'I don't know what I am.' – Tim Robbins

NEW YORK “”mdash; Tim Robbins lost his Oscar. To be fair, his now 12-year-old son stole and hid it for April Fool’s Day and it hasn’t turned up since, but Robbins isn’t too concerned over its whereabouts.

Why should he be? The 45-year-old actor and UCLA theater alum of 1981 won the statue, which is the important part, and Robbins isn’t one to get bogged down in materialism.

When I met with him in the New York offices of his film production company, Havoc Productions, extravagance might be the least-applicable word to describe the surroundings. Filled with neatly stacked boxes waiting to be unpacked, cubicle walls and Apple computers from the mid-to-late 1990s, it hardly looked like the working environment of a Hollywood movie star.

Robbins himself didn’t even have an office; his desk was tucked behind a cubicle jettison separating him from a receptionist.

Aside from furniture, the most expensive objects in the entire office were probably the two antique radios Robbins had on top of a bookshelf behind his desk. Or maybe it was the sushi the receptionist had taken out from a nearby restaurant for lunch, which someone claimed was too expensive for everyday consumption. Where would the Oscar fit in?

But its effects are still felt, even if its physical presence isn’t. Although Robbins calls the Award a “beautiful honor,” he insists that “what validates (his) career as an actor is getting another job,” and that’s where his performance in last year’s “Mystic River” seems to be paying off the most.

When we talked, there were enough scripts on his desk to reconstruct a tree, and seven more FedEx packages came in the afternoon delivery while I was there. The only title I recognized of them all was “The Fantastic Four.”

With so many options, Robbins doesn’t know what he wants to do next, and it showed. He’s already in two movies coming out this summer (He stars in “Code 46″ and has a cameo in “Anchorman”), and questions about future projects usually yielded short, polite, non-committal responses, whether relating to acting, directing or writing.

He was much more passionate talking about current events and his new play, “Embedded,” which he wrote, directed and produced for the Actors’ Gang, his theater company in Los Angeles.

The play, a satire of U.S. involvement in Iraq, skewers everyone from government officials to military personnel to journalists, as the title refers to journalists who are “embedded” with U.S. military in the country and are forced to lean on military officials for stories.

When we talked, “Embedded” was in the middle of a successful run in New York’s Public Theater (Robbins himself was also performing in it for a few weeks), and the Actors’ Gang was in the process of preparing to take the play on a national fall tour before and during the presidential election. Robbins also hopes the Gang can take it to Europe over the summer, cementing the connection between his profession as an artist and his passionate feelings about current events.

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dB Magazine: In an interview you did with Playboy in 1995, you said that “acting teachers are worthless.” Were your teachers at UCLA like that?

Tim Robbins: I didn’t have any acting teachers. I didn’t take any acting classes.

dB: Where did the statement come from?

TR: I’ll tell you something. I took a couple classes out in Hollywood and quit. There’s an awful lot of people who come to Los Angeles and New York with a dream of being an actor, and I find it predatory that there are quite a few acting teachers that have this theory that if they tear you down, they’ll make you a better actor. I’ve seen in the past as a director, some young kid comes in, a total natural. What do you think the acting teacher does? Does the acting teacher say, “You know what? You don’t need to be here.” Never. It’s always, “How can I mold this person? He’s too cocky. I’ve got to cut him down to size and then I’ll make him a good actor.” And I’ve seen actors ruined that way. I saw it happen at UCLA.

dB: How would you teach acting?

TR: By doing. I run workshops at the Actors’ Gang. One of the main rules when we workshop is that there are no negative things said. We will not criticize anyone’s work.

dB: That seems like a double-edged sword. Doesn’t someone have to know if his work isn’t that good?

TR: When you go up and stink in something, you know it. You don’t need to be told by your peers what was wrong, because it’s so easy to be a critic, to pick something apart. It’s a lot harder to be generous and find what was good about something. And that’s what we do. You get to the end of the scene and you sit around in a circle and you say what was good. Acting is really baring yourself. It’s like taking your clothes off and saying, “Here I am.” Why do you need some punk-ass to give you criticism about what you did? The idea is that in that environment of trust, people will risk more. But if a risk is going to lead to evisceration by your peers, why do it?

dB: Not every audience is that understanding. What made you join the cast of “Embedded” in New York?

TR: The opportunity presented itself. It was a limited amount of time, and I’m having a blast doing it.

dB: Does the show play into what you like theater to be: “spectacle” or “theater as an event”?

TR: Yeah. It plays like a rock “˜n’ roll show.

dB: Well, you use rock “˜n’ roll music.

TR: Yeah, and the lighting. The whole approach.

dB: Who are you satirizing more in the play: politicians or journalists?

TR: Probably politicians, because I only satirize half the journalists. A couple characters that are journalists come off OK.

dB: Like the one who doesn’t get to present his ideas because the colonel censors him.

TR: Right, and the woman who does the report from the cemetery. She’s getting some friendly fire stuff, getting the human story through. What we have to demand, coming out of the war stories, is some kind of idea of the human cost.

dB: How often do you see those kinds of stories coming out?

TR: Not very often. A couple people who have seen the play said, “You know, there wasn’t that much censorship.” What do you consider censorship? If you are allowed to be where the troops are launching out, but you can’t go where they land, that’s censorship. And that was the case. They would not allow journalists to see a village that just lost hundreds of lives in civilian causalities. They weren’t allowed to talk to people and say, “Who was that person that died? Tell me about him. What is the human story here? What is the human cost?” We didn’t hear anything. We didn’t even know how many there were. And the military arrogantly said, “We don’t do body counts for civilians.” In other words, they don’t matter.

dB: Ben Brantley, the theater critic at the New York Times, accused the play of preaching to the choir. Is that something you were concerned with when writing it?

TR: That’s a review I’ve gotten for 23 years, and if I ever listened to the critics, I never would have become a writer/director for film. And the Actors’ Gang wouldn’t be around. Critics have a certain theater that they want to embrace put forward as what American theater should be, and “Embedded” is something they either don’t get, or don’t want to see. And I’m OK with that. I don’t want to see the theater they like. What we’re dealing with is theater for everybody. It’s not theater for an elite. One of the major rules that we follow is never assume that we, on the stage, are smarter than our audience. Never assume that audience has ever been in a theater before, and I know from seeing the reactions of people that are first-time theater-goers how vital and exciting those nights are. There’s this visceral response, and we reach our best performances when people don’t have the stifling code of conduct that pervades the theater, the idea that you can’t speak back, you can’t yell. When we have amateur theater-goers in there, they love it. They just tear it up. They yell at us.

dB: What do they say?

TR: We had a guy one night yell at the curtain call. He said, “Boo,” and was shouted down by other audience members. It’s really exciting. Ben Brantley, by the way, also said that I made up the Office of Special Plans. Is he just uneducated or does he never read the front page of the newspaper? I would do a Google search before I would say something like that.

dB: What kind of a point was he trying to make?

TR: I don’t know. All I know is that the theater critic for the New York Times does not know what is real and what was made up in the play, and that tells me that he’s not particularly interested in current events or in different points of view regarding current events.

dB: Do you see “Embedded” as a political statement?

TR: I don’t think I’m making a political statement with this play. I’m raising some questions. I’m spreading information. I don’t think most people know who Leo Strauss is, and maybe after this play they’ll find out how influential he is to the neo-conservative movement. “Political statement”: I don’t know what that means. I think the play is about lies, truth, what it is to tell the truth, what the consequences are, and how the truth can get bent and manipulated for imagery, for propaganda.

dB: You’ve said that “some of the people who get involved in politics or social causes could be better informed for the good of the cause.” Have you ever been in that situation?

TR: I try not to be. If someone asks me about something I don’t know about, I tell them, “I don’t know.”

dB: Have you ever changed your mind about a cause on which you’ve spoken out?

TR: No, but I’ve had people misinterpret what my point of view is, and I’ve had to correct them.

dB: Does that happen frequently?

TR: People want to put you in a box. They want to label you. They want to consider that all people on the left think the same. But I have no problem with people having guns, for example. I think that’s a right we should have. Parts of me at the core are conservative in the true sense of that word, wanting to conserve our liberties. So I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if that’s liberal, conservative, libertarian or anarchist.

dB: Let’s figure it out. I’m going to name some political figures, and you tell me the first thing that comes to mind about each of them: George W. Bush.

TR: The first thing? I can’t do this game.

dB: You can pass on anyone.

TR: Oh, you know what? Chicken hawk.

dB: Donald Rumsfeld.

TR: Chicken hawk.

dB: Colin Powell.

TR: Compromised.

dB: Condoleezza Rice.

TR: In love with George.

dB: John Kerry.

TR: Pass.

dB: Bill Clinton.

TR: It’s hard to say. Bill Clinton did some good things, but he led a shift to the right in the Democratic Party, and he started NAFTA. I have mixed feelings about him.

dB: Al Gore.

TR: Same with him. All he needed to do was define himself more in that campaign and myself and millions of others would have voted for him. But when you’re just presenting yourself as Republican-lite, people are going to go for the hearty flavored beer. That’s what I fear John Kerry is about to do. He’s not going to provide the millions of progressive people the opportunity to vote for him. We want to, but he’s got to earn the vote. He can’t start trying to please people on the right.

dB: Ralph Nader.

TR: I thought it wasn’t a good idea for him to run this time. But now that I see Kerry start to drift, maybe it’s the way to keep the Democratic Party honest. Will I vote for Nader? Let’s put it this way: John Kerry’s got to earn my vote.

dB: In an article you wrote for The Nation, you said that you’d “rather vote (your) conscience than vote strategically.” Does your conscience still tell you to vote for Nader?

TR: No. Part of what I said in there was that it was important to vote for him four years ago because no one was saying what he was saying. No one was bringing up everything from trade policy and how NAFTA has to be reformed to what we put in our food and FDA labels telling you when you’re eating genetically modified food. There are so many issues that Nader spoke of that no one would touch, and this past election season, (Howard) Dean, (Dennis) Kucinich and (Al) Sharpton touched them. What Nader did was make sure those issues were raised. It wasn’t as essential for Nader to have my support this time. However, now that we’ve passed the primary season, if Kerry plays pragmatist, then I see the importance of Ralph Nader.

dB: Does the criticism Nader-supporters get relate to something you said in 1995: “When you have a person in power who punishes people for speaking their mind, it’s truly dangerous to this society”?

TR: Who was I talking about? Because it could be for Bush.

dB: Gil Cates, who produces the Academy Awards.

TR: That’s right.

dB: Is that why you didn’t say anything about Iraq when you won the Oscar this year?

TR: I said a lot about Iraq all this year.

dB: But you didn’t use that national stage to do it.

TR: No, but I didn’t feel obligated to. I’m not going to do what other people want me to do. I never have. What I find curious about that is that I think people wanted me to do it so they could yell at me.

dB: Like Michael Moore.

TR: People were asking me before the Oscars about what I was going to say. I said, “Well, you know what? I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to say anything.” If you were to talk about me with someone who doesn’t know me, they would say, “Any time he’s in front of a mike, he’s ranting.” Seriously. I don’t know how it got that way, but it has to do with the Oscars in ’93, when Susan (Sarandon) and I”¦

dB: With Haiti?

TR: With Haiti, yeah. What was it about?

dB: You were speaking out against the internment of people in Haiti who tested positive for HIV.

TR: They were locked up in a prison for testing positive to HIV. You had a whole room of people with red ribbons on, and Clinton had promised during his campaign to close (the prison) down. It was four months into his presidency; he hadn’t done a thing. There was a press blackout on it. Susan was at a protest the week before the Oscars. No one covered it. We were faced with this information and the opportunity to do something about the safety and well-being of 290 people who had committed no crime, and so we said, “In the spirit of the red ribbons that we wear tonight…” We said something that lasted 23 seconds, and the uproar over it was amazing. We got banned the next year, but still to this day, it’s a shock to people. Why? People had done stuff at the Oscars before.

dB: Well it wasn’t scripted, for one.

TR: People didn’t know we were going to do it. Actually, I think it had to do with the fact that we were protesting a Democratic president, and how dare we? People become very political every four years: “This is a choice for the moral future of this nation. Evil Republican! Good Democrat.” It’s so much more complicated than that. And if we can’t hold our Democratic presidents accountable for their promises, what’s the point of electing them? The fact is it had results. It closed the thing down within a week.

dB: That never got reported.

TR: Of course. Because if it got reported, what message would that send?

dB: That you were right and Clinton was wrong.

TR: No, nothing about right or wrong. The message would have been sent that using free speech has human results that lead to a better treatment of individuals. The fact that we went out and said it and it had results wasn’t reported. What was reported? We were banned. What message does that send?

dB: That free speech has bad ramifications.

TR: Right. I think what we did that night was not a political speech. What we did that night was try to help 290 people who were sick and in the sun and being held behind bars. That’s not a political statement. That’s a humanitarian statement. So I don’t care how the fuck people characterize it and marginalize us and say, “Political, political, political.” Bullshit. That’s humanitarian. I’m not going to play into prejudices and expectations if I have the opportunity to speak in front of that many people, so I thought (this year), “What is the humanitarian thing to do? How can I help a large number of people if I win this thing?” And for me, it was very simple because there are millions of people out there that are potential time bombs because they are walking around with anger about being abused. And appealing to those people, which is really what the film’s about, was the humanitarian thing to do. It did help. I’ve gotten letters from abuse clinics; it’s amazing what happened right after that. People calling. Phones ringing. People getting help for the first time in their lives.

dB: I still have a hard time believing you never wanted to mention Iraq up there.

TR: If I had been completely shut out, if I did not have the National Press Club speech, if I did not have the opportunity to defend myself against my critics over the past year, I might have used that platform as a last resort. But I’m not going to be political because people say I am.