With Inglorious Bastards, you are the lead and that is probably going to project you right onto the center stage in a way that you may have not experienced with Reservoir Dogs or Kill Bill. The media frenzy that you are trying to get away from is probably gonna get a hell of a lot worse.
I am not worried about a media frenzy. I am worried about my children being in a place where that shit is going on. If you are an architect, you draw pictures or houses. And if you are a swimmer, you swim. And if you are an actor, you act. I tried to do many things before this insanity. I was an orderly in a hospital. I went to school to be a paramedic. I was an auto mechanic in a Chevy dealership. I drove tow trucks.

Was this while taking acting lessons?
No, I didn't take any acting lessons. I tried briefly taking acting lessons but it was all a bunch of bullshit. And I went to Steppenwolf for a while in Chicago and there were some great people there.

You were with John Malkovich, right?
I was with Johnny and Terry Kinney and Gary Sinise, and they were a basement theater company, and nobody knew anything about them. I don't put it down. It was an interesting time. But I didn't really learn fuck all over there. I don't need somebody to try to train me to pretend that I am a palm tree or pretending to drink a fake cup of coffee. I guess I really think that acting is a lot more organic than anything that you are trained to do.

(Madsen's gaze falls onto an open newspaper with a full-page black-and-white photo of Karl Lagerfeld.)

He doesn't look to happy does he?

Who, Karl?
What's wrong, Karl? What's wrong? He's angry. He realizes that he's having a bad hair day. Anyway what was your last question? I am sorry.

Michael Madsen Photos by Matt Carr

Can you talk about some of your other interests such as poetry?
Well, I basically started doing that because I had a lot of free time on my hands. You know I was divorced. When you are in this industry, you spend an awful lot of time alone in motels and trains and airplanes. Strange places and you tend to look around and you spend a lot of time noticing a lot people and things people do and I started writing it down. I started jotting things down. I wasn't much of a reader, but I liked Ernest Hemingway and I liked John Steinbeck. I read a couple of biographies of Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, and I really just started writing stuff. I would think of stuff and I would write it on a matchbook or fucking napkin or a paper bag. I wrote one on my leg in the back of a taxi cab in New York 'cause I didn't have a piece of paper. When you think of something, you write it down or you're gonna forget it. And then I started writing down dreams. I had a paper and pen next to my bed and in the morning, when I would wake up I would write down dreams that I had because they were really bizarre. It was just something I was doing. And then when I briefly moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, after I finished Wyatt Earp, the woman who later became my wife and gave me three beautiful sons was with me in Santa Fe. I had all this stuff. I moved all my shit from L.A., because I was gonna leave Hollywood and leave the movie business. And I had a box that had all the stuff that I had written in it. I was gonna build a fire. It was snowing outside and all the fucking wood was wet. I had this box with all shit and I put the fucking thing in there and I was lighting it up, and she grabbed it and she took a few pages out and started reading it... And she goes: "Michael, Michael, you really shouldn't burn these things." So, I got the idea of giving it to a publisher in New York that I had met.

You have an exhibition with Signature International here. Is photography something that you dabble with?
Well, Dennis Hopper got me involved in photography and he is a cool cat. I loved his pictures, because he takes pictures of things that no one else would take a picture of, and I kind of have the same kind of notion and I started taking pictures. All of a sudden, [photographer] Rosalie [Miller] came along and sent me a camera and it was just bizarre — it was as weird as Olivier Assayas calling me — "Excuse me, are you sure you want Michael Madsen to take these pictures?" It was an odd thing but then again it was very flattering and I took advantage of it. I tried to do a good job. I tried to do them what they expected and hoped me to do. It was a good thing and the money goes to a charity. And anything that goes to a charity is a good thing.

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