You know who was wonderful to work with? Was Paul Gleason, may he rest in peace.
I worked with the late Leonard Frey. I did a play, and I would have these ideas and he would say, "I don't know. Try it." And I would try it and it would be awful, and he would go, "What do you think?" And I would go, "It was awful." And he goes, "Okay, we'll try something else." And that's great because it really makes you feel less working-for and more working-with. There's nothing better than to feel a part of the team.
[John] Hughes was open to that [rehearsal]. This can only happen if the director and/or the writer are open to that.
As they were building that library in that school's gym [in the Breakfast Club], they built a rehearsal space for us. It was really an empty room taped out with the same dimensions of the library. And they had the tables all there. And he had us sitting at the same table. All of us.
[John] Hughes was well aware that to ignore the seriousness of young people is to encourage things like Columbine, so you might want to listen. And we were all pretty serious, a little bit, in high school. Some a little more than others.
[John] Hughes is a great loss, I think. He was the first filmmaker that could look at someone who was young without seeing them as being less.
Breakfast Club was great because we had a real rehearsal, and we shot primarily in sequence. I thought that was going to be how movies were done. I didn't really know how lucky we all were. We had a director that liked actors. I didn't know that was going to be rare.
Breakfast Club was great because we had a real rehearsal, and we shot primarily in sequence.
It's strange, 'cause a play, you start at the beginning and you go all the way through to the end. So it's naturally very well rehearsed and you get a rhythm and a flow. In film, you can shoot the ending before the beginning. It's very odd. And it's like a craft you have to learn.
You just have to learn certain technical things, like where the camera is, not to block people's light in your own, to hit your marks, and that you do it kind of piecemeal.
[Kevin] Costner said, "You don't have to do that... this is a wide shot, so you can calm down."
I was trained by Stella Adler for theater so you kind of give it all on every take.
Phil Hicks was the guy that was in the ROTC, that was going to go into the Vietnam War and thought that was the responsibility of the citizen.
I think I was, like, 23 or something [on The Breakfast Club]. I was the oldest of the five. Emilio [Estevez] and Ally [Sheedy] were a year younger. The only real difference was that Molly [ Ringwald] and Michael [Hall] still had to go to school. They could shoot, like, a half day. So a lot of my close coverage was done with Molly's stand-in, so Molly could do her schoolwork.
I don't know if one's more typecasting than the other, or what I am more like. But I know that the high school I went to was a private school. It was prep school. It was a boarding school. So we didn't have a shop class. We didn't have Saturday detention. We went to school on Saturday. We did have Sunday study, which you very rarely get, because then you have 13 straight days of school. Who wants that?
It's more like the inner workings of John Bender. He feels like he's been given a short shrift, he's not been provided the opportunities that maybe these other kids have. So he feels like he begins in a hole. And instead of trying to raise himself up, he wants to bring all of them down. That's a dynamic that's pretty universal. And so that was the real foothold on that. It wasn't like, "Oh, my high school experience is like John Bender's [in St. Elmo's Fire]."
It was an audition process after Breakfast Club, and I wasn't really sure I wanted to do the movie. There was a bigger role that Rob [Lowe] was already set to play, so the role they wanted me to audition for was Alec. [Director] Joel Schumacher... this is back in the days when you could trick me with things like this. He goes, "Don't you think you can play it?" And I go, "Okaaaaay." So then I did it for all the wrong reasons but I don't think I would fall for that again. Who knows. I might.
[St. Elmo's Fire] it was pretty soon after that. I know we didn't do Breakfast Club knowing we were going to do that.
You get the sense that [John] Hughes is so right about the way groups divide and then divide again and then sometimes align and then sometimes break apart. And this idea that Michael Hall's character says, "On Monday, are we going to be friends?" you know, based on this.
If you read a script enough, especially a good script - I try to read it 40 to 50 times before you begin so you get a sense of the arc: what happens before, what happens after, what happens during.
In a good script, it's really like a treasure map. You just focus on that, all the answers are pretty much in it.
There were a few things that, in rehearsal, any one of us might try. [John] Hughes would go, "I like that," to me spitting up in the air and catching it in my mouth. It was just something I did in a rehearsal and Molly [ Ringwald] went, "Ewww." And John went, "Can you do that again?" And I went all day long, and he was like, "Okay, let's do that."
We tried the first evening to go down Division Street and Rush Street, but we couldn't get in anywhere because they didn't like [ Emilio Estevez] sneakers and they didn't like my boots. This was 1983 or '84, so it was ridiculous. We ended up at a jazz club, where you go downstairs and there's a very cool place.
There was no one really like John Bender at my high school.
You can do crap work in a big movie, and it does good things. You can do great work in a movie no one sees, it does nothing. That's the way it goes.
