E-mail a friendBill Pullman
airdate July 2, 2009
Bill Pullman is at home on the stage, TV and in film. He's played a variety of roles, from Lost Highway's killer to the U.S. president in Independence Day. Pullman expected to become a drama teacher and earned an MFA degree in directing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He taught drama at Montana State University, but later decided to pursue professional acting. He also made his film directing debut in TNT's remake of The Virginian, wrote the play Expedition 6 and founded Big Town production company.
Theater and film star talks about the high from being on stage. (1:11)
Full interview. (11:05)
Bill Pullman
Tavis: Bill Pullman is a talented actor who has enjoyed success on the stage and in film, including notable projects like "Ruthless People," "While You Were Sleeping," and "Independence Day." You can catch him in the new film, "Surveillance," which hit theaters this past weekend. He's also starring, though, in the David Mamet production of "Oleanna," which is running here in L.A. through July 12th at the Mark Taper Forum. Here now, a scene from "Oleanna."
[Clip]
Bill Pullman: (Laughs.) Don't try that, Tavis, in the show, or with any of your help or anything like that.
Tavis: No, I don't go there.
Pullman: It gets complicated.
Tavis: Yeah, I don't want to go there. Nice to see you, though.
Pullman: Good to see you.
Tavis: Let's start with "Oleanna." We'll come to "Surveillance" in a moment. Tell me about what we were seeing there.
Pullman: Well, this is a professor at a college and he is -- it's a Friday afternoon and he's thinking he's got to get out of there fast because he's got a house that he's looking to get into, his first house. He came late to teaching, he's kind of a new guy but he made a big splash, and now he's going to get tenure. And then a student shows up and she's got a different idea of how he should be spending his time and he gets very intrigued by trying to help her.
And then it gets complicated once he realizes that she definitely has a different agenda than just being helped.
Tavis: What's the process for you personally when you -- what's the run time on this, roughly?
Pullman: Seventy-five minutes.
Tavis: Okay. As an actor, what's the process for staying in the zone, for getting and staying in the zone, so to speak, when it's just the two of you for 75 nonstop minutes, versus being part of an ensemble cast? That make sense?
Pullman: It's (unintelligible) it's very athletic, so you can't look to ease yourself into it. You kind of have to be ready to go. There is a little physical thing that happens in the place. We have a fight call that starts first, and that's kind of a blessing because it centers you and you get connected to the other actor. But then by the time it comes time to go, after the first week and opening you're almost out of body. You don't know what the heck you're thinking about.
You think you're thinking, but it's just the squirrel brain or something, I think. But now that we've -- you get through that opening night and then it's a privilege to be out there because in a way you have so much control over time and space, different than a movie where there's somebody else who's going to do the cuts and the edits.
But you definitely want to find it. This play has to jump right away, and as you can see from that clip there's a lot of fractured syntax. The sentences are all chopped and small bursts of words -- "You're going to make -- look- look- look -- I want -- no -- you're going to make -- no, no, there are norms here." All that stuff. It means that you kind of have -- and it's almost a different metabolism than my normal self.
Tavis: So that was deliberate, that wasn't you missing and forgetting your lines.
Pullman: (Laughs.) I try to make it look that way.
Tavis: No, I'm just teasing.
Pullman: But when you see a Mamet script, you see those ellipses, which it's not about flow, it's about disruption. Because I think his characters are constantly negotiating with each other in some way, and so they're kind of self-editing. So they'll start in with a sentence and then realize maybe that's not where they want to go, and they'll jump to another sentence.
Tavis: That raises a fascinating question, at least in my mind. You're right about the fact, obviously, that when you're on the stage, unlike a film, you control that time and space, it's all about you and that other character here in this particular play. But you also don't get that break.
You don't get somebody saying, "Cut" and hear this wild applause on the set to at least know that you killed the scene that you just did, which raises the question how do you know, how does Bill know that we're killing this tonight, that we're connecting, that this is actually working, when the audience is just sitting there watching? You don't know until the end, do you? Or do you know?
Pullman: Well, you can get a lot of play from the audience, and this play is a hugely interactive play. You get people sometimes calling things out. They get angry, they get churned up sometimes.
Tavis: So this sounds like the Apollo.
Pullman: Yeah, it does. (Laughter.)
Tavis: Yelling from the audience.
Pullman: It feels like -- yeah, there's like a free -- and especially certain shows. And that's not always the best thing. Sometimes because it's kind of politicized, two different points of view going head to head with each other and certain kinds of entrapments and things like that, power moves and sympathies adjust different times.
Sometimes when somebody shouts something out it galvanizes the audience in one way or another. For me, a great success is to try to throttle that down a little bit. Because you can pop it -- at different times I can come in triumphantly and try to -- and the audience, I can hear them get, "Yeah, yeah." But that sometimes takes them out of the play or it makes them -- so sometimes it's about kind of not giving them what they want.
Tavis: You at least, though, know they're engaged.
Pullman: Yeah, you can -- yeah, you can feel it. It's a very tense play. It's extremely tense. We had a performance where we ended the play and there was no applause. They were just absolutely stunned. It has this incredible final moments, and they -- and it's probably because -- they know it's over, but it's a hard moment. You go, "Oh, yeah, great, great, great." It's not one of those shows.
Tavis: So they were kind of transfixed, then.
Pullman: Yeah, yeah.
Tavis: So did you in that moment, speaking of space and time, in that space and time, did you realize that that was going on, or did you think, oh my god, they're not applauding -- what happened?
Pullman: Well, it was kind of a -- everything is a little -- it was like you slip on a banana peel, you know that moment where you kind of get a cold wash over you? You're thinking, like, is this going to be awkward now? But then you realize where they're coming from and the applause came in and it was very strong. So it kind of got over with fast, but it's -- the Mark Taper Forum is a different kind of theater than I'm used to playing it. It's not a proscenium, it's not a true theater in the round; it's a thrust.
It's truly a forum, which is kind of good for this play because it feels a little bit like when you're in a large lecture hall and you're listening to a professor, and he's going on and on and you're listening to her point of view, and then it's a gladiatorial pit, in a way. It's a good theater for it.
Tavis: To your point now, I've never thought about that until you said this, and you've done a number of stage plays over the years. How much does the actual setting, the venue itself, factor into it? I'm not talking about the set design, but to your point now the actual setup of the stage -- how does that play into -- pardon the pun -- impact the production?
Pullman: Well, I think -- this would be probably hard. If I were in a comedy I might want to have a little more control because sometimes half the audience doesn't see something. But it's great for this kind of drama, I think. I've seen it work great for comedies, too. But another nice thing about this theater is that the seat that's furthest away is only 50 feet away, so you don't have that deep balcony, that balcony above the mezzanine.
Like on Broadway sometimes you can get those where the physicality has to be very clear so they can get reinforcements visually, and the projection has to be kind of high if you're pounding it back to the back row. The theater is blessed with a lot of older people who are good theatergoers, and you can't count them out.
Tavis: You mentioned high a moment ago; let me take that word and apply it differently. What's the high that you get after all these years from doing the stage specifically as opposed to film or something else?
Pullman: There's that feeling like sometimes I feel like a few times where I've gone sailing and you've been tacking back and forth and you're looking for -- and you're moving along but you know that there's something better coming. And then all of a sudden that sail just seems to pocket out with the wind and it's lifting, and suddenly the effort goes away and you're just moving fast.
And that happens on stage when you've got -- especially some good partners on stage who are also kind of feeling the moment and you're in a present tense in a way that you're not, and remembering lines. It's not past tense, it's happening right now and you're moving faster than you thought you would.
Tavis: I've asked that question a thousand times over the years to different persons because I'm always curious as to what turns people on when they do a variety of things, as you do, and that's the best answer I have ever heard. (Laughter.) The best I've ever heard for what it feels like on stage when it gets going.
Pullman: Sounds fun, doesn't it?
Tavis: It's great, it does. I think I may go to train to be a thespian now. (Laughter.) That sounds like a lot of fun -- it just opens up and you start going with it. But it takes years of practice to do that, of course, though. I couldn't just walk out and do that at the Mark Taper Forum.
Pullman: Well -- a little time.
Tavis: Yeah, no, that's kind of you, thank you. (Laughter.) It's kind of you not to bust my chops that way. Tell me about "Surveillance." I haven't had a chance to see it yet, but tell me about it.
Pullman: Well, this is kind of a movie that I feel strongly about for a couple of different reasons. One is Jennifer Lynch, who wrote it and directed it, is daughter of David Lynch, and David produced it. And I met her first when she was 19 years old and she was doing "Boxing Helena," starting that out. And at that point I was going to do it with Madonna, and then the financing fell apart and I didn't get to go -- I was doing something else when it came together.
I'd known her all these years, did "The Lost Highway" with David, and now this is her second film and I think she invited me to do some character that I'd never gone quite to this place before. And I don't know, I really feel like I would have done it if it would have been anybody else, because she's -- there's a very specific joy about going at this kind of somewhat gnarly, depraved characters.
Tavis: So I won't ask you to give the storyline, but tell me more about the character you play in the film.
Pullman: Well, I'm an FBI character who comes in with Julia Ormond, and we're partners and coming to uncover this kind of series of murders that happen on a desolate stretch of road, and interviewing the survivors, realizing nothing is quite what it seems, and the characters, her character and I have an undercurrent. You realize there's more going on there than probably what was obvious to everybody else.
Tavis: His name, Bill Pullman, as you know; "Oleanna," the play here now in L.A. at the Mark Taper Forum. If you're in the L.A. area, you'll want to check that out, assuming you can get tickets; I'm sure you can. And "Surveillance," in theaters as we speak now. Bill, nice to have you here.
Pullman: Oh, thank you very much, Tavis.
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