On whether they have their own Bucket List:

NICHOLSON: Love to see the pyramids.

FREEMAN: I think we all have - a private bucket list. It may not be written down on paper, you got it written down somewhere. And I’m - I’m constantly checking them off. I just checked him off [Nicholson]. [laughs] Not sure about checking him off, maybe I just moved him down to another level.

NICHOLSON: One of my favorite one-worders in this script is, if you kiss the most... well, how do you plan to do that volume? [laughs].

FREEMAN: Exactly. Right. That’s one of mine, too, I love that one.

On whether they could have approached the roles the same way 10 or 15 years ago:

NICHOLSON: Well, you know, again, it’s an impossible question. You know, I would approach it the same way. ... Once again, Jeff Corey, 85 percent of whoever you play is identical to the character, whoever it is, man, woman, or child. It’s the 15 percent that you have to find, isolate, and act, so to speak. So, you know, I would approach it from that point of view, since I’ve held it since I’m in my 20s, I guess that was. I mean - obviously [it] would be different. I mean a lot of this movie was informed by my being not what I thought I would be an excellent patient, but rather a poor one. That happened by coincidence just before this movie. Nothing - as frightening as what these fellas had to go through, but I mean another one of my favorite lines is - this guy who sets up this whole system in hospitals and how they’re run, when they ask him about it, all he’s got to say is, "Well, I’ve never been sick before." [laughs] You know, which I think says a lot about everybody. Suddenly you think you’ve got it and now you’re in this situation. Jesus Christ!

FREEMAN: How things are different.

NICHOLSON: You know, very different. Well, acting is hopefully that every day. You know, sure, I mean we all - what you study is: you’ll have an idea about what this is and what that is, and then your deepest yearning is to come in and to be shocked out of your system by what actually occurs.

Nicholson and Freeman on whether they're selective when choosing roles:

NICHOLSON: Absolutely.

FREEMAN: Of course.

NICHOLSON: You know, and the criteria changes. I mean, like on The Depart... well, go ahead, Morgan, you talk about it.

FREEMAN: No, I was just...

NICHOLSON: On The Departed, I went into what for me is forbidden territory because it occurred to me - a different way. In acting class, you’re taught an actor takes the space, right? It’s a... Zen. You have to go through a lot of classes to know what they mean. But this is apropos of change. On The Departed, this thing went through my mind, as everything goes through repetitively, and I thought, "Well, my space is this." They did not hire me because there was no part for The Departed to play a part. They hired me to kick this movie in the ass, knock it sideways and put it into the realm of - possibly popular. Well, you know, this is something an actor can’t think about. I mean you can’t say, "I’m going to make a hit movie." You’re as dead as you could be. But once I get a forbidden thought, it will not go away. So I just went with it. So that’s different, you know, I wouldn’t have approached that the way-- in fact just the opposite. I would be doing everything to block that thought out. But now I just let it in, because when you make a lot of movies you want them to be different, you know?

FREEMAN: As different as possible.

NICHOLSON: These are all things that you’re not meant to do. Like I hate careerists, when you’re working with them: "Well, I got a little show I’m going to do in Arizona" All that is, like, I want to kill the person. [laughs] But, you also have to accept the reality. You know, I’ve been saying for a long time, "No, it’s not that." Anybody can be good once, twice, if they’ve got some talent. But once you have to ‘Un-Morgan’ the part, or ‘Un-Jack’ the part, that’s when you’re in the pro game. When you can suspend who they think you are and reinvolve them in a new story, this is really our job at this point in our body of work, so to speak.

FREEMAN: How well said, that is.

NICHOLSON: Thank you, darling. [laughs]

On the the decision of the characters to knock things off the list:

FREEMAN: I quoted earlier - almost inadvertently, but hey - a line from Shawshank Redemption. This was a situation - this was a case of Jack’s character saying to my character, "Look, you either get busy living or you get busy dying."... So the decision was, "Let's get busy living."

NICHOLSON: And you recognize certain structural things. We knew we had to make that believable. So my - it’s in the script, if you look at it. It pays off in the line where Morgan’s in the bathtub and he says, "Why do you think I did this?" "Because I talked you into it." See, because my character, he’s a guy who’s good at moving people. And Morgan just says, "You’re not that strong." See, but it’s in there from the beginning of him getting them going, that is very real. Say what you like, we’re in this boat together. You could make your decision, but the real reality is you can’t talk to nobody else but me about this.

Jack Nicholson on whether there's a character he'd like to revisit:

NICHOLSON: I thought about revisiting three of them as a certain unit of work. You know, ones that were unresolved. Bobby DuPea. This thought came to me because Ponicsan wrote a sequel to Last Detail. A lot of movies in that period where the - form of the movie was - well, they just went off. And because they were all about different eras, I thought, "Here’s an actor’s trilogy." You know, as a literary conceit, in other words, you could. The parenthesis of Jake Gittes tells a lot about the character. If you took Bob - where did Bobby DuPea from Five Easy Pieces go? Did he go to Europe and play the piano? What did he do? And who he was, was very typical of America at that moment. Same is true of the military guy in Last Detail. I mean this, to me, is always the one advantage of sequels. And so yeah, I got... I got a million ideas. [laughs]