Marathon Actor Part II: Runner's High

“You have to sometimes find ways to say things without telling the guy it’s awful…I mean, I did ‘The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant’ so I know what that was like. I know what the bottom floor is. I’ve been on it.”

- Bruce Dern

“The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant” (1971) was, more or less, Bruce Dern’s swan song to American International Pictures, the production company responsible for much of the actor’s drive-in theater output in the late 1960s of biker flicks and Roger Corman-directed pulp. The title pretty much sums up the film, featuring Dern as a mad (but very bored looking) scientist with an obsession for creating two-headed animals in his home laboratory. Pat Priest (best known as the normal-looking daughter on “The Munsters”) plays his oblivious wife, and Casey Kasem (host of radio’s “American Top 40” countdown show and the voice of Shaggy in “Scooby-Doo” cartoons) is the doctor’s concerned friend. (Kasem portrayed Bruce Dern’s brother in “The Cycle Savages,” which he also produced.)

“I’m trying to show those doctors, those antiquated old men,” Dern’s demented character declares, “that I am really doing something with my life! That I am giving something of myself to other people!” Then he grafts the head of a homicidal maniac onto the hulking body of a simple-minded handyman, and the evil head gleefully announces, “I’m running this monster, understand?” (The imposing handyman was portrayed by 7-foot 4-inch John Bloom, an accountant when he was “discovered” by Grade Z schlockmeister Al Adamson and cast as Frankenstein’s monster in 1971’s “Dracula vs. Frankenstein.”) In the film’s grim aftermath Kasem wisely intones, “Sometimes too much imagination can destroy a man.”

 

John Bloom, Albert Cole in "The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant" (1971)

Dern would later call “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant” “a real dog shit movie…It was a total whore-out by me just to make the money. I only made $1750, but that was a lot of money to me. I had to get it.” In another interview, he said, “I look on it as a fond memory. It brought me together with my wife (third wife Andrea Bakken). The film was a nightmare to make, but I got married with the money I made…”

In the January 1976 issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, Bruce Dern told actress-fashion designer Tere Tereba, “Since I’ve started to star in pictures I have always managed to retain my singularity of purpose when I got into the business, which was to be an artist, as an actor, more than anything else.”

When asked by Tereba, “When do you think your big break came?...the turning point?” Dern replied, “Well, I don’t think it’s come yet…the beginning I guess was ‘Silent Running’ and the award I got for ‘Drive, He Said’ (the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor). Those two things were probably the beginning of the shape of things to come.”

Douglas Trumbull, the mastermind who supervised the astonishing special effects for director Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” (years before computer-generated imagery became the norm for science-fiction films), made his directing debut in 1972 with the aforementioned “Silent Running.” The script, written by Deric Washburn (who wrote the screenplay for “The Deer Hunter”), Michael Cimino (the writer-director of “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” and the director of “The Deer Hunter”), and Steven Bochco (who would become the successful producer of the TV series “Hill Street Blues,” “L.A. Law,” and “NYPD Blue”), depicts a future when Earth has been completely defoliated. Near the rings of Saturn, a fleet of interplanetary freighters hauls greenhouses protected by huge geodesic domes in hopes of someday reforesting the world.

 

Many scenes aboard the space freighter Valley Forge were filmed
on the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge.

When the four-man crew receives orders to jettison and nuke the domes and return the freighters to commercial service back home, the resident botanist and ecologist, Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), takes drastic measures to ensure the conservation of his treasured charge. In case you don’t get the overt, green message, the otherwise impressive music score by Peter Schickele (popularly known as classical music parodist P.D.Q. Bach) includes a couple of annoying, toes-in-the-dirt, hippie-dippy folk songs by Joan Baez.

Teenager Cheryl Sparks, one of four bilateral amputees recruited
to manipulate the utility droids in "Silent Running"

What ultimately redeems the film, at its heart, is the impassioned performance by Dern as Lowell, and his tender relationship with three pint-sized service drones (played by double amputees), whom Lowell affectionately names Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Critic Vincent Canby of The New York Times called them “sweet-tempered machines, a sort of higher form of Waring Blenders.” Particularly touching is a sequence in which Lowell – wearing a croupier’s visor - programs the scene-stealing robots to play poker with him. Roger Ebert, who called “Silent Running” “a movie out of the ordinary,” noted, “Dern is a very good, subtle actor, who was about the best thing in Jack Nicholson’s directing debut, ‘Drive, He Said.’"

Bruce Dern, director Douglas Trumbull on the set of "Silent Running";
Dern complimented his director, "When he looks through the eyepiece,
he sees something nobody else sees. He sees magic."

One hundred eighty degrees from the nuanced gentleness Dern brought to the role of Freeman Lowell is the unbridled viciousness the actor vented that same year as Asa Watts, the long-haired cattle rustler in “The Cowboys,” starring John Wayne as a Montana cattleman who, abandoned by ranch hands lured by a recent gold rush, resorts to hiring local schoolboys as drovers for the 400-mile cattle drive from Bozeman to Belle Fourche, South Dakota.

The 1972 film was an anomaly for the Duke in the waning years of his career, and life, produced amid one tired formulaic western after another – “The Undefeated,” “Chisum,” “Rio Lobo,” “Big Jake,” “The Train Robbers,” “Cahill, United States Marshal” – each indistinguishable from the other, directed by flunkies who inarguably kowtowed to Wayne’s whim and costarring the Duke’s circle of aging, beefy cronies. The director of “The Cowboys,” Mark Rydell, a former actor who had recently directed Steve McQueen against type in the picaresque slice of Americana, “The Reivers,” was no pushover. John Wayne literally begged Rydell for the starring role in “The Cowboys.”

 

John Wayne poses for a publicity shot with his young costars in "The Cowboys";
Robert Carradine (just to the right of the Duke) made his debut in the 1972 film.

Instead of a Richard Boone, Forrest Tucker, George Kennedy or some other old, familiar saddle pal as an interchangeable nemesis, Wayne is menaced by the singular evil unloosed in Bruce Dern’s inspired characterization of the “vermin-ridden son of a bitch” who terrorizes the boys and ultimately shoots the Duke in the back. Dern was so engulfed in his role that the young actors were literally terrified of him. In a 2006 featurette on the DVD, one of the “cowboys,” now an adult stuntman, told Dern, “You were a scary dude.”

Perhaps in anticipation of his onscreen demise, Wayne purposely laid into Dern in a fight scene. Dern later recalled, “He walloped me bad.” When the time came to film Wayne’s death, the screen legend (with Wild Turkey bourbon on his breath, according to Bruce), whispered to Dern that he was about to become the most hated man in the country. With a toothy grin, Dern replied, “Yeah, but they’ll love me in Berkeley!” Shortly after the movie’s release, Dern received death threats.

Wayne would regard “The Cowboys” as “the greatest experience of my life,” and the role of “Ol’ Iron Pants” remained his favorite. Dern himself would state, “I feel that I was a part of the last great western. That’s what the thrill was to me.”

 

Some of Bruce Dern's most memorable film work has been in westerns: with
Carroll O'Connor in "Waterhole #3" (1967); dispatched by Kirk Douglas to
be gunned down by John Wayne in "The War Wagon" (1967); threatening
Charlton Heston, with Donald Pleasence, in 1968's "Will Penny" (Dern recalled
Heston "tried very hard...'Will Penny' is far and away the best thing he's ever
done"); peering down the business end of Clint Eastwood's sixgun in "Hang
'Em High" (1968); harassed by James Garner in "Support Your Local Sheriff"
(1969); and pursued by Kirk Douglas in "Posse" (1975) .

The last time Bruce Dern spoke to his mother before her death in 1972, she was still trying to convince him to move back to Chicago. “I think I was being groomed to take over the store,” he recalled, meaning Carson Pirie Scott, the department store chain of which Dern’s family owned 51%. “So my mother, she said, ‘Look, give up this foolishness. I’ll put you through law school, you’ll go to Carson’s, maybe do little plays at the Goodman, get this acting thing out of your system.’ I said I was doing movies. She said she couldn’t bring anyone to see anything I had made.”

Not long ago, Chicago Tribune writer Christopher Borrelli commented on Dern’s career: “He lost his head in a movie. Ate a baby. Tried bombing the Super Bowl…He had a knack for playing unhinged.” (Editor’s note: Dern lost his head - and hand - in “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte” and tried to bomb the Super Bowl in “Black Sunday,” but none of his screen characters devoured an infant – that was a joke about his role in “The Incredible Two-Headed Transplanted” in a sketch on “Saturday Night Live.”)

 

Bruce Dern reacts to losing his hand as a jilted suitor in the gothic Grand Guignol
"Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1964), directed by Robert Aldrich and starring
Bette Davis...That's OK, Bruce, it's about to get worse...

Dern’s mother asked hadn’t he shot John Wayne in the back and killed him. “I said, ‘But it’s a movie, mother.’ And she said, ‘Oh, Bruce, your grandfather will never understand.’”

In Interview magazine, Tere Tereba asked Dern, “What kind of roles do you want to play?” He responded, “Multi-dimensional human beings. That’s what I’m interested in.”

In 1973, Bruce Dern costarred with Walter Matthau as homicide inspectors in “The Laughing Policeman,” an Americanization of a novel in the popular series of Martin Beck detective mysteries by Swedish authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, with the filmmakers moving the action from Stockholm to San Francisco. The movie was an attempt by Matthau in the mid-1970s to break free from Neil Simon comedies and, in the words of Roger Ebert, “other vehicles requiring him to shuffle around like an appealing shaggy dog,” a period that also included atypical roles in the crime thrillers “Charley Varrick,” directed by Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry”), and the original “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”

 

Walter Matthau, Bruce Dern in "The Laughing Policeman" (1973)

Directed by Stuart Rosenberg (“Cool Hand Luke”), the complex but savvy screenplay by Thomas Rickman (whose script for 1981’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was nominated for an Oscar) cleverly contrasts Matthau’s sullen, poker-faced restraint with Dern’s bullheaded frustration as reluctant partners. Roger Ebert, who deemed “The Laughing Policeman” “an awfully good police movie: taut, off-key, filled with laconic performances,” praised Dern for being “at his best…a little mean, a little lazy, sadistic on occasion, tough and the perfect counterfoil for Matthau.” A.H. Weiler, in The New York Times, noted, “Mr. Dern’s delineation as (Matthau’s) cynical sidekick, who occasionally messes up procedures with hard-nosed tactics, is…strong and natural.” Ebert summed it up: “Police movies so often depend on sheer escapist action that it’s fun to find a good one.”

Bruce Dern subsequently landed a choice role in “The Great Gatsby,” the 1974 screen version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, a cautionary tale of the American Dream and an ill-fated love affair among the idle (and cruel) rich in the Jazz Age of the 1920s. Dern was cast as Tom Buchanan, the philandering, fiercely jealous millionaire whose wife, Daisy (Mia Farrow), happens to be the lost love of the titular Gatsby (Robert Redford), a reclusive, enigmatic bootlegger-turned-nouveau riche.

Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson, the mistress of Bruce Dern's Tom Buchanan,
in "The Great Gatsby" (1974)

Scripted by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Jack Clayton, a British filmmaker whose sporadic career centered on literary adaptations, including “The Innocents,” an absolutely chilling version of Henry James’ classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, and the nostalgically evocative “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” based on the novel by Ray Bradbury, this opulent, glossy take on Fitzgerald’s classic (it was filmed twice earlier, including a 1926 silent movie and a 1949 production starring Alan Ladd as Gatsby, and was revamped in 3D by filmmaker Baz Luhrmann in 2013 with Leonardo DiCaprio) proved lifeless and overlong for audiences.

For Roger Ebert, Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby “was too substantial, too assured, even too handsome. I saw him as Tom Buchanan, and somebody else as Gatsby (Jack Nicholson, maybe, or Bruce Dern – who plays Tom).”

 

For Rob Edelman, a film professor at the University of Albany and a contributing
editor to critic Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, his favorite Bruce Dern role remains
1975's" Smile," director Michael Ritchie's masterfully subversive satirical
deconstruction of teenage beauty pageants. Edelman cited Dern's "spot-on
performance"as Big Bob Freelander, "a clueless, self-deluded car salesman."

Before Alexander Payne directed him in “Nebraska,” Bruce Dern would describe two filmmakers with whom he had worked as “geniuses.” One was Douglas Trumbull, the director of the aforementioned “Silent Running,” the other was Alfred Hitchcock. Dern had appeared on a couple episodes of the TV series “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” in 1964, the same year he had a small role as an ill-fated sailor in Hitchcock’s feature film “Marnie,” starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.

Bruce Dern comes to a bad end in Hitchcock's "Marnie" (1964).

A dozen years later, Bruce Dern landed a starring role in Hitchcock’s final motion picture, “Family Plot,” after Jack Nicholson turned it down because of scheduling conflicts with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The lighthearted dark comedy concerns two couples – one, a pair of small-time con artists: a phony psychic (Barbara Harris) and her cab driver boyfriend (Dern); the other, sophisticated, professional kidnappers (William Devane and Karen Black) – whose shady exploits come together in a complex game involving a missing heir, past murders, a faked death, and a hidden diamond.

 

Hitchcock and Bruce Dern on-location for "Family Plot" (1976)

“Family Plot” was a box-office disappointment but remains a delightful lark for fans of Hitchcock, who, in the last half-hour of the film, in the words of Roger Ebert, “springs one concealed trap after another, allowing his story to fold in upon itself, to twist and turn, and scare and amuse us with its clockwork irony.”

 

Bruce Dern in "Black Sunday" (1977)

In the late 1970s, Bruce Dern provided two divergent takes on Vietnam War veterans. In “Black Sunday” (1977), directed by John Frankenheimer, a past master of the paranoid political thriller (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “Seven Days in May”), Dern portrays an unhinged vet who was welcomed back to the U.S. after six years as a POW with a court martial and a divorce. As a pilot of blimps for football games, he is easily recruited by a beautiful agent of the Palestinian Black September organization (played by Marthe Keller, Dustin Hoffman’s costar in “Marathon Man”) for a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl game to be attended by the President of the United States. The screenplay was based on the first novel by Thomas Harris, the author who created the notorious character Hannibal Lecter in Red Dragon.

 

Swiss-born Marthe Keller as a Palestinian terrorist in "Black Sunday" 

Robert Shaw stars in “Black Sunday” as a world-weary agent of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, a self-described “old war dog” whose ruthlessness earned him the nickname “The Final Solution.” In the wake of Shaw’s scene-stealing performance as Quint the shark hunter in 1975’s “Jaws,” moviemakers tried to transform the middle-aged, British-born thespian into a Hollywood action hero, with roles in, besides “Black Sunday,” “Swashbuckler,” and “The Deep.” After appearing in 1978’s “Force 10 from Navarone” (Harrison Ford’s first starring role after “Star Wars IV: A New Hope”), Shaw said, “I have it in mind to stop making these big-budget extravaganzas, to change my pattern of life. I wanted to prove, I think, that I could be an international movie star. Now that I’ve done it, I see the valuelessness of it.” Shaw made one more “big-budget extravaganza,” “Avalanche Express,” costarring Lee Marvin, before dying from a massive heart attack in 1978.

 

Fritz Weaver, as an FBI agent, and a bored Robert Shaw, in a bad '70s leisure suit,
save the world in "Black Sunday."

Reviewing “Black Sunday” for the The New York Times, critic Vincent Canby noted, “The film’s best sequence has nothing to do with the action. It’s the quiet recollection by Mr. Dern of his feelings when, as a prisoner of war, he received a snapshot of his wife and children and immediately realized that his wife had taken a lover.” Canby remarked, “Mr. Dern, slimmed down to skeletal proportions, is so convincing as the former prisoner of war…that he effectively reminds us of Mr. Frankenheimer’s best film, ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’”

In “Coming Home” (1978), Bruce Dern plays a gung-ho Marine eager for heroics in Vietnam. While he is overseas, wife Jane Fonda falls in love with paraplegic vet Jon Voight. The romance transforms Fonda’s character from a dutiful, housebound officer’s wife into a liberal-minded, independent woman. Dern’s Marine captain returns from Vietnam, disillusioned by the brutal realities he witnessed there and disheartened by what he finds when he comes home. “I just want to be a hero, that’s all” he laments. “I just want to be a f***ing hero. One day in my life, one moment, I want to go out a hero. That way, I would’ve done something that was mine.”

 

Far more than a polemic against the war, "Coming Home" succeeds as a tender
love story, delicately limned in moments such as this, with Penelope Milford,
Jon Voight, and Jane Fonda.

“Coming Home” was the first feature film for Jane Fonda’s production company, IPC Films (Indochina Peace Campaign). Only six years earlier, Fonda angered American veterans irrevocably by being photographed smiling and sitting on a North Vietnamese Army anti-aircraft gun when she visited Hanoi (below), earning her the derisive nickname “Hanoi Jane.” Not surprisingly, “Coming Home” pretty much wears its anti-war politics on its sleeve. The project was conceived by Fonda, who long had in mind to make a movie about the Vietnam War, inspired by her friendship with Ron Kovic, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran she met at an anti-war rally. Kovic had recently published his memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, which was made into the award-winning film directed by Oliver Stone and starring Tom Cruise.

The lead role of the crippled, bitter vet was initially offered to Jack Nicholson, but he was committed elsewhere. Jane Fonda then tried to interest Al Pacino and Sylvester Stallone, both unsuccessfully. As for his role, Bruce Dern told reporters, “I’ve been so many tortured vets, I would love to have played the Jon Voight role, but no one asked me.” Ironically, Voight was originally cast in the Dern role. Voight later commented that Dern “was absolutely brilliant…I can’t think of anybody who could’ve done it better.”

 

It's difficult to tell which is perplexing Jane Fonda more - Bruce Dern's
thousand-yard stare or his worst-Marine-haircut-in-cinematic-history.
Dern's Bobby Kennedy cut actually contributed to the Marine Corps'
change of policy from  reluctance to agreeing on cooperation for
assistance to movies portraying the Marines in war and peace.

Bruce Dern would recall, “Jane and I were trained by (Lee) Strasberg…We achieved in that movie chances to do things that he taught us at the highest level.” Jane Fonda and Jon Voight won Oscars for their performances, while Dern was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award (the Oscar went to Christopher Walken in “The Deer Hunter,” the other Vietnam movie which also – much to Fonda’s consternation – garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, Michael Cimino).

In the early 1980s, Bruce Dern found himself an unlikely movie star in Canada. First, he starred in the 1980 Canadian-produced romantic comedy “Middle Age Crazy” as a Texas building contractor (specializing in taco stands) whose marriage to Ann-Margret is jeopardized when he confronts a midlife crisis at age 40. (The film was shot on-location in Dallas and Houston, as well as in Toronto.)

 

Dern recalled that one of his toughest scenes to film was having to make love
to Ann-Margret when her husband, actor Roger Smith, showed up on the set of
"Middle Age Crazy": "...I said, 'If I take my shorts off, I'm liable to get an erection
and be rude. And if I don't take my shorts off, I'm saying you don't turn me on."
How was the dilemma resolved? All Bruce would say was, "She is one of the
greatest dames of all time."   

In 1982, Dern starred in “Harry Tracy, Desperado,” a romanticized version of the exploits of the real-life outlaw in the closing years of the Old West. The movie, filmed in British Columbia and Alberta, features Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot as a U.S. marshal in pursuit of Tracy; he also conveniently sings the picture’s love theme. For both “Middle Age Crazy” and “Harry Tracy, Desperado,” Bruce Dern was nominated for a Genie Award (the Canadian equivalent of the Academy Award) for Best Performance by a Foreign Actor. (Yes, in the Great White North, Bruce was considered a foreigner.)

"When the fact becomes legend, print the legend," a character said in director
John Ford's classic 1962 western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"...
And that explains the artistic license filmmakers exercised in the depiction
of Harry Tracy (left), a notoriously short-tempered, homicidal sociopath who
reputedly once rubbed elbows with Butch Cassidy and his gang, hence
the movie's alternate title, "Harry Tracy, The Last of the Wild Bunch."
The Seattle Daily Times reported, "Jesse James, compared with
Tracy, is a Sunday school teacher."

Stateside, Dern’s career suffered a misstep when he starred in the ill-advised “Tattoo” (1981), playing a deranged artist who abducts a model to use her body as his canvas. Maud Adams (twice a Bond girl, in “The Man with the Golden Gun” and “Octopussy”) portrayed the hapless victim. Allegedly, Dern claimed that the film’s sex scene was real, which Adams quickly denied. The twisted screenplay was written by Joyce Bunuel, the daughter-in-law of legendary Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel. This time, Dern was nominated for a Razzie Award as Worst Actor.

 

Admittedly, "Tattoo" was not Bruce Dern's proudest moment...
Nor was this decision, posing with "Tattooo" costar Maud Adams
on the cover of Playgirl magazine and uncovering himself inside.

Back on track was “That Championship Season” (1982), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play by Jason Miller (who directed this film), a powerful ensemble drama, featuring Bruce Dern, Stacy Keach, Martin Sheen, and Paul Sorvino as onetime high school basketball champions whose reunion with their coach (Robert Mitchum) rings hollow when old wounds are exposed and new contentions are sparked. Although the movie was not a success at the box office, Dern won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Paul Sorvino, Stacy Keach, Robert Mitchum, Bruce Dern,
Martin Sheen in "That Championship Season" (1982);
in 1999, Paul Sorvino directed a TV remake of the play,
featuring Vincent D'Onofrio, Tony Shaloub, and Gary Sinise,
with Sorvino as the Coach.

In 1991, David Letterman asked Bruce Dern, perhaps with a little too much hyperbole, why he played some of the most “heinous” people who had ever lived. Dern replied, “I can only tell you that I became an actor because I was interested in what made people do what they do…Whatever character I play lived just beyond where the buses run.” Dern later reflected, “(Letterman) didn’t get it, but the point was that the people I liked to play lived just beyond where everyone else lived. They don’t hear the music that everyone else does, and that makes them interesting.”

By the late 1980s into the 1990s, Bruce Dern’s screen performances had drifted from starring roles to appearances in independent films, along with colorful cameos and guest shots in major motion pictures, including “The ‘burbs,” “Diggstown,” “Wild Bill,” “Mulholland Falls,” “Last Man Standing,” and “The Haunting.” (If you blink, you'll miss Dern's fleeting appearance in director Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained.")

 

Marian Seldes and Bruce Dern as creepy caretakers in "The Haunting" (1999)

In “The Golden Boys” (2008), a wistfully nostalgic romantic comedy set on Cape Cod in 1905, Bruce Dern was teamed with screen veterans David Carradine and Rip Torn as elderly seafarers who compete for the affection of attractive, middle-aged newcomer Mariel Hemingway. The supporting cast of this “Grumpy Old Men” wannabe featured Charles Durning, John Savage, and (in a silent role) Julie Harris.

 

Rip Torn, Bruce Dern, David Carradine in "The Golden Boys" (2008)

Alexander Payne, the director of “Election,” “About Schmidt,” “Sideways,” and “The Descendants,” first met Bruce Dern when he was filming his first feature “Citizen Ruth” (1996), a satirical take on debates over abortion starring Bruce’s daughter, Laura Dern, with Swoosie Kurtz, Mary Kay Place, Kurtwood Smith, Kelly Preston, Burt Reynolds, Tippi Hedren, and Diane Ladd (Laura’s mother). Payne showed Dern Bob Nelson’s script for “Nebraska,” and the actor immediately recognized the plum role for an older actor - Woody Grant, an alcoholic old man determined to travel from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, for a millon-dollar sweepstakes prize he is convinced he has won - little realizing it would take over 15 years to find backers for the project.

“The first day of shooting,” Bruce Dern recalled in a recent interview, “(Alexander Payne) told me, ‘I am your director and this is your cinematographer. Will you do something for us? Let us do our jobs.’ Payne told me that he was sure they could get a magical quality out of my performance as long as I wasn’t trying to show them the emotions of the role but just acted naturally and let them find the emotions.”

 

Bruce Dern, Will Forte in "Nebraska"

“Without a doubt, I have been given good roles in my career,” Dern said. “The remarkable thing about this script was that everything I needed to do the role was on the page. The entire story was there. I didn’t need to add anything extra. No Dern-isms. All I had to do was behave myself and not try to do too much.”

Dern noted, “Alexander told me all I had to do was trust him. I put my arms around him and said, ‘Let’s go and make magic.’ I haven’t felt this way with any other director since maybe Elia Kazan.”

 

Bruce Dern echoed his praise of "Silent Running" director Douglas Trumbull
when he said of Alexander Payne, "When he looks through the eyepiece of a
camera, he sees something no one else sees. He sees magic. And his gift is, he
can explain how and why he sees magic and put it on film."

Bruce Dern once said, “The one thing I’ve hoped for in my career is that people would finally start to realize that I can play. Of course, if I get rewarded for that along the way, well, that’s just more people saying ‘Let’s put the sumbitch on the all-star team this year. He’s played for 55 seasons.’ ‘Nebraska’ might make the playoffs. I’m very sports-oriented in the way I look at it.”

Among the several awards Bruce Dern has already garnered for his performance in “Nebraska” is the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. “Cannes was the biggest win of my career,” he said. “But even bigger was getting the role.” In early January of 2014, Dern was acclaimed as Best Actor in AARP’s The Magazine’s 13^th annual Movies for Grownup Awards.

 

Lovely Laura Dern and dapper dad Bruce at the Cannes Film Festival

At the Golden Globe Awards in January, Dern was nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy but lost to Leonardo DiCaprio, for “The Wolf of Wall Street.” In his acceptance speech, DiCaprio graciously acknowledged his fellow nominee: “And if any young actor wants to follow the filmography of a great artist, take a look at Bruce Dern’s work.”

After “Nebraska,” Bruce Dern stated, “I’m going to play roles people will never forget.”