Yeah, it was fun. He’s such a recognizable thing. The twang. I don’t think anyone is ever going to know Howard Hughes. I think it’s still a mystery. At the time that this happened in ‘71, he was still vital to the culture. Everyone knew this story and the kind of images that were being… You would see these drawings, these crazy drawings of him in the paper and almost every news magazine, and people would say, ‘I had a glimpse of him.’ You know, someone who was a busboy took some food up to his hotel room or something like that and they would make this crazy sketch of this lunatic with long fingernails down to here.

He was a part of the media then? Everybody was very aware of him?

Very aware of him. It wasn’t that long [ago that] he had a movie star girlfriend. He was in the oil business. He was in the aviation business. He was in a lot of power structures, at the top of those power structures.

Are you in talks to play Joe Wilson, the ambassador, Valerie Plame’s husband because there was some talk last night?

I’ve had no communication.

No communication about that?

It’d be a fascinating movie.

But nothing yet?

No. In fact I was just reading her testimony today. Unfortunately we came down to do interviews. Maybe we should stop now and just read it, speaking of smoke and mirrors. [Laughs]

Interesting testimony yesterday.

Did you see it?

I saw part of it and I liked the one question from the Republicans was like, ‘are you a Democrat or a Republican?’ That’s like the most important thing.

[Laughs]

Are you working on anything next or about to shoot something?

Yeah, I’m going off to shoot a movie called “Nights in Rodanthe” with Diane Lane.

Who’s your character?

He’s a surgeon. He’s kind of an alpha personality-wise which goes with the territory of surgeons. [Laughs] A real kind of rock star surgeon whose life is falling apart. It’s about a few days in the lives of these two people who happen to be stuck together for essentially a weekend and how it changes their lives.

You played Bob Dylan in a project you shot, right?

Not literally. Not any of us literally played him. This was a pretty expressionistic part in the movie. It was great. It was really fun to shoot.

What phase of Dylan’s career did you play?

Obviously the 18 year old. [Laughs]

I was giving you the benefit. Are you dying to do another musical or was the experience of doing “Chicago” so great that you’d almost…?

I would be open to that. That was really fun. That was really fun.

You were in “Grease” weren’t you at one point?

I did a lot of musicals. That’s how I started in New York. That was a time when I was very lucky. I was kind of the right guy at the right time in New York so I came and I worked and I could sing and play instruments and act, and rock musicals were happening, so the first three or four things I did were musicals.

You like working with Diane Lane, don’t you?

I’m crazy about her. She was only eighteen when I first…when we did “The Cotton Club.” She told me when we did “Unfaithful,” she was the same age then that I was back then. [Laughs]

Who intrigued you more in this movie?  Clifford Irving or Howard Hughes?

Intrigued me?

Uh huh. Because they’re both different kinds of entities.

Well they become each other at a certain point, you know. Clifford morphs into him. I liked him. There’s things I’ve said already. I don’t know if I’ve said it to this group or the last one. [Laughs] Clifford I found to be a really fascinating character because he is grounded. I don’t think there’s any way that Howard Hughes can be grounded in reality. He’s so ‘off planet.’ But Clifford is a real person. Clifford Irving makes a sandwich, and he eats it, and he mows his lawn, you know, he’s a real person. I can’t imagine Howard Hughes doing anything like that. To see someone like that deteriorate or let themselves go. The boundaries of the known comes so expanded. You can see that in many of our lives when that boundary gets expanded, the possibilities go ‘ppppffffttttt’ and what happens to that individual who was in that position? Do they implode, explode? Do they go with the expansion? Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it scary? It’s all those things. That was the fun of playing him, of seeing that all the rules are gone. In the movie we took him into madness which I think was appropriate for him and for us and we bring him back. You know that coda that we have of him walking down the street after prison and seeing Dick Susskind just grounds it back into ‘okay, life goes on.’

Is there a character that you haven’t played that you’d like to play?

Madeleine Albright. [Laughs] I don’t know. I’m always kind of amazed when things come up and I’ll go, ‘That’s interesting. I haven’t done that before.’ Look, I’ve done maybe 40 movies. That’s 40 characters. How many interesting characters are there in the universe? But they’re usually surprises, you know. It’s not like… The times that I’ve said, ‘Okay, I want to make a music movie,’ and I’ll burrow away and read everything and it doesn’t happen. You don’t find the right thing or the script doesn’t work out or whatever. And then while you’re doing that, this script comes in from over here and you go, ‘I don’t want to read that. I’m working on this here,’ and finally you end up reading it and you go, ‘Wow, this is pretty good.’ Nothing to do with music, nothing to do with anything, nothing to do with politics. ‘Oh, it’s a girl and a guy and they’re…oh, that’s kind of adult and intimate. Yeah, let’s do that.’ That’s how it works.

Where are you shooting next?

In North Carolina.