Judd Apatow and Eric Fischl

Published Apr 7, 2014, 4:00 AM

Judd Apatow’s films—The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Funny People—feature emotionally immature men forced to grow up after confronting sex, responsibility, and death. Of all Apatow’s movies, This is 40 may be his most personal; it stars his wife, Leslie Mann, their two daughters, and one of his long-time heroes, Albert Brooks. Apatow thinks of each movie he makes as a letter, telling him something he needs to know about how better to live life.

Eric Fischl became known in the 1980s art scene for work that explores issues of sexuality and power and what it means to become a man. Alec talks to Fischl about his memoir, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, where the painter writes candidly about his youth, the art world, his own struggles with depression and substance abuse, and his thoughts about the creative process. Fischl started as an abstract painter, but as he explains to Alec, once he began to work with figures, he realized he was “doing the work that [he] was supposed to do, that [he] was built for.”

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policy makers, and performers, to hear their stories. What inspired their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. I look at every movie as a letter to myself, telling me something that I need to know about how to live my life. And I'm I'm only on some level making these movies to say, Judd, pay attention, Judd, live in the moment. She's actually my greatest, most clear scene critic, because she your most prevalent subject. If you painted her more than any other person. Yes, I've painted her in in disguised ways, and I've painted her in you know ways where you can see it's her. Artists often use their childhood and family life for inspiration. Today I talk with a painter and a movie director. Both men have drawn on their own families to create deeply personal art in very different styles. Eric Fischel was described in the nineteen eighties as a painter of the suburbs, but not the suburbs you might imagine. In a woman possessed, an unconscious female is sprawled out in a driveway surrounded by dogs. In Sleepwalker, a young man stands naked in a kittie pool, his hands between his legs. There's a lot of nudity Inficial's work, and not a lot of smiles. Judd Apataw is my first guest. His films include The forty year Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Funny People, which feature emotionally immature men forced to grow up after confronting sex, responsibility, and death. Okay, what kill me? What nobody knows? We know each other. You're a stranger. You can get away with this. I got a gun in the other room. It's untraceable. I'll give you fifty thousand dollars. Don't make me suffer. Please kill me, Ira, I'm begging you. Can you know it's give me like a night to think about it. Of all apataws movies, his most recent This is forty, released in December two thousand twelve, maybe his most personal. It stars his real wife, Leslie Man, and their own children, Maude and Iris, who play her kids in the movie. Here, Apataw's comedic point of view collides with marriage, work, and family. It sounds horrible, but do you ever wonder what it would be? Like if you your wife were separated by something bigger, will be death, like her death. I have given it a fair amount of thought, not any painful way, but just like a gentle floating off. It's got to be peaceful. I mean, this is the mother of your children. And then the new wifes would be great. God, I can't wait to meet my second wife. I hope she likes me better than this one. Judd Apataw began studying the art of making people laugh as a kid when he would rush home from school to watch TV, sometimes from three thirty until after midnight. On the weekend. He'd record Saturday Night Live on audio tape and transcribe the show later to figure out what made it so funny. In high school, he had a radio show in which he interviewed comedians to learn as much as he could about their craft. I think talk about your type of comedy that you do. Comedians such as Gary Shandling, John Candy and Jerry Seinfeld. Some people just tell the joke like an observation and that's it. When you add a whole new dimension on it, Yeah, well, it's one thing to see something, you know, and I think the next step is to do something with it. Now, in his mid forties, Apatow seems to have had his hand in nearly every successful comedy of the last seven years. He was a producer of Anchorman, super Bad, Bridesmaids, and is currently an executive producer of the hit HBO show Girls. But John Apatow still craves reassurance. I need constant approval of my writing as I'm doing it, So I will show people the first scene, the first ten pages people, anybody. I will show anybody. I literally will send it to friends. You know. Jake Kazan, who directed and produced on Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, is one of the first people I show things too. But I'll show it to the studio because I don't like that moment when you have a finished script and you go, I wonder if they'll like it. So if I send them thousands of pages over the course of two years, they're so confused that there's not a moment of truth, and to bury the exactly and when it when it really gets down to it. Lena Dunham and I were working on Girls that was happening parallel to me making This is forty, so we would literally spend two hours breaking girls stories and then two hours talked about this is forty and then near the end I'll get the courage up to send it to like Eric Roth and James L. Brooks and Cameron. Yeah, he's probably the biggest influence. I think his whole approach to stories is just imprinted in my mind from my childhood watching Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi. That's how I feel like stories work. Normal people with everyday, normal problems, trying to get along, trying to make their jobs, in their love and their life work. And his work always ends us some beautiful grace note which is always hopeful yet realistic. And I remember them from when I was a kid. How you know? There was a Taxi episode where Louis d Pamo was dating a blind woman and he was so in love and then she was having an operation to get her sight back, and he thought she's gonna dump me, you can see, And then of course she loves him and thinks he's beautiful, and as he walks out of the room, he throws something in the garbage and he says, I guess I gotta get a real ring. And I love how he would pull that off, so he's very helpful. And in the middle of this is for you, I emailed James Brooks and I said, remind me what the movie is about. Again. I forgot, and he sent me a long email saying, this is what your movie is about. So you kind of I'll let you say this, but it sounds to me like you swim in kind of a pool or a stream with a lot of people who make films, and you're and you're open to their suggestions and you're open to their ideas. If you talk to a multitude of people for their ideas, which ones do you? I mean, in the end, you decide. In the end, you choose. I've always had faith in my ability to make that call, so I don't mind a lot of feedback. It doesn't confuse me if everyone says something different. I mean, I come from television and rooms of people arguing about story, and my formative years were spent at the Larry Sanders Show, where you were a great guest and I one of the great early moments in my career was I wrote a bunch of those scenes and in the episode You're in and just saw it on TV the other day. I was home my favorite line, which was when Chandling goes to the wings of the stage when I'm on the set and I'm not quoting it properly, but rip says, what's the matter? He says, I can't help it. I keep seeing him having sex with my wife and he says, and she's on top, and Rips says, the lazy bastards. That's that is. I wrote that joke. I know I wrote that joke because I was so proud of that joke. And I remember when you came in to the first day of shooting and to do the quick rehearsal, and Gary was given you ship from the second you walk in the doors, like Alex, you need a lozenge, you need a lozenge, and you said, all right, that's how it's gonna be, Gary, That's how it's gonna be. And it's one of the great episodes. So so I think that was not your first job though. My first job I used to write jokes for comedians. I wrote jokes for Rosanne's Nightclub act for one. Why did you did you do stand up periodical? I did it for for seven years. It's all I wanted to do. But I very quickly realized I was better at creating sketches or dramatic situations to get my point across, and as a straight monologist, I wasn't interesting the way my roommate Adam Sandler was or Jim Carrey. Just as a fan, I knew, oh, I'm not these guys. You really felt that were oh yeah? Because and then we were in l A. At the time I was in l A. I lived in North Hollywood with Sandler and how it was under two years and I mean it was the most fun time ever. Every time we see each other were like that was the best. You know. We were just so into doing stand up and back then Sandler wasn't famous, so he was really silly all the time and very obnoxious and trying to make strangers laugh. He really engaged the world for his own amusement, less to protect that he does now. Yeah. He he just loved, you know, asking pulling people over to ask for directions in the car and doing something crazy to them. I mean it sounds ridiculous, but he was the guy that would fart in the elevator and go, Judd, come on, we're in an elevator. Uh. And that disappears when you get famous. So you brought up up there, you know, well, but you brought this up and I'm I can't say I'm glad you did. But in your movie, Paul Rudd is in bed with your wife. Yes, yes, he's in bed with his wife, and to torment her, he just rips off a series of well placed like he's turning over cards in a game. He's like, he rips a couple of parts there. But you that's not how you live, right, Well, it's a that's a complicated scene. And what's funny about that scene is, uh, they're having a very serious conversation about their finances, which are not good, and they're watching security camera footage waiting trying to figure out who's stealing from them, and they see Megan Fox fooling around with someone at work and then Leslie says, at least she's getting some. And his reaction, after a few moments of feeling attacked is to just fart. It's like a monkey. It's kind of like saying, you know, screw you. And Rudd did it as an improv. It wasn't in the script. Yeah, it wasn't in the script. And Leslie knows, okay, if anything happens off page I need to go with it, and she's furious and you see it in her eyes and she's really genuinely disgusted, and you get kind of a real sense of what marriage is like. That's how complex marriage is. Yeah, and now the other question I have a propos of the movie was so I'm thinking, Rudd, it's either the highest honor or he's the goat because you're you know, you're lying in bed with your wife who has made a lot of great films and funny films, and you say, uh, what's your nickname for your wife? Can I ask called les Is it les Leslie? Well, the funny thing is I always call it Leslie And then she's like, Judd, my name's Leslie. It's not I literally say her name, it's Leslie. Leslie is when I'm in Cambridge now exactly. So you're there with her and you say to her, I'm just envisioning this scene where you look her and you say, baby, who's the guy that you like most want to have sex with? It was like, and just be honest with me. We've been together while we have two kids. You know, it's me. I'm making a film, and she says god, Paul Rudd, and I mean that you crossed his name off the list. I know he's never doing my film. Or is it like you put him in or do you say to baby, who's the guy that you view as like a brother, Like if you had sex scenes with him, this wouldn't mean be like like fooling around with your brother, Paul Rudd, that's where you go hire him. She's disgusted, uh, and and that makes it okay to watch them fool around. I I'm always disgusted when she fools around with anyone. I remember when we shot the Cable Guy, she kissed Matthew Broderick and then when they parted, I saw it in the dailies there was like a spit string that connected them for like a foot. And and so yes, I'm glad that unless they're lying about being disgusted by each other, because I may be the fool they are lyned. And that's terrible because I know because I've heard before, I've had my ex wife has got you know, Russell Crowe has got his tongue into her spinal for it, and she's like, no, no, it's just nothing, it's nothing. Well, the day I had a back surgery for a herniated disc back in the year two thousand. Leslie couldn't be there because Leslie, Sorry, Leslie, I couldn't be there because she was. She was shooting a scene where she was making love with Jeff Goldbloom, and you just know he's all handsy in between takes the fly. You know he's just for pushing buttons and a woman and you don't even know we're there exactly now. When you start a film like this, is there a fear when you begin? Do you think to yourself, Oh God, this is the one on all the wheels are going to fall off? Like what's your disposition when you start shooting? You know, I want to succeed because I just want to be allowed to continue making movies. I also have a rebellious streak, which is I do have some sense of what makes a very commercial movie, and I'm working partially against that. Like as the attention span of the audience gets shorter, I want to make longer movies to say there's something wrong with you that you can't sit for two film. I deliberately do it with all of them because I feel like, you know, this is the only time we're going to get with these people? Why do you need to rush to get home? And I like movies like Jerry McGuire and in terms of endearment and movies that were over two hours, it takes an extra twenty minutes to explore, you know, more dimensions of people. So and said to me, you're basically saying these people are worth your time. And sometimes I watched the movie because I have to watch it hundreds of times, I think, wow, this is long. I'm really putting people through it. So on day one, I'm both trying to figure out, like marketing wise and concept wise, a way to make it sell while thinking I'm sneaking some John Cassavetti's Robert Altman aspect into a mainstream comedy. When when when you do a home like this as knocked Up begets this film? Does this film just right away? Do you start thinking of other ideas whether you do them or not? Just absolutely? I think that about most of the characters, I especially coming from TV. I love that there was Rhoda after Mary Tyler Moore or Fraser after Cheers. So anytime a character works, I could watch it, you know, I could watch uh, either of the leads of super Bad go off on their own, Michael Sarah's character or Jonah Hills or the cops. Once it exists, I'm kind of more depressed that we're not doing more stories. And that's just my whole thing. I don't like to let go. So if someone said they're gonna make a movie about what happened to Albert Brooks's character from Broadcast News, I'd be the happiest man in the world. Had you known Brooks, had you been acquainted with him and had worked with him before, and you did this movie with him. I met him in the early nineties when I was working at the Lark Sanders Show. I had dinner with him a couple of times with Gary, and I was and awe to be around him because his Saturday night live movies were really big influence on everything we did at the Ben Steelers Show. And obviously, you know, defending your life in modern romance and real life, you know, was yeah, it's the template for a certain type of you. And in the same sentence again, I was so excited to meet Albert that afterwards I went home and I wrote down every joke he said at dinner, like I still have like the journal entry where he's making jokes about the Menendez case. You don't kill your parents and buy a Rolex. You don't do that. So I wrote the part just for him, hoping it could be good enough. I never want to ask anyone that I look up to to be in my movie if I don't think it could be as good as their movies. You know, I don't want to be their crappy movie. Now when with Brooks, when you work with people like that who are veteran, if you will are very experienced and have a bead tremendous success, what's that experience like for you? Was a director? Meaning? Do you do they come in and they just start riffing and and are they rewriting and improvising and you just let it go? Or do you sit there and you do find a way, a politic way to sit in My brother, to confine ourselves to this what's on the page, not specifically with him, but with any of them that come in, Well, I precious arre you about what you've written. Well, I'm never precious about anything other than my intention. So with Albert, obviously I'm terrified because I'm working with someone who's clearly more talented than me. So I'm trying to figure out how to manage my idea for the story and tap him for everything that he's worth. So I want him writing and thinking and pitching me. I mean, I spent a year in a room trying to think of an original character that he hadn't done before but that would still use, you know, his great comic sensibilities. And then I brought him into a rehearsal and we did the scene as written, We did ideas that I had, and then I just let him play and improvise and pitch me things. And obviously, at the end of the day, if you were to like write down which are those lines are Albert's, you know, it becomes the majority, which is the intention to give him a space where he's comfortable enough to email me at night a better line which you would do with the die. Before any scene, I get a little email from Albert what if he said, did it? And it's always better than my joke in a minute, more from Jed Apatow, who's always thinking ahead. I have these like age issues. So I my friends are all forty five fifty, Okay, what is the movie we would make in our fifties and I'll five years ahead, begin to start flushing, start planning. I'm an like Baldwin. And here's the thing. Take a listen to our archive more unexpected conversations with artists, policymakers, and producers like Saturday Night Lives Lord Michael's. Producing for me, anyway is like an invisible art. If you're any good at it, you leave no fingerprints and you own way you prove your worth is you leave a body of work and people go, oh, that accident happened there again, Oh I see. So you know, you try and get the best out of people. If you look around the room and you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room. Here more from Michael's and those he discovered like Chris rock Aways. I haven't been having a poor day since I met Laura Michaels and I've never been broke. And here's the thing, Dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. When my guest Judd Apatow directed The forty year Old Virgin, he collaborated with an actor who dances on the fault line between insecure, juvenile and unapologetic adult. He was the perfect muse for Apatow's film about a middle aged man quest to finally have sex. I want to go out with you, guys, Okay, I don't need your help. Okay, fine, you don't have to go out with us if you don't want. You know what, I respect women. I love women. I respect them so much that I completely stay away from Okay. I was producing on Anchorman, and I hadn't directed a film before, but I knew that Steve Carrell was one of the funniest people I've ever seen. He was crushing so hard every day on the set that all the actors were baffled and how how funny he was. And he wasn't someone that was in line to be the lead of a movie. He was just one of the great, hilarious supporting actor people. And I always like, I like those guys to be the lead. I always want, you know, I want to see yeah, yeah, Well beyond that, I want to see George Went. I want to I want to I like seeing I like because that's who I feel like. I feel like the side guy, and I always want to follow them home. And so I said to Steve, do you have any ideas for mo vies, because you definitely could carry a movie. And he said, there was a sketch at Second City we did once that we never quite finished, which was about a poker game where they're all telling sex stories and it's clear that one guy has never had sex, and everything he says, it makes no sense. And he's saying, yeah, you know, like when it's such a girl's breast, it feels like a bag of sand and you go down your pants and there's all that baby powder, and and he said, so, you know, I'd love to play a forty year old virgin. And just because I'm such a nerd and so insecure and ashamed of everything in life, I just immediately understood what he meant and that you could do something very sweet and and riotously funny. So we wrote it together. Now now, so when you direct the film, how is the technical challenge for you? Or how is the technical aspects of it for you? Grown? Because it is filmmaking, and are you I like, do Mr and Mrs apple House sit in the screening room at nine and watch Citizen Kane and look at that there is a man. Look at the rack focus? You know, do do you watch scenes from films and say, that's what I want. There, It is right there, Leslie. That's not me at all, because I came from being a stand up comedian. It was all dialogue, it wasn't visuals, so I never tuned into that, and I have no brain for the technology, so I can't remember the lenses and what they do even now, Like what do you do? I hire people who are really good, like surrender all that to other people. Well, it's not a total surrender, because I will show them what I like. You know. I always I'm trying to model my work after movies like the last detail of the how Ashby movie or Coming Home. I like movies that feel almost like a documentary. I want you to forget I exist, and I'm trying to make it as voyeuristic as I can make it. In some ways, it's like Larry Sanders. I like that look for comedy. For what I do. Your kids are in your movie? You put your own chill room in the movie? True, and what effect does that happen to? Like do your kids now do they close their bedroom board? And they don't? They like, don't come in here without a script. We'll talk to me there is a little of Daddy. Why wouldn't you let me work for anybody else? And because I didn't put them in the movie to start a career. I just wanted this idea to work, and I wanted to capture a real family and have people on screen that look like they love each other. Do they want to make movies? Well, I was my ten year old. She literally will say I don't want to be an actress, so she's kind of cool. I think she probably wants to write. And then Maud is doing a lot of things. She's uh. She interviewed one direction for teen Vogue, and her acting is so good here that I am concerned that we'll get, you know, the call out of the Blue from James Cameron to ask her to ride a magical dragon for seven months, and then I have to say Mud, no, you actually yeah, you have to you have to finish school, and then she'll hate me for the rest of her life. I could have been at Avatar too, and you ruin it in said you want me, you want me to wait until I'm in This is fifty, so it's a it's a miscalculation based on my own greediness to capture how great they are from my movie with no you know, forethought of how it will affect their lives. But they did really enjoy making the movie, and they fought so much in the movie and in life that since the movie they've gotten along great Like It's almost like by playing out the drama of the ridiculousness of their sibling rivalry screen, they had to think through like why are we fighting? What is it about? And on some unconscious level they've gone easier on each other since we shot. It's so funny because that's the old actors tenant that gets passed onto you that every role you play, perhaps embedded in that role is an opportunity for you to say goodbye to some party or sol if you don't like I think that's true. I I look at every movie as a letter to myself telling me something that I need to know about how to live my life. That I'm I'm only on some level making these movies to say, Judd, pay attention, Judd, live in the moment, because I am, you know, a detached writer who who needs to be brought into the moment. And a lot the movie when it was finally done, what was her comment to you, uh in the beginning, she worried if it didn't end happy enough, and now she she really loves it. And I kind of like that it has that question mark at the end, which is, you know, it's hard work. It's gonna be hard work, but they love each other and it's definitely worth it. I think that sometimes she, you know, worries that it could go slightly darker by like four percent than it needs to, where I like that question mark of you know, we're all struggling, but it's okay, that's what life is. And still people say I'm resolving it too much, so you can never walk that line. Some people want it so dark and some people are so pissed. It's not all jokes, so you know, I'm always in the middle. Writer director Judd Apatow says he's still wonders what's left to say. Don't worry, Judd, Turning fifty will give you more than enough material for a sequel. My next guest is an artist who, like Apataw, explores some of the more peculiar sides of what it means to be human. But unlike Apataw, his work isn't meant to make you laugh. Eric Fishel is known for powerful and provocative paintings, most notably Bad Boy. In it, a naked woman lies on a bed, a young boy is standing in front of her, his hands behind his back, and he seems to have taken something from her purse. Official grew up in the privileged country club culture of North Shore of Long Island, but his mother suffered from depression and alcoholism and committed suicide when Fisher was twenty two. After decades of living in New York City, he and his wife, painter April Gornick, now live full time on eastern Long Island. In his recent autobiography, Bad Boy, My Life On and Off the Canvas, Official covers his youth the art world, his own struggles with depression and substance abuse, and his thoughts about the creative process. He was in the first undergraduate class at cal Arts, a place that was known for experimentation in all forms, orgies, drugs, but most importantly conceptual art. It would be some time before official, skill, talent, and voice found a home in realism. I started out being trained as an abstract painter. You know, if you you were going to be a painter, you should be an abstract painter. So I tried. What it turned out was that every abstract painting I made felt like it was absolutely the last painting I could make. Then at some point I started to work with figures and with narrative and language and stuff like that, and it flowed. That's when I realized I was now doing the work that I was supposed to do, that that I was built for. And then it was a matter of getting better at it and you know, perfecting it, honing it, etcetera. Was the river I thought of you doing something else creatively. Music was out of the question because I haven't toned deaf years, so and then no way I could do that. I was in a a play in eighth grade in which it was called It's Cold and Them Lar Hills, and I played this hillbilly named Zeke, who didn't speak through the entire play, but was on stage the entire time until the very end, when I had this like big speech where I proclaimed my love for this person who didn't know I was even present the girl, and I get the girl, But it was like spending a lot of time kind of being present and absent at the same time. Was actually a profound experience for me. But it it didn't lead to me wanting to do with the next play or to do that. And I've actually become much more of a public person over the years, and it was a lot easier for me to in private have my thoughts and feelings and and you know, sort of express them before anyone ever saw them. And so I could actually control the form of expression before it entered the world. Yes, exactly. But my sensibility is very much I think, consistent with you know, an an actor's sensibility and a director's sensibility, and in that sense of, you know, understanding what a dramatic moment actually is, where where meaning is present. My work is based on or that as a source material photographs. I did a project once where actually used actors. I was given a house, Miss Vandorot house and craigfelt Germany to uh do some kind of interaction with the house. I never worked with actors before, and so I went to friends who were in the business, you know, writers, playwright, screenwriters, whatever, directors to give me some ideas that like, how do you talk to an actor, what gets them going, etcetera. Because I had no clue. The simplest advice came back from Mike Nichols, who said, I'll give them problems. They love problems, and I said, what the hell is a problem? They said, no, you know she wants to borrow five hundred bucks from him, but you won't tell him. Why why just give him that, You'll see right. I was like, okay, I would give him a problem, and I was surprised at how fast I could tell that the problem I gave him wasn't an good. They couldn't get animated, and they were just like it wasn't achieving the desire to felt they were. They were just dead. It was like nothing. Their body couldn't even move hardly. And at the same time, when I gave him something, they could really bite their teeth into. For example, I did sleep with you, but you have to break up with their boyfriend. The thing is the female actress had like zero interest in him, but she was very professional, and so we're going to do the bedroom stuff and I set up some stuff in there and it really wasn't working. It was saying, you know, there was something. They were dressed in evening clothes. It was late to come home. You know, he's drunk. She's hoping that you know, they could have some sex. Maybe he's you know what, it can't kind of get it together. It was lame. So he gets up and he goes off to the bathroom or something like that. And so I say to her, look, take off your clothes, get in the bed. You're a wild animal. Whatever you do, don't let him in the bed. Now, this bed that I had chosen was like a modernist bed that had this igloe of a mosquito netting over it, so it made like a cocoon or something like that. At tent. All of a sudden, she like curls up into this incredible kind of creature and then like pushes herself against the end of the wall and and and it's like just sitting there waiting, right, and he comes back into the room, and now he sees her in the bed. She's naked. It's like, oh, we're getting some how, We're getting somewhere, right. He takes his bathrobe off and walks over to the netting. He starts to lift it up, and she comes flying across the bed one leap and smashes him in the face. Right, And he's like whoa. And then you got a whoa. This could be fun and you've got good images. I got great images also that Yeah, yeah, they did a whole dance around getting in and out of the bed, and when he finally got in, she slipped out, and you know it reverse the roles and stuff, and that was that. But do you find that this carries through insofar as you know a painter? And this is my view. This is not I'm not saying this is a commonly health view, but this is my view, and that is the work I do. A It requires an audience and also somebody giving you a role, right and someone and exactly someone unless you were self producing. But for you, my view of it as I'd sit there with and look at painters and I think, God, how much I envy them that you sit in a room and you're totally self generating and you do exactly what you want to do, and then you send it out into the world and say if you like it, great, If you don't, I really don't give a shit. You know, it's completely un self conscious in that way unless you're doing a commission. And do you feel that I don't give a ship as a protective a response. I think it's like, God, I hope they liked they oh, sure, yeah, but I don't. I don't believe any painters sitting there pretending that they only do the work for themselves and stuff. They're they're they're seeking some kind of resonance, some some response. Yeah, have you Have you ever done a painting and you were mistaken, meaning you did a painting And I'm being very melodramatic here, but you did a painting and you were done, even you said, good God, official, you've done it. There it is there, you have it. And then and the painting did not succeed in one term, and then other times you sat there and said the opposite, this is a piece of crap in it was one of your most successful has that happened, Not in the extreme, But I've certainly done paintings that I thought were better than they were received. And I've certainly had the experience where I've seen paintings that I didn't think were so good when I did them and see them ten years later and go, you know, that actually isn't that bad. So I don't know, But now it with people that you photograph, manipulate, paint, whatever verb you want to use for the work you do, and the stages of the work you do. How much would you say you're a view of people, because I think, like most men, we have this in common, which is this kind of relationship of your mother. And if you have a good relationship with your mother, let's say you want to replicate that and have a terrible relationship with your mother. You want to find someone is the opposite of your mother, or you want to restage the drama with your mother. As a therapist, one said to me, we want to restage that in our lives, and you get all the good lines now. So I think all art expression is in some way trying to correct a lot of stuff. And if you're trying to put some clarity to it, some order to it, make it makes sense. You know, how would you think that you're you? You're very candid about your mother, who was obviously very ill. You know, she's a very sick woman, and that plays out on her behavior. Um, she wasn't a mean spirited wom she was she was just completely control And how would you say that? Colored? Because count to three when you read the book and your bell bottoms and hate Ashbury and you're into a very kind of summer of love. Sixty six, I thin, Because when you head out to the West Coast and you're in the thick of it, how do you think, what did you carry out there with you in terms of your idea about women, what you wanted or well I had to you know, sort of two kinds of relationships with women. One one was I was attracted to women that were absolutely bad for me. They opened up that void, you know, just emptiness that in a way that was like yeah, and you know, it was full of passion and it was full of you know this, you know, found need and stuff like that was very emotional and very short lived. And then the other kind of woman was one where you know, they were really stable, reliable and reliable, and yeah, I married them. You're married to April. I married I was married once before and stable and stable enough. Yeah, but then yeah, I married April and you know for the last thirty some odd years. Yeah. Did your work change in sync with your attitude toward love and relationships? It did with time. You know, the early relationship with April, for example, we were both young artists, really trying to find our voices, trying to understand who we were. I was dealing with the wounds of the past as opposed to the you know, the present with her. So it wasn't apparent then other than the stability of our relationship gave me the courage to look into these other Well, you know, she's incredibly bright, She's somebody that can multitask in a in an emotional way. Do you have children? Do you think that that was partly because of what your childhood? Yeah, I think we're both. April and I had a lot very traumatic things that passed that made that that seemed dangerous. There there was a point at which I felt like I could handle having kids, but April wasn't there yet. And the one thing I wasn't gonna do was insist that we do it my way because I know what that she was only going to indulge you so far. Yeah, and and or or it was going to break her down in a way that I couldn't bear. So, you know, it passed. M hm. Now, in the book your Father, he went that route that a lot of dads go, which is he just wants to give you the safe advice. Yeah, his parental duty was to say to you, you know, let's be reasonable now. And he told you to go to get a business did your father live to see you become a great success? He did? Yeah, my my mother didn't. My father did He He actually didn't understand what success was in art anyway, that he'd kind of given up by then, right, So, yeah, exactly. She would a very very kind of icy relationship with it was. It was volatile and complicated. But you know, he he really didn't know anything about art, so he didn't really know anything about what success in art was. And back then, you know, success and fortune were not connected to each other in the art world. You you could be highly successful, you know, shown in museums around the world, and and they'll be doing a teaching job or driving a taxi or something to do it. So he was perplexed that I would even be in a field in which there wasn't a monetary reward necessarily, right. But at some point he started to see my name in print, and that was something that he understood as success. And then he really flipped from from sort of disengagement to the proud parent who you know. We we'd go into a grocery store and at the checkout, country guard, you know who this is my son. This is the artist that he take the clipping out of his wallet exactly. This is from the New York Times. That's E R I see F I s h L. Well, you know he uh, he became an artist at the end of his life as well. He he discovered collage, and it took him a while after he retired to find He tried other things, and then all of a sudden he found himself like sitting in his office at home cutting pictures out and gluing them together. And by the time he died, I had realized that he and I could never talk to each other. We just kept missing, you know, but we understood each other visually, and so he would send me his collages and I knew exactly what he was thinking about, where he was at, how he was feeling, and he showed me that he was had been using my paintings to understand what had happened in our lives with my mother and the whole family dynamic. So it was it was deeply rewarding to me ultimately too. But it took me a while to understand that they were talked to about your paint and his painting. Well at first, I mean he didn't he talked to me about success. You know he could see and be enthusiastic for this show and that show, etcetera, etcetera. But there was this uh thing that happened. There was I think, um, you know, really blew my mind, which was that I had done a painting called a Woman Possessed. And it was a painting of a woman outside the suburban home, drunk, passed out in the driveway, surrounded by these dogs that were like, you know, beasts from hell were you know, some were sniffing her somewhere, growling at at the sun. Who had could just come home from school. The school books are on the ground, his bicycles flipped over, he hopped off his bike. So this boy is trying to pull her away from these dogs and her demon dogs. I I showed the painting in Toronto and the and the critic described it in the most beautiful terms. He understood it as as a painting that revealed the profound pain of love, of loving someone, right, And he wrote extensively about it. And so you know, proud son sends it to my father, and unbeknownst to me, my father sends the review of off to my siblings, right, and my younger sister Lori writes back a letter to him. She's furious, why is he trying to make her remember this painful time? You know? And he shared these letters to me. I didn't know they were having until the whole communication came to me, but he shared to me her response and then his response to her, in which he revealed that he had been actually using my paintings the whole time to understand emotionally what had been happening in our lives and stuff, and that he was just trying to heal something, you know, trying to bring her into it as well, into two, into a kind of healing process, and to acknowledge his awareness, yeah, which which took me completely by surprise, and that that he had been seeing the work as deeply as he had, you know, revealed, which is what I intended I hope for you, Yeah, exactly. Coming up, Eric Fischel shares his thoughts about art, commerce and love. I make a painting out of love, and I'm seeking love in return. I want that to come back in that way. Right, So somebody gives you money, right, on one hand, you think, well, that's an expression of love. They want to possess your work, so so they're they're expressing in love, but money doesn't feel like love because it's a neutral currency. Now I have to change that money into something that tells me how much love I just got back. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. My guest today is Eric Fischel. For years, he and his wife worked out of their downtown Manhattan studio. He says the city of the nineties was the perfect place to develop his craft. However, for official, developing a tolerance for the business of art has proven more difficult. I do these works on paper that oil on paper, their sketches. They're a great pleasure for me to do. Some of them lead to painting, some of them don't. But it's it's an activity that I do. And uh, there was a time when they would be sold, you know, for like five thousand dollars, and then you know, ten thousand dollars, and I uh, at some point on the secondary market they were selling for a hundred thousand dollars. So you go back into the studio and you're, you know, I'm making my sketches and stuff like that, and I'm looking at and thinking, well, why not do a couple more, you know, why not? You know, it's like all of a sudden, they're starting to turn into currency, you know, and which is a totally different sort of way of thinking about and how much and how hard is it for you to resist? Because I was joking with a friend of mine and I said, what it must be like in your world where you're completely self determining, where you're completely self generating, I get kind of amazed. I sit there and say, Eric Fisher is the kind of guy where if he and April are like laying there in bed on Sunday, I mean, I have a very kind of a silly improv comedy view of April Gornick and Eric Fisher are lying in bed on a Sunday reading the New York Times, and she turns in and goes, Eric, I'd so love to go Hella skiing. And You're like, sure, baby, let's go Hell. And you go out and you paint a painting hell of skiing trip. I mean, like, like, you can you can just go do a painting. You're Eric ficial and running out the door, whether you like, Like how hard this fantasy that when my muse left me I would still be able to make product right, that I that that I wouldn't be making art anymore, but I'd be making things that look like art, and that that was okay, right, And so there were times in my process where I got stuck. I I the inspiration was gone, and I was sure that it now, you know, I mused my inspiration and had left right a total blockage kind of thing. And what I found, to my horror, was that it didn't just leave my head, it left my hand, and that I actually couldn't paint anymore. I I couldn't draw, I couldn't make something look like something, and that was terrifying. Right, That's that's like your worst nightmare. And so I have that memory, which keeps it gives me somewhat, you know, focused on on staying to true to my ultimate goal. So you're there. So what's the longest period you went you didn't paint. It's it's not so much that I didn't paint. I kept trying like a bulldog one and I just keep trying to go through it. It's just it's dead, dead, dead. So my question for you is do you find that And I've seen this with myself and other people, where when the muse goes away when you lapse into a period of product versus art. When the artist, and that's a very real condition, struggles. I found people where it affects them in many ways. It affects their appetite, their sexual appetite, their physical health, their emotional health, their sleep. I mean, it really really really damages them and it hurts them. Have you gone through periods of that where you were like, really, really, I thought you were losing it? Would you doet out of it? I ultimately painted the way out of it? But you know, rely relied a lot on April to you know, keep me sort of above. So you bring me to where? So you bring me to where are the One of our last two questions is, let's go to Halifax and you meet April And where are you at your life when you meet April? And what happened? I'm twenty seven years old or something like that. I'm teaching at this art school. It actually is a very sort of advanced thinking, a place that like cal Arts where I went to school, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design was also sort of based on the most radical art of the moment um anti painting. So they hired me as a young, untested teacher, simply because they'd fired somebody mid semester, needed someone right away. They could care less about painting, so they took a risk on this guy based on what my former teacher had recommended. I get this job. I'm in Halifax, Nova, Scotia. I go up there with my wife at the time, spend three months teaching there. She lapsing into a deep depression because she she's rootless and being ignored. And I'm following you basically and following me, and I'm not sensitive enough to it. You know what that sacrifice was. And you know, we moved back to Chicago in the summer and I get rehired, and she announces she didn't want to go back and our marriage is over. And that following year, I meet April. I didn't plan on falling in love. I just planned on having sex. And shame on you error call me shallow. Anyway, one thing led to another, and and what it was was I was actually going through a very sort of complicated set of emotions for uh, you know, I had never mourned the death of my mother. I had just broken up with, you know, split with my wife kind of thing. I was now falling in love not wanting to with April. My work was going through a transition where I was giving up the artists. I thought I was going to be for the artist I ultimately became. And that period of doubt threw me into a kind of series of anxiety attacks panic modes where I really began to have some serious psychological issues. I was dissociating and you know, and ended up on you know, any psychotic medicine and stuff like that to stabilize me. Meanwhile, I'm teaching. Meanwhile, you're up showing these young, impressionable minds the world through your lives. Let me show you the world through my clumb up and soaked eyes. And I was only a couple of years older than them to begin with. Your young teach and I had I had never been taught technique. So I'm teaching you do Georgie thing like your teacher were doing at cal Arts. Was that or that day come and gone that day? You know, to some extent, I was definitely going through several women in the in the student body, but not all at the same moment. But um, it was a sacrifice. Yeah, I mean, it's a you know, it's a small isolated community that winters are harsh up there Skilligan's Island. Yeah, and when the skipper runs into Ginger and Marianne, we can only talk about the weather for so many times because then the title charts, So go ahead. So the skipper runs into Ginger and marian Yeah, and ultimately ran ran into April. And uh, she stuck with me through this time, which was really difficult, and in a kind of way that you know, I just couldn't imagine there being anybody else. She's actually my my greatest, most clear scene critic, your most prevalent subject. If you paint her her more than any other person. Yes, yeah, I've painted her a lot. I've painted her in in disguised ways, and I've painted her in ways where you can see it's her. Um. So, now you are a very well known man. You and your wife are a very admired couple in a community that you live in. And I want to ask you, uh, you know, a why do you live out here? Particularly you could escape, like a lot of great artists, finally won't have real anonymity in peace. You can go live in Italy or anywhere you want to go. Yeah. I think there was a moment a while back where I kind of looked around and went, oh, my god, you know this is this is where I grew up. I'm in a different relationship to it. But I but it's definitely, you know, more of a suburban than an urban environment and a and a suburban kind of rhythm to it. But everybody needs a sense of community, needs a sense of place where where they belong. Right, Um, I grew up on Long Island. You grew up on Long Island. I used to come out here in the summertime. It's familiar territory, etcetera. It seems natural in a way to want to be here. Ah. So is it safe to say, just to conclude this, if you will, that the eponymous bad boy of the title still has his doubts, still has his anxiety, still has his fears and issues, and so he just just learned to handle them differently. I think that's true. Yeah, absolutely, they don't go away. I thought that the older you got, the easier, at God, it turns out the opposite. We just learned how to manage it. You just manage it. Yeah, Yeah, that's true. Eric Fischel's work Hangs and Museic ms and galleries around the world and on our website Here's the Thing dot org. And if you happen to find yourself in New York City, you can see his glass mosaic entitled The Garden of Circus Delights beneath Madison Square Garden in Penn Station officials inspiration for the piece Dante's Inferno Here's the Thing. You can hear more in depth conversations in our archive, from artists to policymakers to performers like Radioheads frontman Tom Yorke on performing. You know, I often asked myself, why the hell would you put yourself through this? Because it's very stressful. It's a lot of pressure, and for me mentally, I just build myself up to it in my head gradually and it sounds really precious, but it messes with my head. Listen to more at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Produced by Emily Boutine and Kathy Russo with Chris Bannon, Jim Briggs, ed Herbstman, Melanie Hoops, Monica Hopkins, Trey Ka, Sharon Machee, and Lou Okowski. Thanks to Larry Josephson and the Radio Foundation,

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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