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Other segments from the episode on December 19, 2003

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, December 19, 2003: Interview with Andre Dubus III; Interview with Ian McKellen.

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DATE December 19, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Author Andre Dubus III discusses his new book, his
writing career and his life
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli.

The new film "House of Sand and Fog" is based on the novel by Andre Dubus III.
He's been described as a remarkable and distinctive writer who is the son of a
remarkable and distinctive writer. His novel "House of Sand and Fog" was
published in 1999. Sadly, the publication coincided with the sudden death of
his father, Andre Dubus, of a heart attack at the age of 62. As you may know,
Dubus Sr. was an award-winning writer who had lost one leg and lost all use
of the other in a freak car accident in 1986. The 2001 film "In the Bedroom"
was based on one of his stories.

In 1999, Terry invited Andre Dubus III to talk with us about his novel and to
share some memories of his father. "House of Sand and Fog" is about two
people from two cultures who lay claim to the same house, which is about all
they possess. Kathy is a house cleaner and recovering drug addict who
inherited her father's home, which she loses by not paying back taxes that she
was charged mistakenly. By the time the error is corrected, Kathy has been
evicted and her home has been sold to an Iranian, a former colonel in the
shah's army. In the movie, he's played by Ben Kingsley. Jennifer Connelly
plays Kathy.

For the colonel, the home represents his chance for regaining the dignity he
feels he and his family have lost as struggling immigrants. The colonel is
ashamed to be working on a highway cleanup crew and at a convenience store.
This passage from the novel will give you a sense of how he sees America. The
colonel is sitting on a bench watching people pass by.

Mr. ANDRE DUBUS III (Author, "House of Sand and Fog"): `I hear the speech of
Orientals, Greeks, Germans and French, but the majority are the more large,
more fed, pink-in-the-face Americans who carry their shopping bags, eating ice
cream cones or drinking sweet sodas from cups as they walk past, their small,
loud children leading them. I sit and I regard these cows, these radishes,
and I again think to myself, "These people do not deserve what they have."

`When I first came to these United States, I expected to see more of the
caliber of men I met in my business dealings in Tehran, the disciplined
gentlemen of the American military, the usually fit and well-dressed
executives of the defense industry; their wives, who were perfect hostesses
in our most lavish homes. And, of course, the films and television programs
imported from here showed to us only successful people. They were all
attractive to the eye, they dressed in latest fashion, they drove new
automobiles and were forever behaving like ladies and gentlemen, even when
sinning against their God.

`But I was quite mistaken, and this became to me clear in only one week of
driving my family up and down this West Coast. Yes, there is more wealth here
than anywhere in the world. Every market has all items well stocked at all
times, and there is Beverly Hills and more places like it. But so many of the
people live in homes not much more colorful than air base housing.
Furthermore, those late nights I have driven back to the pooldar apartment in
Berkeley after working, I have seen in the windows of the pale-blue glow of at
least one television in every home, and I am told that many family meals are
eaten in front of that screen as well. And perhaps this explains the face of
Americans, the eyes that never appear satisfied, at peace with their work, or
the day God has given them. These people have the eyes of very small children
who are forever looking for the next source of distraction, entertainment or a
sweet taste in the mouth. And it's no longer to me a surprise that it is the
recent immigrants who excel in this land: the Orientals, the Greeks and, yes,
the Persians. We know a rich opportunity when we see it.'

TERRY GROSS, host:

I'm wondering how you came up with the way that the colonel sees Americans.

Mr. DUBUS: Well, Terry, I guess I can answer that most honestly by talking a
little bit about my writing process. For me, it's really--I think the whole
reason I do it is because I don't know what I'm doing, and I feel--my
imagination is pulled to a situation or to a sliver of an image or to a
character, and I really write it to find out. And so I based the colonel's
situation on a man I knew. He was the father of a friend of mine from
college, and he was a colonel in the shah's air force, and his life did fall
apart after leaving that corrupt regime. And I had an image in my head. I
was visiting him, and I saw him working two jobs and disguising what he was
doing, hiding that, really, from people in the building where he lived. And,
you know, I was struck by it, and it never left for 15 years. That image of
his sort of sallow-faced body in the elevator with groceries at the end of a
16-hour day stuck with me, and I've never been able to let go of it.

GROSS: But when you said that you watched him disguise what he was doing, the
character in your book does a lot of manual labor, but he dresses in a very
expensive, fine suit to leave the house so people will think he's got a fine
job, and then he changes in a hotel or in a rest room along the way to work
and puts on his working clothes.

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah, I lifted that right from life. But it should be said that
the man who I based this on is not remotely like that, and I discovered a
whole new character. But, yeah; and the writer Alice Munro calls those sorts
of moments `starter dough'...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. DUBUS: ...and then we then bake with all these other ingredients in there
and see what comes out.

GROSS: Well, you know, the colonel, in the passage that you just read, sees
Americans as cows who just take for granted the good things that they have
and, you know, live kind of slothful lives and don't appreciate the important
values. And I wonder what, if anything, you share with his point of view.

Mr. DUBUS: Well, I don't share that view. Well, let me be--is that the
honest thing to say? This is the way to answer it: I once read something by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn that never left my mind about how we Westerners are
lacking in the kind of character that those who've lived under communism and
totalitarian regime are spared. I mean, they're spared this lack of
character; that basically our lives are so easy, we've really been
infantalized, if that's a word, we've been made children and we're lacking the
sort of, I guess, character that people in tougher situations have.

You know, there's a really wonderful essay I teach in my writing classes from
the writer Flannery O'Connor called "The Nature in the Name of Fiction(ph),"
and in it, she says so many brilliant things in this essay. But one of the
things she said is that our beliefs are not what we see, talking about we
writers, but the light by which we see. So that's a real mysterious terrain,
and I don't know where it all leads for me. But I do believe that there might
be something of my own view in there, although it's a lot harsher and more
severe and more--really clearer for the colonel than for me.

GROSS: What inspired the idea of two people who have claim to the same place,
the same house, who both desperately need it?

Mr. DUBUS: Well, you know, I know a lot of writers share this little
technique I have. I get a lot of good story ideas from newspapers,
especially, you know, your local or national news briefs, where they just have
a really scant little paragraph that presents the situation, but gives you no
detail. So your imagination really gets hungry for the detail. And my first
writing class I ever taught was in 1990 at Emerson College, and I had never
taken a writing class and I didn't know how to teach one. So I said, `Well,
I'll get them started the way I started,' so I brought in a newspaper and
pointed to some news sections, and one of them was about a woman in Oakland
who had her house evicted for failure to pay back taxes she did not owe. And
when they admitted their mistake, the county who had evicted her, they already
sold it, and now the man who had bought it legally didn't have to give it
back. That was actually in the newspaper clipping. And I told my students,
`One of you guys should write about this. This is pretty interesting.' And
nobody did, but it never left my imagination, either. But after finishing my
second book three years later, I started to write myself into that.

But it didn't come together, Terry, until--I had been trying to write about
the colonel's situation for years, too, and I thought, `Well, maybe it will
just be a poem about a guy in an elevator. I mean, maybe it'll be a short
essay. I don't know what it'll be. It doesn't seem to want to be fiction.'
But then I actually noticed in the newspaper clipping that I had kept that the
man who bought the house had a Middle Eastern name, and while I think it was
probably Arabic and not Iranian, it did get me--you know, the writer lightbulb
went off and I thought, `Well, what if my colonel bought that house?' and then
it just took off and, you know, four years later, it was done.

GROSS: The point of view in your novel keeps shifting between the colonel and
Kathy, and so you're writing in each of their first-person voices. And this
requires you writing in the character of two people who are very different
from you, and you're doing this at a time when some people get very angry if
they think a writer is presuming that he or she is capable of understanding
someone who is of a different race or ethnic group or gender. And I'm
wondering if...

Mr. DUBUS: I'm so glad you're bringing this up.

GROSS: I'm wondering if you feel that this is a loaded time to be writing in
the voices of an Iranian colonel and a woman.

Mr. DUBUS: Especially when I'm a white guy?

GROSS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I know. I...

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah. Yeah. I think--yes, it is a loaded time...

GROSS: Well, that's the way it usually goes, right, that white guys aren't
allowed to do this?

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah, yeah.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. DUBUS: I know. And I completely--I think I understand the intent behind
the anger behind all of this. And while I completely--and with that
anger--and we're looking at, you know, thousands of years of patriarchy and
imperialism and genocide, and that's what's actually caused this anger, and
I'm no small audience. I mean, I listen to that and share in that rage,
actually. But the fact is I think culturally we are deeply misled when we
begin to go after writers who are doing this. The fact of the matter is it is
our job. It's not just an interesting thing to do, it's the very job
description of the writer, is to imagine the lives of others. And I think the
writer Rosellen Brown really put this all to rest for me. She articulated it
really well, I think. She said that, you know, when the writer puts him or
herself in the shoes of the other, you know--for instance, of a white male
writing from the point of view of a dark-skinned man or a woman, etc.--that
far from--this is not an act of colonialism. Actually, because it's an act of
empathy, it's inherently an act of friendship. Now the danger, of course, is
that the writer can fall flat on his or her face and get it completely wrong.
And I think that's where the risk should lie. I mean, we should be able to
take that risk and we should--you know, oftentimes we fail. But nothing
risked, nothing gained.

I truly believe that the imagination is huge, and if I get on my little high
horse for a second, I do think that we live in a time that's suspicious of the
imagination. I mean, I think that's why TV talk shows are so big, and I think
that's why memoir is so big and I think that's why true-life crime shows are
so big. I don't know what's going on, but somehow we don't trust the
imaginative work as much as we did even 20 years ago when I was in college.

GROSS: You teach. Do you find that to be true with students also?

Mr. DUBUS: Mm-hmm. I do. Oh, especially, well, younger ones, those 18, 19,
20 years old who, you know, are wonderful young people. You know, there's all
sorts of hope for the future from my little vantage point in classrooms every
semester. But I do think that we have been shaped by that tube in all of our
homes, and I think maybe that did come out in the Iranian's point of view.
But, you know, that television, I think, has done a number on us in ways that
I can't even put my finger on yet. But there is this impatience I'm seeing
with 19-year-olds who I teach to get to the heart of it, to get to it, to get
to it, to get to it. And `it' isn't necessarily an imaginal, textural
experience so much as `Gimme the facts, gimme the numbers, gimme the bottom
line, gimme the "it,"' and it's kind of a drive-thru, drive-by way of looking
at it.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: The express line.

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah, you know, they're products of this time, and they're
wonderful young people, but it is different from just when I was in school in
the late '70s. I feel a real difference.

GROSS: In understanding the lives of your characters, does it help that
you've done a lot of different things so far in the course of your life?
You've held, for instance, a lot of different jobs, from housecleaning to
bounty hunter.

Mr. DUBUS: Mm. Weird, huh? Yeah. That bounty-hunter thing was a
one-weekend job. Throughout my 20s, I roamed; I didn't know what I wanted to
do. I got a degree in general liberal arts and then just fled and just roamed
the country. And I began to write early on, and I had a hunch that was part
of what I was going to be doing. But I was also interested in acting, and I
just felt this vague sort of passionate need to experience, and I don't think
I kept a job more than six months, which is why I did so many things in the
course of about eight or nine years.

But yet, to answer your question, I think it's absolutely helped. I did go to
Mexico to look for a killer, you know, for some law-enforcement agencies, but,
you know, I was 22 and, I think, just chasing adventure. But again, if I can
quote Flannery O'Connor, whose work I really admire and this essay I teach all
the time--she says that the job of the writer is not to be immersed in
experience but to contemplate it, to reflect upon it, and I think that's right
on, that the imagination really--you don't have to leave your back yard to
write great things. And so while--but it doesn't hurt. Short answer is it
can never hurt. It's good work if you can get it, but you don't--I guess I
get nervous when 19-, 20-, 30-year-old, even, writers think they have to go to
the barroom and, you know, get stabbed to have something to write about. No,
you don't. No, you don't.

GROSS: Well, that said, tell me something about that weekend you were a
bounty hunter.

Mr. DUBUS: Well, I was working with a private investigator. We were working
corrections together. I was his assistant and I was running the show
sometimes and we went off on these trips. He's a very interesting guy. He
was really a healer, and he would heal people he worked on, so he would turn
them in to authorities and then do counseling on them and heal them. It was a
really fascinating situation. But we were tracking down--I have to stay
really vague about this out of safety for myself and my family, but we were
tracking down a guy who was very dangerous, and I had a fake name, a
pseudonym, and we went to a lot of gay bars in Mexico looking for him. And I
was 22 years old and naive, and I got a real eye-opening experience about that
subculture and spent a lot of time going to gay bars trying not to feel
self-conscious. I thought I was a young white male, but I was getting so much
big manly male attention, it confused me. I--`Well, what is it about me
that'--you know, people do that.

So for me, it was less frightening in terms of guns and knives and killings,
which was all afoot. It was more frightening about all the homosexual stuff.
You know, I was 22 and repressed. So it was an interesting experience and
actually very moving because I saw poverty like I'd never seen. You know, I
grew up in, you know, some, you know, fairly depressed areas in the Northeast,
mill towns. And, you know, I thought I grew up in some tough, well, you know,
neighborhoods and, really, they don't even come close to the poverty of,
quote, unquote, "Third World places," and that really affected me. I saw some
really devastating families--devastated families, actually.

BIANCULLI: Andre Dubus III speaking with Terry Gross in 1999. His novel
"House of Sand and Fog" has just been made into a movie. We'll continue after
a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's interview with novelist Andre Dubus III.
She spoke with him in 1999, shortly after his father's death.

GROSS: I was very sorry to hear about the death of your father recently. Had
he been sick, or was this just an out-of-the-blue thing?

Mr. DUBUS: No. No, it was just one of those terrible sudden deaths, you
know--as you know, because if you interviewed him over the years, he was in a
wheelchair the last 12 1/2 years of his life, and that's not easy on anybody.
But, you know, that notwithstanding, he was in pretty good physical shape, you
know. My brother and his partner had built a really long, straight ramp from
his house just in the last few months, and my father did sprints on it in his
wheelchair. In the summer, he swam laps in his pool. He shadow-boxed and
lifted weights. I mean, he took relatively good care of himself. So, you
know, he was 62, and we didn't--you know, it was a shock. He got in the
shower and had a heart attack and died.

GROSS: I understand that in his papers, he'd asked that you build his coffin,
and one of the many things you do is you're a carpenter. What was your
reaction when you found that out?

Mr. DUBUS: Well, it was not in his will at all. It actually came--my brother
and I were busting his chops over, frankly, the last story he'd ever written
called "Sisters." It's a Western, and in the Western, the hero built a coffin
for a man and digs the grave and does it all in about three and a half hours.
And my father was a master writer, but he'd never worked with his hands, and
my brother and I have always done this kind of work, and we really gave him
grief for that, because there ain't no way you can build a box that can hold a
200-pound man in three hours, let alone with hand tools, and then dig a hole
around trees with roots.

So we really gave him, you know, a lot of heat for that, and were having fun
doing it, out on his deck this past summer. And he said, `Well, when you
build my coffin, you can take all the time you want, and I want it to be
straight pine.' Then we got into the discussion here, and he said, `And I want
to be buried on my land,' and so that was just, you know, this past summer,
and from busting his chops. And so I was on this book tour for this novel
when I heard, in San Francisco, and all I wanted to do was get back and hug my
children and then go find my brother and build the coffin.

And we did, we gathered at the lumber store, my brother Jeb and me, and we
designed it, you know, through tears, and it was really such a stark
experience; and then bought the wood, spent about an hour picking it out, out
in the lumber yard where we'd been for years on jobs. Went to the shop, and
from about 5 at night to 9 in the morning, we built my dad's coffin out of
pine, and--Oh!--it was a beautiful night, though, I have to say. You know,
it'd be like on a job, you know. We'd say, `Come on, what kind of router is
that? What kind of a, you know, dado is that? Give me a router; let me show
you how to do it.' And then--you know, this masculine sparring. And then
we'd be hugging each other and crying, and then we'd be ripping a piece of
wood on the table saw and laughing and crying. And then there'd be these long
moments of stillness and quiet.

Over the course of the night, his friends would come by, you know, his
long-time agent and friend Philip Spitzer and his brother, Michael, came with
his family, and they just came and were there and took some pieces of wood
with them when they left. And one of my father's priests came by about 3 in
the morning and helped us sand, and some friends came at dawn with beer and
sandwiches; we took a break.

And when it was finally done, I lay in the coffin and had them shut it so I
could feel what it was like. I was also, honestly, testing to see if the lid
was the right height and there was enough curve to it. And then we dug the
grave because we ended up buying a plot of land a half a mile from my dad's
house, and the farmer who we bought it from said that she hired her hands to
dig it by shovel--she didn't have a backhoe--and when we heard that, we said,
`Well, no, we'll be happy to dig it. If anyone's going to be digging this
grave by hand, it'll be his sons.'

And so my brother Jeb and I, and our good friend Bill Cantwell, who was like a
third son to my father, we dug the grave. And the funny thing is it took
eight hours, so building the coffin with power tools took two men about 12
hours, and digging the grave with three men took eight hours, so the veracity
of that detail was off in that story.

GROSS: So you were right to criticize your father.

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah! He'd need to redo that one.

GROSS: Did he, by the way, redo it?

Mr. DUBUS: No, he didn't.

GROSS: Did he change that?

Mr. DUBUS: He said, `No, well, then, there was sand near those roots and he
happened to have the tools.' You know, he exercised--he was so far along in
the craft, he was such a master, he said, `Hey, screw it. This is called
poetic license.' I don't know if he said that, but that's essentially what he
did. He just put down the big staff and said, `Poetic license. Move on.'

BIANCULLI: Andre Dubus III, speaking with Terry Gross in 1999. His novel,
"House of Sand and Fog," has just been made into a movie. We'll hear more of
their conversation in the second half of the show.

I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli.

Let's get back to Terry's 1999 interview with Andrew Dubus III. His novel,
"House of Sand and Fog," has just been made into a movie starring Ben Kingsley
and Jennifer Connelly. The publication of that novel coincided with the death
of his father, the award-winning writer Andre Dubus, of a heart attack at age
62.

GROSS: Your father had been a Marine, and from what I recall of one of our
interviews, that was really important to him and seemed to be an inspiration
to him during his period of recovery...

Mr. DUBUS: Mm, that's true.

GROSS: ...especially early on. And I don't think that's an experience you
had, and I'm wondering if you could think that that was a fundamental
difference as well, if there's anything that you wished you'd had of that
Marine experience.

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah. I mean, I remember being 19 at the University of Texas and
seeing the boys in dress blues and wanting to jump in and do it because I was
a real athletic kid and wanted to be tested in that way. At the same time, I
was gaining political consciousness and knew that Marines were being used,
frankly, for corporate gain. You know, nothing against the Marines; it wasn't
their fault. So I was politicized and couldn't just leap in like that. But
the fact is--well, I have--this is not an issue for me with the difference
between my father and I in our experience. He used to always say that my
Marines was my bar fighting, and I have to put that in context because, boy, I
can sound like a real blowhard talking about bar fighting, and reactionary.

But I do think that men in this culture, especially in working-class
neighborhoods, have to fight like dogs, often. And I grew up in that area,
and at 15 or 16, began to fight back after not fighting back for years and
fought for a long time. And it became a real problem, I mean, to the point
where--I mean, I was never a bully and I never started fights with anyone who
didn't deserve to have a fight started; usually I'd kind of walk into someone
who was beating up his girlfriend and punch him, and it was a weird,
self-destructive eight or nine years.

But I had my own demons with masculinity. I know that my father has written
about this and talked about this at length, that he joined the Marines because
he didn't feel masculine enough, and he felt he had to prove something to his
father, who I never had the pleasure of knowing. And, you know, I think it
was very soon after his own father's death that my father quit the Marines.

But, see, one thing the old man did for me is never left me feeling that I
wasn't a man already. I judged myself as being--needing some strengthening
and I needed to be more of a man. But I guess the long answer is I do think
every--what you seem to be asking, Terry, is was there a rite of passage for
me? Is that right?

GROSS: Sure. Yeah. And I guess I'm also wondering...

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah.

GROSS: ...what the transition was between not fighting back and fighting
back.

Mr. DUBUS: A terrible event. You know, just like a lot of kids, I was a new
kid in town for years. I think I went to about 14 schools before I got out of
high school, and--you know, as did my brother and sisters--and that's a hard
life for a kid. And a lot of the neighborhoods were tough neighborhoods, and
so for years, I just hibernated and hid inside my house. And my brother was
beaten up very badly by a military policeman in the street, with a whole bunch
of people watching, one day, and I didn't do anything about it, and something
just--I was 15 years old, and my self-hatred got to such a level I couldn't
endure it any longer. I would really rather be stabbed or shot than not fight
again, and something really snapped, and I went on a rampage for about 10
years.

By rampage--that's not the right word. I began to lift weights and take care
of myself and stop eating Twinkies and drinking Coke, and I stopped doing
drugs, which I was doing a lot of in the early '70s as a young teen, and
cleaned up my act, and really started working on my body and then worked on
self-defense, and was surprised that I actually had boxing ability. And then
I sort of set out to exercise that part of my life, and I put myself in
situations, usually barrooms, where there was always an opportunity to prove
whether or not I had what I was hoping I had, which is the ability to fight
when I was afraid, and which is, I think, at the core of us all the time. I
think we're always afraid. I was always afraid.

And so, you know, I would wait until some guy hit his wife or pushed a little
guy down or was just being inappropriate, then I would step in and say
something like, you know, `Hi. Can I have a glass of milk?', something to get
him to insult me, and then I would go at it. It's terrible. I mean--but this
was 15 years ago, and it's something I had to do early in my life.

And in direct answer to your question about the Marines, I think it was my--I
had to build a little rite of passage--not little; it was very significant for
me and very frightening--and I had to design one on my own. And the problem
is once you learn to break that membrane, the sort of psychic membrane between
your fist and somebody's face, it's sort of something you have in your
toolbox, which is a dangerous thing to have...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. DUBUS: ...and it's important to learn, you know, to love actively without
using that.

GROSS: When your father was alive, did you show each other your writing
before it was published?

Mr. DUBUS: Yes, we did. Absolutely.

GROSS: And were you honest with each other? You know, it's hard sometimes
when you're really close to someone and they give you their work if there's
something that you don't think works, it could be hard to be honest because...

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah.

GROSS: ...you know.

Mr. DUBUS: It really is hard to be honest. Well, you know, honestly, there
was very little my father gave me of his that I could say anything but, `Wow,
Dad.'

GROSS: Right.

Mr. DUBUS: `Pretty great. Can I go hide now and curl up in a ball
somewhere?' You know, I mean, honestly, out of the 80, 90--I have to count
now how many stories he wrote and published; I think it was close to 100 in
his lifetime, in his career--there was one little story I didn't like, and I
told him right off, and he wrote it on the plane on the way down to a reading,
and it read like it to me, and it got up into one of this books. And I said,
`Dad, that one just doesn't work.'

But he always told me as well. But after a while, I didn't trust him because
he was so effusive about my work, he believed in it so much more than I ever
believed in my own, that I thought--Oh, and also, I became a father, you know.
Come on. I want to show people my son's poop, you know, whatever. You know,
`Oh, look how cute that little spit is at the corner of his lip.' When I
became a father, I really stopped believing him, although, you know, it's
probably unfair to him, but I thought, `Come on. He loves me. He's not going
to tell me this is a contrived piece of crap I have to write over,' you know.

But we did. We showed each other after--over the years, I've been defensive
because people have assumed with the same name and having--you know, that my
father was a writer that, you know, he helped me. Well, no, he didn't. He
helped me afterwards. If I had a draft done I'd show it to him and show it to
my wife and a couple of friends of mine whose opinion I respected, my agent.
But it was always after the fact, and more so from a just--I'd been always a
fairly private, independent little guy and, you know, a Virgo, so I never
showed him till I was done.

GROSS: I think one of the real dilemmas writers have, even fiction writers,
is that if they're basing a character on someone who they know, and who
they're close to, and that person recognizes themself in the story, that even
if that person is transformed a lot in the fiction, a person could still be
offended if they feel that they've been mischaracterized or described in a
negative way.

Mr. DUBUS: Mm.

GROSS: And I figure since your father was a writer, you might have been very
sensitive to that because there might have been characters in stories who were
loosely modeled on you, and you might have been sensitive about that yourself.
I don't know.

Mr. DUBUS: Yeah. Well, it's a good question. I was, and I do think it's the
obstacle and challenge of so many writers that we--and, you know, back to this
point about imagination being somehow under siege right now in late
20th-century America, in my opinion, is, I think--I see that with writers with
whom I work, who will stop cold in their tracks a perfectly wonderful story
because they're afraid of how their dead mother will read it over their
shoulder, and that's a completely understandable fear. But I do think that
the art has to go past that, and that the truth has to be illuminated in
whatever way. And also the fact, as you said, they are transformed. This is
no longer your mother. This is no longer your father. You know, you based
all those physical features on your living daughter, but because now it is in
a work of literature and not life, it is no longer her. This alchemy occurs.

My father did a very generous thing when I first began writing and publishing
when I was 22. I sold my first story, and he called me--I was in Colorado at
the time--and was just so generous and so loving, and said, `Listen, you know,
you're going to be a writer whether you think you are or not'--and frankly,
for 10 more years I wasn't calling myself that and I didn't think that's where
I was going--and he said, `Just don't do what I did. Don't wait until we're
dead before you write about us.' He said, `Feel free to do it now.'

And I thought that was a really brave and generous, kind thing to say, and I
took him up on it. About a year later, I wrote a story about--based on the
day when my father left my family in divorce, and there was a scene there with
the girl based on my little sister. And in the scene, she cries a little bit.
I think I had phrased, `She cried a little bit, too.' My father, after
reading the manuscript, said, `Well, she cried a lot, actually. And when I
said to feel free to write about us, I didn't mean to take me up on it right
now.' But, you know, yeah.

GROSS: So was...

Mr. DUBUS: That happens.

GROSS: Was he truly sorry that you had done it?

Mr. DUBUS: No. He was--it just brought up--it was painful for him, and
painful for me, and--but, no, he just put it in its place and gave me a hug
and said it was a good story and sent it out.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. I really
appreciate it.

Mr. DUBUS: Well, thank you, I appreciate you having me on.

BIANCULLI: Andre Dubus III, speaking with Terry Gross in 1999. His novel,
"House of Sand and Fog," has just been made into a movie.

Coming up--and coming out--Sir Ian McKellen.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Sir Ian McKellen discusses his acting career and his
coming out to become a gay activist
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

Thirty-four point one million dollars: That was the opening-day box office
total for the final installment in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which came
to theaters earlier this week.

(Soundbite of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King")

BILLY BOYD (as Pippin):: It's so quiet.

Sir IAN McKELLEN: (As Gandalf) It's the deep breaths before the plunge.

BILLY BOYD (as Pippin): I don't want to be in a battle, but waiting on the edge
of one I can't escape is even worse. Is there any hope, Gandalf, for Frodo
and Sam?

Sir IAN: (As Gandalf) There never was much hope, just a fool's hope.

BIANCULLI: Before Ian McKellen donned his robes as Gandalf the wizard in "The
Lord of the Rings" film trilogy, he was already celebrated, especially in his
native England, as one of the most versatile and gifted actors of his
generation. Most of McKellen's work has been on the British stage in
classical theater. His best-known stage role in America was as Salieri in the
original Broadway production of "Amadeus." His film work, prior to his role
in the blockbuster "Lord of the Rings" series, consisted mainly of roles in
smaller films, such as "Scandal," "And the Band Played On," "Six Degrees of
Separation" and "Gods and Monsters."

Fifteen years ago, at the age of 49, McKellen publicly came out. It was in
part a reaction against an English law passed in 1988 prohibiting the
publication of materials that promoted homosexuality. McKellen was knighted
three years after coming out.

When Terry spoke with Ian McKellen in 1994, she asked him if he was surprised
to be knighted.

Sir IAN: Yes, frankly, I was. I think I was the first openly gay person to
receive an honor in Britain, and I took that as a slightly hopeful sign that
maybe the world was beginning to grow up at last. And I was happy to accept
it as an actor because it put me, nominally, at least, in the company of
people I'd admired all my life, like Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud
and so on, but as an activist, which by that time I was, I knew in
class-conscious Britain to be a knight was a very useful handle, and it meant
that certain doors would open because I'd have some social clout, and so it's
proved. And it just means that government ministers, people right up at that
level, are much more likely to answer a letter personally if it's on paper
which is headed `Sir Ian McKellen' than one that just comes from that actor,
Johnny, who I don't really know who he is. It just changed that attitude
subtly but crucially, I've found.

TERRY GROSS, host:

What were your big fears about coming out, and did any of them come true?

Sir IAN: I think what had always been a barrier to my coming out was the
sense that no one would cast me, for example, as Romeo, if they knew that in
my private life it was Mercutio I fancied rather than Juliet. And that is--I
know a lot of actors feel that if their audiences were to know that they were
gay, that somehow it would limit their possibilities of work. That really
hasn't proved the case to me, but I'm 49. I was well-established and, in
fact, I had more work than ever, particularly in films, playing what I always
have done, heterosexual as well as homosexual. So if that was the fear, it
was, in my case, an ungrounded one.

But the real fear was nothing to do with my career at all. It was, as I've
been saying, the great pressure that's put on gays and lesbians whatever job
they do, to keep quiet or shut up and go away, and stay tight shut in the
closet, and it takes a great deal of will to realize that you're taking on the
world by coming out.

GROSS: Do you think it affected your acting at all to have something very
important and very personal that you had to hide from so many people?

Sir IAN: It's difficult for me to assess, but critics and friends say that I
am a better actor. One of the reasons I became an actor was feeling inhibited
about expressing that part of myself, my sexuality, in public and private,
quite openly. I was able onstage to indulge my passions and be very open
about them and draw attention to them, and that's why I think so many lesbians
and gay people who are closeted privately are, onstage, extremely passionate.
And I suppose, therefore, that it might have been that when I reached the
stage in which I was open about this very important part of myself, there
would be no need for me to be an actor anymore, personally, and I think
actually that is true. I find as much satisfaction from my work as an
activist and my getting close to the power structure in the United Kingdom to
the extent of being able just to add my weight to changing those laws which
discriminate against me and other people. That, to me, is as rewarding as any
performing I've done on the public stage.

However, I mustn't stop acting because it's only actually as a gay actor that
I think I can be effective as a gay activist. I don't want to become a
full-time politician; and actually, I'm so at ease with myself now, and that
is the big advantage of coming out. There is nothing I'm frightened of
anymore, but, of course, my acting has got to have improved because I'm
prepared to go into every corner of my nature and my personality and apply it
and put it at the service of whatever fictional character I'm playing.

GROSS: You grew up in small towns in England, and I believe your first
exposure to the theater was traveling theater groups. What were they like?

Sir IAN: I was a theater-goer long before I was an actor and long before I
intended to be a professional actor, and I was very lucky to see a wide
variety of theater. I saw John Gielgud on tour playing "King Lear." I used
to go down to Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1950s and see the great actors,
Olivier, Charles Laughton, Paul Robeson, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, in
Shakespeare. I used to see variety theater, vaudeville, which was still just
standing up in England in the '40s and '50s, and in very close quarters,
sometimes, backstage, I used to visit these artists of various sorts, whether
they were animal acts, conjurers, comedians, singers. And that world of
stand-up comic has, I think, affected my interest in doing my own solo show,
and some of it deliberately uses the techniques of those people who perhaps I
admire more than any other sort of performer who can bravely stand on an open
stage and entertain 1,000 or 2,000 people for a couple of hours. I think
people who do that regularly for a living, and for whom most of their material
is designed to make an audience laugh, must be the most exposing experience a
performer can have, and those who bring it off, I think, have my admiration
more than any others.

GROSS: So you had the courage when you were young to go backstage and meet
the people who were performing?

Sir IAN: Well, I was very lucky. My father knew a man who owned the theater,
and that's how it happened. And so at a very early age, I was intrigued with
the glamour of that secret which performers have, that they know what goes on
backstage and they create what goes on onstage. And then they step out of the
darkness into the light, something magical happens, you know, the henpecked
husband suddenly becomes the man of total confidence. The slightly dowdy
person dressed up in sequins and a bit of makeup on their face suddenly
onstage becomes the most glamorous person in the world. And I wonder now,
looking back, whether that didn't appeal to me because I was in the dark world
of being gay, and yet onstage I was able to step out into the light on my own
terms and attract the audience's attention and approval.

GROSS: When you came to the classical theater from small towns in England,
were there things you had to change about yourself for the theater, things
that neither your carriage or your diction...

Sir IAN: Yes. It's, to me, a fascinating study that perhaps one day I should
try and formalize into a book or something, but theater acting--any acting--is
about disguise, and at the same time, it is about absolute honesty. The
characters one plays are not oneself, but they have within them aspects of
oneself, and you're only ever going to be convincing as, let's say, Macbeth if
you examine that part of your nature which is so ambitious that you would be
prepared to commit murder for your own self-advancement. You have to be able
to imagine what that would be like and, therefore, look deep, deep into
yourself.

Now that is being extremely honest in a way that most people are not required
to be honest in their work, and at the same time, you are disguising because
you are not Macbeth, nor do you speak in blank verse, which he does. And when
I was a young man, I thought as an actor it would be limiting to be vocally,
for instance, identifiable as someone from the north of England, so I got rid
of my northern accent to a great extent and spoke received pronunciation
English. And I rather regret I did that because I think probably on the whole
there's no need to do it. An actor should have two sort of accents, perhaps,
their own, their native one, and then something of a more general nature which
they can use where it's applicable. But when I started out acting, I thought
all actors should only speak with a bland received pronunciation.

BIANCULLI: Sir Ian McKellen, speaking with Terry Gross in 1994. He stars as
Gandalf in the latest and last "Lord of the Rings" movie, "The Return of the
King."

We'll continue after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's interview with Sir Ian McKellen. She
spoke to him in 1994 when he was known primarily for his stage work.

GROSS: I'd like to talk with you about your acting career. First of all, you
really haven't done many movies. Most of your career has been on the stage,
mostly the English stage, but some on Broadway as well, in "Amadeus," for
instance. Has it been a conscious choice to not do movies, or is that
something you would have liked to do more of?

Sir IAN: Thank you. That's a very kind and discreet way of putting it. I've
spent my life trying to get into movies, and here I am. The trouble is with
acting in the theater--and it's about the only disadvantage--is that it does
cut you off from a great many other things, including a stable family life, I
must say. I mean, it's absolutely absorbing, and it's almost a 24-hour job,
and long contracts and long runs make it very, very difficult to suddenly at
the last minute nip off and do movies, which, on the whole, are cast at the
last minute and you're not given much warning. And the only way to really try
and have an established movie career, it seems to me, is to refuse to do the
theater for a spell. And rather late in the day, that's what I decided to do
after I'd finished the United States tour of "Richard III." When we landed up
in Los Angeles, I said, `Right, that's it.'

Of late in the theater, I've been increasingly working in small theaters. I
suppose that all began when I did "Macbeth" for The Royal Shakespeare Company
in 1978 in a very small theater, indeed; perhaps 120 people scattered around a
circular stage area. And since then, I've realized that that's really how I
like to work; and film is an extension, of course, because that's a more
intimate form of acting still.

GROSS: So what are you having to learn, doing more movies?

Sir IAN: I'm not having to learn in the extent of unlearn bad habits. That's
not the point. Acting in the theater is a question of selecting what you want
the audience to receive because an audience sitting a long way away in the
balcony will depend on very clear messages from the stage in gesture and in
exaggerated body language and vocal technique. They need to have the
character presented to them. I'm more interested in having that relationship
where an audience selects for themselves from what is on offer, and that means
they have to be very close. They have to be able to see the flicker of the
eye, they have to be able to see the thought behind the face and the body, and
that means that in front of the camera, I don't select, I just exist. I am,
and that is a different technique of acting, though, of course, the process of
preparing for it is very much like what you go through when you're rehearsing
for a play.

GROSS: Sir Ian McKellen, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

Sir IAN: Thank you.

BIANCULLI: Sir Ian McKellen, star of the new "Lord of the Rings" movie, "The
Return of the King."

McKellen was knighted for his stage and film work, which includes, on
Broadway, the role of Salieri in "Amadeus." He also appeared in the movies
"Scandal," "And the Band Played On," "Gods and Monsters," the "X-Men" and, a
few weeks ago, played himself in cartoon form on "The Simpsons."

(Credits)

BIANCULLI: For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.

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