Greatest Interview Ever

One of the national newspapers is publishing a series of booklets of historic interviews. You know: Nixon; the Sex Pistols, Princess Diana, and so on. Collect 'em all!

None of them approach the glory of this interview with Christopher Walken. It is not a parody. I painstakingly transcribed part of it when it first appeared, about ten years ago, in a colour supplement to a Sunday paper. I wish I'd kept the photos of Walken cooking that illustrated it, and I wish I'd taken down the name of the interviewer so I could give him or her full attribution. Whoever you are, thank you.

I almost did a cooking show. I went to Bravo and MTV and the Comedy Channel. I had meetings with these people and I was going to do this show. It was either 10 or 12 segments. I can't remember. I was going to have some sort of kitchen set-up. I wanted it to be a little like Pee-wee's Playhouse. I love that show. And I'd have maybe a showgirl, you know, with a little thing on, chopping my vegetables. Maybe some musicians. And an audience. Some people to talk to. With the cable, the thing was, when it got down to it, every one of them wanted something much more precise. They wanted it to be much more planned. Much more of a pragmatic, fabricated thing that could be repeated. They wanted to have a comic actor with me. They wanted to have a script. Jokes. I like jokes. But I wouldn't want to have to say the jokes, you know. Because certain times things are funny anyway. I mean, funny people are funny. And I said to them I wouldn't be able to do that. I wanted it to be like the Dean Martin show.

If I wasn't so lazy, I'll tell you what I would do. I saw this thing on television. this whole thing with people putting cameras in their house, for the net. I understand that people outfit their houses with these things, and some guy's girlfriend finds out that she's been naked all over the Internet. You hear about that. If everybody can do it, it can't be that hard. You just need to figure out where to tune in, right? I would need some help with this. I don't quite understand how the internet works. I don't have a computer. You know, 12-year old kids know all about that.

I thought I'd get a couple of those cameras and put them in my kitchen in Connecticut and just, you know, turn them on whenever I felt like it. Maybe I would have a particular time of day I would do it, or something like that. You could charge people to take hits, or something like that. And it would just be me cooking. And I thought to make it amusing, I thought I would have a hotline—you know, a red telephone. And they could call and I could give them advice about their love life. I mean silly stuff, personal questions, about the, you know, "what should I do?" In the old days, there used to be these things—I can't remember what they're called, but it's a Spanish word. Like a bodega, but something else. They'd be on street corners. You could buy a love potion. You could buy, you know, something, if you were mad at somebody, you could buy a hex. They even had aerosol, I remember; you could spray somebody to get them to fall in love with you, or something. I could provide services like that. Or just talk while I'm cooking.

And you remember a programme called This is Your Life? I thought I'd have a curtain over to one side, and once in a while I'd have a mystery guest. You know, actors are always coming over to my house. Maybe Joe Pesci comes over and makes his tomato sauce. Everybody makes something, you know what I mean. Don't you think that might be amusing?