"To do that I spent time with the writer in deep and profound discussion," said Frank over a cup of tea. "The whole thing only cost $500,000. I earned scale. They'd fetch me mornings in some old jalopy. We shot all over New York, mostly in a West Side apartment on 111th Street, and I'd change clothes in a men's room. It's all they could afford.

"I play an old Jewish guy living alone. Being an old dog myself, I loved the subject's universality of experience. People of a certain age are prone to looking back, and this has no sex, no violence, no profanity, just beautifully written scenes of people struggling through their lives.

"At a certain point in time you get jealous of time because there's just so much of it left. I've got a bunch of movies I'd rather not have made. This one I loved."

Frank Langella recently won another Tony for "Frost/Nixon" ("I don't even know where my Tonys are. They're somewhere. One's really old.") and just completed the "Frost/Nixon" film and was off, almost before the tea was cold, to start another. But, despite a career stretching into the future, his thinking was in the past.

"Centering yourself, returning to the exact spot your mother gave birth to you, is an American-Indian custom. If that spot disappeared, then visit the area. Go back to the beginning. Center yourself. Find some sort of peace. I don't drink, carouse, do drugs so, during a bad period a few years ago, I did this. It's a healthy thing to do. A nurse found my birth certificate. I entered the exact maternity room. I laid on the hospital's roof. The point is, to feel peculiar. Doing something out of the norm breaks your pattern. And you know what? Afterwards, I didn't feel as nuts as I had."