The Dude and the Zen Master by Jeff Bridges, Bernie Glassman Page A

weird. Let’s stop for a second and figure out what to do
.
    In life, it’s very important to practice. That’s one of the ways that we’re going to get in harmony with everything. But the most enjoyable times are when we’re just freely playing in the fields of the Lord, in the fields of the Pure Land.
    J EFF : What I dig is that it’s having its way with us, you know? It’s so great when that happens in a movie or any kind of art. The tricky part is getting hooked. The kind of fish I am, I try not to get hooked. That’s kind of my approach in life. I have a lot of resistance to getting hooked because I know the engagement and the investment that will be required. And you only have so much time to do things, so once you choose to do one thing you’re not going to do others. But once you get hooked and it’s pulling you along, a wonderful thing starts happening, where it starts to do you instead of you doing it.
    B ERNIE : Lovemaking is very similar.
    J EFF : Again, coitus, man.
    B ERNIE : There’s foreplay, during which you try to get in resonance with each other, and then there’s the time of coitus itself, where you’re not doing any of that.
    J EFF : It’s doing you.
    B ERNIE : That’s playing. The other is practice.
    J EFF : There’s a very fine line between those two. Can you play and practice at the same time?
    B ERNIE : We say that the distance between heaven and earth is the breadth of a hair.
    J EFF : And you can kind of go back and forth.
    B ERNIE : You’re always going back and forth.
    J EFF : I got a one-track mind, man. Coitus keeps coming up. It’s wonderful to get in that groove. You can’t make a mistake if you wanted to, and neither can the other. It’s like what Miles Davis says: “Don’t worry about mistakes, there aren’t any.”
    B ERNIE : We’ve talked about practice and freely playing, but there are certain people who seem to jump into freely playing without any preparation. How would you relate to people like Sid Caesar or Robin Williams? I heard that Sid Caesar never went by a script, though he always had one. He just reacted to the other people or the situation.
    J EFF : I remember watching his show as a kid. And I played with Robin Williams in
The
Fisher King
.
    When I got the gig I was a little worried, you know:
Robin Williams! He riffs all the time, he can’t help it, it’s like a tic. I’ve got this scene in the end where I’m supposed to give this big soliloquy while he’s lying there in a coma, and I can imagine him suddenly going, AAAAH, you know, fucking with the scene and with me.
Instead, I got to that scene and his presence was so beautiful. He didn’t have anything to say because he was supposed to be in a coma, so he could have gone to sleep while I did my lines. But he was awake and present. He supported me in the most wonderful way without saying one word.
    Robin went to Juilliard; he’s a trained actor. The way I look at it, comedy’s just one of many things he can pull out of his kit bag. When we did
Fisher King
, we’d be working long, sixteen-hour days, it would be four in the morning, and we’d be dragging. All of a sudden Robin would plant his feet and just riff on everybody in the room. He had us all in stitches. It was like jazz, you know. Many directors would laugh a bit and then tell everybody to get back to work. But not Terry Gilliam. Terry would egg him on. He’d have him go on for half an hour or so; Robin would have gone on forever. We were so energized we’d get back to work and have three or four more hours of juice. The power of the clown, man.
    B ERNIE : Would you say that Robin Williams spends a lot of time in the world of practice, or does he just play?
    J EFF : Both, I think. You practice going a little further, making that insult a little sharper. At some point it becomes playing, things come out and you can’t help it, it becomes a reflex thing. So he probably goes back and forth. You can practice playing, can’t you? I