TONY GOLDWYN, voice of Tarzan is probably best known to you as the "bad guy" in Ghost [the one who had Patrick Swayze killed so he could hit on Demi Moore...] or, if you read the fine print, as director of A Walk On The Moon, which all the film student thinking film critics were raving about earlier this year. Cranky prefers cartoons . . .

CrankyCritic: Now that it's done, what do you think of the process of making an animated movie?
Tony Goldwyn: It wasn't what I expected at all. I thought it would be a lark; show up and do this fun animated movie. It was a rude awakening how difficult it was. It ended up being a whole lot of fun and a fascinating journey over three years to develop the thing and keep coming back and see it come to life. A whole different approach to acting, which surprised me.

CrankyCritic: How is acting to a microphone different than acting to a camera?
Tony Goldwyn: It's not so much acting to a camera versus a microphone, but acting without other actors, without props, without an environment, with nothing except what you supply in your imagination, without a physical context too. You're not literally recreating reality, like taking a drink of water or walking down a street. You're imagining you're swinging through a jungle or doing whatever it is you're doing. I've never thought of it this way before but what it really is like, you really have to put yourself in a sort of dream state, like you are when you're dreaming. Dreams feel very real when they're happening and yet you're physically uninvolved in them. That's what you have to kick into, acting for animation. Each session was a struggle. The first part of it was a process of getting your imagination fired up, so you could kind of get in the zone of this other world that was all in your head.

CrankyCritic: It requires more emoting in your voice 'cuz you can't use your eyes or face...
Tony Goldwyn: Well, I didn't really look at it that way 'cuz you have to get everything else involved for the voice to ring true. Particularly with a character like this, or in any Disney movie, the people feel real. They have a sense of reality and substance to them. That was really important to this guy; that he wasn't that sort of one-dimensional he-man Tarzan cliche. We really wanted to make him a thinking, feeling, emotional character. There was no cheating of doing a manufactured voice.

CrankyCritic: So what did you build the voice based upon?
Tony Goldwyn: Before we started out I sat down with Glen Keane and he showed me the pictures of what the concept for Tarzan was. We talked about the character and how I saw it, being away from the cliche of him pounding his chest, and being in a human dilemma. What Burroughs was writing about, really. As we progressed through the three years of sessions, each session they'd have more stuff to show me.

CrankyCritic: And your reaction when you finally saw Tarzan move?
Tony Goldwyn: It was amazing. He is so beautifully drawn. It wasalso startling to see myself in him; my expressions, my facial structure, my eyes. Some moment he'd look nothing like me and then "whoa that's me!" That was very bizarre.

CrankyCritic: Did it alter your performance, once you saw him move?
Tony Goldwyn: Yes. It helped my performance a lot because I got a sense of what his physical life was. It made it much more specific in my mind. I wasn't reaching to get an image.

CrankyCritic: You don't come on like the Johnny Weismuller icon. Your voice sounds slightly higher than even how you're talking now.
Tony Goldwyn: Huh. Well, I think that Tarzan is an innocent. There's a boyish quality to him. An inquisitiveness. The world is all new to him that I think maybe influenced that.

CrankyCritic: How old do you think he is?
Tony Goldwyn: As an adult? I never thought about that. Twenty-ish, probably. In other ways, Tarzan physically in terms of his physical maturity and his sense of himself as an animal is very developed and very mature and yet his sense of himself as a civilized man is, he's a baby. He's till very much on the boy side in terms of his emotional development vis a vis his father and mother. He's still a kid, with Terk and all the others. Life is a playground. Then he goes through certain rights of passage – he has to kill Sabor. That's a big thing in terms of that world. That's his becoming a man.

CrankyCritic: Can we lighten it up a bit? Did you ever wonder where Tarzan learned to shave? [laughs]
Tony Goldwyn: Yeah. [laughs] Those are questions you don't want to ask yourself, playing Tarzan.

CrankyCritic: What did it take to get the Yell right?
Tony Goldwyn: A lot. The yell was very hard. First it was deciding what it would be. Initially it was going to be some new thing we hadn't heard before, of animal sounds. The sound men recorded a bunch of different animal noises; baboons and panthers and birds and monkeys and I would mimic them. Then they designed a yell from that that just didn't work at all. You need to hear the classic Tarzan yell. Then it was doing the classic Weismuller yell but giving it humanity and emotion and kind of more grittiness and specificity to the situation. It's really hard to do, physically. Then it was trying to get it right. Each time he does it, it's a little bit different 'cuz the circumstances are different. We struggled with that one.

CrankyCritic: The hardest part of recording your lines solo, without any other actors was...
Tony Goldwyn: Knowing such great actors were doing other roles. I thought I could be doing this with Minnie Driver or Glenn Close or Nigel Hawthorne or Rosie O'Donnell. The good part about it is you had total freedom. You could ad lib. You could do something ten times, just completely mess it up ad not feel that you were messing someone else up.

CrankyCritic: What's your take on the Tarzan history. What makes it so popular?
Tony Goldwyn: I think that the Tarzan story gets at something really primal that people just go back to. Man's relationship to nature and our relationship to the wild and what we've lost in ourselves by becoming civilized. Particularly in the treatment of this story, the idea of home and belonging and being different and being an outsider. Tarzan is a character who is essentially an outsider in the jungle world and he's an outsider in the civilized world. He's a man without a place. I think that that's a dilemma we struggle with as people in society. Feeling outside society. Feeling different, somehow. Whether an adopted child or whether you're a person struggling through life like the rest of us, that's a common human dilemma. One of the beautiful things that this film affirms is that family and home and belonging are defined by love. That if there was love, that defines the family. Not being of the same ilk. Not being blood or being the same is not the thing. If you have love, that becomes the blood of a family.

CrankyCritic: Had you re-read the original Tarzan before you did this?
Tony Goldwyn: Yeah, that was really the only thing I looked at. I had seen all the Tarzan movies and I knew we didn't want to go there and do that kind of a Tarzan. I looked at Burroughs stories, but just a bit. This is kind of true to the spirit.

CrankyCritic: The spirit is pretty close to the money. There are a couple of radical changes to the original story which fit the film script perfectly. Was there ever a problem with thinking "this is true but this isn't true to the story", as you were making it?
Tony Goldwyn: No. I put 'em aside. I've learned as an actor over the years; I've often been a slave to research. History has always fascinated me. I'd sometimes get into a period piece and I'd learn everything about the real people and the real situation or what it is based on and become an expert in that and then feel beholden to that as a performer. That's not my job. My job is to bring to life this fictional account of what we're doing. I once did a production of The Lion In Winter and became an absolute authority on Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine and all those people. I was playing Richard the Lion-Heart and it completely tripped me up.

CrankyCritic: Are you satisfied with the way your career has gone towards directing over acting? Especially with the favorable critical reaction to A Walk On The Moon?
Tony Goldwyn: Yeah! I love acting. I would never quit acting. Directing opened up a whole frontier for me that I never expected. I found it incredibly satisfying.

CrankyCritic: Would you say you altered your performance acting with the ape characters as oppose d to the human characters?
Tony Goldwyn: Yes. On purpose. There are a couple of components to Tarzan, vocally. When you first meet him and he's interacting with Terk and Tantor and Kala he's just a regular guy. When he confronts the humans, he's an ape. He acts like a gorilla and speaks like a gorilla. Even when Jane teaches him English he approaches it as someone who's speaking a second language. Even though he's a quick study, his vocal character is different.

CrankyCritic: Your performance aside, who is your favorite Tarzan? Feel free to include the print work by Foster and Hogarth.
Tony Goldwyn: Right, exactly. I don't really have one. Johnny Weismuller was great. I'm not an afficionado, though I've seen them all. To a certain degree they were all a version of the same type of thing. They were all great fun but there wasn't one of them that I thought "that's the guy". The one I suppose I'm most familiar with was the Johnny Weismuller character.

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