I didn’t want that scene to end. It felt so good. Just over on that side of the thing there were hippos and they’re the most dangerous animals in Africa. They’re the ones who most often attack people. There was a moment where we had to stop because one of them came and opened his mouth and we beat a hasty retreat to lunch. Hi, I’m Meryl Streep.
I’m here today watching some scenes from my movies for Vanity Fair. Needs a battery. That’s what my grandchildren say. Needs a battery, Mimi. Bill. Oh god, Stellan. Oh my god. You can cut it off now. Thank you. That’s about all I can That was shot in the historically rainiest summer London had ever experienced.
We were shooting in Pinewood Studios. All the towns around us including Oxford were underwater, were flooded. It was the worst weather and we would go to work and open the door to the great big Pinewood studio and there would be Greece. And sunshine and girls in bathing suits and you know, it was ridiculous.
It was complete fantasy and so so so much fun except for Pierce. We were shooting in the James Bond studio and he was so afraid when he was walking to set in his spandex, you know, that um he’d run into Daniel Craig who was playing Bond at the time and he would be humiliated. But he it was so much fun. So much fun.
Made some great friends, lifelong friends on that movie. Yeah, I loved it. And they were all game. Look at how Colin Firth humiliated himself in that movie. I mean, we all just I was in overalls. What was I thinking? I don’t know. It was great. >> >> Amanda, I think I really really took notice of her when we were doing the pre-record before we started shooting.
Her voice is extraordinary and and it’s almost like born to sing that or she could sing actually anything but when I heard her sing, I thought, “Oh my god, she’s an angel.” But she’s so inventive and just an interesting interesting girl and I loved the scene that we did in Mamma Mia and she sat on my lap and the song is Slipping Through My Fingers and it really made me think how swiftly things change.
She was a baby then. Look at how she’s grown up. Yeah. Now, there’s my ride. Loud and long and all the while his eyes went to and fro. “Haha,” quoth he, “full plain I see.” >> >> Look at Bob Redford. Was he the most divine man in the world? And you head back. He prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast.
It’s not a sex scene. It’s a love scene. And basically, he didn’t know how to he’d never of course washed anyone’s hair except his own. Maybe even not his own. But he had to be taught. So my long time makeup man, Roy Helland, J. Roy Helland, uh he showed him how to do it and he really got into it.
He was really um amazing. I didn’t want that scene to end. It felt so good. That’s better. We did it quite a number of times because just over on that side of the thing there were hippos in the water in the river and they’re the most dangerous animals in Africa. They’re the ones who most often attack people.
There was a moment where we had to stop because one of them came and opened his mouth and we beat a hasty retreat to lunch. But it was a great morning. I remember it well. Beauty book my butt. Wait a second. >> Free weights, exercise? >> I don’t think THIS IS A MIRACLE AT ALL. YOU’RE A FRAUD, HELEN. YOU’RE A walking lie and I can see right through you.
>> [gasps] >> Speaking of which, as a friend, some advice. I would stay out of a bathing suit for a while. At least a two-piece. Or if I were you There it goes. I remember being in a green spandex suit that encompassed my whole body and then little pins being stuck in it uh and they measured something.
So no, I wasn’t in my costume and then they for part of this when they take your head off, I’m not sure how they do it but it’s it’s not it’s not like playing in a scene that Arthur Miller wrote or anything. It’s um a completely different animal. Tedious is a a kind of a little word for what it is. It’s excruciating.
And then when we get to the scene, we just do the scene all silly and fabulous me and with Goldie uh we just laughed. We just had a lot of fun. And she’s the best laugher in in America, really. She laughs like >> >> and then they have to stop shooting. Um but it was really that part was fun. But the V VFX or whatever they call it, that part is not not that fun.
On guard. Goldie, she was always late to set but she was so adorable and I’m always on time, you know, and annoying. But she’s late and she had a red convertible I remember and she’d drive herself to set and so that was the that was probably the problem. She’d drive herself to set. >> >> Sorry, you know, and everybody thought, “Oh, she’s so cute.
” >> [gasps] >> Yeah. So I had a beef with her but I loved her. I love her. She’s one of my buddies and you know, over the years we’ve we’ve had some laughs about that movie because people love it. I thought it was like a documentary on Beverly Hills. GIRLS, GIRLS, LET’S JUST CALM DOWN. I’M SURE WE CAN SETTLE this peacefully and Oh, Bruce was divine.
I guess he was a bad boy on certain sets and came with a little reputation for being difficult but we had so much fun with him. He was such a gent and so game and willing to to be ridiculous and I just thought he was wonderful. We were shooting in a trailer in I think Weirton, West Virginia or maybe Steubenville, Ohio. I can’t remember.
But they’re right across the river from each other. I’m wearing a polyester shirt and a mohair sweater and my hair was all puffy and done and it was 106 in the trailer. And the whole camera crew had stripped down. Vilmos Zsigmond, who was the cinematographer, was wearing one of those European bathing suits that’s beyond.
And but they were cool. And I was just sweating buckets and my makeup man had to keep coming in and just patting and doing everything he could and blowing air up into this hair so it stayed puffy. Bob De Niro didn’t even break a sweat. Not at all. That man is I mean he’s in control of his craft. He is intensely where he is in the moment that he was in October in a cool probably drafty cool trailer that didn’t have its heat. And I was where we were.
I was like dying. But it was again, really memorable memorable time in my life. I just felt like it was such a gift to get to get cast in that and then to play with all those amazing wonderful actors. God bless America. My home sweet home. >> >> I didn’t have much to do with him in that film but I had preceded we had done Measure for Measure in Central Park and a lot of things I learned from him and I think about every every time I I work.
Because the director used to call him, “Oh, here comes 20 questions.” He had always, every morning, 20 questions at least. He just dug dug dug dug deep to ask the questions that had not even really occurred to me, you know, to ask. And then he was just an amazing listener. The quality of his what he and intensity of how he soaked in whatever was happening in the scene and outside in the park, a lot of things happen and everything happened to him.
You could feel see it on his skin. He was alive in the moment. That was a great lesson. I’m actually a journalist now. I’ve I’ve been published in a doesn’t matter. Anyway, we are all well aware that running that story was a mistake and are taking immediate steps. >> actually get over this. It’s really remarkable.
A senior editor at Runway, you. Yep. We’re all so thrilled. Mhm. You know what’s funny is you’ve changed. You have. You’re much more confident. Huh. Kept those eyebrows though, didn’t you? >> Okay, there you go. Emily Blunt, ladies and gentlemen. Emily Blunt. You know, who takes charge of this movie? It’s not Miranda. Clearly.
Who takes charge is Emily Blunt. I am the new features editor at Runway. No, you’re not. Are you serious? Wow. Wonders never cease. This version of events, everything what else hasn’t changed, you know, social media now directs our lives, our children’s lives to greatly ill effect the industry of journalism and um certainly print magazines, newspapers and as a result the effect on on culture has been profound.
It’s hard to get the narrative of where where we’re going. Everybody’s sort of destabilized and so in this movie Miranda is on the shoals of that that dilemma. How to keep her enterprise going, how to keep it viable, how to keep it financially working. He said that um that we need to I mean Runway needs to take control of the narrative of the speed patch story and and and restore credibility and he thought someone with my expertise would be good idea and but I thought that for sure you had approved and were excited and that’s why I came
in here all like oh. In the second film because I’m sort of coming beginning in crisis it’s not Miranda in control. So her authority is slightly under siege. And that part is it’s funny and so I felt like I could relax with my friends a little bit better. Also, I’m older and I don’t probably give as many as I used to about things like >> >> that.
Thank you so much for watching.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
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