very few are paul newman. just an actor. the life of an actor in general will ebb and flow and there will be... at the end of the d it's out of your hand what you can do. you're going to need a script or director, you'll need somebody to make it. this is the only art form i know of that from the beginning to the end cost several million dollars toake. usually you paintit cheaply and you sell it for several mlg but it's a very different... >> rose: but you get actors wh wanto work with you. >> they do and i do. i've always done that. i've done that for over ten years now. i take almt no money up front and this movie if it made $100 million i wouldn't make a dime because we had to give away what percentage we had to get this cast. but we wanted to make the movie and we made it cheap compared to what films cost. made it for $12 million bucks and nobody wants to make these movi. nobody wants to make it. >> rose: can that change? >> sure. it will change. i'm not the great estefan of all of the sort of instant twittering and stuff

. >>> paul newman told me that any successful person in any field, who in discussing their career doesn't use the word luck is a liar. >> he's absolutely right. >> so you consider yourself lucky. >> very lucky. >> but you have to have talent to meet the luck, right? >> someone hands you the ball and you run. and if you get hit, you get hit. or maybe you make it through. you never know. i just know that somebody handed me the ball at a certain point and i was hungry enough to keep running and i'm still running. >> what do you think makes you good at what you do? you have to think you're good. >> i'm okay. >> you don't watch yourself, right? >> i don't, no. i don't like to watch myself. i think, you know, i maintain a hunger but not an ambition. you know, i -- i'm very happy to explore all possibilities of a character and really, you know, dive in to the role, to the point of where disney wanted to fire me. >> they wanted to fire you from pirates? >> yeah. >> because? >> they didn't understand what i was doing. they didn't understand the character. they were contemplating subtitling the fil

like the time he got her picture between paul newman and robert redford. she doesn't do that. very cool. she still says, i got my picture -- i can't compete with these guys. >> you should have smacked him straight on the nose. >> somehow, i don't think i'd be doing this interview right now had that been the outcome. >> actually, i think you probably would. let's turn, as i've been desperately trying to do some dime now to politics. >> where did you get that tie, piers? that's lovely. >> are you political? i mean, you were very motivated by what happened to your home town of new orleans. generally do you get fired up by politics? >> i like to watch sort of from afar and learn what i can just as a citizen. but for me there's a very definitive line between having strong feelings about where our country's going and actually being vocal about it. i mean, i'm not going to lie to myself and anyone else and presume that i have a great wealth of knowledge like you or other people in the media have or like private citizens. there's times when i feel very confident about what i know and

i'm thinking of the hustler and those two guys, jackie gleason against paul newman, i'm thinking of hustling and how good he is, john heilemann. and i'm not knocking a hustler, because a lot of politics is hustle. you find ways to bring people in the tent, and this guy knows how to do it. i don't mean hustle as a street corner bad thing. it's so hard to get people in the tent, and this guy seems to have that ability that mitt romney won't have in a million years, to make himself interesting. mitt romney will never be interesting, and this guy's more interesting walking away from it than running for it. >> he's got a quality in politics, chris, that you can't learn and you can't buy, which is both to be, as you say, interesting, and also to feel authentic and real. and we talk about authenticity all the time in this business, but, you know, everyone who looks at this guy, even people who don't like him, look at him and feel like he's talking from the gut, talking from the heart, talking from the head. that what you see is what you get with this guy. he's not playing hide and seek. and that is

peppy, the restaurant put on a spread for us all, and here's one of my favorites, patty mcgee and paul newmanld society, they were at my table along with peter pates, and it was a great