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Compiled by: Jack Foley
Q. Your film has been selected to close the London Film
Festival. Is that an honour for you?
A. Of course. It's a great honour and I love the people
who run this festival; I love Samantha, who I met last night,
and Sandra Hebron. They just give a good feeling to this whole
thing, to me. They just feel like really good people who have
their hearts in it, and really care about putting on a good festival.
And we had good audiences, because the night I came here, I'd
left America - I voted and I got on the plane - and Kerry was
winning, and there was no phones or anything on the plane; I got
off the plane and it said Kerry had lost. So I was kind of shell-shocked.
I first went to a screening of Soldier's Pay, that documentary
we made with my friend, and the audience were really kind of sad,
and we had a Q&A afterwards, and it's kind of good in a way
to be here, with British people.
And I heard some great quotes that I've been emailing back to
the United States, like 'America is becoming the Europe that it
fled', you know, in the sense that it's a more fundamental state.
Q. Where did you get the name Huckabees?
A. My ass! [laughs] I don't know where it came from!
Doesn't it sound like a good name for a store chain. It probably
reminded me of Applebies, I now realise, but don't say that or
I'll be sued.
Q. Is it true that you had a dream and that gave you
the idea for existential detectives?
A. No way! No that's true. I tried to write a movie like
this for 15 years, so the long answer is that in college I had
this guy, Robert Thurman, as my teachers (he's Uma Thurman's dad)
and before that, I had been raised with no spiritual tradition
whatsoever. My mum's a Catholic, my dad's a Jew, and they didn't
want anything to do with anything, so I had kind of my own experiences
as a kid, my own insights, and then at college I met Bob and took
many classes with him, and he was a brilliant scholar, and deeply
unpretentious in a way that many academics are not. He doesn't
make you feel like he's the expert, even though he's an amazing
translator of Chinese sandscript, so Dustin's character is based
on him, in a way. The way he dressed, the suits, the hair and
the accessibility.
And that spirit of Bob suffuses the whole movie, because there's
these esoteric ideas, but there's a great feeling of warmth and
humour about all of it, and that I think is the most important
thing in the whole movie that I share with Professor Thurman.
So I then went to New York and I tried to write something in 1990
that was a short film, the one about the Chinese fortune cookies,
where the guy write insanely personal fortunes by eavesdropping
everybody, and that was kind of an attempt at an existential investigator
who then got involved with their lives.
I got money to make that but I thought I can't make another short
film, because you kill yourself to make every short film, and
I still was working as a bar-tender and had an office job, and
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