2011 a year of firsts: Interviews with Madonna, Spielberg, Scorsese

(Continued)

LOS ANGELES—We continue our recap of our most memorable interviews of 2011. This year marked the first time that we interviewed Madonna and Roman Polanski, whose quotes below are among the most memorable in our year-round series of interviews:

Madonna

Dressed from head to toe in Yves Saint Laurent, her blonde hair a mass of curls, Madonna evoked Marilyn Monroe’s old- Hollywood glamour. The director of “W.E.” arrived at a hotel meeting room in Toronto with an entourage that included a publicist, stylists and bodyguards.

On the high expectations some people have of her as a director: “I’m not sure what expectations people have of me, because I’ve only made one film prior to this. You have more expectations of people when you’ve seen their works before, then you expect their new movie to be as good as their previous work. People are more critical of me than, say, an anonymous director, because I’ve been successful in other areas in my life. I do feel the pressure, yeah.”

What she hopes to imbue in her daughter about the role of women and relationships: “As women, we look at relationships, and we say, ‘Oh, this is the kind of man your parents want you to be, your friends think you should be with, would approve of, etc.’ Maybe they look good on paper, but they don’t actually turn out to be right for you. So, it’s an important message for my daughter, at her age, to understand that we have to make our own decisions. We have to make our own way in life and cast off society’s expectations of who you should be with.”

Roman Polanski

Arriving in a meeting room in Paris’ Hotel Plaza Athenee, with a smile and bemused glimmer in his eyes, Polanski shared that he maintains a healthy lifestyle: “It doesn’t mean I don’t have a glass of wine in the evening. I always did a lot of sports. I eat well, so I think that helps. I never smoked…except cigars.”

What he misses about Hollywood: “In the beginning, there were certain things I missed. But, nowadays, if you go to a studio here, you see technicians using the same methods and machinery.”

Steven Spielberg

Steven offered us a glimpse into the Spielberg household: “The kids come first. I get up at six every morning. I get breakfast made for the kids, and my wife (actress Kate Capshaw) helps me. I do that every morning. I get the kids in the car, and I take them to school. I do the car pool five days a week.

“Then, from school, I have to drive an hour to get to my office in the Universal lot. That’s a long trip, but I do it. That’s my whole thing. But, I can still make movies even though they don’t come before my kids. My kids can preempt anything.”

A very personal project that has been on his mind for years: “A story about my mom and dad that I’m too chicken to make. I’m going to make it someday. But, it’s hard, because I’m taking some deeply personal events of my mom, dad, three sisters and my life and putting them up there for the whole world to see.”

Martin Scorsese

In Martin’s words, the themes of Brian Selznick’s book, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” (which inspired the film, “Hugo”)—the boy protagonist’s “loneliness, his association with the cinema, with the machinery of creativity”—resonated with him.

Martin proceeded to describe his own childhood: “At the age of 3, I contracted asthma. It was 1945 or 1946—I was isolated from everything. My parents didn’t know what to do with me. I couldn’t run and play sports.

“I had a few friends who were also kind of odd in a way. We’d go to the movies. So, I had a very sheltered life until I was 15 or 16. I was sad at times, but it forced me to think of other ways to express myself. It made me start to draw and make movies by myself. When I read ‘Hugo,’ and how this boy is isolated in the train station, and that was a dangerous world, too—I was drawn in by it.”

Zachary Quinto

On coming out during an interview with New York magazine: “I always knew that I would know when it was time. I’ve never hidden that part of myself from people who are in my life. The only thing I hadn’t done was acknowledge it in a public way. I finally reached a point in my life when I felt that an acknowledgment was not only beneficial, but also necessary.

It was necessary for me on a personal level and socially as the momentum toward Equal Rights builds. It’s important that people fold into the fight at different times, levels and impact with the way they make those declarations.”

Debbie Reynolds

It was a film lover’s dream afternoon. Imagine seeing up close hundreds of Hollywood memorabilia, most of them harking back to our movie-going childhood. But, the best part was having no less than veteran actress, Debbie Reynolds, talking, joking, sometimes even singing and acting out a few lines as she gave us a personal tour of her “babies,” a dazzling collection of costumes and props that she has amassed for over four decades. She even dished an amusing zinger or two from her love life that’s very much a part of Hollywood lore.

Film clips of scenes being shown on monitors that highlight some of the costumes and props on display were edited by her son, Todd Fisher, Debbie proudly pointed out. “I just don’t like that last name,” she quipped to laughter.

Of course, it was Debbie’s winking reference to Todd’s father, singer Eddie Fisher, and a well-known chapter in her life. In the ’50s, Debbie was married to Eddie (the union produced another offspring, writer and actress Carrie Fisher).

Eddie had an affair with Elizabeth Taylor, who was then mourning the death of Michael Todd, her husband and Eddie’s best friend. Eddie divorced Debbie and married Elizabeth. It was one of the biggest scandals and controversies in that era.

Christopher Plummer

What was it like when he and the rest of the cast of “The Sound of Music” got back together in an “Oprah” episode: “It was rather sweet, actually. I was dreading it, simply because I thought, ‘Oh God, it’s going to be mawkish and God-awful!’ They were all such sweet kids. Somehow, they found a life of their own…not all of them continued being actors. Suddenly, I found myself having a good time with them.”

On his relationship with his father, the star of “Beginners,” a film about a father who comes out of the closet at 75: “I never knew my father. My parents had an old-fashioned divorce in the 1930s. In those days, if you divorced, you didn’t see each other. My mother, God bless her, tried to bring me up both as a father and a mother. So, I never knew my father. I met him when I was 18. But, it was too late to form a relationship of any kind. Then, he died.” (To be concluded tomorrow)

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