John Malkovich Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

I do remember Spike saying to me at one point,

John Malkovich wouldn't do it that way.

And he seemed serious when he said that,

and I just thought, what a fascinating outlook that is.

[upbeat music]

Being John Malkovich, John Horatio Malkovich.

[wind whooshing]

Malkovich?

I played John Horatio Malkovich,

which is not my name, Horatio, but Gavin is my name.

What I remember about Being John Malkovich,

I was out in LA shooting a movie,

and I called my then producing partner

and old friend Russ Smith,

'cause I was flying back to Europe that night

when the shoot was finished in the late afternoon.

I only had a couple hundred pages of a book left,

and it's a very long flight to where I was going,

so I asked Russ, Is there anything

at the office for me to read?

And Russ said kind of, there was a pause,

and then he said kind of menacingly,

Oh, I've got something for you to read.

So I said, Okay, well, send it out, and et cetera.

So he did, and I saw the title page

said Being John Malkovich.

I thought, oh, how funny.

Then I read about 30 pages,

which I thought were spectacular,

but the character I was to play

had not been in the film at that point,

and I called Russ and said, Did you read this thing?

And he said, Oh yeah.

And I said, It's an amazing piece of writing.

I mean, it's more or less kind of visionary, really.

And he goes, Keep reading.

And I read it on the plane

and called Russ when I got back to France

and said, you know, Call this joker

and tell him we would like to produce it

and I would like to direct it

if he'll make it about someone else.

I think I may have said Tom Cruise or Bill Hurt

or somebody we don't know.

I probably named about 20 people.

When that person is you, at least for me,

I'm not quite sure why that would interest anyone.

Russ set up a meeting with Charlie.

Russ told him, and Charlie said no,

he wasn't gonna change it.

No, he's glad we liked it,

but no, he wasn't interested in changing,

and we said, Okay, would you be interested in rewriting?

We were working with an English playwright

on a script about Howard Hughes at the time,

and this is a long, long time ago, of course.

He said no, he wouldn't be interested in that,

and then we said we also have a script

called The Space Merchants, which we want to.

No, he wasn't interested in that,

and Russ said, Okay, well, thanks, you know.

Good luck, take care.

And then some years later, whenever I'd be in Hollywood,

invariably, someone would come by and say,

Why aren't you doing 'Being John Malkovich'?

It'd been around for a few years,

and I said, Well, I mean,

'cause nobody's gonna do a script

called 'Being John Malkovich'.

I mean, you'd have to be really deranged.

There's a tiny door in my office, Maxine.

It's a portal, and it takes you inside John Malkovich.

You see the world through John Malkovich's eyes,

and then after about 15 minutes, you're spit out

into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Sounds great.

Who the fuck is John Malkovich?

Some years later, I got a call

when I was walking the kids to school

from Francis Ford Coppola, asking me if I'd go up to Paris

and meet this boy called Spike Jonze.

I think what Francis said was,

We'll all be working for him someday.

And I said, Oh, okay.

Yeah, sure, I would've done it anyway,

just out of respect for Coppola.

I went up to Paris, I met Spike,

I liked what he had to say.

The only thing I remember much about the reading is he,

after 45 minutes, I was like, Wait, are you American?

'Cause I thought he was Czech.

He has that kind of surfer speak, or had.

It was lost on me, of course.

I said, Okay, well let me know, and let's see, you know,

see what the cast is and see how it seems and all that.

I do remember one thing Charlie said.

I finally met him, and this was before we were starting.

I sat with him at the meeting, and I had read the script,

but they had cut a lot of the cruel jokes in the script,

and at the meeting I said, Listen, that's not.

Put the jokes back in, they're very funny,

and I couldn't possibly care less.

As we were leaving,

I think they were going one way and I was going the other,

and Charlie kind of sidled up to me, and he said,

I just want you to know I'm a really big fan.

And I said, Well, Charlie, it's okay.

We don't have to do this, I read the script.

It's okay, let's just go ahead.

Ah, don't tell me.

Uh, Maplethorpe?

Malkovich. Malkovich.

Right, right, okay.

Okay, yeah, I thought you were all right in that one movie.

[John] Thank you.

The one where you played a jewel thief.

[John] I never played a jewel thief.

And then we did the film,

and shooting it was a lot of fun.

I got to shoot a decent amount with my little camera.

It eventually got into Venice Film Festival.

It was rejected by Cannes.

It was too long when they showed it to Gilles Jacob.

It was way too long.

I mean, I said to Spike at the time,

and he said, I think you're too close to it,

which made me laugh a lot.

He'd kind of taken a Bergman,

what already is a Bergman film,

and then made it a Bergman film,

but, you know, the script is pretty much

straight up Jewish vaudeville.

The Bergman-esque touches are all around anyway.

So he cut almost 20 minutes, I think.

You know, I remember when it played in Venice

that once Charlie Sheen came on

and was revealed to be my best friend,

that was kind of the end of the story,

meaning there was a rolling laugh

that was, probably just went on for 10 minutes.

Yeah, yeah, yada yada yada.

Were you stoned?

Yes.

No, I'd never met Charlie.

I actually recommended him to Spike.

It had been written in the script for Kevin Bacon,

but he didn't do it.

Charlie, I thought, would just be

the perfect kind of existential character

that's tough to beat.

Actually, he's so skilled and so funny

that I thought it worked fantastically well.

[Interviewer] I love this idea of an alternate timeline

of a John Malkovich-directed Being Tom Cruise.

I think it would've been quite good, but.

For me, when I think about Being John Malkovich,

of course I think almost wholly

about Spike and Charlie Kaufman,

because to me, that introduced two absolutely major talents-

Yeah. To the cinema world.

[Interviewer] Would love to see a reunion

of the three of you.

Yeah, that would be fun.

[upbeat music]

Con Air, Cyrus the Virus.

His name is Cyrus Grissom, AKA Cyrus the Virus.

39 years old, 25 of them spent in our institutions,

but he's bettered himself inside,

earned two degrees, including his Juris Doctor.

He also killed 11 fellow inmates,

incited three riots and escaped twice.

Likes to brag that he killed more men than cancer.

[Falzon] Okay, open wide.

I played a character called Cyrus the Virus.

I was in Europe and I got the script

of something called Con Air.

At the time, I was working with a English novelist

on a screenplay of a film we wanted to do.

I get the script, I see it says Con Air,

I look at the cast of characters

and notice they're all named after romantic poets,

and I take the script and I fling it,

sort of about 15 meters across the kitchen.

This very nice writer, you know,

kind of looks, and he goes [grumbles].

He asked me, he'd never read a screenplay,

he was a novelist,

and then he asked me could he read the screenplay,

and I said, Oh, be my guest, of course, sure.

And I gave it to him,

and the next morning, he came downstairs,

and then he started to give a long speech,

saying, I'm so glad I'm working with someone like you

who would have so much integrity,

he would never imagine doing a film like this.

And I was like, Whoa, Nicholas, whoa.

I'm doing the film.

And he was like, Well, you didn't read it.

And I said, Well, I didn't have to read it.

I get exactly what it is,

and you better believe I'm doing it.

Falzon.

What?

Oh, stewardess, stewardess?

What's the in-flight movie today?

Well, I think you'll like it, Cyrus.

It's called I'll Never Make Love

To a Woman on the Beach Again,

and it's preceded by the award-winning short,

No More Steak For Me Ever.

[Falzon laughs]

Funny fucker, aren't you?

And that's gonna make X amount,

several hundred million dollars,

'cause it's convicts on an airplane,

and they're named after romantic poets.

Nic Cage was doing it, who I had met a few times.

I knew Johnny Cusack.

I think maybe Ving Rhames was attached,

I don't know about Buscemi,

but I didn't know that much about it,

didn't know the director or anything.

All I really remember about it is Jerry Bruckheimer

who I like very much.

He often had this kind of pack

of, they were like extras in a way,

but who were fantastically entertaining.

Danny Trejo had a role,

but there were other ones like Marty McSorley,

who was a hockey enforcer, essentially,

Conrad Goody who was a NFL football player.

Super entertaining, very male energy.

When we break into the cockpit to take over,

this guy, Marty McSorley, when we were rehearsing it,

he was supposed to put up resistance,

he's one of the pilots,

and he just grabbed me by the throat and went like that.

Like, just put me up against the wall with one arm.

I was like, Oh.

It was entertaining, for the most part, to film.

If somebody put an ice cube down somebody's shirt

in Wendover, Nevada, it's 108.

They could just tear the place apart.

You just never knew what was gonna happen.

I'd known Steve Buscemi was a fireman,

and we kept having trouble having too much

or too little smoke.

I was just reminded of this the other day,

'cause I was out in LA doing press

and I saw David Chappelle, who was in Con Air.

It made me think of,

we had such trouble regulating the smoke,

they just kind of always got it wrong

or the cinematographer or director thought it was wrong,

whatever it was,

so finally, I just grabbed the machine and gave it

to Buscemi, who was like, in the shot,

and said, You do it.

And he goes [splutters],

and I said, Well, Jesus, you were a fireman.

Just shut up, just do the thing. Who cares?

Which he did, and quite well, of course.

[Interviewer] Some iconic lines in that movie.

Yeah, I got off a good one

to Steve Buscemi, actually, when he shows up in his mask,

which was, I love your work.

Love your work.

One of them could have come from Nic.

Don't move or the bunny gets it.

Make a move and the bunny gets it.

Nic was very concentrated, very good, very serious.

I think he's gone through such kind of periods, Nic,

and seemed to me pretty serious about everything.

When I met him socially,

he was sort of super funny and sweet,

but quite serious at work, if I remember correctly.

For years, I mean, that was just a calling card

was Cyrus the Virus.

You know, once, I was walking in Chicago,

and I heard two guys arguing

about whether I was Cyrus the Virus or not,

and one said to the other one, you know,

If he'd be Cyrus the Virus, where's the bodyguard?

And the other one said to him, He's the bodyguard.

And then he said, Give me $20, so I did.

One I remember, though [chuckles],

there's a big explosion in Con Air,

and in later years, Andy Samberg did a song,

Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions,

and I remember when we were gonna shoot that,

you have the big safety meeting,

you have the whole crew there,

and I think the guy who ran that was called Ken,

where they explain everything

and you have to do this, you have to do that.

They explain this whole thing.

At 10 yards, this has to take X number of seconds,

you have to be this far away from the explosion,

at 30 yards this, at 50 yards that, at 70 yards that.

If you weren't at that distance

for this enormous explosion,

then you have to abort the stunt.

Kenny said, Okay, well, who wants to count it out?

And all these guys with me said, Well, he does.

Like, as if I would've been like,

the sole person who could count.

I don't know how safe a bet that was,

but that I remember pretty well,

and everyone's still alive, so I guess I could count.

Oh, Cy-onara was a good one.

Cy. Onara.

[Cindino shouts] [flames hiss]

[upbeat music]

Rounders, Teddy KGB.

Certain people still come up to me

in airports, on planes, in restaurants or whatever,

and that's the thing they wanna talk about, Teddy KGB.

A lot of times, it's people

who went through a poker player phase

or are still going through it.

I thought it was a pretty funny part.

Flashy in that way,

and the real decision about that was just how broad to go.

Thousand straight.

Very aggressive.

A new day.

And you won't be pushed around.

But, I re-raise.

5,000.

Not so much in the emotional part,

but there have been, and continues to be, probably,

a lot of discussion about my accent,

which was actually taught to me

by a great actress called Ingeborga Dapkunaite

who grew up in Lithuania,

but her father was a Soviet diplomat.

This was when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union.

Lived and worked in Moscow for years,

so she taught me the accent.

I've spent a decent amount of time in Russia,

and there are a lot of words

which just kind of come back all the time.

Things like him,

they just don't say him.

They just for the most part can't do it.

Of course, there are Russians

with beautiful English accents or what have you,

but that was kind of a decision

to kind of, as they say, go big or go home.

You could do subtly,

well, certainly you could do it

a lot more subtly than I did,

but that's also kind of what Matt was doing.

You must feel proud and good.

Strong enough to beat the world.

I feel fine.

Me, too.

I feel okay.

I thought a nice big thing

in primary colors would be useful.

I flopped a nut straight.

[chips rattle]

Motherfucker!

[Teddy speaking in Russian]

Motherfucker!

That is it!

That's it?

What the fuck you talking about that's it?

Take him down down, Teddy. Nyet, nyet!

No more.

No, not tonight.

This son of bitch, all night, he check, check, check.

He trapped me!

[Interviewer] Matt tells a story

that's basically he was taken a little bit surprised

by your performance.

He says that he hears your lines for the first time,

Uh-huh. And there's like,

a stillness in the room, and people start clapping.

Yeah. And you lean over to him,

and apparently you said, I'm not a very good actor.

Yeah, I think I may have stated it

more strongly than that.

I mean, I think I've pretty much been accused

of doing everything from chewing the walls and scenery

and doing nothing like a statue.

There is a choice you can make

of how far to go with something,

and that was really more about that choice.

The execution was more or less exactly what I chose to do,

but of course, when you do something that size,

it's risky.

It's a fucking joke anyway.

After all, I am paying you with your money.

[soft dramatic music]

What'd you say?

Your money.

I am still up 20 grand

from this last time I stick it in you.

Great fun to film.

Very much enjoyed Matt.

Good group of people and actors.

I liked John Dahl very much.

I hung out a lot with Brian Koppelman

and David Levine, the writers,

and they had said at one point,

We want you to play a Russian in all our films,

and we'll do this one and that one, et cetera.

And then just a couple years ago, actually,

I finished it last year,

they asked me to play a Russian oligarch

in their series Billions,

which they were the showrunners for, which was great fun.

So this is the moment you lead with your chest.

Like Con Air, it continues to have an audience,

and I do remember, Pay that man his money.

He beat me, straight up.

Pay him.

Pay that man his money.

Which I thought was quite a good line.

Quite stylish, actually.

I don't know that I delivered it stylishly.

[upbeat music]

Dangerous Liaisons, Vicomte de Valmont.

In Dangerous Liaisons, I played the Vicomte de Valmont,

about which was said,

I think it was one of the great introductory lines,

certainly to any character I ever played.

Cecile Volanges, who was played by Uma Thurman.

Swoosie Kurtz, who played Uma's mother,

when Valmont's name comes up, had the line,

The Vicomte de Valmont, my child.

Whom you very probably don't remember,

except that he is conspicuously charming,

never opens his mouth

without first calculating what damage he can do.

Then why do you receive him, maman?

Everyone receives him.

This is a play

that was based on the French novel by Choderlos de Laclos,

which was set right before the time

of the French Revolution, end of the 18th century.

De Laclos was an artillery officer in the French Army

who wrote a letter to a friend of his,

saying that he was planning to write a novel

that would shock the world and would live long after him,

and in a very short time, he did so.

I had read the book, I loved the play,

and I worked many, many years

with a theater in Chicago called The Steppenwolf Theater

that we started when we were kids out of university.

We had read it, and the thing had just made us so sick,

depressed us so greatly,

that it really stuck in my mind that I'd like to direct it.

It's beyond my control.

Liar!

Liar!

You're quite right, I am a liar.

And it's like your fidelity, a fact of life.

No more nor less irritating.

Certainly beyond my control.

[Madame de Tourvel] Stop it.

Don't keep saying that.

[Madame de Tourvel screams]

Sorry. Beyond my control.

That was my principal interest in it,

and then I was having a meeting

with Bernie Brillstein and Ileen Maisel.

They told me they were doing Les liaisons,

and I said, Oh, wow, fantastic.

And then Ileen just suddenly said, Do you wanna do it?

And I said, Do what?

To direct or be in it?

I had a great but quite difficult relationship sometimes

with Stephen Frears.

Stephen had come to the play I was doing on Broadway

before we started shooting, a few months before.

He came backstage, and he said,

So, why is it you're actually not so good in movies?

Really why?

Because I don't control them.

I mean, you go on a stage,

nobody stops and says, oh, do this, do that, do this.

Stage is ephemeral, stage is flowing.

One thing grows from another

and leads to another and another and another.

So he said, So to be good in a movie,

you would have to have some control.

And I said, Well, if you're asking honestly, yeah.

We could argue about things,

not in some terrible way or anything, like,

that's neither of our styles, I think,

but I learned a lot on that film, I think,

from Stephen, from the actors always that I work with,

and from Philippe Rousselot, who was the cinematographer,

but also a great deal from an English camera operator

called Mike Fox.

I would argue with Mike Fox that I wanted it like this

or I wanted it like that or like that,

and then I would go to dailies and go, Boy, that sucks.

And then go, pretty much every night,

Mike, sorry, just wanted to apologize.

You're right.

You know, I must have said that 600 times, I don't know.

Pretty charged, pretty tight schedule, very low budget,

but Stephen, I think, did a terrific job with it,

the great costumer James Acheson,

George Fenton, great score,

Keanu, who was just fantastic.

Once, I ran into him when my kids were tiny.

I went to Winchell's Donuts on Melrose and Rossmore.

Walked in and I see Keanu,

and he's like, Man, what are you doing, like,

in, like, Hollywood?

And I said, Keanu, is that really the question?

Isn't the question more what you're doing in Hollywood?

And then he, I'll never forget this,

he looked at myself and these two tiny kids

and he goes, Just another day in Babylon.

[swords scraping]

[Danceny grunting]

That was choreographed

by the great English fight choreographer Bill Hobbs.

Keanu's super athletic and very good at that stuff.

[Danceny grunts]

For that scene, I just remember shoveling a lot

of fake snow here and there,

'cause it was down in the moat,

and to keep people from coming in and out

with their modern sneakers or what have you,

I would just do it myself.

[both grunting]

It's probably the film

where I learned the most about filmmaking.

Liaisons was a, I think,

very kind of signal event in my life, really.

[upbeat music]

Burn After Reading, Osbourne Cox.

But how could she have access?

What about our savings?

What about my savings account?

Mm-hmm.

No.

No, I'm sorry,

I don't know the number to my savings account,

because, believe it or not,

I don't spend my entire day sitting around

trying to memorize the fucking numbers

to my fucking bank accounts, moron!

Of course, I've always liked the Coen brothers.

I got the script, I liked the script very much,

I called them and said, Yeah, sure, I'll do it.

I loved working with them.

They are very specific, but not controlling,

which sounds maybe a contradiction in terms,

but, I mean, I've seen directors that,

if you go like this during a take,

if it's not the same as the storyboard for whatever reason,

they can just be deranged, mentally deranged.

The Coen brothers, at least in my experience,

were very, very specific, but I love that, it's very clear.

There are two of them, so they don't miss anything.

I don't know if they have to discuss it.

They're very experienced,

obviously, they know each other exceptionally well

and are exceptionally close to each other.

I loved doing that, it was a lot of fun.

I mean, I had a sort of, played a childish person.

This is an assault.

I have a drinking problem?

Fuck you, Peck.

You're a Mormon. Ozzy.

Next to you, we all have a drinking problem.

What the fuck is this?

And that had terrific actors who I enjoyed very much.

I had met Brad when he was a young kid in Hollywood.

I thought he was so funny in that,

and extremely underrated.

He's a good actor, he's smart, he has good taste,

he's fantastic looking, and he's very funny,

and I've always enjoyed watching him do that,

and I think he gives a terrific performance

in Burn After Reading.

That your empty little head would be spinning faster

than the wheels of your Schwinn bicycle back there.

You think that's a Schwinn.

It's funny, one of the paparazzi who was there

must have been so glad, you know,

but I was like,

Why would I be happy about hitting someone?

Give us the money, dickwad.

It's funny, though, how films last, you know.

Last month when the NCAA put out their choices

for the four teams for football playoffs,

a scene I did, the one where the character says

he's being crucified and its political.

This is a crucifixion.

This is political.

That was the big meme, apparently,

on the Florida State campus

when they didn't get the call from the NCAA

for the Florida State football team to be in the finals.

So it's funny how things live on

that you don't really think that much of.

[Interviewer] Has a life of its own

after you've done with it. Yeah.

Completely. Yeah.

I'm never really aware of that

unless somebody sends it to me.

Yeah. You know,

and then you kind of suddenly go, That's so bizarre.

[upbeat music]

Shadow of the Vampire, F.W. Murnau.

That is when you can have her.

After my death scene?

Yes.

Don't expect realism there, Murnau.

What do you mean?

Don't cheat me, mortal.

You will stay away from her.

You will stay away from my crew.

I will finish my picture!

This is hardly your picture any longer.

I sound like a kind of goody two-shoes,

but generally, I don't have bad times at work,

and I've been blessed to work

with spectacularly often lovely and talented,

even if they're not lovely, if they're talented, great.

It was a young director called Elias Merhige.

He had done a film that Susan Sontag loved,

which was called Begotten.

A kind of hour-long film, fascinating visuals.

I did a lot of studying on that,

read a ton of books, both about vampires,

but real, not just nonsense,

but the kind of, the history of the idea,

the vampire, his kith and kin, vampires in Europe.

Find your stick.

Now, Count, as she raises the stake, what do you see?

Yes.

Yes.

A wooden stake, exactly, you look at her.

Betrayed.

Yes, you turn, you rise,

you look around.

The sun is coming.

You grab your heart in anguish.

Yes, and you start to die.

Yes, you start to die, alone, in anguish.

Die, you fucking rat bastard vampire pig!

Schweinhund, shit!

Yes, die alone!

Yes, the weight of the centuries bends you!

And,

end.

Very condensed schedule.

The first film I remember doing.

When I started, films were four months,

then they were three months, then they were 10 weeks,

then nine weeks, this was six weeks,

and it was the first one I'd ever been on like that,

so, very truncated shooting time.

I did a lot of writing on it and rewriting.

I mostly worked with Willem,

who I had known a tiny bit but never worked with,

who was spectacular in that film.

Loved his performance, and I'm very fond of him.

Why him, you monster?

Why not the script girl?

[Schreck gasps]

The script girl.

I'll eat her later.

It was a kind of movie where it was so,

the time just wasn't enough time,

and so we constantly kind of would find ourselves

in a jam on a lot of beautiful things,

including a whole, kind of, quarter of the film got cut,

which was unfortunate.

I tried to get Nic Cage,

who was the producer, really, and developed it,

and he may have developed it even for himself

or because he loved either the monster character

or F.W. Murnau, who made Nosferatu.

I just remember writing a lot and trying to condense things,

and when we ended, I thought we needed another day

or two of reshoots, and they didn't want to do it,

and I respected that, 'cause it's their film,

it's not my film, I'm an actor in it.

What Nic saw in the original script was

the kind of Herzog-Kinski thing.

I saw that, but I saw other things as well

that I don't want to say they were equally important,

because I like the film

and I especially like Willem in the film.

I wish we would've had those extra couple of days.

Of course, you know,

you can feel very strongly about something

and be absolutely wrong.

I mean, this is the kind of nature of this beast.

[upbeat music]

The New Look, Lucian Lelong.

Take this one as well, Christian.

It should have some value.

Find your sister, and then afterwards, come back,

and make the House of Lelong a success once more.

Good luck.

Todd had explained to me

where the character was situated in this story,

which is about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel,

about the life at the very end of the occupation in Paris

at the end of the Second World War.

People sometimes ask me about preparation.

That can mean a lot of things.

The thing I most prepare is the script.

What is this?

What do I have to do in this?

What do I say?

Do I understand it?

Is it the right thing to say?

Is it compelling?

Is it interesting?

What's my function,

meaning the character's function, in this?

And also, what are my character's actions?

Do I understand them?

Do they make sense?

Not in the sense of some kind of Psychology 101.

Do they make sense in terms of the entire action

and the entire scope of a story,

and are they written

in such a way as to be playable?

And if the answer to either of those questions is,

which it usually is, well, not quite here

and not quite there, but generally I get it,

and now let's figure these specific things out,

that was the main focus there.

In a way, you defend a character.

What do I mean by that?

Their behavior, or their point of view, or their worldview?

No.

Your job is not that,

your job is to present that character

who normally has one chance to live ever.

It can be a real person or not a real person.

So you want to present it as fully as you possibly can.

These miniature forms require less fabric,

less accoutrements, less expense, less everything.

There wasn't anything that was kind of necessarily out

of my level of culture or education

or experience or knowledge,

because I designed a lot of fashion lines in my time,

I know France well and Paris well,

but I didn't know anything about the personal lives

of these characters I had,

which was quite interesting, as people are.

I was always a huge fan of Ben Mendelsohn-

Yes. Since the first time

I saw him in Animal Kingdom.

He's someone so unique.

He makes such singular choices.

He has a vulnerability

that most men don't care to show

unless it's a kind of shtick, and his isn't.

He has a great access to his emotions,

and that's pretty rare, I think, in actors.

I've seen it numerous times in actresses,

but he's not all blocked up.

Yeah. He's right there.

Very quicksilver, interesting choices,

and just wonderful to watch, not just to work with.

Sometimes you love working with someone,

but he's really both.

He's fascinating to watch.