The Dude and the Zen Master Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’re connected to something bigger. I like to think that you and I are both trim tabs and that we want to turn other people on to becoming trim tabs and turn the rudder a little bit, which will turn this big ship in the direction where we want to be heading.

3.
DUDE, YOU’RE BEING VERY UNDUDE
     
    J EFF : The hip counterculture of each generation has sayings that have poetic wisdom for me, words like
dig
,
groovy
, or
grok
.
Karass
is another, from
Cat’s Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut. Your karass is your family in life, not necessarily your biological family. It may even include people you loathe, but they’re in your sphere in a very strong way.
    Dig
is beyond
understand
. I like digging where I am and what I’m doing, I like jamming with myself. So when uptightness happens, I notice that:
You want to be uptight? You can do that; in fact, see how uptight you can get.
Some days I let myself play with it and really go wild. Acting is about tricking yourself, using your imagination to go all over the place. You can do that even if you’re not an actor; you can always dance with how you’re feeling.
    But even playing and jamming require some kind of practice, you know? Preparation is really important to me, especially when I feel tight or afraid.
    B ERNIE : Practice is critical before you jam with other musicians. But once you start jamming, something happens that you didn’t and can’t prepare for. Everything starts shifting and you’ve got a new song coming out, a new riff, and you flow with that because you’re jamming. That’s what happens in life, too. I can plan and prepare as much as possible, but then I walk down the street and step on a banana peel, and I’m jamming with that.
    J EFF : And life will keep throwing it at you, like it does to the Dude.
Oh, you handled this? Well, what about that? And what about that?
It just piles it on.
    If you’re open, it’s not a problem. Take Orson Welles, for example. Have we made many movies better than
Citizen Kane?
What was he, twenty-five years old when he directed that movie? Man! Gregg Toland, the wonderful director of photography, shot that film, and Orson Welles wanted Gregg Toland’s name to appear alongside his in the credits at the end because Toland had been so important to the final production of that film. Toland felt the same way toward Welles. He loved that Welles was so new to moviemaking and that his imagination was so open. Welles didn’t know anything about making films. I’ve found the same thing with first-time directors. The jam factor is very high; they don’t know what they can’t do.
    It’s also interesting to see how different people react to pressure, including me. You can imagine the pressure on directors. They have a finite time and budget to make a movie, and so much is on their plate every day.
How am I going to do it? I’ve never done this before.
Problems keep coming up, taking more and more out of them.
    With one particular film, right from the beginning of the read-through, I said, “There’s something off about that last scene, which is the climax scene for my character.” The director and the writers agreed and said we’d fix it together as we got down the line. But the schedule progressed with no time to do that. When you’re making a movie, it’s like triage, you have to do just what’s in front of you, and one problem came up after another. Still, I didn’t stop bringing it up to the director.
    As we got closer to shooting that scene toward the end of the movie, she would just “show me the hand” when I would come over, sort of like “Shut the fuck up, Donny!” She had a great sense of humor, called me the Prince of Ideas. I got depressed. How was I going to deal with this
?
    Part of the problem is caring. On the one hand, you want to care, but if your aim is too tight, caring can get in your way. I often write the word
aimless
in my scripts to remind myself not to get my aim so tight that I miss the target.