Jason Bateman: My dad was a writer-director-producer and he, instead of taking me to the park to throw the ball with me, that stereotypical bonding, would take me to the art houses and show me foreign films at the age of 10, 11, 12 or even younger when I could hardly read, let alone appreciate anything with subtitles. But it was our time together, so I grew this affinity for acting and movies and whatnot.

                        The long answer to this question, which I’ll try to move quickly through, is that we had a neighbor who was an actor who was my father’s age. He drove by the house one day when I was helping my dad wash his car, I was ten, and he said, "Do you want to come with me to see how an audition goes?" I said, "Sure." We get there; they’re reading for the part of the boy that same day. So he says, "Here are the sides for the part. Go in there and just make it look like you know what you’re doing."

                        I go in and I read for the part of the boy and I end up getting the part. This was before I was doing anything. I came back feeling pretty cocky, and I told my dad this is something I’d like to do and would he take some pictures of me and let’s get me an agent and all that stuff. I started out doing a bunch of commercials.

                        You do a bunch of commercials then you get guest spots, then you get series parts and then you get movie parts.  That’s kind of the way it works. I started when I was ten and by the time it was the age where you have to pick a career at 18, I had already done eight years at it and had sort of accrued some kind of momentum and position where I thought, "Well, let’s continue with this."

                        But it’s a very tough way to make a living, being an actor. Even if you’ve been as lucky as I have, you’re constantly getting fired, effectively. You go out for a job interview, and you have to make a big emotional investment in that to really be competitive and then you don’t usually get them. But when you do, it’s euphoria and then three months later you’re fired basically because the job comes to an end, and now you’ve got to go out and audition for another job.

                        Most people have maybe half a dozen job interviews in their life, and most people who put 30 years into a career can count on a pension and some job security. That’s not really the case, at least with the acting side of it. I would suggest anybody who’s considering doing it really need to do it and possibly have a side gig because if you can audition with a healthy level of indifference, then you are more of an appealing candidate because like anything in life they can sniff desperation and what not. It’s a tricky thing.

                        I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining because I do really like what I do and, like I said, I’ve been really lucky but it’s not as fantastic as everybody makes it sound like. It’s tough work.

Christine Aylward:     We’ve heard someone gave us a quote from Ed Harris that says, "Leave desperation at the door and then it opens up for you." We even heard that today with casting directors.

JB:                   Desperation is not helpful inside the audition. However, if you’re too indifferent. then you can’t really compete. You have to have this healthy level of, like I said, indifference and really wanting the job so that you learn your lines because it’s better if you have learned the dialogue instead of looking down at the thing and talking and talking. If you’ve memorized your lines that’s better so you need to be committed to it to do that, but you can’t care too much because then if you want them too much they don’t want you. It’s like a girlfriend or a boyfriend. It's high school. Everything you need to know you learned in high school or fourth grade, right?

CA:                 What is your favorite part about your profession?

JB:                   My favorite part about doing what I do is...well, the funny answer is that you get great tables at restaurants, and you get to meet a lot of people that are heroes of yours, and you sometimes turn out to be heroes of theirs and so you can have a really great conversation as opposed to just, "Will you sign this piece of paper for me?"

                        The other more serious answer it that’s fun to pretend to be other people and do that convincingly with a level of humor sometimes or a level of drama sometimes that impresses those that you respect. Nine times out of ten those people are just behind the camera, so you’re really performing for a very small group of people. Ultimately that product ends up going out to millions and millions, but you can’t think about that. That’s a little daunting. It’s this somewhat insulated creative process. It’s all kind of in a bubble. It’s a lot of fun.

                        You’re creating something off a white piece of paper and making it live and breathe; that’s kind of cool. Some people might say it’s a God complex where you really are creating life and environments, multiple departments coming together to make that environment come to life and make it believable and consistent. That’s kind of an interesting, sometimes complex and complicated process that really involves everybody on the team. It’s not just the people in front of the camera talking. There’s nobody on the set that doesn’t need to be there which some people forget about but it’s really true.

CA:                 On the collaboration side, team effort, who would you say, and I’m sure it varies based on what you’re doing at that moment, but who would you say that you collaborate most closely with?

JB:                   I would say that you collaborate most with the other...as an actor you collaborate most with the other actor you’re in the scene with followed closely by the director. Some directors like to work in somewhat of a dictatorial manner, and they’re not that flexible to seeing the part played in any other way than what they’ve always pictured in their mind perhaps even before you were on the project. That can get a little frustrating sometimes.

                        It’s workable but it’s always better when a director sees what he or she’s got coming from those actors and then helps those actors stay within the borders that those actors are limited to through their skill set or whatever. What you’d like to do is mostly collaborate with the other actor who’s really the other half of the scene. You can practice until you’re blue in the face the night before, how you’re going to say something and what kind of stupid face or important face you’re going to be making in the mirror. But when you get on the set the other actor really dictates how that’s ultimately going to work and fit in the scene that you’re creating and sharing for the audience.

                        You have to be flexible. As a result of that, you’re really collaborating with that other person. That hackneyed cliché of hitting the ball back and forth is really true. You can’t play tennis by yourself so you really have to rely on the other person a lot. It’s fun.

CA:                 If someone who really wants to be an actor, what advice would you give them?

JB:                   If somebody really wants to be an actor the advice that I would give them is make sure you have to be an actor. It’s something that really makes a lot of sense to you, and if you don’t do it you will feel like you’ve lived your life...if you don’t get it done, you feel at the end of your life you haven’t really lived all of your life.  I feel that way about directing. I can’t wait to direct a movie. That’s something I really want to get done before I go. There are other things but if acting is one of those things then pursue it. Like I said, if you’ve got another way to pay the rent, your chances of actually getting the gig in the room, your chances become much better because you’re not desperate.

CA:                 Are there certain people who inspired you? Who you either have worked with or would love to work with?

JB:                   There’s a long list of people that I do admire that I’d love to work with. Actors, writers, directors, all that stuff but mostly generally I really enjoy working with people that take it seriously but not too seriously. People who really have fun with it; people who are also not handcuffed with insecurities that manifest themselves in being unpleasant to be around on the set. People who are really comfortable in their skin and comfortable being an actor or director, then they’re usually pretty nice people. I like working with nice people, you get a nice product out of it.

                        What we do here is really so in the ether if there’s garbage in the air, it makes it more difficult to take it from good to great. The difference between that really lies in a lot of intangibles so if you’ve got people that are being not great then it’s tough. Generally anybody who’s nice. I’d take a nice bad actor than a mean good actor.

CA:                 What are some of the movies of your favorite movies?

JB:                   I don’t know. I’ve got a few favorite movies but anything that really creates what I said before: that creates an environment that is a unique environment both visually, sometimes musically, because only then are you seeing really all departments contribute as opposed to just pointing the camera and letting actors say what the writer wrote. Sometimes that can get a bit limiting.

                        But when you have a director’s vehicle, usually, the star of the film is the director, usually you’re going to find something that’s got somewhat of, pardon the term, a "vision". I like those. They’re complicated things to do well and to take the audience at the beginning and deliver them at the end without dropping them, really trying to create some sort of specific tone and environment. They’re fun to watch and they’re really impressive to study.

CA:                 Do you have any favorite characters? Not necessarily of yours but just favorite characters that you love?

JB:                   One of my favorite characters is one that Robert De Niro played in "The King of Comedy", this guy, Rupert Pupkin. The film I don’t think was ever really a big hit, and I don’t know why that was. Perhaps maybe it was when it was released it was a crowded weekend or whatever it was. Really that one sticks out for me because he seemed almost...that was almost his most eccentric character, which is saying a lot given that he was mostly a character actor.

                        He never really dropped us; it was a very ambitious level to play that character at, and he managed to play him really believably all the way through it without winking. That’s hard to do, especially when you shoot out of order. If you’re going to shoot scene 65 today, you might not shoot scene 64 until five weeks from now. In scene 64 you might be running down the sidewalk, and in scene 65 you enter the building so you’ve got to remember that you better enter it out of breath even though you shot it five weeks earlier.

                        There’s a lot of tracking one has to do as an actor to make sure that once it’s all put together it works. When you’re dealing with an eccentric character, you really have to make sure your homework is really sound. He obviously knows how to do that and certainly did in that film in spades.

CA:                 It's about scenes for you as well, if you're shooting scenes at the time. Are there any movie scenes that you just love?

JB:                   I’m so bad about that. I'm so bad about retaining films that I see. I love watching films, but I forget them as soon as I see them. I don’t know what that is. Especially the endings of them and the people I go to see them with. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called a friend the next day and said, "Dude, you’ve got to go see this movie. I saw it yesterday." It’s like, "You know, we went together to that film. And we’re in a fight now." I don’t know what it is, but I forget a lot about the movies that I see. I don’t know if I can really recite a particular scene that I love.

CA:                 So you don’t have that chip that I think all guys have where you remember movie quotes and say them around the dining table?

JB:                   Movie quotes are different, funny lines. That's different. But I qualify it by saying that I’m now 40, and I either need gingko biloba or it’s just a natural progression where I’m focused on different things now. When a guy’s 15 he remembers a lot of jokes; he remembers funny quotes from movies. I’m trying to think up new things to call my daughters’ dolls; funny names. It’s awful. But I still climb into movies as deeply as I did before. I just don’t pick out as many things and remember them for the water cooler or to recite in class to be a cut up. I don’t know where it comes from but it’s not there anymore.

CA:                 Can you tell us about a really great experience you’ve had with a project that you’ve worked on?

JB:                   When I started doing the show "Arrested Development" it was a show that was different than any other television show I’d done in a few areas, but the one area that I really, really gained a lot from was that its flavor of comedy was very dry and serious and I said before, no winking. When you do a sitcom, when you literally hear the audience laughing, there’s sort of an understanding that there’s a performance going on therefore the whole style of the comedy is much more burlesque, it’s performance as opposed to acting.

                        "Arrested Development" was single camera which means that there’s no audience there; it’s shot like a movie. Also, its original concept was that this was a real family and these cameras were following these people around so there was nothing funny about it to these guys. If they knew that anybody was laughing at them and the problems the family were having, they would be deeply offended. That concept, that flavor of comedy was something that’s always made me laugh but I was never able to do.

                        My mother is British so it’s a very sarcastic, sort of above all else do not embarrass yourself type of humor, so when I started doing it, it had been beaten into me for so many years to make my characters likeable because that’s what the network always says when you’re doing a sitcom. "He’s got to be likable and the people want to just love him." But the guy I was playing had to really despise a lot of things that were going on around him. And so, I was nervous about doing that because I was afraid I was going to get told, "You’re being too mean. You’re being too sarcastic. You’re being too intolerable of the people around you, even though they’re your family."

                        When the show runner, the boss, Mitch Hurwitz said, "Jason, there’s something about your face," and he was talking about my big, fat, doughy face, "There’s something about your face that if you skinned a cat, the audience would still love you. So don’t worry about being mean, be as dry and as sarcastic as you naturally want to be, whatever your sense of humor is." I said okay and he said, "Don’t worry about it." So, I did that.

                        Sure enough, when I would watch the episodes I remember feeling that I was being about as nasty as I could be and I watch it on television, "He’s still kind of a nice little guy." That was growing for me, and that was an important step for me as a comedic actor. I realized I could do a comedy that I liked more than the comedy I was given before and still get away with it and be likable.

CA:                 What’s the process that you go through when you think about getting involved in it?

JB:                   The main thing I’ll look at truthfully when I’m thinking about doing a project, first of all, like I said, I’ve been doing this a long, long time and really only in the last five years do I actually have the choice of what projects to do. So I don’t want to come across as, "When I pick what movie I’m going to do next." You basically take what you get.

                        But on the rare instances when two competing projects overlap and you’ve got to pick one, I will look at who’s doing it and what the quality of it is. Not necessarily the scale of it, but is it a respectable piece of work or is it some kind of cookie cutter, commercial, popcorn-y piece of junk food which are viable pieces of business and keep the engine running in Hollywood but can be dangerous to be become too synonymous with.

                        For me I think, and the jury is still out on this and I’ll let you know, but I think that the key to longevity is respect in the business as opposed to box office or whatever. I’m saying this from having been on the other side for a long time where doing all those sitcoms for all those years made it tough to get the kind of parts that I really wanted to do, the kind of parts I would love going to the movies to see because I was known for something that was less good.

                        For a long time my name got in my way and then "Arrested Development" came along and really hit the reset button for me. Now the projects I’m being invited to take part in after that are of a similar taste and quality, so I’m trying to perpetuate that perception so that I can continue working because as soon as people don’t respect you you’re not invited to the party anymore. A lot of it is about that and it’s less about whether I’m the star of it or even mentioned in the credits. It’s about the people you work with; and by the way, those people end up being really nice to work with too, going back to my first answer. People who are good at what they do and are confident in that don’t usually have much to prove and don’t have a chip on their shoulder and it’s kind of a nice set.

CA:                 Tell us a little bit about the differences for you in pace and in preparation in TV to film.

JB:                   The pace of shooting in television is much, much faster, and sometimes that’s helpful in a comedy because you can keep momentum going and you don’t get bored on the set. Although the slower pace of doing film work is beneficial ultimately to the actual content of what you’re doing because you can take a little bit more time to pick a different angle to cover this and help say to the audience what you’re trying to say, maybe by virtue of where you place the camera or the size you’re using, all that film making stuff. It’s less participatory as an actor.

                        You’re sitting in your dressing room waiting for the other people who are making a creative contribution to do their work. If you appreciate that process then you can appreciate that there’s actually work going on and you don’t get really, really bored. But as an actor it’s less fun because you don’t have to rush to get seven pages done in the day you’re only trying to shoot two pages or something.

CA:                 Do you remember the first movie you ever saw?

JB:                  No. I don’t remember the first movie I ever saw. No one’s ever asked me that before.

CA:                 Do you remember some of your favorite movies from when you were little?

JB:                   A lot of the movies that I loved when I was little were the ordinary people type of movies. "Kramer vs. Kramer", that kind of stuff and "Apocalypse Now" and "Rocky". It seemed like they were $20 million movies that you would think about, "Those films earned Academy Awards." They’re adult dramas, "The Verdict" and things like that. Those kinds of films seem to not really be done anymore, and I’m not smart enough to tell you why but it seems like the big event movies, the $200 million effects films, which are incredibly difficult to do well, are really feeding the beast and then if you want your brain scratched a little bit, you’ve got to go maybe watch a $10 million movie.

                        The middle class films, which seemed like they were the only films being made back then, have really gone away or at least atrophied to maybe only getting a dozen of them here. I miss those and I would like to participate in a lot of those but again I don’t know when they’ll come back, if ever.

CA:                 Do you remember the first record, with your own money you ever saved up and bought yourself?

JB:                   I want to say the first record I ever bought, I think, was the Sugar Hill Gang with that long rap. One of the first raps. I don’t know why. I was pretty down back then. But the first album, I think, I ever had was the Bay City Rollers. My mother was a stewardess for Pan Am, and one of her big routes was to fly to London a lot so she brought those back for me. I had all of those.

                        I was real sweet on plaid back then which is not a great look for a five year old but it helped me a lot. Did really good with the ladies in first grade. Crushed them. No girl was safe in first grade. Just keep humming S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night and they just lined up.

CA:                 What about the first concert, do you remember, going to?

JB:                   No. My first concerts were, I don’t think, were anything all that memorable and I’ve done a little too much damage upstairs to recall it. It would probably take a little bit of hypnosis to get me to really recall it. No. I got nothing there.

CA:                 All right. Okay, we’ll let you slide on that one. You had some really good albums.   

JB:                   I gave a good album answer. I could never figure out the bong water I thought was a drink to cool down your throat afterwards.

CA:                 Getting back to the craft for a second, what do you do to prepare for a role?

JB:                   I don’t do a ton of preparation. It works for some people; it doesn’t work too much for me. The whole concept of preparing and really focusing on acting and acting class and back story and all of that stuff really works well for some people, and it never really did for me because it always made me think like I was acting. The goal is to not act and so to take an acting class you’d be learning how to act to do preparation is all sort of an actor process.

                        Again, it works for some, not for me. You’re being asked to say and do certain things, the character is, and if those behaviors and lines are not really justified by a lot of things that happen in the script that the audience is exposed to, then you kind of have to create in your own mind why is this guy saying this, why is this guy doing this?

                        So, you might have to make that up in your head so that you can believe it so that then it comes across as somewhat believable. But usually a good script has elements that substantiate the objections and the words; sometimes they’re not there and then you have to do a little bit on your own.

CA:                 Have you ever found that it’s difficult to get out of character? You leave the set and you’re...

JB:                   I’m not that guy. Daniel Day Lewis is a character actor. The rest of us just do variations of ourselves.

CA:                 Dream project. Sounds like a dream project is you want to direct. When you think about that is there, and it sounds like you like serious movies. Is that something kind of directorial? I know you’ve directed already. Will you direct your first film? Have you directed TV?

JB:                   I haven’t directed film yet. My dream project would be to direct a movie that lends itself to creating a very specific environment that’s somewhat on the fringes of society where you really need to take full advantage of multiple departments to not only articulate that to department heads but to observe it when you have it and then have the courage to say, "Yes, that’s it. We’ve got it. Let’s move on" and bring the audience with you and across the finish line at the end. That’s a dream project. I look forward to being capable of doing that. I feel like I’m confident I could. I would just need the opportunity. I’m patient though.