I don’t know. You don’t think of it that way. You don’t think of those parts as achievements. You think of the roles you play, the paintings you’ve made. I mean, imagine an actor saying, “I don’t want to go on anymore because I can’t do better than the last movie I made. I might as well quit now.” We’d call that resting on your laurels and I guess you’re not supposed to do that. I’m all for that! You know, resting on your laurels, you get a nice big check, take another profession on… But for some thick reason, I keep wanting to go back and do this stuff.
Yeah, if I find something that I feel I can contribute to in a way, and feel as though I’m in it, I’m saying something – whatever that means. What it means is that I “hold as it were the mirror up to nature,” as Shakespeare says. If I’m expressing something that I feel is a way to exercise my talent and help to communicate a role, a human being in a movie, I will try doing it. I’m not going to say the word “retirement” because it’s kind of a strange word for an artist to say, “retirement.”
But there are artists that have retired. Like Phillip Roth – I did a movie of his book The Humbling. He has quit writing and he’s very happy! So he says. He goes off and does what he does. I can understand that. It gets so routine. You get the script, you’ve got to read the script, you’ve got to learn the script. You have to go through that process again. So, you’re looking for the other things, like a director who wants to use you.
