Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman on whether The Bucket List evoked thoughts of their own mortality:

MORGAN FREEMAN: What you’re doing always in any acting situation, is acting. You’re not trying to live the character. If you are, you’re going to get in deep trouble, I think. Playing a character who is dying or going to die, no, you just do it. I don’t have any sense of my own mortality. I reject any thoughts of my own mortality. What’s to think about that? I like the premise of the movie. It ain’t about that. It’s about living.

JACK NICHOLSON: Yeah, that’s right... This is a movie about living. I think, you know, one of the things about it that I liked is - everybody considers their mortality all the time whether they know it or not; that fear of the unknown. It drives you - I went to so many Christian Amerdia lectures that illustrate this point that it’s phenomenal. So I think what I asked [other members of the press]... "Did the movie stay with you?" Because we wanted to, even though it’s a comic approach, to have some resonance. And they said it did. But I think it’s because - these are interior, private conversations that we have with ourselves. And that we haven’t really seen them on film before. You know? We haven’t seen them sort of on the nose. Like we all, I’m sure, who’ve ever been to a funeral, have said, "Well, how do I want my whatever you want to call it to be dealt with?" Do you want a big pink statue like this? Which was one of my considerations at one time. [laughs] Do you want to be staked out on the top of a tree like an Indian and let the birds eat - you know, all these kinds of things, I know I’m - nobody’s that different. So I went by the assumption these are things that people have thought about - how consciously they’ve thought about it. And if you touch that chord, you know, this is what you get. My first acting teacher, Jeff Corey, said, "Your job is to provide a stimulating point of departure. This is what you do in a theatrical experience." And I thought, "This is - this’ll be a doozy, you know, for that particular element." You know? So, that’s what I think of that.

On how much of the sky-diving sequence was real:

NICHOLSON: Oh, we dove like son-of-a-guns. Fantastic. Fearlessly leapt out into the void, didn’t care, and so forth. [laughs] This is part of my new "lying" approach. [laughs] But you know, why I say that, and... this is probably useless to you, because I’ve said this before. When I was first doing interviews, I met Diana Vreeland who was the editor of Vogue Magazine. And you know, the normal complaints people have about interviews - she said, "Well, Jack, you must not tell them the truth." I said, "What?" She says, "Well, my guess is you’re going to be doing a lot of interviews. If you tell them the truth, very quickly you’ll become bored with your own life." So, you know...

Freeman and Nicholson on finding the right chemistry and how they pushed each other beyonmd the script:

FREEMAN: I’ve been dancing with him since the beginning. I know his rhythms, I know lots about him... Just from watching his work.

NICHOLSON: And you know, other than where it’s the goal of the character, like I have to push to get him in this trip, so there’s that. But other than that, I don’t think Morgan and I - either of us are pushers as actors, I think. I think each of us is more than enough for the other.

FREEMAN: Yeah.

NICHOLSON: You know, I told him when I first met him, I said, "You know, Morgan, this might be something somebody didn’t say about you, but I consider you the modern James Dean." He said, "What?" I said, "Well, I’m not - I’m talking about this one thing. You know, there’s acting and there’s cinema." When Morgan Freeman - Dean had this quality, when they wear a hat or a coat, or whatever it’s - you know - you don’t see a non-telling, graphically non-telling image of Morgan ever. I mean you don’t have to do too much. And he does plenty. But I mean I don’t think he’d heard that about himself. Apropos of watching one another, I bring this up because I’d thought that about him for a long time. You know, I could almost list the various hats, or coats, and what they meant, you know, to the character, and why it was not only right for the character, but it served the big picture. And this is what I thought was Dean. Dean knew how to be photographed. I think that was his main talent.

Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman Talk The Bucket List Page 2