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Feb 16 - Feb 23,2003 |
Time can't stop the irrepressible Jack
Oscar-winning Nicholson talks About Schmidt, his days as a ladies man and retirement
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2003-02-02
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Jack Nicholson
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Oscar-winning Jack Nicholson (he's won three for best actor and one for best supporting actor), at 65, once again proves himself an actor's renegade by pulling off a performance that has him swapping his trademark cool to play a man best described as "small" - not in stature but in standing.
His performance in Alexander Payne's About Schmidt as a recently widowed man in who decides to drive cross-country to his daughter's wedding, has won him critical reviews nation-wide as well as the best actor award at the recent Golden Globes.
Tandem talked to Jack Nicholson in Los Angeles.
Do you identify with Schmidt?
"I identify with the man. I looked at him as the man that I might have become if I wasn't lucky enough to wind up in show business."
Can you expand on the similarities?
"I have a mathematical background, he's an actuary. Then there are the retirement issues, what happens when your normal activities or your job no longer drive your day, loved ones move away from you, your children get older? My daughter Jennifer has a clothing shop, she has her own business now, so I don't get to talk to her as much as I did a year or so ago, those kinds of things. So there's always a lot to identify with. And you know, what I liked about the film is that the guy has some very tough ideas of his own."
Schmidt also believes for much of the film that he has no impact on the world. How can you identify with that?
"Well I didn't identify with that part of the character. But I also have a lot of contact with people in my life and want to be seen. There's a whole field of psychology based on the fact that people want to be seen. I never thought about it in that way, but I understood that part of the character."
Have you given any thought to your own retirement?
"I started thinking about that before The Two Jakes was written. I owned a property called The Murder of Napoleon which I thought of as the ultimate story of retirement. I feel like my take on the material would have been that he allowed himself to be killed at St. Helens, that here was a man who had conquered the world not once but twice, and who had been betrayed by everybody in his life, with a couple of exceptions. I think what Alexander did with the script is he found a man who was living a two-sided life. He deals with the facts, he is an actuary and pretty much that dominated his life. And then in the course of this movie, everything is taken systematically away from him - his wife dies, his daughter is going away - he feels the distance there. His job is now over. As he travels, so are one by one his illusions in life. This is a human movie, human problems, human aspirations, human frailties; by the looks of it myself, I'd say its quite beautiful."
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