Grif­fin Dunne on act­ing, Joan Did­ion and his plans for an After Hours TV show

When Grif­fin Dunne first appeared in Lon­don in 1981, it was as the liv­ing-dead vic­tim of a were­wolf. He roamed the streets of the UK cap­i­tal, slow­ly decom­pos­ing and accom­pa­ny­ing his friend through his own trans­for­ma­tion into the mur­der­ous beast. In the years since An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don, Dunne has nev­er stopped wan­der­ing, per­pet­u­al­ly mov­ing between act­ing, pro­duc­ing and direct­ing. When we meet on his return to the city he once haunt­ed, it’s to dis­cuss Joan Did­ion: The Cen­ter Will Not Hold, a new doc­u­men­tary about the famed author of ​‘The White Album’ and ​‘Play It as It Lays’.

This was a par­tic­u­lar­ly spe­cial project, Dunne reveals, since Did­ion is both his sub­ject and his beloved aunt. ​“I knew it’d be impos­si­ble to just do a straight-ahead doc­u­men­tary as if I wasn’t relat­ed to her. It would be kin­da false to not acknowl­edge that, but by acknowl­edg­ing it too much, it takes it away from the work.” Instead Dunne chose to focus on Didion’s lega­cy as a reporter of Amer­i­ca. ​“The idea was always to show what was going on in Amer­i­ca through what was going on in her life.”

Enquir­ing about cer­tain painful peri­ods in Didion’s life was evi­dent­ly chal­leng­ing, but Dunne admits that get­ting her to talk about her work wasn’t much eas­i­er. One of his ear­li­est mem­o­ries of ​“being intim­i­dat­ed” was when, after read­ing her best­seller ​‘Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem’ aged 11, he asked what she was work­ing on. Didion’s hus­band John Gre­go­ry Dunne (him­self an author) over­heard their con­ver­sa­tion and screamed, ​‘You nev­er ask a writer what they’re writ­ing!’ As Dunne observes, ​“The intel­li­gence that comes across in her silences is daunt­ing and intim­i­dat­ing to just about every­one on earth. And actors who can describe how they act are usu­al­ly over-explain­ing in their work.” For this rea­son, he under­stands Didion’s desire to ​“keep [her] voice quiet.”

Pro­fil­ing the author and his per­son­al con­nec­tion to her in The Cen­ter Will Not Hold was, ​“a bal­ance that [he] was finess­ing right up until [he] had to lock pic­ture and release it.” Dunne explains with a smile that although top­i­cal, he decid­ed not to include the sto­ry of how Aunt Joan unknow­ing­ly helped him to become a direc­tor. She asked his moth­er to allow a 12-year-old Grif­fin to attend a par­ty at her house where Janis Joplin was due to appear. Although Dunne’s idol arrived too late for him to meet her (it was a school night), he end­ed up bas­ing his first film, the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed 1996 short Duke of Groove, on this ​“sem­i­nal moment” in his life.

When it comes to choos­ing projects, Dunne has always allowed him­self to be guid­ed by an adven­tur­ous spir­it. ​“You could spend years and years on some­thing that even­tu­al­ly nev­er hap­pens,” he says, ​“so I would just grav­i­tate to what­ev­er became tru­ly real.” Although this ten­den­cy occa­sion­al­ly frus­trat­ed his agents, Dunne was able to pro­duce works by such lumi­nar­ies as Mar­tin Scors­ese (1985’s After Hours, in which he also starred as a New York drifter in for a long night of sex­u­al frus­tra­tion), John Sayles and Sid­ney Lumet. ​“I learned a lot,” he says, and ​“all that pro­duc­ing and act­ing paid off” when it came to employ­ing his tal­ent­ed friends and col­leagues in his own films.

His attrac­tion to bud­ding projects explains Dunne’s cast­ing in Jill Soloway’s incred­i­ble and dement­ed TV show I Love Dick in 2016. ​“Actu­al­ly, that part chose me!” he explains. In New York, Soloway’s son was talk­ing on the phone with his room­mate who had just spent a day with Dunne in Los Ange­les for a funer­al. When asked if she’d heard of the actor, Soloway appar­ent­ly let out an elat­ed scream. As Dunne tells it, ​“They’d been through two actors who didn’t work out, and they were four days from shoot­ing.” Dunne was on a Skype call with Soloway 10 min­utes lat­er and arrived on set just in time for pro­duc­tion to begin.

“It’s up there with one of the best parts I’d had since Were­wolf and After Hours,” says Dunne. He plays Syl­vere, the old­er cul­tur­al the­o­rist hus­band of Chris (inter­pret­ed with bound­less ener­gy by Kathryn Hahn), with whom he moves to an artists’ retreat in rur­al Texas. There, Chris becomes obsessed with the mys­te­ri­ous mod­ern cow­boy pro­fes­sor Dick (Kevin Bacon, per­fect­ly cast), which in some twist­ed way reignites the sen­su­al flame in her own marriage.

Dunne recalls how he bond­ed wit his co-star over Soloway’s old-school cre­ative process. ​“Kevin and I were among the only and old­est guys on the set! We would have peo­ple stand­ing on a box before work start­ed and they’d talk about their feel­ings… Kevin and I would look at each oth­er and go, ​‘This is like being back in act­ing school,’ But in a good way, ​’cause in act­ing school, every­body is so excit­ed about what they’re doing; they’re at the begin­ning of their lives.”

He may have explored var­i­ous oth­er facets of film­mak­ing, yet act­ing remains close to Dunne’s heart. I can’t help ask­ing him for his thoughts on the Meis­ner tech­nique, which I’m study­ing myself and which Dunne learned from the very best at the Neigh­bor­hood Play­house School of the The­atre in New York. His eyes light up and he gen­er­ous­ly asks me more about my course, before again find­ing a way to con­nect act­ing to film­mak­ing in a wider sense. ​“It’s a tech­nique that works just as well for writ­ing as it does for act­ing, it’s enor­mous­ly help­ful. A lot of peo­ple who stud­ied the tech­nique and with Sandy [San­ford Meis­ner] went on to become writ­ers instead of actors, and par­tic­u­lar­ly directors.”

For Dunne, the way this approach employs impro­vi­sa­tion from real ele­ments makes it espe­cial­ly truth­ful. ​“It’s not abstract like in oth­er kinds [of act­ing] where you have to… pre­tend. Do a thing where you’re think­ing of your dead moth­er… dig­ging up her body…” he says, only half-jok­ing. “[With Meis­ner], you just deal with the cir­cum­stances that are in the script.” He remem­bers pro­duc­ing the 1990 film White Palace with Sid­ney Pol­lack, a fel­low Meis­ner alum and Jack of all trades, as an extreme­ly grat­i­fy­ing expe­ri­ence. ​“I learned more watch­ing him talk to [the film’s] writer than I learned lis­ten­ing to writ­ers talk about writ­ing. The way he was able to break down what a moment is about, what the scene is about, what the char­ac­ter is think­ing, where to place the actor… it was riv­et­ing to watch.”

After direct­ing such a per­son­al doc­u­men­tary, Dunne says he can’t wait to go back to fic­tion and already has sev­er­al projects lined up. Most excit­ing is a present-day TV adap­ta­tion of After Hours, in which tech­nol­o­gy becomes the obsta­cle and the night lasts a whole sea­son, with a new hero – or hero­ine – and a dif­fer­ent city for each sea­son (he promis­es to give him­self a cameo). He’s also adapt­ing the pop­u­lar New York Times col­umn ​‘The Ethi­cist’, in which a failed stand-up come­di­an gives eth­i­cal advice to read­ers. Add to the mix a secret project he can’t talk about (“It would total­ly jinx it!”) and an act­ing gig due to start film­ing in Mex­i­co this month, and it’s clear that Dunne has no plans to set­tle any time soon. ​“I don’t want to if I don’t have to!”

Joan Did­ion: The Cen­ter Will Not Hold is avail­able on Net­flix now.