Mike Myers has lived in New York for years, one of many things about him that few people seem to know. He receives me in the SoHo workspace he has taken on; until recently his office was in his house. "Not a good idea," he reflects. "It’s a lose-lose for everybody." He lives there with his second wife, Kelly, and his two-and-a-half-year-old son Spike. On the day we meet, he and Kelly are expecting their second child. "Any second," he explains, and he means it quite literally. He places his iPhone on the table next to him, and as we talk he looks at it anxiously when each new message pings, then shakes his head. Not yet. (A girl, Sunday Molly Myers, will arrive eleven days later.)
Though Myers will bristle slightly at any suggestion that he has disappeared in recent years, it is simply a fact that it has been quite a while since most people have seen him, except in the endless re-runs of his past glories. His face last appeared on screen for a few vivid moments in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and that was five years ago; the last movie he was instrumental in creating and starring in was in 2008. That was The Love Guru, a rare failure for him, both critically and commercially. Since then, there have been occasional rumors of further Austin Powers and Wayne’s World sequels, but nothing has been confirmed. The project that has finally brought him back into the spotlight, or at least hesitantly hovering around its edges, is a documentary he has directed, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon. Gordon is best known as a rock music manager and became friends with Myers after their negotiation over what song by Alice Cooper, Gordon’s longest-standing client, Myers could use in Wayne’s World. Not the most obviously fascinating subject, you might think, but the strange and affectionate movie Myers has made is unexpectedly engrossing.
In person, Myers is stranger still but equally engrossing. Though he is friendly, and at times very funny, for the most part he talks in a way that, superficially, seems wildly different from the tone of the movies that have made him famous: If there are two ways to answer a question, one of which involves a cheap and easy laugh and one of which encompasses thoughtful and unusual self-examination including quotes from, say, a film studies theorist, Myers is generally drawn to the latter. As a consequence, some of what Myers says may seem a little pompous or pretentious when written down. If so, the words themselves don’t fully convey the strange mixture of passion and sweetness with which they are said by a man who seems, for the most part, just deeply and intensely enthusiastic about working things out—and often doing so in ways that his most famous successes might never lead you to suspect.
At the start, after he has made a cup of coffee—there are assistants somewhere in a back room, but they are not required—we sit on the same side of a long table, facing each other, and I begin with the most obvious question of all:
Where on earth have you been?
Every time I make a movie, it’s usually three or four years between. I write most of what I do and create most of what I do. I have four or five creations in my head right now, in fact. That actually takes the longest time, just to sort of figure out which is the one that is appealing to you. And then it takes a long time to write them. On top of that, I also love to take time off. I play floor hockey twice a week here in New York City, I have a great group of friends here. And two and a half years ago I had my first child and I really wanted to be present for that, I wanted to just take it in. And it’s just been...I mean, it’s the happiest time of my life. I had no idea. I knew I would like it, I didn’t know I would love it this much. And then during that time, I was working on Supermensch, which took probably two and a half years. I think there might have been Shrek 4 in there. I can’t remember. Before the kid I don’t even remember, to be honest with you. Everything is "before kid" and "after kid."
What did having a kid teach you that you didn’t expect it to?
Are we ready to go down a very corny field? Adam Sandler, when he heard that Kelly and I were pregnant, called me up and said, "You’re gonna love it—it’s like falling in love for the first time when you’re twelve, but it’s every day." And I think he undersold how momentous it is. And I’m going to sound corny again—so corn alert—but I didn’t know that there was that much love in me, to be honest. Dana Carvey says it’s like finding a room in your apartment you didn’t know you had.
Did you worry that it wasn’t there?
No, I just didn’t know. I wasn’t looking for it.
The last time people saw you, which was nice but unexpected, was in Inglourious Basterds****.
I never have a five-year plan for anything. One of the most influential things I ever saw was Steven Soderbergh’s acceptance speech, I forget which movie, where he said he just makes things. I reference him at least once a day. To the point where a friend of mine got me a needlepoint that said WHAT WOULD SODERBERGH DO? It’s in there. [He gestures towards an open doorway down the hall] He just makes things.
And I make things. I make about a painting a week. I started painting about two and a half, three years ago. A friend of mine who’s an amazing painter named Damian Loeb, I would go over just to watch him paint, and then one day he said, "Why don’t you paint?"
What was your first picture?
My first painting was of my wife, Kelly. My second one was of my dog, George Harrison. And then I got into this Colonel Sanders thing.
Colonel Sanders? Help me understand that.
Growing up in Canada, looking south at America, they are so amazing at creating identity that they even have enough leftover to come up with the colonel who is the colonel of chicken! As a kid I literally said the words, "Why are they militarizing chicken?" Because I didn’t understand the Kentucky Colonel of it all. Our whole family was obsessed with the Colonel. For me show business was buying Kentucky Fried Chicken. Because it was nationally advertised, and it seemed exotic. First of all, it’s a great character. He has his own unique silhouette—you can draw him in three lines. On the day that Lucian Freud died, I painted my version of a Freud with the Colonel, naked, holding a palette, painting himself. Then I did the Colonel with the Pearl Earring. Then I did the Colonel Lisa. You know, which is the Mona Lisa with the Colonel. This is so just a hobby. It is just making stuff. That’s all I want to do, is just make stuff.
Do you still paint Colonels?
Oh yeah. Yeah, I do. I know. It’s just a fun constant, you know what I mean?
We all need a constant in our lives.
And it’s just for funsies. So it’s not gonna be a "I’ve suffered for my art and now it’s your turn." I also make GarageBand tunes. I make one a day. I have now for eight years.
What do they sound like?
Um, they usually end up sounding like the Pet Shop Boys. And the Lightning Seeds, and a bit like Joy Division, and it can sound like Kraftwerk. I made one this morning.
What can you tell me about it?
I downloaded an mp3 of Howard Beale’s speech from Network—"I want you to get mad..."—and I recut it and Auto-Tuned it. One of the things in GarageBand is when you Auto-Tune it, it gives you a random melody. So that’s my melody, and then I write my music around that random re-melodizing effect that occurs, and then I select a beat.
What did you call it?
"Just Let Me Have My Steel-Belted Radials."
Who will hear that?
My brother Paul. Kelly, from time to time. She’s very patient. She’s very pregnant right now, has less time to hear my GarageBands. And I’ll hear it. I’ll review them, I’ll re-edit them. But the point is process.
There’s some of your music in the documentary, isn’t there?
Yeah, but, dude, good luck trying to find which it is. I made two little things just because we had no money and it needed nine seconds here and eight seconds there. [In the credits supplied to the media, Myers’s pieces are given the titles "Disco" and "Idiot On The Mount"]. It’s just to make stuff, you know. I’ll write poems, too. I’ll write haikus. I also make iMovies all the time, too. Lately all my iMovies have been Spike, of course, so I did A Hard Day’s Spike. I recreated the _Hard Day’s Night _opening but just with footage that I had of Spike.
All of this—what does it give you?
It connects me to creativity, which is, which is to me the greatest gift my family gave me: saying that being an artist is a noble profession. At the end of the day I’m an artist. Sometimes it’s in the comedy arts.
And these things you make like this are separate from your career? They’re just for personal creativity?
Yeah. But I’ve had an interesting career, I mean, _Austin Powers _was personal. I thought you would have to have grown up in my house basically to get the references. Ultimately we were spoofing spy spoofs.
So when you have something that is so personal but then it connects with people, do you understand why?
Um, I don’t. There is an oscillation that goes in my head, it’s a 60-cycle hum between two states. [The first is] that is the audience is my boss, it’s a lot to ask for them to come to see something, so it had better be of the highest quality. This is the mentality I grew up with with my dad—that you have to be nice to your boss, and you have to work hard for your boss. Everybody on the planet is in the service industry. That’s the paradigm: that we’re here to serve. That’s one part of the oscillation. Then it oscillates over to "I need to be very connected to what I do and it needs to thrill me on just the whimsical...silly..." Things don’t need to exist, you know. Movies don’t house, clad, shod, cleanse, or feed you. But I’m so glad there’s movies. I love them. So that’s the 60-cycle hum that allows me to make something somewhere in between there. It’s almost like a maglev—in between those two magnets is where I will make something.
Very often that has worked amazingly for you. But obviously the last movie, The Love Guru...
Yup.
...didn’t seem to connect with people.
Yeah.
Was that a shock?
Um, nothing’s a shock. You kind of have to make it and you put it out there. There’s a lot in that movie that I love. It’s a very long season. So I Married an A Murderer made even less—I love Jack Kerouac, and I love San Francisco, and I wanted to do a romantic comedy that genre-mid a bit. It was designed to be a big summer movie, and it has since over time come to be the thing that people will say, "Oh I love So I Married an A Murderer." But at the time it was scathingly reviewed, and that reaction was shocking to me. And then Austin Powers happens and Shrek. It’s a long season. I just make stuff, and sometimes it does well. But there’s a lot in that movie [The Love Guru] comedically that I’m really, really proud of. I completely recognize it didn’t meet an audience.
But I wonder how hard it is to understand why.
I can tell you this, which makes people laugh: I tried my hardest. I can tell you that much. I just love making stuff, dude, you know, you can’t be too attached up and you can’t be too attached down.
I recently read the New York Times’ review of The Love Guru... [_Myers raises a halting palm toward me to stop me continuing, correctly assuming that I am about to quote some of their words. It is a review that reaches its peak in the following, breathtakingly scathing paragraph: _"Which might sum up The Love Guru in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word ’unfunny’ surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again."]
I’ve never read it. I won’t read it, and I’d love not to know. ** **
But you must have an idea...
No, I don’t read reviews at all, up or down. I have never read a review. The way I knew about what Siskel said [_this is presumably the scathing review of _So I Married an A Murderer] is that Jay [Roach, Austin Powers director] mentioned it to me. I’ve never read a review. Right out of the gate, because I read a lot of biographies, and it is something that is mentioned a lot, getting into the habit of not reading them.
You just thought that was good practice?
Do you know what it is? I truly, truly believe that you have to—this, I think, is Stanislavsky—love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art. I’m very, very grateful to be part of the Hollywood film industry but I never thought that anything that I would do would be so mainstream. I truly, on all things sacred, I thought that I was going to be John Cassavetes, because my training was improv. I was going to go to York University to get a bachelors in fine arts film. Not film production—film studies, which I don’t even think they offer anymore. I read all of the [French film theorist] André Bazin books, _400 Blows _is by far my favorite film hands down of anything, you know. Strangelove [he gestures to the Dr. Strangelove poster on a nearby wall] is, comedically, the altar to which we make our offerings. I was a punk rocker, you know. In ’77 I was 14, I’d gone to England, I met my cousins and they gave me "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols, as a parting gift. My dad was so offended by it because he’d fought in World War Two and he was a monarchist that I had to put it in a Jimi Hendrix cover to sneak it in. And from that point on I was "that’s show business but it’s not show business... it’s this weird cottage industry off of show business."
**But to go from that guy to the guy who made the films you made and had such amazing successes with...did something in your life go awfully wrong or something go awfully right? **
Um. Wow. What an amazing question. I must salute you. [He pauses for some time, as though the verdict is in the balance.] For which I have a definitive answer, which is things went incredibly right and I am absolutely grateful. What I thought I would be, in many ways we were—there’s a lot of subversion in everything I’ve done. The New York Times—according to Lorne [Michaels], I didn’t read it—they had referred to Wayne’s World as "postmodernist"—it’s a teen comedy that had elements of being postmodernist. Spike Jonze, who I love, just asked me to give him his National Board of Review best film of the year award and to write a few words, and I said that what I love about Spike Jonze is he’s like a circus performer who rides two horses. One foot is on a horse called the avant garde, and the other foot is on a horse called being a humble entertainer. And he manages to keep both feet on both horses all the way through, so it’s thrilling.
**But I think, to take your metaphor, that your broad public image is as someone who lives in the comedy stable—and so people maybe don’t realize that your horse arrangements might be a little more complicated than they at first seem. **
First of all, thank you for getting out the equine metaphor stretcher. This gets us back to how not factory-made my career is. Everything I’ve done has been handmade. I love that that was the name of George Harrison’s company: HandMade Films. I’m 50 now, there are two stars on the walk of fame, one for me, one for Shrek, which is insanely flattering. There’s all the insane success. I can’t believe how well they did. It’s mind-blowing, truly. What do they say? If you bat .300 you can get in the Hall of Fame. Which means that seven times out of ten you didn’t connect with the ball. The song that I keep coming back to lately is the song "Across the Universe." The first time I heard it, it was the first song I ever heard on headphones. And I was like "Wow, this is pop music, but I truly feel like I’m going across the universe right now." I just think I haven’t lost the sense of the magic of that.
Is it really true that the very last letter George Harrison wrote in his life was to you?
Yes. That’s mind-blowing, dude, for the son of a Liverpudlian, a person who worships the Beatles. The letter came on the day of Austin Powers 3 when we were shooting the scene where Tom Cruise, Gwyneth Paltrow, Steven Spielberg, Danny DeVito, Kevin Spacey are doing the Hollywood movie version of Austin Powers’s life as directed by Steven Spielberg, and it was the day George Harrison died.
Had you ever had any contact with him before then?
No. And then I got this letter on that day. I cried like a baby, and it’s prominently displayed in my house. He says "...sitting here with my Dr. Evil doll...I just wanted to let you know I’ve been looking all over Europe for a mini-you doll." And he says "Dr. Evil says frickin’ " but any good Scouser dad will tell you it’s actually ’friggin’ as in a ’four of fish and finger pie’, if you get my drift." He said, "thanks for the movies, so much fun." Dude, I can’t even. On the [Beatles] Anthology special I spoke about how I still get teary thinking of that last shot [in A Hard Day’s Night] with the helicopter and all the 8-by-10s and it says B-E-A-T-L-E-S on the door and the helicopter takes off. I love the spirit of that film so much, that spirit got into Austin Powers and Wayne’s World, which is that it’s a party. And he said [in his letter] "I’m sorry I left you on the helicopter that day, I promise I won’t do it again."
Did you ever learn how he came to be writing this to you?
Yeah, but I can’t really speak of it. But it is fantastic and sad and awesome, and this is the magic that I’m talking about that I feel very grateful and privileged to be part of it.
**Um, a while back I was trying to ask you about Inglourious Basterds. **
Right.
Aside from your shared encyclopedic knowledge of old war films, what did you and Tarantino have in common?
He is a very passionate filmmaker—he sees all of this as an immense privilege. I love his movies, first of all. I think only a few filmmakers should be entrusted with dream sequences when they make films. Only some filmmakers should be given the license to make a dream sequence.
You think there should literally be a license that has to be applied for?
[nods] I think you must apply for it, and there should be a dream board.
And what would be the most common reasons for rejection?
At times dream sequences can be an immodest, athletic, non-connected-to-the-dramatic-question-that-you’ve-posed detour that shows off one’s cinematic chops and breaks the tonal agreement you’ve made with the audience right out of the gate. That would be my biggest problem. [Pauses] Fellini gets to make dream sequences.
Who else gets a lifetime pass?
I would say Spielberg. And I loved [Kubrick’s] Eyes Wide Shut, which I knew to be Traumnovelle, a dream novel, based on Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, so I knew the deal right away, no deal was broken for me, and that is an unbelievable dreamscape that Kubrick’s created. I think Darren Aronofsky has the right to make a dreamscape. I think Soderbergh should also be allowed to make dreams, because there’s nothing that man can’t do. I worship him so much, because he just makes things and some things are for everybody and some things are for a few people. And he takes his time and he drops out, he comes back in. I just think that the dude is doing everything right.
That’s what I think about with Tarantino, is that only certain people should be allowed to make Grand Guignol, and he has taken the absurdity of that to such an amazing next level and it’s so funny. It’s so fascinating, his universes are such beautiful immaculate universes. I think André Bazin talked about kinetics—which is kind of like, if you were watching the film on the airplane and you didn’t buy the headset, you could still follow kinetically as if you’re a dance partner with the filmmaker and they have their hand on the small of your back, guiding you through it. One thing leads to the next leads to the next, and the dominoes that Tarantino sets up are so fantastic—so it’s appropriate but unusual, appropriate but thrilling, appropriate but scary, appropriate but suspenseful. It’s never not appropriate. Everything_ is_, is organic to itself—even the most fantastic ideosphere he might create. There are rules unspoken, but there’s always an authenticity to whatever ideosphere he creates, you know what I mean? The other thing that is amazing about Tarantino, which is another André Bazin concept, is presence—where you no longer see the frame. So we often talk about "dreams are private movies and movies are public dreams", you know? In that way Tarantino, Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Spielberg, Soderbergh—for me they create such fascinating worlds that you just don’t see the frame at all, you’re never taken out of the movie, you are just in that public dreamscape, and it’s thrilling.
Had you ever spoken to Tarantino before he asked you to do the movie?
No, no, he just called out of the blue. I thought it was my brother Paul punking me.
Would you have done anything he’d asked?
I don’t know. What an interesting hypothetical. He called and said "Would you like to play a British general in a World War Two movie?" and I was like "Are you kidding me?" It was amazing. We shot at Nazi headquarters, and first day I got there he was like "Mike, come here", and I watched a scene where Hitler is having a portrait done of himself. I didn’t know what to make of it except to say, "My god, what an unbelievable, awesome life I have."
Hanging out with Tarantino and Hitler for the day.
Yeah, it’s one of the most fantastic experiences of my life.
Do you get offered lots of non-comedy acting parts?
I never get offered anything. I’ve never been offered anything. I’ve never been on lists where I’ve been offered anything.
Literally? People are not sending you scripts and saying "please could you do this?"
Since 1991 I have received fifteen scripts.
That’s impossible!
No, it’s true. I’m just not that guy. I never will be that guy.
**So if more filmmakers you admired offered you interesting dramatic parts are you totally open to that? **
Yeah, a hundred percent, yeah, absolutely.
Either I’m crazy or people are going to read this and you’re going to get pestered.
Oh well, um, that would be very flattering. I’ve just never expected that that would happen, you know. I wrote my own stuff when I was a kid in Toronto doing little comedy bits before punk bands, I wrote my own stuff at Second City, I wrote my own stuff at Saturday Night Live, and I, for the most part, have been able to write my own stuff in the movies. I’ve just been on that trajectory, you know.
I understand that, but I just assumed you turn everything else down.
I do turn virtually everything down.
All fifteen of them?
All fifteen of them, yes.
Well, no, because you did Inglourious Basterds.
[nods] I did _54 _[the little-seen 1998 movie about the world of the disco-era New York club Studio 54] because I loved that character so much and loved that world.
So then you turned down thirteen of them?
Well, I shouldn’t...I don’t know the exact number. It could be as high as forty. But I would say in the fourteen-to-forty range.
It’s weird to think that for a certain generation the moment they may most readily associate you with in recent years is when Kanye West said "George Bush doesn’t care about black people"** on the Katrina telethon while you were standing next to him looking a little...well, I don’t know how to describe you.**
Surprised.
And a bit uncomfortable, maybe?
Yes.
Do you remember what you were thinking as he said it?
I don’t do many things. And I remember watching the television and seeing, because I’m a citizen now, my fellow citizens on the roofs of buildings dying. And I turned into my father, where my dad would shout at the TV. My dad hated injustice. I’ve been called for many, many telethons, hither and yon, and I remember just being so upset and feeling, ironically, that if this was white people on roofs, the army would be there in five seconds. And these are my fellow citizens, who just happen to be people of color, sitting on roofs for multiple days. So when they called me I said, "Yeah, I’ll do it." I went there specifically because I wanted to help the Red Cross. I was supposed to be by myself, and I was, like, "fine", then they said "Do you mind doing it with somebody else?" And I always remembered that Live Aid thing of "leave your egos at the door", so I said, "Sure, of course." And they said, "Would you do it with Kanye West?" and I said, "Uh, sure." I actually wasn’t familiar with his work. And then he said he was going to take some liberties with the thing.
So he gave you kind of a warning.
Yes, but I didn’t know that the liberty would be calling out the president.
If you watch the footage, I don’t think he knew.
I don’t think so either. But the question itself is a little beside the point of what actually went down in New Orleans. For me it isn’t about the look of embarrassment on my face, it is truly about the injustice that was happening in New Orleans. I don’t mind answering the question but the emphasis of it being that I’m the guy next to the guy who spoke a truth. I assume that George Bush does care about black people—I mean I don’t know him, I’m going to make that assumption—but I can definitively say that it appeared to me watching television that had that been white people, the government would have been there faster. And so to me that’s really the point—the look on my face is, to me, almost insulting to the true essence of what went down in New Orleans. You know, there’s a great line by the great Northern English poet Elvis Costello, as sung by Nick Lowe: "What’s so funny ’bout peace love and understanding?" [Myers seems both dubious and slightly irked when I tell him that it was the other way round—the song was written by Nick Lowe but made famous by Costello.] The point being that. What is so funny about peace, love, and understanding? To have the emphasis on the look on my face versus the fact that somebody spoke truth to power at a time when somebody needed to speak? I’m very proud to have been next to him. Do you know what I mean?
**Of course. **
I’m, like, super proud to have been next to him. The look on my face is...to be honest with you, I thought I handled it well. I was like "This is what’s happening..." Because live TV is my milieu, and improv is my training, you know. It has been painful that the culture has at times meditated on my surprise, when it’s really the message, dude. The message, the message, the message, you know. There’s a world of fail culture, and it’s hardly a fail on my part to be next to the guy that spoke truth to power at a time when horrific injustices... [he trails off, point made]
**I was watching it live in a hotel lobby in Northern California, and I can still remember it exactly. **
I’m not downplaying its remarkableness. I mean it is what it is, dude. You know, I’m having a remarkable experience on this planet, a truly extraordinary experience. Given where I’m from, I am so grateful for the extraordinariness of it. I’m having an extraordinary experience on the planet.
You’ve recently been busy making Supermensch. Do you want to make documentaries, in general, or did you just want to make this documentary?
I wanted to make this documentary. This is not a career move. This is entirely a labor of love. ****
Did you look at, or style it on, any other documentaries?
I’ve been a fan of documentary filmmaking for forever. I remember going to see even Louisiana Story. Cathy Come Home, I loved that. I think the biggest influence on me would be Italianamerican by Scorsese. Loved Man on Wire. The Kid Stays in the Picture, you have to look at that film because it’s about show business and in essence, truly what the film is about in my opinion is family. _Supermensch _is about family. That one of the things that we all seek is sanctuary.
But in the movie you’ve got family and sanctuary on one hand, and on the other fame and celebrity. In its form and in the stories told in it, Supermensch seems like it is celebrating high and hilarious times with the rich and famous, but then it ends up with Shep Gordon saying "there’s nothing about fame that I’ve ever seen that is healthy...it’s very hard to survive."
I call fame the industrial disease of creativity. And it is. Fame can be so toxic that it has reproductive harm. From day one in talking to Shep it’s been family family family, and interviewing him it became clear that everything for him has been a search for that family.
Have you found fame hard to survive?
An artist’s duty is to be misunderstood, that’s for sure. It can be weird to have crimes committed in your name. It has been weird to see things written about you up and down that have absolutely no basis in reality. Sitting in Toronto, I thought that was not possible, but having gone through this experience, I’m like "wow, that’s really possible." That part of it has been odd. And the notion that people have that fame is ego boosting is one that I would have believed in Toronto. It’s more ego death than it is ego restoring. Mostly the exposure that comes with fame is like putting your penis on the table and having everybody saying "that looks like a penis, only smaller."
What kind of fictions or untruths along the way did you find most jarring?
I shouldn’t like to get into those.
Can you explain anything at all?
The craziest one, of course, is "morbid fear of tunnels." UFO alien sex diet...I "only eat salmon." It’s just not true. Though I do enjoy salmon. England creates many fascinating ones: "He refuses to drive." I didn’t want to drive in England, on the wrong side of the road. Here’s one: We had 120 people at our wedding. Kelly and I didn’t tell the press. I didn’t grow up going "we have to call the press." But a _private _wedding became a secret wedding. Do you see the subtle paradigm of that? "Recluse," I’ve had. I go out all the time, floor hockey twice a week, we have a standing get-together at our house every Friday, I have friends who are schoolteachers, I have friends who are social workers, I have friends who are painters, friends who are graphic designers, friends who are musicians, and some friends are actors and some friends are filmmakers. I’m very engaged in life. I’m very, very grateful for the approbation and exposure my work has occasioned but when I don’t have a movie coming out, I don’t do interviews. We are talking right now because I have a movie coming out called Supermensch.
Um...going back one moment, did you just say the words "alien sex diet"?
[nods] Alien sex diet. I have no idea—I was just told about it. Me and a whole bunch of other celebrities had discovered this diet. You know, my feeling about all of it is that the perks outweigh the quirks, and to complain about it is like saying "Oh my god, these gold bars are so heavy. Why do they pay you in gold bars?" But you asked me a very, very clear question.
And the movie you made about Shep Gordon really throws out questions like that.
Yeah. He toiled in the fields of fame.
It’s weird that his story, when you summarize it, sounds fairly generic, but in the telling it’s much more interesting.
He is a combination of Brian Epstein, Marshall McLuhan, and Mr. Magoo. He is Zelig, Gump, and P.T. Barnum. He is all of those things. We’re all a cast of thousands, you know. We’re all filled with different aspects of things, we’re all filled with contradiction. I mean intimacy is an interesting contradiction. We want to be in a relationship to be seen but we don’t want to be seen at the same time.
Toward the end of Supermensch you describe Gordon as "the nicest man I’ve ever met." That’s not a very promising starting point for an interesting documentary, and yet somehow it isn’t the problem it should be.
I see what you mean. Shep truly does not see kindness as weakness; he doesn’t see love as a faulty business plan. And when one says "nice", my tongue is firmly implanted in my cheek—that it can be reduced to the word "nice" when in fact it’s part of a broader, beautiful paradigm.
The idea of reciprocation and karma runs very strongly through the movie, and most of the time it’s in a positive way. So much so that the viewer almost doesn’t notice that Gordon applies the same philosophy in a consistent but shockingly raw way when it comes to Teddy Pendergrass. [Gordon, Pendergrass’s manager, describes how he unsuccessfully beseeched Pendergrass, who was refusing to take the stage for a London concert as the audience waited, warning him that a decision like that would come back on him. Soon afterwards Pendergrass had a car accident which left him a quadriplegic.]
Yeah.
Because Gordon’s really saying: I believe in karma, and this guy lets these people down then the next week he has an accident that cripples him. And that what happened to Pendergrass is consequently his fault.
He’s not attached to fault and he’s not attached to blame. He just believes that stuff goes out and stuff goes back. But I completely see your point and I think it’s a very astute observation that that aspect of his philosophy he stands beside, as uncomfortable as that might be. [Gordon, incidentally, then helped look after Pendergrass until he died twenty-seven years later.]****
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a documentary before where one of the on-camera interviewees is the movie’s director.
Yeah. Good question. I don’t know the answer to that.
Well, you got some good stuff out of yourself, so it clearly worked.
You should have seen the crap I cut out. We were panning for gold.
You tell a funny story from the beginning of your friendship with Gordon about being invited to a luau at his house in Hawaii at which Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone are to be in attendance—"like being at Madame Tussauds, with a pig" as you memorably describe it. It did leave me curious about what the evening was actually like for you.
I got too quiet. I’m an introvert, ultimately. I’m a site-specific extrovert but I’m mostly introverted, and I don’t do well in small groupings. I can talk to a large group of people and I’m okay one on one, but in small groupings I tend to get very shy, and I just sat there drinking a Molson trying to take it all in. I just observed. You know, all of this stuff happened so fast. I met Shep in ’91. I was a punk rocker up until ’83, however much can one be an authentic punk rocker in the suburbs of Toronto, so that’s eight years.
You talk in the movie about a difficult period in your life when you invited yourself to his house in Hawaii for a week and stayed for a couple of months. [Myers says in the movie: "He took care of me like as if I was a baby chick that had fallen out of the nest."] I imagine the audience will assume that this was to do with the end of your first marriage.
Then they’d be wrong. I was having real problems accepting my father’s death. My son’s birth has been the most amazing like healing for me. But it’s the sense of the one person who I would want to have seen this the most. I’ve said this too many times—it just happens to be true so I don’t know what to do: My dad informed every aspect of everything I’ve done. And I thought I was okay and then I wasn’t. Shep was very helpful in allowing me to just be. The most amazing thing with Shep is he didn’t ask me questions. He didn’t wonder why I was there. And Hawaii is such an amazing place, it’s so restorative. The irony being that my dad was always angry with Hawaii because the Hawaiians murdered Captain Cook: "Bloody murdered him, mate!"
An excellent point, I suppose.
I had a great experience with my parents—my dad was my hero. A funny Liverpudlian. My mom’s funny as well. She used to do this thing where she pretended she was a zombie and, and my kid Spike loves it, so I called my mom on her birthday and said, "Hey, my kid loves the zombie." And my mom, without missing a beat, said, "I created a monster." Isn’t that a great line? I said, "Dude, that’s a really good joke." She said, "It wasn’t just your dad who was funny, you know." My dad just had a great way about him, too. I’d say, "I don’t want to go to bed", and my dad would say, "Well, you have to." And I’d say, "Why?" And he said, "Because in this play we call life, I play your father, and you play the son."
Do you watch a lot of comedy these days?
I do.
Modern comedy?
Both. You know, Lorne has a great expression: "Comedy and sausages are two things that, once you know how they’re made, they affect the appetite." Comedy done right can be an art form; for the vast majority of the time comedy’s a craft, and there is certain rhythmic constructs that can be learned. What interests me is...one of the loveliest things that Seinfeld said to me about my character Dieter on Saturday Night Live was that it was comedy where comedy hadn’t existed before, and I had broken all the rules of American parody. I was parodying something that nobody had seen. That idea: of discovering new frontiers of subjects fit for comedy. Right now the show that I’m loving is Portlandia with Fred Armisen.
Your former bandmate. [Myers and Armisen played a set of original synth-pop tunes at a New York club in 2011 under the name The Modern Weepers.]
Yes, indeed. Indeed.
What happened to your band?
We don’t have any time. When you have a kid, everything changes. It was fun. He is such a great musician, oh my God.
What’s the last movie that really made you laugh?
Oh, The Trip, I loved. That’s the Cassavetes in me. I think what Steve Coogan does is so cool.
**But that was a while ago. **
Yeah. Yeah.
**Do you know what your next movie will be? **
No.
I guess most people expect either a Wayne’s World 3 or a new Austin Powers.
I don’t know. Do they? I can’t think of it that way. Two baseball things that are in my consciousness always: One is "you can’t think of the plate, you just have to hit the ball." You can’t think about anything, you just have to be in that zone. I truly believe that. The other one is this famous story, and I’m probably gonna get it wrong—I didn’t grow up with baseball, but I just remember hearing this story and being blown away—of a very famous American catcher and there’s a pitcher and it’s the World Series and it was game seven, and it was the bottom of the ninth. One more pitch, they would win the World Series. So, all the pressure’s on. The catcher calls a time out to come to the mound. The pitcher goes "what should I throw?" and the catcher goes "I don’t know, throw anything you want." And he goes "Well why’d you come to the mound?" He said "Cause isn’t it great? Isn’t it great that we’re here?" He’s like "What do you mean?" He goes "When you’re a kid did you ever think that it would be bottom of the ninth, one more pitch?...I just wanted to come and talk to you, that’s all." He puts his mask back on, they throw a strike, won the World Series. There is a little bit of: You have to stay in that zone, you know. You just have to. And it’s a yummy place. It’s a very yummy, creative, fruitful place.
And so how far away are you from knowing...?
I have five ideas. You need to just let them percolate. Everything’s about whether the idea is sparking me. Is this something that I can honor the audience, and make it great, you know? Those are the two things. Often the logistics of moviemaking are, between coming up with an idea and it on the screen, the tendency of the idea is not always to bloom, it’s mostly to rot. It’s an entropic process. So between you pitching an idea and it getting written down, nature takes some of its energy away. Between it being cast, it being shot, it being edited. And then you’re in the theater and the guy in front of you has a coughing attack, you know. This is just the nature of it.
Are these five all ideas that you hope will all be movies one day?
I do but I can’t be attached. When I wrote Austin Powers I’d also written a Battle of Britain movie at the same time. This Battle of Britain movie I was certain was going to be it, and then it was Austin Powers.
Was that a funny movie?
It honors the heroism of it. My mom was in the RAF and she’s one of those radar ladies with the sticks on the Perspex-covered map of England. The tone that I wanted for it was True Lies. An action movie with some comedy. I love that film. I think that film is tonally one of the more perfect combinations of comedy and action. I’m in for ten minutes, I’m in for two hours with that movie. If I get ten minutes in I’m, like, "Ahhh, dammit, I’m gonna be late."****
But are you prepared to go back to, say, Wayne’s World or Austin Powers if you decide you want to?
That’s an interesting question. The quick answer is: Yes, I’m prepared to do anything, you know, if it’s good. If it feels like it’s going to be thrilling. You know, one of the great things of turning 50, one of the great things of becoming a parent, is I get to be me. I don’t have to please anybody. I’m extremely happy with how things are going, have gone, and will go. I’m very grateful for my beautiful family and I’m grateful that I got to choose an artist’s life. But I don’t have to explain myself to anybody. I can tolerate living in the temporary uncomfortability of being misunderstood. At the end of the day, the feedback I get from people—including George Harrison which is of course extraordinary—but equally, and I promise you equally as meaningful to me, complete strangers, who are not known artists, who have said "We’re going through a hard time and we put on Austin Powers, Wayne’s World, whatever, and for that moment that your movie was on there was a truce in our house...." That’s all that Shep ever talks to me about, by the way, did you know that? He never talks to me about box office, he just keeps saying to me, "Do you know how much joy you bring people?" And I go, "I don’t." But he goes, "That’s it, dude, your movies make people happy."
Do you see a lot of echoes of what you’ve done out in the culture?
Constantly, and it’s unbelievably flattering. I noticed it when I got super sick. I had this horrible flu that was going around New York. It starts in the throat and then it went everywhere, and I was down, dude, and I couldn’t sleep I was that sick, and for eighteen hours the only thing I could do was watch TV. I propped myself up on the couch and just grazed. There were seventeen references to stuff that I had done.
Somebody called somebody their Mini-Me without explaining it, somebody said somebody had lost their mojo, somebody said "schwing", somebody said "you’re like butter", somebody said "touch my monkey." It was surreal. I thought I was hallucinating. But it was very gratifying. I was blown away. It was very surreal, and very satisfying.
How would you like people to think of you these days?
I don’t know. You can’t go there. It sounds so corny, but the only meditation you can do is love...alignment with...and making stuff. The insane absolute almost Newtonian law of just loving the art in yourself and not yourself in the art is the path to such amazing happiness
So what I’m hearing is: you’ve got a lot more Colonel Sanders paintings in you.
I do. A lot more GarageBands. And I have a lot more movies. I just make stuff, you know. That is absolutely the truth. That is the absolute truth.
Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent