P: Fred Schepisi [IQ]?

R: Fred has extraordinary patience and grace with the people he works with. And since there were a lot of discussions about the script, I have to say in retrospect that I admire him for keeping his patience and working with all of us in a positive way.

P: Let’s talk about that. There were problems with the IQ script, and it was actually being rewritten while you were filming. What does that do to the mood on the set?

R: You just have to have faith that the words that are being written at the last minute are going to work. In this case it was Schepisi’s movie, and it was up to him and his collaborators myself included to pull it off. His instincts are ultimately the ones that will wind up on the screen.

P: Given your scholastic record in math and science, do you see any irony in playing a guy who pals around with Einstein?

R: [Laughs] Yes, I do. I think, though, that the character I play is a little more interested in science than I was.

P: You play a mechanic in the film. Are you mechanical at all?

R: No. I can fix things around the house and work a computer, but I could never invent a computer or fix a car.

P: Why is it so hard to make a good romantic comedy like IQ?

R: Any time you’re trying to do a movie with a happy ending, it’s very difficult because it’s been done before and you don’t want to be manipulative.

P: aren’t all movies manipulative?

R: In their structure, yes, but you should arrive at the ending out of true behavior, real behavior. You don’t want to arrive there artificially. For example, Shawshank has an ending that’s uplifting, but it’s done in a way that’s real and truly moving.

P: In researching your character for The Player, you followed two studio executives around, David Hoberman from Touchstone and Bill Gerber from Warner Bros. What did you learn in the time you spent with them?

R: Phone etiquette. I listened in on some of their phone calls. There’s an awful lot of politics in the job, and 80 percent of that is staying in touch with people who may, at some point, have something you want. So these guys make 100, 200 phone calls a day to different people around the town. Writers, directors, actors, other studio heads, competitors, restaurateurs, club owners. They see a new movie, they call all the creative people in it. They want to touch base with them.

P: Did you pick up anything else?

R: From those two guys? Yeah. Billy dresses well. And neither one of them is evil.

P: Had you gone in thinking that they were?

R: Not them specifically, but executives in general, yes. But I came to understand that there are people in the industry who start out wanting to make films of substance, but in order to rise on that ladder, they have to make a certain number of compromises. In doing so, they risk losing sight of what they originally intended to do.

P: There’s that word, compromise, again. You used it when you were talking about politicians and now when you’re talking about movie executives. What are you willing to compromise?

R: My sleep time.

P: That’s it?

R: I’ve long ago compromised my eight hours a night.

P: Anything else, professionally or personally?

R: I guess what I’m talking about is compromising integrity. If you find yourself in a movie that you have questions about, it’s not a compromise to your integrity to show up for work and do your job. I think it would be a compromise to do a job just for the sake of the money and not be concerned about what’s in the script. But, again, I’m lucky that I’m not in that position.

P: You did frontal nudity in The Player, though you were covered with mud in the scene. What’s the hang-up about male nudity in films?

R: I don’t know what it is. I don’t know a lot of women who are turned on by a flaccid dick, either. But there’s also the theory that nudity doesn’t really make something sexy the characters and their relationship make it sexy. The scene in The Player in which Greta Scacchi and I make love is filmed, I think, in a way that’s incredibly sexy. And you don’t see anything but our faces.

P: What topics scare Hollywood the most?

R: Politics. And African Americans - if they don’t have Uzis. I don’t think people have been able to deal with the fact that African American filmmakers can make movies about life and relationships. It’s interesting to see the ascendancy of certain African American filmmakers who don’t shy away from portraying the urban hellhole, the violence, the gangs

P: The hood films.

R: The hood films. I’m sure it’s much easier for an African American filmmaker to walk into an office and say, "I want to do a film about gangbanging, about the gangs," than it is for one to walk in and say, "I want to do a film about two people falling in love."

P: What was it like to film Shawshank in prison?

R: We shot in the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, a prison that had been shut down a few years before. The walls were still full of deep sorrow and pain. The conditions were horrifying. Two and three people in a cell no bigger than a car. Rats. No running water. No sense of the outside. A real Victorian hellhole. Should prison be a country club? No. But this was out of control.

P: In preparing for the film, you had yourself put in leg irons and placed in a cell in an actual prison. How long were you in for?

R: I was in for a few hours, about three hours.

P: Why?

R: Because I wanted to hear it and feel it and see what it did to me. I tried to imagine what it was really like to be in there. But, ultimately, I can’t tell you that I had an experience filled with suffering and pain, because I knew I was going to get out.

P: Is that part of your technique in creating a role?

R: I wouldn’t say I’m a method actor. I do research when I feel I don’t have enough experience for the part I’m playing. I try to use my imagination more than emotional recall. I don’t buy that if an actor is thinking about something painful in his personal life and he cries on-screen, that it’s really the character crying.

P: Let’s back up. What got you interested in theater?

R: A couple of things. Seeing my father onstage. Being around that world with him, backstage, that old smell-of-the-greasepaint thing. Seeing the response from people who had seen him in a play was very exciting. In my childhood I really wanted to be an athlete, a baseball player or a hockey player. But around the time I was 12, my sisters were working in a theater in Greenwich Village called the Theater for the New City, and I would sometimes go down to rehearsal with them. I started getting on my feet and clowning around, and they ended up putting me in a play when I was 12. And I was hooked.

P: So you began acting regularly at the Theater for the New City?

R: Pretty much, yeah. I also ran spotlight. Swept up. Did box office. Ran the lighting board. But acting was the most fun. Plus, it got the attention of the girls. Not many girls fall in love with spotlight operators. Anyway, I didn’t really understand how unique and wonderful my training had been until I went away to college when I was 17 and started studying in a traditional theater department. I began discovering Ibsen and Chekhov. I’d already been trained in absurdism and surrealism, and now I was starting to learn what happened before that. But my concept of theater has always been pretty strange. I don’t care for gratuitous realism; I think it’s boring. I like spectacle. I like the idea of theater as an event.

P: Getting back to your childhood, you were the youngest of four children, right?

R: Yes. I don’t remember much of my childhood before the age of six. From what I hear, everyone did my talking for me. I didn’t really speak until I was three and a half or so. I didn’t really have words. My father described me as the oldest baby he’d ever seen. I apparently was very serious and reflective.

P: How old were you when you first became aware of what your father did for a living?

R: I must have been three or four. I saw him in concert.

P: What was that like?

R: I have a very vague, cloudy memory of that concert. But I do remember everyone singing along, clapping and laughing at something my father had said. And I remember I felt pretty good about that. There was something really intoxicating about it.

P: Did he ever talk with you about your wanting to go into show business?

R: Uh-huh - he discouraged it. When I said I wanted to major in acting in college, he told me that it was a difficult life, that there was unemployment, that it was something that you have to continue to work at, that you can never relax with it.

P: Would you want your kids to become actors?

R: If it makes them happy. But I would want them first to have a well-rounded education like I was able to get. There’s nothing more boring than unintelligent actors, because all they have to talk about is themselves and acting. There have to be other things.

P: As a kid, you got kicked out of league hockey for fighting. Were fistfights a regular part of your life?

R: Well, yeah. You had to know how to fight or you had to know how to avoid a fight. Growing up in that neighborhood, if you avoided a fight, it sometimes had more ramifications than if you just took a couple of licks. I didn’t enjoy fighting, so I learned how to avoid them. It was also dangerous to hit the wrong kid in my neighborhood, because a lot of the guys I played with had fathers in the Mafia. I remember being chased by a couple of them.

P: By the kids or the fathers?

R: The fathers.

P: What was it like being a Sixties kid growing up in the Village?

R: It’s only in retrospect that I understand how special it was. Someday I have to write a book or a film about it, because when you grow up in something, you can’t see how unique it is. You have no concept. It’s just what life is. But I was in the hub, right in the midst of a social and cultural revolution. This was the neighborhood where it happened - this and Haight-Ashbury were where everyone was gravitating. On the one hand, there was Washington Square Park and protest marches and folksingers on the street. There were wildly dressed people. There was the flamboyance of the homosexuals. There was rock and roll. And on the other hand, I had practice after school in different sports - you know, normal childhood pursuits. I was a sports fan, but I also went to peace marches.

P: Once you got interested in theater, your father didn’t allow you to go to the High School of Performing Arts. Why not?

R: He said, "You have to get an education first." At the time I hated him for it. But, ultimately, he was dead-on right. I don’t think those schools really produce intelligent people. They produce people who are technically better dancers and singers and actors. I learned never to listen to acting teachers because they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

P: Those who can’t do, teach?

R: That’s right. And it’s dangerous, I’ve seen it happen: A talented, instinctual actor is fed a lot of baloney by a teacher about different techniques and methods - and he’s ruined. Everything that was good and fresh about this person is compromised - I won’t use that word again - everything is sacrificed to the altar of the acting teacher’s ego. The need to control. The need to have their little sheep. I think it’s a terrible profession. I think acting teachers are worthless. I learned so much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class. So I just don’t believe in it.

P: You and your family performed as the Cordless Family in something called the Eveready Tour. What do you remember about that?

R: It was a promotional tour in, I think, 1966. We toured the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest for Eveready batteries. We drove in a Rambler station wagon, sang sons on the way, went sightseeing, stayed at hotels - a big thrill. In every city we would do a couple of television and radio spots promoting Eveready batteries.

P: What was your part in that?

R: I had to play with a toy that was powered by batteries. It was a train, I think. I don’t remember what my brother had. My father had a carving knife and my mother had a hair drier or something. My parents have pictures of that somewhere. They’re pretty funny.

P: Could you imagine doing something like that today?

R: Certainly not for Eveready batteries.

P: How deep were the discussions at home - about politics, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war?

R: We would discuss who Martin Luther King JR. was and what he was trying to do. Our parents would say all of this tied in with our Catholicism and our responsibility to other human beings in the world. And it was our job to be as true as we could to our sense of justice and to Jesus Christ’s sense of justice. Meanwhile, my brother was going to be drafted soon, though the US pulled out [of Vietnam] the year he was set to go. And my sister was arrested at Antioch College during a protest. The way my mother described that to me was: "You should be proud of her. She was fighting against this war, which is unjust." I think there are lessons you take from your parents, and one of the strongest ones I took from mine was that a mob isn’t right. Just because your opinion is outnumbered doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Many times throughout history, it’s been a sole voice that’s been the right one. Just because your opinion is outnumbered doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Many times throughout history, it’s been a sole voice that’s been the right one. Just because someone gets arrested doesn’t mean what they’re doing is wrong. Some laws are unfair and unjust.

P: Heavy stuff for a ten-year-old.

R: Yeah. But when a ten-year-old has a sister who gets busted, you have to deal with that as a parent. And I think they did a good job of dealing with it.

P: How big a part of your life was Catholicism?

R: Pretty big. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic school until eighth grade. My father was the head of the choir. I would serve at mass two or three times a week. I went to church every Sunday. At the same time, I don’t think I was ever overly serious. I don’t know if I ever really bought into the eternal damnation bit.

P: What do you think about it today?

R: Catholicism or religion?

P: Both.

R: I think Catholicism is_ let’s put it this way: I think there are a lot of valid lessons in any religion, but once a religion approaches dogma to the exclusion of any other religion, it becomes dangerous, hostile, something opposed to the spirit of the religion. There have been too many wars fought over who has the right God on their side. There’s too much arrogance and hatred in people who consider themselves religious. So I distrust religion as an organization.

And yet it’s interesting to think about Jesus Christ and what he was in that society. Put it in perspective. He was a radical. He was essentially advocating the overthrow of that government - and not a violent overthrow but a defiance of its laws and its society. Once you accept that concept, you begin thinking about the crucifixion in a new way: It was a political act intended to eliminate a voice. After Christ died, the succeeding generations made him who we now perceive him to be. But somewhere along the line that got corrupted.

Many governments have used any number of gods to keep people in their place and make them fear authority. To keep them paying their taxes. To give them lessons in humility. To justify unfairness and injustice. Historically that’s what religion has been used for.