Jason Schwartzman (2014)

Well Bill Murray, is, um, inhuman. He's a legend. He's a magician. He is the chosen one. So I don't think anything is WEIRD. I think everything he does is beautiful. Let's use that word. Let's look through it through the prism of beauty. And I would say that... he... he's the kind of guy that I wish I could be, and he's the guy who seems to know how to do everything. And if you are ever in a pickle, he's the guy you'd want to be with.

You get the feeling if shit hit the fan, that he'd be the one who'd be the last one standing.

That doesn't really answer your question.

But I've had beautiful, beautiful times with him. The first thing that comes to mind is a traditional Jain dinner in India that began at midnight and ended at 5 AM. It was just Bill and I and this Jain family in India. Well, we had met them earlier in the day and they invited us to dinner at their house and we went. This was during the filming of Darjeeling Limited. It was nice.

Good question.

Can't answer it.

I mean, the answer is yes.

Wow.

Well, tell them THANK YOU and as you list them that way, it sounds like a great life. And I have, I think that, obviously my family is the most important thing to me, and when i Look at them I feel so proud that we are together.

But obviously, no one's life is awesome in the way that you think it is. I only say that so that you know that everyone's life shares so many similar qualities, I am sure. I mean, I always look at other people and actors and musicians and I think "man they got it ALL figured out. They are so successful, they seem so happy and they are expressing themselves the right way... they don't have anything negative about them." but I'm sure that's not true.

And I always have to tell myself that. or sometimes my wife will tell me that.

I'll say "Man, how did that guy do that?" and she'll say "You don't know that they're happy or what's really going on, that doesn't mean anything."

So my ultimate advice is: to try the best you can to always be open to new experiences.

And be available to mistakes happening. And also, try to get 8 hours of sleep.

Right now Jonathan Ames is working on another television show he's developing with Seth Macfarlane, but he's also working on the Bored to Death Script, and I don't want to say that it's definitely happening because this is a mysterious business and sometimes things don't happen, but my fingers are crossed and I've seen parts of the scripts, and it's excellent. And that would be a real amazing day if it got to happen.

The first thing I am attracted to is the movie. What is the movie gonna be, or what is the world that this movie is sort of taking place in? And that's the first thing that I'm attracted to. And the characters sometimes, it's how it fits into that. So it's not like I look for that, or am attracted to that, necessarily. I think ultimately I'm attracted to the bigger thing, and that's what some of the parts HAVE to be to correctly tell the story. Hopefully tell the story.

The best story from BORED TO DEATH...

Well, every day with Ted and Zack and Jonathan was unbelievable. Those are some of the funniest human beings in the world.

There's one where in season 3, Ted Danson does a performance of Don Quixote, dressed as Don Quixote, and Zack and I went and had dinner together, and we were walking back towards set, and we could see, like, down the street, a knight walking across the street, and it was Ted Danson dressed as Don Quixote and we stopped and said:

"Look at that man, Ted Danson, dressed as a goddamn knight crossing the street. Isn't he the best? What a sunafabitch."

Parks & Recreation.

Thank you for seeing SPUN, it was such a small movie and such a great experience, and also an experiment in trying to make a movie in that style, SO ambitious, so I appreciate you taking the time to see it!

I met Tim Heidecker at a wedding, and got to talking, and just got along really well, and we both live in Los Angeles, and made an effort to see each other a little bit and to hang out, and he told me about "Bedtime Stories," and asked if I would ever be interested in being a part of it which was such a thrill and honor, because i thought those 2 men are thinking and working on a very high level, so to be asked to be a part of their approach and their environment was really, really exciting for me, and really SO much fun to work with them. I think that they're as good as it gets.

Wow, how did you know?

Scott Pilgrim was incredible because that's how I met Michael and Mary Elizabeth and Edgar, who are all friends of mine to this day, which I think is more rare than I thought in Hollywood. And I got to do a fight sequence that took 3 weeks to shoot, the way the schedule timed out, even before i went to do the movie, my wedding was scheduled for a certain date and it happened to fall right in the middle of this 3 week sword fight scene, so in the middle of the sword fighting scene I had to fly to Los Angeles and get married and come back. To this day, if I look at the scene, I think I can tell what moments I'm married and which moments I'm not.

Oh, that's a GREAT question.

Um, let me just think for a second here.

I would say that first of all, Wes is such a great screenwriter and works so hard on these things that very little doesn't make it. Because he's worked on them for so long that he really is pretty certain about what he wants and what he doesn't want, and what he needs and what he doesn't need, but of course there's something that gets trimmed out. I believe when we made Darjeeling, there was a sequence in the train where I played a piano, and we all kind of sat around a piano and bobbed our heads and sang songs. And that got cut.

P.S. Thank you!

P.S. I love you!

Uh, I don't know? I don't know any other way to do it.

Man! Yes, please!

That would've been my answer. The Coen brothers are extremely beyond incredible, and I love them so much, and that would definitely be a dream come true.

I mean, I don't know? I don't really... somewhere between every day and every other day?

These are the kind of questions I would ask. I like details.

I did not.

They, uh, Wes has some of them, and I think what remained was auctioned off for charities.

Um... my favorite Muppet... is this in JUST the Muppets or the whole realm? I would say my favorite Muppet-Muppet is Animal, BUT in the whole realm, I love Oscar the Grouch. And a character on Sesame Street named "Stinky."

Hmm.

Myself.

BORED TO DEATH - all I want is to do more BORED TO DEATH. if I got a call from HBO saying "we're getting the band back together" i would jump into a freezing cold bucket of ice, and I would get on a plane to New York and go straight to set with a big grin on my face.

I like having a mustache, just because I like it and my wife likes it, but it's funny, in this era, people always think you're kidding around, and they say "I have my mustache and to go get some food" and people will say "Funny mustache" and that makes me want to say "Funny fuck you!"

That shit's serious.

My favorite ride at Disney is....

Hold it, wait for it, hold on...

SPACE MOUNTAIN!

Hello! Great questions.

1) I can't really say that I have a favorite, but if you're asking me, um, I guess I would say RUSHMORE because that was the first time I'd ever been in a movie and my first time working with Wes, and it was so special to me. And i would have to say that that has a special reserved place in my heart, so I would say that one. But all of them mean something very special to me, but that was the first.

2) Yes! The people of Versailles who run Versailles were very welcoming to us, and gave us incredible access to it, and yes, we saw all kinds of private rooms and private passageways, and I would say one thing that was truly one of the most breathtaking things I've ever seen in my life was a private opera house the king had built for Marie Antoinette that only seated 100 people, and it was a private opera house, and it was so beautiful, it was like a little jewel box. It was absolutely one of the most breathtaking things I've ever seen in my life.

3) The future plans are that I am writing music, I am always writing music, I try to write music every day, um, just because it feels good and it's relaxing to write music, and hopefully accumulating enough songs that I can start to piece together an album and start making one sometime soon. I really look forward to trying to make another record.

4) Great question.

Holy smokes.

Um.... I would say... when I was about 16 years old, my mom gave me a book called "Ask the Dust" by a writer named John Fante, and it just, I had never read anything like that before, and I think it kind of blew the lids off some of the things in my brain, and until then I was reading mostly for school not for pleasure, and that was one of the first times I read something that really, really hit home, and then I got into his other books. So: thank you, Mom!

5) You can expect to see a movie that I think is unique and, um, different from a lot of modern movies in that it has a sort of unorthodox storytelling technique and without giving too much away, characters drop in and out in unexpected ways and at unexpected times, and also it's not a movie that I think is very brave because it's a movie where people are learning a whole lot and changing a whole lot. It's very relentless, which I love by the way, don't get me wrong, and in modern movies, there's typically a need for catharsis, or an arc, or a story where one character is different by the end of the movie, and I think that it was refreshing to see a movie where a character changes very little if not more for the WORST at the end. Does that give away too much? Ah fuck it.

6) I don't know how to do that, but we'll figure it out.

Well, I would say: Every day on that movie was an incredible experience and a dream come true, every day! It was HARD, in the best way possible, because David O. Russell asks of everyone to bring everything they have to work each day, and when you get there, you are not just trying to execute the scene the way it's written, but to do it as written and then try to go beyond it, and that means questioning everything and leaving no stone unturned, and it felt, every day we were onset, so vibrant and intense and like we were really making something.

One of the first things Dustin Hoffman ever said to me was after work on the first day, David had asked me to change some lines around, and so I went and did these new lines, and I think I surprised Dustin with them? I don't think I had told him - not because it was an acting game, but that's who it worked out with the timing - and afterwards I went to his trailer and I said "Mr Hoffman, thank you so much for bearing with me and letting me try out a few things."

And he said "Are you kidding me?!? A take is the one place in life you can fail."

And I think it was pretty liberating to hear that, and that kind of approach, of being able to mess around and I don't say "mess around" like go out and do whatever you want, but the idea you can fail was really powerful to hear.

And Bill Murray said in an interview I read: You gotta be ready to die out there.

And I think that means that you can't be afraid of failing. You just have to go out there and try.

Yes, it was INSANE. I don't think of things in terms of "highlights" or THE highlights, you try so hard to have every experience be its own thing, but it's pretty hard not to say - it wasn't even a dream come true, because I hadn't even DREAMT that big, you know?

Sesame Street is something that for EVERYONE, is such a part of their upbringing, so to get out there and see Snuffleluffagus, just to see Oscar the Grouch - it's a very overwhelming moment, because you TRULY are in your childhood, in a way.

And I'm sure everyone has that feeling when they go there, it's not an unusual thing. And it was also just impressive to see the way they work, they are such an efficient work of people, they have all worked together for so long that to sit and watch professionals working at such a high level - I've never seen anything like it, it was like a little army.

I would LOVE to do a comic book movie! I don't really have a character that I would, um, say right now that I would like to play. I would love to have that experience though. I think that that would be really fun and different and another example of trying to have an experience that's unusual, you know. But I don't have a character that comes out of my mouth when I'm asked that question.

Thank you for the question. Um... the hair doll was made out of hair.

And I don't know what happened to it. But I'm sure we could find out.

I hope so too. But how can one be sure? It seems I swallowed enough gum to last the next 30 years. I FEEL good, but I can't be completely sure about this stuff.

It was just for CRIBS. Basically, at the time, the real answer is that I was living at my mom's house, and she didn't want to have MTV Cribs in our house. So they made an agreement that I could set up a tent with some of my favorite things. All of the belongings in that tent were mine though.

I was NINTENDO, but not even Super Nintendo. I was the first Nintendo!

Breakthrough was my favorite game. Yeah.

I like flying them MORE. Because every time I take out my kite, and fly it, I have a great memory to go along with it.

Working with Wes on Rushmore was the beginning of a whole new chapter of my life, and he's my mentor, and when I met him I was 17, he was 27, and he turned me on to all this film and all these actors and just things I'd never heard of before. And he took me under his wing and showed me so many different sides of culture I had never seen before, so I am very glad that i had that in my life, and continue to have that.

And then the Mark Gonzales video - I know Mark through Spike Jonze and through Dan Field, who's my manager, and I've known Mark since I was about 14, and he was really cool to let us use this footage of him skateboarding and that was footage that had never been seen before, so I'm very thankful he let us use it. I love skateboarding and watching it, but i don't own a skateboard (nor should I).

But i was in a video by Mark Gonzales that he directed, and i rode on his shoulders while he skated down a hill!

I met him for the audition for RUSHMORE. And I was 17, he was 27, and why we work together? I think that honestly, it's hard to find people in life that you want to even spend that much time with, honestly! And so the fact that you could meet someone that you want to spend time with AND work with, I think that's super-rare, and I think that we share similar tastes and sense of humor, and we are interested in a lot of the same things, and I think that as you know someone more and more through the years, it helps you with the work because you can get to the work faster on-set, the way he can communicate what he wants to me, I think it becomes more quick so you can try more versions of things because there is less nervousness or getting to know each other to cut through.

You can just get right to it.

I was at my dear friend Woody Jackson's studio, in his house, and Woody is someone I collaborate with a lot on music, and I was writing that song, and I was about to record it, and Kirsten lived really close to Woody's, and we became really good friends during MARIE ANTOINETTE, really close, and she's someone that I love very much, and she called me out of the blue and I told her I was at Woody's, and so she came over, and I think she brought lunch, and I asked her if she wanted to sing on it? Part of me thought it would be nice to have a duet, and that also came from the fact that I wanted to sing it low and have a high voice above it and i can't sing that high, plus I think she has a really sweet voice. So...

Good friends? Mmmm... I love Michael Cera.

Thank you!

No, I don't collect swords. Should I?

Well, I didn't do it, but my wife had our second baby! SO I would say that's my favorite thing I got to do this year.

In terms of co-stars, I can't really put one in front of the other in terms of who was the most fun. They have all been incredible. But I would say getting the chance to work with Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman, another example of not even a dream coming true because you didn't even think it would be possible to dream that big, those 2 guys had a very huge effect on my life prior to working with them, so the fact I got to work with them was very powerful.

And favorite toppings? I would say... mushrooms, olives, and peppers.

Not very often. I have a drum set, but it's not really even set up. Sadly.

The truth is that I like playing drums in the context of a song, with people, but my house isn't really set up to have a bunch of people playing, and therefore I don't play with anybody, and therefore i don't play drums. I respect people that are interested in pushing the bounds of rhythm and play by themselves and try to get crazy independence of each limb.

I'm not really at that level.

My level of drumming is more of a rock and roll setting, so I can't really do it alone. It's a lonely loud instrument.

Great question.

We were making the video, but it's so complicated and so hard that it's taking longer than I thought, and hopefully it will happen, but if not, please accept my apology. It was a very ambitious thing to attempt to do, and Coconut records is really just me and my manager Dan and stuff, so it's not a huge group of people to help me - and on that record specifically, I had to take all the polaroids and had to take them to the post office to send them out, so hopefully people understand I mean well, but it's a lot harder.

Um... to read faster.

I don't have any weird fan encounters. I would say that for the most part, the people that i talk to have been really really cool, and, um, you know, respectful, and I grew up loving music and movies, and I never had confidence to walk up to anyone and tell them I admired their work, when I was younger and I would go see bands, I would wish I could tell them I loved their work - I used to go to all the early Weezer shows, and wish I had the guts to tell Rivers Cuomo that. So when someone comes up to me, I think

A) that's really meaningful to me and

B) It's cool they were bold enough to dot hat.

Um... probably.. MASK.

Yeah, I don't juice vegetables, but I like to make smoothies. I love making smoothies.

Working with the cast & crew of MOONRISE were incredible, especially because on this movie we were working with lots of kids. It was one of the most blatant moments of realizing that you're older than you think you are, when I was talking to some of these kids and making references and getting looks from them that were blanker - or more blank - than a Wite-Out factory.

Yeah, one is that the way Wes likes to work is that he likes to take over a small hotel and have it be only for people working on the movie, so there is no one outside of the movie living there, so it becomes like a production office. All the actors will eat together run a big cafeteria, the lobby does hair and makeup... anyways, one day i was waking up and walking down the steps, and I saw Jeff Goldblum, and he said "did I want to go get some soup with him?" and I didn't know Jeff all that well, but we ended up spending almost 9 hours together, and that's just the kind of thing that happens on a Wes Anderson movie. On a typical movie, everything can be so separated, but on a Wes movie, it's like a little family, so that proximity to everybody, getting that time with each other was so incredible, and just to spend a day with Jeff Goldblum was just fantastic. I learned so much from that one 9 hour session of hanging out with him.

Yes I did meet Billy Corgan! He came to the set one day and I hung out with him and Jonas, our director, and Billy talked about meeting and playing with New Order, and that was really exciting to hear him tell some stories about New Order.

Well, probably a Napoleon Fish.

The last 3 albums I listened to would be...

• J. Dilla, Donuts

Let me just look real quick...

• Supergrass, In it for the Money

and... um... looking...

• Sid Selvidge, The Cold of the Morning

I would say that I feel very lucky that I've had such good experiences with the current lineup of talkshow hosts and Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, are all SO great, and i've never been on Seth Meyers, I met him once, but have never been on his show - but these guys are all great people who are truly nice, and their spirit, and what they are trying to do and how they are trying to do it is really contagious and it's calming, because I get very nervous to do those things, it's not natural or easy, and you know, I love those shows, I watch all their shows, I'm a fan of their shows, and I want to do well for them, and you know, it's definitely scary when you're standing behind that curtain and they introduce you.

And I'm so happy for all of them - it's so cool that these great guys who are HONESTLY nice and fans of that medium got to do this as their job. What a dream come true for them.

Yeah, you know, from Wes' movies I... have a few props and I was given the Rushmore blazer and the green velvet suit I wore in the movie. And I have also the pepper spray from Darjeeling Limited. And of course, all the gum from Scott Pilgrim is still in my stomach, but that's a gift I have to give back slowly at some point.

No, I'm not. I think that I loved video games as a kid, and at a certain point, there were so many systems upgrading so quickly that i lost control, and then I just dropped out. And now i don't even OWN a gaming system.

But that's not to say that I don't think it's incredible. I'm so blown away by it and I think it's amazing.

GREAT. I'm in Chicago right now! I love it here! And I've been doing press all morning and talking to people about the movie, which is a pleasure, because the only way you can get the word out there is to start meeting people and answering questions about it, because the questions have all been really smart. And I've NEVER done this in my life before, and I wish I could do this all day long! I wish there was a hotline I could just dial into where I could have a 24 hour hug, of just asking me questions.

I guess on Thursday? I don't know, I have no plans to do anything with Jason Statham, but why not that would be fun! I really like him!

I don't really know what the other version of it is? I mean, I like to just be with my family and you know, work, and do our own thing. We have our own life, and it's not on purpose, it's just what we do.

Cactus Cooler.

My favorite horror film is more of, I guess, a thriller, but it's called THE VANISHING, the original one. It's terrifying.

But a more modern one that I love was THE OTHERS, the Nicole Kidman movie.

And you know a one I think is underrated, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES? That's terrifying. When Richard Gere says "chapstick" I basically want to go cry.

I don't really have an all-time favorite movie. I have many movies that i love. But... I think... yeah, I can't really say there's one all-time favorite one. I would say that I love STOLEN KISSES, I love THE LAST DETAIL, I love THE LONG GOODBYE, I like THE RED SHOES... and I like POP SECRET... I love 32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD and I love HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS.

Hmm. Oh man, what would it be? I don't know, probably it would be... That's an impossible question! but i would like to listen to The White Album a lot, but I would want to come back and get a new album at a certain point. I would like to bring only one album on vacation, but i would like to come back home.

Um... not to sound cheesy, but I really have had a good time on ALL of them. I'm not saying they are not hard. And you know, stressful, because making a movie is, you know, serious work. But each experience offers something unique from the one before it, and I enjoy that newness and I enjoy meeting and working with new people and getting to know them, or getting to know some strange version of them, and that's part of what i was saying about like "what is the world of the movie" because part of it - what's the experience going to be? Because as an actor, you can't control what the final product is going to be like, but you can control some of the process of it, what it's going to be like while your'e doing it, so my approach is to try to have a good attitude, try to have fun, and what's the making of it going to offer all of us. So I try to also go with that.