Having just seen Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! and seeing some very articulate eighteen year-olds, I thought back to Roy Scheider's character in Sorcerer. Scheider was an interesting actor. He always came across as real, yet we didn't know his characters too well. We knew enough, saw how they reacted, when they didn't. There are times in Jaws and Marathon Man and The French Connection where he stops and thinks instead of immediately acting. We're curious what awakens inside him when he's thrust into the middle of a situation, sometimes when they develop right on the spot. How would we react? We're almost always in his shoes. He was the everyman, which ties back to my interview with John Badham, who with Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss cast these guys, in their late thirties and forties, as heroes. We identified with them, cheered for them, even if we didn't really know them. That's an accomplishment right there.
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