Jason Schwartzman is an odd little man that plays odd roles. He’s best known for his appearances in the Wes Anderson films “Rushmore,” and “The Darjeeling Limited” and other indie-ish films ”I Heart Huckabees,” and “Shopgirl.”
The Rushmore star is promoting the strange HBO dramady Bored to Death. In Bored to Death, Schwartzman plays Jonathan Ames a poor yet published writer who spices up his life by becoming an unlicensed private investigator.
His uniqueness is in full bloom in his candid interview with Terry Gross below.
“This is an embarrassing story, and one that I feel terrible about because it will expose me as a low-key liar. But I did it and I brought it upon myself so I’m just going to come clean now. … I was finishing up a film, Funny People, that I was acting in that was taking up all of my days. And I was supposed to be writing the song, and every week I would get an e-mail from people at HBO saying, ‘How’s the song coming?’ And I would just say, ‘Everything is great,’ even though I had nothing written. And I would quickly invent something that I had written, and describe something, like, ‘I’ve come up with this walking bass line; I think it’s very right for the song,’ and they’d write back, ‘Great. Can’t wait to hear it.’ … Basically, I lied for a month on the fly about what was in this song, musically. Then it came time for me to submit a demo, and not to seem like a liar, I went back through all of my sent e-mails and saw all of the things I had said were in the song, wrote them down — and then basically to fulfill the lie, I wrote the song based on every fib I had e-mailed. And I wrote it in 10 minutes.”
