Playboy's 20Q: James Caan

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[Q] Playboy: People know you for playing explosive types such as Sonny in The Godfather and Will Ferrell's nasty dad in Elf. But on your TV series, Las Vegas, you play a casino security chief who drops pearls of wisdom to the show's younger characters. What advice about Hollywood or the larger world do you give your co-stars offscreen?

[A] Caan: The fact that I'm playing a guy who gives advice tells you how far-out the show is. Las Vegas is not The West Wing or The Practice. It's just meant to be fun, the kind of show you can watch and go to the refrigerator during. I'm not knocking it--it's great--but sometimes we cross the line a bit in terms of its integrity. I would like some of the shows to be more intense, more involved with the underbelly, scams and grit. I might say to the guys I respect on the show, "Look, this is stupid. Nobody would do this," but then they come back with, "You know what? The people like it." The main pearl of wisdom I give these young kids is that you shouldn't make your career your whole life. No matter what heights you achieve, even if you're Brad Pitt, the slide is coming, sure as death and taxes. So if you put everything into that one basket--acting--you'll wind up hurting yourself, either with drugs or any other self-destructive thing you can think of.

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[Q] Playboy: You've had your own well-publicized struggles with drugs. Would you say some of those were attempts to hurt yourself?

[A] Caan: They were very self-destructive. My sister passed away in 1981, and she was my best friend, kind of the glue that held my family together and really the only thing I was afraid of in my life. If I didn't sleep, I'd actually put on makeup so she wouldn't say, "Where were you all last night, you bastard?" When I lost her I was at the height of my career. I just quit trying. I think I missed most of the 1980s, really. I think I had a good time, but I don't remember. I never really liked cocaine, but I was a real purist because I never did anything but coke. It was coke and it was girls. I'd like to think the girls wanted to be with me because I was so good-looking, but that's horseshit. It was because I had coke in my pocket.

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[Q] Playboy: What finally made you turn things around?

[A] Caan: One morning you wake up and realize there's no party, there's no girls--and yet you're still doing it. And if you're not doing it, you're looking for it. I got tired of being tired. I went to meeting after meeting, although I'm not a drinker. I know I can't do coke. I know I can't take this or that pill. I inadvertently hurt people emotionally. My last wife, I hurt her so badly. You have to make those amends. Professionally, when I get paid, I show up. Sometimes I don't feel like it, but I realized that unless you have passion for something, just don't do it. My least favorite answer is "I don't care." If I say, "You want to make love?" and the answer is "I don't care," I'm like, "Hey, then go masturbate."

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[Q] Playboy: Do you worry about your actor son, Scott, or any of your four other kids making some of the same mis-steps--or some of their own?

[A] Caan: You always think your kids aren't smart enough to know what's going on, but Scott knew. For him it was, "Cocaine, see you later." People think I'm on cocaine when I'm not because I'm a hyper person. You can only imagine how I was when I was going, like, 180 miles an hour. It sucked. I don't miss it at all. It was part of the whole self-destructive thing. All I can do with my kids is tell them my story. You'd think that as life goes along I'd make fewer mistakes than my dad, Scott would make fewer mistakes than I did, and eventually we'll raise a perfect Caan. I don't think that's likely. I keep making the same mistakes.

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[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been competitive with Scott?

[A] Caan: Not when it comes to acting. Scott's a tough guy, but he's sweet. You don't really have to push him, and you're sorry if you get to that point. I made him competitive. When he was a kid and we played Ping-Pong, basket-ball or whatever, if he knew I was dogging it he'd get pissed. So if he won a game or if he played extra good, he had a sense of pride, which is important. The poor guy--I was his baseball coach for six years, and he was such a good ballplayer I thought I'd be watching him from front-row seats at Yankee Stadium. But then he became a goddamn actor [laughs].

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[Q] Playboy: Throughout the 1970s you turned down movies that worked out pretty well for other actors, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kramer us. Kramer, MASH and Apocalypse Now. Were those self-destructive decisions on your part?

[A] Caan: No, but talking about it is like looking up a dead horse's ass. What do you learn? I recently did a magazine story, and it quoted me as saying, "I was supposed to do Kramer vs. Kramer, and I said, 'This is middle-class bourgeois horseshit. Who's going to go to that?'" I was talking about how stupid my opinion was, like, "Oh yeah, I'm a real genius. I thought Kramer was middle-class bourgeois horseshit." Bob Altman wanted me for MASH, and I wound up doing a piece of crap instead--Rabbit, Run. Milos Forman came to me three or four times with Cuckoo's Nest, and my opinion, which was wrong, was that it wasn't visual enough. I wouldn't have been as good as Jack Nicholson, who was absolutely brilliant, as was Dustin Hoffman, who's a good friend, in Kramer vs. Kramer.

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[Q] Playboy: The rumor was that you almost played Michael Corleone in The Godfather, the role that put Al Pacino on the map. How would your life be different today if you had?

[A] Caan: I don't think it would have been different at all, except I probably would have had a lot more money. I was close to Francis Ford Coppola well before The Godfather, from when I did a movie with him in the late 1960s, The Rain People. At the time of The Godfather he was the best writer, the best director. He knew everything about cinematography. He knew actors. When Robert Evans, the head of Paramount then, told me they wanted Costa-Gavras to direct, I said, "Francis is the guy, because he's a Mediterranean Italian, not a New York Italian," and I think that's basically what made that picture so successful. You accepted everything those guys did because it was for the sake of the family. Of course, the geniuses who now say, "Oh, I put that picture together," are lying. They were the same people who told Francis, "If you mention Brando's name again, you're fired," and who said about Pacino, "We don't ever want to see that kid." So they spent $420,000 on screen tests, but Francis had it all thought out and had the cast he wanted: Duvall, Brando, Pacino--who nobody knew--and me as Sonny. He wanted Sonny to be an Americanized version, a hothead, a guy who didn't have that same kind of blood coursing through his veins, whereas Al was the typical Sicilian-looking, dark-haired, dark-skinned guy. Even when they came to me about playing Michael I knew that wasn't what Francis wanted, so I didn't want it.

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[Q] Playboy: Most people know you for your big movies--The Godfather, Misery--but you've done great work in films that few have seen, such as the 1981 Michael Mann thriller Thief and, more recently, Dogville. How do you come to terms with that?

[A] Caan: It's funny, because Scott called me this morning and said, "Dad, I'm not going to be an actor anymore. I'm going to direct or something." When I asked why, he said, "I've been watching Thief for three days. It's mind-blowing. It should be the bible for any actor who wants to try something outside himself." There can't be a greater gift than that, getting praise from my son. Thief was done when Mann was great, before he went off on his own goddamn tangent. What I really cherish is when friends and fellow actors look up to me and ask for my advice. I wouldn't trade that for anything. I've worked with some pretty amazing younger actors--Benicio Del Toro and guys like that--so when they look up to me, that's just a wonderful feeling.

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[Q] Playboy: Shortly after you started making movies, in the 1960s, you co-starred in the Western El Dorado with movie giants John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. How did they treat you?

[A] Caan: Mitchum was just a great guy, a fucking great character and a very underrated actor. He could have done anything. Wayne was a good guy too--tough but like a kid when you got to know him. I definitely didn't ask him for any acting advice. I don't think John Wayne would do well in Hollywood today, although he was a great personality. I guess if he were a young man today he'd be in that action-hero class. I got more from watching Brando during The Godfather than I would have gotten from anybody spouting advice. He was the guy, the guru of the acting world, without a doubt. Anybody who says different is full of shit. Richard Harris, God bless him, used to criticize Brando, but when I asked, "Then why the fuck do you spend your life imitating him?" he couldn't say anything.

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[Q] Playboy: You'd been married three times before, but your current marriage has lasted nine years, which is a record for you. Does keeping it zipped come any easier to you now?

[A] Caan: Fidelity has become easy for me because I had the other side for quite a while. I had a great time. I was never a pig about it. I never slept with anybody I worked with. Wait, that's not true. I did--but with all my 75 pictures, I had to think about it, didn't I? Hopefully, I treated all the girls I was with respectfully. It's very different now. Sure, I take a little Viagra now every day but just so I don't piss on my shoes [laughs]. Actually, I tried Viagra once, of course. Unfortunately, only the maid was home, and I didn't need it for her [laughs again]. The point is, if there's somebody else I really want to sleep with right now, she'd better be a better and nicer-looking person than my wife. And if she is, then I need a divorce.

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[Q] Playboy: Was there any woman you really wanted but couldn't have?

[A] Caan: Sophia Loren. I met her when she was 60 or something. It was beyond any dream and probably one of the greatest compliments of my life when she was asked about her favorite actors and she mentioned me. When I saw her, oh, had she grown older gracefully. She's just beautiful. You can see that passion in her.

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[Q] Playboy: Some of your fantastic-looking female co-stars on Las Vegas--Nikki Cox and Vanessa Marcil, among others--have been quoted in interviews saying you're a sexy guy. How does that feel for you at the age of 65?

[A] Caan: They're just being nice. Now, Josh Duhamel, who also stars on the show, is hot. The girls are all really sweet, talented, nice and beautiful, and I love every one of them. I'd much rather wake up next to them than next to Brando. Listen, if I were young enough, none of them would stand a chance. But I'd have to take all of them or none. I'm afraid that's the deal.

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[Q] Playboy: You play a surveillance ace on your show. Have you ever been put on the other side and been the subject of surveillance in real life?

[A] Caan: I thought I was under surveillance. There was all this stuff in the papers about my Mob connections, which was all nonsense, all pumped up. The truth is, I grew up in a neighborhood where some of the guys I knew and that my mother had coffee with are now reputedly bosses. That shouldn't be a plural, because there's just this one guy, who's a dear friend of mine. I certainly don't condone crime. I hate it. I know them only from the standpoint that if someone in my family were to get sick, they would be the first ones I'd call. They've never asked me for any favors. From that, though, came this whole fantasy thing about me--and on top of it, I played Sonny. You know what? Sometimes it's fun. People leave me alone. I've never needed a bodyguard in my life.

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[Q] Playboy: You never worry about dangers to you or your family?

[A] Caan: My wife is a little neurotic about that. We were in Park City, Utah for a while. We lived on 4.6 acres in a place where nobody has a gate. Nobody even has a key to their fucking front door, I swear to God. My wife changed all the locks when we moved in, then added a top lock, then spent another $5,000 on the thing that sounds an alarm if you touch a window. I said, "Listen, in 1895 there was maybe a toaster stolen from this community and that's been it, so what the hell are you doing?" Since we've moved back to Los Angeles I have a large weapon in lieu of an alarm system. I'm not going to get specific except to say what's important: It's very large, and it will kill you. Now sure, a pencil can kill, depending on how close you are when you use it. This thing, you don't have to get so close.

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[Q] Playboy: As depicted in Las Vegas, Americans are now being watched in airports, banks, hotels and convenience stores. When does it become too much?

[A] Caan: If you're not doing anything wrong, why do you have to start yelling about the First Amendment? What the fuck are they going to see? The only people who should be worried are the ones trying to get away with something. The ACLU will fucking drive you nuts. In Vegas there are something like 3,000 cameras. Obviously they can't go in bathrooms and they can't go in your bedroom, but they're not looking at girls' boobs or up their dresses or at people kissing. They're looking for cheats and guys who are dangerous to the public. The way we live our lives right now, everybody's running around a little fucking nervous, so personally I don't mind that holdup at the airport, especially when my family is traveling. In the old days I probably would have had a beef with this because I might have had a little stuff in my pocket or something. Now the big thing I might do is sneak a cigarette, but it's not as if I try to smoke on the plane.

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[Q] Playboy: How big of a Vegas guy were you before doing the TV show?

[A] Caan: When I was young I had a friend who was a part owner of Caesars, so I got to know all the guys--gamblers, casino owners, pit bosses. People who think they're good gamblers are so full of crap. I'm sure almost everybody who goes to Vegas says, "I'm taking $2,000 with me, $5,000, whatever, and if I lose it, so what? I had a good time." They lose it, then spend another $5,000 or $10,000 trying to get even. The cold-blooded gambler does the opposite. When he's losing he steps away and cuts down. When he's winning he sends it in because, after all, it's the casino's money. Maybe one half of one percent of people are really cold-blooded gamblers. Normal people can't do that.

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[Q] Playboy: When Las Vegas was about to debut, CSI star William Petersen called it CSI in a hotel.

[A] Caan: Who the hell's William Petersen? I'm sorry, but I don't even watch my own show. I watch Fox News--not because I'm a conservative, which, oh all right, I might be. I watch it because it's so stimulating. They're so over-the-top. It's theater. Bill O'Reilly is mad. My wife gets angry when I watch ESPN because she doesn't like to hear the squeak of sneakers on the basketball court when she's trying to go to sleep. She's like, "Why do they yell so loud all the fucking time on ESPN?" Hey, I don't know. They're loud announcers.

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[Q] Playboy: Are you still a jock?

[A] Caan: I've had 11 shoulder operations from non-Jewish activities like riding tournaments, rodeos, coaching football--which I had no business doing. My doctor and I are playing golf tomorrow, and we're friends, but this fucking guy, every time I see him I go, "Wait, I just came to say hi," but it's too late and he's doing another surgery on me. A while ago I looked at my birth certificate and started playing golf. What else can I do? I ride horses. I got my kids into riding horses, too. My son Scott is starting to ride. I got my eight-year-old a horse. It must be a Caan tradition or something.

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[Q] Playboy: Are you religious?

[A] Caan: They pulled me out of a lake when I was five. I was unconscious at the time, and I clearly remember all that stuff flashing before me, a great light. I think the closest I've ever come to seeing God was when Scott was born. I love all my kids, but there's just something about seeing your first boy being born.

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[Q] Playboy: Your hero Brando was a Method actor. Are you?

[A] Caan: Right before I do a scene, I look up to heaven and say, "Come on, give me a break." That's my method.