In Pacific Heights (1990), Matthew Modine played a landlord trapped by a vicious tenant he would not evict. Now he returns in The Neighbor as the tenant who refuses eviction from a most beautiful landlord (Michele Laroque). This time, not an edge-of-the-seat thriller but a light-hearted comedy.

Clare Elfman: Before talking about your new film, The Neighbor, can I ask you something about three old favorites of mine? Do you mind if we go back a bit?

Matthew Modine: No, I don’t mind at all. There is no present without a past.

CE: I’ve been a fan of yours for so long…go back to Short Cuts.  Can you talk about your experience of balancing the tragic and the comedic? You have this great comedic style.

MM: Thank you. Well, Robert Altman, in addition to being a wonderful director, was a great friend, and so it was the second time that we worked together.

CE: Oh – what was the first one?

MM: It was a film at the beginning of my career called Streamers. It was a play that was by David Rabe.

CE: Wasn’t Streamers about the Vietnam war?

MM: Yeah, it was on Broadway. Mike Nichols had directed it, and then John Hurt, I believe, played my part on Broadway. So we made that into a film and I won a prize at the Venice Film Festival for Best Acting Award, and that really launched my career. So it was a real pleasure to work with Bob again. He wanted me to do the Hollywood movie…oh shoot what’s it called? Tim Robbins played the part.

CE: Are you talking about The Player?

MM: The Player, yeah.

CE: Oh — were you really up for that part?

MM: Yes, but I was doing a film called Wind with Carol Bell that Francis Coppola produced, and I was in Australia, and that’s when we started to experience… when there was early talk about global warming, we found ourselves sailing around in it. But I’m off point…

CE: That’s okay because I’m going to be off the point for a minute too, because I know of your interest in conservation. I’m going to come to that later.

MM: Okay, so Bob [Altman] had a wonderful sardonic sense of humor, and I appreciated that, and it’s always the same story with a director. It’s almost really a director’s medium, and an actor has to be able to trust that the director knows what he’s doing. The reason that Bob was always able to get those incredible casts is because he knew what he was doing. Even if the films ultimately didn’t work, there was always some tremendous thing to be learned from the experience of working on a Robert Altman movie.

CE: Well, let me take you back to a second one — there was a remake of The Browning Version, and that’s a great favorite of mine. How did you manage in that one, since that was a remake and you had an earlier one to look at? Did you have to develop your role in your own way?

MM: You always have to find your own way. I think that’s a great competition, you know. When they give acting awards, everybody should have to play the same part. I wanted to work on The Browning Version because Albert Finney and I had worked together on a play that began at the Steppenwolf company that Gary Sinise had directed.

CE: Were you with Steppenwolf?

MM: No, I wasn’t. I would have loved to have been a part of that group of actors. I think it’s still one of the oldest surviving companies in the country’s history.

CE: So you knew Albert Finney…?

MM: Because we had done Orphans together. Alan Pakula directed Orphans with Albert Finney and Kevin Anderson. I had such a good time working with Albert. When they actually approached me about working on The Browning Version, I just jumped at the chance to work with Albert.

CE: …And the third one was one that’s very similar in plot to The Neighbor, and that was Pacific Heights. Do you remember that?

MM: Yeah. This is a happy version of the creepy Pacific Heights. Given the different personalities, Pacific Heights is what could happen in a situation when you start messing with a person’s castle. I’ve been staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, which is going through a similar kind of thing where there are different parties involved in the ownership of the Chelsea, and a couple of the owners just thought they could come in and toss people out that have been living there for 20 or 30 years.

CE: So you’re living this in life, actually. So which one are you? Are you the creepy one or the funny one?

MM: No, I’m a happy bystander in this one, because the fight is one that I do not want to get involved in because I’m not rent-controlled. But the people who are rent-controlled, who are losing their residence in the hotel…they were just trying to throw them out and it’s gotten bad. There have been people who have been hurt, people who have been punched…

CE: Oh wow. These are rough times. Now in this new movie, The Neighbor, you work with two other terrific actors who also recently came out in great comedies, and the first one was Michele Laroque, and I saw her in The Closet. The other one was Patrick Breen, who turned out to be a wonderful creature in Galaxy Quest. What was it like working with them on The Neighbor?

MM: It was a fun film to do. The director, Edward O’Flaherty, was so happy to be having the opportunity to direct a film that you have all that youthful exuberance of a first-time director, although it’s not his first time directing –- it was his second feature, but he has all that enthusiasm and everything is so important, and it’s just exciting to work with somebody like that. And being in a position to be able to help green-light a film — it’s a very honorable position to find yourself in.

CE: Explain that a little. You are in the position to green-light it for them.

MM: Yes, when they go looking for financing for films, there are certain actors that they’ll agree to give money to to make the film, and I’m in that position. So you still look for good material and then you meet these young directors and you say, “Oh, this is wonderful. I can give this guy a hand-up the way that Robert Altman gave me a hand-up.”

CE: What was it like working with Michele Laroque? Because I know this was her first time in English. I’d seen her in French comedies.

MM: I wouldn’t want to try to do a comedy speaking French, you know? I was very enthralled with her ability to be able to not just work in another language, but to be able to find physical comedy. There were times working with her when she reminded me of Carol Burnette, in a more subtle, less obvious way. Carol was really quite broad and I love that too, but Michele had her own way. Yeah, everybody that they found for the film was very professional and came prepared to play ball.

CE:  Since this was a script re-written from the French, what were some of the problems you had on that? Or was it a relatively easy shoot?

MM: No, we had a good rehearsal period, which is always important on a film — to be able to have an opportunity to explore it and learn about what’s going to be said in the situations so that you avoid being on the set and discovering problems with the script once you start filming. The script was in pretty good shape, and what we did during the rehearsal process was just discovering things that would make it funnier that would fit our personalities.

CE: Was there anything that you added that was a funny touch?

MM: We added the getting my belt buckle caught…

CE: That was a funny scene.

MM:  I saw the film at the Napa Valley Film Festival. It was the first time I’d seen the film. It was just up there six or seven weeks ago, and it was so great to see it. It was a sold-out audience. They added a screening because that went so well, and then the next one sold out, and it was just refreshing to hear people laughing about things that work.

CE: The one with the belt buckle was a good one, and then the flowers kept getting caught in the door…

MM: Yeah, the flowers, and then leaving my clothes out and the sweat dripping down…

CE: Gross, but very funny gross. So any more fun or particularly difficult things while filming?

MM: It sounds so cliché to say it, but it really was a pleasure to work on it. It was one of those films where you wake up in the morning and you’re excited and enthusiastic to go and play with the other people involved.

CE: You’ve done so many interesting films. What is your favorite role? What’s the best one or, from your personal standpoint, the one you love most?

MM: Birdy was a really special film to work on. I didn’t expect it to work at playing Birdy. When I auditioned for Birdy, I auditioned for the role of Al that Nicholas Cage played. So I think Birdy was really special. There was a film that I did with I guess what we’d say was the protégé to Robert Altman, called Equinox.

CE: I’m putting that one down to go see.

MM: I played twins in it, and Alan Rudolph directed. It’s a beautiful film. I was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for that film.

CE: You live outside Hollywood. Do you prefer to keep your family away from the Hollywood scene? I know you’re bringing up kids (and how old are they?)…

MM: My son just graduated from college and my daughter is about to graduate from high school. It’s not that we avoid Hollywood, it’s just that they really prefer New York. To be a young person in New York City, where you don’t have to have an automobile — to be able to go see a friend, to be able to use public transportation, just to jump on a train or a bus or take a cab — it’s liberating for them.

CE: My curiosity: How did you get into film in the beginning? There are so many aspiring actors who will read this and wonder.

MM: Probably with my father’s drive-in, growing up with movies. My dad was a drive-in theater manager.

CE: So you saw movies from early on.

MM: Oh yeah — tons of films from my childhood, yeah. Our house was always next door to the drive-in.

CE: So what’s on the horizon?

MM: There’s a film called Opa! which was filmed in Greece, about an archeologist who goes looking for this cup of St. John the Divine, and it’s a romantic comedy. I just did a film with Marcia Gay Harden and Mena Suvari…

CE: Oh, what is that? That sounds good.

MM: It’s a Lifetime film. It’s a good one — directed by Peter Medak, who is a really good film director, called Sex & Lies in Sin City.

CE: That one I’ll look for. Let me ask you this: I know you’re a champion of energy conservation. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

MM: At my dad’s drive-in, when I was a little boy, because I was the youngest of seven kids, I had all of the shitty jobs, which really were because I had to go clean the bathrooms…

CE: That is a shitty job, Matthew.

MM: That’s a shitty job, yeah, and picking up the trash. And sometimes it was really miserable and it was not something that I wanted to be doing. And my dad said, “Look, you can get angry about it and point the finger and blame people because they made a mess in the bathrooms, but it’s not going to get it done. So you can point the finger and blame or your can point the finger in a direction that helps you to get the job done.” And that kind of thinking has just stuck in my mind my whole life. Like one of the really wonderful things I was responsible for in Los Angeles was getting people to to double-side scripts.

CE: To print on both sides of the paper so you save all the paper and it works?

MM: Yes, I tried to get the William Morris Agency to do it, and they were a little bit hesitant to do it at first, so I made a budget of how much money it costs, how much paper, how much it costs to ship because of the weight, and how much time could be saved by double-siding scripts and made a budget, and I took it to…his name was Irv Weintrob at the William Morris Agency. I think he’s still there. And he took it to the president of the company, and they saw the practicality and the economic advantages of double-siding on scripts, and they changed overnight.

CE: I never even thought of it, to tell you the truth.

MM: That was an example of what my father said, like you can point the finger and talk about waste, or you can point the finger and say, “What can I do to solve the problem?” Having done that, it’s more than a billion sheets of paper that have been saved since that time.

CE: I think you also championed the use of the energy-saving car, like the Prius, etc.

MM: The Prius is a wonderful solution to the problem. If you go back to 1978, that’s when I was in college and I was studying oceanography…

CE: Where’d you go to school, by the way?

MM: I went to Southwestern in California. And Jimmy Carter gave a speech from the White House, which was one of the most prophetic speeches that I’ve ever heard. The speech, I think, was called The Moral Equivalent of War. And he said that if we don’t address our energy needs then, during the first oil crisis that we were having, he said that America would lose its moral relevance in the world, that we would begin fighting, there would be wars for oil… It’s an amazing speech that he made, and if you read it, you say, “Oh my God — why didn’t we do it in 1978?” He gave the speech from the White House wearing a T-shirt because he’d turned thermostats down in the White House. He put solar panels on the roof of the White House which were taken off by the next president because they felt it was ugly or it made our country look weak. These were the necessary steps that a visionary saw to solve problems. And my family came here…I’m a son of the American Revolution.

CE: I know you came from Utah originally…

MM: Yeah, but I’m from that pioneer stock, and you don’t complain about problems. You say, “What can I do to solve them?” And this organization that I started, Bicycle For A Day… Riding a bicycle is something that you can do to immediately have a positive impact on the environment . Look, here’s ten things that you can do every day to reduce your carbon footprint. These are ten things that you can do — as an individual — that, when done collectively, when you think of 300 million Americans doing it collectively, has a tremendous impact on the environment, and we just have to wake up. The things that I think are so inspiring and empowering are things of that generation — the great generation that Tom Brokaw talked about. You know, the victory gardens that people had, the metal drives that people had, the way that this country pulled together in what Jimmy Carter called a Moral Equivalent to War — that we are facing that moral equivalent to war, that we have to address these problems that exist with that kind of fervor. We have to pull the nation together and say, “Let’s plant victory gardens. Let’s ration gasoline and give friends rides to work so we’re not one person in a car…”

CE:  From your point of view, as an actor who has been in some really great films, do you see film as a way of teaching – more than just pure entertainment?

MM: Absolutely. I studied with Stella Adler.  It was one of the first things that she said when she started teaching us when we were kids. She said, “If you’re going to stand on a stage, be projected on a motion picture screen, or go into people’s homes on their television, then you have a responsibility — not just to entertain. They’re going to be inspired and touched by the things that you do and the things that you say, and there’s a responsibility that comes with that,” and that’s not one that I take lightly.

CE: Well, I appreciate that. Since I write the Classic Corner, for my upcoming columns, give me two or three of your own very favorite classics and I’ll go ahead and review them.

MM: Little Big Man… Network.

CE: So great.

MM: Unbelievable. That speech that William Holden’s wife gives — Beatrice Straight. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress — unbelievable.

CE: Well thank you so much, Matthew. And good luck to everyone with The Neighbor. You all are a great cast and it’s a very funny film!

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