Adam Goldberg Interview, Déjà Vu

Movies Online recently sat down with Adam Goldberg at the Los Angeles Press Day for "Déjà Vu," directed by Tony Scott and starring Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Val Kilmer, and Jim Caviezel. In the film, Adam Goldberg plays the brainiac physicist, Denny, who helps Denzel Washington understand the cutting-edge science behind the strange chain of events happening to him. Goldberg is best known for his roles on NBC’s sitcom "Joey" and such feature films as "Keeping Up With The Steins" and "Stay Alive" – but has never played a character like Denny before.

Modeling himself after some of today’s leading physicists, Goldberg had a blast with the role, even while his own mind was being blown with everything he learned. Says Goldberg, "I play the mad scientist who knows all the theories behind wormholes and time tunnels and ways of bending time and space. It was quite daunting at times, because you can’t really improvise your dialogue when you play a physicist. After all, they’re dealing with the laws of the universe!"

Adam is a versatile actor with a unique talent for mining the neuroses of his characters for both comedic and dramatic effect. We really appreciated him taking time to sit down with us and talk about his character, what it was like working with Denzel Washington, and his plans for a sequel to The Hebrew Hammer. Here’s what he had to tell us:

AG: So Tony’s (director Tony Scott) not wearing shorts today, you guys are really missing out; I’ve never seen him in long pants before.

AG: Oh yeah, but he’s cleaning up for the occasion.

AG: Tony said this? Wow, that’s amazing; I’m going to kill him. Really? Well, no, he gave me access to a lot of this material that Brian Green had written and video demonstrations and that sort of thing. So, yeah, he gave me access to all this stuff that ended up really being the main resource that I relied upon to kind of get my head around this stuff – so there was this Brian Green book, this demonstration that he did for the producers and writers and so forth, the PBS series that he did, eventually a phone call. For instance, at one point, I felt -- I don’t exactly what – but that my character would maybe disagree with this particular theory based on now what I have read, and so I called Brian Green to kind of clarify a couple things and then things would sort of change based on that. But from the beginning, Tony (Scott) was like, ‘This is the guy, this is the resource.’ I’ll tell you what Tony had a lot to do with was how long my hair is – he was insistent. (laughter)

AG: Oh yeah, that was my hair, but he just insisted from December until whenever we started shooting, don’t cut it. (in his best Tony Scott voice) ‘Don’t cut the hair, don’t cut it.’

AG: Oh, no, there’s no doubt. I can wrap my head around sort of worm holes as these tunnels and anything that’s a diagram, or coffee cup, or a donut, or some sort of concrete example – but I mean it was a cursory understanding of it and whatever it was that kind of directly related to the things I needed to sort of say. And for a while, for a couple weeks, I could have and make arguments about these sorts of things, but it began to become very painful to me, so I looked forward to the film wrapping so I could go back to being stupid. (laughter)

AG: Does the cat survive? Haha! No, that’s the thing that’s so fascinating about of this stuff is that, for instance, Brian Green will say that he can’t rule any of this out, and because he can’t rule it out, it’s therefore possible. But do any of them actually think even in a thousand or a million years it’s possible, probably not. But the only thing that they’re saying is that technology is the thing which is hindering this possibility, but not the physics, which is pretty fascinating and kind of amazing because at the very least, you can begin to view space and time as these real places and you can actually think about the past as a place on a map and the future as a place on a map – actually getting there is obviously a completely different story.

AG: The one-liners, yeah; but with that sort of technical jargon stuff, I mean that’s just a matter of shooting it over and over and over again, and really kind of getting it into some sort of a routine. Tony was really responsible for the energy of those scenes. I mean he really, really wanted to make sure… even some times it would feel counter-intuitive as an actor to be delivering that stuff in this way; but you sort of watch the scene be put together and you begin to understand what he’s doing, what Tony’s doing. And it was essential that he kind of just really galvanized that energy in the room, and that has a lot to do with him just putting firecrackers under our asses so to speak and really getting us going. The rest of it is just a matter of obviously just practicing your lines in your trailer.

AG: I didn’t have one until yesterday which was the television interviews and then I figured because I was asked for awhile about halfway through the day, I decided what it was which is, you know when you say something to somebody, and they say, ‘Oh no, you said that same exact thing two weeks ago when we were eating sushi and you had too much sake.’ That’s déjà vu – it’s a drinking related black out. (laughter)

AG: I only shot there for a day, you know. I went there for the table reading and this press conference about shooting in New Orleans. But I really spent the only night I had or day I had there that I wasn’t working with my really, really good friend who owns a couple bars down there. So it was more about just what his life is like there now; and I certainly saw quite a lot of devastation. But I can’t give you a sense of what it was like making an entire movie down there since Katrina.

AG: Oh, it’s all on a stage, except for my initial appearance which was shot in New Orleans.

AG: Yeah, but you know Val and I had worked together before on The Salton Sea. Yeah, I love Val, and we’re planning on trying to do some movies together in the future. So we would spend our in between time kind of brainstorming about that sort of thing and/or becoming so giddy and delirious from all the electricity surging through the room that I think eventually we were actually reproached. Yeah, we were sort of like the ‘bad kids.’ But I don’t know how everybody else manages to maintain their sanity, because you know it’s this fairly small area with a lot of buzzing and images and you know it’s not green screen, it was all up there and shot beforehand. So it began to… I think some of that kind of seeps into the… I mean there’s a couple of lines I say that are born out of sheer delirium and somehow Tony just was like (imitating Tony), ‘Oh no, I left it in.’

AG: Oh yeah, he shot the whole movie before we got to our scenes and then it took about…I guess…I don’t know…ask him, but I think it was two weeks or so… and edited everything so that our job was essentially to kind of sync up our dialogue with what he had already edited. And more often than not, he had timed the stuff so well, it made perfect sense. It was totally intuitive. But, there’s nothing, so far as I know, that was green screened. There might have been a couple images that were replaced. I don’t know.

AG: No, but she’s hilarious, I love her. Oh yeah, she’s really funny.

AG: Why do you say it like that?

AG: Oh no, but she’s like a comedy actress. She’s done lots and lots of comedy. She’s funny as hell and a very nice girl.

AG: Yes, there have been some discussions about that.

AG: I don’t know, can’t say. I really don’t know. We have discussed that idea. I mean it’s a weird thing because it was this culty thing, but then a lot of people have asked me why not do a sequel to it. So we began talking about it, and it interestingly does involve time travel, and I can tell you that I did come up with the title of the movie. So whether or not I’m actually -- how I’m credited is left to be seen – but the title is The Hammer vs. Hitler, so that’s my contribution to political non-correctness.

AG: Yeah, I guess so. Well, I don’t know. I mean I always thought if it got out there, that it would definitely be something that people would get a kick out of. But it was this kind of weird thing where it was sort of in the theaters, kind of, but then it was on Comedy Central so I was never quite sure how it was being seen or who was seeing it, but it seems to be one of those things that when people do mention something to me that I’ve done, it always seems to come up. It’s kind of a mixed blessing because it’s such a specific kind of absurd thing, but at the same time, I think it’s really funny. But yeah, I’m proud of that.

AG: I’m putting together a film that was based on a play, that was produced some years ago in New York, and it’s just in the embryonic stages. I’m looking to direct something that I haven’t written, and so this is maybe the first thing I’ll do, and I’m starting to look at some other things, and some books and stuff like that. But the gaps between the times that I’ve made my films are so large, partly due to the fact that I have relied on myself to write them, and so I want to steer clear of that for a while and try to give myself an opportunity to do it more often because writing seems to only happen every five years for me or something like that.

AG: Everyone asks that, and not me - that was the writers. That was in there, that’s what everybody says. It’s unbelievable. You didn’t like the ‘snorting hash’ line, which is actually a bastardized quote from Airplane that I never thought would end up in the movie and I was like, ‘Tony, you do realize that’s from Airplane?’ And he’s like, ‘It is?’ No, that was actually one of those things that was in the script; that was the idea that they were really trying to prod out of me is to keep the guy as irreverent as possible.

AG: Well, he felt somewhat threatened by me, I think. I don’t want people to laugh at this every time I tell them that, but you know he’d obviously seen the work. That’s what happens. People start to get a little … but eventually, through some breathing exercises which I talked him through, he relaxed, and I thought he gave a nice little performance. No, I mean he’s obviously an incredibly strong actor, I have no personal relationship with the guy, but he’s incredibly easy to act with. Anyone who’s there and in the moment, and actually listening to what you’re saying, and responding to what you’re saying, and doesn’t do the same thing twice – which is much like I work. I’ll rarely do the same thing twice. He’ll rarely do the same thing twice, and that keeps you in that moment, and that’s how I really like to work the most. It’s always difficult to do something with somebody where you could do one take with a clown wig on your head, and then they have no reaction to it, but he’ll always react to what’s going on. He’ll always give you something new.

AG: Yeah.

AG: Saddened. You were. (laughter)

AG: Yeah, because everything that was in the… I mean how much someone’s going to cut to you or something, obviously you never know. But I mean I knew that everything I’d done was in there, and in fact there was stuff that was added later on in re-shoots. It was exactly what we shot, and I only knew that because Tony had said that it’s all in there. But you know it was always meant to be this character who really serves this book, this kind of expositional purpose, but ultimately is this guy who’s able to empathize with Denzel’s character’s empathy, and sort of help him on that sort of voyage. But Tony was really – I think he got more and more excited by that stuff. I think he was a little nervous initially about all those scenes, but then I think as the scenes started to come together and he started to edit them, I think he got more and more excited by it, even though on the page maybe they weren’t the most thrilling thing he’s ever shot.

AG: I don’t know; there wasn’t anything there, per se. And then I had read, just suddenly I was kind of sending him back in time and there was something in the script where they’re listing all the names of the people as we’re closing up the lab who had been killed and I said that maybe we could get a shot of me sitting down and watching that and suddenly being affected by this. Because I said I just feel like we need to make this link even stronger between me and what I end up doing for Denzel. And then even that bit about God was an addition that I had made just to try to … it was just a more interesting route for me, I think, than just to be this kind of cold, clinical guy. But just to feel like maybe… because I think that’s sort of what this film’s about, you know, is putting a human face on all of this horror. I mean I don’t view it so much as a love story per se so much as being able to put a human face on all the anonymous faces of all these disasters, and how sort of as a cop, or as a scientist, or an FBI agent, or whatever it is, you have to kind of remove yourself and make all these people completely anonymous, so it doesn’t get to you. But it gets to him, and I see it getting to him, and maybe it gets to me a little bit because the scientist in me thinks it’s all impossible, you have to understand, so that was the thing that contradicted… It was like how do we live with this contradiction? The scientist says, ‘You will die if I put you in this chamber. I don’t want to kill you.’ And yet I think the human being says, ‘Hey, you know what, who knows?’

AG: My haircutter took a little too much off the top, actually he thinned it too much (laughter) because I always have to have it thinned.

AG: No, that’s why I was really surprised it ended up in there. It doesn’t make any [sense]. It’s just a bunch of words strung together. Is it possible to snort hash? I’m sure you can. It’s like in blocks, but I’m sure if you grind it up, you could probably…you could snort anything.

AG: (teasing) Not familiar with drugs? I’ve seen you around. (laughter)

AG: Alright guys, take care.

"Déjà Vu" opens in theaters on November 22^nd.