Terry Gross

So this documentary is all about him.

And he was, I think, in his 80s when you made it, and he's in his late 90s now?

Yeah.

So I want to play an excerpt of a conversation that you had with him that's in the film.

And you tell him you're entering the second half of your life and thinking about what you want out of this next phase.

So are art and success getting closer for you with films like Boyhood, Blue Moon, the streaming series Reservation Dogs, and The Lowdown, The Good Lord Bird?

I want to mention something that is also something that you mentioned to Seymour Bernstein, the pianist.

You told him you had stage fright and talked to him a little bit about that.

Under what circumstances do you have stage fright?

Was it just literally on stage because you've also done a lot of theater?

Or was it also on screen when you could like do a retake?

But you said you thought when you had that stage fright that you were going to die.

Why was it death that you thought would be the final symptom of stage fright as opposed to just humiliation and never working again?

And he literally died several months after.

You tell a story, and I think it's in John Lahr's profile of you in The New Yorker, about how one of the ways you overcame the stage fright was the story of when you screamed on stage.

Would you tell that story?

I'll preface this with a story that Seymour Bernstein told you about a violinist he knows who was afraid he'd drop his bow during a performance.

Yes, exactly.

And he conquered that fear by intentionally dropping it during a performance, and it didn't ruin his life.

But getting out of the moment and thinking about who was in the audience that made you lose your train of thought as your character, that's what made you freak out where you were in the monologue, right?