Written with Christopher Fryer and Robert Crane, Dern's book invokes Hitchcock (the actor affectionately refers to him as "the penguin") and other directors he's worked with, including his longtime friend, actor Jack Nicholson, who directed him in "Drive, He Said" (1970) and with whom he co-starred in "The King of Marvin Gardens" (1972). Fryer and Crane had first interviewed Dern, who turns 71 next Monday, in the 1970s for a book on Nicholson. "They came to me three years ago," Dern says over the phone from his Southern California home, "and said, 'You should write a book because (a) you've got a good memory, (b) you've had an interesting life and (c) nobody knows really that much about your family background, and if you put it together beside your career, it almost doesn't make sense.
And so maybe you should tell the folks that.'" The Illinois-born Dern is something of a political blueblood. His grandfather was a former Utah governor who served in Franklin D.
Roose.velt's Cabinet; his godfather was two-time presidential hopeful Adlai E. Stevenson.
"I insisted that it be honest, that we didn't change names and just called it like I saw it," Dern says. Its from-the-hip, discursive storytelling makes "Things I've Said" one of those books you read with your ears. In addition to recalling his shooting of John Wayne in Mark Rydell's "The Cowboys" (1971), his tour de force as a lonely astronaut in Douglas Trumbull's cult classic, "Silent Running" (1971) and his Oscar-nominated portrayal of a Marine tormented by Vietnam in Hal Ashby's "Coming Home" (1978), Dern also discusses more intimate experiences.
There is his stormy relationship with ex-wife Diane Ladd (with whom he fathered actress Laura Dern) and his ongoing affair with distance running, which began decades ago when he was a student track star at the University of Pennsylvania. Are there qualities in both running and acting that overlap? "First of all, endurance," Dern says.
"Acting ...
really any of the arts, particularly in the fabric of American society, is an endurance contest. Everybody in marathons has to put in a lot of miles before you're gonna think about catching up to the people ahead of you." He adds: "The same is applicable to acting.
You start out hoping to get a job; then you try and get two jobs in three months and then six a year, and then as you get better and better you get into the movie business and get a few movies a year ...
you start climbing the invisible ladder to bigger, better parts." Dern, who has worked continuously since his movie debut 47 years ago, still paces himself professionally, with a recurring role in the HBO series "Big Love" and a role in actress Mary Stuart Masterson's directorial debut, "The Cake Eaters," which was screened at last month's Tribeca Film Festival. "I plan to keep running," he says, "till I'm 100.
Who's going to bet against me?
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