Russell Crowe

By: Izumi Hasegawa

Izumi Hasegawa: What was it like working with Leo again after so many years?

Russell Crowe: Oh yeah, have I got some stories for you. It was the same as it was working with Leo in 1993, easy and fun. 

IH: A lot of your scenes in this film are you and your cell phone essentially; was that like doing a voice on a cartoon?

RC: I don’t know I’ve never done a voice on a cartoon. It’s the same as if you’re doing a CGI film and you’re supposed to be floating in a flock of black ravens. In fact most of the time when you’re on a film set what you see in the audience has nothing to do with the experience of the actor. So you’ve always got to be shutting off things that are going to affect your focus and all that sort of stuff. It’s the same sort of thing where you just zero in on the phone call. Some guys try to attempt to do that thing of having both people on the phone at the same time, which is just utterly a waste of time, its better off that you just do the groove by yourself. And then the next person, if you shot it first, gets to hear where you were and so they will fold into that, or if you’re doing it second it’s the same thing. You listen to what they said and then you have a think about it. 

Ridley Scott: If you’re the director you got to go out and if somebody’s done it first, and I run it, then the other actor will say, “Christ, he’s taking forever to say his dialogue.” So it’s always better on your own.

Producer David Ignatius

 

 

 

IH: David, how did you describe the two characters, Ferris and Hoffman, in your book when you wrote it, and were they even named Ferris and Hoffman? For Russell and Leo, how did you see these characters? What was it about them that made you both say yes? 

David Ignatius: They were called Ferris and Hoffman in the book, and something I’m really happy about is how faithful the movie is to the book, both in the interaction of the characters, in its picture of the CIA struggling around the world against a very difficult adversary, and in the way in which these characters, Ferris in his way and Hoffman in his way, rebel against the situation they find themselves in. So I thought it was captured well; there’s more I can say about the book, but the basic feeling I have as a writer is the story I wanted to tell — the feeling that I hope people have at the end of the book is the same feeling I had at the end of the movie.

IH: When you describe them in the book, was it anything like the people we see in the movie?

DI: The first time I talked to Russell, he asked me, “Where’s Hoffman from?” And I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Maybe he’s from Massachusetts. I kind of can imagine Worcester or some working class town in Massachusetts.” Russell said, “No, he’s not. He’s from Arkansas,”and he had decided that that was where this character was from and that’s how this character was going to talk, and they obviously re-imagined the characters in a hundred different ways, and that’s now who these people are. I’ll never be able to read the book and read about Hoffman and not think about Russell, and the same thing with Ferris and Leo. 

Leonardo DiCaprio: To put it simply, I saw my character as an operator in the Middle East that was trying to operate and do his job in the higher moral context that his boss wanted him to, and there was this great conflict that was set up in the book and adapted by Bill into this script of this dilemma that this character has where he’s consistently told to do things that he doesn’t believe in for the betterment of his country and this war on terror, and he simultaneously is accustomed to the Middle East and their cultures, and he meets up with this Jordanian intelligence officer who he grows to respect and wants to do the best job he possibly can, but he’s being manipulated by both sides. Besides this being a great political piece that’s pertinent to this time, it was this fantastic cat-and-mouse espionage thriller that works on its own.

RC: The first thing that I got was a phone call from Ridley saying, “How would you like to put on a large amount of weight?” And that always appeals to me, and so that was kind of like a sell right there. But one of the other things that he said is that he wanted the character to feel like an ex-football player with bad knees who still had some grace about him, so that was also interesting. Everything else comes from the book and the way the character talks in the book — the dialogue in the book. 

IH: Was it for you that you had such a great relationship with Ridley that you would do pretty much anything that he wants you to do?

RC: I went through a period of time where, even after the great relationship we had on Gladiator, I didn’t fully realize that that was probably a unique situation that will come along in your performance life, and so we went through a thing where he asked me to do Black Hawk Down, but I’d just done a movie where there was a helicopter in the background and I wasn’t interested. Then he wanted me to do Kingdom of Heaven, but I was in the middle of doing something else, and I said, “Oh, you’ll have to wait a year,” and he said, “Fuck off, who are you?”  With the last three things we’ve done together, it’s basically, “Right, this is what we’re doing,” and I’m like, “Okay, cool.” I’ll say yes first with him and then work out why I want to do it afterwards.

IH: A quick question about the technology that we see in the film:  it’s seems almost impossible that it’s real — how real is it? 

DI: I think the CIA would like to be as adept at the use of technology as Ridley Scott. They can do some pretty amazing things from what we know, and what we have to say is we don’t really know exactly what they can do, but certainly there’s a wonderful scene in the movie where Leo looks up in the sky at the overhead reconnaissance and he’s talking on the phone at the same moment to Hoffman, and that’s real. There are predators; there are unmanned drones overhead all the time  – everywhere of importance around the world — so we do have those capabilities, and the ability to talk in real time with the operator on the ground is also real. I expect it drives our officers in the field crazy that, as in the movie, at any time the boss can get on the phone and tell you what to do and tell you what not to do; nobody likes being second-guessed. They used to talk about Donald Rumsfeld having a seven thousand-mile screwdriver that he was using to minutely manage things far away, and I think the movie suggests that too.

IH: Are Russell’s character and Leo’s character like brothers? You have a younger brother [to Ridley]. Did you intend to put this brotherhood bond in this film?

RS: Actually, I don’t think it was a brotherhood. I think it’s very much a boss/operator relationship that Ed Hoffman might want to project his warmth as if it is brotherhood, or coach to player, that “I’m watching over you, buddy,” but actually, that’s where the seduction begins. So I think this is fundamentally about seduction and betrayal, where, if necessary, he will betray his most valuable asset in the field, if there is a higher reward than losing his asset. 

Leonardo DiCaprio

 

 

 

 

IH: Leo, you did most of your own stunts…?

LD: Most, yes. 

RS: I’ll give you an example of most of his stunts. [Pretends to dial a phone]

LD: That I didn’t do. I didn’t do any dialing, I refused. We got beautiful hand doubles for this movie.  

IH: Were there any stunts that were challenging or painful? And you had to learn some Arabic; are you able to remember any of that?

LD: Absolutely none. I can’t remember a single word even, to tell you the truth. But we had an Arabic coach there who was really helpful, because it was more so than any accent — you have to be so exact, and there are different dialects of Arabic from country to country. So it was really difficult, to tell you the truth, and one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do language-wise, because it comes from the throat — it’s different. Also learning about the customs and the culture and all that, so we had advisors for that sort of thing. And as far as the stunts were concerned, it was difficult. It was a very difficult shoot, but that’s the nature of working on a Ridley Scott movie — you have to embrace that. The pace in which he shoots is really intense, really fast-paced, and you have to be prepared for anything in any given moment. He literally has helicopters on standby circling around, ready to get an overhead shot of you running through an entire city, and he’s like, “Alright, you’re happy with the scene, great, you’ve got your dramatic beats, okay. Why don’t you walk down the block and we’re going to have three helicopters chase you through an Arabic street in real-time. They’ve blocked off some traffic, but you’ll be fine. It’ll be great, go ahead.” And you have to just be prepared for that. That was the biggest adjustment; I’d just come from this other movie called Revolutionary Road, where it was like doing a 1950s play, where we are talking about our feelings for months at a time in a small room. And then I wound up in Morocco with missiles being shot at me — it was a bizarre transition. Once you get accustomed to that pace, you embrace it and you enjoy it, and it starts to become this adrenaline-fueled work environment that you love. 

IH: Did that building really blow up behind you?

LD: I didn’t notice that part. 

RC: By the time you turned around, it wasn’t there anymore.

RS: The shepherd’s stone house — yeah, that was blown up. 

LD: Oh yes, that was a big explosion. [Laughs]

RC: The key for any young player, if they want to go and work with Ridley — you have to be prepared to bleed. It’s as simple as that. 

IH: You two, as actors and performers in this film, look like you’re at either end of the spectrum. Russell, you look like you’re having the time of your life; and Leo, you look like you’re a guy in the middle of the worst day of his life. How was that a challenge for each of you to come at that differently?

RC: I definitely was having the time of my life, because I knew that ultimately I’d be out of there in five weeks. It wasn’t going to be my responsibility. Somebody else was going to get blown up this time, and I was perfectly happy with all that. 

LD: I didn’t want to say that, but I think the nature of the environments kind of played a toll in those [performances] — to tell you the truth, we were there for three and a half extra months, even thinking back — you enjoy this stuff.

RS: I do, I like the place. 

LD: People always ask, “Was it fun? Was it fun working on that movie?” I don’t know if that’s the operative word. It was challenging and interesting and all those other things, but “fun” isn’t always the operative word.

IH: Russell and Leo, what are your memories of making The Quick and The Dead? 

LD: We were both hand-plucked to do that movie. He had done Romper Stomper and I had done Gilbert Grape, so we were hand-plucked to do this big budget film, so we were both very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

RC: There’s a difference in our ages, but we were both in the same sort of position where the people above us in the cast were Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone, and everyone below us in a casting position were all these really famous character actors like Keith David, cats like that. They were looking at the two of us going, “Who are these guys?” So that naturally kind of put us together in a way where we’d just hang out together because we didn’t care about status. We just wanted to enjoy the experience. The two things that have changed about Leo since that time — he can drink legally and he’s no longer a virgin. 

IH: And Leo, about Russell?

LD: I don’t do comedy, but he’s the same guy, he really is. I remember when I first started having these interpretations of these images, these clichés of what movie stars are and this and that, and they’re egomaniacal pricks and tyrants, but in general, for the most part, they’re nice people, to tell you the truth. He couldn’t be more professional. He couldn’t be a more normal guy to hang out with. He’s intelligent and great and blah, blah, blah — all that stuff. And he hasn’t changed, that’s it. 

IH: (To Donald DeLine) How’d you get involved with this?

Donald DeLine: Ridley and I and David Ignatius collaborated on a project at Paramount. We did this idea of David’s. It was an original idea of David’s. It also was a story set in the Middle East. It was based on a journalist, a Christiane Amanpour type of character, so we all got to know each other through that experience. David gave us the galleys of this book. We both read it right away and fell in love with it, so we teamed up and did it together. 

IH: Russell and Leo, did either of you do any research in regard to the CIA in terms of CIA protocol?

RC: We can’t discuss that with you. 

LD: I got to talk to some people who worked in that field. It’s a very interesting subject matter to take on. Unless you’re talking about the CIA in the general context of history, what they’ve done historically, which we’re only now starting to learn about the basis of it being able to operate, is the fact that it’s shrouded in secrecy. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to function. So there’s a certain leap of faith that you take with all this stuff. It was really David [Ignatius]’s research that he did in the Middle East, talking to Jordanian intelligence and all of that stuff that Bill [Monahan] then adapted and did the screenplay that takes on a life of its own. But we did the best research that we could, in that regard.

Screenwriter William Monahan

 

 

 

 

IH: William [Monahan] and David, whose line was “Welcome to Guantanamo”? 

William Monahan: That came up somehow in the process with Ridley — the Guantanamo line. I’m interested in your thought that it sums up the whole movie.

DI: That line may be in the book, I can’t remember. We’re living through a period now where we’re seeing how horrific the intelligence operations can be, but one of the strengths of the movie is that it transcends the here and now and tells the story that could be told about the agency’s operations, I’d like to say, this year, ten years ago, ten years from now… 

WM: I don’t think of it as a topical movie, now that I think about it. It’s an exciting spy story that very well could have been happened during the French Revolution — this cat-and-mouse spy game thing. It would work in almost any context. It’s best to look at it that way.

IH: Leo, can you talk about working on Revolutionary Road before you did this movie? Can you talk about working with Kate Winslet?

LD: Kate has remained one of my closest friends and is the best actress of her generation. She brought this book to me, which was a portrait of America after the war, trying to basically become the idyllic image of what a family is supposed to be, and two people trying to struggle to do that, and they’re basically torn apart because they feel like they’ve become clichés and have lost their identity. Kate and I basically knew we could push each other’s buttons performance-wise and knew we could pull stuff out of each other. We’ve known each other since we were almost teenagers, so it was something that I jumped at the opportunity to do. 

IH: Do you play lovers in that film as well?

LD: Lovers? [Laughs] Do we play lovers? We play husband and wife, so hopefully. 

IH: Leo, being in danger while Russell is picking up his kids — is it a commentary on the larger world about where the insulation goes?

RS: It’s a comment on cell phones when he’s about to engage in the field. He gets a call from his lawyer saying (his ex) wants the house. You’ve got to go, “Who wants the house?” Then you realize he’s engaged in a private condition, which is getting divorced back in Washington. That’s what can happen today. The access to everything and instant information to everything has changed the world. 

IH: Insulation affects their work?

RS: Isn’t that always the way? It’s the desk paratrooper up front who says, Montgomery, Patton, Napoleon, who the great generals in the field were saying, “If we put this quarter of a million troops over here, it’ll get wiped out, but we’ll have a million safe over here.” What’s the right decision? You’ve got to make a choice. The guy who’s running one of the black ops of the CIA, he’s in a box that’s even more secret than the CIA. He said, “Independent functionary, it’s the least staff as possible.” Put as few people as possible because the more people that know, the more likely it is that you’re going to get a leak. So he’s a freewheeling independent functioning within the CIA. In the field, he may not have a lot of guys the level of Farris. He may only have a dozen and he may choose to have them all together, and Farris may not know if there’s another functionary there on his beat because he chooses not to talk about it. That’s why there’s an “oops” when somebody shouldn’t have been there.  

IH: One of Ridley’s signatures is the sense of place. How important is it for you when approaching a film, putting your actors in these locations?

RS: The location is always like the other character. It’s up to me to create a proscenium that’s so real that when the actor walks into that proscenium, he’s actually affected by it. I always remember the first time walking on a battlefield in Germania. It was four miles east of Gatwick Airport, but we walked over the hill and into the front, and that proscenium was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? What I like is he’s never seen it until he walks in. It becomes part of the world. The locations are the work. 

IH: How does that sense of location affect you, the actors?

LD: You’re the one who’s done 18,000 movies with him. 

RC: It’s great, wonderful when it’s there, but equally you can’t rely on it because the next thing you do may have none of that canvas and you may have to run it all in your mind. It’s the same thing we talked about before in having a telephone conversation with someone who’s not on the other end of the line or doing something in a blue or green screen room where you’ve got to imagine everything that’s around you that everybody else will see. So it’s fantastic when you can walk onto a stage of that size, even half of the Coliseum that we built in Malta was better than not having a Coliseum there at all. So it goes both ways. It’s fabulous when it works and when you can be in that place and time that the character is supposed to be in, but on the other side of that, being an actor, you can equally shoot Botswana from Texas. The game is a bit more ambiguous.

LD: Of course, it’s relevant and it would be great to have the real locations constantly. We shot Morocco, which doubled for a lot of different places. It’s more the attitude of the director that you’re working with and the environment that he wants you to be surrounded in. That’s what was great about working with Ridley. He’s like a human editing bay. He’s constantly saying to himself, “Do I believe this? Do I not believe this? Do I believe the people I’ve surrounded the main character with? Do I believe what they’re saying? Do I believe what I’m seeing through this screen?” He’s this filter — this bullshit filter — and he trusts his own instincts on such a gut-level. It’s great to work with somebody who will come in and say, “Okay, this entire scene is wrong. Get rid of three pages of dialogue or let’s move this outside. Whatever it is, I’m not believing it,” or “I am believing it. Push it to an even more extreme.” I keep talking about this, but it’s amazing to watch him behind the monitor or in the tent with six different monitors and cameras from every different angle and he’s just snapping from monitor to monitor, switching and knows exactly and really efficiently saying, “This is exactly what I’m going to use in the movie and everything else is a profound waste of time. Let’s just not do any of that other crap. This is the moment that I’m going to choose and this is the kind of thing that I want, and let’s go work on something that’s actually beneficial to the movie.” And that’s the attitude that he has and you go in every day and feel like you’ve done a day’s work, and everything that you put that effort into will wind up, for the most part, as a part of the movie. That’s the great thing about Ridley. Besides the locations, it’s what I just said. 

IH: There’s a moment in the film when your character tells Ferris to never have kids. What are your own thoughts on parenthood?

RC: It’s the most fantastic thing I’ve ever experienced. It continues to get more fun and more complex every day. We did actually debate quite a bit about Ferris’s attitude towards children. I think Hoffman’s attitude is that he’s passing onto a man that he’s trying to use in a certain way so he may be expressing a momentary negative, but what he’s really trying to do is suppress his desire by doing anything else but his job. Another moment we had was when Hoffman is on the phone talking and there’s this thing where his kid went to go to the bathroom. I think there was just sort of a dismissive aspect in the script and I said to Ridley, “It’s just a function of being a dad that he can still do this thing while he’s taking his kids pants down, pointing him in the right direction, make sure he doesn’t get it on the floor. Then I push him off back to bed while he’s destroying something on the other end of the phone.” I think that’s what Hoffman was getting at a little bit before. I think he used the word “insulation.” He needed distance between him and the reality of what he’s doing so it’s easy for him. He’s playing a video game, whereas Ferris is consigned in real life. 

IH: You have a story that has a love story within it and yet the characters can’t touch each other. How tricky was that?

RS: The book started off with Aisha being a national. In fact, she was a French girl in the embassy. I asked David how he felt if she was local, which I felt wasn’t initially there as the idea of what it bled into. It started to underscore Ferris’s attachment and liking for the region that he was in. So when he comes to that little lunch he has with her, where she’s obliged to have a chaperone there, which is her sister and the two kids, afterwards she says, “Ironically, my sister wants to go to America.” He says, “Well, if you want, I’ll swap passports with her.” She says, “Don’t joke about things like that.” He says, “No, I mean it.” So you start to get a sense of attachment to this particular place that he’s somehow found his own magic in, and then, what’s really nice about it is that she’s taken what some would think are ridiculous aspects of the crime, but in some ways I think is a rather charming aspect of the Koran that she can’t touch, cannot shake his hands. So you’ve got to have a chaperone, you can’t shake hands until they’re fully engaged in an acknowledged relationship, which probably means family, et cetera. And if you go there in the scale and spectrum from where we are today in our society, all that stuff, anything goes, right? So I think that’s a balance — there’s a plus for reappraising some of the better aspects of being a little more reserved about relationships and how fast they travel. 

IH: Why do you do your own story boards?

RS: It’s all about focus. If I get lost, I just sit there and I will doodle. The doodle will start because I spent a long time in art school, so I can really draw. So I’ll doodle and suddenly I’ll find the beginning of the movie in one picture. Usually, I start my stuff on the telephone. Right by the telephone, I’ve got a book of doodles. 

RC: It’s not just that he draws. He not only draws, but he can draw upside down. So he can put a piece of paper in front of you so you’re looking at the piece of paper and he can draw the frame for you. It’s a very strange talent.

IH: This question is for Russell and Ridley. One of the best pictures you guys did together was A Good Year. Do you have any more movies where a head isn’t being decapitated coming out? 

RC: Yeah, we’re doing another one. It’s called A Gooder Year.

RS: I think what happens is that people don’t expect something from Russell — they expect something from me, so you step into a new arena and everyone is so taken aback by it that we basically got fundamentally beaten up, mercilessly by British press and French press. At the end of the day, you can’t give a shit. All you can do is actually be your own critic, that’s key. Doing what we do, you have to be your own critic and judge and adjudicate as to what you do and how it turned out. I look at it and I’m very happy about it. Actually, I was thrilled with this and the process was really great. I’m glad you enjoyed it. 

IH: Leo, can you talk to us about working with Mark Strong? He gave such a good performance.

LD: He sure did. He gave a fantastic performance. He was one of the last people to be cast in this film. He’s done a lot of theatre in England and he came in, and I think he was immediately taken back by the sleazy ‘70s suits that he had to wear and the cheesy attire that he had on, but he jumped into the role full force. He’s so subtly conniving and deceitful in this movie. He embraced the character and just had such a great attitude, even though he came literally the last week of filming, but he’s fantastic in it. I don’t really know what else to say except that he just knocks it out of the park. We really needed somebody on Russell’s end to be able to be the flip side of that coin. We needed somebody with some weight to them to be able to match up power-wise when they sit in a room together, like who’s got the upper hand. Thank God we got Mark Strong. 

IH: Leo, everyone knows about your commitment to the environment and a green economy. We’re facing the hugest bailout in history and I was wondering how you feel about that. A good deal of this money that might be earmarked for the economy or environment will not be…

LD: Well, if you’re talking about the environment and our country shifting to alternative technologies in ways to power the country, I’ve been profoundly disappointed for years, so it’s no news. We should have started eight years ago to be less dependant on foreign oil and start to invest in some of these new technologies, but now we’re way behind of the curve again and the United States should be the one to set an example for the rest of the world. Brazil is doing it. Other countries are starting to adapt these principles, but we haven’t. The only thing that I really want in this new election, because I get asked a lot — I’ve been an outward supportive as a Democrat in the past and have gone out for [John] Kerry and all these things. My new thing is to say, “All right, obviously people don’t want other people to tell them how to think or what to believe or what’s right politically and what’s wrong.” The only point for me in this election is I want enough young people to go out to the polls and actually vote this time — to register and vote, because then we’ll get a real consensus of what this country is. We’ll really understand where, morally, our country is. These young people will be able to dictate policies for the next 50 to 100 years. It’s about time that we do that. That’s my only wish — that we get a real representation of the future of this country in this next election, whoever wins. 

IH: Russell, can you talk about your friend Nicole Kidman and her new baby?

RC: Sunday Rose was born on the same day as my son Tennyson, the 7th of July. Nicole and Keith brought Sunday Rose around on a Sunday, which I thought was appropriate. Nicole had one look at my younger son Tennyson, and looked up at me and said, “I’m a great believer in arranged marriages.” I believe she made the connection between Sunday and Tennyson now — so Tennyson is already engaged! But Sunday Rose is a beautiful child with beautiful, delicate features, and it was fun when she brought her around Sunday — it was nice. I’m not going to be giving Nicole any advice. She’s already brought up two children. She’s pretty well-versed. 

IH: Ridley, can you talk about the torture scene? How do you know how long they should be? How do you know it’s not too much for the audience to keep watching?

RS: Well, experience. How long do you know when you’ve seen enough of a man throwing himself on a kitchen table and giving birth to something coming out of his chest? So you start there and the studio said to me, “It’s gross.” I said, “Hang on, I’m being paid to be gross, okay?” because that was a horror movie. In this instance, the scene was always tricky because we’re going down a dreadful cliché, but the cliché is real and horrible. I would not do any research so much as I would consider it immoral of me to watch a beheading. However accessible it was, I couldn’t do it and I wouldn’t do it. Believe me, I’m not queasy — it just would feel wrong, even entertaining watching it. Who’s watched a beheading here? Anybody admit it? So first of all, you’ve got to imagine what that would be, but then also what we’ve got is a very good text. We’ve got a good scene, good words, great actors, so there’s a dynamic in that scene that I know I have to keep it flying, as does Leo, because one of our challenges will be that none of the audience is ever going to believe for a second that he’s going to die in this scene. One of the challenges, from that point of view, is to put you on the edge because it is theater, it is a film — is he gonna die or isn’t he going to die? Do you think he’s going to die? I thought about it. I thought, “Go on, cut his fucking head off.”

IH: Leo, what was it like to see yourself in the scenes being tortured? 

LD: That whole scene — without giving the ending of the movie, so I don’t even like to use that term because I don’t want to talk about what happens — but we knew that there was this pivotal end moment in the movie where I’m in the hands of the enemy and this was something I think I know way back when Bill Monahan first gave me the script and told me about this project and told me about Ridley and about the whole relationship. We talked about that scene. This was the scene that needed to be the pivotal moment in the film, that unless that worked and was believable and had the guts to it and the intensity to it and the weight, the film wouldn’t work almost. It was something we talked about at great length and analyzed in every possible direction. What would a CIA agent trying to do his best in this world finally say if he’s in that situation? What are the words that would come out of his mouth? What kind of tactics would he use to try to get out of the situation? What is he thinking about? Is he thinking about his own survival? The betterment of his country? What secrets does he release? It was one of the more complicated scenes for the movie and one of the most intense in the sense that we knew we had to knock it out of the park. I actually got sick after the scene for three days because there was just so much intensity put into that.

RS: There’s an evolution of the character which there’s a large part of it in the book that we don’t actually have. The part of the book which is now the only part of the book we have is Ferris sitting in one corner present at a scene where there’s a guy being cross-examined with a cricket bat. And after that, obviously, the man dies. So you’re starting off a film with a man who is coming to a point of deep reflection as to whether he’s actually doing the right job or not, and if he is, is this the right way to do it? So you’re already starting a film with a guy who’s already halfway out the gate. He’s already in disarray in terms of being a functionary and to do what he’s doing. I think what’s interesting is Hoffman starts to sense that. So you jump to the end and what I would think that if you believe in karma, which I do — I’ve got this inherent belief in karma — you’re carrying it all the way through to where you finally get to “What does Ferris think about this as retribution? And what must be at this moment will have to be, therefore I’m in acceptance of what is dealt me.” If that comes out of the scene, then that’s what it is.  

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