Newsgroup: it.fan.tv.friends
Titolo: [XXL] David Schwimmer interview

Spero non mi siano sfuggiti spoiler... fate comunque attenzione... ;))
This interview was in The Observer yesterday
(
http://www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,605453,00.html
):
Friends in high places 
Being Ross in Friends has made him a household name and earns him
$750,000 an episode. But after eight years, there's talk of the hit
sitcom coming to an end, and David Schwimmer's ready to try something
new. Tim Cooper hears why he's going back to school 
Sunday November 25, 2001
The Observer 
Vg'f orra n ovt qnl sbe Ebff. Ur, nybat jvgu fbzr 20z bgure Nzrevpnaf,
unf whfg sbhaq bhg gung ur'f gur sngure bs Enpury'f onol. I feel I
should buy David Schwimmer a drink to celebrate. Instead, he offers to
buy me a hot dog. We are in Chicago, where Schwimmer - whiny, neurotic
Ross Geller in Friends - studied drama and founded a theatre company.
It's his week off from Friends and he's helping raise funds for the
Looking Glass Theatre's new home. They have been peripatetic for the
last 12 years, and they are about to move into a big stone castle that
serves as the city's water pumping station. 
Last night, Schwimmer hosted a 'cultivation' evening to attract
potential investors and schmooze the city's business interests. The
opportunity to meet 'Ross from Friends' makes it a hot ticket, but
Schwimmer is more than a front man for the theatre. It's very much a
labour of love and, in addition to giving them financial support, he
writes, directs and stars in their productions. Unlike his five sitcom
co-stars, Schwimmer has a theatrical background - and a keen interest
in social issues. Right now, he's writing scripts on the subjects of
race and internet paedophilia. In real life, he is a very active
director of the Rape Foundation in Los Angeles, lecturing about
date-rape drugs at colleges in the city. 
It's swiftly clear that Schwimmer is no pampered Hollywood star,
despite the $750,000-an-episode pay cheque from Friends and the
obligatory multi-million-pound mansion in Los Angeles to go with his
Chicago loft. He makes his own schedule for our interview, leaving his
home number on my hotel voicemail even before we've spoken; he wears
clothes so nondescript that I can't even remember what they were, he
drives me around in his eight-year-old car and he invites me to play
volleyball with him and his friends. We don't go to stylish, exclusive
places; he suggests a hot-dog place before settling on a neighbourhood
restaurant called Toast, moving on later to cheeseburgers at his local
bar. He has no minders or assistants, his publicist is a childhood
friend (who is miles away in New York) and he turns off his cellphone
while we're talking. I'd like to tell you something bad about him just
for the sake of balance: he says he sometimes steals parking places
while other drivers are about to reverse into them, and he carries a
big, heavy torch behind his car seat in case they get violent. But he
has yet to use it in anger. And he wouldn't sign an autograph on the
way to lunch. But only because he didn't have a pen. And he was very
sorry. 
'There's nothing negative to tell about David,' says British actor
Andy Nyman, who has just spent several weeks working with Schwimmer on
Uprising, a film about Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw
Ghetto, shot in Bratislava. I'd called Nyman in search of some
balance, but failed to find any. 'I can see that when you are as rich
and famous [as Schwimmer] it's very easy to be difficult. But he's a
proper actor: diligent, hard-working, and truly a lovely man. He's
great at dealing with his celebrity, too.' 
After eight years in what quickly became the most popular sitcom in
America, David Schwimmer is one of the most recognisable faces in show
business. But, while he may be adept at dealing with his fame, he is
still uncomfortable with it. 'One of the ways I stay grounded, I like
to think, is by having little mini-battles every day,' he says. When
the staff at Starbucks recognise him, for example, and tell him to
jump the queue, he insists on waiting his turn. 'Sometimes,' he tells
me, 'if I'm in a bar, guys will want to buy me shots. I'm not a big
drinker but if I say no, it's like I've insulted them. They're like,
"Ooooh, think you're too good to drink with me, do ya?" And then I'm
an asshole.' 
But it's worst when he's with someone else. 'Whoever I'm with just
becomes invisible,' he explains. 'Literally invisible. People push
them out of the way to get to me. Sometimes they grab my arm and start
yelling, "Ross, Ross!"' He's really very agitated now; he grabs my arm
to demonstrate, and knocks it right off the table. 'I'm sorry,' he
says, mortified by his display of anger. 'Did I hurt you?' 
At almost 6ft 2in, and with an athletic physique honed by daily
workouts, yoga and weekly volleyball games, Schwimmer can deal with
day-to-day hassle without too much difficulty. But he despairs of
celebrity culture, of people becoming famous for being on Jerry
Springer and taking part in 'reality' TV shows. 'I find it sad that
everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame and, in America, we are so
consumed by it. It has never been comfortable to me. I don't hang with
a lot of celebrities. And I don't go to Hollywood parties. I hear
about these parties at big directors' and stars' and producers' homes
and I guess I'm not really interested.' He admits: 'To be honest, in
some respects it has probably hurt my career because I don't kiss ass.
I don't show up and get my face out there all the time.' 
Despite being brought up in Los Angeles, Schwimmer has always been an
outsider there, just as his parents were when they emigrated from New
York with their two young children. At school, he was the outsider,
too. He confesses to having been a troublemaker and a bully in his
younger days. Nor did he fit in when he was sent to the
ultra-glamorous Beverly Hills High School. 'When I was there I always
felt: this is not me, I'm surrounded by people with a different value
system. And I just wanted to get out of California.' He left to study
drama at Chicago's Northwestern University and his friends today are
the people he's known from school and college, his theatre friends;
his publicist, Ina, went to infant school with him. 
Until recently, Schwimmer used to live in Hollywood, but he couldn't
stand it. 'It was too noisy, too busy,' he says, elaborating with a
really Ross-like inflection. 'Too many cool people trying to be really
cool.' Now he lives, alone, in a big house in Hancock Park. 'It's a
mixed ethnic community, which is rare in LA, and although there are a
few celebrities in the area, it doesn't feel like an industry town,'
he says. 'It's like a regular neighbourhood where you see kids playing
in the street.' He lives there because it reminds him a lot of
Chicago, where he has had a home for the past 15 years, and he often
has his Chicago friends to stay at his big, barely furnished '1924
Spanish' home, which he is slowly restoring. 
David Schwimmer was born, a year after his sister Ellie, in the New
York borough of Queens in November 1966. Two years later, his parents,
Arthur and Arlene - both lawyers - moved to Los Angeles, where his
mother became a leading light in the fledgling feminist movement. 'I
have unusual parents,' he explains. 'They were always involved in
issues. My dad has just retired and the first thing he did is join
this organisation called Habitat for Humanity, which Jimmy Carter
started years ago. Basically, my dad was a lawyer sitting behind a
desk for many, many years, and the first thing he did on retiring was
throw on a tool belt and go into the outside of the communities and
build for those in need. You gotta see him - he looks like he should
be buried in books, but he was so excited to be actually physically
giving back when before he could only give back either monetarily or
intellectually. That's the kind of family I come from.' 
They were, he says, a very warm family. 'I always remember just a lot
of love, playing catch with my dad, going to plays and movies. It was
a fun family, always card games after dinner and stuff like that. But
at the same time it was really rigorous and there was a lot of
pressure on academic achievement.' 
Schwimmer was tall and lanky and hyperactive. 'I was always the class
clown, I was the troublemaker in class. And I was always restless.' He
got into a lot of fights. 'I was a bully,' he remembers. 'I was nearly
expelled from junior high and elementary school before that.' One
time, he faced expulsion after a brutal fight with a tomboy who was
bigger than him, and his mother came to see the principal to ask why
the girl was not getting the same punishment as her son. David was
impressed because Arlene was a prominent force in the original women's
liberation movement, founding the National Organisation for Women in
California and the League of Women Voters. That day, she demonstrated
something vitally important to him. 'She believed in equal rights.' 
As his mother's career as a divorce lawyer became increasingly
successful, thanks to high-profile clients including Elizabeth Taylor
and Roseanne Barr, the Schwimmers moved to Beverly Hills and sent
David to the famous high school, popularised in Beverly Hills 90210.
Puberty played havoc with his looks; he became short and fat, he had a
premature moustache and braces fastened by a device that he likens to
'a harness for a horse'. Feeling no kinship with most of his
overprivileged classmates, he buried himself in studies. He was best
at science and maths and thought he would become a doctor. He became
popular within his clique - 'the dorky science and math guys' -
because he also did drama. 'And within the acting group I was also
kinda popular cos I was funny and also doing well in school. Somehow
within those two cliques I found friends.' 
But he was still an outsider. 'Within the cool cliques I was a
complete outcast. There was this huge group of very beautiful people
at high school: really gorgeous men and women who had the latest
fashions, drove the new BMW or Porsche or Mercedes to school - the
Volkswagen Rabbit convertible was really popular one year. Those were
the kids who had parties after school in big mansions in Beverly
Hills. My friends and I were never part of that.' 
When Schwimmer finally got his driving licence in his last year at
school, his parents bought him a car. 'They knew I was leaving for
Chicago very soon, so they weren't going to buy me a new car. So my
dad went shopping at used car lots and we found a 1976 Chevy Monte
Carlo. It was literally shit brown.' One Saturday night, Schwimmer and
his friends went out in this 'boat of a car' and drove passed a party
that the cool people were throwing at one of their houses. 'Just
driving by this incredible house, we heard people laughing and we
recognised some of the beautiful people from school and we weren't
invited and certainly weren't going to crash it - you know, peer
pressure and everything - we just didn't want to be subjected to that
kind of ridicule.' 
Schwimmer realised he was always going to be the outsider. 'I
definitely felt a class system in place.' He felt the same thing when
he later started trying to find work and discovered his looks were
considered 'too ethnic' for leading roles. He thinks Hollywood is rife
with racism and anti-semitism, even though many of the producers and
directors are Jewish. The only time he can recall Ross being defined
by his race/religion in eight years of Friends was when he dressed up
for his son as the 'Hanukkah armadillo'. Schwimmer was outraged when
he watched the movie Star Wars: Episode 1 to see 'a racist stereotype:
a small schmizerly pawnbroker with a huge nose - all the
characteristics and traits of a Jew. I remember wondering whether
anyone else had seen this and was feeling what I felt. I think it's
damaging.' 
Schwimmer believes that racism already 'saturates' America and worries
that it is becoming legitimised since 11 September, a theme he wants
to tackle in his stage adaptation of Race, a massive collection of
testimonies on the subject compiled by the broadcaster, author and
journalist Studs Terkel. 'I don't think there's a real concentrated
effort to alleviate the problem of race in America,' Schwimmer says.
Of equal concern to him are internet predators, about whom he is
accumulating case histories before writing his script. 'I have stacks
of cases and more than half of them are teachers, and two-thirds are
married men with children,' he says with evident disgust. He has even
logged on to chat sites, posing as a teenage girl, and was horrified
to find 'she' was propositioned within minutes. His drama will also
tackle the wider issue of how the internet has changed the family.
'The family dinner discussion around the table has disappeared. Kids
run to their rooms now and spend hours either playing games on the
computer or chatting with people.' 
Clearly his dramatic interests are a far cry from the frivolity of
Friends. And, although the sitcom has earned him Ross-like leading
roles in comedy films such as The Pallbearer (with Gwyneth Paltrow)
and Kissing a Fool, Schwimmer recently took a decision 'to make an
effort to find roles that are as far away from the character of Ross
as possible'. Television viewers have just seen him as a sadistic
drill instructor who turns out to be an inept leader of men in
Spielberg's Second World War epic Band of Brothers. 
Schwimmer had five great-uncles who all fought for the US in the war
and, unlike Private Ryan's siblings, all survived. 'For a lot of
veterans, this was the highlight of their lives; they felt there was a
value to their lives for the first time and it had an importance
greater than themselves,' he says, admiringly. He believes it would be
unwise to talk directly about the war on terrorism, but in a
hypothetical draft he would answer his country's call 'without
hesitation'. Things may be 'forlorn and fucked-up' in terms of
education and racism and health care, he says, but you've still got to
defend your freedoms. 'You have to inherently believe what the country
stands for, or else you shouldn't live here.' 
In the forthcoming Uprising, he plays a Jewish police officer working
for the Polish police, who faces the stark choice of betraying his
race or working for the freedom fighters. Next, he will be seen as 'a
young, immoral, independent film producer' in Mike Figgis's
experimental film Hotel, shot with a huge cast in Venice. It was, he
says, 'the greatest experience ever'. He's seen it and it looks
beautiful: full of 'really unforgettable images and moments'. 
When he was 12 or 13, Schwimmer went to a Shakespeare workshop given
by Ian McKellen in Los Angeles. 'I was absolutely riveted,' he
recalls. He started studying drama at Beverly Hills High. There was a
local drama contest called the Southern California Shakespeare
Festival. Schwimmer entered three years running. 'I won first place in
a group scene and also first place in an individual dialogue, which I
adapted from The Tempest. It was a scene with myself, basically; I
played three characters simultaneously - Prospero, Ariel and Caliban.'
He wanted to go straight into acting, but his parents insisted he go
to college so he had something to fall back on in case the acting
didn't work out. His exam results were so good that he had his pick of
a dozen universities. He chose Northwestern because he had attended
its summer drama course when he was 16 and felt it had the best
undergraduate programme in the country. 
After graduating in theatre and speech, his first TV role was in LA
Law in 1986, followed by the comedy-drama series The Wonder Years. He
had a recurring role as a lawyer-turned-vigilante in NYPD Blue and
appeared briefly in ER in 1993, before auditioning, unsuccessfully,
for a series pilot called Couples. He tried again when it was
rewritten for a cast of singles, and retitled Friends. The rest is
history. Soon, he hints, Friends really will be history. 'Our contract
is up in April, we're not signed up to do another year and we are not
even in talks,' he reveals. 'No one wants to call it quits, but I feel
like there is so much other stuff I want to do - theatre and film and
developing other television as well - that I'm ready for it to be
over. I wouldn't mind if the show was over after this year.' It's
clear that he's had enough. 
People are always wondering whether Schwimmer is like Ross. Someone
once told him that Ross takes things more seriously than the other
characters and that he feels things more deeply than Joey and
Chandler. 'He's literally in a different dimension, a different
reality than the others. Not everything is frivolous to him, there's a
seriousness about him in terms of how he thinks about relationships,
the family; he's more issue oriented - if there were issues on the
show!' He laughs. 'And that's more me.' 
Schwimmer says that he, unlike Ross, has changed over. But he manages
to remain 'intellectually engaged' by directing some of the episodes.
'So it's not mindless. There's a challenge in itself in trying to keep
things fresh, playing the same character for eight years.' He adds,
somewhat unconvincingly: 'It's actually quite fun.' Unlike the stint
where Ross was engaged to an English girl. His lip curls instinctively
at the mention of Helen Baxendale, and for once the Friends code of
silence is broken. 'To be honest with you I don't think she wanted any
part of us,' he says. 'I felt like I, at least - and the others -
welcomed her with open arms into the family, but she kept a real
professional and personal distance. I was disappointed that she didn't
want to engage. Some kind of connection would have been nice - after
all, we were going to be married.' 
He insists, as they all do, that the six stars of Friends really are
good friends, and that, because they became famous together, they are
able to keep each other's egos in check, though they socialise less
off-set than they once did now that most of them are in long-term
relationships. 
Schwimmer's own, with Israeli actress Mili Avital, has recently come
to an end. He blames the tabloids for printing false stories that they
had become engaged at a particularly difficult point in their
relationship. 'It was really hurtful,' he says bitterly. 'They just
don't understand the damage they cause.' 
He has not had a date in the three months since they broke up, and
there's a sadness in his eyes when he talks about the split. 'She's
incredible, simply the best person I've ever known, inside and out.
She's the most genuine, and generous, and artistic and clear-headed
person I've ever known.' 
It has been suggested that Schwimmer, who had a three-year
relationship with law clerk Sarah Trimble in the mid-90s and has dated
singer Natalie Imbruglia, has a problem with commitment. But he
disputes that. 'I was committed to Mili for four years. I think, if
anything, I'm a workaholic and that was the problem. I was not able to
find a healthy balance between my work life and my personal life. It's
a flaw in my character and I can't seem to find the balance yet.' 
He is coping by burying himself in more work and believes he will
'flip a switch' when the time comes to start a family. 'I know myself
very well and I love kids and I know that, when I have them, I'm going
to want to be there, not making films. I will want to have a break.
And I want to have more than one child. I look forward to it, but I'm
just not ready to change my lifestyle that drastically.' 
That time, however, may be just around the corner. 'Maybe it's as
simple as waiting for the show [Friends] to end and maybe moving back
here to Chicago and spending more time with the theatre company and
deciding to raise a family and direct and act in the theatre. Maybe
it's that simple, that that time will come, maybe in another year or
two, and my life will change,' he says, optimistically. 
The change could be a drastic one. 'I've also thought about just
totally leaving this profession,' he says, seriously. 'I've made a
good amount of money. I'm very happy that I can now support my theatre
company and support friends and family, and I'm ready to maybe go back
to school and change careers.' It can't be the drink talking:
Schwimmer has nursed a single pint of beer for almost two hours now.
'I've thought about it a lot,' he says, talking enthusiastically about
going back to college to train as a teacher. 
'I think we can really use more - and better - teachers in this
country. I would like to teach in public [state] school. I think I
have a lot to offer in that area.' 
He gets excited running through the subjects he might teach - English,
maths, science, history ('I'm a history buff!') and he seems
completely serious. 'I just see this chapter of my life coming to a
close and I'm not quite sure what the next chapter has in store. But
until I figure that out, and decide what I'm gonna do, I'm certainly
not ready for the family chapter to begin yet. One of my dreams has
come true: I'm making a living at what I love to do most. I'm really
blessed. Not only that but I can retire - and I'm not even 35. So now
isn't it time to maybe do something else and give something back?'
-- 
j.

Spero non mi siano sfuggiti spoiler... fate comunque attenzione... ;))
Gli spoiler ci sono...ma sono rottati...vale lo stesso ? ^_____^
Andrea \ e la traduttrice ufficiale che fine ha fatto ? ^_________^

beautiful: full of 'really unforgettable images and moments'. 
questo pero' vorrei segnalarlo. quando cavolo esce questo film, se ne
parla da tantissimo. il regista ha messo una ventina di attori famosi
in questo hotel di venezia e ha fatto un misto tra le regole del
cinema dogma e quelle del grande fratello, cioe' eliminazioni a
sorpresa tra gli attori, scene girate a mano, improvvisazione e cambi
sul momento della sceneggiatura. una vera goduria:)
per di piu' e' pieno di bellissime attrici italiane, vorrei vedere chi
e' toccata a ross ;)

>Andrea \ e la traduttrice ufficiale che fine ha fatto ? ^_________^
Ero io?? Boh so che mi ero offerta, ma ero disoccupata...ora ho
trovato lavoro...sorry!!!!!
Mavi\in 2 parole, David Schwimmer è troppo fico per essere vero
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"Paranoia is knowing exactly what is going on."
ICQ 6901746
http://www.angelfire.com/hi/mavi
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Mavi\in 2 parole, David Schwimmer è troppo fico per essere vero
Ma che bello...una traduzione sintetica...ma perchè allora jAsOn
scrive così tanto ? ^___^