Jack Nichlson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List Jack Nicholson is in London for the premiere of The Bucket List, a touching tale of chalk and cheese characters, who, facing terminal illnesses in adjacent hospital beds, set out to tick everything off their ‘to do’ list before they kick the proverbial bucket. Ultimately, of course, after all the skydiving and sightseeing, they realise that there are matters closer to home, and their hearts, that need to be resolved before they can go peacefully.
What better explorer for the final frontier could the rock’n’roll generation have than this great actor and personality who says with relish: “70 was the first time I felt young for my age since I was 50. That was the great bonus. I thought ‘70, I feel great!’ I’m just out there clearing the way for them.”
Asked whether he has a ‘bucket list’ of his own though, Nicholson struggles for an answer, “I don’t make lists… but since they came relatively late in my life, I want to live long enough to see my children graduate from high school, I always wanted to speak another language, learn how to cook…”
Every poster for The Bucket List carries the exhortation to ‘find the joy’, a rallying cry to all those unfulfilled lives - with the finishing line in sight - not to go gentle into that good night. On attaining joy, this go-getting star is firmer: “People sometimes seem to be afraid to be happy, but you know, I think with the kind of life I’ve lived, almost every day – if there’s not some overwhelming tragedy – then there is some joy in the day, everyday.
“So it comes from a lot of angles you know, I saw my daughter in a play just before I left, I snuck up behind Dennis Hopper to scare him and he jerked around - he’d just seen his son playing Lenin in a play where he had an axe in the middle of his head.
“The only time I’m happy that I’m alive is when I wake up in the morning, after that it’s a horrible few hours.”
The charismatic actor acknowledges that things change as you get older - even for living legends: "Your priorities do change, whether it's character or loss of facility...
“But you know literature, not just films, but in general, is pretty limited in terms of people beyond 50, there aren’t a lot of stories. There is of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Memories of My Melancholy Whores, but pretty much the themes are strikingly limited.”
As an actor who’s always breaking the mould, Nicholson suggests movies shouldn’t shy away from showing the sexuality of older characters.
"I want to bring sexuality to middle aged characters because you know father knows best, I don't know how all those children came into being if they never took their pants off."
Recently he’s been quoted as saying he hopes for one more great romance, but he explained he was actually discussing it as a theme for a possible piece of writing.
"I have a lot of old friends, and when you hear something from eight, nine or ten of your friends, as a writer, you know the subject is out there generationally.
"If you asked your friends I think you'd find my research is good, You'd find that this is that 'man want woman' whether you're married or not - this is like that eternal yearning, you know, 'let me be taken away just that one last time' so therefore it came up not as a bucket list, but as something I felt was a good theme for a piece of writing."
The Bucket List is probably the first mainstream movie to tackle the end-of-life issues now beginning to face Nicholson’s gilded generation. The world’s first teenagers reinvented every life stage as they moved through it, and now they are busy re-framing the seeming non-negotiables of ill health and death. What other bitter-sweet comedy shows both its leads shuddering through the after effects of chemotherapy, yet sends you out of the theatre feeling uplifted?
Critics may not love The Bucket List unreservedly, but the public is voting with its feet. Last weekend, the film was the highest grossing in the USA, suggesting that these are questions babyboomers want exploring on their screens.
Would you want to know how long you had left? How you were going to go? Would you want to plan your own funeral? None of these seem like fun topics, but The Bucket List manages them all with a light touch, and they are after all, questions all of us have to answer eventually.
While he claims not to have paid much thought to death himself, Nicholson says, “I know these are conversations that people have had with themselves. I think everybody’s thought ‘well, do I want to be buried or cremated?’ I think everyone has had that conversation privately but you’ve never seen it in a movie.
"I think there's a lot of that in the picture and I think that's part of the reason why it does connect."
Last weekend The Bucket List shot to the top of the box office chart in the US, Nicholson is not surprised.
"This is the second-highest test scoring movie in the history of Warner Brothers. When it tested it got very high scores, so I asked the statistician, I said 'Let me ask you something, when a movie scores this high in the testing period, has any of them ever not been a success?' And he said 'no, absolutely not'.
"Do you know what the first test audience said? I was there, in a study group this guy said: 'This is not a movie about dying, this is a movie about living.'"