James Woods on Fame, Acting and Himself

By Hilary Rowland

      James Woods called me on my cell phone the other day, just to chat, and to let me know he's moving back to LA from New York. Our conversation made me realize all over again that despite my having known him for a couple of years now, he is still in many ways an enigma to me. But one thing I can say for sure - he is definitely an interesting and complex character.

So who is James Woods really? Everybody seems to have an opinion about Jimmy. People either love him or hate him. There's no in between. A lot depends on whether they judge him based on his acting ability (he's known as one of the finest character actors in the industry) or based on what the gossip press says about him. You can't really blame the second group for being fascinated; Jimmy does have a habit of just saying whatever's on his mind without the usual self-censoring that most celebrities employ. He once said of an unusually hostile journalist, "She's a fucking pile of unmitigated pus ripped from the ass of a dead dog. I'll let her hang herself by her three teats." In cooler moments, he's had more sober advice for up-and-coming thespians on how to deal with journalists: "Pretend you're in a deposition, and know that they'll [most likely] ask you questions and not care about the answer," he advises. "They just wait until you're tired, set you up and destroy your reputation. The press is unequivocally the enemy."* Wait a sec. Except for me, right Jimmy?

Whatever your opinion, here's a quick overview of who he is. He is an American citizen who's father died when he was 12 and who is very close to his mother. He has starred in over fifty movies (including Oliver Stone's Nixon and Any Given Sunday "Oliver is a fuckin' lunatic", Martin Scorsese's Casino and Penny Marshall's Riding in Cars with Boys.) He has been nominated for an Oscar twice (The Ghosts of Mississippi and Oliver Stone's Salvador.) He lived with actress Heather Graham for a year. He has an IQ of 180, scored perfect on his SATs and went to MIT on a full scholarship. He is extremely opinionated. His favorite companion is his Kerin terrier Angel, whom he absolutely adores.

As the NY Post puts it: "He's just James - and, believe me, one would have to be stone-cold dead not to find him attractive. He treats a tramp like a lady and a lady like a tramp, and from what I observed during my 90 minutes with him, in the bar of the Mark Hotel, every lady - and every tramp - was smitten. (As were several of the male patrons. To use a current phrase, James is 'all that' - and then some!)"

As a director he once worked with said: "What is it like to direct Jimmy Woods? I wouldn't know. You don't direct him. You surf him. It's like surf-riding the biggest wave you ever saw. A moving mountain of energy and inventiveness and intelligence. And if you stay standing up, it's the biggest damn thrill of any director's lifetime."

How does "Jimmy" describe himself?
"I'm a guy who plays golf, reads books, and does movies. I've never been arrested, I don't drink, I don't do drugs...I'm living in one of the most beautiful houses you'll ever see in your life - and by the way, you'll notice that instead of being one of those 20,000-square-foot pimp houses you see in Beverly Hills with two feet of lawn, it's a two-bedroom house. I go to the Good Shepherd every Sunday for Mass. What's the problem? Wake up and look at the facts. Facts are friendly."
[Okay Jimmy, maybe the Sunday Mass is a bit of a stretch, and your 'modest little cottage' did recently sell for $6 million but you do call your mom every day (which is better in my books than going to Mass) and the rest of it sounds about right to me.]

What was it like growing up as Jimmy? Was Jimmy a wild teenager?
"When I was in high school, we were all laboring under the illusion, or maybe it was a reality, that everyone in our school was a virgin. We had very strict rules. It was a public school, but you couldn't let your hair touch the collar of your shirt and you weren't allowed to wear jeans - much unlike the schools are today where I don't know what the standards are. On the other hand, we had I don't know how many National Merit Scholarships and people went to Harvard, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, and Georgetown from our school - so you do the math. We had a rather strict school and we had people of enormous success and achievement."

So did people have fewer choices back then?
"I think people always have choices, it's just whether they choose to make them or not. Everyone thinks that choices are handed out by some big divine intervention, but they're not. We make choices every day of our lives, no matter what you do, at any age. People talk about decisions that are made, our parents were at war at 19 years old - fighting and dying and being wounded for their country. I think that we've been up until now a rather indulgent nation, and now I think we're starting to become more serious adults. The word "choices" is just one of those propaganda words. You have choices every day and you make them every day."

What about this tough-guy perception people have?
"One of the reasons people think I'm tough is, when you're insecure, you kind of compensate by being a little hysterical. I'd kind of have little mini fits every once in a while. Little 'poo-poo head in the schoolyard' fits. Now I realize that nobody's interested. It doesn't work. It doesn't help me at all. So I decided to kind of shut up and be an adult. To be a little bit less of an asshole and a little bit more of a man. And given this moment right now, I'm glad I finally did something with it. I'm glad I stopped the bullshit that I wasted my time with for the past 20 years. And for the first time in my life, I think I'm really, really happy. I guess I'm finally sort of accepting things I can't control anymore."

LA is known for attracting every beauty queen from across the country. Comments?
"This look - skinny rakes with implants - is an increasingly unsexy, unsensual look. Give me a little softness, a little reality, a little imperfection. Everything is denial. All these girls in Hollywood walk around with these bottles of water so they won't get toxins in their system, and they're all fuckin' dying of anorexia nervosa. They're all smoking cigarettes, they're all throwing up in the toilet every night. Half of them are doing drugs. They all look like they're made of pencils. Their skin is hanging off their fucking bones. Their body image is their only image. Their self-esteem has been ripped to shit by all the horrible ramifications of the nasty parts of feminism - not the good stuff, which is important, but the nastier stuff, the male-bashing stuff."

How would one get to know James Woods better?
"I'm cautious of people who are too charming. Charming people can be dangerous - my alarm goes off immediately."
[Okay - but don't give up yet. Every time I've seen a fan approach Jimmy he has always been more than cordial. In all my time knowing him I have never heard him utter a single unflattering word about any fan.]

What about the fans?
"I'm famous for being nicer to my fans than anyone on the face of the Earth because I figure a) They pay my salary, and b) It's probably like a big moment in your life to meet somebody so I would say, just come on up. I've never had a problem with a fan in my life. They usually come up and say "Gee I enjoy your work" or "You're one of my favorite actors." It's kind of an inhumane way of looking at one person as being sort of more special just because they make movies - but I understand why people feel that because the media has made some kind of silly element out of us being celebrities. Celebrity - I don't even know what that means. Obviously it's the same basic word as celebration, but I don't know what's being celebrated. Anyway, I kind of go out of my way to talk to them [the fans] about them.

There are people who come up and it really means a lot to have them meet you. I have a special thing because I did My Name is Bill W so I have a lot of people who are recovering alcoholics coming up to me, and they very clearly understand I'm not that character. They all sort of know that I was never in AA or an alcoholic, or had any of those problems that a lot of celebrities had, but they really appreciate that as an untroubled person, in that sense, that I was dedicated to that, and I promoted that, and was aware of the impact potentially in people's lives. And also, my work is generally more along the kind of material driven lines, rather than success or money driven, so with that comes the fact that I'm involved in projects that have some meaning to people about certain things politically or emotionally or morally. So, I get kind of a little more serious following. As well as my 4-year-old fans, who, of course, are Hercules fans. [Jimmy is the voice of Haydes, the evil God of the Underworld in Disney's Hercules.] I have to tell this because it happened. A little girl - 5 or 6 years old - asked me for my autograph, and I said sure. I assumed she hadn't seen Once Upon a Time in America so I asked, 'Did you see Hercules?' She said, 'No, no, but I saw his movie.' That's worth all of it - all the aggravation."

Speaking of movies, who does a star actor like James Woods think is good?
"The Coen Brothers are phenomenal, just great filmmakers. As actors, Russell Crowe I always find very compelling. If you take away the tabloid stuff, and the big movie stuff, like Gladiator, if you look at his work in LA Confidential, I thought he was fantastic, and really good in The Insider - and terrific in Gladiator, by the way. It's not easy to do that stuff seriously. You have to get over the sand and sandals kind of clichéd look and do it with a commitment, which he did. It's not easy to do. I find myself compelled by him. DeNiro is still one of our greatest actors. Robert Redford understands film acting better than anybody on the face on the earth. You know how some carnivores get every bit of meat off of a carcass they can? Well, there's nobody who gets as much blood out of a moment as Redford. Within the range of his talent he knows how to get every single note available, and he is a genius not only at getting those notes but in making them fully accessible to his audience. He is one of the few actors that can play three or four emotions at the same time, and he is amazing; he truly understands the subtlety of film acting."

What about female actors?
"Cameron Diaz has sort of reinvented the charm and joy of watching what a woman can be on screen, without a political agenda. Actually just be charming as a woman, and talk about somebody who loves to see fantasy or escape - someone who actually just loves to smile. Someone who is really thrilled about being pretty and charming and witty and bright. All those things that we find attractive in anybody, but as a man, particularly in a woman. What a miracle - she smiles, she's an amazing movie star. Someone else is grumpy and it's like 'Get her off the screen.' Two of our biggest movie stars are Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz, and they smile onscreen. Something people have forgotten about doing for 30 years."

What's it like working with other stars like John Travolta?
"I've known John [Travolta] for years, before either of us came to L.A. We did a reading together of a Terrence MacNally play. John was like a kid then and had a strange voice and those weird eyes. We bumped into each other a couple of weeks later and he was in LA. and he said 'I got this series called Welcome Back Kotter,' and I ended up doing the first episode as a guest star and we became friends. Then John exploded into stardom with Saturday Night Fever and we've known each other ever since. When we were working, after the first scene I asked him, why are we having such a great time doing this? He said I think it's because we made a tacit assumption to cooperate. A lot of times actors tend to be very competitive with each other. Great actors want to make the scene better, and we're pretty secure with our status so it's not like we're out there trying to win every scene."

And the new, fresh-faced stars?
"Some kid goes out, some teen makes a movie and makes ten million dollars a picture and they think they know about acting. Somebody yells action and they sort of... talk. It's just astounding the lack of discipline, but it's a generation raised by a bunch of feminists who are never home."

Frequently said to be one of the most talented actors in Hollywood, does James Woods have any acting advice for these beginners?
"I am one of those guys who could do the most emotional scene and crack a joke instantly. I'm lucky. I'm just like an idiot savant. I have one enormously enjoyable, pleasurable--for me--talent, which is being able to act. I do it without any confusion or restriction or ambivalence or hesitation, and it just flows, almost as naturally as anything in my life. So I don't have a big burden about it. I'm not one of those 'method' guys. I'm tired of the Actors' Studio bullshit that has ruined movies for 40 years. All these guys running around pretending they are turnips or whatever the hell they do. You just play the character as he really is. As a loudmouth, blowhard, coward, shithead. You know, it's OK to be just who the guy is.

One of the reasons that I'm not very good about talking about the process of acting is that so much of it requires you to be unconscious [of it] when you do it. When you're aware of what you're doing, it's never very good. If you just let go and you're in the scene, all of a sudden, it's good. I can't act; I swear to you, I feel like I can't. I dread it every time I do it. I feel like the more I do it, the less I know. Which is a good thing.

When you're in the middle of acting a part, no matter how 'intelligent' you may be, your frame of mind starts to drift into that character. It's difficult for you to have objectivity about the performance. So I rely a great deal on the director to take the pulse of what we were doing. Because if you're wildly improvising in certain scenes and you have a director who's really an observational guy and who is known for having a kind of odd sense of taste about the things he likes, you have to be very careful. You could be improvising and getting into some pretty dangerous, hairy areas with the things you come up with. You want to feel free but do you trust that he's not going to use the [scene] where you say some outrageous, ridiculous thing? Part of the improvisational process is you do it, 70% of it may work if you're really lucky and 30% is really terrible."