Dan Aykroyd: The Playboy Interview: Part Three

Playboy: You've worked with your wife, Donna Dixon, on several films. Is it difficult mixing work and marriage?
Aykroyd: Oh, no. It is a lot of fun. She's an extremely capable and funny comedienne. There have been no problems. I'd do it again any time. But now she's given up the business. She wants to be a full-time mother and has made that commitment. It may be temporary. She may go back to acting and she also has a tremendous sense of interior design. She's decorated the house in California, the two houses in Canada and the house on Martha's Vinyard.

Playboy: Why do you own so many houses?
Aykroyd: We seldom use Martha's Vinyard house anymore, but I've had it for a long time. We're in Los Angeles when we need to be and we go to the family house in Canada whenever we can. There are two houses on the property. Ours and one our friends stay in. The property is about seventy acres with two thousand feet of waterfront on a lake twenty-two miles long and three hundred feet deep in some spots, they say. It's really beautiful. We jet ski out to our island fifteen minutes down the lake and set up camp there. I'm really fortunate I have a place to go. The world is sort of closing in around me. They strung a set a high-tension power lines across the farm next to ours, sort of visual pollution if you're looking certain ways. The highway is getting busier now and the city we live near is growing. But then there are those magic nights after nine o'clock when you don't hear any traffic and there's just the black sky and the loons on the lake.

Playboy: Have you ever thought of chain-sawing the towers carrying the power lines?
Aykroyd: I wouldn't use a chain saw. I'd use muriatic acid and let the solvent eat away at the bases over a long period of time and bring them all down at once. But I actually don't have to worry too much about it because a big windstorm tore down about three of those towers. They'll rebuild them, of course, but I've tried to rationalize the fact that the wires are there because many UFO reports say that power lines attract UFOs.

Playboy: What's your off-camera life like these days?
Aykroyd: I'm basically a recluse. I never go out anymore. I had all that in the old days. After the Saturday Night Live shows, we went to the Blues Bar, a place I opened down at Dominick and Hudson. It was a private bar. We put armoor on the window so we couldn't see outside and just had wonderful nights. We wuold invite everybody from the show and stay up till Sunday morning. So I've seen the nightlife. Increasingly, it has just made me want to withdraw.

Playboy: Is it simply a matter of getting older?
Aykroyd: I suppose it's that by nine-thirty at night, I'm beat. These words are coming from the master night host of all time. I would be standing at the door at three A.M. at the Blues Bar ready to invite anybody in, to crank a song on the jukebox and serve another beer.

Playboy: Is there any danger that by going to bed early you lose touch with the scene that inspired much of your work?
Aykroyd: I don't think so, not considering what I'm doing now. In fact, I've got to conserve my energy. To do these films, I get up at six in the morning. We work more than twelve hours a day. That's not to say that I never burn the midnight oil. I still like to see the dawn. About once a month I stay up all night and, the next day, I swear I'll never drink red wine again. I have had some spectacular campfires this summer up at the old family farm in Canada. We go out into one of the fields with the trucks, light a big bonfire, look up at the shooting stars, and let the cool nip off a Canadian August night roll over us. I can stay up until dawn doing that. Those late nights in the country are nectar, absolute nectar. We try to get up there as much as we can, and I make sure that many nights' and many days' silences are broken by the sound of whining, whistling Harleys. I have two up there and bikes are always welcome. I love to hear the sound of a Harley coming down the drive.

Playboy: That's an interesting mixture of sensibilities. What is it about Harleys that so intrugues you?
Aykroyd: I think every red-blooded North American boy at some point pruchases or is given an automobile or bike that means everything. That's why I love old cars. You climb into an old car and it smells musty. It smells like your grandfather's car. To me, that's texture. These are all things I worked so hard to enjoy. They're very simple. I love cold-weather riding. Being on a backcountry highway on a summer night with the mist rolling off the fields, smelling everything from the thickness of manure on the land to the evening mist, driving through a little town like Poland, New York, where everybody has the American flag up on the whitewashed front porch and kids are out on their bicycles. You roll through town at fifteen miles an hour and take in everything. What more could you ask for?

Playboy: What more could you ask for?
Aykroyd: John Candy and I were recently marveling at how fortunate we've been. When I met him, in 1971, he was selling Kleenex and I was a mailman. And now we star in feature films together, work in these great enterprises.

Playboy: What movie is next?
Aykroyd: I'm not sure. They're talking about My girl 2, which I may become involved with. Jimmy Belushi and I are talking about doing a Chicago police story. I'm writing a couple of things.

Playboy: Are you interested in doing more dramas or do you plan to stick to comedies?
Aykroyd: For a while, all the movies--Doctor Detroit, Neighbors, Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers--were comedies. I was expected to get out there and be radical and produce laughs. I don't have any obsession with it, but my tastes are broader than that. That's why Driving Miss Daisy meant so much. Now I could see writing something historical or serious.

Playboy: Does the work get easier?
Aykroyd: In some ways. But a working film actor works hard. The first thing that's hard is getting up early in the morning. The second thing that's hard is waiting. You work when they're ready not when you're ready. The toughest part is when the camera's rolling, that one or two minutes of compressed time. You're concentrating, distilling your character. You have to do that over and over every day. You have to shut out everything else. It's like being a diamond cutter. When he looks up from his work, there's the clock on the wall, other instruments, other staff, customers, the money being counted. When he goes to cut his diamond he has to slice that facet. If he doesn't hit it clean, that's it. the after activities are also hard: taking criticism, putting it out there and having people hate it.

Playboy: How much do reviewers affect what you do?
Aykroyd: Sometimes the reviewers love you, sometimes they hate you, but mostly they are mixed.

Playboy: You really got knocked for your directorial debut, Nothing But Trouble. What went wrong?
Aykroyd: It was a good little story, but the studio didn't know what to do with it. They changed the title at the last minute--originally it was Valkenvania. It was kind of dark and they didn't know how to sell it. On top of that we opened when the Persian Gulf war was going on, Silence of the Lambs opened, and Julia Roberts' Sleeping with the Enemy had its second weekend. We were doomed. The studio backed away from it.

Playboy: Because the test audiences didn't like it?
Aykroyd: Right. It wasn't what they thought it would be. But sometimes films are bad and they go out and do business. The reviews weren't all bad for that movie. The Toronto Star thought it was funny.

Playboy: Did you enjoy directing?
Aykroyd: A lot. But that movie set me back ten years. Nobody's going to hand me the reins.

Playboy: Even after all your other successes?
Aykroyd: Well, they may, but it will take some convincing. Nothing But Trouble came out when I was filming My Girl, and I remember knowing within about two days that it was all over. The way it works is tht people are the critics. They are the ones that matter. The business is built on research and audience response cards, not reviewers.

Playboy: Doesn't so much reliance on feedback from audiences take a lot of creativity out of the business?
Aykroyd: Well, I still write movies for one person, and that's me. I'll fight to put in some obscure technical reference tht maybe twenty people out of the millions will understand. But it's also good to take into consideration the responses of the people, because that's who we're making these movies for.

Playboy: You once said you wished you had the money, not the fame. Is that still true?
Aykroyd: I wish that today. The fame is worthless. It doesn't have anything to do with the quality of my work. I could happily dispense with it. I would much rather be paid for what I do and not have to go home with it at night. But what am I going to do? Maon and cry and bitch about it? I'm the only person on this planet who's been a Ghostbuster, a Conehead and a Blues Brother. I've had a recording career, a TV career, I won an Emmy and was nominated for an Oscar. I had a number-one record, a number-one TV show and a number-one movie. With cable and reruns I'm going to be on the dial fro the rest of my life.

Playboy: Did turning forty last year mean anything for you?
Aykroyd: Age never really bothered me. Forty is just a number. Somebody accused me of having my adolescene arrested at fifteen. It could be true. I am forty with a cone on my head.

Playboy: Do you have any sense of what people think about you?
Aykroyd: I think people perceive that whatever I do is going to be different from what I did last. I'm perceived in the comedy sphere mostly. I think there's curiosity about what I'm doing like, "What's that maniac up to this time?"

Playboy: Can that be a burden?
Aykroyd: Not really. I mean, I don't always have to be funny. I just like to find out what people are thinking, I like to talk with them. I'm just thankful that I'm not treated like one of the more controversial figures in history. When Robert McNamara was going to his home on Martha's Vinyard, a Vietman vet tried to throw him off the ferry. I'm sure Henry Kissinger takes abuse. Jane Fonda gets it from the vets. All I have behind me is, "That maniac made me laugh once or twice."

Playboy. August 1993.
Transcribed by L. Christie



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