Sean Penn and the Squared-Away Individual

And I still have this kind of sense of privacy about me that it's not arrogance and it's not secrecy, and I think Sean shares it because he's from the same generation as me. And it's a protectiveness of the job, of the magic trick of acting. The less you know about me, the more freedom I have to become someone else. And that was a fear of doing this podcast. was, you know, the more I talk about myself or the more I reveal aspects of myself, which I want to do, because that's important for this back and forth that I have with people like Sean.

There's a certain fear, you know, that it kind of takes away a little of my ability to do magic. on the other end. I think it's important to remember that, as we're listening to all these podcasts, that if there's a reticence, it's not necessarily shame about one's behavior, it's not necessarily regret about one's behavior, it's not necessarily a failure. But when you're talking about people that transform as a living, then you're talking about the ability to remain hidden. And that goes into all aspects of your life.

I'm David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are.

Sean Penn is a fantastic actor. He's had iconic roles in movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dead Man Walking, and just think about the range between those two roles. He won Best Actor Awards for Mystic River and Milk. This year, he's starring in a new movie called Daddy-O, written and directed by my good friend Christy Hall. Go see it.

He's an author. His Bob Honey books were not critically acclaimed, so what? But I like them. That's more important. He's also no stranger to controversies off the screen.

We ended up talking a lot about the craft of acting, including how he studied with legendary acting coach, Peggy Fury. Maybe the best part of this interview, though? No Zoom. We were in person, face-to-face in the house, his house. We were drinking water.

because we were talking so much. Sean was smoking. I was happily enjoying the secondhand smoke. Here's our conversation.

I kind of want to start at the beginning, because it's my feeling that, like, people's sense of success and failure, their own, like, interior sense, is created very early on in life, you know? And my sense of you is, you have a very strong sense, interior sense of what works and what doesn't, of what succeeds and what fails. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. I just wanted to go back to, like, what's it like growing up in Malibu?

Your dad being a director, your brother being, you know, an actor and kind of getting you into it. What were the stakes? What was the vision? What did you fall in love with?

so I grew up in the San Fernando Valley until I was nine, turning ten. But even seven, eight years old at that time was a very different time than now. And, you know, my biggest memory of that time is whenever one wasn't at school, they were with their five, six buddies on twin bikes right around the, all over the valley. And you'd go for hours and hours, miles from your house, and your parents wouldn't worry about you. There was no cell phone to bother you with that stuff.

And I remember, you know, like, in terms of work,

how we gauged success with something.

From a very early age,

I never liked too much when I had a dictated chore.

But when I noticed a certain part of the yard that would feel better, more squared away, I could be, you know, on my hands and knees for 10 hours getting every stray pebble out of there and getting that dirt swept under those trees. And this always gave me a great feeling of accomplishment when things were squared away.

And after we came to Malibu, and that's where it ended, 10 to 17,.

until I was 17,, I never had a thought of being an actor.

I was on a trajectory in my own fantasy to be F. Lee Bailey. I wanted to go out and fight the good fights in criminal justice as a criminal defense attorney.

And then it was literally upon graduation that I realized I had not paid any attention to the notion that your grades would matter to get you into higher education and ultimately law school. And there was no part of my body that was ready to go voluntarily back to school after that, after graduation. But by that time, and in about the last year of high school, I started making these super eight sound movies with my friends, things that were motivated by my younger brother, Christopher, where he had, you know, discovered the sound on film, you know, the magnetic strip. And I was watching he and his buddies make these little movies. And what were those about?

And these super eight cameras and a little edit kit, and you could start making, you know, talkie movies. So I think that, without knowing it, I had found interest in what my dad did, which was directing film. And it was about camera angles. It was about, that was in my head.

And so I started doing that in high school.

And so I found myself having to plug in, as an actor, into the movies that we were doing, and it was okay. And then the actor, Anthony Zerbe, came to, did Career Day. And it's when it all clicked, my senior year of high school. And I said, because there was no thought that I could go ask people to entrust millions of dollars to me as a director, you know, as a 17-year-old, barely high school graduate.

And voila, I got into acting school. And I got with a repertory company out in the valley called the GRT. And that was a great experience, because I was doing everything from selling tickets to lights and sound. And building sets. And then, over time, it let you start to be in the shows and doing a lot of shows around different equity waiver theaters in LA.

And this is where it comes to my sense of, I don't know, completing something or succeeding at something. I remembered I was going to a lot of theater at the time because I had become sort of obsessed with this craft of acting.

And I remember, almost every time I went, I never had to worry about being great at it, because I just knew I was better than most. I'd watch a performance on stage and think, that's not intimidating to me.

I'm not saying I was as good as them or anything, but I knew it wasn't this magic show.

And it was a big New York Times piece at the time, because they wouldn't get life in prison.

And so there was this young hitman character and he said, why don't you come read for it?

And man, I stayed up all night, the nights, leading up to that audition, first audition. And again, not in pursuit of being an actor, but there was a check involved here. And I got it down and I went in and it was,

I can't remember what I would call what I did, other than maybe it was just very flat. I did not get the part.

So then, the actor who played that hitman was, do you remember the actor Barry Miller? He was the one that jumped off the bridge in Saturday Night Fever.

And my dad said, come down and see this actor, do the part you were doing.

Let me see what the rest of you.

And I'm watching this guy and I'm thinking to myself, I'm watching the scene I auditioned being shot.

That's like, he got that word wrong. He's supposed to walk over there then. But he's not, he's free and he's doing it. And I thought, you can do that?

I had that in an acting class. The first acting class I went to, because I thought, like you, I knew nothing about it. I thought it was about saying words in a certain way, at a certain time. I remember doing an audition where I was convinced that I was going to say, refer to the car, Alfa Romeo, as an Alfa Romeo. And they were going to die.

They were like, they were just going to die laughing. And it was dead. when I said that. They just assumed that I didn't know how to pronounce the word. So it was like that.

And then, when I went to Marsha Halfrecht's class, this woman in New York, you know, it would take three hours to get through a scene because she'd stop you and she'd say, just explore the place. Say your thoughts. Say your thoughts. Say your thoughts. It wasn't about the words at all.

And that kind of freedom is just so invaluable.

You almost were more interested in trying to figure out what he was looking at than whatever the scene was.

And then she's, you know, you're sitting there next to your scene, partner.

. Yeah, I'm an August baby. So I got out of high school at 17.. So I'm sitting there down on La Brea in this loft studio. And Peggy takes a long look at me and the whole class is there waiting to see what Peggy thinks of what she just saw.

And she said, you know,

if you were washing dishes in the scene,

I would have believed you.

But it was like washing dishes. And she wanted me to step further. And you started to connect the dots of allowing your own imagination to find what that, you know, the truth of something. Let's say that you started to find the choices that you could make that gave it levels and, you know, somewhere to go.

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Just like ringing the bells on this idea of failure and success. Is there a difference to you in the making of it? And in the actual seeing of it? later. And performance, you know, you can feel a certain way.

during performance. There's always that tension of, is it coming off or isn't it? You never really know. And that's the beauty of it too. It's like, fuck, this is exciting.

I could be fucking up here badly. Right.

have found your best intentions and let you discover that you actually gave them to him or her. And they've woven it in such a way that you're delighted that you didn't fuck the whole thing up. And the other thing can happen where, you know, somebody just doesn't get what you were doing and they take all the wrong bits and put it all the wrong. And you're subject to that. And so there's a lot of.

deep disappointments that happen because it extends beyond your own performance and how that's taken care of. And I mean, as a director, I'm sure you too, you're sort of the bodyguard of everybody's performance.

that way. Like I would, I would literally, I once brought him up.

took 75%, easy, 75% of the adjustments that he made in the cut that I had presented him. And it was just him working with the editor. And, and so, especially with, you know, someone very experienced and talented like that, it's a win-win, you know,

Right. But then I realized that's what he looked at. I have the shot. He's put the shot in when he's looking at it. And that's where that look is coming from.

And man, isn't that interesting on screen?

It's a lot more work as a director, but the actor is the one that has to, you know, sit there all day carrying the imaginary world in that way. Doesn't know how the director is going to pace the work.

And I, but here's what happened is that there's a scene in the movie Taps, which was the first movie that I did, first, big movie or whatever.

And where Tom Cruise opens fire on the National Guard from this building. And that's going to start a war between these cadets at this academy and the National Guard.

And Tim Hutton heroically runs into this room to grab him off the M60 and gets lit up by the National Guard on the way. And he's taken down. And I go as written, I go after my best friend, Tim's character, to drag him to safety. after he's been shot. He's riddled with bullets.

And I come to set and they're ready to rehearse it.

And Tom's there. Tom looks to us at the door. He says something about it. He's great, very excited about starting this war. And he turns to his gun.

And he's, as he starts to fire, Tim runs in, they go, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Tim has a big fall. And then, okay. And Sean comes in. And I hit the deck and I start scrambling towards Tim to get him.

Cut. Harold Becker says, Sean there, you dropped right out of our frame.

And then he starts to describe all the squibs they have built into the wall behind me that you won't see if I go to the deck. And I said, well, what do you want? You just run it. And I said, they're shooting tons of automatic weapons into this room. There's no.

This became a five-hour standoff because I couldn't. And of course, in the end, I got, you know, the producer comes down. Everybody's around me.

Just do one like we're asking you to. And we will then take the time and re-squib the wall and we'll do one your way. And I know my way is the one that's going to work. Cut to.

Tom and I come back to California after the movie's done. And we were spending a lot of time together at that time. Jogging partners. And then, and then, and then, you know, cut to the month's pass and the movie opens and we go to the Avco theater.

And we're sitting there and it's crowded. People, people came out. It was a reasonably successful movie, as I recall.

And it gets to that scene. And here goes Tom with the gun. And there goes Tim getting shot. And there goes Sean. And I knew by now, not hitting the deck.

Just running in like a bulletproof man dragging Tim out of there. And the guy sitting right in front of me says, hit the deck, asshole! To the screen.

You mentioned, you talk about, like success and failure, whatever box office movies, it's all kind of exterior put on by some other metric.

But, Spicoli, you created a type in what? Seven minutes of screen time? A type that lives on to this day through, you know, like Bill and Ted, like just, just that whole thing. It's kind of an amazing thing to think at that age, to have that small role and to have that kind of imaginative impact.

And I knew not that I was in, you know, had my own interpretation to bring. I knew that I, that I knew who Cameron was talking about, because this was eight out of 10 of the guys I grew up with.

But I knew the behavior. There was one guy in particular who was, let's say, the brand that gave me the biggest giggles, you know, who grew up here in the area. But it was, they were all speaking the same Greek. And so Cameron had written that guy, what I did, Cameron had written.

Get to know me.

But beyond that, what do we learn from these kinds of so-called missed opportunities or failures in our work?

And, you know, there's this thing of, especially for those of us who learn on the job, not going to film school and so on. I think it's, you know, fair and necessary humility to say that we learn how to make a movie by about the day we wrap. So what I did is, right after I wrapped and when I was having Jay Cassidy, my editor, put an assembly together and I was letting myself have a couple of weeks to get my eyes fresh. Well, the timing was such that Martin Scorsese was making Cape Fear down in Florida with Bob DeNiro. I called Bob and asked him if he would ask Marty if I could come down and watch him work.

And he let me come down. And what was refreshing was that he was second, you know, I wouldn't say second guessing himself. He was just as humble to it as I found myself being. You know, he kept, he was his first, I think it was his first anamorphic movie. And he was calling everybody, you know, makeup girl or this one over to the monitor, saying, you know, am I using the frame well enough?

And I thought, you know, you just got to keep that openness and that, you know, obviously within that, this guy's command of cinema is and the grammar that he's got retained from just being a great expert on and knowledgeable about why the camera's here and there versus there and what it's saying visually. And to varying degrees, we're all dependent on understanding that stuff. We can't just get away with just shooting willy nilly. We can try it, but it's not likely to work very well. And it's not going to be very satisfying work.

But it's great to have something that the magic of it is always going to be a little bit bigger than us.

But now, when I go back further, this is a book I'd read 10 years earlier. And I had tried to get the movie rights to it. And the parents were not yet ready for a movie to be made about their son.

And I certainly respected that. But I told them, if that ever changes. And 10 years later, they called. For 10 years, I'd been making that movie in my head. And it was done.

I read the book, cover to cover, twice in one night, 10 years earlier. I didn't pick it up until I had a screenplay written. I wrote the screenplay without rereading the book. And then I went back and did some polishes. And I took some of John Krakauer's prose and put it into either dialogue, because he's a great, wonderful writer.

And, you know, went and explored the places and all of that. But the movie, essentially the shot for shot, was almost entirely, I had been making it for 10 years.

subconsciously shooting the movie in my head.

a week or two to reduce stuff in a few months after you imposed for a while. Right.

the son. Couldn't get it made. Couldn't get it made. Couldn't get it made. I lived with that movie, that idea for that movie, for 12, 14 years.

Aged myself out of the sun. Had to look in the mirror and go, this is ridiculous if you're trying to do that. Started thinking about playing the father. And that's how it came about. But I, when I, when I shot that movie, I had had it in my head from both angles, son and father, for many, many years.

And I just want to share something. You may or may not like me sharing this, but you were, you are such a friend to creators. And I'll just say this because we were watching that film here on this computer. We're both terrified of the computer. We finally got it to play.

Neither of us wanted to pause it because we thought we couldn't get it going again. And you, you needed to pee really badly. So you, you turned away from me and you peed into a bottle while you kept your eye on the screen. And I have to say, that is one of the most respectful things that anybody has ever done to, to my work is to actually pee into a bottle and not take care of it.

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I think for you, like for me, Brando was the guy.

didn't think enough of acting in the world as a man. And that there, there would have to be more. is failure baked into the act of acting to the, to the pursuit of acting. Is there some kind of moral masculine failure?

But when I was falling in love with film, and particularly my late teens, whether it was Robert De Niro or Al Pacino, Dustin, there were actors who were doing something new and, and with filmmakers that were doing something really new.

And it had been started, I would say, strongly, by Marlon and, and Kazan.

watching Bob, of all of them particular, because there wasn't much to know about him other than what you saw in the performances, right? He was not doing talk shows, right? He wasn't hardly ever doing print interviews. And I admired that and I appreciate that. As a audience,

when I came to fall in love with acting, it was in that idea, you know, to just be an actor.

But, as life calls out, to different people in different ways, right? And, and when I started to feel that I had to build on what had become a profile.

And I did see, you know, there were plenty of times after Marlon had been outspoken for decades on many things that it didn't impact my ability to watch him. Right. Now, Marlon is particular that he's endlessly watchable. But I just decided to kind of take the chance with it, because we are who we are, and we were called to what we're called to. And I started to blend them all.

So whether I was acting or writing, or directing, or engaged in some kind of activism, it was all just what you did that day, along with putting your pants on.

And so you're open. That's what I'm saying. You're open to attack. It's not just like, oh, call me a bad actor, whatever.

it upset you? And Brando supposedly said, I just tell myself, it's all true, and then it doesn't bother me.

Or he might put spinach on the side of his mouth at a fancy dinner party, just to see if anyone would say anything. Right. And they won't.

But I guess I would ask you, not directly, if you want to answer, and I don't want you to answer things that you don't want to answer, but where do you put the hurt for that? For the misunderstanding? Cause? I feel, you know, you've been misunderstood from time to time. Um, where do you, does that hurt?

Where do you put it? How do you square it?

Everyone knows it now because of social media. Everyone knows it. The hurt of, and the, and what we, what we take of reputation, you know, it's an interesting thing.

Um, you know, the answer for me is, you got to keep moving.

Woodwork. It's a big one.

And, uh, I think, uh, you're talking about reputation, and taking care of one's reputation is a different thing today than it was 15 years ago.

Because so many of, for most of us, we know when we're being fuck ups. So the care is to be taken in, right down. by that. I mean, affect your reputation as much as you can control, as much as you live it, whether it's misinterpreted, criticized or not, in, in advance of your own vision as you possess. So you may not be ready to settle this part of your clock, but don't put it on display, because that's not where you're going, you know, put on display where you're going, right?

But there's a certain kind of fuel in it, right? When, when they, when they, when they want to take you on.

And I'm dropping into that motherfucker. Let's go, you know, and it's going to, it's going to take care of me, or it's not right, right.

And that's true. with this, you know, a range of attacks. I mean, God, there's been an awful lot of good things that have come out of the well, both, both the legitimate attacks and the illegitimate ones, because, men, once you're able to walk through the fire, those deeply unfair or untrue things, you kind of say, well, I'm no stab wounds. I'm still alive. I'm yeah, I'm still here.

Round two. Hit the bell. Yeah.

Just when you, when you fail that, that future, the obligation you have to your better self, you know, or your, your more mature self, and to the people that it affects.

because I told you, I, I, I, really, I really enjoyed this book a lot.

Therefore able to giggle through the insanity of this, or do you think the joke's being played on you?

So if your character thinks a certain way, that's you. And I, and that was made personal as well.

I, I hope that's true.

Just getting my post, Sean Penn interview stuff down the next day, the day after.

Really enjoyed the conversation with Sean. One thing that I ran out of time on, missed, was a discussion of Daddy-O, the new movie he's got coming out, which was written and directed by a friend of mine named Christy Hall, first time director, did a masterful job. And I wanted to talk about, cause. it was similar to what happens later that I did with Meg Ryan just recently, where it was, it's two people. It's me and Meg, and what happens later.

That's it. And there's Sean and Dakota Johnson. That's it in Daddy-O. And Christy Hall, like Meg Ryan, manages to keep the plate, spinning, the ball afloat, whatever metaphor you want to use for just two people holding a screen. And in hers, it's really just two people in a cab holding a screen.

Meg and I had a big, you know, good looking airport to play around in. Christy has limited herself beautifully to a taxi cab where Sean is driving Dakota from the airport. And not to give anything away about that movie. I think it's terrific, but it's a real cool give and take between an older guy, played by Sean, obviously, and his, what you'd call patriarchal wisdom, or stereotypical patriarchal wisdom, and a younger woman. And I don't know, would you call it millennial wisdom?

A more modern kind of take on the world. And neither is validated completely or discounted completely. There's kind of a meeting in the middle between these two, let's say, partial points of view. And it's definitely something that I want to get the word out there about as well. Daddy-O.

There's more. Failed Better. with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content, like more of my behind-the-scenes thoughts on this episode. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts.

Failed Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Keegan Zemma, Aria Bracci, and Donny Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of Weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of New Content is Rachel Neal.

Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Krupinski, and Kate D. Lewis. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Whittles-Wax, Jessica Cordova-Kramer, and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis, Rowan, and Sebastian Modak. Special thanks to Brad Davidson.

You can find us online at Lemonada Media, and you can find me at David Duchovny. Follow Failed Better wherever you get your podcasts, or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership.

I'm Sam Smith, and welcome to The Pink House. I love being in The Pink House with you. Join me as I talk to my friends and some amazing queer icons about their idea of home, like Elliot Page, Joel Kim Booster, and Gloria Estefan. Music was always my escape. It was my happy place.

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