CHRIS NEUMER: I hadn't spent much time looking at your career, just the projects that you had been in. I didn't realize that you had hit it off so very big so early in your career with Risky Business, Revenge of the Nerds, "Moonlighting," Better Off Dead. It was boom, boom, boom just like that at the beginning of your career.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: That was the beginning of my movie career. It wasn't really the beginning of my career. I had started in the theater and I had worked in the theater for years, almost 10 years, before I ever did any movies.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: My first movie was Risky Business, but there had been years of doing work in the theater before that.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Very well. It's really a different discipline. You can't do either one without some degree of talent. It's just a different discipline. It helps you, in my opinion, as far as your work ethic goes.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Because theater requires different things of you that film often doesn't, such as memorizing long stretches of dialogue and working on your own because the film has no rehearsal time. So you have to have a sense of how to do that kind of thing on your own, a particular process in order to be there on the day. When you are doing stage [work] and you are rehearsing, you have loads of time to get all the ducks in order. You don't have that in film most of the time. You just have to have a solid process and that only comes from, in my view, training and that is theater. When people start out in movies they don't have that background. They have their own way of doing things. A lot of actors don't work well with rehearsal, film actors. I'm just not that way. Sometimes I wish I were better at it.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: At working without rehearsal. I actually improve the more times I have to do something. People who don't have any kind of solid training are frequently better the first time and they become progressively worse as they go on because they are not used to repeating performances.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Well, maybe not self-sufficiency, but at least it provided me with a work method that has done well for me.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: I went two years to an acting academy that was connected to Oakland University in Michigan. It had actually been founded by a man named John Fernault, who was an English director and acting teacher. He was connected with a regional theater in Michigan which was also on the same campus and was called Meadowbrook Theater, which is still there, but the school is gone. He brought over from England a lot of English teachers. There were some American teachers, but the sense of the way things were done there was primarily the English classical tradition. That was the system that I was instructed in and it was sort of modified by the American teachers who brought another quality to it. We had one teacher who had studied French under Jacques LeCoq, a great mime in Paris, so we had bits and pieces of a lot of different traditions. The overall predominate one was the English classical tradition. I was never a method actor; that's just not me.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Yeah, it occurred to me at the time, but at that time I was still working very much in the tradition that I had been taught. For example, with Revenge of the Nerds I approached that in exactly the same way that I would have approached a play, although it was made more difficult by the fact that there wasn't a real script to be starting out with. They had a script that we were using, basically, but they brought us to Tucson, Arizona where we were shooting a week early to work with the writers and the director and the producer. We were evolving the script during that week and hence it gave me an opportunity to use some of the disciplines that I had used before, which I always use. In this case, it was to write a biography of Booger. That was something that they taught us to do and I always did it. I didn't do it any differently just because it was Booger. I had to come up with who he was and why he was, what his experience was, what his background was, not that any of that is ever going to show. That's only something that I do for myself, if I am given the chance, as a means of developing the character. The fact of it being Booger didn't make any difference to me. The funny thing was that the first two movies I did, Risky Business and Revenge of the Nerds, had abbreviated rehearsal periods, but they were rehearsal periods. They actually were rehearsals. By today's standards, it was luxurious because now you don't get anything. I have long since stopped doing things like writing biographies of characters because so much of the things that will happen now are… it's just garbage, most of it. You have to just learn the lines and be funny and that's as good as you can do most of the time. There are other cases where you will be doing something that requires work or gives you the luxury of work and those are always the best jobs.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: It's a combination of things I think. It's usually a director. The thing is that the system has changed so dramatically in the last 20 years. I think part of it has to do with the director, because so much of what is done now — and I'm speaking only of the kind of movies I do, I'm not talking about Sean Penn's movies — the sort of movies that I do are usually lower budget, from mid- to low- to no-budget area and the emphasis is on getting it out as quickly as possible, getting it done as quickly as possible. They hire people like me because they know that I'm quick and I'm dependable and I come in prepared.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Exactly. I prefer more than one because I'm usually better if I do more than one. But I will usually be able to deliver something on the first take that is at least usable. I think that partially it stems from the fact that a lot of the directors now are coming out of television and music videos and things like this, which have no tradition outside of visual concepts. They're not really there for anything else but to deliver a visual story and do it in a way that is frequently choppy and disorienting because that's what people do now. That's the style of a lot of these things: the strange cutting, the strange photography that disorients because the truth is if people weren't disoriented they would realize they weren't watching anything very interesting.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: That's my own view. I think that directors have a problem because they are also coming out of traditions that don't have room for things like rehearsals, real character development, things like that. They come out of an area that doesn't require that. The whole history of film, really, since we are just talking about film, the whole history of film is filled with people who came out of the theater or who came out of movies when they were still making really great, traditional movies. Or even live television, people like Robert Altman and those kinds of directors, who came out of these intense systems where they were creating things that required a degree of just basic story-telling and…

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Television killed it pretty much.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Not television in the fifties so much because television in the fifties was more radio with pictures, so there was a lot of emphasis on story and character. They look very odd to us now, but the truth is they were like radio plays, teleplays. It was the next step out of radio and I don't think it was that. I think it started in the sixties and just progressively got worse until the eighties and nineties where there is so little value to any of it. You also have to give the directors a generational shift so that the people who are coming up were people who were watching television in the sixties or the seventies. You get those people and your audience is with them. I was driving down the street today coming back from taking my daughter to school and I saw the big poster for Starsky and Hutch. It made me laugh because it's Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller and they are incredibly funny people and I understand exactly what it is that they are doing. The funny thing about it is that they are of an age in which Starsky and Hutch would have been something they were watching when they were six or whatever it is. To them, that was one of their favorite shows. It's like Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu doing Charlie's Angels, something that you can imagine them in their pajamas watching. The audience is going along with them. The actors, the directors and the audience are all now in a frame of reference that has nothing to do with the theater. It has nothing to do with great cinema. It has to do with television, at least in this country.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: The laughs are all so different. The laughs come out of grossing out people, which is something that really started with movies in the eighties. As much as we think of them as cult classics or modern classic comedies, like Nerds and Better off Dead, this whole thing began with those kinds of movies — with Animal House and that bunch — where they were doing things that were at the time considered 'pushing the envelope.' Now they are considered 'quaint.' But at the time, Nerds was considered a gross movie, a teenage gross-out sex comedy. That's what it was. It was like a genre that was happening at the time along with Porky’s. So that's what that was then. Now, because of the necessity, when you base any kind of comedy now… there are movies like Nerds or Better off Dead, [which] were not based in gross-out. They were actually based in character and if you didn't care about those people, they wouldn't still be watching the movies. Hang on one second, will you? …I was saying that you wouldn't still care about the nerds if you didn't care about the characters and love to see them.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: So you are not basing movies on gross-out as part of the thing, part of the mixture. From American Pie, do you really care about any of those people?

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: If I can, I do.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: I would probably, because if I'm doing a character that is a full-fledged character with levels and blood in his veins, then at least for me that requires a different approach. If you are going in… Like, I did something for Ben Stiller last year. He's got a movie that he's producing which I don't even know the title of. They changed the title. It's sort of a basketball comedy and they asked me to come in and do a cameo basically. They sent me the scene and I was playing the high school principal, I think. I'm not even sure who he was, actually. I never saw the script. I never saw anything because the guy isn't seen except in this one moment where he comes out and makes an announcement to the school. So I said, "OK, sure." I went and it was very nice, very pleasant, but there was absolutely nothing to prepare for. On top of that, once I got there I discovered that the scene had been rewritten and I had never been given the rewrites. I didn't even have the ability to prepare the speech really because by the time I got there, they changed the speech. Those kinds of things make it… you just have to be focused on how you make it as funny as possible.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: I couldn't possibly do that because it depends on the type of comedy and the circumstances. What I find is always the case is that it is to be done with absolute conviction. That conviction is probably the most important thing of anything in comedy. If you let people know that you know it's funny in any way, that wrecks it. The person who is doing it has to believe in what he is doing, believe that what he is doing is normal. Now, again, that is different depending on the type of thing. Booger doesn't think that he is disgusting. He is what he is and the reason that the nerds work so well together is because, really, throughout the whole movie, none of them think of themselves as nerds. You see Bobby Carradine in the opening sequence, where he and Tony Edwards are going to college, and they are so excited. Tony is a little bit worried, nervous because he doesn't know how he is going to do, which makes his character so marvelous. He's a little nervous about it, but they are not going there fearful because of the fact that they know they are misfits and know that they are nerds and that they are not going to fit in. That's something that hits them once they get there. If there was any kind of wink that was being done by any of these guys that they are in a funny movie, that they look funny, they dress funny and they are ridiculous… but they never believe that. So that's what makes it funny. That's one of the things that make it funny. They don't see anything wrong with the people they wind up living with at the nerd house either. Even Booger… what is Booger doing there? You don't really know. He doesn't really fit in in any way. It's just that he is disgusting and he is antisocial and has bad habits and the nerds are the only people on campus who let him get away with it.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but the reality of the moment is essential in comedy because if you don't play the reality, then you are playing the joke. If you play the joke, then it's not funny. That is why a lot of standup comics make bad actors, bad comic actors. They are used to playing jokes however they play them and they don't understand that there is a deeper reality, which is funnier than the joke.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: I never considered it an anchor. I considered myself a character actor. My performance in the first movie, I don't consider really any of the other movies in the same category, the work that I did in the first movie, I think, is overall, among the best performances that I have ever given in films.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: I created a character that everybody believes and connects to on some level and enjoys on some level, but it is somebody who has absolutely nothing to do with me. I mean, it's utterly not me. I don't have a single thing in common with Booger or any of the things that he does or whatever you figure somebody like him would espouse. I'm just nothing like him. Because I also look very similar to the way I looked 20 years ago, I don't look that much different… The other nerds, people don't even know they were in the movie. Tony Edwards and Tim Busfield… he's unrecognizable.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Tim Busfield was Poindexter.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Well, Larry Scott — he's probably pretty recognizable because he doesn't look that much different.

CURTIS ARMSTRONG: Yeah, but it was a wonderful performance.