Original subtitles

- Dude here. - Who is this?

- Dude, the bagman. - Who is that?

Dude.

Nobody f**ks with the Jesus.

Sometimes there's a man -

and I'm talking about the Dude here.

Sometimes there's a man.

He's the man for his time and place.

The Big Lebowski playing the Dude.

What can I say? Let's see. Gosh...

It was such a good time.

Just such a terrific movie.

"The Dude,"

the legendary character from the Coen brothers' cult classic,

has become inseparable from the actor who portrayed him in 1998:

the American actor Jeff Bridges.

- How much of the Dude is in you? - A little bit.

Like the film, its star needed time

to make a name for himself.

Thank you guys so much!

This depiction of the laid-back Californian

finally put Jeff Bridges on the map.

Where is the money, Lebowski?

The Dude has made the myth of Jeff Bridges

in the same way that Jeff Bridges

has made the myth of the Dude.

Though he was in his fifties at the time,

he was one of those actors

who remained virtually unknown to the public for years.

It took about 18, 20 years, let's say,

for him to truly mature from

the more adolescent parts

into the mid-range.

And now, in his older age,

he's having even more success.

There are a lot of people who, if you say the name Jeff Bridges,

they wouldn't know who that was.

It kind of goes along with his underappreciated status as an actor.

Jeff Bridges has never chased fame.

He was more interested in being than having.

He lives far from Hollywood's bright lights,

but was that fate or a deliberate choice?

I really resisted

making movies and following that path,

but then it became the path of least resistance

because I started to get work.

Here's the astonishing story of an unwilling star,

a deep dive into the unusual career

and the troubled psyche of an extraordinary actor,

shaped by his family history

and driven by an artistic destiny too vast

to be content with acting alone.

He's a guy who's getting along in age.

He's not sure about his sanity

and his past.

Well, let's say it's interesting.

The Dude abides. Well, where does he abide?

He abides nowhere. He's not in,

so therefore he abides everywhere.

Does this face look familiar? But could you put a name to it?

Jeff Bridges occupies a unique place in Hollywood lore,

that of a familiar stranger.

Neven gonna find her in this crowd.

This American actor, who today has

over 100 films to his name,

remained little-known throughout the 1970s and '80s.

This is too hard.

I remember talking to friends of mine, saying,

"Oh, this Jeff Bridges movie is coming on", you know,

and they all just go like, "Who is Jeff Bridges?"

Five.

When you mention his name,

most people can't name a single film he played in

or even picture him.

Maybe it's because he vanishes into his characters.

We know his roles better than the man himself.

It's kind of sad for a guy as talented as he is

to be as kind of obscure as he is.

He's starred in plenty of big films

with top directors

and household-name co-stars,

actors who are stars in their own right,

yet he himself has never quite achieved star status.

He's not showy.

His acting is too good to be noticed.

He gives off a vibe

that is very different from these New York, kind of

"ethnic actors",

volatile, who came of age at the same time

as Jeff Bridges,

mainly in the 1970s:

Robert de Niro,

Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman.

You can picture them in the streets of New York

and with method-acting from the Actor's Studio,

versus what I think is a much more laid-back,

California style.

With Jeff Bridges, you get the feeling, "Hmm a good old boy",

the kind that you'd like to stop at a trucker's bar

on the highway and have a beer with.

The first roles of the New York actors,

they kind of leapt off the screen

and became big, either critical, or commercial successes,

or both.

It took longer for Jeff Bridges' versatility

to become manifest.

It's almost extraordinary

in how ordinary he can be.

INVENTOR OF DUDEISM

I don't think many actors

really convey that same sense of humanity that he does.

Maybe he lacked

the same outgoing personality.

That, too,

may have held back his fame.

Hey, buddy.

I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Yet the very young Jeff Bridges was noticed

as early as his fourth screen appearance,

in the early 1970s.

She never let you screw her, that's for sure.

And I'll just see how honest she was.

Jesus, she never lets you screw her. You're not that good a c*cks-man.

I remember the first time I saw him on screen.

It was The Last Picture Show, directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

He was part of a remarkable ensemble cast.

I went for a casting call, basically,

and as Peter tells the story,

he saw me come into the office

and he said, "Oh, there's Duane."

And he enjoys making the film

and the quality of the film...

Still to this day, people see that film, really,

it's very moving, it's very powerful.

He gets nominated

for the Academy Award as best supporting actor

and everybody kind of goes like, "Whoa..."

I can remember waking up to the phone ringing

at about, it seemed like, five o'clock in the morning.

I don't know what time it actually was.

Someone said, "You've been nominated for an Academy Award."

I've got some good news for you.

You won a contest.

This is going to be rough.

I thought it was a dream. I couldn't believe it

and then it kind of all dawned, like, "Wow, this thing is real."

It was a wonderful validation

to be acknowledged like that by people who do what you do.

But he was quite young, and it took a while

before we realised his range.

What's funny about the Academy Award,

of course, is: he doesn't get it.

Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show...

If you see the video of him losing,

he is like the happiest loser

I've ever seen in my life

and you could see that it's kind of a relief

that he didn't actually win.

Jeff Bridges, strangely, doesn't like to shine

or find himself in the spotlight.

After that nomination, he turned down roles

that might have pushed him to the forefront

or even rejected films outright.

It was sheer lunacy by Hollywood standards

and yet, in 1974, he still found himself

sharing top billing with Clint Eastwood

in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,

the debut of the then-unknown director Michael Cimino,

and nearly backed out at the last minute.

I remember Cimino, Michael Cimino,

and about two days before we started shooting,

I went into Mike's office and I said,

"Man, I'm so sorry."

"Why?", he said,

"Mike, I led you down this road for...

I'm not right for this part. I can't.

I don't know who this...", you know,

"I'm sorry. I apologise. I'll do everything I can.

Of course, you don't have to pay me,

but you know, God, I just can't do it, Mike."

How am I supposed to know what to do?

THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT

What's the matter? Is the job too tough for you?

Fortunately, Michael Cimino left him no choice,

but over the next decade,

Jeff Bridges made a point of staying in the shadows,

even smothering his own success whenever it threatened to surface.

Take 1984, for example,

when John Carpenter,

then on the rise thanks to his genre films,

called on him to play an alien

who had taken human form.

His performance was once again widely praised

for its originality.

Starman may well be his first

true character role, I'd say.

It was a tremendous challenge,

this idea of...

You know, usually, the task is to be very comfortable in your body

and to take on a character

and be very at home in your body,

but this was the antithesis of that, where you really had to

be not at home in your body, but a stranger in your body.

That was an Oscar nomination in the best actor category,

where his clipped speech and his jerky rhythms

still managed to convey such a warm soul.

Up yours.

Two Oscar nods in ten years,

roles of every kind, even Tron,

and yet he never asked for more.

Humble and reserved,

he maintained this discretion,

even at the risk of being overlooked by Hollywood.

But where does this strange attitude stem from?

Is it a sign of immaturity,

or the expression of an inner conflict?

Jeff Bridges was driven by a kind

of existential, personal quest

since he was a teen.

He was more interested in being than having.

And he thinks of the work he does

as advanced pretend,

that there was still a kind of childlike, playful quality

that actors are occasionally able to maintain their entire lives.

You have to go back to his unusual childhood

to find the roots of his unique outlook

on the actor's craft.

I think a lot of us know that Lloyd Bridges is your father.

- Beau Bridges is your brother. - That's right.

It's quite a challenge.

Why do you have that feeling

when you have a name like Bridges

and you're such a fine acting family.

It's just... You know...

The Pacific Coast Highway to famous Malibu Beach.

A summer and winter getting-away-from-it-all retreat

for Lloyd Bridges and his family.

The Bridges family, yeah.

A very, very famous acting clan.

Lloyd,

his wife and his baby son

and a nine-year-old Beau.

My mother and father met at UCLA

in the theatre apartment

and my mum,

who's probably the best actor of the whole bunch.

Dorothy Bridges was affectionately nicknamed

the General by the family because she was the one

who issued the marching orders.

But she did lose a child.

Gary was born in 1948.

Unfortunately, Gary didn't make it.

I think it was six or seven weeks.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

So when Jeff comes along, a year or so later,

Dorothy is very paranoid.

Jeff Bridges was fussed over and over-protected.

He has borne the legacy of that parental trauma

in a constant, lifelong doubt

about his right to exist.

Isn't he both the replacement and the survivor?

Did you wash your hands? Did you wash your hands?

Yeah, he did. OK.

Jeff kind of has a theory that

a lot of your personality can be discerned

by the story of your birth.

The story of his birth was:

Dorothy began to feel the contractions.

She went to the hospital

and she felt Jeff

kind of like turn inside of her,

like he wasn't coming out, like he was not ready for this

and he was just going to hang out inside.

Was Jeff Bridges already refusing to exist?

In any case, his parents

took a decidedly unconventional approach to raising their children.

So many... You know, showbiz families, you know,

the parents, they tell the kid, "Don't get into it", you know.

My dad was just the opposite.

He loved all of the aspects

of it.

The publicity, the signing of autographs, the acting...

Jeff got into acting very young.

I think he was six months old

when he did his first film. You know, he was just this baby.

From 1951, his parents threw him in at the deep end.

As a baby, he was already in a film, The Company She Keeps,

directed by John Cromwell.

My parents had me

and they were visiting some friend who was shooting a picture

and they needed a baby and my mum said, "Take it!"

May I?

THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS

And... how did you feel? Were you excited about it?

Well, I was a very happy baby

and the baby in the movie is supposed to cry...

and my mother said "Just pinch him."

I told you the kid was too young to take on a trip, but no.

No, you knew better.

Lloyd really wanted, though, the kids to get into acting.

He thought it would be a great life.

His father became famous in the 1950s

for films such as High Noon

and for the TV series Sea Hunt in the decade that followed

and his dad always, like, kind of coaxed him into it, you know?

"Hey, Jeff, I got a part for a kid, about your age...

How'd you like to come and do that?" You know, and...

"I don't know, Daddy. I don't feel like doing it."

"You can miss school..."

"I'll give you money. You can buy toys."

"All right, all right."

And so that's how Jeff did four episodes of Sea Hunt.

My dad,

he taught me all the basics.

When I was a kid, maybe eight,

I remember sitting on his bed and...

He's now, go back and do it completely differently.

Tell me, what's your problem?

I lost my bike.

I just got it the day for my birthday

and I hardly got a chance to ride it.

Oh, that's a shame.

He said you can do it in different ways.

One, go over your lines as yourself if you were the character.

Really, Mister? Can you?

And just make it seem

as much like yourself as possible.

Then go over that same scene,

but concentrate on the character.

What are the things that are different than you?

And then the third way in telling the story,

what do you want to convey in that scene?

Oh, boy, you got it, oh, boy!

Thanks, Mister. Thanks a lot.

Yeah? You're happy now?

OK, let me see you ride it.

When you're born into that world,

the doors swing open

far more easily.

Of course, you still need talent.

The camera needs to capture you well.

What if your father finds out about it?

He's not going to.

You promised not to tell him. You better keep that promise.

I promise.

Lloyd Bridges ran

family improvisation exercises at home.

He taught Jeff and his elder brother Beau

all the tricks of the trade.

OK now. Where is this mist?

The main thing you experienced from him

that he taught me it wasn't anything he necessarily said,

but rather how he approached the work with such joy.

He just loved it so much

and the joy is kind of contagious, you know.

I'd been working with him as an adult

in Tucker

and whenever he showed up on the set,

he was up and he was hot.

Preston Tucker.

Mister Tucker.

Sit down, gentlemen, sit down.

Let's get right to the point.

You're one of the most powerful men in Washington. I know that.

He was just feeling so good and people would realise,

"It's fun what we're doing. That's right. I forgot."

"We're like pretending

like we're kids. We're having fun."

And when you relax, that's when the good stuff comes out.

It goes round and round, oh, oh, oh, oh

and it comes...

Funny line.

Lloyd, he loved that life so much.

He figured they would love that life as much as he did.

What's that all about?

Jeff resisted, whereas his brother Beau

was instantly won over.

Of course, Jeff complied with his father's demands,

let himself be persuaded by his arguments,

wanting to please his parents,

but despite the freedom, creativity

and joy surrounding them,

there was no real enthusiasm.

As a child, he was colour-blind.

He had a slight stammer and lacked self-confidence.

As a kid, he was always a little bit big for his age

and he as a little bit chubby,

he will certainly tell you

that he was a very, very, very anxious child,

who had difficulty being looked at

and had these little quirks in his personality.

He never liked getting his hair cut.

I saw that!

He didn't like the feel of the scissors.

He didn't like the way the hair felt on his body

and he got made fun of for that, quite a bit

It doesn't look right.

Everybody's got a different head, contour, shape.

- You aren't trying to match it? - Well, of course, I'm trying.

I want you to cut it like the picture.

That's how I want it.

- Oh, sweet Jesus. - Sit down.

And he didn't like to be teased.

Beau, his elder brother, as was often the case, would needle him.

Jeff couldn't find the right words to stand up to him.

I tortured him a lot, when I was... when he was a kid...

I had him going so bad

all I had to do was just point my finger at him

and wiggle it like this and look at him...

And it would drive Jeff crazy.

The rest of the family sitting at the table.

I would do it under the table,

so he just knew this look I'd have.

I'd look at him. I knew that the finger was going.

Jeffrey, why are you crying?

He's doing the thing with the finger.

Because he teased me in such a cruel way

and my mother would always tell me,

"That's just because he loves you so much, you know Jeff."

They poked fun at each other

and that was part of the whole Bridges family type of milieu.

See...

When Jeff was a kid, he was a stutterer.

But Jeff was the most sensitive. That became an issue.

Let's talk about when you were 14 years old

and when you went camping with your little friend Malcolm.

He says, "Malcolm's tried to kiss me."

Excuse me. It's your dad.

Dad?

- Yeah, dad. - What the hell is going on?

There's only one way to finish it.

Put on the gloves and fight it out like you did when you were kids.

A diffuse sense of humiliation had crept in

and Jeff had only avoidance as his escape.

He entered the world of show business,

albeit reluctantly.

Well, I initially wasn't attracted to acting.

Like most kids, you don't want to do what your parents want you to do.

You want to do your own dream,

so I resisted for a long time.

He ends up getting into acting, he says,

because it was the path of least resistance

and, I think that reluctance is part of his personality today.

I try hard, really, not to engage.

I spend a lot of energy doing that, you know.

Not to engage, yeah.

Either his father or his mother, I can't quite recall which,

completely sold it to him by saying,

"You'll see, it's not work, it's fun,

it's a laugh."

He then went through a few depressive spells,

especially around 15 or 16, when you're trying to find yourself.

He smoked and tried quite a lot of drugs.

Sometimes growing up hurts.

And from then on, he never had the desire

to become a superstar.

Good luck, son, good luck.

Particularly during the early 1970s,

Jeff would give interviews, very open interviews,

and he would highlight his anxiety.

He would say, straight out, "Listen, I hate myself."

- What do I do, Albie? - Stick it out, buddy. Keep trying.

Do you think I could?

You think I could really make it, Albie?

He never felt he deserved it.

He'd never trained formally,

feared he'd fail to meet his family's expectations

and, above all, didn't want to be labelled "Daddy's boy."

The pressure on him was enormous.

How could he not disappoint his parents?

How could he find his own path, his destiny?

He hid behind indecision.

He claimed his laziness

and lack of ambition as a way of life

and beneath that laid-back coolness

lay the anxiety that haunted him.

He's somebody who does not like to make a decision.

He'd rather let things kind of hang on the fence

and wait for, you know, events to take place,

beyond his control

so that he doesn't have to make the decision.

I saw a funny nickname your brother called you.

Are you familiar with it? He called you...

Oh, the "Sloth!". He's got many nicknames for me.

The Sloth. That's an interesting one.

That probably comes from being so,

you know, relaxed and kind of, you know, laid back.

And Beau is not?

Beau came to his rescue

and gave him a hand.

He pushed him to work,

made him rehearse and signed him up for auditions.

Probably my dad made the phone call to her,

a casting agent called Millie Gusse. She was a legend in the business.

Jeff could come in and do just a general audition.

Can I turn to the right?

And he nailed it. And she was amazed.

Very slowly put the rugged gunfighter smile.

Done.

He conducts what he calls experiments on himself.

He kind of goes like, "All right, I really don't want to do this,

but this is going to stretch me out a little bit.

Let me take it a little bit at a time

just to see how I feel about it, to see how it works."

And that was the story with the acting.

I had about 10 movies under my belt

before I decided it.

The movie that really put me over

and made me decide

that this is something I wanted to do for the rest of my life

was a movie of the great play "The Iceman Cometh"

and I initially turned it down, you know. I could...

I was even playing that thing back in those days,

"Oh, I'm bushed man. I don't want to do it."

Here's your guy.

Hello, Larry.

What's up?

I finally decided, "Well, I certainly don't feel like it.

I want to do it and see what happens.

Maybe this will put the nail in the acting coffin?"

So I get into this.

This is directed by John Frankenheimer

and all of my scenes are with Robert Ryan

and we're sitting at a table

like this

and we're waiting for this take

and Bob's like this and the guy says,

"OK, we're gonna roll."

And I look at Bob's, where his hands were,

and there were these puddles of sweat on the table...

and I say, "Bob, after all these years,

you're still afraid, you're frightened."

He said, "Oh, I'd really be scared if I wasn't scared."

And I saw that all these old pros

are scared to death.

And what a relief to find that out, that being frightened

was not something to be frightened about.

And I said, "Oh, I want to be one of those guys."

Thanks, Larry.

You're anxious because you want to do it right, you know,

especially if it's something you really care about.

It's your buddy and you got to figure out how to work with that.

That fear is always, always, with me,

so the acting almost happens by accident.

He didn't always want to commit to certain projects,

but he committed to the idea

of being an actor by that point.

Jeff Bridges then embraced a wealth of experiences,

roles and personas.

He set out to keep everyone guessing.

He was also very aware

of how his father's career was limited

by typecasting

and he learned quickly that he should avoid that

by not creating a persona

where you recognise the actor from role to role,

but allowing for the most vast range of possibilities.

I tried to, kind of, pepper it and then pleasantly

confused the audience about who this guy is,

so it was easier for them

to project the character onto me or vice versa

and also let the money guys know, the financiers know, you know,

that, "Oh, you can hire Bridges for this or that..."

And he started manifesting

the ability to play both comic

and dramatic,

both anti-hero and alien,

both romantic and psychopathic.

He was starring

in big-budget Hollywood aspirational movies,

but was always on the side,

also making independent, low-budget films.

There is a tremendous range here

and they create a body of work that suggests

he was far less interested

in virtuosity than in versatility.

Amid this flurry of roles, in 1989

a film paired the Bridges brothers

and made a real impact: The Fabulous Baker Boys.

THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS

This is paint, Frank.

It's not paint. It's a magical sheath

which simulates a dazzling head of hair.

- Frank, this is paint. - Just help me put it on, OK?

They had a great time together.

The chemistry that they had,

the teasing... on so many levels.

It's like they don't even have to rehearse with each other.

It's interesting in the movie

that the Jack character is just sick and tired

of being under the thumb of the Frank character.

Jack is a lot more morose,

tougher, than the character of Jeff Bridges in real life,

but of course, it's a great acting job.

It's not a caricature,

but it is, I think, indicative of their relationship on some areas.

F*cking m*ron?

It's three o'clock in the morning. Who's watching Paper Boys?

Yeah, there's a little bit of that sibling rivalry there.

A scene from the film, especially the fight,

revealed Jeff's commitment,

even the hint of madness that sometimes got the better of him.

We wanted the fight to be real awkward

and I said, "I'm going to have a word

that will work within the context of the scene, and if I say it,

you know you're really hurting me and back off."

So, comes the time, and he goes bananas.

You know, he's out there. He's not even hearing me.

He grabs my finger...

I said, "You are breaking

my effing finger, brother."

My hand, Jack.

He had to channel that overflow of emotion and creativity

through other outlets.

Music had been part of his life since his teens,

but he'd also developed other talents.

I think my brother is...

in every sense of the word, he's a renaissance man.

He can do many, many things.

Jeff Bridges sees himself more as an artist.

He paints and draws,

a need he's had for as long as he can remember.

He plays guitar and even released albums.

All of these pursuits helped to shape the man he became.

The acting for him, there was a little bit of work involved,

whereas the other kinds of creation,

the music and the painting, and those types of things to him,

those are more near and dear to his heart

and, for him,

the creation of art is something that is also the expression of self,

or at least the expression of where he thinks he is as himself

at that particular time

and it also helps him to determine, on any given day, "OK, who am I?"

You know, "What makes me the way that I am?

What is the meaning in my life?".

But the acting certainly pays the bills.

Where these worlds converge: photography.

Since the 1980s,

Jeff Bridges has been taking

unique on-set photographs to gift to his crew.

He's a multifaceted human being,

who I think is always drawn to telling stories.

You can tell stories as a photographer

in a rather compact and compressed way.

You tell stories as an actor in a much more extended way,

but for me, this is all of a piece.

There's a continuum of his life, his work, his passions.

I love this photo of Coppola

and his father is in the frame.

Jeff Bridges has the panning camera

that allows the frame to incorporate

much more than the traditional still camera.

This is emblematic of Bridges' way of seeing.

I think he has a wider angle than the close-up

that characterises many of our great actors

who care primarily about the work of art they are enhancing,

but not necessarily about the wider experience

of the people watching these films.

He especially enjoys

telling the joke he ended up on the receiving end of

about one of the photos

he took on the set of The Big Lebowski.

As part of the dream sequence,

the Dude was required to glide between the legs

of the bowling pin Karins,

and look up their skirts.

To ease the tension,

I asked if I could take a picture of this event.

So I get on my little skateboard,

be pulled under their legs,

got my camera in and said, "OK... and look up."

and there's just a jungle

of pubic hair coming out of her outfit.

I mean, it's just a mess

and just before I kind of register that, I'm pulled.

and the next one has even a bigger jungle

and they're all jungled out. It's like...

They had stuffed huge clumps of crepe hair.

My wife knew about it, you know...

His wife was on set that day,

along with their daughters.

Jeff pays special attention to his family,

a stance that, too, reflects

his unique journey.

With each film, he found it hard

to spend weeks away from his wife, whom he had married in 1977,

their family life and their home in Montana.

He's a little bit of an anomaly in Hollywood.

He has been married to the same woman for five decades.

Jeff Bridges's private life

has been that of an ordinary, honest citizen,

a "decent man",

so there is little

for the tabloids

to grab hold of.

His marriage offered fresh excuses

to escape the limelight and even to step back from acting.

After all, Jeff Bridges's real struggle

had always been the necessity of making choices.

When you're doing that movie, you're unable to do this movie

coming down the pike, but you're not even sure

what that movie is, but you might like it better.

So I really try to hold out as long as I can.

He's someone who, all his life,

I think, has asked himself countless questions about who he is

and the direction his life is taking.

That makes him a very engaging, richly nuanced person.

His aim

has been to find happiness and fulfilment

both in his work and in his private life,

something that sets him apart from your typical Hollywood superstar.

And yet fame still caught up with him.

To become a star often requires a rare moment:

when an actor discovers the perfect role,

one that aligns exquisitely with their true nature.

Perhaps that's precisely what happened for Jeff in 1998

with The Big Lebowski, directed by the Coen brothers.

The Coen Brothers, they said,

"Jeff, we've written something for you, man."

I said, "Oh, wonderful."

I was a big fan of their Blood Simple and the early stuff

and then I got the script and I said,

"Wow, you guys must have been spying on me.

This is wonderful. It's nothing like I've ever played before."

This character

is so incredibly non-self-conscious,

so natural, so comfortable in his own skin,

that, really, it's hard to imagine any other actor

playing the Dude.

I think that for many people,

if you're asked to sum up Jeff's career,

that's the role that springs to mind.

No, don't do this...

not on the rug,

man...

Jeff's method was to kind of mould

the character that he was playing, to shape it,

to fit his own kind of personality

and, sort of, embody the character that way.

He felt it was more of an emotional kind of approach to the acting.

You know, when I prepare for any film, I think about

the aspects of myself that kind of parallel the character

and I might magnify certain aspects,

ones that don't fit a kick to the curb.

And I said to Mary Zophres, the costume designer.

"Why don't you come up to my closet? Let's just look around."

And she said, "What are these weird jelly shoes here?"

I said, "Oh, yeah, those are my shoes."

"Oh, those are good for the Dude. Let's put those."

"Oh, look what this T-shirt is. What's this weird

Japanese lettering over this baseball guy? What is that?"

I was like, "Oh, yeah."

So, you know, we just used a lot of my stuff.

As Jeff Bridges, one of the aspects of the Dude

that is very powerful in him

is this whole idea of being open to an experience,

about what's happening in the moment.

He's very happy to try and find, through experiments,

a meaning in life.

Throughout his life, he's kept asking himself,

"Who is Jeff Bridges?

Do I recognise myself in my roles,

or am I someone entirely different?"

And after inhabiting so many characters,

there were times when he no longer knew who he really was.

I think one of the problems with having such an iconic role

is that once you see that character,

it's hard not to see the Dude in every character.

With Jeff Bridges, it's a little bit different.

In every role he's been in since The Big Lebowski,

maybe he's just growing

into this greater transcendent dudeness.

He's becoming more and more like the Dude himself,

because he always was the Dude.

Jeff Bridges has been very socially conscious,

very progressive in his understanding

of the down and out people in the United States.

There's a genuine citizenship about Jeff Bridges

in the sense that he plays the kind

of reticent hero who doesn't want to get involved with stuff.

Are you employed, sir?

Employed?

He's been something of the antithesis

of the all-American "winner"

and all that.

He hasn't been fooled

by the myth of the American Dream.

Is this... What day is this?

We have this new idea of a hero

who is neither good nor evil, nor anti-heroic,

but "aheroic".

And by that, what I mean is that he kind of rejects

the whole notion of heroism at all,

because heroism is a kind of ideal.

My advice to you is to do what your parents did. Get a job, sir.

The bums will always lose.

Do you hear me, Lebowski?

The bums will always lose...

You have people like me

who feel as if this movie has changed their life

because it's genuinely a philosophical movie.

It's deeply philosophical to the point that it can really

inform a lot of how you should live, ethical philosophy,

how you should treat other people,

how you should prioritise things in your life.

The identification has happened.

I don't think the typecasting has happened.

I'm sorry, I wasn't listening.

The Coen brothers pulled it off,

taming Jeff Bridges's lack of self-confidence.

Like many masters,

the Coen brothers make it look like it's just nothing.

It's falling off a log.

But a lot of people, you know, are wondering

if there was a lot of impro in that movie,

because it's kind of... the dialogues are so natural...

and no, there was not.

- Every "f*ck"... - Where the f*ck are you going man?

- Every "man"... - Man!

It was all down on the page.

He peed on my f*cking rug.

The Big Lebowski bombed at the box office on its release,

yet over time it grew into a cult favourite.

It gave Jeff Bridges long-overdue recognition.

The Dude

became a pop-culture icon

and even spawned the satirical religion

"Dudeism".

With that role,

Bridges finally got the acclaim

his talent deserved.

Jeff Bridges' career changed

not after The Big Lebowski was released,

I think it changed after The Big Lebowski

sort of got on a roll and became

kind of a cultural phenomenon

rather than just the film.

Jeff Bridges really had a chance to go against type,

to reinvent himself as a kind of deep, profound,

dramatic character and comedic character

that he hadn't really had the opportunity to play before.

Suddenly, he was given

much more profound, philosophical and meaningful roles

because people realised that he really is, in real life,

a very philosophical guy, and that this really

comes through in a very honest way in his acting

and in his performances.

In 2009, he starred in Crazy Heart

as Bad Blake,

an ageing country singer battling alcoholism.

He didn't just play the part,

he also rekindled his love of music.

I turned it down several times, maybe for a couple of years,

and it kept showing up.

The reason that I gave myself

was that there was no music, you know,

no matter how good the story is, it's all about music.

That was kind of a lie I was telling myself.

I was really kind of afraid that, you know... ruining a dream...

Crazy Heart was perfectly suited to everything that Jeff Bridges

brought to the role.

Buddy?

There was such

a palpability about Bad Blake.

I know other actors

could have played him

and sang him, but he was perfect.

I lost my little boy...

It wasn't a performance,

it was an incarnation of a character

about whom I had mixed feelings

and it's not a traditional happy ending

of an American Hollywood movie.

That film earned Jeff Bridges his first Oscar in 2010.

It was an award that recognised his long,

often underappreciated career.

And it's kind of interesting that when he won also the Golden Globe,

that he said like, "Hey, you guys

are really messing up my underappreciated status."

Mum and Dad, yeah, look.

A lot of people, when they win the Oscar, they capitalise on that

in their next movie projects.

What does Jeff do?

He forms a band, The Abiders,

and he goes out on the road, living his high school fantasy

of being a rock star.

After that win,

Jeff Bridges dared to take on anything,

from rock'n'roll

to the legendary heroes of American cinema.

The Coen brothers even cast him in True Grit,

stepping into a part once owned by John Wayne.

He's got this Western thing. He's very quick with the gun,

but very slow with expressing affection.

He was underappreciated,

but the appreciation level rose and rose.

By now, he's a venerable star.

He's reached the pantheon of the old actors,

the great Western stars that had aged in the saddle:

Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Gary Cooper.

They would all come back as old men

and there was always a nostalgia

about their coming to the end of the rope, so to speak.

And now Jeff Bridges is among these actors himself.

Jeff is doing The Old Man, the television series,

and it's a hit nominated for a Golden Globes

and so he's now a television star.

So what's kind of interesting for me at this point in Jeff's life

is that he has become... It's a sort of full circle.

His dad was most famous

as a television star

and today Jeff Bridges, he's a television star,

so the circle on that, it's interesting that it's complete.

The Dude abides.

From film to TV series.

His understated, sincere approach, the exact opposite of

Hollywood's frenzy and flamboyance, ended up prevailing.

Jeff Bridges has since become, perhaps unwittingly, a genuine star,

but a star nonetheless.

For true stardom, far from the glitz and glamour,

first demands being a tremendous actor.