Richard Dreyfuss Breaks Down His Career, from Jaws to Daughter of the Wolf

Someone said to me, How could you play Cheney?

And I said there's a little bit of Cheney in all of us

and there is and was and will always be.

I'm Richard Dreyfuss and this is my career timeline

and it's all true, because I have no secrets, okay.

[smooth jazz music]

I'm nine years old and we've just moved from New York

and my mother is in the kitchen

and I say to her, I wanna be an actor

and she said, Don't just talk about it,

and I got up and went down to the local

Jewish Community Center and auditioned for a part

and although I didn't get the part I wanted,

I did get cast in that show.

Really without a break of any kind,

I proceeded to work as an actor

at the Jewish Community Center for maybe 20 years.

♪ She's a doll, she's queen ♪

♪ She's a tantalizing teen and Karen is her name ♪

I was doing a TV show

and I was working with Richard something or other,

as we were doing a scene, he fucked up a line

and I went, cut!

You don't do that,

into the silence that was created from that faux pas,

cut, Peter Tewksbury, the show's writer/director

walked over to me, he said, You don't do that.

By the time he got to the end of that sentence,

I was about that big, but I never did that again.

You mean, she isn't here?

She said that she'd be here if we needed her.

No, she's not here.

The actor's oath, you know what the actor's oath is?

Do you know how to ride a horse?

Are you kidding me?

I was raised on a ranch outside of Vegas.

No, I don't speak Italian

and no, I don't know how to flip a rope.

In those meetings, you don't tell the truth,

then on the day that we shot all of the ranch stuff,

I went up to the head ranger and I said,

so how do you?

And he goes, Oh, shit!

He said, This is hard, this is really hard.

I knew what I was doing

and so he put the two kids on a buck board next to me,

the moment the word action was uttered,

it was followed hastily by, Cut, cut, cut!

Because they knew I didn't know what the hell I was doing

and I was out of control.

[Ben] She's alright, she's upset and she screamed,

but it's okay now.

Shall I get the cops? What?

I'll get the cops. Hey, wait a minute.

First of all, every young actor in America

wanted the role in The Graduate.

I auditioned because all I wanted

was to get to Mike Nicholls, I wanted to get there.

The night before I was supposed to see Mike,

his office calls and someone says,

He had to fly to New York last night,

in order to see a young actor named Dustin Hoffman,

and I could just sense myself

reacting to the name Dustin Hoffman

and I knew it was like immortality,

went right up the back of my neck

and then he did the greatest thing in the world,

Mike Nicholls, who is known as a great gentleman proved it,

because he offered every actor

who ever auditioned for that part another part in the movie

and that's where shall I call the cops,

I'll call the cops came in.

[Mr. McCleery] Alright, boys,

you can all go back to your rooms now.

Well, say goodbye to your stepdaddy.

My first film role

was in a film called The Young Runaways

and directed by a man named Dreifuss.

I had to be outfitted in an asbestos suit,

the costumer did a half hour on short actors,

you know, Humphrey Bogart, Dustin Hoffman,

after a half hour of this,

I said excuse me, are you trying to tell me that I'm short?

And I couldn't wait to get back to tell my best friends

about this crazy costumer and I did,

I went to Rob Reiner, Carl Borack and Albert Brooks

and I went I have the funniest story to tell,

at that moment I realized

for the first time that I was short,

I didn't know how to handle this,

I still don't, I'm in therapy for the longest time,

but we made friends with it.

[suspenseful orchestral music]

I can sincerely tell you

that I tried desperately to get out of that one,

because I had done a film in Canada

called The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

I turned Steven down and he said, Why?

I said because this is gonna be a bitch to shoot

and I'm really lazy

and then I saw Duddy Kravitz for the first time

and I said to myself if somehow this film

is sold in the United States, I will never work again,

I had to get that behind me

and so I just did what every normal human would do,

I begged for the part on my knees

and then Steven gave it to me and Steven said,

We had to deal break another actor out of the film,

I felt like shit.

I got the role and then acted it as well as I could

and that made me a something,

I wasn't a star, but I wasn't not a star.

I knew that Steven was known at that time

as the uncrowned prince of Hollywood,

I wrote a piece for one of his tributes,

that said there is a man,

who is a film director in Hollywood

and I spent a summer with him.

I watched a young director

to be turned from a boy into a man

during the shooting of that film,

I watched this guy accrue authority and accrue confidence

and it was amazing

and it was so subtle.

He told me how to shoot Jaws with that one interesting shot,

there is not one shot in the film that stands up,

but the story will hit you right between the eyes

and you will never ever forget that experience.

Steven told me towards the end of the shoot of Jaws

what his next film was gonna be about,

I knew if I didn't get this part, I was going to get grim,

I walked by Steven's office every day

and badmouthed every actor in Hollywood,

the only time I ever did that and I said,

Pacino has no sense of humor, De Niro is crazy.

Finally after weeks of that, he looked up at me and said,

You've got the part.

It was the only film I'd ever done

or could conceive of doing

that was as filled with potential and greatness

as that film was, that part will outlive us all.

So what's the deal, huh?

I mean, I got a lease here in my pocket,

you gonna honor it or what?

I got a phone call to read another script

called The Goodbye Girl,

it was what happened in real life to Dustin Hoffman,

when he was not trying to prove

how terrible his life was,

really, apparently it all happened,

I thought it was hysterically funny.

Three weeks later we were in rehearsal

and we rehearsed by reading the script in the morning

and reading the script in the afternoon

and doing it all over again the next day,

we came intimately familiar with that script,

then the next week we were introduced

to the complete set of The Goodbye Girl,

which was true down to the ashtrays, true

and nothing was as brilliantly conceived as that set

and then we finished this movie and then we got praised.

My agent calls and says,

You've been nominated for Best Actor,

I've been nominated for blah blah blah,

and I said who else was nominated

and he said, Woody Allen, John Travolta,

Marcello Mastroianni and Richard Burton,

and I said I'm gonna win,

it was the happiest moment of my life.

Real empire,

nobody will fuck with us again.

Someone said to me, How could you play Cheney?

And I said there's a little bit of Cheney in all of us

and there is and was and will always be.

I didn't have to go very far,

because I knew he was right here, right there

and I didn't have to be persuaded,

I had been part of the crowd all within me

and I can pick and choose the appropriate character,

everyone has Mahatma Gandhi

and everyone has Dick Cheney, no kidding.

Where is my son?

If she'd paid the ransom, they'd be here by now.

Daughter of the Wolf was a part,

where I got to play a truly psychopathic,

completely, utterly insane,

bestial killer,

so much fun, I have a theory about that,

where you find actors like that

and it's always that you'll find them right inside yourself.

Where is my son?

I'm sitting on a set for Bewitched,

I'm nervous and I'm saying to myself, why are you nervous?

You've made your case that this is gonna be it

for the rest of your life, why are you nervous?

I then got up, walked over to the lens

and I leaned in and said,

I like you, I want you to like me,

I have no other ambition, this is it

and I leaned in and blow kissed a kiss,

I was never nervous again, I don't know why,

but I became overnight 10 times the actor I had been.

[smooth jazz music]