Elliott Gould

After our talk with Elliott Gould, we found ourselves owing him 15 cents, the result of two seven-and-a-half-cent bets on basketball games. At 72, the man knows his lines and spreads like the compulsive gambler he played in Robert Altman's California Split -- co-star George Segal's gambling character is actually based on Gould himself. Gould no longer gambles like he did in the '70s, a decade in which he enjoyed a truly formidable run. There are the Altman classics like The Long Goodbye and M.A.S.H, as well as Ingmar Bergman's The Touch, Irvin Kirshner's comedy S* P* Y* S and the Curtis Hanson-penned The Silent Partner. He went on to star alongside James Caan in Harry and Walter Go to New York, as well as Little Murders, written by cartoonist Jules Feiffer and directed by Alan Arkin. He's packed more unforgettable performances into that one decade than many great actors do in a career, and he hasn't stopped working, most recently starring in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen.

Gould's craft is invisible and therefore deceptive: an "effortless actor." He speaks lines
as if they'd never been written. In the case of the modern take on Raymond Chandler's
The Long Goodbye, Gould turns mumbling into Shakespeare, his asides akin to the notes one
might scrawl on the novel's pages. He'll improvise an emotionally expressive, quick, physical
doo-dah, something he learned from the tap dance numbers he patterned as a kid. He's an
idiosyncratic conversationalist, with the writerly ability to convince his listener of whatever he
says, and to command a wealth of knowledge on seemingly any subject. A 1974 magazine ad
for Jim Beam featuring Gould referred to him (and the whiskey) as one of a kind.

SAFDIE BROTHERS: Are you a Knicks fan?

ELLIOT GOULD: No, I was a fan, but I really don't like any team more than any other.

SB: You probably saw them win in the '70s.

EG: Oh yeah, I was at those games.

SB: Game seven? Were you there when Willis reed limped his way through the tunnel?

EG: Yes. It was amazing.

SB: Do you go to Lakers games now?

EG: Walter Matthau used to share his tickets with me because he had courtside seats right in the corner. But when it came to the playoffs, he'd offer me other seats.  I said, "What are you talking about?  No, I want those seats! Otherwise stick those seats up your ass!"

SB: Ha! Do you think your lack of boundaries helped you or hurt you as an actor?

EG: Definitely helped me. If I understood what I was doing, they would have knocked me off a long time ago. I just blasted through. I got freedom from [Robert] Altman. He had confidence in me, so I had trust in myself. Then on the other hand, movies are about time management in relation to resources and money. That's it. One of my problems was that I thought it was about being talented. Groucho Marx and I were friends in his latter days and he gave me my greatest review. Do you know what that was?

SB: No.

EG: I changed a light bulb over his head and he said to me, "That's the best acting I've ever seen you do."

SB: Like Marx, you have a background in Vaudeville, studying it as a child, right?

EG: I was a tap dancer. And it wasn't my idea -- it was my parents'. I was very withdrawn, very shy and very inhibited. When I went to song-and-dance school, I didn't want to do it, I developed a rationale that since I didn't know how to express myself, if I memorized routines, then perhaps I would be able to express myself through that which I had memorized. When I was 12, I was part of a show that celebrated the first anniversary of the return of Vaudeville to the Palace in New York. I would also listen to the radio a lot. Still, the Brooklyn Dodgers was the greatest theater for me.

SB: You did so many movies in the '70s. Was there something pushing you from inside to work that hard?

EG: I just felt that was the time. I was batting one thousand! I was over the top, you know? I didn't know that I had no perspective and no sense of judgement. I never played the game, and I always thought there would be somebody there to fucking guide me and advise me, and there wasn't anybody there! I didn't come here to Los Angeles to be somebody. Identity is such an abstraction. That's not going to be easy for you to interpret, but it's the truth, I don't want to have to think about me, ever. I just want to work with people. My ideal is -- and of course it's not terribly realistic -- that all my pictures would say, "Produced for the children and directed by us all."

SB: That reminds me of Phil Spector, who personally referred to his songs as "Little Symphonies for the Kids."

EG: I found a paperweight with a quotation within it that said, "The greatest artist in the world is an uninhibited child at play." I mentioned that to the [the writer] Herb Gardner and his wife, and they said, "And Picasso!" I said, "I didn't know you were a materialist, because I don't care who anybody is. But I'll tell you what, you keep Picasso and I'll keep the child, because as far as I'm concerned, without the spirit of the child, it's all meaningless." It turns out that the quote in the paperweight belonged to Picasso! Do you know what the definition of "genius" is in the dictionary?

SB: I'm sure it's something in the realm of insanity.

EG: No. Just: "one of a kind." I believe that each of us is meant to be one of a kind. Taking into consideration the ego and the vanity of our species, modesty and humility is a real asset. I enjoy reflecting that a zucchini is also one of a kind.

Josh and Benny Safdie are New York-based filmmakers. Their feature film, Daddy Longlegs, premiered at Cannes in 2009.

Family Bookstore Takes Us to L.A.