PLUME: Well, I guess a lot of it’s covered in the book, but I would like to ask about Close Encounters - just a general summation, because I really would like to point people towards reading the book, because it such a wonderful, comprehensive piece. At least you’re not being mistaken for Dreyfuss anymore…

BALABAN: Yes, I am.

PLUME: Still?

BALABAN: Sure. We don’t look anything alike, especially as we’ve gotten older. In fact, I think I mentioned it in the afterword … Literally three years ago at The Carnegie Delicatessen, I was sitting with Richard and the waiter came over and he said, “Oh, please, I don’t want to bother you, but can I have an autograph?” So Richard takes out his pen and he smiles. And he goes, “No, no, I want your autograph,” and he pointed to me. I said, “Well, who do you think I am?” And he said, “You’re Richard Dreyfuss.” I said, “No, that’s Richard Dreyfuss. I’m Bob Balaban.” We don’t look anything alike, although there is obviously something there that I don’t recognize, that causes people to think of us as similar. I wish I looked like him.

PLUME: Well, I loved you in Jaws.

BALABAN: Well, it is true, and I mentioned this is the book that when Steven hired me for Close Encounters, Richard was not wearing glasses in the movie and didn’t have a beard. So Steven said, “Well, Bob, maybe you should wear glasses and have a beard, and then people will know you’re not Richard.” But, unfortunately, everyone knew Richard from Jaws, in which basically I looked like I was imitating Richard in Jaws, in Close Encounters. I wore the same wire framed glasses - which happened to be my glasses - so essentially, I was kind of doing a Richard impression by mistake, because literally, everybody did know him from Jaws in which he had a beard and my same wire frame glasses.

BALABAN: Yes. Richard said something about the Ku Klux Klan marching that got everybody who was racist terribly up in arms, and very angry at Richard for not being racist.

PLUME: And this happened to be while you were filming in Mobile, Alabama…

BALABAN: Sort of in the capital of racism. They hired bodyguards to protect Richard, and I said, “Well, where’s my bodyguard? Everybody thinks I’m Richard. I’m the one who’s in danger here.” They said, “Well, you’re not the star of the movie, we don’t really have it in the budget for a bodyguard for you.” So I ended up flying back home for the weekend, and nobody killed me.

PLUME: It’s a nice part in the book when you recite Julia Phillips’s response to that…

BALABAN: She did an amazing job. I don’t talk about her too much in the book, because I didn’t encounter her all that much, nor she me. She was busy raising more money for the movie, or doing much more important things than having lunch with me. But, looking back on it - and I mean, we were friends afterwards, she was really a wonderful producer. She worked like a dog, she had good taste, and she protected the director from the studio in a very masterful sort of way, and kept raising money for the movie while we were in production, because it had been under-budgeted - or else nobody would have given it a green light. And that’s a very scary position to be in, and she did a really good job.

PLUME: It must have been a horrible campaign to try and mount, especially with the issues that kept arising.

BALABAN: It was hard, yep. In some of the scenes, Steven had to - I remember at one point, when we did the famous, “You have had a close encounter of the third kind,” scene, that was the scene that - I think I mentioned this in the book, I’m not sure - but that was the scene that had never been turned in, or approved. It was something Steven wanted to shoot - I think it didn’t even get approved. It was written on little scraps of paper and handed to us in the morning, and we just learned it as we went to work that day, so it could avoid - you know, stay under the radar. Then it turned out to be a classic scene from the movie.

PLUME: What percentage of the film, would you say, was rewritten from the script you originally received when you signed on?

BALABAN: Oh, 10% or something. It wasn’t real different. When we finished shooting, Steven looked at it, sat down, and went, “I think I have to clarify some things.” And he changed my profession. I think eventually in the movie, as it exists, I’m not an interpreter, although I speak French. I think in the first version I was actually hired to be an interpreter and then it turned out I’m a mapmaker. I just don’t even remember why I was there - frankly, it’s a long time ago. But I know there were some changes, like there were story changes instituted after the first cut of the movie, and we went back and we did a few things …

PLUME: How would you sum up your relationship with Truffaut that developed throughout the filming?

BALABAN: I had one of my favorite experiences… standing next to a captive audience, because I was the only person who could speak French, and he didn’t really like to speak English. He was really stuck with me. By the end of the filming, my oral-linguistic skills had improved to the point where we were actually communicating rather successfully, and ended up feeling close. I just had an amazing time hearing this man’s thoughts, watching him. He’s certainly one of my idols and remains it. And yet, as Truffaut said in Day for Night, you create a family on a film set, and then the movie’s over and you usually never see each other again. We did keep in contact after the movie, but you know, he went back to his life in France, and my life here and all that. But we corresponded occasionally and I always look forward to seeing him. It really wasn’t relatively that much longer afterwards that he died. It was completely unexpected, obviously. I knew he was ill, but not for very long. I always thought about what he used to say - as a filmmaker, he would say, “I’ve got to hurry and make the movies that I want to make. I only make movies about things that I’m passionate about, because I have a limited time on this earth to be doing the things I want to do, and I want to make sure that I do them.” I mean, it’s like Woody Allen. There aren’t many people who are able to spend an entire lifetime going from one movie to the next, that is their movie, that they’ve written, they’ve created, it came from them. Truffaut was very aware of his mortality. Not morbidly so, but very, very practically. When he died and knew he was dying, I assume that he must have gotten some consolation from the fact that he had spent every minute of his life doing the thing he loved to do the most, in the most beautiful and in the most focused way. It must have been of some consolation, I hope.

PLUME: I think the book paints one of the most human portraits of Truffaut, that’s ever been put in print.

BALABAN: Wow, that’s a nice thing to say. But I mean, what else could it be? I was just having lunch with him all the time. I couldn’t think of him as anything else.

PLUME: You don’t often see the portrait painted of him in simple matters. There’s always a reverential treatment, almost a god-like treatment. But you don’t get the nuance, as one gets from your book, of the incompatibility of jokes across a language barrier, and his struggling with a line and hoping that he doesn’t have to do it, and then coming back and being a little miffed and wondering why his line was reassigned.

BALABAN: Yes. Well, I mean, isn’t that what we were saying earlier… that’s our gift, that’s what we can give to people is - everybody is just the same. They may have thicker shells, or a grander car or a larger chariot or something, but everybody’s in there worrying about mostly the same things, I think. Also, you have to be careful. When you first meet people who are your idols, you have to work very hard at not treating them like they’re your idols, because they don’t appreciate being treated that way, and then you can’t get close to anybody. I mean, you can’t have an experience.

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