Bruce Dern names the best directors he ever worked with: “Six geniuses”
Very few actors can say they’ve been nominated for two Oscars 35 years apart, but Bruce Dern is one of those lucky few. In 1978, he was acknowledged for his role in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home. He appeared alongside Jon Voight and Jane Fonda as a captain in the United States Army whose wife has an affair while he’s overseas. Then, in 2013, he was up for ‘Best Actor’ for Nebraska, in which he played an old man taking a road trip with his son to retrieve a large sweepstakes prize.
Combine this with his work in the western genre, particularly alongside John Wayne, his many other dramatic and comedic performances, and the fact that he is the father of Laura Dern, and Bruce’s contributions to the world of cinema rank up there with the very best. Such a long and accomplished career has allowed Dern to work with some of the finest creative minds in the business, a privilege he reflected on during a conversation with Variety ahead of his 80th birthday.
“I’ve worked with six geniuses as directors,” he told the publication. “[Elia] Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Trumbull – when he looks through the camera, he sees something no one else sees; he sees magic – Francis Coppola, Alexander Payne and Quentin Tarantino.” That is a list that would make any self-respecting film fan shaking with excitement.
Dern studied alongside Kazan at the famous Actors Studio in New York City. The On the Waterfront director gave his peer his first film role, a small, uncredited part in the 1960 Montgomery Clift vehicle Wild River. As for Hitchcock, the actor holds the honour of having starred in the ‘Master of Suspense’s final feature film, Family Plot. Released in 1976, the film revolves around the kidnapped heir to a massive fortune and a phony psychic and her boyfriend’s (Dern) attempts to track him down.
Certainly the least well-known for Dern’s six, Trumbull’s most enduring work was as a visual effects maestro on movies like Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. As a director, he made the cult favourite sci-fi flick Silent Running, which stars Dern as a botanist aboard a spaceship containing the last of Earth’s trees. Payne directed Dern in the aforementioned Nebraska, whilst Coppola was his boss on the set of the 2011 horror movie Twixt. He also penned the screenplay for the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, which features Dern as Tom Buchanan.
Finally, there’s Tarantino, who has become something of a Dern fanboy in recent years. The pair first worked together on Django Unchained, in which the actor has a cameo as the owner of a plantation. Dern returned for the director’s next venture into westerns with a more sizeable role in The Hateful Eight. Finally, he appeared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, playing real-life rancher (and Manson family patron) George Spahn. We’ll have to wait and see if he makes a fourth appearance in Tarantino’s upcoming ‘final’ film.
Spending time in the company of such revered auteurs could really go to your head, but even in the face of all his success, Dern remains humble. When asked how he felt about everything he’d achieved, he simply shrugged and said “I’m just Brucie from Winnetka.”
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