The Dude abides! Jeff Bridges talked recently about how glad he is that The Big Lebowski became the cult film it is:
“I love that,” he says. “It’s so gratifying because it didn’t do much when it first came out, then it was a bigger hit in Europe and it splashed back over here. I’ve been to one of those festivals. I played it. It was my Beatle moment, playing to a sea of Dudes, screaming and excitement.
“It’s great to have a movie that I loved being a part of, and some people think the Coen brothers, they’re so good at what they do, it must just be like nothing, improvisation. But on that movie, no improvisation. Everything is scripted. They’re very precise. And to have the appreciation that it’s got now, and people study it, it’s great.”
Jeff Bridges may be having his best year yet with all the Oscar talk for Crazy Heart.
Besides Bridges in Tron, I remember being obsessed with him in the movie Starman. I can't even count how many times I've seen that movie. Here's an interesting comment he made about that opening scene as the alien:
So I’d go through my phone book and I’d go, ‘Which friends are in this book that I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out they were an alien?’
Jeff Bridges in Starman“One of those guys was a fellow named Russell Clark who was a dancer and had these interesting movements, so I thought I’d hire him to teach me some dance and kind of approach this thing like a dancer. I felt if I cracked that opening scene, then it would be a process of just becoming more human as the film went on.
“It was almost like imagining that I was somebody in a human body as if it was a ride, not myself. Like I was driving it around. And then it was impersonating. Like you’re sitting like this right now (he indicates the interviewer’s posture), and you’re sitting that way because you’re comfortable. So Starman would see that and rather than knowing why you did it he would do it and it wouldn’t be for the purpose, it would be kind of a bad impersonation.”
Michael Sheen from The Queen
