The Bucket List - Rob Reiner interview

DIRECTOR Rob Reiner talks about the pleasure of working with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman on The Bucket List and the things that bring him the greatest joy in his personal life. He was speaking at a UK press conference...

Q. Is it true that one of the items on your own personal bucket list was to direct these two in a movie?
Rob Reiner: Yes. I’ve worked with Jack before but I never got to work with the two of them together. For a director, it makes your life a lot easier when you’ve got the two best actors in the world. Jack was talking earlier about the tone of the film. When you have two actors who are gifted as Jack and Morgan, it’s like studio musicians who read a score. They look at the notes and they can sit down and play them immediately. They can read right away what exactly the tone needs to be and strike exactly the right balance. They read the script and they know how to balance the humour and the emotion.

People ask me all the time what it’s like to direct two guys like this and I say: “It’s easy.” When you have two guys that come to play and come to the work prepared and they’re not threatened because they’re very secure in their own talents, you can say a little something here and there because it never threatens them. They’re never going to get knocked off their game by something I might say. It is like a dream come true for me.

Q. So, what was it like to watch them play?
Rob Reiner: The two of them understand the premise that the more they give to the other person, the more it reflects back on them. It’s like two great tennis players hitting the ball back and forth with each other – if you give the guy some pace on the ball, they’re going to be able to hit it back with equal pace and it lifts both of your games up. They understand that if they’re doing their best, it’s going to make the other guy look good and ultimately make them look better.

Q. Did you allow them to improvise at all?
Rob Reiner: We didn’t improvise. Once we hit the stage and were ready to work, it’s set with what we were going to do. Now, there’s a lot of work that goes on before that happens. With Jack we spent months before we started the initial shoot and then every single day I’d go to him and sit in his trailer for half an hour or 45 minutes and we’d rework the scene. The process that we went through with each other is improvisational. We talked back and forth to each other and that was the process by which we arrived at the script. Once it’s there, then you go ahead and do it.

The wonderful thing about Morgan is that we’d throw him things five minutes before we’d start shooting – we’d rework dialogue five minutes before we were ready to do a scene – and Morgan has such an incredible facility: he’d look at it, process it right away and say: “Fine, OK I’ll do that.” He really is like a zen master; he’s so calm and so inner directed and centred. Jack and I have a little bit more of a tendency to be hurricane-like and whirl around a bit, but he’s the calm in the eye of the storm. None of this seems to phase him.

The other thing that was a pleasure with these two guys was that all the stuff that goes into preparing – once these two guys come to the stage, they’re ready. It’s like horses at the gate; once the gate opens, they’re out and they’re running. That means one take, two takes or three the most that we ever did on anything. I’d ask Morgan if he wanted to do another take and he’d ask how I felt about it. If I was OK with it, he’d say: “Well, let’s move on.” It was like that with Jack too. The minute he steps on that stage, he knows exactly what he’s going to do. We were able to do this picture in 44 days…

I work fast, so I come prepared and am always ready to go – but when you’re working with professionals at this high a level you have to be. I spoke to Jack about this before A Few Good Men because I knew he’d worked with Stanley Kubrick on The Shining and he does many, many takes. So, I asked Jack what that was like and he said [mimics Jack’s voice]: “Hey Stanley, I hear you like to do a lot of takes. But if we 100 takes, the 101st one is the best…” So Jack basically says: “I’m here to do whatever is needed. If it’s one take, we’ll do it; if it’s 100 we’ll do that too.”

Q. The film is marvellous because it makes it very clear how important it is to find joy in your life. Can you tell us how you went about finding the personal joy in your life and what it was?
Rob Reiner: I think going back to something that Morgan said – if you are comfortable with yourself then you can find joy. So, for me it was getting married and then having our three children. You don’t know the feeling you can have when you have children. There’s no feeling of love more than when you look at your children. And that’s really what the message of the movie is about. It’s about making connections. In the case of Jack’s character, it’s to reconnect with his daughter. And that is where he’s going to find his joy.

To me, what’s so wonderful about the movie and why people are connecting with it is because everybody watches it and they’re all in the same boat. As Jack’s character says: “Whether we’re going to die tomorrow, or the next day, or down the road, we were born with the knowledge that we’re going to die.” Everybody has that knowledge on some level. It’s an unconscious thing when you’re very little and it becomes more and more apparent the older you get. As you go through life with the knowledge that it’s going to happen to you, you have to find happiness and joy. We all want to do that. So, you sit there in the movie theatre going through exactly what these characters are going through.

And the message in our film is about making the connections with the people that are important to you during the course of your life. There’s a song at the end that John Mayer sings, called Say What You Need To Say, and it’s aimed at the people that are important to you. For me, that’s where I’ve found my joy – my wife and my children.

Q. Was it easy to tap into the vulnerable side of Jack Nicholson?
Rob Reiner: Well, Jack’s shown some vulnerability over the years with different characters he’s played but I think for this character to see him as vulnerable as he was is a testament to how broad his talent is. He’s an artist, you know. He approaches things as an artist, he takes his life experience and he lets his life experience reflect in the character and inform the character. I worked with him 15 years ago on A Few Good Men and he’s lived 15 years of life since then. And he brings all of that to each character he plays. So, he can draw on lots of things.

Q. How did you come to cast Morgan Freeman’s son in the film?
Rob Reiner: He did a great job. Morgan said I should meet him but told me not to give him any special treatment. If I thought he was right, then fine. If not… But he came in and gave a beautiful reading and I thought it couldn’t be more perfect than to have him play Morgan’s son.