Coffee Shop Summits - Ian Holm - Interview

A few people thought Joe Gould was a great writer, others saw him as a cantankerous homeless person; but to Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker writer who immortalized him, Gould was an authentic New York character in an age when the city still brimmed with them. Ian Holm, who stars in the new movie Joe Gould's Secret, explains why the man still commands our attention

RICH COHEN: How did you first come to Joe Gould's Secret?

IAN HOLM: Stanley Tucci, whom I worked with on Big Night [1996], sent me the script. Any actor of my age would jump at the opportunity to play Gould. He is a great character. In those days, bums, homeless people, whatever you call them, were usually slotted in as characters and eccentrics. And, after all, Gould was Harvard-educated, so he was a clever dick. But he made a conscious decision to opt Out and came to New York in about 1916, and lived on cowboy coffee and fried eggs for the next forty years, so he must have been of fairly robust health. He was able to talk volumes, I mean he had verbal diarrhea, and I think he was a very appealing character to a lot of people like e.e. cummings and Alice Neal and so on. But nowadays, Mayor Guiliani would just put him in jail and throw away the key.

RC: Had you ever read the original Joe Mitchell story?

IH: I read "Professor Seagull" and "Joe Gould's Secret." Then we unearthed some articles from the period written by Joe Gould in the Dial and so on. He had a good, interesting, florid style. People like William Saroyan thought he was one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

RC: You've played Shakespeare; did you find anything Shakespearean about Gould?

IH: Shall we say Lear? [laughs] I mean, there was a Learian quality about him. A journey, except that Lear's was a journey through madness and there was some kind of resolution. Whereas I think that the demise of Gould was fairly swift. You know, he ended up in Pilgrim State Hospital and died in 1957. But of course Joe Mitchell went on and he lived to a great age, and it was 1996 when he died. Mitchell lived in the New Yorker offices. He went there every day for thirty-two years and never wrote another thing. Except that he did. I have spoken to people who said he went in and typed every day and it was all stashed in drawers somewhere and nobody's ever found it--a bit like Gould, really. Is the great Mitchell novel there, or did it die in his head?

RC: Do you have any theories about why Mitchell never published again?

IH: No, I absolutely don't. I mean, apart from the fact that he was an incredibly shy man and the stuff that he was writing he felt was not worthy of him or he didn't want to publish. It was just such an extraordinary thing that he had this ritual of turning up at the New Yorker every day for that length of time and having nothing else published.

RC: Do you think that Mitchell's writing about Gould affected Gould in some way?

IH: Yes, I do feel that. Gould's demise was pretty swift. Their friendship didn't continue and he scuttled away in the dark and wasn't heard of until somebody said to Mitchell, "Listen, you've got a friend up in Pilgrim State, maybe you ought to see him."

RC: Gould and Mitchell seemed to have some things in common. For instance, both were disappointments to their fathers.

IH: Yes. And they're extremely unlike each other, but like each other. You've got Gould with the verbal diarrhea and Mitchell who could hardly put two words together. I think it was Ross, the editor, who at one point said to Mitchell, "It's good you don't write the way you talk."

RC: Did you feel a difference between the actual city and the one you were capturing In the movie?

IH: In a way, but some of the old bars are still there, and Rizzoli's is there. And if you shoot certain buildings in a certain way, all the stuff is still there. Around the Village. Manhattan is something else. It's not what I regard nowadays as the real New York.

RC: How does the profession change as you get older? Do you get better?

IH: Yes. I think in movies, particularly, I've always been a minimalist. It was Bogart who once said, "If you think the right thoughts, the camera will pick it up." The most important thing in the face is the eyes, and if you can make the eyes talk, then you're halfway there.

RC: Who have been your favorite actors to work with?

IH: I would say Laurence Olivier. For people in my generation, certainly Tony Hopkins. He was such an influence on the youngsters in those days.

RC: As you've gotten older, how have the roles you've been offered changed?

IH: [laughing] They've gotten older! I'm afraid we are bordering on grandfathers, yes. I am actually 68 now.

RC: To end up with Joe Gould: One thing that always struck me about the story Is the way Gould presents himself. Mitchell accepts him in a way I think people wouldn't today. The guy is telling fantastic stories about a book he's writing that no one's seen and Mitchell puts it in one of the great magazines in America.