Jeff Daniels In the old sitcoms, there were always background characters that didn't do much of anything but fill the background space, and that's the difficulty of the character played by Jeff Daniels in Pleasantville. His Mr. Johnson runs the soda shoppe. He makes cheeseburgers. He's never been in love, because he's not the star of the show. But when real world characters invade his cozy little town, some amazing changes occur. Not only does color come to a black and white world, so does a revolutionary character development evolution . . .

Cranky: When you first read the script for Pleasantville, did you flash back to any 1950s show in particular?
Jeff Daniels: No. I know we use a TV show to get there, but it's their world. The first thing you do is empty your head of any history, any childhood anything. And you go "cheeseburgers, fries and I paint Santa Claus once a year. There is nothing else." The scene where (I) see Betty (Joan Allen) for the first time, it's as if he's getting this urge within him that he doesn't understand. It's a 13 year old looking at a woman for the first time and feeling his body change. It's feeling it for the first time; don't have a clue what it is. For me there was no y'know pulling up Father Knows Best episodes and screening them . I didn't do any of that. I just played it as simply as I could. That's what (director) Gary (Ross) wanted.

Cranky: Had you met Don Knotts before?
Jeff Daniels: Nope. Met him today. We passed through the night on this movie. He'd work, I didn't. It's a thrill. I'm real happy to have met him. The Andy Griffith Show was one of my favorite shows growing up. He was so great in that show. He had a lot of big comedy to do and he pulled it off and he was believable. He always thought he was Barney, not just an actor being funny. It was influences like Don in that character, and Dick Van Dyke in his show -- you can see Dick Van Dyke sprinkled throughout my work -- and Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin guys like that. Don was one of those guys who could do big comedy believably.

Cranky: How's the theater in Chelsea going. Still doing that?
Jeff Daniels: Excellent. Right now I'm in the middle of rehearsals; directing a play I wrote called Boom Town. Going to open in the middle of October and run through, I hope, Christmas. We're seven years old. It's the seventh play I've written - I write one a year for them. This spring we produced a world premiere of Lanford Wilson's new play, Book of Days, and it was a box office hit. Critically it was a big hit. Producers have come to look at it and what happens to it I don't know. Lanford was very happy with the way it was. When you have a Pulitzer prize winning playwright in your theater it just changes everybody in it forever. So it was just a great spring and the culmination of a very concentrated effort on my part and others.

Cranky: Did Pleasantville remind you at all of Purple Rose of Cairo; the crossing between the screen and reality and Black and white and Color.
Jeff Daniels: Yeah. Gary brought that up when he gave me the script. He said "You may not want to do this because it's about someone going back into something similar to Purple Rose" and I thought "so what?" There are other examples of using that kind of device to tell your story. It doesn't bother me at all. It's two different movies.

Cranky: Does comedy feel like a trap to you? It's great to have this theater where you can act, and I'm sure the writing makes you use a different part of your brain. Do you feel like you have to break away from the comedy stuff?
Jeff Daniels: Well, I have. If you sit down and look at, I think it's 28 movies, there's a lot of diversity in there. There's a range. Not all are 100 million dollar hits. The Gettysburg thing is in there. Something Wild was like both. I hear what you're saying. I love comedy and when you do comedy you give up; you hurt yourself in the quest for winning best actor at the Oscars.

Cranky: All the actors I've talked with say it's the hardest thing, being funny on the screen.
Jeff Daniels: Everything they say about it is true. It's really difficult. I don't think it's harder when you work with really great directors like Woody or Mike Nichols or Jonathan Demme; Gary's in that group. They're so meticulous about how they want you to do take 16 after 15 completely different takes. Drama is difficult. Comedy is the same thing. You're hitting a very small target. I enjoy the challenge of trying to be one of the people who can do both. To go big with a Dumb and Dumber and contrast it with a Pleasantville; It was the same guy who did them. I've got to do the comedy because I'm one of the guys who can. I want to. It's more complete. One of the things to do is play yourself; and just do Gary Cooper and just do the image, and keep the weight off and light yourself great. You play the same guy every time and you can be very famous and very rich. I'm just not interested.