Interview

JW: I'm assuming from what you said that you, of course, like to go to the theater with other people.

CB: Yes. You have to be part of an audience.

JW: You can't really watch a theater performance by yourself. You can watch a movie by yourself, though.

CB: You can, yeah, because your connection with the screen is really intimate, and the story is only being told to you. When you go to a concert, part of being there is that you're all hearing the same thing. It's about being in a crowd. If you go to a gig and there are two people there, then it's not the same thing.

JW: Let me circle back for a second. What about this new form of communication that's happening right now on the Internet? When you go to the theater with your friends, and you stand in the foyer and you communicate about what you've just witnessed and you exchange ideas and thoughts about what went on, you have a responsibility-when you're face-to-face with people, you're responsible for what you say. You have to defend it and stand behind it. On the Internet, though, you don't have to do that. Journalists, film critics, theater critics, music critics, 12-year-olds-they all become one voice in a sense. Should creative people be frightened of this kind of communication without responsibility?

CB: I think the downside of the Internet is that speaking-or writing-has become the point in and of itself. I'm of the opinion that it's okay to be silent, to not speak if you don't have anything to say. Someone was talking to me the other day about her teenage daughter who is very creative. Now, to become a painter or a sculptor or a graphic designer is quite an isolated way to spend your life. But this girl's passion, she said to her mother the other day, was being with her friends, and she said there's this sense that she doesn't exist without the other people there. It seems like people increasingly just can't be by themselves because they're so used to having an epicenter on the Internet that actually exists for other people. Until someone clicks onto your Facebook page, it doesn't mean anything.

JW: Right, you don't exist.

CB: Then, suddenly you have 175 friends. But it's important to be aware that this is a big part of the way the world is communicating and of the effect that it is having on people's thinking.

JW: Well, when you go out to give a performance, you're putting yourself out there into the world to share with other people. If you just do it in your room by yourself, no matter how beautiful it is, is it dead?

CB: It's always better in your room. It's always perfect in your room. And then other people get in the way.

JW: It's dead, though, in your room. It doesn't live.

CB: It doesn't mean anything beyond you having a little narcissistic moment. It has to be for other people. That's the thing about the audience-it's a cliché, but they do complete the meaning of it. There's that fantastic moment in King of Comedy [1983] when Rupert Pupkin [played by Robert De Niro] is delivering a speech, and there's a laugh track, and you think he's doing his routine to a filled-up auditorium, but it's just this wallpapering of people. So, yes, that may be an avenue that we go down as humans quite frequently, where we imagine our way into it.

JW: But when there are only 10 people there and there are supposed to be 300, that's an interesting challenge. It's almost like you can share more, or something more beautiful can happen, because there's an emptiness in the room that you can fill up. When I go to see a Broadway show and watch someone perform who says the same lines every night, I get jealous in a couple of different ways. I want to know what it's like to do the exact same thing every night, or twice a night, or three times on Saturday, like they do in Vegas, because I've never gone out and played the same set twice. And I want to know what it's like to try to find new life in the exact same words every time.

CB: But, see, I've thought that so much about people who have a hit song, and then that's the song they have to play over and over. I thought about that so much playing Bob Dylan [in I'm Not There, 2007].

JW: Well, Dylan never played the songs the same way twice.

CB: Well, no. But what you're trying to do as an actor is somehow trick yourself into believing that these words have never been said, and so you've got to discover them for the first time.

JW: Have you ever acted in a small room of only, like, 10 people? And I don't mean at a read-through of a script or something.

CB: Probably when I was drunk. [White laughs] Have you done something like that?

JW: Well, I guess I was comparing it in my mind to playing a song for people on a piano in a small room-maybe at a party or something like that where you're performing and the room is small and you can connect easily. I was just wondering what it would be like to act in a small room of people like that.

CB: Fortunately, as an actor, people don't necessarily ask you to do that: "Can you do your Lady Macbeth?"