How did your own university experience compare with Mike’s?
Billy Crystal: Oh, it was nothing like it as far as the campus life and all that. I finished up at NYU in the film program, but my fraternity was really the theatre. When I did theatre in junior college, they became my campus family. You had your nerds in that, too. They would do the tech or they would be the light and sound crew and the set designer. Then you would have the actors in another spot. Then you would have the directors. Those were the cliques I knew.
Unlike Mike, I was very shy going in. I was hoping to be a baseball player at a little school in West Virginia called Marshall University, and it was sort of an isolated place for me and just a wrong choice overall. The best thing that came out of that was getting a job as a disc jockey on the campus radio station. Disney asked for a picture of me in college and that was really the only one I had, the one of me at the door of WMUL “The voice of Marshall University.”
When you do comedy, a lot of it is very physical, so how hard is it to convey that when you are restricted to only using your voice?
Billy Crystal: I know this guy. You know what he looks like and what he’s going to do and how it’s going to be funny, but Mike is more energy than he is anything else. It’s really hard when you think about it. We’re on our feet pushing it out all the time. We have four to six hour days and you’re just exhausted towards then end of it, and that’s when they usually close out with just 45 minutes of us recording screams. (Laughs) When you see those days you tend to ask them to put them at the end.
That’s why the director is always so important to me. Dan Scanlon directed this and he’s kind of a hipster. (Laughs) He’s a really funny guy, and he would sometimes paint these pictures for us, literally. They were these beautiful computer generated oil painting looking backdrops of where we are, so I know what the dorm looks like, what the frat looks like, what the classroom where Alfred Molina – who’s great in this – teaches looks like. We also had a look at what everyone’s character looks like, which is especially great in the case of Helen Mirren’s character to see what she looks like. We’re surrounded by at least renderings of everything. That’s always the hardest thing for me: to ask where am I and what am I doing.
This film has certainly opened you up to a whole new generation of fans. Do you remember any particularly memorable interactions with any of them?
Billy Crystal: Yeah, and that really started on Parental Guidance where my nickname was Farty because I played a guy named Artie. My friends all called me that in the movie. I don’t really get “You look marvellous” anymore, but I do get a lot of Farty. I don’t know which is better. Now when kids know that I am Mike Wazowski, it’s a totally different thing. Sometimes they can’t make the leap from who the character is in the movie and who I am in real life, because when you’re four you buy that these movies are real!
Are you surprised at how often people remember your impressions from early in your career?
Billy Crystal: It’s funny because I never really did a lot of them. One of my favorites though was Sammy Davis Jr. on SNL. I was Sammy’s opening act for a bit and it was easily one of the greatest experiences of my life. I did a month with him in Lake Tahoe. That was an extremely important experience for me to be that close to a true genius on stage. You’re probably too young to remember him at his height, because he wasn’t that tall. (Laughs)
But the genius of Sammy Davis Jr. was that he was really the first guy who could do everything. When I was growing up, he was our Michael Jackson, but he was even cooler. He could sing, dance, do impressions, play instruments, and he could be really funny. The whole persona of the cool thing with the Rat Pack, the cigarettes, the big glasses, the knee high boots, and the Nehru. He was just a cool throwback even then.
I would go on at 8pm and I would be off at 8:28 precisely. I would get to the dressing room usually around 7 for an 8pm show, but Sammy would be there at 5 because he loved being close to the stage. Sometimes he stayed to himself and he was alone. Sometimes he was playing backgammon with some stage hands. He didn’t care. He just loved being in that environment. He said he was getting there at 5 and all of a sudden I was getting there at 5:15 or 4:45 and we would just talk.
And he is the greatest storyteller you could ever imagine, and the stories were about the Rat Pack. There were all these stories about Sinatra. One of the first stories he ever told me was about getting high with Gary Cooper. So when you’re in the room with him you just can’t help but start to inflect and do the things he was going to do. Then on SNL I just started doing him, and that was really satisfying. And I mean, that’s a hard thing to do because it’s a white guy in make-up doing it, but it was done with love an affection and obviously with Sammy’s blessing. That was a great thing to be.
Monsters University not only gives the message of being yourself, but the power of having other people around you who believe in your potential. Did you have some people who specifically helped you along the way at that same point in your life?
Billy Crystal: That’s a good question. I had a number of people, but most importantly is my wife Janice. We’ve been together since 1966. Any time anything good or bad happens, she is there. Any moment of self-doubt is something that she lets me have and then talks me out of it. That’s the most important thing. Along the way, you know, I’ve been blessed with some pretty great managers and agents. I’ve been with the same people since 1974. They’re my second family. These are the people who can tell you the truth, both good and bad, and it has to be done in a right way. You also have to have someone who’s always there for you so you can make mistakes, but they never seem as bad.
And along the way, even my audiences give me that. It’s always comforting to know that people want to see you. When we opened on Broadway with 700 Sundays originally – and I’m really not trying to blow smoke here, I’m really not – we became the highest grossing non-musical in Broadway history that meant so much. Think of how many plays showed there. That was unbelievably comforting and supportive that people would even want to come out and see this story about my family. That’s always great to know that’s out there and it makes me want to keep putting this stuff out.
That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank Billy for his time. Be sure to check out Monsters University, in theatres this Friday!
