E-mail a friendRob Reiner
original airdate December 18, 2007
Rob Reiner transitioned from Emmy-winning actor—for his role in the hit series, All in the Family—to versatile filmmaker and one of Hollywood's top directors. He's principal and co-founder of Castle Rock Entertainment, with box office hits that include When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men and The American President. A political activist and children's advocate, Reiner launched Parents' Action for Children, to help raise awareness about early childhood development. His next feature is The Bucket List.
Director-producer explains how he stays energized about politics. (2:29)
Rob Reiner
Tavis: I am pleased to welcome Rob Reiner to this program. The Emmy-winning actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker has enjoyed a long and noted career in film and television. He began acting at age 11 when he was still in his early twenties; landed a role on one of TV's most influential shows of all time, "All in the Family."
He has also directed seminal films like "A Few Good Men," "When Harry Met Sally," and "Stand By Me." His latest project is "The Bucket List" and stars two guys named -- what are these names? Jack Nicholson and some guy named Morgan Freeman? (Laughter) The film opens Christmas day in select cities; around the country in January. Here now, a scene from "The Bucket List."
[clip]
Tavis: So I'm in the movies not long ago, Rob Reiner, and this comes on the screen, the trailers, and I fall out laughing at that line. And I see it now for the second time, it's still just as funny.
Rob Reiner: It's funny, and they make this list. They sit together and they make up a list, and Jack, of course, he's saying, "Let's do it." They're two guys who meet in a hospital and they both find out that they're terminal. And Morgan's character says, "It's pointless now." Jack says, "I would argue the exact opposite," and they get into it.
Jack writes down -- he starts scribbling things down, and Morgan picks it up and he says, "What is this?" He starts laughing, he says, "Kiss the most beautiful girl in the world? How do you plan on doing that?" And Jack says, "Volume." (Laughter) So, yeah.
Tavis: You have worked with any number of A-list stars over the years, of course, but how do you take in working with Nicholson and Freeman on the same project? I could have asked you that about "A Few Good Men" with Cruise and Nicholson on that project.
Reiner: Yeah, no, if you're a director, that is the thrill of a lifetime, to get to see the two greatest actors and work with the two greatest actors in the world. And it makes your life very easy. These are two guys who know that the better they do, the better they're going to make somebody else, the better (unintelligible) back to them.
It's like watching two great tennis players batting the ball back and forth to each other. The harder they hit it, the harder it comes back. And they also are two people without ego because they are very secure in their talents. They're not threatened by anything. So you can tell them, you could say, "Hey, let's try it a little bit this way or a little bit that." I might hear it slightly different than they hear it. They're completely open, they don't get upset or take umbrage or anything like that. It's really a thrill.
Tavis: Is that, to your point, now, Rob, is that a luxury as a director or that is rather commonplace? By that I mean to have actors of their ilk, of their stature, who are not caught up with ego about their acting?
Reiner: It's a luxury. You have to get to a point where both those guys feel comfortable in their own skin, and they come prepared. They come ready to do their work. When they hit the stage, it's one, two, three takes the most. You're working with two eminent professionals at the top of their game, so it makes my life easier.
Tavis: How do you decide, now, the kinds of projects you want to engage yourself? And I ask that against the backdrop of all this work that you have done. But directorially, when you decide you're going to do something, what's that decision based upon these days?
Reiner: Well, I think about what I'm feeling and going through at any particular point in time, and if I can find myself in what the characters are experiencing, then I can tell the story. In this case, I turned 60 this year, and as you get older you start thinking more and more about your mortality. It's just what happens. Have you lived a meaningful life? Have you done the things you'd like to do with your life?
And all of a sudden this project comes along and I go, oh, my god, this is speaking to the same things I've been thinking about for a long time. So I take it and I read it, and I read the first 10 pages. And in the first 10 pages, I know that there's a real writer at work. He's got a unique voice and he hits the right tone. And to me, this is the tricky thing about a film like this.
It's about two people that have cancer and so we want to not be not reverential to the subject matter. We want to be as serious-minded as we can about it. There's a lot of emotion, but there's also humor. There's humor in life, and if you're going to reflect the life experience in any way, you're going to have comedy and tragedy and they have to live together.
This writer hit that tone right at the beginning. There's a little thing right at the beginning of the movie -- Sean Hayes plays Jack Nicholson's assistant. He comes to the hospital room, unveils -- and all of a sudden, there's Morgan Freeman lying in the bed. And Sean says, "Hey, what are you doing here?" And he says, "Oh, fighting for my life. You?" (Laughter)
And that's to me the right tone, and we hit that right tune. And that balance, you've got to strike that balance, otherwise you have something that's too maudlin, too sentimental and sappy. And I was very lucky, because Jack Nicholson was a collaborator in this. He's a great writer, people don't know that about Jack.
He's a wonderful writer and he collaborated not just in the early parts of the script when we were preparing it, but every day I would spend a half-hour to 45 minutes in the trailer with him. Every day we'd work on the scenes. And I think we had a good blend. We tried to strike the balance between emotion and humor, and with Jack, he goes a little darker, a little edgier than me. I'm a little softer -- sweeter -- and the two of us together, I think we hit the perfect blend.
Tavis: I want to go back to the early part of your career in just a moment here, but since you mentioned this bucket list relative to your own life, not to get too personal here, but now that you are 60, how are you doing on your bucket list?
Reiner: Well, I have the same three things on my bucket list that have been there forever, and the wonderful thing is you keep striving to improve yourself in those three things. One is on the top of the list, and this is really what the movie deals with. It's am I doing what I need to do in terms of my relationships with my family and my friends, the people I care about in my life, am I doing as much as I can to make those relationships good? That's number one.
Number two, am I using the talent that God gave me in a positive way that I can make films that impact the culture in some positive way? And three, am I using whatever celebrity I've gained from all of that to help effect public policy and move an agenda forward for young children and the environment and so on. So those are three things that you never complete. You kind of keep striving towards improving those things.
Tavis: Let me pick, if I can, those last two, and have you unpack it a little more, if I can. To your second point, is it more difficult to do that second thing, which is today, with all the clout and name identity and exposure and access that you have behind you that comes with the name Rob Reiner, is it getting more difficult to make films in this business that impact the culture in a positive way?
Reiner: It is. it is more difficult because studios -- and rightly so; they're in a business, they're trying to make money and most of the pictures they would rather make are big what they call tent-pole pictures, franchise-type pictures where you can have lots of explosions and visual effects and all that stuff and sell lots of tickets.
If I were to -- and I was very fortunate I got Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman to do this, because think about this for a second. I'm going to a studio and I say, "Okay, I got a movie about two old guys dying --"
Tavis: Thank you, Rob. Nice to see you. We'll talk to you later. (Laughs)
Reiner: "-- dying of cancer. Give me $45 million to make a movie." They're not going to do it so fast. But I have Jack and Morgan, and luckily Alan Horn at Warner Brothers -- I have a relationship with him for many years -- says, "Okay, we'll take a shot with this." It's really not easy, it's really not easy.
Tavis: Yeah, you say two old guys, you're out the door in the first 30 seconds.
Reiner: Yeah, exactly.
Tavis: A movie about two old guys. Thank you, Rob.
Reiner: Yeah, goodbye. (Laughter)
Tavis: To your third thing on your bucket list, to use your celebrity for the common good vis-à-vis public policy. You've done that quite remarkably well here in California, for those who don't know your involvement in California issues and education and healthcare and the like. Are you still struggling with that last one?
Reiner: Absolutely. I ran an initiative a little while back, prop 82, and it was designed to provide preschool to every 4-year-old in the state, which I felt was a critical thing, and not just for the 4-year-olds but for their trajectory throughout their education and career. Whether or not they're going to drop out and learn to read by the fourth grade is in a large part determined by what foundation they're given early on.
So here we have an education crisis in the state where we have big dropout rates and 50 percent of the kids failing reading by the fourth grade. I thought this was something we really need to do. Now that's not to say with First 5 we haven't done a lot with preschool; we have. And we've set up preschool programs all throughout the state.
But I felt this was something that we really needed to do, and I failed. We didn't pass it. It required a tax increase and that's the third rail of politics, to talk about that. It meant people like me would have to pay a little bit more. I felt that we at the upper end had benefited outlandishly through the Bush tax cut and we could afford to fund some basic things for the common good to build an infrastructure for the state, which is education is the foundation for everything in an economy, and I failed.
So I'm always looking for an opportunity now, how can I move that agenda forward? And that's one of the reasons why we so desperately need, in my opinion, a Democrat in the White House, because then we have an opportunity to start those big-ticket items. And we've got the war on terror, we've got the environment and global warming, but we have the kitchen table issues of healthcare and education that are always there.
And we need to change the debate. We need to change the way in which we discuss programs for everyone so that we don't make taxes and revenue or however you want to talk it the bogeymen on this. As long as it's done properly.
Tavis: I want to come back to your involvement in this presidential race that you intimated a moment ago. Before I do that, though, let me go back to the comment you made about -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- about using your celebrity, again, to help the least among us -- as Sly Stone would say, these everyday people. I'm curious, and this is not a brown-nose question or sucking up to you, I'm really curious about this. How does a guy who is born into a family of privilege, much less Hollywood privilege, who has the benefit of White skin, White skin privilege, end up spending so much of his life caring about people who are politically, socially, economically disenfranchised? Where does that come from?
Reiner: That comes from my household. My father, we had arguments. He used to argue, and as a kid, it was about baseball. He was a New York Giant fan back in the days when the Giants played in New York City. Karl Hubble, Mel Ott, those were his idols. And then in 1947, which was the year I was born, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and my father immediately became a Dodger fan.
It meant something to him that we had broken the color line in this country. He's always had that attitude about -- and that's been in my house. During the Vietnam war there was a lot of activism in my house. My father marched in the moratorium. My mother was a member of Another Mother for Peace. They had the poster "War is Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things." She was part of that group.
And so this was the way I was raised. I remember during the civil rights movement, the last incantation of it during the sixties. It's ongoing, it's continuous, but the big push in the sixties for the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, they were active, they were involved. And so those are the discussions I heard around my family table.
I talked about this when I made the movie "Ghosts of Mississippi." I remember when Medgar Evers was assassinated. Everybody knows where they were when Kennedy died, but I remember when Medgar Evers died, and we talked about it in my household. And it was the first of the high profile civil rights slayings.
And that was in 1963, and that was right around when Kennedy gave his very seminal speech about civil rights. So I remember all these things and that's why I wanted to make that movie. So it's been part of the way I was raised in my life.
Tavis: Two things right quick before we go forward. First of all, your father's been a guest on this program, as you know, and for those who are watching, when you are promoting your show with whoever you're promoting it to -- conventions or whatever the case may be -- whenever they ask me to speak somewhere and they run a clip -- we call it a clip reel; they run a clip reel of the guests who've been on my show -- you only have time for a few people because it's only a couple minutes long -- your father, Carl Reiner, is on my clip reel because when he was here, we had the best time.
There's a particular clip that is so funny, and every time I'm about to be introduced and they play that clip reel, it kills every time because your father is just a funny guy. Secondly, to your point about the "Ghosts in Mississippi," again, at home they can't see this, but the woman who did your makeup today, Sheila Evers.
My makeup artist is the niece of Medgar Evers. Her father, Charles, Medgar's brother. And the guy over there taking pictures right now who they can't see at home is Van Evers. Our photographer is Medgar's younger son.
Reiner: Right, and Van is in the movie. And we have a wonderful scene with Bill Cobb where he plays Charlie Evers, and there's a wonderful scene at a radio station. Charles still has the radio station down in Jackson. So I spent time with Charles, and then Myrlie was involved in the project, and it was a very emotional experience for me.
I went down to Jackson and I stood right on -- we shot the sequence where Medgar Evers was assassinated right at his house on Guynes Street -- and when I scouted that location I stood on the driveway and started crying. I just started breaking down and crying because I thought about -- at that time I had two children; now I have three.
And I thought about the idea of being taken away from your children right there in front of them. It was just too much, too much for me. And Myrlie, I was on the Oprah show, we were promoting the film, and Myrlie surprised me. And this was one of the most emotional experiences I ever had in show business, my show business career.
She brings out this Lucite-encased -- and I couldn't make it out, what it was at first. And it was a poll tax receipt. And it was the poll tax receipt that was in Medgar Evers' wallet that was on him the night that he was assassinated, and it still had blood stains on it. And I keep that. That's the one thing I cherish more than anything I have during my whole movie career.
Tavis: That was her gift to you?
Reiner: She gave me that. She gave me that, and I started crying on Oprah's show on (unintelligible).
Tavis: Rob Reiner's a big crybaby.
Reiner: Yeah, crying (unintelligible).
Tavis: Meathead is a crybaby.
Reiner: Yeah. (Laughter)
Tavis: No, I just shared that because we take great pride in having Medgar's family work on this program every day. Now back to your politics, as I promised we'd get back to. So you're supporting Hillary, but Al Gore, I'm told, was your first choice?
Reiner: Well, I supported Al Gore during the 2000 election. I'm very close friends with him, and I waited to see what he was going to do, quite frankly. I'm very loyal to him and I felt he didn't get a good shake there in the 2000 race.
Tavis: There's an understatement of the year.
Reiner: Well, yeah. He won; they just didn't let him govern. That was the thing. (Laughter) So he can feel good about the win, but he didn't get to govern. And unfortunate for the world that he didn't, because --
Tavis: But he's a Nobel laureate now.
Reiner: Yes he is, and that's wonderful. But I used to say to him all the time when he was considering or thinking about it, I used to say, "Al, we got a great story to tell here. It's like 'It's A Wonderful Life.' We can imagine what the world would have been like without Al Gore. We've seen it." So I said, "You could tell that story. You're like George Bailey on this."
But the reason I picked -- and once it was clear that Al was not going to get into the race, then I looked at all the candidates -- and by the way, we've got great candidates. I like John Edwards, I like Barack Obama. We've got really smart, good candidates. But to be honest with you, when I looked around, based on my experience and what I know goes on in government -- I've held a government job for seven years, I've been in public policy, I know what happens in order to get and what you need to do in order to move and agenda forward.
And I looked at all the candidates and it was not even a question for me. Hillary Clinton, of the three top ones that I was considering, she's the only one that had the real understanding of the three things that you really need. You need to understand public policy backwards and forwards, like a WONK. You really have to understand it.
You have to understand the programs you need to institute in order to make the public policy work. She's steeped in both those. And the third is politics, and to really understand the machinations of politics to move that agenda forward. And you have to be experienced in all those three things. Yes, we want change. We do want change. But what she says is absolutely true -- unless you have the experience, you cannot make that change.
You have to know how government works, and it is naive to say that you can go into Washington and not know the mechanics and the inner workings of Washington in order to make an agenda forward. So that's why I back Hillary.
Tavis: Part of what you share now underscores for me why so many people are turned off to the process. It's not because they're stupid or ignorant; it's not even because all of them are cynical, necessarily. People know that our democracy is dysfunctional. And if there's any proof, to me, at least, that our democracy is dysfunctional, it is what happened to your friend, Al Gore.
I raise that only to ask you, Rob Reiner, how it is that you stay excited and energized, as obviously you are, about politics when you saw up close and personal with your friend how dysfunctional our system can be?
Reiner: Because what else do we have? This is what we have. We have this system of government, good, bad or indifferent. The basics that are outlaid in the Constitution are sound. We have strayed from them considerably in the last seven years. We've basically thrown out habeas corpus, we've thrown out -- some of our civil liberties have been destroyed with illegal wiretapping. We've got treason that's been committed by the highest levels of government.
No question about that, with outing a covert operative, Valerie Plame. So there's a lot that has happened, but that bedrock document, the Constitution, is still there, and it allows us to change course. We can bring new people in. Things do change, and sometimes it takes a long time. It doesn't happen overnight. And it needs people who are dedicated and are willing to be public servants.
That's why I admire anybody who wants to go into public service. Just on the initiative that I did, prop 82, I got, in my little way, swift boated, just like you get. I was going to raise taxes, and so we can't have that. We're going to do anything to kill this guy because he wants to raise taxes. So I understand how it works, and God love the fact that we have people who are willing to do it because there is no other way. So yes, we have to change the system and that's going to take a lot of doing.
Tavis: And your name -- and speaking of a lot of doing, your name even now continues to come up from time to time here in California about running for governor, and Schwarzenegger's pretty much termed out. So?
Reiner: Yeah. Well, here's the thing --
Tavis: So, so?
Reiner: I'm going to tell you the so. The so is we had a very serious discussion about this the last time around.
Tavis: Absolutely.
Reiner: And I didn't carry my whole family. I basically polled 40% in my family.
Tavis: Yeah, okay.
Reiner: So I figured if I can't carry my own family, I'm going to be in trouble.
Tavis: One quick question with 45 seconds to go. For your fans -- I'm going straight to hell for taking 45 seconds left in the show to ask you this -- when you think of "All in the Family" these many years later, you think of what?
Reiner: I think of how proud I am to be part of a show that really added to the culture and the cultural fabric in such a meaningful way. It was a great experience for me, a great learning experience. It was like the PhD for me in terms of my work in films. I learned about audiences, I learned about the country, I learned about so much, and I wouldn't trade it.
Tavis: Well, I'm glad you were there for that and I'm glad you're still here doing what you do.
Reiner: Hey, thank you.
Tavis: Rob Reiner is directing the new film called "The Bucket List." Stars two great actors, of course -- Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Opens on Christmas day in select cities and then around the country in January. Rob, nice to have you on the program.
Reiner: Thanks for having me.
Back to December 18, 2007