Exclusive Interview: Alec Baldwin

NEW YORK: The award-winning actor Alec Baldwin, whose prolific career includes work on stage, film and TV series, notably NBC’s 30 Rock, talks with World Screen about his wide-ranging interests.

WS: Night of Exploration is not the first show you’ve done with National Geographic. How did your association with them begin?
BALDWIN: My association with National Geographic, like most people who are my age, began with my grandparents collecting the magazine. My grandfather put all of his magazines so lovingly into chocolate brown slipcases. And National Geographic has its place in the anthropological overview for children, especially when they are getting to be a certain age when animals aren’t just toys, they’re not cartoon figures; when kids get to about seven or eight years old, [they have] an interest in dinosaurs and the world and National Geographic becomes a part of that.

As I got older, in the ’80s and the world of cable television [started to develop] and there were only a couple of publications that were successfully able to morph into a cable channel. Playboy was one of them oddly enough! [Laughs] National Geographic was the other, but on a really successful level. I don’t get to watch a lot of TV. I wish I could, actually, but I just don’t have time. And if I’m not watching by appointment a ball game or the news or the debates or 60 Minutes or something that I’m fond of, if I’m home and I’m just dead and I want to relax, I think the only channel I can put on that I’m guaranteed there’s going to be something I want to watch, is the National Geographic Channel. So I’ve admired them and what they’ve done.

I get approached all the time, I don’t want to say the names of these companies because I’ve turned them down, but, many, many major, very serious cable [channels] would come to me and say, Would you do this program on camera or voice-over? Something very prestigious, something with great people involved, smart, academicians, and so forth. I would say no because I was on TV for six and a half years [on 30 Rock] then the show went into syndication, and now I do these commercials for Capital One to fund my foundation, we give all the money away to charity. I was dreading that kind of fatigue, I thought people are going to be so sick to death of seeing me on TV all the time. But I did Walking with Cavemen and Frozen Planet for Discovery and then I did Great Migrations with National Geographic. And when they came this time [for Night of Exploration], even though my answer to everybody had been no, and I told my agent, “I’m authorizing you that the answer now is no. I just can’t do it.” And she said, well National Geographic wants you to host their program for their 125th anniversary, and I was like, damn! [Laughs], you know, I had to say yes! I did and I am an admirer of theirs and I am a fan of Nat Geo and Nat Geo WILD. And the National Geographic Channel is in 170-plus countries around the world, so it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

WS: And National Geographic magazine is so beautifully put together. There is something so special about the photography and the quality of the paper.
BALDWIN: I remember sitting on a set of a movie and The National Geographic magazines were props in the film. I picked up this National Geographic and it was all about a mining town in Appalachia and what it’s like to work in the coalmines. The whole essence of it, the photography, the writing, the whole purview of it, had that Walker Evans-esque [quality]. There’s artistry to the magazine that you just can’t shake. It really is like nothing else. You can go back and read those magazines now and enjoy them just the same and learn a lot. And so my relationship with them goes back since I was 7 years old.

WS: You’ve also been a champion of documentaries for a long time.
BALDWIN: I don’t know if the word is champion, but I’m a fan of them. I produce a program for The Hamptons Film Festival. The artistic director of the festival, David Nugent, and I produce a summer doc series, this year is our fifth year. We try to have a mix of the more purely cinematic [films]. Last year we showed Alma Har’el’s movie Bombay Beach, about these communities along the Salton Sea and at the terminus of the Colorado River and so forth. It was a beautifully haunting, weird movie. Then we’ll show something that is much more of a pure documentary, like How to Survive a Plague. We showed the Kunstler sisters’ biography about William Kunstler, their father, which was a beautiful film. We showed The Cove, where Louie Psihoyos went on to win the Academy Award. That was a weird moment for me to screen the Psihoyos’ movie in August of that year, interview him afterward, and then seven months later I hosted the Oscars and handed him the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, so that was weird. I am a boundless fan of the Maysles brothers [Albert and David], and their films Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens and all that kind of stuff. I love documentary film.

WS: Tell us about the documentary you made called Seduced and Abandoned, whose title makes reference to the 1964 Italian comedy film Sedotta e Abbandonata. It was filmed in Cannes and the idea was to show how to get a movie financed outside the studio system…
BALDWIN: Jimmy Toback and I had wanted to make a movie and we had thought a lot about it. We had three ideas for movies we wanted to do in terms of their cri de coeur of what we wanted to say. In one of the movies we were writing, the two central characters were movie actors. It became difficult to figure out how to shoot the movie within the movie; that becomes very expensive, whenever you have movie making as part of the film. So we went around and around and around with the ideas of these three different films, and finally I said to him, the Cannes Film Festival is coming, why don’t we make a movie about getting a movie made? Why don’t we make a movie about going to Cannes and to the Marché and [show] that aspect of pitching a film and trying to raise money? That’s just ostensibly what it’s about; really, this is an homage to Cannes. We’re going to have the sweet and the sour. We’re going to show how the sausage is made to one extent, but also talk about the glory of it. And we did get [Bernardo] Bertolucci and [Roman] Polanski and [Francis Ford] Coppola and [Martin] Scorsese to talk to us. And the movie came out really well. People have been very, very flattering about the film.

WS: There’s a constant struggle, isn’t there, between art and commerce? There still is today or is that changing?
BALDWIN: That’s an understatement. The movie business is in a tough place now because it’s like the food business. In order to feed 300 Americans three square meals a day, there are a lot of corners we’ve got to cut. In order to get a mass audience that can help the movie turn a profit, in what is the octopus of the film distribution system today, there’s homogeneity of the product. The movie business is in the potato chip business now—it’s not a nutritious meal.

WS: Hasn’t a lot of the great stuff that used to happen in independent movies moved to television now?
BALDWIN: Everybody says that. [The answer to that question] leads to a long dissertation about the kinds of people that run these companies now and they don’t know anything about films, they don’t even like films. Years ago [Harry] Cohn, [Irving] Thalberg, the Warner brothers, and so forth, were purported to be people who, if they themselves didn’t make films, if they didn’t have that talent, they recognized people that did and they facilitated them. Now the people that run the major studios have no ability whatsoever to make films. They’re in the potato-chip business. They want to get the saltiest, fattest snacks they can and feed them to people and make money.

And independent film struggles with a lot of the economic stresses that used to go into making good films. Let’s say you had a script and you wrote it and they finally agreed to let you direct it, and they get everybody on the hook and they say to you, “Oh we really can’t give you $4 million. We thought we could give you $4 million. You’re going to have to do it for $3 million and cut more corners.” And eventually you’re incapable of making the film you promised yourself as a filmmaker you would make. You see people now, countless people in the independent film world, going off and making a film for the sake of making the film, and that’s the triumph. The triumph is, I got it made! And when it’s done and they screen the film, you sit there and ask, well, what did I make? Was that the film you promised yourself you were going to make? And it’s not, which is where television comes in. Television is faster, you’ve got to move a lot faster. It’s a muscle you have to develop, but people are able to. Terry Winter was a lieutenant of David Chase’s for years on The Sopranos and now he’s got a show of his own, Boardwalk Empire. And don’t think for a minute he isn’t a very happy guy. He’s got his own thing he’s doing. Scorsese was his executive producer. [Other] guys go off and develop Breaking Bad and Matt Weiner has Mad Men. All these people who develop these shows, like Jenji Kohan who did Weeds, [and has also created Orange Is the New Black] they birth these shows and they don’t seem to be any less happy than the people who are successful in the movie business.

WS: 30 Rock was such an amazing show. There was a week of mourning in my family when it ended.
BALDWIN: We were all [in mourning]; it was tough.

WS: How did 30 Rock get away with so much? There were no sacred cows, you lampooned everybody.
BALDWIN: The networks, this is just in my lifetime, have all gone through cycles like this, where they find somebody who has the hot hand. CBS let Norman Lear do what he did [All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons] and they didn’t interfere. NBC let Steven Bochco do what he did [Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue] and Dick Wolf [the Law & Order franchise] and ABC let Aaron Spelling [Starsky and Hutch, Dynasty, Charlie’s Angels] do what he did and spend money and say, we’ve got to do this, and the networks trusted them. And any time you’re with someone who has that kind of juice with the network, who’s your protector, and of course Lorne Michaels [was 30 Rock’s] protector. Lorne is a person who has the ear of the people right at the top. And what Lorne did was say, Tina’s going to go off on this little island of hers with her writing staff and their kind of crazy and funny view of the world and they need to be left alone. I’m sure that 30 Rock would have made more money, it would have been more profitable, and a lot of cuts could have been made if the network had been more intrusive and more customary in the way that they dealt with [writers and producers]. But they didn’t. Lorne protected Tina.

For example, if I’m in a scene with Tina and say, “How was your date?” And she says, “Well, we ended up snowshoeing.” Wham, cut to Tina with some big parka on, huffing and puffing snowshoeing across the floor in the studio in Queens, and they’re blowing dry ice into the ring. Now, other people would have said, isn’t it funny enough just to tell it? But Tina didn’t, she wanted to show it. And that was the thing I always used to just marvel at, was how Tina and company, they shot everything and showed it. And that cost a lot of money. Even for a little interstitial cut like showshoeing, it wound up being three seconds of film of Tina huffing and puffing over the ice fields. And that was Lorne making sure she could do that.

WS: And Jack Donaghy’s infatuation with Bob Ballard [the explorer who found the Titanic and who collaborates with National Geographic]. Is that something that Tina wrote or did you bring that to the story?
BALDWIN: No, no, no! [Laughs] Tina wrote that!

WS: Are you involved in any other television projects?
BALDWIN: I have a development deal with Universal Television to develop shows, but it’s been interesting because NBC needs to go where the ratings are and the ratings are not on sophisticated shows like 30 Rock and The Office and Community anymore. NBC struggled because the shows that are the most successful shows are aimed at a young, male demographic [whose humor is] much more scatological, everything’s much more kind of sexual, and not as clever as Tina. And so what I might wind up doing is working with Universal Cable Productions, they are producing Bates Motel with Vera Farmiga, [and produce shows] that might wind up on Netflix or on a cable station, I hope. So we’ll see.

WS: Besides the many causes you support, you have your podcast. I listen to it often, especially when I prepare for interviews with somebody. The conversations are so in-depth. You even interviewed Joseph Stiglitz [the Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor at Columbia University] my God…
BALDWIN: When [we interviewed] Stiglitz, he had to take a break to go teach a class! He said, come, I can talk to you for 45 minutes, and then I’m going to have to go teach a class and come back. So we sat in his office waiting for him!

WS: How do you decide who to interview and how do you prepare for them?
BALDWIN: I have people that prepare for me. Emily Botein is a veteran producer in radio. To me, though, the most important thing about the podcast is that it works best as the result of nothing that I do. In fact, it works best as the result of something I don’t do—and I’m not always good at this—and that is to shut up and not try to prompt. The podcast thrives due to the fact that we have a conversation for about an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. We’ve had some people in there for an hour and a half. We talk and we talk and about 20 minutes go by and I’m not asking you for anything, I’m not pressuring you for anything. And you start to tell me who you are in your own words. We don’t apply any pressure. Stiglitz and the academics and the writers and so forth are much more information-centric. But for the people that are show business personalities, like David Letterman, Michael Douglas, Kristin Wiig, Rosie O’Donnell, Stacy Keach and David Simon, who did The Wire, Elaine Stritch, Kathleen Turner, on and on and on, or want to reveal more about themselves, when you let them do it in their own way, when you make it seem like you’re not after them and you’re not trying to work [the interview, you get so much more]. When you do the Late Show with David Letterman, or you do Late Night with Jimmy Fallon or The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, those segments are produced within an inch of their lives with the segment producer before you go on. So when I do my podcast I want it to be the opposite of that, which is, we let it breathe and then eventually you start to talk about something that’s very heartfelt to you. And it’s yielded some great dividends for us.