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Film interview - The Bucket List – Jack Nicholson Interview page two

You seem to enjoy a great chemistry with Morgan Freeman on screen but your characters are completely different from who you both are off screen. How did you go about creating that chemistry? Was it by working against each other?
Jack Nicholson: I have a personal maxim that I always use, which is to assume the other actor is perfect while I'm working with them. If you don't, you won't be immediate – and the object is to be immediate. Sometimes I've been fortunate enough to be involved in editing but I think the particular performance I do best in editing is to improve the performances of all the other characters – just in terms of timing and tuning it up. If you've done it for any amount of time, the better everybody is, the better you are.

The Bucket List’s director, Rob Reiner, has mentioned you did three takes at the most, but you've also worked with Stanley Kubrick [on The Shining], who was known for doing many. Which do you prefer?
Jack Nicholson: For me, I like to do every take a little bit different. As I told Stanley: "If you think [take] 100 is it, believe me 101 will be better!" But that was just to psych him out, actually. But one of the problems is that a director can fall in love with that process, so I sometimes in the 20s almost have to do an intentionally bad take otherwise they'll never stop! Rob went so fast on this and it was fine.

I liked it because I had a bit of an energy problem before we started. I'd been in the hospital before, so on the one hand I was very glad not to be in the grinder so to speak, but on the other hand it was like: “One take? Maybe we should do it again.” But you sense what Rob is doing. Very early, I sensed that I wasn't going to get much pyrotechnical help from the camerawork because this was a two-hander. It was going to be on me, so there was a simplicity to it. When you're just sitting or lying there, an actor knows that you're going to have to come up with a performance.

But I think that's one of the virtues of this picture: it's not pyrotechnics... the script is very subtle. When you do something subtle, people don't always notice it. I thought that Nancy Meyers' script for Something's Gotta Give was by far the best script in terms of reading it and saying: "My God, a moron could play this part..." She's on the committee at the Writers' Guild but she got absolutely no attention for that. I read a lot of scripts and eventually they can become a good script but most of them get re-written and re-written and then worked on in the morning and all that. But when I read that script I said: "Gee, I'd love to be intelligent but there's not much to criticise in this script..." So, simplicity is often overlooked.

We haven't often seen you cry in films. How difficult was it to find that emotion?
Jack Nicholson: It just took off on me, to be honest with you. I got a good break there. Sometimes when you shoot so far out of continuity it can be difficult. But this was shot at the beginning and it was one of the scenes that I worried about how I was going to play. I was standing there and just looking at the pictures of a young Morgan and on take two I just went off. So, it was a lucky break because I didn't have to worry about it anymore for the whole length of the production. I think we even took it back a little bit [smiles].

Do you subscribe to the view that comedy is one of the hardest things to do?
Jack Nicholson: Well, I just watched Morgan and it looked pretty easy for him to do. But yes, comedy is much more difficult, frankly. With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny. Rob [Reiner] and other directors I've worked with are professional humorists. I'm not. I'm a funny person but if you said to me, "be funny", I'd be at a loss.

If you had to make a list of three things you'd like to do before you die, what would be on it?
Jack Nicholson: I don't make lists. Some of the things came relatively late in life. I wanted to live long enough to see the children graduate, go to high school and stuff like that. I always wanted to speak another language, learn how to cook, stuff like that.

Interview: Rob Carnevale  
Photo: Warner Bros