Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (16 page)

Harold:
Grandiosity is the curse of what we do. There’s a great rabbinical motto that says you start each day with a note in each pocket. One note says, “The world was created for you today,” and the other note says, “I’m a speck of dust in a meaningless universe,” and you have to balance both things. I once did a public talk and told them that story, and I said, “I literally have a note in each pocket.” I took one out and said, “This one says, ‘You’re great,’ and this one says, ‘You’re great.’ ” The culture is what it is. I’m as much a product of our culture as I am a participant in it. It’s very gratifying on a personal level to know that people responded so much and cherish those films. Any of us who make films or work in any of the arts aspire to have a dialogue with the culture and with our audience. Our audience could be an audience of one, like when you grab your best friend and say, “Read this. What do you think?” Our little hearts pound as our friends read our poem, look at our painting, or read our script. If they like it, our spirits soar. It’s great. We can get grandiose from the approval of very few people.

Judd:
If you look at the entire generation of people you began with, it seems that very few of them have continued to work at a high level. There are a lot of people that crashed, or their work crashed. Then you look at other people….Larry Gelbart is still a great writer after fifty years. Do you attribute that to anything?

Harold:
What eventually happens in all our lives is that we’re faced with developmental challenges. It’s always, “Now what?” We all start to work
for certain reasons, and I think most guys in the room would recognize that we work to meet girls. The last line of
Caddyshack
is, “Hey! We’re all going to get laid!” It was an improvised line I can’t even believe I edited into the movie. Getting laid is just a metaphor for getting all the things we’re supposed to want when we’re adolescent. We want to be rich, we want power, we want to be attractive to people, and we want all the perks of success. We’ll leave out of the discussion what happens when you don’t get it. But let’s say you’re Chevy Chase and you do get it. You’re getting all the perks, people offer you money, women are throwing themselves at you, and you’re famous. Now what? Now it becomes a measure of character, growth, and development. Who do you want to be from that point on? You’re rich and famous, so what do you have to say? You’ve got the stage. You’re on it. You’re there. Now what? Once you’ve got people’s attention, what do you want to do with it? Growth is hard. I’ve said this to Chevy. I see him. We bump into each other every couple of years. A few years ago, twenty years after
Vacation
, and after he’s already done
Vegas Vacation
, he says, “We’ve got to do something together.” I said, “Well, what are you thinking?” and he says, “ ‘Swiss Family Griswold.’ ” My first thought is,
Do I need to do another
Vacation
movie
?
Does he need to do another
Vacation
movie
? So I said, “Maybe it would be better to do something you’re actually interested in, like an issue in your life.” When you’re almost sixty years old there’s got to be something more going on. What are the challenges of being a grown-up in the world? Start with something that’s important or interesting to you, and that’s what you make movies out of. It’s like the rat in the experiment that just keeps going back and hitting the lever to get the same reward each time. It’s all about growth and development. I’ve tried to find meaning or create meaning in each of the films, a meaning that’s specific to me at that time in my life. All I can address is the sincerity and the meaningfulness for me. If I do a movie like
Bedazzled
, as broad as that is, or
Multiplicity
, or any of those films, I’m really examining those aspects of life that are portrayed in the film. If I had to do a Vegas film, I would be looking for what Vegas says about society. What does it mean to me? What does it say about the addiction to gambling? What does it represent? Everything means something, intended or not. Every story tells a big subtextual story. It’s all rich. It’s all subject to interpretation. That’s the fun, isn’t it? When we see generic work that has only
one interpretation, so what? You might as well stay at home and watch another rerun of
Friends
than see another romantic comedy. And I don’t mean to be down on romantic comedy.

Judd:
Unless the guy’s never had sex for forty years.

Harold:
That was a good one, though. That transcended romantic comedy.

Judd:
You talk about how you enjoy the disasters and the difficult moments. I’m not like that. I usually end up on my back in surgery when something like that happens. I don’t get that, the enjoying-the-pain part. But maybe that’s because I’m in pain the whole time, and you’re not. When it gets even worse, it’s like,
Can’t I just have my low-level hum of stress and suffering as we do this?
When you think of the worst fights, or the worst kind of conflict making a film with Bill Murray, what’s the one that comes to mind, like,
Wow, that was really ugly?

Harold:
As my first job out of college, I worked in a mental institution for seven months. I learned how to deflect insanity, or how to deal with it, and how to speak to schizophrenics, catatonics, paranoids, and suicidal people. It sounds funny, but it really expanded my tolerance for the extremes of human behavior, which turns out to be great training for working with actors. They have an incredibly hard job, and most of them are already a little bent. That’s why they’re actors in the first place. They have a desperate need to get out there and reveal something about themselves. Even as a teenager, you’re in a room full of people and someone is acting out. God, that’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s always the person who’s in big trouble. The rest of the class sits there and goes, “Wow! Did you hear what he said to the teacher? That was great!” We all wish we’d said it, and we’re fascinated by the result: “He’s going to get in trouble!” Then you meet someone like Bill, who says things to people you can’t believe. Like a sociologist or a psychologist, you watch for the impact: “God, you can say that and get away with it?” I’ve seen a total stranger come up to Bill on the street in New York: “Bill, love you on
Saturday Night
!” He says, “You motherfucker, I’m going to bite your nose!” He wrestles him to the ground—total stranger—and bites his nose. I guess you
can
do that.

Judd:
What is that? Is he having fun, or is he mad? Does it make it impossible to maintain a relationship with somebody like that?

Harold:
It keeps you constantly alive to possibility. Anything can happen here. It’s great. It kind of frees your imagination. Actors are nothing if not self-revealing or at least self-presenting. It’s kind of remarkable. It almost seems like a cliché to say comedy comes from pain, but real comedy is connected to the deep pain and anguish we all feel. I worked with Robin Williams on an obscure film called
Club Paradise.
Peter O’Toole, Jimmy Cliff, and Twiggy are in it. It’s a wonderful mess, but it’s a wonderful movie in a lot of ways. Robin is one of the most deeply melancholy people you’ll ever meet. You can just see it all over him. It’s what makes him so human, and I love and respect him. Deep down, Bill is as serious as a person could be. He’s raging, angry, and full of grief and unresolved emotions. He’s volcanic. Comedy gives them a place to work out ideas and entertain—and these guys love to entertain—but they want you to know that they feel. I think that’s part of it. You go see Robin Williams do stand-up, and you can’t get more laughs than that. I’ve been onstage. I know what it feels like to have those waves of laughter. It’s like being bathed in love. Once you’ve had it, it’s like a drug. It wears off, and then you need something more. I want the audience to feel something more than that. I want them to feel my pain.

Judd:
You always hear stories of conflict during
Groundhog Day
, but was there any conflict trying to rein Bill in and focus his energy?

Harold:
Never a creative problem. Bill kind of passive-aggressively takes his anger out on the production itself, but never me. I’m too calm. I don’t offer him anything to go after. He would go after the producers, or the costumes….Whoever was around had to take it from him. Or he’d go back and trash his motor home. I’d say, “Well, now you’ve trashed your motor home. Good idea.” No one fights with me. I’m just a detached observer of this extreme behavior. One time, we were shooting
Vacation
, and it was 110 degrees in Arcadia. We’re shooting a scene where Chevy and his family have arrived at the amusement park, Wally World. They park a mile away so they can be the first ones out at the end of the day. They run across the parking lot to the tune of
Chariots of Fire
in a slow-motion shot. It’s 110, and the pavement’s about 130 because it’s been sunny all day in Arcadia. Everyone’s really angry. Anthony Michael Hall gets heatstroke and has to go to the hospital. We continue to shoot with
Chevy, and he’s really irritated because it’s so hot, and he kind of blows a take. He’s loading luggage on top of the station wagon, and he’s holding this duffle bag. He screwed up, and he’s really mad. I’m sitting in my chair, and I think,
He’s going to throw that bag at something.
I see him look to his left. There’s a light stand. I know he’s processing,
I can’t throw it at the light. There’s the sound cart. I can’t throw it at the Nagra
[a professional audio recorder].
I can’t throw it at the camera.
Then he looks at me, and I go,
He’s going to throw that bag at me.
All this takes place in a split second, and of course, he throws the bag. I was so ready that I just put my foot up and knocked it to the ground. Then I say, “Come here,” and I take him away from the set, but not so far that everyone won’t hear us. This is my opportunity. The whole crew can hear. I say, “You fucking asshole, everyone’s been out here all day. The crew’s been out here longer than you have. They’ve been here since six in the morning. We’re all tired, and we’re all hot, so if you can’t control yourself, why don’t you…” Blah, blah, blah. So the crew is ready to applaud me. I’ve both cooled Chevy and made allies with the crew. So I try to turn adversity into something positive.

Judd:
At what time in your life did you get acquainted with or interested in Buddhism? It seems like it influences your approach.

Harold:
My best friend in college, we went to San Francisco together and graduated college in ’66. The word
hippie
had not been coined yet. We called ourselves freaks and beatniks. We went to San Francisco. The Haight-Ashbury was flowering. Jimi Hendrix was playing, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, the whole thing. My roommate, David Cohen, was really stunned by it. We were both really powerfully affected by this radical energy that was going on. It was political, cultural, consciousness, religious…it was everything. David went back to San Francisco. He’d been in four years of psychoanalysis—all through college—formal, Freudian psychoanalysis. So when he got to San Francisco he made a methodical investigation of all the new religious and spiritual movements, from bioenergetics to yoga. He moved systematically through all these movements and finally came to the San Francisco Zen Center. Zen Buddhism is the cleanest, sparest, most rigorous religious practice there is. You sit for forty minutes in an
extremely painful cross-legged position trying to keep your mind centered and focused. He became a full-fledged Zen monk and finally a Zen priest. He worked his way up through the Zen Center and stayed there more than twenty years. I so admired his practice and this amazing calm it brought to him. I started reading Buddhism and thinking about it. I don’t claim to be Buddhist. I’m too lazy. Then I met my wife. She’d spent her college years in a Buddhist meditation center in L.A., and her mother lived for thirty years in a Buddhist meditation center. Everything I’d heard and read about it so impressed me. I grew up Jewish, and then I found out that American Buddhists are less than five percent of the population, but thirty percent of them are Jews. It’s kind of an amazing statistic. It fit nicely with the Talmudic approach to life, which I’d been evolving. I’m so lazy that I just did a very superficial investigation of Buddhism and distilled it down to something the size of a Chinese takeout menu. It’s literally that size. It’s threefold, and I call it the “Five-Minute Buddhist.” It reminds me how to think—not what to think, but how to think. It’s a good response to existentialism, which is a psychology I embrace. There’s an actual school of existential psychology—a discipline—and that’s the one that makes the most sense to me. I wear Buddhist meditation beads. As Tony Hendra says in
Spinal Tap
, “It’s an affectation.”

Judd:
As someone who is an existentialist with a dash of Buddhism, if that’s your philosophy, you seem like a serene, happy person. How have you taken the darkest philosophy there is and found peace for yourself?

Harold:
Serenity is an illusion, but if anything is possible and I can do anything, then there’s a limitless capacity to do good. That’s what
Groundhog Day
is about. In
Groundhog Day
, Bill destroys all meaning for himself. Buddhism says our self doesn’t even exist. The self is a convenient illusion that gives us ego. In conventional terms, of course, it exists. There’s a name and picture on your driver’s license, you have to get dressed in the morning, and your paycheck is addressed to somebody, so you have a self. But it’s really an illusion. I did a group exercise, and we were asked to face another person and describe ourselves in two minutes. I started describing myself, and from the very first statement started thinking,
That’s not really true. That’s what I like to think about myself, but I’m not as good as I’m saying.
It’s all a projection. So then we switched partners,
and they said, “Now tell this person who you are.” So I did a corrective on the first, wrong view of myself, and as I’m talking I’m thinking,
That’s not me, either.
The whole point of the exercise is that we’re not who we think we are. We’re only occasionally who we want to be. We’re not what other people think we are. The self kind of evaporates as a concept. If you can take yourself out of these existential issues, life gets a little simpler. If life is full of possibility, and I stop thinking about myself, I end up where Bill ends up at the end of the movie: in the service of others. I called it the “Superman Syndrome.” By the end of the movie he has every moment scheduled so he can do some good. He’s always there to catch the kid. He’s always there when the old ladies get a flat tire. We even cut some things out where he’s always there to put his finger on a package someone is wrapping so they can tie the string. How the hell does Superman find the time to talk to Lois Lane when he could be stopping a dam from breaking? There’s always some good you can be doing, which can make you crazy, too. There’s a condition I call “altruistic panic,” where you feel like you have to do something for someone somewhere. If life only has the meaning you bring to it, we have the opportunity to bring rich meaning to our lives by the service we do for others. It’s a positive thing.