Paul Giamatti Breaks Down His Career, from 'Big Fat Liar' to 'The Holdovers'

Iconic, the blue pool scene.

That's one of those things

where when you sort of read it in the script,

you don't really process exactly

how long you're gonna have to actually be blue.

That was like weeks I feel like I had to be blue.

[gentle music]

Hello, I'm Paul Giamatti,

and this is the timeline of my career.

[gentle music continues]

Hello, my name is Larry,

and I am very happy to make your acquaintance.

Well, Larry, I'm very happy to make your acquaintance too.

I've never seen the movie, so I have no idea.

I don't think it was the greatest movie in the world.

I don't know if you know this,

it's the first script produced written by Quentin Tarantino.

I remember getting the script and thinking,

That has to be a fake name.

Like, that's the weirdest fake name.

I had this one scene in it and I played a guy

whose father was also his brother.

I was like a stable hand.

And I was really pleased to get the part,

'cause, you know, I got paid scale,

which at that time,

I could live off of that for like two months.

So it was really great.

[Sergeant Hill] German fire now is concentrated

to the westward.

Who's that on the loudspeaker?

That? That's Dagwood Dsseldorf,

our friendly neighborhood morale officer.

There really wasn't a part.

Spielberg would come up to me and be like,

Say this and this.

And I was like, Oh, okay, sure.

And I was having to improvise and I'm like,

I'm a terrible improviser.

But I was like, Okay, whatever you want.

He was kind of making it up with everybody in a way,

but really with me in that scene, as we went along.

Then he had this whole idea.

He's like, I think I want you to fall

through a wall and do all this stuff.

And I was like, Okay,

and I had no idea I was gonna be doing any of this,

so it was great.

They were all really nice guys,

but they had gone through sort of a bootcamp together,

you know, so they were very bonded.

And they would bring in all these day player guys, like me,

and all these people.

It was great and everything,

but I wasn't hanging out with them like at bootcamp.

But it was weird 'cause we had to deal

with the drill instructor guy,

Dale Dye, who's a famous drill instructor.

I remember that guy just screaming at me

when I first got there.

He was like, Don't hold your fucking gun up like that,

it's gonna rain in the barrel.

And I was like, Who the fuck is this guy?

I just was like,

Why is this dude yelling at me all the time?

[Christof] What's he doing in the basement?

He moved down there after Meryl packed up and left.

Peter Weir is an amazing director,

and the audition process was for everybody I think.

You'd go in and he would pretend

to be like a cheesy talk show host.

And you would sit down

and he would improvise the whole audition with you,

and he wanted you to just kind of make up

this sort of life as an actor,

and it was really wild.

And then, he kind of would figure out,

with me at least, and I think the smaller parts,

what he wanted you to do.

It came back to me that he was like,

I have an idea for a guy who runs the control room.

I don't really know what it's gonna be,

but we'll sort of make it up as we go along.

And that's what it was, he was amazing.

They hired Ed Harris who had like a weekend

to work on the part.

And he showed up and he was, you know, he was intimidating,

but he was a really nice guy.

It was like you had to be very on top of your shit with him,

and he was awesome.

And just getting to watch him do some,

he did a whole sort of breakdown thing at one point.

It was just amazing to watch.

[Thade] I promised my niece a pet for her birthday.

Excellent, oh, the little ones make wonderful pets!

Oh, but be sure you get rid of it by puberty.

The one thing you don't want in your house

is a human teenager.

Planet of the Apes was,

yeah, not, I guess very well received,

but I loved playing the ape.

I mean, I worshiped the Planet of the Apes movies

as a kid, so doing it was great.

And Tim Burton, it was a big, huge movie,

but it didn't feel like that.

He made it feel like it was a little indie movie.

He was so engaged with everybody

and all this weird shit that we were doing.

So it felt like just this fun,

weird, little movie we were making.

It was this giant thing

that I guess nobody really cared for,

but I thought it was great

and it was really, really fun to work.

The physicality of the costumes, all that was amazing.

[dramatic music]

[tires squealing]

Oh my god!

Shawn Levy was a friend of mine in college,

so he really wanted to do it with me.

It was basically me and him just making each other laugh.

And the guy who wrote it, John Hamburg,

I'd worked with before too.

So it was just us trying to push the envelope

of how much we could get away with in a kid's movie.

Like, how much of an asshole I could actually be?

It was really fun, it was great.

The kids were great, and it was just stupid, you know?

I mean, I never had that much to do

and he gave me total carte blanche

to do any dumb thing we could think of,

and it was great, it was totally fun.

Iconic, the blue pool scene, yes, indeed.

That's one of those things

where when you sort of read it in the script,

you don't really process exactly

how long you're gonna have to actually be blue.

It was like weeks I feel like I had to be blue.

I only was blue my entire body once,

but the rest of it was my hands and face, like, every day.

It didn't come off my feet for like three months.

My feet were blue for months afterwards.

Hey, Tobe, tell me something...

Can you eat lentils during lent?

I really wanted to play that part and it was a blast.

It was only about 2 1/2 weeks we shot that whole movie,

just shot out of a cannon and we did it really fast.

There was stuff in that,

I mean, I have a whole big monologue

in that where I talk about my name.

And they had no idea what they were gonna do,

so they put me in a thing like this.

And they just sort of messed me around,

They made me walk around, they put me on a turntable.

They just did stuff.

They didn't know what they were gonna do with it.

And then, they handed it to an animator

and these guys were amazing.

This guy, Gary Leib, who's amazing,

and he just came up with all this brilliant stuff.

So that happened a lot with it.

We didn't know what we were gonna do with it.

They didn't know.

And they'd film it, and then just hand it to that guy,

and he did all kinds of amazing things with it.

Do not sabotage me.

If you wanna be fucking lightweight, then that's your call.

But do not sabotage me.

Oh, aye, aye, Captain, you got it.

And if they want to drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot.

No, if anybody orders Merlot, I'm leaving.

I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!

I never thought I would work with Alexander.

I'd always hoped I would work with him.

He's amazing, you know, he's incredibly at ease.

He's incredibly open.

You rehearse, you have a good time.

You don't shoot long days.

He knows what he's doing.

He stands by the camera, there's no monitor.

It's like really congenial and like a family.

And Tom is amazing.

You know, he's even kind of more bizarre

and funny off-camera than he is on.

I mean, he's hilarious, but he has no guardrails off-camera,

and so he's amazing.

When we said that line, I remembered thinking, Why Merlot?

I knew nothing about wine,

and I still know nothing about wine.

And I actually said to Alexander, Why Merlot?

And I think he said,

It was the one that sounded the funniest in the line.

We tried other things, but Merlot was the funniest.

Keep him in front of ya, cut him off, all right?

And let go with the punches, hit him!

He ain't gonna like it.

I guarantee you, the more you hit this bastard,

the slower he's gonna get.

Russell is an amazing guy.

His acting is extraordinary.

He's like a machine.

To act with him, and he loves acting,

and he loves actors and he loves interacting,

and he's just amazing to work with and watch.

You know, and it's not all about him.

He loves to have everybody in it and involved in it.

He knows full well that he's only

as good as the people around him,

and he loves that.

And he worked his ass off in that movie,

it was an insane task he had.

It was these humongous sets that were really complete.

The boxing stuff was especially that way.

I was immersed in a group

of like a couple hundred extras around me.

And then, it was thousands a couple of times.

So the sense that you were always in that world was insane,

sweaty, screaming and all these people around you,

and it was like you were in that world completely.

And we had to improvise all that stuff too,

so it really felt weirdly like a time machine.

May I inform you as well, sir,

that I am in possession of intelligence which confirms

that we are as likely to find the French army

on these shores as we are on the moon!

I got the script, it was like a phone book.

And I read it and I was like,

This is interesting, but this guy's kind of horrible.

Like, you're gonna make this thing about this guy?

They just offered it to me and I was like,

Sure, I'll do it.

The most challenging thing in that was actually

just the sheer volume of what I had to do.

I never shut up and I had to be 40, then 70,

then 35, then 80.

I went through so many makeup changes.

But you were so immersed in the period,

that was super immersive.

It was almost like this method thing by default.

You had no way to get out of this world.

I was there all day long every day.

I had one day off the whole time,

so you were just forced to be the guy.

It was really kind of cool.

You lost sight of any reality outside of the thing.

It was nuts.

The makeup guy gave me, he found online,

some historian had put together from all of his letters

to all these different people,

all of his ailments and everything,

so you did learn a lot about him.

My teeth hurt, I can't sleep,

I have diarrhea, I feel depressed.

It was like he was constantly, so from that,

you actually did learn quite a bit

about what he must have been like.

What catches your fancy here?

Hmm? This boy?

Yes, open your mouth.

Open. Wider.

Look in there.

Never been sick a day in his life.

I thought the script was really amazing.

I still think it's one of the most amazing scripts

I'd ever read.

I knew that writer, John Ridley.

I just thought it was kind of an amazing script

the way it was sort of depicting the subject

in a way that I don't know

that it had been really done before.

Oh, you know, the character was what the character was.

He was a horrible human being.

And the scenes were kind of wild to shoot,

and Steve McQueen was fantastic.

I do remember him saying,

I don't want you to have a southern accent,

because everybody's got a southern accent

and it's almost an easy way to kind of,

he said, I wanna mix it up

so people realize it wasn't just all of those people.

It was all these guys doing this.

You gotta believe in me the way that I believe in you.

The way that I believe in this.

Because you have a unique talent, Eric.

Very special.

Don't around.

I had worked with that director before,

F. Gary Gray, on a movie called The Negotiator,

and so he came back around.

I don't know, I guess he just thought of me to play

that soulless person,

like all the other soulless people I played.

That was a villainous part, that was a tricky part.

They didn't want him to just be a villain,

but it was hard to not make him just a villain in some ways.

But it was a fun part, that was a great movie.

That was another period thing

where you just felt really in it.

And a lot of it, 'cause it was improvised

and those concert scenes and stuff were really fun to do.

It was mayhem, that movie,

Thank you for seeing it this way.

I worried maybe you'd hold a grudge.

[chuckles] Grudge?

No, sir, no.

No, you said it yourself, None of this is personal.

There was a ton of dialogue in that show

and it was difficult dialogue.

It was not easy stuff to memorize.

Not because of the terminology,

actually the sort of sentence structure

and the weird kind of structure of the speeches

and stuff was difficult.

And so we had to spend a lot of time,

I had to spend a lot of time doing, everybody did.

It was just it was dense stuff to memorize.

Drop your credentials at the guard's desk

and get the fuck outta here!

Soulless. [laughs]

He's soulless, that guy's really soulless.

It was a tough character.

I mean, it was a kind of confining,

difficult character in some ways.

So I was okay not having to be in that space

with that guy all the time.

But the show was fun, the people were great,

and it was a great job to have.

So, yeah, but I made a lot of friends, which is nice.

You don't all the time on a movie or even a play,

'cause it's done and gone.

But this went on for years,

so you actually genuinely get close to people

in a really nice way.

Dud, a muse provides inspiration.

The intoxicating riddle that lies at the heart

of every great work.

Sex would only ruin my process.

That's why I haven't ejaculated in 10 years.

That show, the guy who wrote it, Jim Gavin,

it got to me because I was producing stuff,

and I thought it was great, that pilot,

I still think it's great.

And I thought, This guy's got it,

I have to help this guy get this thing made,

'cause I just think it's so great.

And the fact that AMC did it at all,

and then that they did it for two seasons is amazing,

'cause it was weird I suppose.

I mean, I didn't think it was that weird,

but I guess it was.

And I wasn't meant to be in it,

I wasn't meant to be in it at all.

But I did a voice on a audiobook,

the guy listens to these audiobooks on the thing.

And then, the guy thought,

Well, maybe I'll actually have your character appear,

so that was fun.

It was a great character too.

And that is why I have come to the conclusion

that the only way to know the exact date and time

of the end of the world is to provoke it ourselves.

[people murmuring]

Well, that seemed to get your attention, didn't it?

It's by a guy named Alex de la Iglesia,

who's like the big horror maven of Spain,

and I love horror things.

And so, I don't know, he was really into Billions,

so he came to me for the second season.

And I watched the first season,

which I don't know if anybody's seen it,

but it's insane, that show.

It's completely insane.

And I thought, I definitely wanna do this.

And I played the closest

I'll ever get to a Bond villain probably,

and a complete psychopath, and it's really great,

and it ends up in a totally insane place.

But I loved doing that.

Everybody was speaking English to me, which was,

it's more impressive what they were doing

than what I was doing,

was these actors were acting in not their own language

and they were pretty incredible.

And it was tricky with him, the director,

'cause he didn't speak much English,

but he can convey things.

He's very like, Ah, great, great, like that,

so, you know, you're like, Okay, all right, that worked.

Or, he'd go like, No, no, no, no, no, no, like that,

and that's about what he would do for me, as a director.

But I got it, I knew what he wanted to do,

so it was really fun.

[Paul whistling]

Sir, I don't understand.

That's glaringly apparent.

I can't fail this class.

Oh, don't sell yourself short, Mr. Kountze,

I truly believe that you can.

I went to a school like that.

I didn't board there, so I didn't have that experience.

But there was a very specific teacher

I had that I almost kind of had to keep trying

to put out of my mind,

'cause I didn't wanna be too wrapped up

in trying to impersonate him.

But he was very much in that character.

It was weird, 'cause I kept thinking,

I'm not, actually, [chuckles] I'm not working hard enough.

I was like, Well, I'm not doing any work.

I need to be working harder,

because I just kept drawing on memories, you know?

And I felt like, I can't possibly be doing a good job

because I'm not doing anything.

And then, I watched it and I'm like,

Oh, I'm doing plenty, I'm doing plenty.

But, you know, it was weird,

I'd never actually had that experience.

And I think part of the reason he wanted me to do it

was I think he thought

it was gonna spark my imagination effortlessly,

which it did.

[gentle upbeat music]

I think when I was younger I was more like,

Oh, I gotta play that part,

and I gotta play this crazy thing,

and I have to do something like that.

That's gotten less and less true.

And now it's much more about

If I just keep reading the script,

and I'm interested in the story

and different kinds of stories,

and different sorts of movies,

that's actually more interesting to me.

The movie is what's gonna last, not my performances.

It's gonna be the movie.

I mean, performances will help, but it's the movie.

Thank you for having me, Vanity Fair.

I hope you all enjoyed this timeline of my career so far.

[gentle upbeat music]