Carol Kane: ’I feel very old and very young at the same time‘

The acting legend and star of Between the Temples shoots the breeze on acting your age, keeping artistically active, and being super creative with John and Gena.

There’s a 50-year span between Carol Kane’s debut credit in Carnal Knowledge and her current role on Star Trek; in-between is an Oscar nomination for Hester Street, starring with Andy Kaufman on Taxi, the Broadway run of Wicked, and roles for (naming just a few) John Cassavetes, Woody Allen, Gus Van Sant, Cindy Sherman, Elaine May, Steve Buscemi, and Jim Jarmusch—an oeuvre so vast that no two people could possibly have the same sense of it. (I’ve not even mentioned Scrooged, which you’ve likely watched with family on at least one holiday visit.) But some vision coheres in Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, featuring Kane as a late-in-life widower who decides to receive the Bat Mitzvah she missed 60-or-so years prior. A brilliantly shaped scriptment (more on that below) from Silver and C. Mason Wells makes ideal scene partners of her and Jason Schwartzman—together they’re one of cinema’s snuggest odd couples.

Kane is a lively, quick-witted conversation partner, and very much the one-woman repository of history her career suggests—the kind of subject that essentially does this job for you.

LWLies: You’re listed as an executive producer of Between the Temples. What motivated you coming aboard in that capacity, and what did its responsibilities look like?

Kane: To tell you the truth: there wasn’t a lot of [Laughs] responsibility other than the responsibility of collaborating from the beginning with Nathan and Chris. You know a bit about how Nathan works? It’s not a script as one is accustomed to reading. It’s sort of a chapter-book type of thing; it gives you a little suggestion of each scene. The night before you shoot a scene, we get pages. Even those pages do look more like a regular script, that’s not how it’s going to end up. Even though there is dialogue, that dialogue is suggestion. So there’s a lot of responsibility to collaborate and to give it your all over and over again, because you might shoot a scene from top to bottom and think, ’Oh, we got it that time.’ And then [Laughs] Nathan will say, ‘No, no, no. That’s not it. That didn’t work.’ You have to just dive back in the water. Aside from those lessons and, in the rehearsals, collaborating around the table before we start to shoot, those were the main responsibilities. I didn’t have to raise money or hire the genius DP that we had, or any of those things.

It’s only your second producing credit of any sort; the other is iMordecai, which was just two years ago. Given some of the great filmmakers you worked with and who didn’t always get a fair shake – a Joan Micklin Silver or Elaine May – I wonder if you’ve wanted to materially support films behind the scenes for a while, and if there’s some satisfaction that comes from it.

Oh, I’ll tell you what: if something works out, there would be a gigantic satisfaction. I’ve been working with Elaine on a play for a while and we’re just really hoping it will come to pass because it’s so brilliant. We’ll see what happens. But yeah: there’s so many great filmmakers, as you said, where things didn’t surface the way they should have for their careers. Joan is a big, great example of that.

What’s this play you’ve been working on?

You know, I don’t think I have permission to say.

It’s just exciting to hear about something new.

Right? She’s such a genius.

I’ve watched a lot of things you’re in, but much of it’s decades-old, stuff I saw as a kid. And there are ways actors get embalmed in your mind. But because we’re all human beings, we all age.

If we’re lucky.

Well, yes. Very true. But when you show up and look and sound your own age, I found something very moving: we’ve been able to see you grow onscreen. I wonder if there’s something to embrace about getting older as an actor: new ways to use your face, your voice, kinds of roles you can now play.

To be honest with you: it’s not easy. I, like you, have watched me age onscreen. But the thing is: in your mind’s eye you don’t necessarily realise how old you’ve gotten. [Laughs] You know, visually. Well, I feel very old and very young at the same time. But then, if you sort of see your face on film, there’s no… it’s like a smack. There’s no denying what you look like. I’m trying to embrace it. I’m trying to show it like it is, tell it like it is. The much-overquoted —because it’s brilliant—quote from Bette Davis: “Old age ain’t for sissies.” That’s a powerful fact. You have to embrace a lot of change. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s something that you struggle with. [Sound of piano in background] Hold on. One second. That’s my momma playing the piano. Could you hear that?

Yeah.

My momma’s 97.

And she plays the piano?

Every day.

She sounds good.

Oh, she’s brilliant. She’s a composer. She’s an improviser, also, and she has a piano partner, and she improvises with him. One time Elaine and her daughter, Jeannie Berlin, they came over for dinner, and my mom and her partner played for them. It’s all completely improvised. Elaine just went crazy. She said, “I’m an improviser. I know about improvising.” That was just brilliant. She was so bowled-over. How lucky. But as I said: I want to embrace it. I think sometimes I may look pretty and sometimes not so pretty, but that’s how it is in life, right? Do I wish that I had the jawline that I had when I did Carnal Knowledge? Yeah. [Laughs] I sure do, and I never will again – unless I get my face cut up.

This is a performance you couldn’t credibly give 20, 30 years ago, and I’m hearing your 97-year-old mother brilliantly play piano in the background. I imagine that’s encouraging. But I don’t know.

It’s, I would say, encouraging, inspirational, and daunting all at the same time. Because how do I live up to the creative force that keeps her going to the piano and creating at this age? It’s really something extraordinary. Like I say: inspirational and daunting. [Laughs] Because I don’t know. Because I said: young and old. The old part of me feels a little tired sometimes, and I don’t know if I’ll have that same life force that she has. You don’t know ‘til you get there, I think. Definitely I could not have played this part in the way I played it at a different age. It’s my age; it’s being my age.

Jason said he spent about a year between getting the scriptment and production’s start—the word he used for that time was “fertilization.” Was there anything you zeroed-in on with the prep time you had? Her way of dressing, speaking, moving?

Huh. [Pause] Well, he said “fertilisation.” I would say “gestation.” But isn’t that interesting—because fertilisation is the male version of gestation. [Laughs] You know, it’s so specific and private, everything about how a person gets put together—the images of people I had in my head—and a big thing, which is going to sound a little boring: I really wanted to sound authentic with the Hebrew, and that was quite a challenge for me. I spoke Yiddish in Hester Street. I don’t speak Yiddish, but it’s much more accessible to me than Hebrew. So that was something I worked very hard on, with a lot of help, and I was quite frightened for the ceremony – the Bat Mitzvah – which I suppose is appropriate, because I imagine that was true for Carla, too: the thing about getting it right, having the opportunity to do it, and then the obligation and the aspiration to get it right. I just have to say, in terms of who I became, ultimately, in the movie: a lot of that had to do with Jason. I mean, he was just… I would say, “No acting required,” for me.

Who else is like that?

Of course I’ve worked with Gena Rowlands. I don’t know if you know that I got to be in a play with Gena Rowlands that John Cassavetes directed. It’s the last thing he directed, and he wrote it. It’s called A Woman of Mystery. Gosh. Oh, God. And I got to be there.

Didn’t you two know each other a bit?

Well, I worked with John on a couple of plays. I had worked with him on another play before that that a friend of his, Meade Roberts, had wrote, that was about Eugene O’Neill, and Ben Gazzara was O’Neill. I was his first wife and Patti LuPone was his second wife. It’s so thrilling. John and I worked on a piece for a long time that never got born—it was quite brilliant and we rehearsed together for a long time—and then this play did get born.

And it’s a sacred memory.

Well, that’s the right word, isn’t it? What it was like was wildly challenging and exciting and terrifying. Specifically on this play—the third thing that I worked with him on, with Gena, A Woman of Mystery—when we started rehearsing I hated my character. [Laughs] And I was begging John to let me out. Begging him, like crying. Here’s what John said—this’ll give you a taste of what it was like—“Oh, okay. Okay. Here’s the deal: if you still hate your character on opening night, you can leave.” And he meant it. He meant it, fucking, a zillion percent. One day, we were already in previews, I went to visit a little girl I knew named Susie De Luna—who was an extraordinary character, and she’s since passed away; she was an amazing young person, a little girl—and I went over to John and Gena’s house after I saw Susie. I started to talk about Susie to John. He said, ‘Oh. Oh. Okay. Let’s sit down. Let’s start writing.’ And he wrote a scene based on the spirit of Susie. I don’t mean ‘spirit’ as in ‘booga-booga.’ I mean her guts and her uniqueness. She was a fucking brave person, against all odds.

How did the writing go?

We sat down and wrote a scene, like, with yellow pads at the card table, and started writing. I mean, he started writing – I just wrote things down — and then he wrote a whole scene. He said to Gena and me, ‘What do you think? Should we try it tonight? You want to put it in tonight?’ I’m talking about a preview with an audience. We did it. From then on, I was in love with my character. What he wrote that day changed everything for me. He did know that he could do it, and he did it. Gena knew that she could do it and she did it. It was very… God, it was so stimulating. John made everybody much better than they were. And Gena was right in there with him. They were very challenging to each other as artists; they were brutally honest with each other. But that was the basis of John’s work—a sort of brutal honesty. Don’t you think?

Oh, absolutely. Those movies still knock your teeth out.

Knock your fucking teeth out. Have you seen Opening Night lately?

It’s been a little while.

Oh, my God! Time to see it again. Well, maybe because I’m an actor it means more to me because [Laughs] Gena’s playing an actress. But it’s also great to see John playing an actor in a scene with Gena and Gena is clearly the star and John is clearly the supporting actor. Just to watch that dynamic knowing that he was in charge of everything but he… boy, to see them together, just acting onstage and her being better than him and him knowing it. In their characters. I mean. It’s just, like, wild. Anyway, I better shut up. I get excited about some of these people. Why not, right?

Published 13 Sep 2024

Tags: Between The Temples Carol Kane Jason Schwartzman Nathan Silver