Do you think everyone feels that way?
I hope not.
Do you see other’s acting and writing and feel that they are much more genuine than you are?
Oh yeah. The actors are great. They’re brilliant. That’s the beauty of it. To see a great movie or great plays.
Well some people say that Blade Runner was their favorite movie of all time.
It is a great movie.
And you wrote that.
No I didn’t. There’s a lot of great people involved in Blade Runner. The most salient of which is Ridley. Usually that’s what it is, it’s the director. He stood on the shoulders of a lot of slaves and I was one of them and there were others.
Well you have to have an authentic voice with the screenplay to make it believable.
The origin of it, yeah, that’s me but then came David Peoples and what he did became a lot of Blade Runner. Then you get the graphic design, production design, and then we’re back to Ridley. Plus the music and the editing. So there’s that.
And you’re the one that thought the book would make a good movie.
I didn’t love the book but I saw a through-line that would make an interesting movie. And then I had the good fortune to get a wonderful producer, Michael Deeley.
You also made The Minus Man. How do you think about that in terms of authenticity.
Well, that was pretty good. I’ve done two things in my life, this part of my life. The early part of my life was about the dancing. And that’s what I feel the best about. The dancing. But since I was 21, there were two things that were really terrific for me. One of them was writing and directing The Minus Man. Still is when I indulge in the memories. And it’s really sad too. Because that’s what I really wanted to do, wanted to continue that experience. I was 60 when I made it so that’s a bit late maybe. I think if I had done it when I was 30 I’m sure my life would have been very different. The other was a play I directed, Beckett’s Endgame. That was the other triumph of the spirit for me.
Do you have specific memories from those two things where you felt like, “Yes, I really did something here.”
Well there are memories I have that are learning curve memories. Where I messed up. I still think about those all the time. Why didn’t I do this instead of that? Let me do it again and I’ll know what to do. I remember the fun and the beauty of it. The affirmation of it I guess. It was a different world when I was doing that. It wasn’t the same old world. With Endgame I was never satisfied, but with The Minus Man I was very satisfied. I thrived. I was old enough then to integrate with everybody. And the things I wanted to do that everyone said you couldn’t do – social things, simple things – “Don’t ever show your vulnerability” – screw that. “Stay off your feet.” That was another one I got from other directors, more experienced than I. But finally I just did what I wanted to do and it was really compatible, except for a couple of moments here and there.
What advice would you give?
Don’t let it end until you like it. And that’s really hard to do. I don’t know how to do that but Wes Anderson does, and did, and right off the bat. He’s a sweetie pie guy, full of warmth and understanding but he’s also steel when the shit comes down. You have to be smart as hell too.
Let’s go back to the dancing. I didn’t realize you felt this was the greatest thing you did.
When I was doing that, the romance with it, the connection to it was so deep and so voluptuous, gratifying. I lived it. I was living The Minus Man but I was living other things too. I was grown up. But when I was a dancer, it was just me. Young stupid me and I thought I walked alone. The love of it, my adoration of it, like a child’s imagination, I could smell it. I could sense it everywhere. I was the center of it. It was Spain, it was me, another time, other clothes, it was all consuming. I was too dumb to take advantage of my talent and to learn. I didn’t take advantage of it but I pretended to. I’ve never had that experience again. I was thirteen. Thirteen to seventeen.
Why did you stop?
I really don’t know. I know the superficial reasons. I think fear had something to do with it. And stupidity. Not knowing how to proceed. Pretending to know how to proceed. Fighting to proceed but doing it wrong. Fear of not being able to walk in and do things. At the same time I was kind of crazy at seventeen, living in New York without anything, in love with a girl who has this thing called schizophrenia. She’s a model and she’s beautiful and I’m living with her and I don’t dance anymore because I’m so messed up and enamored with her and she’s so crazy and kicks me out and I have no place to go and nothing to do. I don’t want dancing or insecurity anymore. Let me go home and get a job and get married and be safe. So I hitchhiked back to LA and met a girl, got married, had a child. And then I’m not a dancer. I’m a writer. I retired at eighteen from dancing. I was anguished, like a romance, that I didn’t do it anymore. Until I was thirty I thought I would. I’m not good at knowing the score.
Any lessons learned in life you want to pass on?
Keep it physical. Take it all in. What I saw from kids is that they stopped being and doing that at a certain point. The animal part of ourselves gets diminished and gets replaced by something more conformist and pragmatic. So I guess in a word it would be “Play.” And then watch out because when you get older there’s no room for it anymore. Find the room. The big challenge I guess is understanding another person. To understand their experience. Maybe we are too self-involved. We are animals. A bunch of monkeys don’t care that an alligator is getting killed over there. The monkeys don’t give a shit. But we do to some degree. Our fear teaches us something. Our abhorrence. So if you are open to knowing the fear of others and know how they feel. That’s a good idea.
What do you think is your biggest failure that lead to better things?
I think it all started when I stopped going to school. I started stopping when I was six or seven. By the time I was thirteen I wasn’t going much at all. When I was fourteen I was in juvenile hall. No school would take me at that point. So then I ended up in a private, theatrical school. No one really showed up there because they had gigs. I went there until I left the country at fifteen. I got a freighter to Spain. My family understood and said ok. It also got me out of their hair. Hard for them in a way.