Mr. Byrne's Professions

DATE April 12, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Los Angeles Times writer Kenneth Weiss discusses what
is happening in the deep oceans of the world
DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave DAVIES, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily
News, filling in for Terry Gross.

If you've ever been troubled by beach pollution or a coastal oil spill, my
guest, Los Angeles Times writer Kenneth Weiss, says what's happening in the
deep oceans of the world will really scare you. In a five-part investigative
series with co-writer Usha Lee McFarling, Weiss says humans have fundamentally
altered the chemistry of the ocean, creating oxygen-deprived dead zones and
spawning growths of toxic algae, which spread at alarming rates. The series
recently won the prestigious George Polk Award for environmental reporting.
Weiss and McFarling are in New York for the Polk Awards presented at a
luncheon today.

Well, Ken Weiss, welcome to FRESH AIR. You begin this series by describing
the appearance of some very troubling vegetation in the waters of Morton Bay,
Australia, almost a science-fiction-like story. Describe this weed.

Mr. KENNETH WEISS: It is a very strange and bizarre situation. The
fishermen there have been plagued by boils and rashes that infect all parts of
their body, including their private parts, and, in fact, at first they didn't
know what was going on and they thought they were passing around a social
disease, but over time they figured out that it was actually connected to this
black hairy growth that they were pulling up in their nets. And no one
believed them that it could possibly be so toxic until a bucket of the stuff
made it back to the University of Queensland marine botany laboratory, and
there it got put in a seaweed dryer, and essentially the toxic fumes from the
seaweed drove professors and lab techs and students screaming into the street,
eyes tearing, choking, coughing. It's very caustic stuff.

DAVIES: And the fishermen get their boils from coming in contact with nets
that have been in the water and have touched this stuff?

Mr. WEISS: Exactly. It turns out that it's a cyanobacterium and basically
little bits and pieces of it are mixed in the water and come running down
their arms, off their hands, down their arms into their clothing, and they get
covered with this.

DAVIES: This is a primordial substance, an algae? Or what is it?

Mr. WEISS: Yeah. This is really the primordial ooze. This is a type of
cyanobacteria that used to rule the world 2.7 billion years ago. And that was
a time when the oceans were a very caustic place, and these things have very
good defense mechanisms and not afraid to use them. What's interesting now is
it's come back in Morton Bay, and it's growing at an astonishing rate.

DAVIES: How fast can it grow?

Mr. WEISS: It can basically grow about a football field an hour covering the
seafloor, and so it starts off as little spores and then sprouts little tufts
of black hairy weed, cover the seafloor, and then over time it creates its own
oxygen essentially and lifts up to the surface and then is a big floating
mass, sometimes the size of football fields, floating, and they end up washing
ashore and driving out fish and causing general problems for fishermen.

DAVIES: Now, what's interesting about this series and the growth of
primordial algae and microbia like this is that you're describing a kind of
pollution that's different from what we typically think of as where we dump
toxin into the water. This is actually dumping nutrients, too much food into
the ocean, right?

Mr. WEISS: Right. This is an issue of too much of a good thing. Nitrogen
and phosphorous and iron and carbon dioxide, all things that plants and
animals need for their lives. But we're stoking the oceans with sort of a
daily infusion of Miracle-Gro, and there's a scientist who, I think, sort of
sums up very succinctly what's going on here. This fellow named Jeremy
Jackson at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, he says we've
failed to follow the basic homeowner's rule of thumb, that be careful what you
dump in the swimming pool and make sure the filter is working. So if you
think of the oceans as just a very big pool, we're using them as a communal
toilet for sewage and runoff from farm lots and animal feed lots and a slurry
of waste off city streets. And at the same time, we're stripping out all the
coastal wetlands that used to take up these nutrients, and we've removed most
of the oysters and clams and small fish that used to eat a lot of this algae.
And the result are these prolific blooms of algae and bacteria, and many of
them are toxic.

DAVIES: And you've seen this phenomenon all over the world, right?

Mr. WEISS: It's popping up everywhere. It's quite remarkable, and so often
these are reported in newspapers as local freakish phenomena, but the fact is
that they are actually happening all over the world.

DAVIES: What is a dead zone?

Mr. WEISS: A dead zone was a term used to describe a low-oxygen area in the
ocean. What happens is we have all these nutrients washing into the ocean,
creates a big bloom of algae, and as the algae dies, it slips to the bottom.
Bacteria start to break it down and as the bacteria break down all this plant
matter, it sucks all of the oxygen out of the ocean. And the term dead zone
is really a misnomer because there are a lot of things that live in dead
zones, mostly bacteria and jellyfish and a few worms. The biggest one in this
country is off the coast of Louisiana, and it's been as big as the size of the
state of New Jersey. Very often the dead zones have nothing in them except
for this sort of white, snot-looking bacteria all over the bottom, feeding on
carcasses of dead crabs and anything that couldn't swim away.

DAVIES: So you have at times an area of the ocean the size of New Jersey in
which there are no swimming fish?

Mr. WEISS: That's right. Dead zones are generally on the bottom of the
ocean. Sometimes fish can live on the top.

DAVIES: Are they spreading? Do we see more of them?

Mr. WEISS: Yeah, I think, you know, many people are aware of the dead zone
off Louisiana but scientists have been telling these around the globe and now
there are about 150 of these dead zones throughout the world. They seem to be
doubling in size and number about every decade.

DAVIES: What's the effect on the kinds of marine life that flourish in this
chemically altered ocean?

Mr. WEISS: What scientists have really noticed is that marine mammals in
particular are taking it on the chin. I noticed there were stories out of
Florida just this week about manatees washing ashore dead from a red tide down
there, and on this coast off California, every spring we get hundreds and
sometimes thousands of sea lions and birds that wash ashore either dead or
dazed and confused on the beaches, and they've basically been poisoned by a
neurotoxin that is produced by algae, and they pick up this neurotoxin by
eating sardines or anchovies that consume the algae and pass it up the food
chain. And this stuff's really insidious, and it packs the memory centers of
the brain, and the result is bizarre. Sea lions lose their way. They swim
inland, up rivers and range ditches and as far inland as Sacramento. And
others tend to turn on their young.

There was an amazing incident here last year when marine mammal workers came
to a rehab center and found a sea lion pup shredded in its cage, and initially
they thought vandals had come in and only later realized that the mother had
done this to her own young. The theory is is that she'd simply forgotten
she'd given birth and when the pup tried to suckle, it ripped it apart.

DAVIES: And that's from a toxin they get from this algae that blooms in this
nutrient-rich ocean?

Mr. WEISS: That's right, and this one is called Pseudo-nitzschia, again
seems to have a dense mechanism that can be very powerful, a neurotoxin that
affects the hippocampus. The--it's basically the memory center of the brain.

DAVIES: Now how does the overfishing fit in? We've got nutrients dumping
into the ocean which tends to feed lots of microbial growth. What about the
big fish? The tuna, the salmon and other big fish.

Mr. WEISS: Yeah. Well, it turns out that an awful lot of the big fish have
been taken from the oceans and you've probably seen reports of 90 percent of
the big fish are gone and predictions of collapse of the seafood. But what
basically happens, if you think about this as an energy cycle, we're stuffing
the oceans with all this food, all this energy, and typically, you know, algae
would produce, then would get eaten by smaller fish, who would get eaten by
bigger fish and work their way up the food chain. We've taken out a lot of
the bigger fish, so what happens is this energy of UL gets cycled into what
scientists call a microbial loop. So you have a profusion of algae and
bacteria, and it is not taken up the food chain so it just stays in these sort
of lower rungs.

DAVIES: And one scientist said, `We're working our way down the evolutionary
ladder.'

Mr. WEISS: Yeah, I think the one concern is that's sort of evolution in
reverse. I mean, this is the way the seas used to look billions of years ago.
It was all bacteria and then later algae and then producing more advanced
forms of life. These more advanced forms now are in retreat, and these other
kinds of more primitive forms, they're very well adapted for change, and if
they see a niche, they'll take it.

DAVIES: You write that jellyfish may be playing a more prominent role on the
planet that in the past. Why?

Mr. WEISS: Well, again, jellyfish have been around for hundreds of millions
of years, and they seem to be very good at adapting and exploiting any kind of
niche that opens up so the sea turtles that eat jellies have been decimated,
and there's lots and lots of things for a jelly fish to eat, plankton and, you
know, basically algae, and so they've got lots of food and fewer predators,
and they're moving in in a big way.

DAVIES: And are they edible? Are we going to see more jellyfish dishes on
menus 20 years from now?

Mr. WEISS: Well, one of the fun things we did was we went out with a
shrimper off of Georgia, and he's found that he can make more money catching
jellyfish than shrimp, and the reason is that shrimp have become quite scarce
and jellyfish have moved in in a big way. And so one day we went out and
caught tens of thousands of pounds of jellyfish, and those are processed right
there in Darien, Georgia, and then shipped straight to China, and jellyfish
salad and jellyfish soup is considered a delicacy in China and in Japan.

DAVIES: My guest is Ken Weiss. He is a staff writer for the Los Angeles
Time.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

DAVIES: If you're just joining me, my guest is Ken Weiss. He's a staff
writer for the Los Angeles Times and the lead writer for a series on the
altered chemical life of the oceans, which recently won the prestigious 2006
George Polk Award.

You describe some waterfowl in the Midway Atoll, an island far from just about
anywhere in the Pacific, which were dying because of plastic stuff in their
stomachs. Where did it come from?

Mr. WEISS: The issue of plastic marine debris is starting to become a hot
topic. What makes plastic so useful for you and me, it's lightweight and
durable and doesn't break down. Makes it persist forever, virtually forever
in the environment, particularly in the oceans, and the plastic that we saw
out in Midway was--most of it was from land-based sources. About four fifths
comes from the land. The other is jettisoned from boats. And the atolls out
there act like basically giant combs in the middle of the Pacific and pick up
this debris that's swirling around, riding the currents. What we looked at
out there were the albatross, and this is Midway Atoll, where we were, which
was about as far from any continent you can get. I have to say, one of the
most magical places I've ever been. It's exhilarating because there's so much
life, about two million nesting seabirds, and it's also depressing because you
see so much death, and what you see is--you get to this island and it's--every
square inch seems to be covered with some sort of lace and albatross chicks.
And they're really sort of ridiculous in their appearance. They're about the
size of a big chicken, and when we were there, they still had this downy fuzz
over their face that made them look like they had a pompadour, like a bad
Elvis impression. You come up to them, and they start clucking their beaks as
if to defend their turf, and they're quite adorable just when you see them
like this, really sort of goofy birds. But then come back a few hours later
and their wings are drooped and they're listless, and then the next day
they're dead. And a wildlife biologist there showed us what's going on, and
he would cut open the stomach of these birds, and in there would be six ounces
or so of plastic, Lego toys, toothbrushes, toy soldiers, fishing lures, you
name it. And the concern is that so much--they have so much plastic in their
bellies that they're displacing the food and water they need to survive.

DAVIES: You write that some of the plastic takes the form of these little
pellets called nurdles? What are they?

Mr. WEISS: Nurdles are essentially preproduction pellets. They're
resin-pellets, and these are fashioned out of petrochemicals, and they're the
basic building blocks for all kinds of plastic materials. So these pellets
are shipped from Houston and other petrochemical centers to industrial sites
all over the country, and they flow like water essentially, and then they're
put into plastic molds and film extruders and this sort of thing, and make
everything from plastic bags to medical devices to water bottles, you name it.
What happens is that some of these plastic pellets spill off of manufacturing
lots, out railyards, and they basically get washed down streams and rivers,
out to sea, and again, they've been found all over the world. There's a
scientist in Japan who's now studying their movement around the world. He
likes them because these pellets soak up toxins like DDT and PCBs, and he has
a program where people mail in these little pellets to him, and he can tell
how much pollutants are in their area.

DAVIES: So they're sort of research vessels of a sort?

Mr. WEISS: They become little research sponges that circumnavigate the
globe.

DAVIES: In one of your more recent pieces, you look at what can be done to
stop the flow of nutrients into the ocean, which is creating too much food for
this microbial growth and altering the chemical balance there. What sort of
technologies exist or what methods exist for limiting all this extra food
we're dumping into the ocean, and where are we seeing it implemented?

Mr. WEISS: Well, there are a lot of technological fixes we can make to
lessen the amount of nutrients we flush into the ocean. Our sewage systems,
for the most part, are fairly antiquated. There's a lot of technology out
there--I mean, we could clear our waste water to the level that we could drink
it if we wanted to spend the money. That doesn't happen very often. Usually
we still use pipes flowing out to the ocean as a way to jettison this stuff
and hope it stays out of sight and out of mind.

DAVIES: I would have thought that most sewage in the United States is pretty
treated and the days in which raw sewage was dumped into the ocean were long
gone. Are we talking about stormwater runoff that's polluted or are we
talking about sewage that is inadequately treated or both?

Mr. WEISS: Both. Both actually. You know, if you look at sewage, it's
true, we have improved our sewage treatment. We've knocked down the harmful
bacterial counts that could affect someone swimming in that water, but we do
almost nothing to take out the nitrogen and the phosphorus, the food
essentially that causes these algae blooms.

DAVIES: So the stuff that we would consider clean isn't good for the ocean?

Mr. WEISS: That's right. It's, you know, still stoking the oceans with too
much of a good thing. Too much nitrogen. Too much phosphorus. Too much
iron. All sorts of food that causes these blooms of algae.

DAVIES: So much attention has been paid to global warming, you know, with Al
Gore's movie and a lot of activism. What are the stakes here in terms of the
chemical changes in the ocean? Are we talking about changes of diet and loss
of recreation or something far more serious?

Mr. WEISS: Well, if you're talking about global warming, you know, the
oceans are the great equalizer for our climate. The oceans cover 71 percent
of the planet, and they absorb basically half the CO2 that we're pumping into
the atmosphere through tail pipes and smokestacks. There is a cost for the
ocean absorbing all this CO2. It's actually causing a chemical change.
They're becoming more acidic, and the question is, well, why would we care?
And the problem is that every clam and oyster and coral animal relies on an
outlying ocean to pull out the building blocks with calcium carbonates that
they use to build their shelves. So what's going to happen and predicted by
the end of the century is that simply become acidic enough that they won't
have this basic material to build their homes. This hasn't happened yet. But
in lab experiments, they've seen little snails essentially dissolved before
their eyes, helping the level of CO2 that we're going to be seeing by the end
of the century.

DAVIES: Are there practical things that ordinary folks can do that will make
a difference?

Mr. WEISS: Yeah, I think there are lots of things. And I think it's not
necessarily having to give up a whole lot of things but simply make wise
choices. So, for instance, I love seafood and I love to eat fish but I'm
careful to eat fish that are in pretty good shape, their populations are in
good shape, instead of those who are on the brink of joining an endangered
species list. One interesting rule of thumb is to try to eat lower on the
food chain. So oysters and clams and mussels and small fish like herring and
sardines, they have an ability to reproduce very quickly and bounce back very
quickly. That's very different than the top predators such as sharks and
sword fish and blue fin tuna that take many years to become mature, and taking
one of those out of the ocean has a much bigger impact than these
fast-producing fish. I think a lot of people are aware of these campaigns:
not to litter and not to wash your car and let the suds run down the street
into the storm drain, not to dump oil into the storm drain, all these sorts of
things. But I think ultimately, there's only so much we can do as
individuals. I think it's important that we participate, but ultimately it's
going to be up to governments to make big changes.

DAVIES: Well, Ken Weiss, thanks so much for talking to us.

Mr. WEISS: Thank you.

DAVIES: Los Angeles Times writer Ken Weiss. His series with Usha Lee
McFarling, "Altered Oceans," has won the prestigious George Polk Award. You
can find a link to the series on our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

Unidentified Singer: (Singing) "How much do I love you? I'll tell you no
lie. How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? How many times a day do I
think of you? How many roses I'll sprinkle with dew? How far would I travel
to be where you are? How far is the journey from here to a star? And if I
ever lost you..."

(End of soundbite)

(Announcements)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Actor Gabriel Byrne talks about movies he's played
including his new film "Jindabyne"
DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, filling in for Terry Gross.

My guest, actor Gabriel Byrne, has appeared in more than 50 feature films,
often playing troubled or conflicted characters. He began acting in his 20s
in Irish theater and television before moving to the United States at the age
of 40. His films include "Excalibur," "Miller's Crossing," "The Usual
Suspects," "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Vanity Fair." He stars in the new
movie, "Jindabyne," which was featured at this year's Philadelphia Film
Festival and opens later this month.

Shot on location in Australia, the story revolves around four men who trek to
a remote river for a fishing trip and discover the body of a murdered young
woman. Rather than hiking out and reporting the discovery immediately, they
complete their fishing trip before calling the police. That generates a
community controversy and strains in their personal lives. In this scene,
Byrne's character Stewart is arguing with his wife Claire, played by Laura
Linney.

(Soundbite from "Jindabyne")

(Soundbite of traffic)

Mr. GABRIEL BYRNE: (As Stewart) We have to move on. Look, I was--I was
worried that the girl would be dragged down to the--to the rapids. Carl's
ankles (censored by station) he couldn't walk. There was no way we could hike
back. The kid was freaking out. It was just, I don't know what we could do.
I don't see why I have to justify myself to you. Claire?

Ms. LAURA LINNEY: (As Claire) What if you'd found a boy in the river?
Wouldn't you have taken him out and covered him up?

Mr. BYRNE: (As Stewart) What? What are you talking about?

Ms. LINNEY: (As Claire) You don't know?

Mr. BYRNE: (As Stewart) No, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't
know where you're going with this. You're not making any sense.

(End of soundbite)

DAVIES: Well, Gabriel Byrne, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Mr. BYRNE: Thank you, Dave.

DAVIES: This new film "Jindabyne" is--it's the name of a town, which is a
real place, a town in Australia that kind of has this interesting history,
having been relocated to make room for a lake. You know, in some stories, the
place itself is a character. I'm wondering, did this place bring anything
unique to this story?

Mr. BYRNE: Well, the town of Jindabyne is, as you say, a relocated town, and
the idea of an underwater town or a buried town has kind of great kind of
significance for me as an Irishman. I grew up listening to tales of towns
buried underwater. In fact, one of the four stories I remember was hearing
about the myth of Atlantis...

DAVIES: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BYRNE: So to come to this town in New South Wales where you could see on
days of low tide, you could see the spires of the church and some of the ruins
of the houses that had been vacated and--was a mixture of awe and eeriness.
So, yes, it's a very major character in the film. The film takes place in the
new town of Jindabyne, and it concerns a murder that happens and the effect
that the murder has on the inhabitants of this village.

DAVIES: Well, you know, a lot of people who have had the successful careers
in acting that you have grew up in New York or Hollywood, or were around show
business. You weren't at all. I mean, you grew up in Ireland in a--you were
the oldest of six kids, right?

Mr. BYRNE: Yes.

DAVIES: Stories of what you did in your 20s before you ever got into theater
are pretty remarkable. You went to Spain and, what, did archaeology? Taught
school? Is that right?

Mr. BYRNE: Yes, I graduated from university with a degree in languages and
archaeology, so my first ambition was to become an archaeologist, and I don't
think really what I ended up doing is that different, really. You know,
rooting around, trying to find things, occasionally discovering something
that, you know, makes you exuberant with delight. I then taught languages in
Dublin and in Spain, and I also had many other jobs that I was really not very
competent at and got fired from most of them, but I like to think of myself
before I went into acting as having the kind of career that if one was a
paperback novelist, it would look good on the back cover.

DAVIES: When you did find your way into acting, you got onto a hit Irish TV
series and...

Mr. BYRNE: Yeah.

DAVIES: ...I gather became pretty well-known pretty quickly. What drove you
to acting in the first place? What got you there?

Mr. BYRNE: I often think that the last thing I should ever have been was an
actor really because I don't know--to me the notion of showing off in anyway
is appalling to me. I used to associate acting with kind of showing off, and
when I was teaching, I taught extracurricular class in drama, and I began to
see the effect it had on the kids, and drama was able to reach them in a way
that no conventional subject--I was teaching Gaelic and Spanish and English
literature. Drama reached them in a way that none of those subjects did, and
I realized that the reason for that was because they were actually not showing
off as I thought but actually revealing who they were and that it was a really
complex and involved process. And yet I was still terrified to do it. And I
was 27 before I decided to leave teaching for a year and become an actor,
against all the advice of my fellow teachers and my family and friends who all
told me I was crazy to do it. I said, `I'll give it a year and see how it
goes.' And in that time, I was lucky enough to join the Project Theatre, which
was just coming into existence in Dublin at that time, and it was just one of
those rare, I suppose, confluences of luck and timing and everything. Jim
Sheridan, Neil Jordan, Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, Colin Meany, Gerald Hines and
myself. We were all in this garage basically working for $25 a week in
repertory company putting on different plays that we'd written ourselves or
that, you know, some of the great classics. And so I learned to be part of an
ensemble there, and I discovered the addiction of theater, the addiction of
performing, which really had more to do, again, with expressing the
inexpressible about oneself and...

DAVIES: And the addiction was not to the attention, not to the spotlight.

Mr. BYRNE: No.

DAVIES: It was to expressing something meaningful.

Mr. BYRNE: Yes, yes. Absolutely. And the joy of--the effect that drama had
on the audience. And I grew up in that kind of an environment. I grew up
listening to great storytellers when I was a child. There was an old man. He
used to come to my aunt's house, and he would come into the kitchen, and he
had a chair by the fire, and almost the entire village would turn out to see
this man who performed in different houses around, once, twice a year, and he
would begin in total silence by saying something like, `This didn't happen to
me, and it didn't happen to my father, and it didn't happen to my father's
father, but it did happen to my father's father's father.' So what he was
saying was `I don't want to stand over any of the details of this, but I am
telling you that it's true, but it's far enough in the past to be rendered
unexaminable.' And so I watched the effect that a man like that had on people
listening and how they were moved and affected by it, and I got that same
sense in the theater.

DAVIES: It's interesting. If the addiction of acting was the effect of
telling a gripping story and revealing something about oneself and seeing what
that did for an audience, it's interesting that you've done so many movies
where, day after day, you go from a trailer to a set, and there really...

Mr. BYRNE: Mmm.

DAVIES: ...is no audience other than, you know, the crew and your fellow
actors.

Mr. BYRNE: Well, there's the camera, and somebody told me once--Alan Bates,
actually, the English actor, years ago told me, he said, `You know, the
amazing thing about the camera is that the camera photographs thought,' and I
never forgot that because, if you look into the lens of a camera, the first
thing I do, usually because I'm extremely nervous on the first couple of days
of any film, is I go up to the camera and I stare it down. I look into the
depths of it and I stare it down, try to stare down its power, and I think of
all the people who are inside, in the camera who are sitting in there
listening and watching, you know, try to not be afraid of them.

DAVIES: My guest is Gabriel Byrne.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

DAVIES: If you're just joining me, my guest is actor Gabriel Byrne. His new
film is "Jindabyne."

I wanted to talk about "Miller's Crossing," which you did in 1990, the Coen
brothers film, which, I guess, was a breakout role for you in a way. There
you play Tom Reagan, who's a trusted associate of a mob kingpin, I guess, from
the '20s or '30s. I thought we'd play a clip here. This is where your boss
Leo, who's played by Albert Finney, has come to you in the middle of the night
because he's concerned he can't find the lady he's saying, whose name is
Verna, and your character Tom is a very perceptive guy who sees things about
Verna that Leo doesn't. So here we are. Let's listen.

(Soundbite from "Miller's Crossing")

Mr. ALBERT FINNEY: (As Leo) Tommy, I don't know where Verna is.

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) Mm-hmm.

Mr. FINNEY: (As Leo) I know what you're thinking, `What else is new?' But
the situation now, I'm worried.

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) Verna can take care of herself, maybe better than you
can.

Mr. FINNEY: (As Leo) What does that mean?

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) Want another one?

Mr. FINNEY: (As Leo) No! What does that mean?

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) How far she got her hooks into you?

Mr. FINNEY: (As Leo) That's a hell of a question.

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) It's a grift. If she didn't need you to protect a
bullet from Johnny Caspar, do you think she'd still be going on slow carriage
rides with you through the park? That's the deal, isn't it? You keep her in
here under wraps till Casper cools down?

Mr. FINNEY: (As Leo) Jesus, you're a sharp prickly pear. What's wrong with
wanting her brother taken care of?

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) Nothing. I don't blame her. She sees the angle which
is you and she plays it. She's a grifter, just like her brother. Probably
had grifter parents and grifter grandparents, and someday they're each going
to spawn little grifter kids.

Mr. FINNEY: (As Leo) Stop it, Tommy. I don't like to hear my friends run
down even by other friends.

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) Friendships got nothing to do with her.

Mr. FINNEY: (As Leo) Well, you say...(unintelligible)...help your
friends...(unintelligible)...kick your enemies.

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) Wrong, Leo. You do things for a reason.

Mr. FINNEY: (As Leo) OK, Tom. You know all the angles--Christ!--better than
anybody. But maybe you're wrong about this. You don't know what's in Verna's
heart.

Mr. BYRNE: (As Tom) I know. If she's such an angel, why you looking for her
at 4:00 in the morning?

(End of soundbite)

DAVIES: And that's Gabriel Byrne and Albert Finney from the film "Miller's
Crossing." Great piece of dialogue there. Do you want to tell us something
about getting this role, this Coen brothers' role?

Mr. BYRNE: Well, when I came to America for the first time, I was 40 years
old when I did that picture. It was the first picture I did in America. I
think that it came out at the same time as "Goodfellas," so it got overlooked
as a gangster film, but the language of it and the visual imagery of the film,
the humor and the extremely complex plot and relationships between the
characters, it's a film that has lived on, strangely enough, so many people
have seen it on DVD. The more famous the Coen brothers got, of course, the
more people wanted to go back and look at their previous work, and they came
across this kind of--hidden kind of picture. I think when it came out the
first weekend, it made about $4,000 or something.

DAVIES: Really?

Mr. BYRNE: I remember sitting at the cinema up at Carnegie Hall, and there
was two people in this gigantic cinema--myself and two friends of mine and the
guy in front of me, who was with his wife, kept saying to his wife, `What are
they saying? I can't--I can't hear. What did he--what did he--who is this
guy?' You know, I wanted to just tap him on the shoulder and say, `Look, hold
on. It gets--you know, it all gets explained at the end.'

DAVIES: Now, it was around then that you moved to LA, right?

Mr. BYRNE: Yes.

DAVIES: After you made the film, right? I know that Ireland is such an
important part of your background...

Mr. BYRNE: Mmm.

DAVIES: You studied Irish literature and speak Irish...

Mr. BYRNE: Mmm.

DAVIES: ...and I'm wondering when you relocated to LA, was it difficult? Was
it culturally jarring?

Mr. BYRNE: Yes, it was. I think that even for people who don't come from
somewhere like Ireland, I think, LA can be culturally very confusing. A
friend of mine who's a designer said to me one day, he said, `You know,' he
said, `I come up your road and it's Beverly Hills, 2001,' and he says, `I come
into your house and it's Cannamar in 1943.' So I don't know what that says
about LA or my house but I tried to keep my sense of identity and my sense of
who I am in LA, and I remember once driving my car out the driveway, and there
was a group of men walking down the street, and I thought, `Wow, that's very
unusual' to see a group of men walking together on that street because people
don't walk in Beverly Hills, really, except maybe to walk their dogs or
something. And as they came closer, I realized that I recognized one of the
men, and there was--the group would stop outside each house and they would
point in and then explain something and then move onto the next house. I
thought this was weird. I'm going to wait just to see how--and it was Ronald
Reagan, and he was in the very last days of his illness and because it was a
flat part of Beverly Hills, they used to walk him there, and I remember he
crossed the road and they all went behind him. There was a group of Mexican
men who had just finished working in a garden there, and what's really unusual
is that nobody talks to Mexican gardeners in LA. So here was this man talking
to this group of Mexicans who couldn't believe that the ex-president of the
United States was talking to them. And I just remember--I don't know why that
incident stands out in my mind but the idea, I suppose, that so little happens
on that street that was unusual that the idea of four men in the distance
walking together...

DAVIES: Yeah.

Mr. BYRNE: ...was enough to make me stop my car and say, `This is weird.'

DAVIES: I wanted to talk a little bit about "The Usual Suspects"...

Mr. BYRNE: Yes.

DAVIES: ...which is a film you did in 1992...

Mr. BYRNE: Yes.

DAVIES: ...which is a real kind of cult favorite.

Mr. BYRNE: Yeah.

DAVIES: Did you know this was going to be such a great film as you were
making it?

Mr. BYRNE: No, not at all. In fact, you never--you can never predict
anything. I mean, we laughed for 25--we shot that picture in 25 days, and we
laughed all the way through it. And, in fact, they left things in the movie
that were actually--another director would have taken out but Bryan Singer
brilliantly left in-takes where we were just cracking up because it showed the
camaraderie between these five people and...

DAVIES: That's funny. I don't think of that movie as filled with laughs. I
mean, can you recall a take--one of the spontaneous takes that made it into
the film.

Mr. BYRNE: When--in the lineup when...

DAVIES: Mmm.

Mr. BYRNE: ...when they all get to say, `Give me the keys,' none of us could
stay in character because we all thought what the other was doing was so
funny, and if you look at the moment, Stephen Baldwin is completely, like,
mental and then Kevin Pollak has his version of it, which is totally the
opposite and very, very funny. And then Benicio del Toro, who took a
brilliant decision to be not understood by the audience. So all that stuff
was improvised so it was very difficult to not laugh. There's a shot of us
all laughing at each other that's left in the film, and I think it's just an
inspired piece of spontaneity, and it really works for the picture.

DAVIES: Well, Gabriel Byrne, thanks so much for speaking with us.

Mr. BYRNE: Dave, thank you so much indeed. It was a pleasure.

DAVIES: Actor Gabriel Byrne. His new film is "Jindabyne." Here's that scene
from "The Usual Suspects" we were just talking about. We'll hear Kevin
Pollak, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio del Toro, a little narration from Kevin
Spacey and then Gabriel Byrne.

(Soundbite from "The Usual Suspects")

Unidentified Actor: Number one. Step forward.

Mr. KEVIN POLLAK: Hand me the keys, you (censored by station)...

Actor: Number two. Step forward.

Mr. STEPHEN BALDWIN: Give me the (censored by station) keys, you (censored
by station). Ahhhh!

Actor: Knock it off. Get back. Number three. Step forward.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BENICIO DEL TORO: Hand me the keys (censored by station).

Actor: In English please.

Mr. DEL TORO: Excuse me?

Actor: In English.

Mr. DEL TORO: (Censored by station) (Foreign language spoken)

Actor: Number four. Step forward.

Mr. KEVIN SPACEY: It was bull (censored by station). The whole rap was a
setup.

Mr. BYRNE: Hand me the keys, you (censored by station).

(End of soundbite)

DAVIES: Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews the new album by Fountains of Wayne,
their first collection of new songs in four years.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Fountains of Wayne's new
album, "Traffic and Weather"
DAVE DAVIES, host:

Fountains of Wayne, the band led by songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris
Collingwood, has a new album called "Traffic and Weather," their first
collection of new songs in four years. The band came close to becoming a mass
audience act in 2003 with a hit single and music video for their song "Stacy's
Mom." More recently, Schlesinger wrote the parody pop songs for the recent
Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant movie, "Movie and Lyrics." Rock critic Ken Tucker
says the new album is a deeper exploration of the central question about
Fountains of Wayne: Are they making potential hit songs or satirizing them?

(Soundbite from "Someone to Love")

Unidentified Singer #1: (Singing) "Seth Shapiro got his law degree. He moved
to Brooklyn from Schenectady, '93. Got some clients in the food industry, he
says it's not the money, it's the recipes. He calls his mom, says he's doing
fine. She's got somebody on the other line. Puts Coldplay on, pours a glass
of wine, curls up with a book about organized crime. When it's late..."

Unidentified Singers #1: (Singing in unison) "When it's late..."

Singer #1: (Singing) "And it's hot."

Singers #1: (Singing in unison) "And it's hot."

Singer #1: (Singing) "And a date with the Late Show is all that you've got.
Don't give out."

Singers #1: (Singing in unison) "Don't give out."

Singer #1: (Singing) "Don't give up."

Singers #1: (Singing in unison) "Don't give up."

Singer #1: (Singing) "One of these nights you might find someone to love.
Someone to love."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. KEN TUCKER: That's "Someone to Love," the song that leads off Fountains
of Wayne's "Traffic and Weather." It's the album's first single and typically
first-rate craft. This is a tale of two lonely, urban singletons told with
tight little rhymes that get the details both right--consuming Coldplay with
white wine--and depressingly specific. While the song's lyrics may be too
downbeat for mass amusement, the melody is a chipper counterpoint. And
anyway, the video for this song is going to star Demetri Martin, a young comic
with a lot of hip cred for his genuinely funny work on "The Daily Show with
Jon Stewart."

But Fountains of Wayne aren't, to their credit, going for a facile coolness.
Consider this finely observed, almost majestic anecdote of betrayal.

(Soundbite from "This Better Be Good")

Unidentified Singer #2: (Singing) "I saw you holding hands with some guy
wearing light blue Dockers pants. And I thought that I might just give you a
chance to explain. What the hell is in your brain? You know you pretend
you're going to Sea Bright for the long weekend, but something don't seem
right. And your best friend Renee keeps on saying she saw you at The Gap with
somebody in a baseball cap. And, you know..."

Unidentified Singers #2: "This better be good. This better be good. This
better be good now, baby. You sure don't act like you should. This better be
good. Good."

Singer #2: (Singing) "I thought..."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: Fountains of Wayne music always aspires to a platonic ideal.
Teen pop music that sounds as smooth and catchy as anything recorded by Gary
Lewis & the Playboys in the '60s or Hilary Duff in the present time. But
whereas those acts were and are able to sing in the first person about fresh
heartache and youthful self-doubt, as 30-going-on-40-somethings, Schlesinger
and Collingwood know that they would sound like fakes or knaves if they tried
to do that. And so like Chuck Berry so many years before them, they create
younger, less-jaded characters than themselves who carry the emotions the band
wants to get across. Chuck had "Nadine" and "Little Queenie." Fountains of
Wayne have "Michael and Heather at the Baggage Claim."

(Soundbite from "Michael and Heather at the Baggage Claim")

Singer #2: (Singing) "Michael and Heather at the baggage claim, tired of
playing the waiting game. Every bag has got a different name. Michael and
Heather may never get home again.

Unidentified Singers #3: (Singing in unison) "Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba."

Singer #2: (Singing) "Michael and Heather..."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: Schlesinger and Collingwood put word power into their pop,
composing taut couplets with frequent interior rhymes. In various songs here,
their way of keeping it real is to name check Costco, light blue Dockers and
the sitcom, "The King of Queens." They inhabit our world as much as a band can
whose co-leader scores Hollywood movies and is writing the score for a John
Waters Broadway musical. In that same tradition, Fountains of Wayne do it the
old-fashioned songwriting way, putting their anxieties, their insecurities and
their ambivalence, into their puns, their rhymes and their melody. Whereas
most pop rock strives to sound tossed-off, Fountains of Wayne aren't afraid to
let their naked ambition stand revealed.

DAVIES: Ken Tucker is editor at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"Traffic and Weather" by Fountains of Wayne.

(Credits)

DAVIES: For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.

(Soundbite of music)
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