Robert Forster Interview

Robert Forster Interview Part 1
- Getting 'Jackie Brown'; From the worst job to the best job in the same year
- "I was dead in the water. No agent, no manager, no lawyer"
- "Quentin's dialogue was very human"
- Auditioning for 'Reservoir Dogs' & talking to Quentin
- "Stardom was not going to be my future, so being well thought of at the end was a good fallback strategy"
- Playing bad guys for 13 years after 'Delta Force'
- Working with Thomas Hayden Church in 'Divorce'
- "Could it be the part of the Bail Bondsmen?"
- Tarantino said "I hire anybody I want"
- Months before 'Jackie Brown' came out
- "I hope I see my dad again"
- Tarantino's kind gesture to Forster's father
- "My dad never gave up on me"
- Broadway debut in 1965 & being one of the last contract players for Fox
- Meeting John Huston for 'Reflections of a Golden Eye'
- Education from John Huston
- Facing the music
- Sobering lessons in life from playing tennis
- Joe Stein
- "Always do your excellent best & learn to accept what is"
- ROBERT FORSTER'S THREE STEP PROGRAM
- Two rules of money
- "Life is only once so you better make the best of it"

 Robert Forster Interview Part 2
- Nerves & anticipation before "Jackie Brown" opened
- 'Diamond Men' opening after 9/11
- "Wow Donnie Wahlberg!"
- Memorable scenes in 'The Descendants'
- Meeting the girl in 'Bye Bye Birdie'
- Acting methods
- Marlon Brando Story
- "If they want me I'm not that hard to get"
- Passing on the original 'Twin Peaks'
- Robert Loggia
- "David Lynch is in a class of his own"
- Shooting 'Medium Cool' with Haskell Wexler
- 'Breaking Bad' & 'Better Call Saul'
- Playing an honest man
- 'Too Late'
- Quentin's perceptiveness casting Robert Forster in 'Jackie Brown'
- Quentin setting the mood on the set of 'Jackie Brown'
- High & Low moments
- "I created a job for myself"
- "Tell 'em the truth Bob!"

Academy Award® Nominee and “Grindhouse Giant” (according to the NY Times) Robert Forster is known for his solid work in films from the top to the bottom of the business.  Robert’s Oscar-nominated role of ‘Max Cherry’ in Quentin Tarantino’s JACKIE BROWN marked the beginning of what he calls the ‘third act’ of his career -- now spanning over five decades.

Robert has appeared in over 100 films. The old ones, starting in 1966, include REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, MEDIUM COOL, THE STALKING MOON, ALLIGATOR, VIGILANTE (the Blu-ray release of which earned him the moniker “Grindhouse Giant”), THE BLACK HOLE and STUNTS, and the TV series BANYON.  Then for 13 years he played villains – starting with DELTA FORCE (1985), ending with one of his all-time favorites, AMERICAN PERFEKT (1997).

Since his Oscar-nominated role of Max Cherry in JACKIE BROWN (1997) his films include upcoming AUTOMATA and SURVIVOR; OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN; Best Picture Nominee, THE DESCENDANTS; MIDDLE MEN; GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST; THICK AS THIEVES; LIKE MIKE; ME, MYSELF & IRENE; FIREWALL; LAKEBOAT and DIAMOND MEN; and TV series including upcoming BACKSTROM; LAST MAN STANDING; BREAKING BAD; INTRUDERS; ALCATRAZ; HEROES; HUFF!; KAREN SISCO and FASTLANE.

In addition to his work in film, television and theater, Robert records audio books, including the best-seller "Hit Man," and Elmore Leonard's "Mr. Paradise," and delivers his speaking program, INTERACTING, to a variety of groups – from acting classes to graduating classes; baggage handlers to CEOs; and once (he’s pleased to report) to a group of white-collar criminals in a detention facility. He developed this program during the self-termed "sliding second act" of his career. INTERACTING is like a stand-up act with a "Menu" of positive stories instead of jokes ... and a few jokes too. The stories are the lessons of his life and outline several guiding principles -- respect, responsibility, parenting and raising any job to the level of an art form.

- www.RobertForster.com

 

 

 

JAMES REMAR INTERVIEW

James Remar Interview Part 1
- Neighborhood Playhouse
- Longevity & Acting for Life
- Digging Ditches & Odd Jobs
- Odd jobs after 'Cotton Club'
- "Walter Hill gave me my career"
- "Were you a trouble maker at the Playhouse?"
- 'The Warriors' & 'The Cotton Club'
- Playing 'Dutchman Schultz'
- Coppola's new cut of 'The Cotton Club'
- "I thought I was going get nominated for Best Supporting Actor"
- Did the Neighborhood Playhouse prepare you for the real world?
- Acting school vs Real Work Experience
- "Disappointment in acting school is a microcosm of show business"
- Do you mind being asked to play villains over and over?
- "The villain typically drives the action"
- "I take all my parts very personally"

James Remar Interview Part 2
- Working with Quentin, Leo, & Christoph in 'Django Unchained'
- Actors dropping out of 'Django'
- Playing two parts in 'Django Unchained'
- The Opening Sequence
- Another '80's Villain
- What was different about Quentin from the other great directors?
- "I'm the only actor to die twice in Quentin's movie"
- Reading for Quentin's earlier films
- 'Reservoir Dogs'
- "I'm not as desperate now. And I'm just beat up"
- Jack Palance & Martin Landau
- Drug problems & getting fired from 'Aliens'
- 'Uncommon Valor'
- Patrick Swayze & Michael Biehn

James Remar Interview Part 3
- Stardom vs Acting
- "Not good work, great work!"
- "I STRUGGLE"
- Playing James Gordon's uncle in 'Gotham'
- Philosophy for taking jobs
- Cameo parts in Blockbusters
- Honorable day's work on 'Lap Dance'
- "I'm a jobbing actor"
- "I don't get the luxury of spending time to train for a movie"
- Christoph Waltz' injury on 'Django Unchained'
- Roles that got away
- "Sometimes it's tempting to say 'I don't want to do this anymore"
- "You're an easy guy to talk to"
- "Acting is not lying. You have to be very honest to be a good actor"
- Method Acting
- "It's a long, long, long haul. And in many ways its been a struggle"

James Remar BONUS - "Make Your Bed!"

James Remar END CREDITS

ROY FIRESTONE INTERVIEW

Roy Firestone Interview Part 1
- "The human condition is what always interested me in my interviews"
- "My interviewees were more comfortable talking about their influences than themselves"
- 'Up Close' post production & day to day workflow
- "I think I felt better everytime I did an interview"
- "Everyone had a story, whether they could articulate it or not, & it was my job to find that story"
- "I didn't care about looking at stats sheets before an interview"
- "...using Wikipedia is the biggest mistake an interviewer could make"
- "We didn't have a team of people behind the scenes. We just did the show everyday & put it out there for what it was worth"
- "I was interested in the guest, & what that person had to say about themselves, & less about my own opinion. That's changed now"
- "...out of the 5,000 shows I did, less than 20 people ever wept on my show. But that's what I was known for"
- "Infamy, emotion, drama. theatre, anger, & bad behavior will always sell on television" 
- "Dennis Rodman was an emotional livewire, & that appealed to me"
- "I was proudest most when we revealed something in a person's character"
- "Digital media today doesn't allow for much reflection...and we're poorer for that"
-  "We are conditioning ourselves to be a sound bite society" 

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Roy Firestone Interview Part 2
- "People want to be understood"
- "Life is not black or white, it's mostly black & grey, & other colors too"
- Roy addresses the controversial reception of his OJ Simpson interview on Up Close (27 years ago!!) featured in ESPN's "OJ: Made in America" Part 2
- "The fawning part of the video was a reflection of the times"
- "The LAPD bought into the whole thing too. My job was to do an interview, it was their job to get tough!"
- "If someone doesn't want to answer truthfully & live in denial what can you do?"
- "A lot of people was conned by a conman & a lot of people believed in his (OJ's) myth like I did"
- "Don't judge me because you know something I didn't know at the time. It's not fair!"
- "I judge myself in hindsight & that's why I have the regret"
- "There was a lot of nuance in the OJ story that demands people to judge me more fairly but I was not"
- "I asked Ezra Edelaman to give me a few seconds in the film to talk about what was going on at the time, but that was not afforded me....people have savaged without even trying to understand what was going on at the time" 
- "...owning up to what!!"
- Jamele Hill's tweet                                                                 
- "If all my interviews were suck ups I wouldn't have been on the air very long"
- "You have to take the bad with the good, I've had mostly good in my career & in my life so I have to deal with it. I am completely comfortable with what I represented on ESPN for parts of three decades"   

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Roy Firestone Interview Part 3 (BONUS)

 

Roy Firestone is a seven-time Emmy Award-winning and seven-time cable ACE Award-winning host, interviewer, narrator, writer, and producer.  As the ground-breaking, original host of ESPN’s legendary Up Close, Up Close Classic and Up Close Primetime, Firestone has interviewed more than 5,000 athletes, musicians, actors and political figures, as well as scores of writers and filmmakers.
Firestone has recently hosted Public Television's "LA Tonight" which featured interviews of an eclectic list of legendary music, entertainment, and sports figures, including composer Burt Bacharach, record producer David Foster, songwriter Diane Warren, and tennis great Andre Agassi, among many others.
Sports Illustrated calls Firestone "The best interviewer in the business."  The late Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Jim Murray once said, “Roy Firestone isn’t just the best sports interviewer I’ve ever seen, he's the best interviewer period. That includes, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, any and all of them.”
Not limited to television, Firestone is also prolific on the printed page — as the author of two best-selling books, Up Close with Roy Firestone, and most recently, Don’t Make Me Cry, Roy.
Critically acclaimed as a performer, monologist, humorist, musician and impressionist, Roy Firestone is one of the nation’s most sought after live corporate performers, keynote speakers and lecturers.
Firestone has performed in more than two thousand venues spanning two decades.  He recently shared the stage with performers Josh Groban, Reba McEntire, David Foster, Forrest Whitaker and Jon Bon Jovi.
As an actor, Firestone was featured in the Academy Award-winning film, Jerry Maguire, where he played himself in an unforgettable (and often repeated) scene with Academy Award-winner Cuba Gooding Jr. 
His numerous television credits include Everybody Loves Raymond and Married with Children.  Fans of The Simpsons remember him as the voice of ‘Bart Starr.’ No stranger to talk shows, Firestone’s appearances include Late Night with David Letterman, Later with Bob Costas, Larry King Live and The Tonight Show.
Firestone is also an accomplished musical vocalist.  He recently released his first CD, Another Voice, produced and backed by Grammy Award-winning fusion band, Hiroshima.

- www.royfirestone.com

PETER STORMARE INTERVIEW

Peter Stormare Interview Part 1
- Catching up with Peter from 18 years ago
- The impact of Fargo
- "The life of a theater actor is like being a foot soldier"
- "I'm like a grasshopper"
- Gaer Grimsrud
- Miller's Crossing
- "Now it's time to leave!"
- "Cells in your body will fight to protect you until the bitter end"
- No blings
- "I have a path I have to walk"
- "Ingmar Bergman took me under his wings"
- "Nor time, nor space can keep us apart"
- The chosen one
- Armageddon
- "I could have chosen a very different path after Fargo"
- "Happiness is nothing you can grab, but you can strive for it by doings things"
- "You can fix your problems within. Without a shrink!"
- John McEnroe's last racket

Peter Stormare Interview Part 2
- Choosing projects
- Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt, Jphnny Depp, & Terry Gilliam
- Helping young filmmakers
- Brick and mortar
- "I'm a grasshopper"
- "You have to love yourself before you can help others"
- "I hate pictures too....I want to taste & feel life. I want to meet people"
- "I'm a daydreamer....for me, imagination is real"
- "I don't like doing long interviews"
- "You're one of the reasons why I'm married to my wife!"
- Ingmar Bergman & theatre politics
- "Lot of people loathed me in Swedish Theater"
- "I chose Stellan Skarsgard to be my mentor"
- "Stellan walked his path & never looked back"
- Dancer in the Dark
- Lars von Trier vs Bjork
- Bjork's decision to not release an official soundtrack
- "They drove her (Bjork) too hard!"
- Lars von Trier shooting "I've seen it all" in Dancer in the Dark with a 100 Sony handheld cameras
- "The movie theaters are going away, but horses disappeared when the cars came too"

Peter Stormare Interview Part 3
- "I don't do research because I use my imagination"
- "My costume designer always decides what I should wear"
- "I'm just a color in a big painting"
- "Acting is like being a magician"
- "Acting is a trick!"
- "Ingmar Bergman told me 'you have to be a question mark in the theatre"
- Autumn Blood
- "I THINK ALL THAT (sense memory & Meisner method) IS ALL PHONY BULLSHIT!"
- "Stanislavski has been misinterpreted in this country"
- "The best way to be a carpenter is to make 200 fucking cabinets before its refined & good! It's the same in acting!"
- "Acting school is a fraudulent business to me"
- "They want to teach you how to audition now. They don't even want to teach you acting anymore"
- "I'll be spending more of my time directing experimental fragmental movies"
- "I loved the Fargo pilot"
- "There was so much posing on Mad Men"

Peter Stormare Interview Part 4
- Working with Steve Buscemi again
- "Matt Damon was fantastic!"
- "I'm not a party guy, I like silence"
- The Beatles, The Clash, & Nirvana
- "I never had a low moment"
- "I take pride in that people respect me"
- END CREDITS

Peter Stormare was born in Kumla, Närke, Sweden and grew up in Arbrå, Hälsingland. He changed his surname when he discovered that he shared it with a senior student at an acting academy. Like "storm" (a word which has the same meaning in Swedish and English), "stormare" is a Swedish word, meaning "stormer". Before settling on "Stormare", he briefly contemplated changing his name to "Mrots Retep", which is simply "Peter Storm" backwards.
Stormare began his career with the Royal Dramatic Theatre, to which he belonged for 11 years. In 1990, he took a leading position as Associate Artistic Director at the Tokyo Globe Theatre and made a name for himself through various Shakespeare performances, including Hamlet. Three years later, he moved to New York City and mainly took part there in English language productions. He played Carl Hamilton, a fictional Swedish secret agent. He was discovered by international audiences for his critically acclaimed role as one of the kidnappers in Fargo (1996). He portrayed Dieter Stark in the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park and later played sleazy, unlicensed "eye-doctor" Solomon Eddie in Minority Report.
In 1998, he appeared in "The Frogger", a Seinfeld episode where he played a rogue electrician known as Slippery Pete. He portrayed Uli Kunkel in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, as well as playing Lev Andropov, a Russian cosmonaut in the 1998 film Armageddon. In 1999, he appeared as a villainous producer and director of hardcore porn in the film 8mm. He also portrayed Gunny in the 2002 film Windtalkers and Alexei in the 2003 film Bad Boys II. In 2003, he played Ernst Röhm in Hitler: The Rise of Evil. In the 2005 film Constantine, he played Lucifer. He played an interrogator in the 2005 film The Brothers Grimm. His first major character in television was on the Fox series Prison Break in 2005 for the first two seasons, where he played the inmate mob boss John Abruzzi. He was originally cast in Fido, but opted out of the film upon being cast in Prison Break.
Stormare voiced Mattias Nilsson in the video games Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction and Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, Isair in the computer game Icewind Dale 2, and Johann Strauss in Quake 4. In February 2006, he starred as Wolfgang in Volkswagen's VDub series of television commercials. He played the main character in the film Svartvattnet, which was filmed in Sweden and Norway in 2007. In the 2007 film Premonition, he played Dr. Roth. In April 2007, he appeared in the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode "Ending Happy".
In December 2007, Stormare participated in the Swedish reality show Stjärnorna på slottet. He appears in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 as Dr. Zelinsky, a Russian scientist who builds a time machine. He starred as Walter in the Canadian independent crime thriller Small Town Murder Songs (2010). He appeared in the music video of the song "Uprising" by the Swedish power metal band Sabaton. He plays himself in the 2011 Norwegian comedy Hjelp, vi er i filmbransjen and appeared as a psychiatrist in the Swedish horror film Marianne (2011). He appeared in a trailer for the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops II, made for the "Revolution" DLC pack. He has since reappeared in most trailers for the game.
In 2014 - Television, Stormare has recently appeared in episodes of Longmire, Arrow and The Blacklist. 2014 starred in the Eli Roth produced film Clown, who portrayed Karlsson.
In 2015 - Stormare voiced, and motion captured, the character Dr. Alan Hill, in the video game Until Dawn.
After Bono of U2 heard some of Stormare's music, he encouraged Stormare to make an album. In 2002, Stormare released his first album, Dallerpölsa och småfåglar. He plays in a band called Blonde from Fargo and runs a record label called StormVox.
Stormare divides his time between the United States and Sweden. He married actress Karen Sillas in 1989; they divorced in 2006. He married Toshimi, a native of Japan, in 2008. Their daughter Kaiya Bella Luna Stormare was born on May 9, 2009.
Stormare is the godfather of Gustaf Skarsgård, the son of Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård. While working on a Disney film in Prague, he was introduced to Bob Dylan after Dylan's concert by bassist Tony Garnier. His nephew is The Sound of Arrows singer-songwriter Stefan Storm.
Stormare is a Christian. When he was young, he participated in Baptist meetings in Arbrå. He has a strong spiritual side, inherited from his mother, who claimed to be a medium, and who inherited this from her own father.