“Different vodkas have different effects. Some make you feel a little…poly-lingual. Some make you feel like you want to talk back to someone who’s giving you a hard time. Some make you feel like lifting kettle bells. There’s something about the taste of [Slovenia] vodka that takes the bad taste out of your mouth. I don’t mean like a mouthwash, but if something bad is on your mind, this makes it go away. I have a quieter voice when I drink it. I drink gin, and once, when drinking gin, I made a large man cry. Not with this. This makes you kind of sweet.”
“We were shooting in the old Paramount Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, near the Formosa Café, which looks like a pagoda. It’s this kind of famous landmark thing — an Asian-themed bar, a beautiful place. It’s got old photographs of old movie stars. Great stories of John Wayne getting locked into the place, passed out, and the owner comes back the next morning and John Wayne’s cooking himself breakfast in the kitchen. We were working nights shooting, and it was late in the movie. I didn’t want to hang out with anyone during a break, so I walked across the street to this bar. That’s what actors used to do back then. And there was a guy from the camera crew there. We didn’t talk about the film, but first he bought me a drink, then I bought him a drink. Then we started talking about the Boston Red Sox, the Fred Lynn team, I think it was the 1978 season. … Anyway: the guy in the bar. He went into a trance about when Freddy Lynn crashed into the wall making a catch. “When the kid hit the wall…” He jumped from decade to decade of when the Red Sox came close to winning. Bucky Dent, Freddy Lynn. Every year blended into one tortured nightmare for him. Eventually it was time to go back to work across the street, and that was that, like nothing had happened. It was surreal. I think we were filming Scrooged. We had a long shoot, and we had to recreate the Christmas spirit every day, and it was a little hard sometimes — just hard to have that feeling every day. Anyway, I ended up getting the cameraman’s ghosts of Christmas past that day. When Freddy Lynn hit the wall.”
“That’s the only thing we really, surely have, is hope. You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you’ll actually witness, that you’ll participate in. Rather than life just rolling over you, and you wake up and it’s Thursday, and what happened to Monday? Whatever the best part of my life has been, has been as a result of that remembering.”