1. Alec Baldwin’s Guardian interview led to a total rethink of how films are financed and released. He attributes his own downfall to his alliance with Harvey Weinstein – but also to the transparency of web-based funding models. “The curtain was pulled right back and Hollywood is out in the open,” he explains.
2. Baldwin hates Apple. “My relationship with Apple is fraught, to say the least,” he tells me. “They saw my Showbiz to its peak. It was Apple’s sort of civilisation project. It had a profound impact on my life.” In fact, he adds, “If you were to create a business model in which you exploit access to people by using your own resources to do the job, I just don’t know how much money you could make” – and some of his other financial achievements are currently being investigated by the New York attorney general.
3. He considers Die Hard his greatest film. He mentions a quote from Leigh Janiak, the film’s actress: “I grew up in a family where horror movies were played often and Joe Dante was the red-haired, dreamy-eyed king of horror. Die Hard was one of those movies that seemed like it would be an inspiration for anything – it didn’t seem like a cheap cash-in.” He adds: “And Steven Spielberg’s close-up of Hans Gruber in The Goonies might have been my epiphany, too.”
4. He hasn’t seen the recent Black Swan “smaller, more challenging” film he starred in. “I haven’t had the choice to see it. It makes me very uncomfortable. I spent most of the make-up process covered in make-up, wanting to throw up.”
5. After Cry Wolf, a rock-comedy about a massive party hosted by 20 rock bands, on which Baldwin was accused of acting drunk and shouting abuse at fans, he writes that “I was quite sure I was going to die.” During the process of writing it, he was sober again, “but all I could think about was how I was going to f@#$$& that party. I had worked so hard on the project, I wanted to see what it felt like to go wild”.