Adam Goldberg could be considered the Woody Allen of his generation, having brought neuroses to the screen with greater comedic effect than most other modern actors.
He's expressed his angst-ridden need to dance in Dazed and Confused, made a failed relationship seem all too real in 2 Days in Paris and driven Chandler Bing nuts in a memorable run on Friends.
In the new indie film Untitled, Goldberg plays a classical musician whose postmodern, atonal compositions are far too abstract for most ears. Strangely, he seems to take comfort in the fact that no one understands him. His and other characters' stories work as a subtle parody of the New York art world.
We caught up with Goldberg -- who makes his own music in a project called LANDy -- on the phone from his LA home last week. Q&A after the jump.
I can't lie; it's not great. I got a flu shot last night.
Swine flu?
No, just the regular. They won't let anyone between 24 and 55 get them. Just got the regular one because I was getting a physical, and I had a long talk with my doctor about the origins of the flu, and, the shot takes two weeks to work. Do you feel like [expletive] the next day when you get one?
No, but I'm pretty unaffected by stuff like that. You?
I can't tell. I can't tell if it's normal feeling like [expletive] or flu-shot feeling like [expletive], but it's decidedly more achy. It's like I ran a marathon yesterday ... which I didn't.
I saw 'Untitled' this morning. In the movie, your character is unapologetic about his music being inaccessible to the mainstream, while his brother is a visual artist who wants wide acceptance for his work. Where do you lie in that struggle, as a filmmaker and musician?
I struggle with it psychologically, but I don't necessarily do anything about it. So many things are beyond my control that I've tried to stop bothering so much with creating or realizing some notion of what success is. At a certain point I realized that things are the way they are. The acting thing kind of has a life of its own. The things I've done and developed, I guess it can be argued that I could have done more to create calling cards. I just don't know that I'm capable of that. My character in the film is definitely capable of it, but he's more intellectually opposed to the idea of doing something that would be widely accepted.
There's a moment in the film when he plays some music alone that's pretty and evocative, but it's hard to tell whether he would ever play it for anyone else.
I don't necessarily think that's where he's going, but I think he ends up finding the middle ground between being true to himself and what he is as an artist.
Even though the film is supposed to be a parody of self-important artists, the music your character is making definitely has merit. There are found-sound classical ensembles all over making stuff like it, and there are folks who dig it. What's your impression of the music in the film?
I tried not to judge the quality of it too much, because we weren't physically capable of using the score composer's own recordings in the scenes. So what you see is us trying to re-create it, which isn't quite as good. [Laughs] But there's something in me that gets it. I mean, I've always been a fan of Steve Reich, but there was a time where he used tape loop phrasings and hand claps before he finally applied them to something more symphonic. I think that eventually my character would apply his techniques to more harmonic music.
And the Hollywood sucker in me totally wanted that to happen on camera. I wanted to see him bring that all together.
Well, truth of it is, that was in there. No one has asked about it, so I haven't talked about it. But yeah, it was part of the ending. It ended up just being too much, I think.
There's always DVD, right?
Exactly. Some of my best [expletive] is in the bonus features. In general. They should just compile all of my bonus features.
You did a TV series last year called 'The Unusuals' that I thought was great, but it sort of got lost in the network shuffle.
Yeah, it was just doomed to fail, from the moment we started. [Laughs.] It was part of a casualty of that writers strike. That whole TV season got screwed up. We were always off the calendar, so it was always going to come on at a weird time. So they tried to do a mini push of our show and, like, Cupid [Laughs] and then, this one that's still on. The Murder She Wrote type show. The guy who's a mystery author.
I think it's called Castle ...
Right right right. They were just throwing [expletive] at the wall to see what would stick, and, uh, hey man, Castle stuck. Our show wasn't perfect by any stretch, but at the same time, they need to let stuff breathe. It's like the opening of a big movie. If it doesn't perform, you're screwed.
Does that make you want to shy away from TV?
My experience has been so ass-backwards. There is a pattern, though. I'll do a supporting role in a big movie, and then a stupid comedy, and then a TV series that gets canceled. And then do some tiny little movie that actually, in its own weird way, fights its way to the screen. Whether it's Hebrew Hammer or 2 Days in Paris or this. I never thought [Untitled] would make it to theaters because films of this nature usually don't.
I'm a big fan of '2 Days in Paris'. Such a funny but raw take on relationships. Do you think you'll work with Julie Delpy again?
[Laughs.] It's extremely unlikely. You can probably scour the Web as to why. I am extremely proud of the film. But we had been boyfriend and girlfriend many years ago, so we've known each other for years. That was a totally unique, bizarre situation.
I can see how that may have been too close for comfort.
Yeah, there's a whole story, and I probably shouldn't go into it. But she's been open about her version of the story, and I haven't publicly refuted it, probably because no one gives a [expletive.] It was a collaborative, improvisational process. ... Yeah. I'll just end it with that. [Laughs,]
On your roles in bigger movies, what do you get approached about the most?
To this day, I still get the "I want to dance" thing, or it's a confessional about how disturbed they were about my death scene in Saving Private Ryan. But my work as a supporting actor just comes along when it comes along. There's only so much control you can have over that.
And you also have a new album out for your LANDy project, which is the work of several years ...
It wasn't as though I began something I knew would be a record years ago. It was just that I accrued lots of recordings over the years, and I decided to compile them, re-record some things and kind of make sense of all of it.
You gonna do live shows?
We did. I put together a band and played around LA a bit. Truth is, it's not my favorite part of the process. I wish I liked it more, but for a variety of reasons, what I like is the recording and mixing.
Do you think that being known for other things leads to the distaste for live performing? I would imagine there are lots of lookie-loos at the shows, just as there would be at, say, the shows for Ryan Gosling's band.
Oh totally. It's gonna be worse for him, there's no question about it. But he's got a good record. Our record at times is pretty lush and well-produced. I'm a big fan of layering things and creating an atmospheric sound. Above whatever insecurity I had about the scrutiny, I was just concerned about getting it right. But we're just finishing another record as well.
You should at least do South by Southwest.
Years ago I was trapped [in L.A.] for a money gig and I was asked by the [Flaming] Lips if I wanted to do something with Steven Drozd, because he worked on my record. And I was all over it until the gravity set in and I figured out what a task it would be to work out all the stuff live. But yeah, that would make sense, because South by Southwest is pretty cool.
So what's next, acting-wise? What was the physical for?
[Laughs.] I was just getting my annual physical. When you get one for a movie, they're a complete joke. You lie about everything they ask. But, no, it's just that time of year. But I spent most of this year working on music, and now I'm trying to really start writing again. I just need to make sure I have enough bread to do that before I have to find a job. But I just finished this really cool [animated] thing that Luc Besson and the director of Shark's Tale did. It's a movie called Monster in Paris, and it's beautiful. We finished the voices a couple of months ago and I guess it will take about a year to finish. It's really old-fashioned looking, and I play a crazy inventor. It's lovely: you can act in a whole movie and you don't have to wear make-up. I told my agent that whatever else he could find like that, I'd do.
You're not a fan of make-up?
I'm not even a fan of being photographed. I guess I chose a pretty funky line of work.
'Untitled' opens today at the Magnolia.
