‘Can you take another story?” asks the veteran actor Bruce Dern towards the end of our talk, as though every tale is a drink and the landlord has called last orders. He doesn’t want to keep me and knows we’re running out of time. It’s just that one memory sparks another and these tales won’t tell themselves. He says that the next one is a doozy. “It’s about Marilyn Monroe.”
Throw out all the questions and turn the clocks to the wall. One does not interview Dern so much as say hello, hit record and sit back. The man began his career acting alongside Montgomery Clift and Mary Astor and has collaborated with everyone from John Wayne to Tom Hanks, Hitchcock to Tarantino. He’s the lawless survivor of American movies, blown in from the past, and talking 19 to the dozen. “I’m 90 fucking years old,” he tells me. “So I’m not going to be around to see all this AI shit or whatever. But I don’t consider myself old. I still walk and jog every day.”
He used to run seriously and was good at it. Running, he says, taught him how to pace himself, stay focused and not lose heart when his rivals streaked ahead. “Every time I ran I used to have to come up from behind. And it was the same in showbusiness, I was always the second or third banana, never the first choice for anything. But when you’re running a marathon you learn that the first 16 miles don’t matter. It’s really only the last 10 miles that count.”
I confess that I love Dern in his lagging, dragging early years, too, when he played Jack Nicholson’s shady brother in The King of Marvin Gardens, Robert Redford’s nemesis in the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, and the world’s last botanist in the eco-fable Silent Running. But his final straight has been a blast, a downhill dash after all those gruelling hard yards. Dern’s turn as a lost, flailing dreamer in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska won him the Cannes best actor award at the age of 77. He returned to the festival again this year as the star of a documentary tribute, Dernsie, named after his signature habit of breaking from the script. The scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when Brad Pitt’s hero introduces himself as Cliff Booth, only for Dern’s befuddled old rancher to mutter, “John Wilkes Booth?” That was a Dernsie, cooked up on the spot.
Both visits to Cannes were terrific, he says. After the documentary screened, the organisers sat him on stage and the applause rolled on for six minutes. The festival boss, Thierry Frémaux, asked what that meant to him. “And I said, ‘Well, what it means is that Cannes gives a shit.’ I’ve gone through my whole life trying to find people who give a shit about Bruce Dern. And I’ve found it twice – both times in Cannes.”
Who is to say that he’s not about to find it in Scotland? Next week he’s booked at the Edinburgh film festival where his latest movie, Northbound, receives its world premiere. Dern plays incorrigible Arthur, who’s on a final lap of his own, fleeing a stuffy US nursing home for his old boyhood shack on a Canadian lake. Northbound is scratchy on the surface and sentimental underneath. It’s like Nebraska’s sweeter and sunnier cousin. “Yeah, they’re related,” Dern says, although further details elude him. “This one was a little movie that we made in Canada for about a million-six American dollars. We made it in 30 days during the Olympics. But it was two years ago now.”
I’m surprised to hear that Dern feels overlooked. He’s such a distinctive, arresting presence; the wolfish guide to America’s wonky corners, perfect at playing loners and cranks and wayward angels alike. Nicholson – his onetime rival and close friend – ranked him among the finest performers of the late-60s Easy Rider generation. If actors are cattle, Hitchcock liked to joke, “then Bruce is the golden calf”. He landed juicy roles and made money, but it was always an insecure life. It took an Oscar nomination for his role in 1978’s Coming Home to make him feel he belonged – and even then, only slightly.
Arthur in Northbound longs for his childhood home. Dern can’t relate. Where is home anyway? He was born into a wealthy, well-connected Chicago family (Adlai Stevenson was his godfather; Eleanor Roosevelt babysat) who all but disowned him when he quit college to act. He trained at the celebrated Actors Studio in New York, studying under Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, but was rarely given any lines and struggled to make much impression. “I got very impatient,” he says. “The other men at the Actors Studio were starting to make it: Harry Guardino, Ben Gazzara, Tony Franciosa. They were all acting and directing and going off to Hollywood. Not Brucie! I was on stage not speaking. I was still Harpo-fucking-Marx. When I finally made my Broadway debut, it was in a play called The Shadow of a Gunman. I had one scene and six lines and was on stage for 52 seconds. So you tell me, who’s going to give a shit about that?”
Now he’s on a roll; the old days bubble up. He says: “The Actors Studio had a baseball team. Our best pitcher was George C Scott. Peter Falk with one eye was our third baseman. On Memorial Day weekend we’re playing softball in the park. And Gadge – that’s what we called Kazan, Gadge – turns to me and he says: ‘What are you still doing here? Why aren’t you in California? We never said you couldn’t go.’ Well, that’s what I’d been waiting for. The next day, a Tuesday, I went to California and I never went back. Memorial Day 1960.”
Hollywood, he explains, was first his lifeline, then his base. He worked on Hitchcock’s TV show and acted in Roger Corman B-movies, before bagging his first big respectable movie in 1969’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? “You can’t even find that movie any more,” he tells me. “It came out, won an Oscar and then disappeared. I got a copy for my birthday. It’s probably the only one.”
I’m wondering how Kazan kept him quiet all those years. The man’s a glorious loose cannon, garrulous and digressive; two parts Ancient Mariner to one part Grandpa Simpson. His stock of stories is bottomless, although he has his favourites. Dern remembers the time he introduced Hitchcock to the director John Frankenheimer and the day Bette Davis called Joan Crawford a cunt. The Hitchcock-Frankenheimer meeting, he adds, happened the same week a stray boulder blocked the Pacific Coast Highway, which meant that you had to drive to the boulder, squeeze past on foot and then continue your journey in a second car. This in turn made him late for lunch at the Bel-Air Hotel. He says, “I don’t know if you know the Bel-Air Hotel. It’s not very big. It has, like, two storeys.”
I don’t know it, I tell him, but he has already moved on to another lunch date. This one is with Sir Richard Attenborough. The director is practically begging our hero to play the American journalist in Gandhi. Dern re-enacts the exchange; their back-and-forth dialogue. “I said, ‘Where do I have to go?’ and he said, ‘India’. I said, ‘India? The country, India?’ I said, ‘I have a confession to make. I need to run every day and I am terrified of snakes. If I run outside my hotel in the morning, will there be a guy on the steps with a basket and a snake?’ He said, ‘Probably.’” That was enough, Dern was out. “Martin Sheen ended up playing that part.”
Can I take another story? Keep them coming; the more the merrier. Dern once met Marilyn Monroe at the Actors Studio. He walked her all the way across town to her home near Sutton Place, in the east of Manhattan. At one point they passed Greta Garbo on the street and Monroe broke down crying because she thought Garbo didn’t know her.
Dern has told this story before; it’s part of his regular repertoire. All being well, he’ll be telling it another decade down the line. “I’m done,” says Arthur towards the end of Northbound, gazing out from his deck at the morning mist on the lake. By this point I suspect that the interview might be done, too. We’ve been talking for two hours and Dern’s voice has turned croaky. I thank him for his time, because he has been ridiculously generous. “You’re welcome,” he says. “Thank you for giving a shit.”
• Northbound screens at the Edinburgh film festival on 17 August.
