Q: In The Accidental Husband you play the father of Uma Thurman’s character. He’s very calm and wry and low-key—a lot like your own dad?
A: Uh, no. Wrong. He was a bit of a maniac. I think down the road he actually went off the deep end. But that’s a whole ’nother legend.

Q: There’s sort of an inside joke in The Accidental Husband, in that your character’s girlfriend turns out to be Brooke Adams, who played your accidental wife in 1978’s Days of Heaven.
A: Right, right. It’s crazy. I think I ran into her once in the whole time since Days of Heaven, and it was backstage at a Broadway show somewhere. I haven’t had any contact with her. Wonderful gal, though. It’s crazy, you know. Time is just nuts.

Q: What did you two talk about when you first saw each other on the set?
A: Well, obviously, the time that’s elapsed, and what she’s been doin’ and all that. It’s like your whole life passes. The same thing with Patti Smith. With Patti, I hadn’t seen her for probably, god, 25 or 30 years, and then all of a sudden we bang into each other in New York and we start doing stuff together again.

Q: I was just listening to Patti Smith’s cover version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” You play the banjo on that, right?
A: Actually it was a six-string guitjo I was playing—it’s a banjo body, but guitar strings. And my son was playing traditional banjo along with John Cohen from the New Lost City Ramblers. It was quite an amalgamation. You know, I hate to say it, but I’d never really heard the song before, and Patti brought it up, and I love it. It’s an incredible piece of music—and incredible lyrics, too. I never really studied on it, you know, because I guess it was out of my generation or somethin’, but it’s a fantastic song. It’s very esoteric, in a way.

Q: You and Patti were a very close pair in the early seventies. Did she lead you in certain creative directions?
A: Yeah, she had a tremendous influence on me, because I was unaware, at that time, of any of these French poets, the symbolist poets and all that stuff, and she kind of turned me on to Baudelaire and Rimbaud and all those poets that I never paid any attention to, bein’ a dumb-ass American out in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t nearly as well-read as she was. I’d knocked around American literature, but certainly not the Europeans. Essentially Patti was a poet back then. She hadn’t really broken into music. I’m certainly not responsible for it, but I kept tellin’ her, you know, that she should sing this stuff. She was doin’ poetry readings and stuff at St. Mark’s Church, and she was kind of performing these poetry readings as though they were songs, and I said, “Why don’t you sing ’em?” So I got her a guitar, and she learned a couple chords, and she started singin’.