“I was born in 1944, at the end of World War II. But in my lifetime, this is the worst time that I could ever remember. There’s much too much conflict in the world.”
Michael Douglas is center stage, opening the 71st Taormina Film Festival—an event he last attended 21 years ago. And as only the greatest can do, Douglas doesn’t mince words.
“I am not happy to see the defense budgets increasing across the board,” he continues. “My country in particular insisted in demanding other countries increase their military budgets. I have a hard time understanding why, with all the AI and how intelligent we are as human beings, how we possibly could be having as many wars and conflicts as we are. It’s ridiculous.
“I realize that my country bears a lot of the responsibility to the chaos that exists in the world. I apologize to my friends, be it my neighbors in Canada or Mexico, or all the countries in the EU and nato. I’m embarrassed. But beyond that, I really do not want to even give the benefit of having more discussion about our president. No, no.”
Douglas would return to this subject several times during a meeting with the Italian press, though he hardly ever mentioned Donald Trump. What is his biggest disappointment? “This last election in our country,” he said. “Immigration is a problem in every country. But this president created such drama, that all these immigrants were murders and rapists. This is before he got elected.” Now that Trump is president again, Douglas explained to his Italian audience, he’s been able to bypass Congress in an attempt to enforce draconian immigration enforcement. “And my question to our government is, when or how do we stop this executive power?”
The longtime California resident also objects to Trump’s determination to punish California, a blue state. “The state of California is the fourth largest GDP in the world. You have the United States, China, India—then the state of California. Bigger than Japan,” he said. “The San Joaquin Valley in California supplies 60% of all the food in America.” And much of it is picked by seasonal workers who come from Spanish-speaking countries, some of whom stay in the U.S. even after the work is done.
“There’s no possible reason that you should call out the National Guard or the US Army” to deport these people, said Douglas. “To go into these middle-class neighborhoods—these are people who all have had jobs, been living in the country for 30 years or whatever. A very heavy-handed approach which isn’t resolving anything.”
But Douglas didn’t focus only on politics. He mused about filmmaking: “I still trust my first instinct, but I spend a little more time structurally trying to break it down and understand it. Generally my first instincts have been right, but not always. And so now I am a little more careful.” Any regrets? “Yeah. I’m not going to tell you, but sure, I have regrets I don’t want rub salt on my ex-wife or something.”
And he spoke about perhaps his most iconic character: Gordon Gekko, the smooth-talking centerpiece of the 1987 film Wall Street. He was, unambiguously, the villain of that film. Yet audiences have always been drawn to him. “He dressed very nice,” said Douglas. “He was powerful.” After that movie, said Douglas, he was constantly approached by bankers who said, “You are the one that got me into Wall Street.” Douglas’s incredulous response? “I was the bad guy!”
Another Douglas masterpiece turns 50 this year: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which the actor produced. One of film’s biggest hurdles, said Douglas, was how difficult it was to find an actress to play Nurse Ratched. “They all turned the part down because in 1975, a woman—and this is because of the woman’s movement—a woman could not play a villain. Whereas the men all want to do villain parts. The villain parts were always the most fun; they were the best. So I always thought that was strange.” The role was eventually taken by Louise Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for her performance.
Douglas did not hesitate to name his greatest stroke of luck: “Marrying my wife, Catherine [Zeta Jones].” That came about thanks to chance, he added. “I remember reading in a magazine article that she was doing a movie with Sean Connery, and the article said, oh, she likes older men. She does. So that was the stroke of luck.”
Aging in Hollywood, said Douglas, is probably not as much a problem for him “as for women, especially someone like Sharon [Stone, his Basic Instinct costar] or my wife, Catherine—people that are known. But on the same breath, as I’m looking at my youngest kids—my 22-year-old daughter wants to be an actress, and my 24-year-old son wants to be an actor. My daughter is getting more attention. So the ladies get attention younger than the guys do, but the guys end up going a little later.”
Douglas himself comes from a legendary acting dynasty. He was asked what his father, Kirk Douglas said to him when he won his first acting Oscar; Douglas replied, “He said, ‘if I knew he was going to be so successful, I would’ve been nicer to him.’” Kirk was joking, Douglas added.
There are times when he worries about the future—especially how AI-generated likenesses may affect the art of acting. “I’m very pessimistic only because I’ve seen what happened with social media, and now they’re telling us, ‘oh, we’ll get the guardrails on AI,” he said. “I don’t think they are.” And the technology is just beginning. “I was at a conference recently with a lot of major tech experts, and they all said, ‘In the next five years or less, you’re not going to recognize this planet.’ The power of AI and robots is going to happen. It’s going to explode.”
But Douglas also has cause for hope. “Gen Z, I have real hopes for. I really hope that they are going to politically push the elderly out and clean up this mess.” They face an uphill battle in Hollywood, though. “I think it is very hard to become a star. They don’t want to promote movie stars, because movie stars are expensive; they would rather promote AI or CGIs. My real hope is—my son is on the town council in our town. He’s 50 years younger than the next person. Somebody has got to assume these responsibilities. Because rather than dealing with the top down, we have to start from the bottom up. We have to make our mayors, our local town council members, our local judges responsible. So hopefully more and more people will be getting politically active in local politics.”
Original story in VF Italy.
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