Dennis Quaid — the interview’s up!

My interview with Dennis Quaid is now up at CT Movies.

There’s a bit of a story behind this.

Most of this interview comes from a private one-on-one that I had with him at the junket in Los Angeles two weeks ago; only, maybe, two-and-a-half paragraphs come from the roundtable interview where all the questions were asked by other reporters. And Quaid’s profession of faith came as a complete surprise to me. If I had been more on the ball, I would have followed it up better.

As it is, I was a bit preoccupied that day. The day before, my wife had phoned me to tell me that she’d just had an ultrasound that looked pretty bad; and when I checked out of the hotel only an hour or so before the interview, I discovered that I had racked up about $300 in phone charges, beyond the per diem set by the studio, because the hotel was charging an outrageous five dollars a minute. (As you can tell, I don’t stay in hotels much. I figured if $1 chocolate bars cost $5 at the mini-bar, then a phone call costing between 5 and 20 cents anywhere else couldn’t be more than a dollar or two per minute.) And on top of everything else, I was a little under the weather; I don’t know that I would say I was sick, per se, but I couldn’t eat all that much at the hospitality suite.

So, my mind was semi-elsewhere when I sat down to talk to Quaid.

In hindsight, I also wonder if Quaid had been planning on “coming out”, as it were, and if someone had neglected to tell us. My editor and I had originally asked for an interview with Quaid’s Yours, Mine & Ours co-star, Rene Russo, because she went public with her born-again beliefs six years ago, when her nude scenes in The Thomas Crown Affair caused a bit of controversy. (I wrote about it here; see also Entertainment Weekly and Terry Mattingly.) Paramount replied by offering us an interview with Russo and Quaid together. We said we could do that, but we also told them we wondered if Quaid might be bored by the faith questions we would ask Russo, or if Russo might give us less candid answers if there was a third party in the room. As it turned out, Russo had bronchitis and had to skip the junket altogether, so Paramount offered us an interview with Quaid by himself — and my editor and I figured we’d focus on his recent involvement in family films.

Just out of curiosity, I did a bit of web-snooping the night before the interview to see if there was anything out there connecting Quaid with Christianity, but I couldn’t find anything. So I simply asked him all the “family films” questions, and near the end of our allotted time, with few questions left on my plate, I tossed out a question about faith just to see if he had anything to say — and suddenly the interview got a little more interesting.

So interesting, in fact, that I thought I had a scoop — until several days later, when Beliefnet put up its own Quaid interview.

Naturally, I wish I had known about all this beforehand, so that I could have prioritized those questions and given them the space and attention they deserved. And Quaid actually seemed to be more interested in answering those questions than in answering the standard family-movie questions; when his publicist stepped in to let me know that the interview was almost over, Quaid told him to give us a few more minutes. I wonder if, given that I was interviewing him for a Christian website, he had expected me to launch into those questions right from the beginning.

The thing is, CT Movies covers pretty much all films as a matter of course, so we don’t always pursue the testimonial angle unless we have good reason to think that we should. On the other hand, I don’t believe Beliefnet.com covers film so systematically, so if you’re sitting down for an interview with them, it’s practically a given that personal beliefs are going to come up.

Ah well, live and learn.

And for those wondering about my wife: After spending the last three weeks at St. Paul’s Hospital (three blocks down the road from where we live) and getting lots and lots of “bed rest” there, she was moved this morning to the BC Women’s Hospital, where she will get lots and lots more “bed rest”. I am told that this move is a good sign, because it means the twins are viable now. Everybody’s fine, as long as nothing happens earlier than it should.