Where's the money, Lebowski?
The Big Lebowski is about a character named Jeff Lebowski,
played by Jeff Bridges,
this sort of aging pothead who lives in Los Angeles
and who becomes the victim of a case of mistaken identity
just because he happens to have the same name
as a millionaire who lives out in Pasadena.
And by virtue of that, he's thrust into this intrigue surrounding a kidnapping
involving the millionaire's wife.
The Big Lebowski started, really,
with us thinking about a friend of ours
in Los Angeles,
who the character that Jeff Bridges plays is sort of loosely based on.
This is a guy who we've known for about 15 years,
who actually does call himself the Dude,
and it was imagining him
in the context of a Chandler kind of a story
that got us started on the script.
It just seemed interesting to us to thrust that character
into the most confusing situation possible,
the person, it would seem on the face of it,
least equipped to deal with it.
That's sort of the conceit of the movie.
Wait. Let me explain something to you.
I am not Mr. Lebowski.
You're Mr. Lebowski. I'm the Dude.
So that's what you call me. You know?
That, or His Dudeness, or Duder,
or, you know, El Duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.
Are you employed, sir?
Employed?
The Dude, who is...
He's better known as the Dude, but his real name is Jeff Lebowski,
and he gets confused with another Lebowski,
a fellow who's...
You know, a lot wealthier fellow.
And he gets mixed up for this guy,
and all kind of hell and confusion breaks loose.
"We have Bunny."
LEBOWSKI: ...written by men who were unable to achieve on a level field of play.
"Gather $1 million..." Cowards!
"...in unmarked, non-consecutive 20s." Weaklings!
"Await instructions. No funny stuff." Bums!
Bummer.
This is definitely the Dude we wanted.
I think he did have a good time making the movie.
He got to eat whatever he wanted.
Yeah.
I mean, it was clear to Jeff
that the character wasn't into the Los Angeles health, fitness and beauty,
and that he could let himself go,
which he probably kind of enjoyed, even just for that.
Yeah, and he really...
Yeah, one thing he did take from the real character, the real Dude, is...
You know, the real Dude is quite overweight, and I think...
Jeff met him once, and I think he looked at him and went,
“Okay, I can kind of let my waistline go for this part."
But all Jeff wanted to know... Actually, pretty consistently,
Jeff Bridges, at the beginning of the start of shooting every scene,
he'd walk up to one or the other of us
and ask if we figured whether or not the Dude burned one on the way over.
Yeah, "So do you think the Dude burned one on the way over?"
So we'd think about it.
Usually we'd say, "Yeah, he probably burned one on the way over,"
and Jeff would go over in the corner,
rub his knuckles in his eyes to turn them red
and do the scene, and that was kind of the extent
of what you had to do to direct Jeff. Yeah.
Some actors like talking about it more than others.
(SIRENS APPROACHING) No, you're not wrong.
Am I wrong? You're not wrong, Walter.
You're just an asshole.
Okay, then.
Play Quintana and O'Brien next week. They should be pushovers.
Man, would you just... Just take it easy, man.
In this one, in this particular case,
the story was very loosely based
on the narrative structure of a Chandler novel. You know?
And those novels are very episodic in nature.
They usually follow the main character
as he encounters these different characters
on a journey to uncover a mystery or find a missing person
or whatever it may be in the novel.
So that was sort of the...
In this case, that was sort of the model for the story.
In each movie, it's a little bit different in terms of where the...
Actually, the one case where it got, just in terms of plot, most involved
and most difficult for us to manage
was Miller's Crossing, which was a gangster movie,
sort of a homage,
or a rip-off, depending on your point of view,
of Dashiell Hammett.
And that got very...
Just in the sense of the convolution of the plot, got very involved,
and that was sort of, as I say, difficult to manage.
This one, yeah, not as much. It was partly...
In this one, we sort of figured,
if things become a little bit too complicated
and are unclear, it really doesn't matter.
I mean, the plot is not the...
And, again, this is similar to Chandler.
The plot is sort of secondary
to the other things that are going on in the piece, I think.
And if people get a little bit confused,
it's, I don't think, really necessarily
going to get in the way of them enjoying the movie.
Yeah, you look at something like The Big Sleep,
and nobody seemed to know, including the people who wrote it,
what the hell was going on in that plot either, so...
The hero, the Dude, is not a private eye,
but he's really a guy who's a throwback
to the characters of...
You know, early '70s, late '60s kind of guy.
What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?
Dude.
Oh, I don't know, sir.
Is it being prepared to do the right thing,
whatever the cost?
Isn't that what makes a man?
Sure. That and a pair of testicles.
Sam Elliott would actually ask us for...
Like, "What am I doing in this movie?"
Yeah, Sam would say, "I don't know what I'm doing here, boys.
"Happy to be here, don't get me wrong, but..."
We didn't have anything to tell Sam. We didn't know either.
But, you know, didn't hurt his performance any.
How're you doing there, Dude?
Not too good, man.
One of those days, huh?
Yeah.
Well, a wiser fellow than myself once said,
"Sometimes you eat the bear, and..."
Much obliged.
"Sometimes the bear, well, he eats you."
That some kind of Eastern thing?
Far from it.
I like your style, Dude.
We really wrote that part for Sam 'cause we like his voice.
You know, he's got that really...
I mean, he really can hit that lower register.
Also, he's got that really big mustache,
so when you're cutting the movie, you can move his lines around,
cheat them into his mouth wherever.
ETHAN: You know, you can never see his lips.
It's a good thing about working with Sam Elliott.
Walter's kind of an interesting character for me.
I'm trying to do justice to him.
He was written so wonderfully.
He's head of a security agency, his own.
I think he gets by all right.
Doesn't really... The most nattily dressed fellow in town.
He's got his own agenda. He was...
He's got an Army background,
and that's his career, is reminding people of his service in Vietnam.
He means well, but he is a little oafish.
That wasn't her toe, Dude.
Whose toe was it, Walter?
How should I know?
I do know that nothing about it indicates that it was her...
The nail polish, Walter!
Fine, Dude.
As if it's impossible to get some nail polish, apply it to someone else's toe...
Someone else... Pinking shears.
Where the... Are they gonna get...
You want a toe? I can get you a toe.
Believe me, there are ways, Dude.
You don't wanna know about it. Believe me.
Yeah, but, Walter...
Hell, I could get you a toe by 3:00 this afternoon, with nail polish.
Yeah, we wrote the Walter part for John, who...
I guess this is the third movie we've done with him.
And...
Well, actually, as we wrote the part that Turturro plays for Turturro
and the part that Steve Buscemi plays for Steve.
So those parts were essentially written for those actors.
Were you listening to the Dude's story, Donny?
What? Walter...
Were you listening to the Dude's story? I was bowling.
So you have no frame of reference here, Donny.
You're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie
and wants to know... Walter, what's the point, man?
There's no reason... Here's my point, Dude.
There's no fucking reason why these two...
Yeah, Walter, what's your point?
Walter, what is the...
Look, we all know who is at fault here.
We saw John Turturro play an Hispanic character
in a play at the Public Theater about...
Must be about 11 or 12 years ago.
And ever since then, we've wanted to write something for him
where he plays an Hispanic character.
And this just seemed like the right opportunity for it.
JOEL: I mean...
And then, to really give him something to sink his teeth into,
we made him a child molester.
But...
I think it's really a pretty vivid characterization
given the amount of screen time he has, don't you think?
Yeah. Yeah. John goes to the core of things.
The characters were conceived as being
partners in a dysfunctional marriage.
The Jeff Bridges and John Goodman character, they were...
And at the point where we were writing the script,
we sort of conceived them in the sense that...
You know, designed them so that they would be able to...
Or constantly would be pushing each other's buttons
in terms of those kinds of reactions,
you know, the sort of getting on each other's nerves
and yet, still, at a certain level, really liking each other.
One of the things that Jeff, I think...
It's interesting, because one of the things that Jeff sort of came to
while we were rehearsing, before we started shooting,
was he conceived the character, appropriately,
as being very mellow and laid-back,
and yet, in practically every scene in the movie,
he ends up exploding
because of what Walter is doing or saying or making happen.
And that was something he hadn't associated,
on the first reading in the script, with the character,
but is very much a part of how they, the two characters,
relate to each other.
It's a definite buddy movie.
That's what I love about it, and...
The dialogue's just funnier than hell.
I mean, it's one of those where you crack the page
and you start laughing every two pages,
and enough where you gotta sit for five minutes
and then you can pick it up again.
Walter, I love you,
but sooner or later you're gonna have to face the fact
you're a goddamn moron.
No time to argue. Hey, man...
The bridge. Hey, Walter... Hey, Walter!
Hey, Walter...
WALTER: Here goes the ringer!
What the fuck? Okay, Dude, your wheel.
Hey, man... What the fuck! At 15 m.p.h., I roll out.
I double back, grab one of them and beat it out of him.
The Uzi. Uzi?
You didn't think I was rolling out of here naked, did you?
Walter, please! Fifteen, Dude! Let's take that hill!
Walter!
(MAN IN ME PLAYING)
We've done four movies
with Roger Deakins as the cinematographer.
JOEL: Well, it's funny. We met Roger...
Specifically, the way we started working with Roger is,
when we did Barton Fink,
we were shooting a movie in Los Angeles,
non-union,
and for that reason, we...
But on the other hand,
we wanted to work with someone whose work we knew and liked,
as opposed to someone who was just starting out.
And that meant a foreign DP
who wasn't in the unions in the United States.
So we went...
We'd seen Roger's work, I think, on a number of things,
but in particular Mike Figgis' movie Stormy Monday,
I think was the last one we'd seen before we talked to him.
And we met Roger and liked him and hired him to do that movie,
and we've been working together since then.
You know, Roger's just...
He's one of the top three or four DPs
working in the world right now, I think.
He's like... There's nobody better than Roger.
And just personally, we get along really well.
So it's been a good collaboration.
ETHAN: Yeah, Julianne Moore ls really good. Yeah, It wasn't meant to be...
It isn't specifically English, the accent.
It's some vague, non-specific geographically,
“swell finishing school for girls in Switzerland," maybe, accent
that she came up with.
Yeah, she just read the script and sort of intuitively grasped
that there should be something horribly regal about the character.
She's very funny.
Julianne Moore plays a wonderful avant-garde artist who specializes in
some sort of feminist art. I couldn't really put my finger on it.
Yeah, something to do with women.
Do you like sex, Mr. Lebowski?
Excuse me?
Sex. The physical act of love. Coitus. Do you like it?
I was talking about my rug.
You're not interested in sex?
You mean coitus?
I like it too.
It's a male myth about feminists that we hate sex.
It can be a natural, zesty enterprise.
However, there are some people,
it is called satyriasis in men, nymphomania in women,
who engage in it compulsively and without joy.
Oh, no.
Oh, yes, Mr. Lebowski.
Well, movies always get weird reactions.
Like, some people, some journalists we talk to, say,
"Well? So how did you come up with the story?
"Just sit around and smoke a lot of pot?"
It was really strange. We got that from one journalist.
Then, when we were doing an interview in Germany,
a German journalist asked us,
"So how do you come up with the story?
"You sit around in a room and drink a lot of beer?"
(SNORTS)
I'm throwing rocks tonight.
JOEL: Steve doesn't say much in the movie. He...
Well, we thought it would be interesting after...
You know, he plays sort of a motor mouth in Fargo. He never really shuts up.
And so we thought it would be interesting to go the other way in this movie
in terms of the character that we wrote for him.
Somebody pointed out to us recently
that he's been in the past five movies of ours
and we've killed him in each one.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what the... Yeah. I don't know why.
In progressively more gruesome ways, too, actually.
Well, not that his death in this one is particularly gruesome,
not to reveal too much.
But his remains seem to get smaller and smaller in each of our movies.
I don't know what we'll do next.
No, don't do...
Not on the rug, man.
The carpet. You know, it's interesting,
we just got a call from Floor Covering Weekly,
a magazine to the trade about floor coverings,
that wanted to do a story on The Big Lebowski
because catalyst for the story was the floor covering.
So we did a really long...
We were so excited about being on Floor Covering Weekly
that we did a really long interview with the woman. She was really taken aback.
It was the one time we've talked to a journalist
where they were anxious to get off the phone
and were just humoring us as we mattered on about the carpet
and all the other floor coverings in the movie.
And she promised to send us a copy of the magazine,
but it hasn't materialized yet.
Yeah, it's hard to believe that there's actually a weekly about floor covering.
Yeah, how much is there to say? 'Cause that's...
And you would think, by virtue of that,
she would be interested in a lot of material
about the movie. Filling some pages. Yeah.
We even offered to pose for her if she'd do a cover.
Pose for a cover picture, the two of us in front of the Persian carpet
which Jeff Bridges' character appropriates.
And she was sort of polite, but declined.
Then we started getting suspicious
that maybe the whole thing had been a hoax
and she wasn't actually a legitimate representative
from Floor Covering Weekly,
but some journalist who'd been turned down for an interview
in another context.
But, yeah, it is true that the movie does... The catalyst for the plot...
The whole beginning of the movie has to do
with a rug being soiled in a sort of very particular way.
And the main character's journey through the movie
is an attempt to get redress for his soiled rug.
That, also, was loosely taken from real life.
One of the characters that the movie was based on
used to have a rug that he'd, I think, salvaged out of the trash from somewhere,
that he would go on and on about how it tied the room together
in his little apartment.
So, yeah, the rug became a very important element.
Yeah, then it just seemed to take off.
Actually, literally.
I mean, we got into the whole flying carpet, Thief of Bagdad thing
with one of his pothead hallucinations.
We gave the script to Joel Silver, the producer,
who gave us a really interesting note
which we actually ignored but maybe shouldn't have.
He said that the movie should have ended with him getting his rug back
or some mention of the rug, which would have been a nice resolution,
but we never did do it.
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We thought we could do many of those shots practically,
the shots where we don't see Jeff full-figure,
floating between the girls' legs in the bowling alley.
But actually, the human body is such
that Jeff's shoulders are just a little too broad
and the girls, though they were cast to be tall,
were just not tall enough,
so that Jeff couldn't actually fit between their legs.
They had to be shot in separate passes.
There was a pass of the camera tracking past the girls' legs
and then a shot of Jeff being propelled over the bowling alley.
And they had to be composited in a computer
with Jeff shrunk very slightly
so that he could, indeed, plausibly pass between their legs
but not shrunk to the extent that you'd notice.
But, yeah, all those shots of Jeff
with the dancing girls in the Busby Berkeley sequence
are composited in a computer.
So they were shot separately.
The shots where the camera actually goes through the legs
were shot practically, on a stage, just with a camera on a...
Well, we did it two ways.
We had a little skateboard, essentially,
that the camera sat on, that was sent down...
With a motor on it, and the camera was... You could...
Sent down between their legs,
and it was controlled by an operator with a joystick.
It's similar to a device that we used in the bowling alley
where we would chase the bowling balls down the bowling lane.
This little motorized skateboard with a camera on it
could get up to about 20 miles an hour
and chase these bowling balls down the lane.
Well, you know, another convention of the private eye movies...
I mean, Raymond Chandler's stories,
but, again, private eye movies generally,
is at some point the private eye gets slugged,
or gets slipped the Mickey Finn or whatever,
and goes into some sort of delirium or hallucination.
That's sort of...
That's certainly a hallmark in the movies
and in many of the novels that movies are based on as well.
So in that respect,
we had license to do it by virtue of the genre,
but also, it seemed like we had a special license
to do that sort of splashy thing
by virtue of the character as being a heavy drug user.
So, you know, it just lets you do things
that are sort of a departure from the rest of the movie,
and do, in a sense, come out of nowhere,
are stylistically not like the rest of the movie.
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