Jagged Edge (opposite Glenn Close); Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream; Blown Away (co-starring his late father Lloyd Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones); Peter Weir’s Fearless; and Martin Bell’s American Heart.

He scooped Oscar nominations for The Last Picture Show (1971), Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (1974), Starman (1984), and The Contender (2000), while he is known the world over for his performance as The Dude in The Big Lebowski.

A keen artist and musician, Bridges lives with his wife Susan and their three children, dividing their time between their home in Santa Barbara, California, and their ranch in Montana.

This year he featured in his first-ever big-budget action picture, Iron Man, and now stars as magazine editor Clayton Harding in the big-screen adaptation of Toby Young’s best-selling memoir, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People out on March 16th.

You are a good friend of How To Lose director Bob Weide. Had you come close to working together before?

Yeah. Many years before I was working on adapting the children’s book, The Giver, into a movie, and we were looking for writers. I then saw an adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut book, Mother Night, which Bob had done and which they made it into a movie with Nick Nolte.

And Kurt Vonnegut, for me, is a very difficult writer to adapt for a movie, yet Bob had done such a brilliant job. So I thought he’d be good for another difficult task, The Giver, and we worked on that together for a while, but unfortunately it didn’t work out for either of us. We got along very well creatively, but I lost the project.

We’d worked on it for many years but we could never get the money for the thing, which I couldn’t understand because it’s a great story. So then someone with a lot of money picked it up and we’ll probably see a great movie one day. Anyway, working together I got really turned onto Bob’s talents he’s a wonderful documentary-maker, and of course there’s all his great work on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

So did working on this film with Bob live up to your expectations?

It’s always fun to work with people you like, your buddies, and there’s an element of play in anything that I do. Really, my life is like playing ‘pretend’ as a kid, but now I’m grown up, so I have all the fun clothes and toys! Plus, the film had a really great cast; I loved working with Simon Pegg, and, of course, Danny Huston, who’s a good friend of mine.

Having friends around you must have made the set a fun place to be?

Oh yeah, in fact we played this game a lot. I like to play this game when I’m on set called ‘Pass the Pigs’. It’s a children’s game, like ‘craps’ for kids, where you roll these little pigs and you get different scores depending on how they land. As you know, I’m a keen photographer, I’m always snapping away on set, and I think I’ve got quite a few of us all playing Pigs!

How would you describe your character in the film, Clayton Harding?

Clayton is a fellow who was very like Simon Pegg’s character, when he was of a similar age. He was snubbed by ‘Society’, and being a witty guy he used that snub to fuel his attack on ‘Society’ in a very funny way. It served him well, professionally; he developed the magazine called Snipe, and he became Simon’s character’s hero.

Then as Clayton got more involved in ‘Society’, hanging out with people he used to send up, he starts to lose his edge and becomes part of the clique that he was once critiquing. He misses having that edge like missing his youth and sees a bit of himself in Simon’s character, so they develop this love/hate relationship.

I’ve heard that Bob and the producers saw an echo of the real Jeff Bridges in the character, the rebel who’s conformed. Did you discuss that with them?

No, I’ve not heard that actually, but in being an actor, it’s great to play the gamut of emotions and personalities. That’s a fun thing to do one moment to be The Dude, and in the next film to be the President of the United States, and then in the next one be a carcass of a rocker, in Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. So I like going back and forth, switching between the realms of funk and finery, if you will.

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