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Bruce Dern - quotes

Quotations relating to actor Bruce Dern.

I thought it was fantastic when I saw it. It was just so great. And Barbara did it great, you know. She was cute in the movie. She was a very talented girl. I leaned to Hitch after that. I said, "You know what, Hitch? You should go up at the top of the stairs. Barbara should look at the diamond. You should pan over on the stairway, and you should start down the stairway. Not Barbara. You. And you should wink in the lights." He thought about it for a long time, maybe 15 minutes. And then he said, "No." Had the world known that was going to be his last piece of film, it would've been so fantastic.

— Bruce Dern (2001)

Casting

When I met him in '63, when we were doing ''Marnie'', I was the flashback sequence in ''Marnie''. So, we shot on another stage from the stage that Tippi and Sean Connery and everybody was working on, which was the main stage, and he would come over to the stage I was on. And he shot the flashback sequence with a huge lens. It was a German lens that looked like a lightbulb, and what it did was it distorted everything in the foreground, but made everything in the background sharp focus. And so, it was neat because I had Mr. Hitchcock to myself. He had no other distractions except me. So, he really took time to get to know me a little bit. And every year, then, he made sure I did a guest-starring appearance on ''Alfred Hitchcock Presents''.

And 12 years went by, and he was casting ''Family Plot''. I wasn't the first choice. I think Al Pacino was the first choice. And Mr. Hitchcock didn't like to pay actors. And he was very upset that he had to pay Julie Andrews and Paul Newman $750,000 apiece to do ''Torn Curtain'', and he never got over that.

So, when he got to ''Family Plot'', to get even over a $100,000 was, like, amazing. And he didn't want to pay Al Pacino whatever his price was then. And he'd just done ''Serpico'' and ''The Godfather'', and all that, so he was, like, big stuff. And so, then they were going to go to the next on the list. And I certainly wasn't the next on the list. I was about 15th on the list. But he jumped right away. He jumped over everybody. And he called my agent, and he said, you know, "I liked Bruce. I think Bruce would be good for the film."

And so I went, and I saw him. I said, "Why would you want me to play this part?" He said, "Bruce, I-I never know what you're gonna do next. "I know that the frame is perfect. I know the shot works perfectly. All I want is to be entertained. I make entertaining movies."

— Bruce Dern (2001)

Film Production

Dern describes the runaway car scene...

He said, "Bruce,you know what would make this scene work?" And I didn't know. So, he had to explain it to me. He said, "Well, what I do is I do close-ups of you and Barbara, "and I do the car's point of view of the road. And I never show you the car. I show you the car when the oil's coming out of the brake thing, and then I let the car go. And I just cut to you and the car's point of view of the road. That way, the audience thinks they're you and are going through the trip." He does that on all his movies. I mean, that's the way to keep suspense. I didn't know that. I didn't know that's why it worked in a movie.

Then at the end, we have the car crash. And the first thing you see is the car is upside down, and here's Barbara's head peeking out of the top. And then she's going to try to get out of the car. She starts climbing out, and her foot is on my face, 'cause the car is upside down like that. Well, that's just, you know... Hitchcock said, "Women always walk on men. They walk all over 'em." So, why not, you know?

Then I come underneath the car with my head out that way, and he said, "You be a worm, and she'll be a bird." Well, that's inventive.

— Bruce Dern (2001)

I have a scene where I say something like "Merry Christmas." And I said, "Merry Chris..." Cut. I said, "Hitch, wh... what are you doing? I have to say 'Merry Christmas'." "No. No, Bruce. Because when you say the 'mas,' I'm going to be over here. So, we don't need to shoot it now." So, when I tell directors that on ''Family Plot'' we only shot 110,000 feet of film, period, and printed 55,000. That's a two-to-one ratio on a two-hour-and-20-minute movie.

— Bruce Dern (2001)
keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Family Plot (1976), and production

The scene in the kitchen was very difficult to do for an actor because it was a scene in which you started the scene and 30 or 40 seconds into the scene, you wept. That's hard to do because usually you're prepared, and then they start shooting. Then you can cry rather easily. So this was very difficult.

They shot it twice, and the second time, it was very good. I cried just when I should have, and I thought it was wonderful. But he printed only the first one, and I went to find him. And he was sitting sort of near the kitchen turned away from the camera. And I said, "Mr. Hitchcock, please, I was so much better in the second take. I really wept when I should, and I..." And he said, "All right. Print the second one as well. Yeah, that's fine." And then when I saw the movie, of course, you never see the scene. You only hear the scene. It's Bruce Dern listening to the people in the kitchen. You never see it. So, that explained it.

— Karen Black (2001)
keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Bruce Dern, Family Plot (1976), and production

He loved the risqué, and that's why he liked me in ''Family Plot'', because I threw caution to the wind, so to speak, and was unpredictable. He did never know what I was going to do next, but he knew it was going to be in his frame. If I'm sitting here and talk to you, and I want to talk to you like this. You're out of the shot... half out of the shot... because his frame ends here. So, if you put your hand here, it's going off-screen. And he let's you know that right at the beginning. He says, "You have no room for movement. But within the room you have, change dialogue, do whatever you want to do, just make it interesting."

He laughed out loud in the hamburger-eating scene, where she and I are talking on the phone talking to the bad guy. Two times I made him laugh out loud, so we had to do it over. That was one scene, and the other scene was I threw in a line when we're going down the mountain in the car... The car is going off the road, we have no brakes. The guy's tried to kill us by screwing our brakes up, and she's climbing all over me, and I threw in that line, "God, I gotta get off this road." And he just laughed out loud.

— Bruce Dern (2001)
keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Family Plot (1976), and production
Dern describes Hitchcock's cameo in "Family Plot"...

I walk in, I see this shadow on the glass talking to another shadow. Well, it's him!! And you don't see him. You just see his profile and the shadow. Well, come on. Is that not hip, you know, genius? I mean, that's just terrific. I said, "Congratulations." He said, "Did you see me, Bruce?" I said, "No. But I saw your image." He said, "Well, I told you I wasn't going to appear." So, he just got such a kick out of that.B

— Bruce Dern (2001)
keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Family Plot (1976), production, and the Hitchcock cameo
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