Austin Pendleton

I think every actor who's any good is the Method. Whether they know it or not. You either develop a capacity to believe what you're doing or you don't. And great actors who forswore the Method, John Gielgud, people like that, the man believes everything he's saying, so however he arrives at that, to me that's the Method. That's all it is, a technique to know what you're talking about and mean what you say. I don't make those distinctions. You get Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, two very different traditions of acting in a movie together and they both believe what they do.

All the comedies I've done have been hard to film. Film is an anomalous environment for it because you don't know whether they're gonna laugh or not. So you're doing this stuff in total silence. Also comedy is hard to master. In theater when you do a comedy, you rehearse for a few weeks and you begin to feel the rhythm. In film it's an arbitrary rhythm usually that has to look like a truthful one to work. It's very pressured and difficult. I'm not complaining, I've been in some of the best comedies ever made. But I have never been on the set for a comedy where you don't feel like you were in trouble all the time. This is true of bad comedies I've been in and the good ones. You're just exhausted.

(2009, on Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990)) That's my favorite movie that I've been in. Everything about it. First of all, the movie itself. Secondly, the experience of doing it. That afternoon, acting with Joanne Woodward in that scene in her living room is the best four hours I've ever had working on-no, it was eight hours, because James Ivory is a very meticulous director. It was, I think, the best time I ever had on a movie set. First of all, she's just a great actress. But also, just the way Jim Ivory allowed that scene, the way he edged it along, that's the happiest I've ever been in a movie. And I think the movie, itself, is essentially flawless. I think it utterly does completely what it was trying to do. And their two performances are just brilliant. And with the exception of a couple of indies I've made recently, it's the work of mine I had the least amount of discomfort watching. Paul Newman was the ultimate sweet fellow. I didn't have anything opposite him in that film, but I'd known him slightly before that. He was just the nicest person you've ever met. He was very funny and thoughtful, and when you had a conversation with him, it was an actual conversation. He never in my presence uttered an uninteresting word. He was just fascinating. His outlook on things. And he was famously generous.

(2009, on The Muppet Movie (1979) and landing Starting Over (1979)) That was just after I'd had, as an actor in New York, a disastrous season on the stage, where every role I played... I went from being one of the highly praised actors in New York to the most reviled in a period of three months. There were reviews that were actually advising me to leave the profession. It was like free-fall. And indeed, for years after that, I couldn't get a job in a play in New York. But then they began to happen again. I just didn't know it could happen that quickly. I thought every actor goes through ups and downs, but this, I was like hiding under the sofa. And in the middle of this comes this call for The Muppet Movie, and by this point, I was so depressed. I read it and it was sort of a nowhere little part, from the script I read. So I said to my agent, "I'm turning this down."" And she said