Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Welcome to Corolla Classics. I'm your host, superfan Giovanni. This is the podcast where we play the best moments, highlights, and fan-selected clips from all 17 years of The Adam Corolla Show.
If you would like to access the ad-free archives of The Adam Corolla Show, The Adam and Dr. Drew Show, as well as the podcast Beat It Out, make sure to check out Adam Corolla's substack, adamcorolla.substack.com. And if you'd like to request a clip, please email us, classics at adamcorolla.com. Now on to the clips.
Go to first, we have Adam Corolla Show, episode 130, from all the way back in 2009 with Christoph Waltz. One of the biggest gets... for a guy who was super early in his Hollywood career. Right off Fresh from the Glorious Bastards, Adam saw a preview screening, was obsessed with the movie. Really cool interview. Adam was super excited to do it. It's a real flashback to another time.
I hope you guys enjoy.
Yes, get it on. Got to get it on. No choice but to get it on. I'm not screaming right now because I'm in the presence of what I believe is greatness. Christoph Waltz has joined us. Christoph is in Inglourious Bastards. That is obviously the new movie by Quentin Tarantino. And Kristoff, I believe, is going to win an Academy Award. I watched a movie.
I got to see a sneak preview of the movie just the other night. And I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. But I left that theater so impressed by your work. And everybody I was with was trying to figure out where you were from, what other movies you'd been in. And somebody said, I've never seen that guy in another movie.
And I said, when you're a really good actor, people don't recognize you from movie to movie because you turn into that role. But have you been in other movies that we've seen? No, I don't think you have seen anything that I was in.
I do, the past 10 years, virtually all of my stuff in Germany. So, you know, German speaking area being my sort of playing field.
One of the things that was so impressive about your performance in the movie was you spoke German and you spoke English and you spoke French and even Italian at one point. Now, I know you speak German, you speak English, you speak French. Italian, did you have to learn for the movie?
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Chapter 2: What insights does Christoph Waltz share about his acting career?
And I will say this about Tarantino movies. I've enjoyed the lion's share of Tarantino movies. It's the same thing... I mean, you enjoy... You know you're watching a Tarantino movie. You're having an experience. And... You know, Reservoir Dogs I probably liked better than, well, maybe one of my favorite Tarantino movies. Maybe better than Grindhouse, for instance.
But either way, you know you're watching a Tarantino movie, even if you have ones you like more than others.
There's something interesting I observed in Cannes at the festival. They were enthusiastic reactions and somewhat cool reactions. And the cool reactions were all the smart alecks, to say the least. who knew, you know, the experts, who knew what to expect from a Tarantino movie.
Now, if there's one thing that you rightly can expect from a Tarantino movie is that it's not going to be what you expect. Right. The enthusiasts all kind of, you know, tuned into the movie, into what it was, the new thing, you know. They didn't want to be the experts who can predict. And so, hey, this is why I go to the movies.
I feel that way about Oliver Stone when he's doing his thing as well. I feel like... Whether you loved it or hated it, you knew you were watching an Oliver Stone movie, and there's not too many guys you can say that about. So what was the process like? How did you get hooked up with Tarantino?
Well, how I got hooked up with him was traditional casting, really. The casting agent in Germany who suggested a group of people to Quentin for the German parts because Quentin, being Quentin, insisted in this authenticity that all the German parts are being played by German actors, all the French by French, the Americans by Americans.
Yeah, of course, you know, in the interest of, you know, making this a box office success, you know, they tried to talk him into casting American stars, but he insisted. He wanted Germans for Germans. Right.
So, well, thanks, you know, that's... And as far as you, and again, I know... For those of you who haven't seen the movie yet, you're going to think I'm laying it on a little thick. Once you see the movie, you won't think I did enough ass kissing. So please understand that. This is a tour de force and obviously going to open doors for you here in the United States.
In your mind, were you content just to go on doing German movies or did you always want to make the hop to the States?
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Chapter 3: How does Christoph Waltz describe the process of learning languages for roles?
I was, I should say, kind of resigned to going on making German movies. You know, not that this is the worst. You know, it could be, you know, you could be in Ghana trying to get a movie together. It would probably be a lot more difficult. Right. So we have something that resembles, albeit remotely, an industry in Germany and in Austria, but it's mostly geared towards TV.
So, you know, TV is a different form of production, different form of attention, different form of work altogether. And that's not really, you know, what I kind of set out to do when I started out. Well, in the interest of making a living, yeah, you... You do it, of course. And understand me correctly, please. I was always privileged. I did the good stuff with the good people.
But there's a ceiling, and that ceiling is somewhat low.
Yeah, you want... I mean, I think ultimately... When you make a movie, and it's not just vanity, but whether you make a movie or you paint a painting, you want as many eyeballs on it as possible.
Yeah, but you also want to spend as much attention on it. as you can possibly get together for making this one thing happen. So you don't want to just churn it out because the program needs to go on the screen.
You want to give it your full attention and you want to give it everything you've got and you want to really try to excel and in a way push the envelope to find out what it is that you can do.
And this is a movie, yeah, and then you want as many eyeballs on it as possible.
Exactly. So, you know, you take a car on the road, you want to see how much it can do and not just practice parking.
This movie, by the way, I'm now thinking... can easily run in Germany and would probably have less subtitles in it than it does in the United States. And it could run in France and might have less subtitles in it than it did in the United States. My only objection with the movie was there was a huge man with a bald head that was sitting in front of me. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What are Christoph Waltz's thoughts on Tarantino's filmmaking style?
All of that was done in the studio because it's easier done in the studio. But altogether it might have been, I don't know, eight, nine days. It's nice to have a budget, isn't it? Well, sometimes it helps, yeah. I mean, I think if the date wouldn't have been set through Cannes, the festival started on May 13th. Right.
and by the way uh kristoff won uh best actor at the can film festival by the way he's too modest to bring that up but he did slip me a note to tell me to bring that up first he asked if we'd be on camera i told him no and they kicked me in the shin uh yeah so they wanted to have it ready for the can film festival absolutely so had had this date not been set you know i'm sure we would have spent more time with
Yeah, that was your hard out, as they say in the business. But as I always tell people when it comes to budget, people think low-budget films means no special effects, but really what it means is no time. Exactly.
If you're doing a low-budget version of this film, you have one day to shoot the cabin scene, and you're just not going to get, no matter how great you are and your other performers are, you can't get the scene that we saw up on the screen in Glorious Bastards if you have one day to shoot that scene.
You've probably experienced that. Impossible. Unless you rehearse it for about eight weeks. And then you put it on like a play, but still in a day you wouldn't get it because you wouldn't get all the shots.
All the angles and all the effects and everything else. And again, just the tension you could cut with a knife. So now as far as your career goes, this obviously going to kick doors open for you. You're going to be in great demand. I'm guessing you're already fielding offers for roles to do out here in the States. Now, you're going to get roles that are non-German officer roles, I assume.
I do hope so, yes. And so you can do an English accent or just an American accent, as it were? You know, I think...
Yeah, possibly. I don't know. But I guess I could. I think you could. What I'm saying is there are so many fantastic parts that are not really tied to a nationality. Right. We'll walk on the street here in Los Angeles. Oh, please. How many accents... Apart from the fact, how many people do you meet who don't speak English at all?
Look, here's what I want to tell everyone to do. Just dial a wrong number in Los Angeles and see if the guy who picks up the phone speaks English. That's how... That's how you know it might be time to move. Once in a while you dial that wrong 818 number and you just get that crazy accent on the other line. You realize almost every time I dial the wrong number, I get something other than English.
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Chapter 5: What family dynamics are revealed in the conversation?
I think a woman in particular, I think he did.
And was he sort of, like I said, he'd sort of like to, not quite, he wasn't on the grift, but he was like kind of doing his own thing a little bit. Yeah. And you wouldn't call him a great family man? No.
No, no. He did his thing. He hung out with musicians. And he always wore a suit. In the world that I came from, the men were all, you know, going to the factories. But he always had a suit on from the moment he got up in the morning. He got up in the morning and put on a suit.
And he would go to the union, the musician's union, and would hang out with different leaders and so on, trying to get to work and everything. Yeah. So he would come home like four or five o'clock. He might put on the water for the pasta. My mother and my mother worked in a factory and she had to walk home and she she never took any transportation.
Didn't want to spend the money.
I think so. And the way that it was worked out, that it might have been better even to walk through side streets and where the factories were. It wasn't kind of on a main thoroughfare.
She got home and she cooked him dinner, right?
Yeah, yeah. She would do something. I mean, she'd prepare something the night before or something. And that'd be the first time that our little family, and we were small, but most of the Italian families were large, was only three boys. And that's because my brother and father had a lot of problems, too, and were really struggling to stay together. So we had a small family.
And that's the time we'd get together regularly.
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Chapter 6: How did the Carolla family navigate Thanksgiving traditions?
Families mixed together. My brothers lived down with my cousins. I had a crib made for a very young child. I was 32 by then.
Dating? Dating.
dating. The crib, my feet were out the bottom of it, but that's the only bed they had.
Eventually, you guys moved into a place that was your own, right?
Yeah. We found a tiny house. To my knowledge, it was very small. We were moved by horse and wagon. And that might be the, that might really, there was a fellow in the corner that owned a chicken, a little chicken store, and he had a horse and wagon. That's what he would use. And we'd asked him, because he would do it for $5 or something, if he could move our furniture, a little bit that we had.
He said, yeah, and I remember him out front while we were loading things in the horses, two horses he had. And the horses clicked to the next house. Yeah, that's a vivid memory.
I remember, I don't know what year your mom passed away, early 80s?
83.
83. Your mom passed away. Did you fly back for that?
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the cranberry sauce recipe shared?
I didn't have much to build it on, but I was just doing a kind of a math, which is somebody had a house that's completely paid for and they just died. You got to whack it up with a couple of your brothers. But hell, that means 40, 50 grand is coming our way. The house sold, I think the house sold for like $17,000.
Yeah, exactly.
That was in 1983. Under $20,000, yes?
Three-story house, yeah.
Three-story house, well under $20,000 in the 80s. So couldn't have been doing too good over there.
Well, we paid. See, during the war again, my youngest brother went into the war. Ralph, you got those sabers from him. Japanese sabers, yeah. Yeah, I remember him. Anyway, during the war, while he was away, we had a relative, a paisan, that was in real estate, and that house I stole for $17,000. We paid $4,500 for it. In what year? During the war, so $44,000, $45,000, $43,000.
Wow. And by the way, you want to talk about the entrepreneurial spirit. That's why the Corollas are rich. 4,043. But in 83, almost $17,000. Profiteering. Enough to buy a fairly nice used car. Very nice used car. Fairly nice. And only 40 years later, too.
So, I mean, you're talking about, you know, you do that eight, ten times over the course of a lifetime, you're going to have 60 grand in the bank. That's a lot of used cars.
Yeah.
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Chapter 8: How does the discussion reflect on family history and relationships?
So you have three brothers and you're three Italian. I mean, all together, there's three. You have two brothers, two full-blooded Italian brothers. And between the two of them, they have one daughter. And then you have a son and a daughter. And then that's it with the Corollas, right? Yeah. Better hope that kid of mine don't go gay. That's it. Are there no other Corollas?
No, I don't think there's any Carollas left that I know of, no. Yeah, that is, well, first I was with Ralph. His wife made it clear early that there would be no children. So he wanted them. So that was over with just as we're off with. Vicki.
Oh, Vicki, sorry.
Is Vicki still alive? No, Vicki died. Vicki died before Ralph died. The Ralph was the one that was sick and she was healthy and died just suddenly. Yeah, so that was clear. And Mario was married just for a short while. And had the child, and he never married again.
And he lived upstairs in your mom's crappy house for the better part of his life?
Yeah, he was away for that short time that he was married, but then he came right back, and yeah, he was with my mother to the end, until 83, yeah.
That's sort of sad, lonely.
Yeah.
Did you guys talk much or have much in common? It doesn't seem like you had much in common with him.
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