You first became known for your Steppenwolf Theater Company work: emotionally confrontational, pushing audiences or forcing them to react. I’m curious how you think contemporary audiences are different from audiences back then.
Hey, each generation is entitled to do their thing. There are things my kids like that I don’t quite grasp, but that is the natural flow of life. We say these young people are lost in this way or that. I could also say: “What were we? Geniuses?” I don’t think so. Things seem crazy sometimes, and unrecognizable, but I’m 70 years old. It’s perfectly natural that they seem unrecognizable because part of the thing of aging is, as Linda Loman said in “Death of a Salesman,” “Life is a casting off.” This is the natural ebb and flow. People change, art changes, their relationship to art changes, the artists change.
You left me hanging on something: Do you remember what it was about “Being John Malkovich” that made Spike Jonze say you were too close to it?
I do. That was after I’d seen the cut of the film that was going to be shown to the people from Cannes. Although his best note in that vein was when he told me some choice I had made, he told me that wasn’t the way John Malkovich would do it. Which I thought was fantastic.
John Malkovich on (Really) Being John Malkovich
By David Marchese