Life’s Work: An Interview with Alan Alda

Walter McBride/Getty Images Best known for playing Hawkeye Pierce on the TV series M*A*S*H, Alan Alda is also a film and theater actor, scriptwriter, director, nonfiction author, science-show host, and founder of two organizations designed to help people improve their communication skills—a topic he covers in his new book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? HBR: Coworkers have described you as diligent, the hardest worker, a perfectionist. How do you keep that up over the course of a career? ALDA: I don’t think I’m a perfectionist. My early training as an improviser, which was really the only formal training I had as an actor, got me used to the idea of uncertainty and the value of the imperfect. Everything is a stepping-stone to something else, whether it’s perfect or kind of lousy. I’m always looking to get better. It will never be perfect. Could improv skills help the rest of us? The kind of improvising I value is not designed to entertain people. It can be entertaining, but that’s not its purpose. In its purest form, improv puts you in touch with other people in a way that is intimate, informal, and fully engaged, so you can be aware of what they’re feeling and thinking. That’s an extremely useful power to have in any type of communication, from the boardroom to the bedroom. We’re social animals, and we’re built for this, but we often avoid developing this capacity to relate to others. It’s a shame because without it, we won’t make much headway working together. Are there simple ways to build those skills? Both the Center for Communicating Science and my new company, Alda Communication Training—a long boring name, but the acronym is ACT—work from this basic idea that improv exercises, like role-playing, can strengthen these abilities. But, yes, there are things we can all do in our daily lives that bring us into better touch with others. So-called active listening, where you let people know you’ve heard what they said, is helpful. Last night I interviewed someone on stage, and at first my mind was filled with things like “What am I going to ask him?” and “What’s his book about again?” Even though I was concentrating, I was distracted. I wasn’t paying attention to him. So I started to really see him—the hairs in his eyebrows, the different colors in his cheeks—and as soon as I did that, I calmed down. My tone of voice changed. I was thinking about what he was feeling, not about how I was doing. That’s the basic advantage of the improv thing: You think about the other person. How do you get a new team, like a cast, to gel? The same thing: by being aware of what they’re feeling, which is empathy, and what they’re thinking, which scientists call “theory of mind.” You get clues from their voices, their body language, the words they use. And then you let them know you understand—not by saying, “You seem to be nervous”—but in a way that puts them at ease. Sometimes it’s joking. Sometimes it’s just being listened to. As the director or senior actor on a set, or as a workshop leader, how do you move people in that direction? By expressing my own passion about it and watching to see what lights them up and if we’re in sync. The sincerity of that engagement is really important. In your book you talk about an exercise the M*A*S*H cast did that you’ve since employed with others. We discovered it by accident. Usually in making a movie or a television show, when you’re not needed to play a scene, you go back to your dressing room. But during M*A*S*H we would sit around in a circle and kid each other and go over our lines together. The sense of group was fortified all day long. The laughing was important because when you laugh you’re vulnerable, opened up, allowing the other person to affect you. After that when I did a play, I wouldn’t make it an overt ritual, but I would try to work it so the cast was in the habit of sitting and laughing together, and the performance became just an extension of that playful experience. When the other actors came out on stage, I’d already established a relationship with them. It wasn’t somebody I hadn’t seen since the night before. We were cooking. I mean, when we did [the Broadway play] Art , we would be kidding each other until seconds before the curtain went up. There was the energy of being connected, and that really changes your point of view, your focus. You’re not lost in your own head. It makes a big difference in any encounter, whether it’s in your personal life or in business. On many projects you’ve been the writer, director, and star. How do you wear all those hats at once? Not easily. One of our daughters, when she was about eight, said, “You’re directing yourself? What do you say? ‘You, go there.’” It’s a problem because when you’re directing you need objectivity, and it’s hard to be objective about your own performance. One of the things I would do is shoot many more takes if I was in a scene, so I’d have things to choose from in the editing room. Maybe that came off looking like I was more concerned about my own performance than other people’s, but that wasn’t why I did it. Was it also hard to be a boss and a colleague at the same time? I didn’t realize how hard it was at first. Sometimes I’d give a bit of direction to a fellow actor, and they’d look at me as if to say, “Who are you to tell me what to do?” It’s a real breach of etiquette for actors to do that to one another. But I was, in fact, the director. So you have to be very adroit. Sometimes I wasn’t. I’ve been learning how to do this. How have you improved over the years? I haven’t directed in a few years, but if I did now, I think I’d be much more interested in what the actors can come up with without any hints from me—because they need to own their performance completely. On the stage you get to do that. The curtain goes up, and the evening is yours until it comes down. You have the final cut every night. On the screen you chop the performance into little pieces, and there’s often somebody standing there, telling you, “Do it a little more like this.” Some people are amazing in the freedom they give themselves to tell others what to do. But it takes away some of the fun. Who have your favorite collaborators been, and what did you learn from them? I loved working with Scorsese because he was so encouraging. Even if he didn’t like what you were doing, you got the impression you were great, and little by little you saw the value of moving to something else. I loved working with Woody Allen, because he never said anything. He just had you do it until it got better—although he only does a couple of takes, which adds to the excitement. And there’s almost no rehearsal, so you have to relate to the other people. That’s why there’s often a feeling of life in his movies. There’s that social connection. All you have is one another. It’s interesting that you respond well to different types of leadership. I think you have to. One thing I’ve learned is that there’s no certain way to behave to get the most out of people. And if you’re in a relationship with a leader, you’ve got to be able to work with and get the best out of that person, too. It’s not just the employer but the employee who has to use these tools, because the leader doesn’t always give you what you need. Did you seek out other mentors in your career? That’s how I learned. Whenever I was in a company as a young actor, I’d have talks with people with more experience. I also watched from the wings, where you see how they create the illusion. That’s right, because your dad was on the vaudeville circuit and then Broadway. You had quite an unusual childhood: Your mother struggled with mental illness. You had polio. You were in this crazy show-business world. How did all of that affect the way you chose and approached your career? We never knew we were in a crazy world. That was just the world, and people not in it were civilians whom we felt sorry for. That was my naive way of looking at it when I was boy. The same thing was true of my mother’s illness and my own. It was what life was. But one of the most valuable experiences for me growing up was spending hours and hours daydreaming, lying on my back, looking at the clouds, trying to figure things out or letting fantasies build in my head. I would also read things that were above my head. Our living room was lined with books chosen by an interior decorator for their leather bindings. They included bound volumes of the Congressional Record, which I read avidly, stories about East European dragoons, and love stories—stuff I didn’t understand but could imagine. I’m not sure exactly how it’s connected, but these were formative experiences that led in some way to what I do now. You seem to be naturally curious: willing to read books you don’t understand, explore science that you have no fundamental knowledge of. Is that something that can be cultivated? I hope to cultivate it by, for example, helping scientists be open about their own curiosity. Often when they talk to the public about their work, it’s a story told backwards. They tell you the end result, but they don’t tell you what prompted them to search for it. They don’t tell you what the obstacles were, the disasters that occurred, the wrong turns they took in getting to their final discovery. That’s where the drama is. That’s where we realize that science is a human experience. These people aren’t gods. They’re not secret masters of the universe. They have the same way of working things out that we do. Resilience, like curiosity, is now a hot topic. You had your own setbacks before M*A*S*H. You weren’t immediately successful as an actor. Why did you stick with it? I often hear that you’re supposed to have a goal and keep working toward it. But if you’re an actor, it’s very hard to do that. Instead, you take whatever opportunity is in front of you and make the most of it. That’s what I did. I was guided not by a goal but by the love of what I was trying to learn how to do and the deep desire to do it as well as I possibly could. And that made a big difference because whichever way it led me, I’d be OK. I wouldn’t necessarily be successful financially, but I would be successful in somehow being able to do this thing I loved. At a very early age, I wanted three things: to work with material I valued and people I respected in front of an audience that got it. I could have been in a small regional theater for the rest of my life, and I wouldn’t have been disappointed. But then you hit this amazing professional peak: popular, award-winning series, 11-year run, iconic character. After achieving that, how did you start thinking about what to do next? Well, I’d always been interested in science, and when I was asked to do Scientific American Frontiers on PBS, I said I would if I could interview the people, not just read a narration, because I wanted to learn. The way we did that show was unusual. I didn’t go in with a set of questions. I just went in with my curiosity, and my goal was to get them to explain their work to me in a way that I could understand it, so that the audience would have a better understanding of it too. It was an extension of what I’d learned as an improviser and from following my nose wherever it led. I did the same thing as an actor and writer. Then I realized I was learning something about how to help people communicate, and that turned into something else. I had no idea that one day you and I would be talking, or that Lawrence Krauss and I would be on stage at the New York Public Library discussing the history of physics. But it came out of respecting my curiosity. With such varied interests —TV, film, theater, science, and now education—how do you prioritize projects? I sometimes don’t know where I’m supposed to be the next day or even two hours from now. But when I was writing, directing, and acting in M*A*S*H and producing and writing another series at the same time, I learned to give my full attention to what I was engaged in at that moment. I didn’t worry about the other things, even if there was a pressing deadline. That’s a kind of mindfulness—being as much as you can in the present—but it’s also the engagement you learn from improv, not distracting yourself with the past or the future or “How am I doing?” Of course, one time during M*A*S*H when I was trying to write a scene with collaborators, I lay down on the floor and fell asleep while I was talking. How do you respond to criticism? I’ve always hated criticism. For a long time I would not read any reviews, because they stick in your head. The bad ones you never forget, and the good ones often praise you for the wrong things. But I think I’m getting better at it now. I mean, when we do a workshop, I say, “Tell us what didn’t work for you or what you think we could do better.” I don’t crave criticism, but I do want an honest response. I’m also a little more aware that criticism, hard as it’s been in my work on the stage and as a writer, is one person’s opinion, and I don’t have to accept it. I can look for what might be useful in it, but I don’t want to get trapped into trying to appeal to somebody’s point of view. It’s an effort to be rational about it. You talk a lot in the book about connecting with an audience. But how do you approach communication when it’s asynchronous, as with a taped television show or a product launch? You can respond to people that aren’t physically in front of you by putting yourself in their minds. You can certainly think about what you want to say, but more important than that is how it’s going to be received. Who do you think you’re talking to? What are they going through? When they read that first sentence, what will they be thinking or feeling about it? Will they be prepared for the next one? Do you approach all your professional pursuits in the same way? I notice that when I start a new thing—whether it’s acting in a play or writing a book or going on a diet—it usually takes me about three weeks to focus, and then I get obsessed with it and it’s all I think about, and I realize that almost everything I experience is somehow related, and I make use of it in some way. So the similarity is this entrance into an obsession. Obsession has been very good to me. You said communication skills can help from the boardroom to the bedroom. You’ve been married for 60 years and are always described as a happy family man. How did you maintain that life while staying so busy with work? The simple answer is we love each other. I recommend that highly. My wife, Arlene, and I are also patient with one another, and the older we get, the longer we’re together, the more we make each other laugh. I actually met someone who said, “Gee, it’s interesting you laugh a lot. We never laugh.” And I thought, “How do you stay together?” It’s a real bonding experience to laugh. We laugh at stupid things, witty things, ourselves, or each other. When your daughters were young, though, how did you navigate the practical aspects of balancing career and family? When I was doing M*A*S*H, I had to shoot for about five months a year. Neither one of us wanted to take the kids out of school and move to California, because they were just entering their teen years and needed to create a world of their own, not be dragged around by ours. So at first I wasn’t going to do the show. But Arlene said, “Look, if it’s that good, maybe we can fix it with travel.” So in the summer, when they were out of school, we were all together in California, and then for three or four months in the fall, I would fly back east every weekend. In fact, I’d fly home anytime I had two days off. There was one week when I flew back three times. But it didn’t seem like a sacrifice. It just seemed like a way to be with the kids and Arlene.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Alan Alda

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