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00:00 Wow. I don't know. I need a hint.
00:04 Geez, I have no idea. I'm terrible at this game.
00:08 Nobody has to be a hero. It just sometimes turns out that way.
00:16 Oh my god. 40 days and 40 nights.
00:20 Geez, I have no idea. This is terrible.
00:24 As I said, I'm super jet lagged. I'm gonna say Blackhawk Town.
00:28 Am I correct? Thank god.
00:30 Nobody has to be a hero.
00:34 It just sometimes turns out that way.
00:40 I love Ridley. We became fast friends on the movie.
00:43 I used to come into work with him sometimes in the car
00:46 and he'd be kind of explaining what he wanted to do for the day
00:48 and he'd be drawing these amazingly intricate storyboards
00:51 as we're going over these bumps in the middle of Morocco.
00:54 And you'd get to the set and he'd have shown me all the storyboards
00:57 and then he'd set up the cameras. He'd be like, "I want one over there.
00:59 I want a box over there. And I want you here."
01:02 And the shots would be exactly what he'd drawn.
01:04 He had infinite ability when it comes to visuals.
01:07 And it's pretty incredible.
01:09 Adios yourself back to the halls of Tripoli, shitbird.
01:14 I've got business with the lady.
01:16 Wow. Wow.
01:20 That's such an evocative line. What the hell?
01:24 And I remember saying it, I think.
01:27 Adios yourself back to the halls of Tripoli, shitbird.
01:29 I've got business with the lady.
01:31 I mean, it's got to be a super stylized movie.
01:33 And it's got to be... It's not Sin City.
01:36 [buzzer]
01:37 Oh, I'm so bummed. I'm so angry at myself for not remembering this.
01:41 I'm super jet-lagged. I'm going to have to call...
01:43 I'm going to have to ask.
01:45 Oh, is somebody telling... Oh, totally. 100%.
01:47 Adios yourself back to the halls of Tripoli, shitbird.
01:50 I've got business with the lady.
01:52 Roy wrote the book because he was interested in that story,
01:55 but also because his mother was killed.
01:57 And so we discussed the case quite a bit beforehand.
02:01 The filming of it was marred by delays.
02:04 Finally, the iteration that we filmed was cool,
02:07 but I felt like I'd been living with it for years at that point.
02:10 Apparently not enough, because I can't remember the line.
02:13 Thank you.
02:15 "You're a stone fox."
02:17 I know this one. This is "Virgin Suicides."
02:19 You're a stone fox.
02:22 So you're like, the first few films that you do
02:25 or the first few times that you're on stage or whatever,
02:28 you remember all that stuff.
02:30 I have held that film up as a sort of marker of like,
02:33 if I can make films that are that much fun, then I'm happy,
02:37 and it rarely happens.
02:39 I didn't know what to expect in this industry,
02:41 because I actually was going to art school in New York
02:44 and thought I was going to be painting.
02:47 So the whole fame aspect was so foreign to me
02:50 and not something that I ever pursued,
02:53 so it was simultaneously overwhelming
02:56 and like the funniest thing ever,
02:59 because I was not the most popular kid in school,
03:02 and suddenly, yeah, I had people chasing me down the street.
03:06 Cool, thanks.
03:08 Okay, so I just guessed this one.
03:10 "Swear to God, everywhere I look, I'm seeing tits and ass."
03:13 That's got to be "40 Days and 49 Nights."
03:16 "I swear to God, everywhere I look, I'm seeing tits and ass."
03:20 It was a different time.
03:22 There were a lot of kind of sexy comedies coming out at the time,
03:25 and what I appreciated about this one
03:27 is that it was about abstinence from sex,
03:29 basically this ridiculous concept of like losing your mind
03:33 through not being able to do the deed.
03:37 I became friends with the guy who wrote it, Rob Perez,
03:40 and he said he had done it himself, and at the time,
03:44 like, who cares?
03:46 Like, it's not that big a deal, but back then,
03:48 he was kind of playing it up as it was like
03:50 this mystical experience that he had.
03:52 I was attracted to the bizarre concept of it.
03:55 I was young. I was like 21 years old.
03:58 It's funny to a 21-year-old.
04:00 "This ain't the farm, and these ain't no crop dusters."
04:06 "I'm not playing chicken with you."
04:09 I think that's exactly how I said it.
04:11 This is Pearl Harbor.
04:14 "This ain't the farm, and these ain't no crop dusters."
04:16 "I'm not playing chicken with you."
04:17 I love Ben.
04:18 I think everybody's quite aware of this now,
04:20 but he's an incredibly intelligent guy,
04:22 and at the time, they always thought that Matt was like
04:24 the brains behind the operation,
04:25 and he had like this just incredible capacity
04:28 to do like 50 things at once.
04:30 He was producing a film at the time.
04:32 He was like always had his little crossword.
04:34 He was working on his crossword.
04:35 He was doing like--
04:36 I don't remember who he was dating at the time,
04:37 but he was constantly on the phone with them.
04:39 Whenever I see him, we're friendly with each other,
04:41 but we're not, you know, we're not super close,
04:43 and I don't know if you know "The Onion" has an article
04:45 about us being like, you know, remembering our time
04:48 at Pearl Harbor, which my friends send to me
04:50 all the time.
04:51 I don't know why, but unfortunately, Ben and I,
04:54 we don't get together and discuss
04:56 the trauma of Pearl Harbor.
04:58 Okay, I'm under the impression
05:01 that you're under the impression
05:03 that I owe you $96,000.
05:08 I mean, "Lucky Number 11"?
05:10 [ding]
05:11 Yes.
05:12 Okay, I'm under the impression
05:13 that you're under the impression
05:14 that I owe you $96,000.
05:16 So many good memories from set.
05:17 I became really close with Bruce on that,
05:20 became close with Lucy Liu for a while on that,
05:22 and obviously was able to watch and admire
05:26 Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman doing their thing.
05:29 There was another actor who was supposed to play
05:31 Bruce's part at the last minute.
05:32 He fell out, and then Bruce was like,
05:33 "I'll do it."
05:34 So bizarre that this huge movie star
05:35 would come in and play this role,
05:37 and he was so interested in what
05:39 the other actors were doing.
05:40 He was like a school kid on set
05:42 watching Sir Ben and Morgan do their thing.
05:46 Okay.
05:49 We have two advantages.
05:51 We know this town, and we know the cold.
05:53 We live here for a reason,
05:54 because nobody else can.
05:56 30 days a night.
05:57 [ding]
05:58 We've got another of-night,
05:59 night-number movie.
06:01 We have two advantages.
06:02 We know this town,
06:04 and we know the cold.
06:06 Still one of the scariest vampire films,
06:08 I think, that exists.
06:10 I haven't seen it in a long time,
06:11 but people come up a lot and tell me
06:13 that they love the movie.
06:14 We had a really easy experience
06:15 making that film.
06:16 We shot it in New Zealand,
06:17 and it was warm, and it was gorgeous,
06:18 but we were shooting inside of this kind of hangar
06:21 filled with Epsom salts,
06:22 which is probably, like,
06:23 we probably all have cancer at this point.
06:25 I don't know what.
06:26 It wasn't just salt.
06:27 It was, like, all this other stuff
06:28 thrown in there to make it look like snow.
06:31 It was, like, a lovely experience.
06:33 Everybody's like, "Oh, how did you survive that?"
06:35 It's great. New Zealand's amazing.
06:37 I'm from Minnesota,
06:38 and, like, I know my limitations
06:39 as far as cold goes,
06:40 and, like, it gets to -40 in Minnesota sometimes,
06:43 but, like, up in Barrow, Alaska,
06:45 I think it's -40 a lot.
06:47 Like, those days, we don't go out.
06:49 People live in that all the time.
06:50 They're crazy.
06:52 But they're tough.
06:54 Thank you.
06:55 I'm late, which is ironic,
06:56 because I started out 9 hours and 23 minutes early.
07:00 I'm terrible at this game,
07:01 which is ironic, because I started out 9 hours early.
07:03 I definitely remember this.
07:04 Like, I remember the words coming out of my mouth.
07:08 Oh, my God.
07:10 I don't know.
07:11 I need a hint.
07:12 This is awful.
07:13 I've done - I mean, I've been doing this for 25 years, right?
07:16 So that's, like, that's a long time.
07:17 Mozart and the Whale? Oh, man.
07:19 Of course it is.
07:21 Yeah, all right.
07:22 I love - I love Mozart and the Whale.
07:24 I'm late, which is ironic,
07:26 because I started out 9 hours and 23 minutes early.
07:29 I haven't seen it since it came out.
07:30 I got to know Jerry Newport,
07:31 who was the character - my character was based on him.
07:34 He's such a delightful human being,
07:36 and a lot of these lines came directly out of his mouth.
07:39 I think he told me the first time we met,
07:41 he was trying to explain
07:42 what his relationship with his wife was,
07:44 and that's basically what the movie's about,
07:46 and he said, "Sex with me is an acquired taste."
07:50 And I was like, "Okay, cool," like, right out of the gate.
07:53 And I was like, "All right, I love this guy."
07:55 Theory will get you only so far.
08:00 This is much more recent.
08:02 This is Oppenheimer.
08:03 Theory will get you only so far.
08:05 Ernest Lawrence, I think, is probably
08:07 the most significant cultural figure of the 20th century,
08:10 American 20th century, that I knew nothing about.
08:13 I got this unbelievably detailed sort of sense
08:17 of this person that had history gone
08:19 just a little bit differently would have been someone
08:22 that we were talking about in this same way.
08:24 He was the first American to win a Nobel Prize for physics.
08:29 He was on the cover of Time magazine.
08:31 He created the Rad Lab.
08:32 He was running four different segments
08:35 of the creation of the atomic bomb.
08:38 And I felt like an incredible responsibility to play him,
08:43 but also an incredible responsibility to show--
08:46 'cause they were so opposite in so many ways--
08:50 to show sort of a yin to Killian's yang.
08:54 Oh, aliens are taking over the Earth.
08:57 Wait.
08:58 The faculty.
08:59 Aliens are taking over the Earth.
09:01 Wait.
09:02 Like I said, I wasn't really an actor,
09:04 and I think if you ask Robert, or I asked Robert,
09:07 like, "Why did you pick me?"
09:08 And he was like, "Because you were just,
09:10 you were, like, too cool to even learn your lines
09:13 for the audition." [laughs]
09:14 It was basically because I didn't know anything about it.
09:17 I go in, I talk to the director, right?
09:19 And everybody else is like there,
09:20 and they're prepared, and they're doing the thing,
09:22 and he was like, "No, I need Zeke to be, like, a rebel."
09:24 That's why he gave me the role, 'cause I was terrible,
09:26 because I didn't know how to do my job.
09:28 There's not much advice I could give to a kid in that position.
09:31 When you're at an age where you're just--
09:33 it's your formative years, and you're being commodified,
09:35 it's almost impossible not to be either drawn into it
09:39 or to fight back against it.
09:40 And I think my position was, "I'm gonna fight against this,
09:43 and I'm going to find myself."
09:45 And I think that that was the right move, honestly.
09:48 Enjoy yourself more.
09:49 Don't think too-- I would give that advice to myself right now.
09:52 Like, to all of you, to everyone.
09:55 Enjoy yourself more.
09:56 It goes fast.
09:58 It's a good thing.
09:59 ♪ ♪
10:02 ♪ ♪
10:05 (upbeat music)